Also, keep in mind that Windows 3.0 flew off the shelves when they released it (even Microsoft was surprised by how strong the sales were). I believe this was because Win3.1 did such a good job of multitasking DOS apps. If you had a business that ran on DOS apps, Win3.1 would let your people keep running those DOS apps, while also running any GUI apps you might decide to buy. It was a low-risk decision.
I did, of course, mean "Win3.0" and not "Win3.1" in the above paragraph. Win3.1 ran DOS apps just as well as Win3.0 did, but I was talking about the unexpectedly strong sales of Win3.0. Sorry about the mistake.
Neither DOS nor Windows 9x were ever "the right thing". We are talking mid-90's here.
I submit to you that in 1981, DOS was the right thing. Then in a few short years, there was a huge pool of useful software for DOS, so DOS compatibility was essential.
I think calling Windows 95 "small" represents a seriously distorted world view.
Whereas you have a serious case of rose-colored glasses here. I love *NIX and I run Linux on my computers now, but I'm not blind to the actual history. Sure, it's theoretically possible that a *NIX could have come along and displaced DOS/Windows.
But the *NIX market was fragmented. Picking any one *NIX meant locking yourself in with one vendor. DOS/Windows was viewed, by most customers, as the more open standard: sure, you had to get Windows from Microsoft, but you could buy your hardware anywhere. And MS didn't charge much for DOS/Windows.
Also, keep in mind that Windows 3.0 flew off the shelves when they released it (even Microsoft was surprised by how strong the sales were). I believe this was because Win3.1 did such a good job of multitasking DOS apps. If you had a business that ran on DOS apps, Win3.1 would let your people keep running those DOS apps, while also running any GUI apps you might decide to buy. It was a low-risk decision.
For business users (let alone home users), a $2000 Sun box was a chance to buy a machine that would not run the DOS apps they already owned, would lock them in to Sun's flavor of *NIX, and had nothing to do with Microsoft and IBM... and "Nobody ever got fired for buying (Microsoft|IBM)." Sure, the box was $2000, but how much to buy the box, a word processor, a spreadsheet, etc.? And were there even programs as useful as the best of the DOS/Windows programs in every category? In 1995, could you buy a typing tutor for your kids that would run on your Sun box? (And how much did Sun charge for a decent C compiler? And how good was GCC for SPARC in 1995? And how much was Motif or other toolkits for Sun? Not much chance of a free typing tutor in 1995.)
Now that Linux is viewed as a more open platform than Windows, perhaps Linux can take over from Windows. (Even if it doesn't "take over" it will still grab a chunk of market.) I'm a big fan of Linux so I'm all for that. But the world is a different place now, than it was in 1995.
Windows 9x is still DOS with a quick switch over to the graphical shell.
That's true, but for the time it was the right thing.
You could run Win95, and do useful work with it, on a PC with 4 MB of RAM. More was better; I ran it with 8 MB. (In 1995, RAM was expensive!)
Part of the reason it was small was because of the stupid thunking into DOS. DOS is small, partly because it started out small and partly because lots of people hacked on it over the years trying to keep it small. (DOS 4 was an exception, but the MS DOS guys were quick to point out that IBM made DOS 4. DOS 5, done by MS, was actually smaller than DOS 4, despite having many improvements.)
Also, Win95 had lots of 16-bit code inherited from Win 3.1, and it thunked into that a lot. Again, this contributed to the small size.
I'm glad that machines are so powerful these days, where 128 MB of RAM is considered a small amount. But part of Win95's success was that it actually ran on the machines of the day.
For the complete system numbers, you don't double the difference and add some for the power supply inefficiency; you just add some. The power supply doesn't dissipate 1W for each 1W it provides the system!
So, better numbers: if the Pentium 4 dissipates 23W more than the Athlon XP, and the power supply is 66% efficient, the Pentium 4 system will dissipate 35W more (the extra 12W come from the 66% efficiency of the power supply).
What Intel calls "thermal design power" is sort of similar to what AMD calls the "typical" number. It's 75% of the theoretical max temp, so the theoretical max temp for the Pentium 4 would be 109.0W. But the P4's clock throttling would keep it from hitting that theoretical max temp.
