As IronChef already noted above, you are thinking of Danny Dunn.
My favorite was Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, the one where he gained access to this awesome computer. (Lots of blinky lights on the front, and cool spinning tape drives! Woo!) He decided to use it to do all his homework for him. So he spent hours and hours studying his books, and entering data from his books into the computer so it could do his homework. At the end of the novel he realized that he had spent far more time studying and doing data entry than he would have spent just doing the homework, but he now knew the material so well that he totally aced his tests.
when are they going to reprint the original Tom Swift?
Either those are old enough to not be under copyright, or else no one cares, because you can get them from web pages. For example, you can get Tom Swift books in Palm DOC format from here:
I agree with you, as long as you are talking about Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. I loved that series. I think I have read them all.
Sometime in the 90's I saw, in a bookstore, new Three Investigators books. Reworked a bit, like the new Nancy Drew or other revivals. Now all three boys drove cars, at least two of them had girfriends (I don't think Jupiter Jones, the brilliant nerd, had one), they took karate lessons, etc. They still had their ultra-cool secret headquarters: an old RV buried under a pile of junk in the junkyard Jupiter's uncle owns... no one remembers it or knows it's there, and the Three use secret entrances so no one sees them go in or out.
This was the tag line on the front of the book:
"Jupe is the brains. Pete is the muscle. And Bob is Mr. Cool." The old books didn't need snappy slogans like that; they were just interesting.
steveha
Probably will be a success
on
nVidia nForce
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· Score: 5
AMD has had trouble selling into the low end of the market. Most of the trouble has been because the Intel side has low-cost motherboards with integrated video and sound. Vendors who want to build an inexpensive AMD system can get a Duron chip, but the savings are canceled out because they also have to buy video cards and audio cards.
Now nVidia is going to make it possible to make an integrated motherboard, and the performance is going to be excellent. The Duron totally crushes the Celeron, the GeForce MX totally crushes the 810 onboard video, and the audio DSPs totally crush everything currently on the market. As long as the price for a Duron plus one of these boards is about the same as the price for a Celeron plus an 810 motherboard, they will sell a whole bunch of these.
Some people just delight in screwing things up for everyone else. Maybe they feel vengeful against all the total strangers to them; maybe it gives them some stupid sense of power, to annoy so many at once; maybe they just want some attention. But they are out there and they will do it.
I played Unreal Tournament one night, and some of the players on the other team took our flag. But instead of taking it to their home base, they hid it somewhere, and sat around text-chatting to each other. When players on my team asked them to just take the #%!$ flag and have done with it, they denied having the flag, but eventually said "Oh, THIS flag?" Very funny... not. All I could do was find another server. I don't even think they were actually cheating, but they were definitely screwing around with us rather than playing the game.
I played CounterStrike one night, and some guy had an invisibility hack. It was a bomb-planting level and he was a Terrorist. What happened was that the CTs would kill all the Ts but the invisible one, and then the level would just drag on and on until time ran out. This guy would run right next to me, making a clicking sound (I'm pretty sure he was toggling his flashlight off and on; it sounded like the flashlight click). I tried spraying bullets around, but I don't think he was "there" to hit. Everyone, including all the other Ts, wanted to vote him off but we couldn't make it work.
I've played CS on servers where Friendly Fire was enabled, and guys would run around killing their teammates. But that's not the worst. Some guys would shoot you just enough times to really hurt you, but not kill you, so the server would never kick them off. If you killed them, the server would kick you off. You couldn't win, and we couldn't get voting off to work.
I have other examples, but in all cases just being able to vote the moron off the server would keep the cheater from ruining the game for everyone else.
More subtle cheats, like ones to see through walls, are impossible to prove; but the truly obnoxious and outrageous stuff would be shut down cold. And that's a good thing.
I think we should have a separate program for importing
I like it. This nicely end-runs the problem of library compatability for C++/C/whatever. And under Linux, at least, firing up a new process is fast, and you only run the import filter when opening a new document, so there would be no issues with speed.
Odds are against you. Corel sells WordPerfect for money; if AbiWord and the rest become viable contenders, who wants to spend the money for WordPerfect? It is arguably in Corel's best interest for all the free word processors to have lousy filters for as long as possible.
How are the WordPerfect filters? If they suck, then Corel could rationally join the filter crew, since good filters would then benefit Corel as much as anyone else. At least in that scenario there is some clear benefit to Corel.
Of course, if the decision is made by a stereotypical boss figure, Corel will mind its own fish and stay out. Why do something new and different? Could be risky. Continuing to do the same thing is always seen as safe.
The stelae and three statues were to be taken to the government antiquities laboratory in Alexandria for desalinization treatment before being sent on an international tour at the end of 2003
Does anyone know how you desalinate stone objects like statues? And why it is necessary?
When you are putting together a new computer, pick all the components with an eye towards efficiency.
Do you want the fastest possible video card? Then you buy a GeForce. But the GeForce runs hot. I like the Radeon; it's close to the performance of a GeForce 2, and it runs cooler. (Also, ATI has published all the info needed for free drivers, while nVidia has not, but that's another thread.)
Do you want the fastest possible CPU? Then you get an Athlon 1.33 GHz, but that runs hot. I like the Duron; a Duron 850 will be close to the performance of an Athlon 800, but it runs much cooler.
Do you want the fastest possible hard disk? Then you get a 10,000 RPM drive or at least a 7,200 RPM drive. But if you want quiet, get a quality 5,400 RPM drive (maybe from IBM). I bought a Quantum lct15 drive; that is the quietest drive you can get. It turns out that it is only 4,400 RPM! I do notice that disk-intensive operations are a bit slow on it, but most of the time the system runs totally fast (since it has 256 MB of RAM, my applications, once loaded, stay resident in RAM).
As others have said, the PC Power and Cooling "Silencer" power supplies are indeed quieter. They don't move as much air, but if your system doesn't run too hot they will do fine.
I'm typing this on a system I built for my wife, using the above ideas. Duron 850, lct15 hard disk, Radeon CPU, PC Power and Cooling power supply, 256 MB of RAM. By far the noisiest thing is the CPU fan. By the way, I didn't put in a case fan; the power supply fan is adequate to keep the whole system cool!
One last idea. I haven't done this yet, but I think it will work very well. Small, high-RPM fans make more noise than big, low-RPM fans. I want to disconnect the CPU fan, and put in a big flexible plastic hose over the CPU heat sink; the other end of the hose will go to a 80mm case fan. I was thinking of using the vent hose from a clothes dryer for this. I figure I can use plastic tie-wraps to attach the hose to the case and to the CPU heat sink.
Which Athlon -- the Athlon 1