Note also that since your power supply isn't 100% efficient, and since the power supply has to produce one Watt for each Watt your system dissipates, that a complete system with a Pentium 4 will dissipate over twice the difference of just the CPUs. In other words, for our example, the Pentium 4 dissipates about 23W more, so the Pentium 4 complete system will dissipate even more than 46W compared to the Athlon XP system. I'm not sure how efficient a typical power supply is, but if we assume 66% efficiency, the total for the Pentium 4 complete system would be about 58W more than the Athlon XP system.
I've been counting the days until I could have auto image resizing.
I use a 1600x1024 desktop. I have a CSS file that gives me nice large fonts, but I can't do much with images. When I'm viewing web comics, much of the time the text in the speech bubbles is so tiny I have to lean way forwards to read it. I read web comics every day, so I'll be using this feature every day.
P.S. If there were an option to simply scale everything by a factor of 2, I'd turn that on by default. Any web page designed for 800x600 would fit great on my screen. (Okay, it would be a little bit tight vertically, but horizontal is more important.)
I still doubt that UMAX will give you support if you call them with a Win95 problem. And what will you tell them if they instruct you to install the latest hardware drivers from the motherboard manufacturer? "I can't seem to find any Win95 USB drivers for my KT400 chipset motherboard."
As long as you don't mind being self-supporting, or as long as you can find vendors willing to support problems you find when running under Win95, then yes you can run stuff under 95.
You are perfectly happy to run drivers from 1997 or whenever, and I prefer new drivers. We don't agree. And it doesn't look like either of us is about to convince the other to change his mind.
Most people use their computers for typing letters, doing spreadsheets, and email. No need for USB for any of that.
As I said, clearly they don't need USB devices since they don't have any now and they are surviving. And as I said, it's sometimes nice to buy what you want, instead of buying what works with your ancient hardware and software.
Besides, you can buy add-in pci usb cards.
You are relentlessly missing the point here. We are talking about running Win95 on new hardware. The new hardware probably already has USB ports. And yes of course you can buy add-in PCI USB cards.
But say you get a new USB scanner. Where is the driver that will make that scanner work under Win95? Can you name any manufacturer who supports any USB device under Win95 today?
First, if they bought their computer with Win95, either pre-installed, or OEM version, they're allowed to move it from the old box to the new box, as long as they remove it from the old box. No copyright violation there.
Microsoft has consistently claimed that you cannot move Windows from a computer where it was pre-installed. I will admit that I don't know how far back they have been claiming this; was Win95 licensed differently, such that it is legal to move around?
Even if I'm wrong and it's legal for them to move Win95 around, there are still the technical issues.
Most Win95 sold was OSR2, which supports 32bit fats, but even if they're stuck w. 2 gig partitions, who cares? Most of their files will be on servers, anyway.
OSR2 was shipped with a lot of computers, but Microsoft never sold it separately that I know of. Their hypothetical warehouse full of legal Win95 is probably not OSR2.
Your point about files being on servers is probably valid. I still think FAT16 sucks, of course.
As for updating drivers, all they have to do is go through their game collections. A lot of updated drivers for Win95 are just sitting on game CDs as redistributables, so even if M$ removes the files from their site, who cares?
Maybe you would like to try to support, say, a VIA KT400 motherboard running drivers from 1997. Not me, no thank you.
New hardware should have new drivers, or you are asking for trouble.
USB - most office workers only need USB for the mouse.
Scanners. PDAs. Flash chip readers, if their job involves digital cameras. External drives, perhaps. Label printers.
Clearly, since they are still running Win95, they are surviving without USB stuff. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything they might want to run. It would be nice to be able to pick the best product based on features and cost, and not on "will it work with our ancient hardware and OS".
When you buy a new computer, it will not have Win95. Unless they bought full versions of Win95, they aren't allowed to move Win95 to the new computers.
Even if they have many, legal boxes of Win95 in a warehouse, it may not run well on new hardware. Suppose they buy a system with a VIA chipset. Will the VIA 4-in-1 drivers support Win95? And I sure hope they have the OEM version with FAT32 support; FAT16 really sucks on huge disks. (Max partition size is 2GB, and to get that you need an incredibly huge cluster size.)
They may actually want to be able to use USB devices. Even if they have that really rare OEM build of 95 that supports some USB stuff, no one ships drivers for that. Win98 is the oldest MS system that anyone provides drivers for.
And of course they may actually want a system that crashes less.
Your example, of replacing PIII/933 boxes running Win2K, makes much less sense. Especially since WinXP probably runs decently on a PIII (just add lots of RAM).
Does anyone know what the story is with Valve? They worked for years and then came out with Half-Life, a huge monster hit. They re-wrote major portions of the Quake engine to do it! They had huge frickin levels! This wasn't two guys in a garage somewhere.
And then... lots of nothing. Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift were done by Gearbox. Counter-strike was mostly done by people outside Valve.
Did Valve lay off most of the people who worked on Half-Life? If not, how are they paying all those salaries? Does Valve have any actual projects in the pipeline (little pun there) or is Team Fortress 2 all they are working on? (And does anyone think TF2 will actually ever ship?)
For that matter, who the heck is Gearbox? Was it spun off in some way from Valve, or is it something else? How big is Gearbox?
I think that something really bad must have happened to Valve. But I don't have any idea what it was.
IDE drives are "dumb", and require the CPU to handle much of the work.
No longer really true. Ever since UltraDMA/33 mode, the CPU has not had much work to do with an IDE drive. SCSI drives still have a few tricks such as tagged queuing, but those features have been filtering down to IDE drives as well.
SCSI drives intended for servers cost more, and generally are better made, than IDE drives. They also come with much longer warranties (makes sense since they are made better).
The article includes a graph that shows a steep drop-off of their stock price.
The very first thing you do is to look at the numbers on the axes of the graph. The vertical axis of the graph is price of one stock share in dollars, but the graph goes from $15.43 down to $13.86, so that steep drop-off wasn't as steep as the graph makes it look. If you plot the same numbers on a graph that goes from $16 down to $0, it's not nearly as dramatic. The stock price fell by about 10.6%, while the graph makes it look more like 100%.
To learn more about tricky graphs and other misleading charts, read How to Lie with Statistics, a truly great and fun book.
"Lupin", being French, is pronounced like "loop Ann", accent on the "Ann".
Goemon's sword is supposed to be a legendary sword that can cut anything. Some of the humor is seeing him cut a tree in half or something like that. And he's annoyed each time he uses it on an object instead of a person--which is all the time since it's not a violent show. "Once again, I cut a worthless object."
You got it right: "Fujiko" is the correct way to spell her name in Roman letters. She cares more about money than Lupin does, a lot.
I seem to recall he also said that Debian policy is against this and in favor of having man pages
Correct; Debian policy is that everything has a man page. Where info pages exist, they get auto-converted to man pages, and such man pages note their origin so you can go to the info system to read them if you like.
Some programs have a man page that just says "UNDOCUMENTED: this command does not have a man page." This is considered a bug. Debian developers have been known to write man pages for programs that don't have them.
Personally, I hate hate hate the info text browser. Where info files get converted to HTML, I am happy to have the clickable browsing, but I still always want man pages. "man -k" (or "apropos" for BSD fans) is great when I'm trying to figure out which command to use, rather than figure out details of a command.
I don't care how many people commit fixes; I care how quickly features get added, whether by one hard-working coder or by a huge team. I care how fast bugs get fixed and features get added.
For me, Metacity just works. It isn't fancy but it doesn't need to be. It just works.
And the basic point is inarguable: there are fewer people out there who want to work in Rep than there are who want to work in C, and none of the paid GNOME developers seem to want to touch Sawfish.
My understanding is that they removed Sawfish because it is difficult to maintain. The original developer of Sawfish has moved on to other things, and he isn't working on it at all. Sawfish is lacking some major features (multihead support, accessability), and large parts of Sawfish are written in LISP. I guess the GNOME developers don't like working with the code base.
Metacity is simpler than Sawfish, and the theory is that it will be simpler to keep it bug-free.
I've switched to Metacity; I'm content with it.
The guys who get paid to work on GNOME are not doing anything with Sawfish. If its fans are dedicated enough, however, they could keep it going.
Unfortunately it is clear that NASA, as an organization, is incapable of building useful spacecraft. NASA is very good at turning money into piles of paper, not so good at anything else. (Small pockets of NASA can manage some cool stuff. No large organization is 100% stupid or 100% brilliant. But a big project like a replacement for the Shuttle is a non-starter.)
I really, really, really want to see useful spacecraft get built. But we might as well make a pile of money and burn it, as give that money to NASA.
What to do? Set up cash prizes, big ones, for anyone who builds a truly useful spacecraft. $X billion dollars to the first company to put a 1000 pound payload into orbit, and then do it again with the same ship two weeks later, and again two weeks after that. $Y billion (such that X > Y) for the second company. A fat contract for sending supplies to the space station would be good, too.
Want edge flipping? Run Sawfish instead of Metacity, and you can have it again.
I'm content with Metacity. You can't drag an app to the edge of the screen and have the screen flip; but you can send the app to one of the other workspaces with a click of the mouse, and you can click on the little window representation in the Workspace Switcher and drag that to move a window to another workspace.
While I'm sorry that you liked one of the features they took out, I think the simpler interface was worth it (especially for newbies who might be confused by the various options). And you can customize things to bring back the stuff you miss.
I'm not a KDE user, so I'm not actually saying that KDE is doing it wrong. But GNOME 2 is doing it right.
First, you design things so that they just work the way most users expect. You run tests to make sure you have it right.
Next, you make preferences dialogs with the most common options in them. You do let users configure things, but you make sure you don't have ten million options to sort through to find the one you want.
Next, you make an "experts" configuration interface; it could be config files, but in GNOME 2 it is GConf. (GConf looks a lot like the Windows registry, but it isn't fragile and centralized, and at its heart it's actually config files.)
Last, you make the system modular so that the really dedicated can swap out a module if they want something really different. If you don't like Havoc Pennington's way of looking at things, you can run Sawfish instead of Metacity. If you don't like Nautilus, you can run Gnome Commander or many other file managers.
Back when I was running GNOME 1.x, I actually hated the excessive number of options. I could actually maximize a window just horizontally, just vertically, or maximize both! Now with GNOME 2, all I can do is maximize both... but that's all I ever wanted in the first place.
If you benchmark a 933 MHz Crusoe chip laptop (such as a Fujitsu Lifebook P2120) versus a 933 MHz C3 chip, which would win?
Both are low-power. The Crusoe is even-lower-power than the C3. I know raw CPU power isn't the reason why a person buys a laptop, but I'm still curious.
You will pay more for the Lifebook, but it also has better 3D hardware (Mobility Radeon vs. Savage). That might make a big difference if you want to play Counter-strike or something, if the CPUs are at all similar in computing power.
I used a K6-III/450 for years, and I suspect that either the C3 or the Crusoe will be just fine for web surfing and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, keep in mind that Windows 3.0 flew off the shelves when they released it (even Microsoft was surprised by how strong the sales were). I believe this was because Win3.1 did such a good job of multitasking DOS apps. If you had a business that ran on DOS apps, Win3.1 would let your people keep running those DOS apps, while also running any GUI apps you might decide to buy. It was a low-risk decision.
I did, of course, mean "Win3.0" and not "Win3.1" in the above paragraph. Win3.1 ran DOS apps just as well as Win3.0 did, but I was talking about the unexpectedly strong sales of Win3.0. Sorry about the mistake.
steveha
Neither DOS nor Windows 9x were ever "the right thing". We are talking mid-90's here.
I submit to you that in 1981, DOS was the right thing. Then in a few short years, there was a huge pool of useful software for DOS, so DOS compatibility was essential.
I think calling Windows 95 "small" represents a seriously distorted world view.
Whereas you have a serious case of rose-colored glasses here. I love *NIX and I run Linux on my computers now, but I'm not blind to the actual history. Sure, it's theoretically possible that a *NIX could have come along and displaced DOS/Windows.
But the *NIX market was fragmented. Picking any one *NIX meant locking yourself in with one vendor. DOS/Windows was viewed, by most customers, as the more open standard: sure, you had to get Windows from Microsoft, but you could buy your hardware anywhere. And MS didn't charge much for DOS/Windows.
Also, keep in mind that Windows 3.0 flew off the shelves when they released it (even Microsoft was surprised by how strong the sales were). I believe this was because Win3.1 did such a good job of multitasking DOS apps. If you had a business that ran on DOS apps, Win3.1 would let your people keep running those DOS apps, while also running any GUI apps you might decide to buy. It was a low-risk decision.
For business users (let alone home users), a $2000 Sun box was a chance to buy a machine that would not run the DOS apps they already owned, would lock them in to Sun's flavor of *NIX, and had nothing to do with Microsoft and IBM... and "Nobody ever got fired for buying (Microsoft|IBM)." Sure, the box was $2000, but how much to buy the box, a word processor, a spreadsheet, etc.? And were there even programs as useful as the best of the DOS/Windows programs in every category? In 1995, could you buy a typing tutor for your kids that would run on your Sun box? (And how much did Sun charge for a decent C compiler? And how good was GCC for SPARC in 1995? And how much was Motif or other toolkits for Sun? Not much chance of a free typing tutor in 1995.)
Now that Linux is viewed as a more open platform than Windows, perhaps Linux can take over from Windows. (Even if it doesn't "take over" it will still grab a chunk of market.) I'm a big fan of Linux so I'm all for that. But the world is a different place now, than it was in 1995.
steveha
Windows 9x is still DOS with a quick switch over to the graphical shell.
That's true, but for the time it was the right thing.
You could run Win95, and do useful work with it, on a PC with 4 MB of RAM. More was better; I ran it with 8 MB. (In 1995, RAM was expensive!)
Part of the reason it was small was because of the stupid thunking into DOS. DOS is small, partly because it started out small and partly because lots of people hacked on it over the years trying to keep it small. (DOS 4 was an exception, but the MS DOS guys were quick to point out that IBM made DOS 4. DOS 5, done by MS, was actually smaller than DOS 4, despite having many improvements.)
Also, Win95 had lots of 16-bit code inherited from Win 3.1, and it thunked into that a lot. Again, this contributed to the small size.
I'm glad that machines are so powerful these days, where 128 MB of RAM is considered a small amount. But part of Win95's success was that it actually ran on the machines of the day.
steveha
Aaack. I cannot do math today.
For the complete system numbers, you don't double the difference and add some for the power supply inefficiency; you just add some. The power supply doesn't dissipate 1W for each 1W it provides the system!
So, better numbers: if the Pentium 4 dissipates 23W more than the Athlon XP, and the power supply is 66% efficient, the Pentium 4 system will dissipate 35W more (the extra 12W come from the 66% efficiency of the power supply).
Sorry about that.
steveha
they are already running waay too hot.
Actually, AMD processors are cooler than the equivalently-performing Pentium 4 chips.
Athlon XP 3000+ max heat: 74.3W
Athlon XP 3000+ typical: 58.4W
Athlon XP 3000+ temperature limit: 85C
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz theoretical max heat: 109.0W
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz thermal design power: 81.8W
Pentium 4 3.06 GHz temperature limit: 69C
What Intel calls "thermal design power" is sort of similar to what AMD calls the "typical" number. It's 75% of the theoretical max temp, so the theoretical max temp for the Pentium 4 would be 109.0W. But the P4's clock throttling would keep it from hitting that theoretical max temp.
My source for all this:
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm
Note also that since your power supply isn't 100% efficient, and since the power supply has to produce one Watt for each Watt your system dissipates, that a complete system with a Pentium 4 will dissipate over twice the difference of just the CPUs. In other words, for our example, the Pentium 4 dissipates about 23W more, so the Pentium 4 complete system will dissipate even more than 46W compared to the Athlon XP system. I'm not sure how efficient a typical power supply is, but if we assume 66% efficiency, the total for the Pentium 4 complete system would be about 58W more than the Athlon XP system.
steveha
I have yet to see an opensource program that was anywhere as cool as Flight Sim. :)
Don't know whether you will like it as well as MS Flight Sim, but you should check out Flight Gear.
http://www.flightgear.org/
steveha
I've been counting the days until I could have auto image resizing.
I use a 1600x1024 desktop. I have a CSS file that gives me nice large fonts, but I can't do much with images. When I'm viewing web comics, much of the time the text in the speech bubbles is so tiny I have to lean way forwards to read it. I read web comics every day, so I'll be using this feature every day.
P.S. If there were an option to simply scale everything by a factor of 2, I'd turn that on by default. Any web page designed for 800x600 would fit great on my screen. (Okay, it would be a little bit tight vertically, but horizontal is more important.)
steveha
So, Win95 supports usb devices. Satisfied?
I still doubt that UMAX will give you support if you call them with a Win95 problem. And what will you tell them if they instruct you to install the latest hardware drivers from the motherboard manufacturer? "I can't seem to find any Win95 USB drivers for my KT400 chipset motherboard."
As long as you don't mind being self-supporting, or as long as you can find vendors willing to support problems you find when running under Win95, then yes you can run stuff under 95.
You are perfectly happy to run drivers from 1997 or whenever, and I prefer new drivers. We don't agree. And it doesn't look like either of us is about to convince the other to change his mind.
steveha
Most people use their computers for typing letters, doing spreadsheets, and email. No need for USB for any of that.
As I said, clearly they don't need USB devices since they don't have any now and they are surviving. And as I said, it's sometimes nice to buy what you want, instead of buying what works with your ancient hardware and software.
Besides, you can buy add-in pci usb cards.
You are relentlessly missing the point here. We are talking about running Win95 on new hardware. The new hardware probably already has USB ports. And yes of course you can buy add-in PCI USB cards.
But say you get a new USB scanner. Where is the driver that will make that scanner work under Win95? Can you name any manufacturer who supports any USB device under Win95 today?
steveha
First, if they bought their computer with Win95, either pre-installed, or OEM version, they're allowed to move it from the old box to the new box, as long as they remove it from the old box. No copyright violation there.
Microsoft has consistently claimed that you cannot move Windows from a computer where it was pre-installed. I will admit that I don't know how far back they have been claiming this; was Win95 licensed differently, such that it is legal to move around?
Even if I'm wrong and it's legal for them to move Win95 around, there are still the technical issues.
Most Win95 sold was OSR2, which supports 32bit fats, but even if they're stuck w. 2 gig partitions, who cares? Most of their files will be on servers, anyway.
OSR2 was shipped with a lot of computers, but Microsoft never sold it separately that I know of. Their hypothetical warehouse full of legal Win95 is probably not OSR2.
Your point about files being on servers is probably valid. I still think FAT16 sucks, of course.
As for updating drivers, all they have to do is go through their game collections. A lot of updated drivers for Win95 are just sitting on game CDs as redistributables, so even if M$ removes the files from their site, who cares?
Maybe you would like to try to support, say, a VIA KT400 motherboard running drivers from 1997. Not me, no thank you.
New hardware should have new drivers, or you are asking for trouble.
USB - most office workers only need USB for the mouse.
Scanners. PDAs. Flash chip readers, if their job involves digital cameras. External drives, perhaps. Label printers.
Clearly, since they are still running Win95, they are surviving without USB stuff. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything they might want to run. It would be nice to be able to pick the best product based on features and cost, and not on "will it work with our ancient hardware and OS".
steveha
When you buy a new computer, it will not have Win95. Unless they bought full versions of Win95, they aren't allowed to move Win95 to the new computers.
Even if they have many, legal boxes of Win95 in a warehouse, it may not run well on new hardware. Suppose they buy a system with a VIA chipset. Will the VIA 4-in-1 drivers support Win95? And I sure hope they have the OEM version with FAT32 support; FAT16 really sucks on huge disks. (Max partition size is 2GB, and to get that you need an incredibly huge cluster size.)
They may actually want to be able to use USB devices. Even if they have that really rare OEM build of 95 that supports some USB stuff, no one ships drivers for that. Win98 is the oldest MS system that anyone provides drivers for.
And of course they may actually want a system that crashes less.
Your example, of replacing PIII/933 boxes running Win2K, makes much less sense. Especially since WinXP probably runs decently on a PIII (just add lots of RAM).
steveha
Does anyone know what the story is with Valve? They worked for years and then came out with Half-Life, a huge monster hit. They re-wrote major portions of the Quake engine to do it! They had huge frickin levels! This wasn't two guys in a garage somewhere.
And then... lots of nothing. Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift were done by Gearbox. Counter-strike was mostly done by people outside Valve.
Did Valve lay off most of the people who worked on Half-Life? If not, how are they paying all those salaries? Does Valve have any actual projects in the pipeline (little pun there) or is Team Fortress 2 all they are working on? (And does anyone think TF2 will actually ever ship?)
For that matter, who the heck is Gearbox? Was it spun off in some way from Valve, or is it something else? How big is Gearbox?
I think that something really bad must have happened to Valve. But I don't have any idea what it was.
steveha
IDE drives are "dumb", and require the CPU to handle much of the work.
No longer really true. Ever since UltraDMA/33 mode, the CPU has not had much work to do with an IDE drive. SCSI drives still have a few tricks such as tagged queuing, but those features have been filtering down to IDE drives as well.
SCSI drives intended for servers cost more, and generally are better made, than IDE drives. They also come with much longer warranties (makes sense since they are made better).
steveha
The article includes a graph that shows a steep drop-off of their stock price.
The very first thing you do is to look at the numbers on the axes of the graph. The vertical axis of the graph is price of one stock share in dollars, but the graph goes from $15.43 down to $13.86, so that steep drop-off wasn't as steep as the graph makes it look. If you plot the same numbers on a graph that goes from $16 down to $0, it's not nearly as dramatic. The stock price fell by about 10.6%, while the graph makes it look more like 100%.
To learn more about tricky graphs and other misleading charts, read How to Lie with Statistics, a truly great and fun book.
steveha
Good summary. A few more notes:
"Lupin", being French, is pronounced like "loop Ann", accent on the "Ann".
Goemon's sword is supposed to be a legendary sword that can cut anything. Some of the humor is seeing him cut a tree in half or something like that. And he's annoyed each time he uses it on an object instead of a person--which is all the time since it's not a violent show. "Once again, I cut a worthless object."
You got it right: "Fujiko" is the correct way to spell her name in Roman letters. She cares more about money than Lupin does, a lot.
steveha
Thank you very much for mentioning this! I find the lynx style of navigation much nicer than the native info user interface.
Debian has a package called pinfo that provides this.
# apt-get install pinfo
steveha
I seem to recall he also said that Debian policy is against this and in favor of having man pages
Correct; Debian policy is that everything has a man page. Where info pages exist, they get auto-converted to man pages, and such man pages note their origin so you can go to the info system to read them if you like.
Some programs have a man page that just says "UNDOCUMENTED: this command does not have a man page." This is considered a bug. Debian developers have been known to write man pages for programs that don't have them.
Personally, I hate hate hate the info text browser. Where info files get converted to HTML, I am happy to have the clickable browsing, but I still always want man pages. "man -k" (or "apropos" for BSD fans) is great when I'm trying to figure out which command to use, rather than figure out details of a command.
steveha
I don't care how many people commit fixes; I care how quickly features get added, whether by one hard-working coder or by a huge team. I care how fast bugs get fixed and features get added.
For me, Metacity just works. It isn't fancy but it doesn't need to be. It just works.
And the basic point is inarguable: there are fewer people out there who want to work in Rep than there are who want to work in C, and none of the paid GNOME developers seem to want to touch Sawfish.
steveha
You seem to suggest that Lisp is the problem. Does it make software hard to maintain?
Not necessarily. However, it does limit the pool of people interested in maintaining it.
I could write a window manager in FORTH. I would love it. Would you be interested in trying to help me maintain it?
steveha
My understanding is that they removed Sawfish because it is difficult to maintain. The original developer of Sawfish has moved on to other things, and he isn't working on it at all. Sawfish is lacking some major features (multihead support, accessability), and large parts of Sawfish are written in LISP. I guess the GNOME developers don't like working with the code base.
Metacity is simpler than Sawfish, and the theory is that it will be simpler to keep it bug-free.
I've switched to Metacity; I'm content with it.
The guys who get paid to work on GNOME are not doing anything with Sawfish. If its fans are dedicated enough, however, they could keep it going.
steveha
Unfortunately it is clear that NASA, as an organization, is incapable of building useful spacecraft. NASA is very good at turning money into piles of paper, not so good at anything else. (Small pockets of NASA can manage some cool stuff. No large organization is 100% stupid or 100% brilliant. But a big project like a replacement for the Shuttle is a non-starter.)
I really, really, really want to see useful spacecraft get built. But we might as well make a pile of money and burn it, as give that money to NASA.
What to do? Set up cash prizes, big ones, for anyone who builds a truly useful spacecraft. $X billion dollars to the first company to put a 1000 pound payload into orbit, and then do it again with the same ship two weeks later, and again two weeks after that. $Y billion (such that X > Y) for the second company. A fat contract for sending supplies to the space station would be good, too.
But pay only for results!
steveha
Want edge flipping? Run Sawfish instead of Metacity, and you can have it again.
I'm content with Metacity. You can't drag an app to the edge of the screen and have the screen flip; but you can send the app to one of the other workspaces with a click of the mouse, and you can click on the little window representation in the Workspace Switcher and drag that to move a window to another workspace.
steveha
I use vertical-only maximization frequently because I want to keep a window exactly 80 characters wide, but as tall as possible.
That's interesting. GNOME saves the positions of windows; can't you set them up once and be done with it?
Sawfish is very configurable (in a Lisp subset language called Rep). You can probably add that feature back in if you want it.
The WikiSawfishLibrary has sample code for lots of stuff. One of the hacks there is to set custom sizes to some windows; maybe you can use that.
http://sawfish.skylab.org/WikiSawfishLibrary
While I'm sorry that you liked one of the features they took out, I think the simpler interface was worth it (especially for newbies who might be confused by the various options). And you can customize things to bring back the stuff you miss.
steveha
I'm not a KDE user, so I'm not actually saying that KDE is doing it wrong. But GNOME 2 is doing it right.
First, you design things so that they just work the way most users expect. You run tests to make sure you have it right.
Next, you make preferences dialogs with the most common options in them. You do let users configure things, but you make sure you don't have ten million options to sort through to find the one you want.
Next, you make an "experts" configuration interface; it could be config files, but in GNOME 2 it is GConf. (GConf looks a lot like the Windows registry, but it isn't fragile and centralized, and at its heart it's actually config files.)
Last, you make the system modular so that the really dedicated can swap out a module if they want something really different. If you don't like Havoc Pennington's way of looking at things, you can run Sawfish instead of Metacity. If you don't like Nautilus, you can run Gnome Commander or many other file managers.
Back when I was running GNOME 1.x, I actually hated the excessive number of options. I could actually maximize a window just horizontally, just vertically, or maximize both! Now with GNOME 2, all I can do is maximize both... but that's all I ever wanted in the first place.
steveha
If you benchmark a 933 MHz Crusoe chip laptop (such as a Fujitsu Lifebook P2120) versus a 933 MHz C3 chip, which would win?
Both are low-power. The Crusoe is even-lower-power than the C3. I know raw CPU power isn't the reason why a person buys a laptop, but I'm still curious.
You will pay more for the Lifebook, but it also has better 3D hardware (Mobility Radeon vs. Savage). That might make a big difference if you want to play Counter-strike or something, if the CPUs are at all similar in computing power.
I used a K6-III/450 for years, and I suspect that either the C3 or the Crusoe will be just fine for web surfing and such.
steveha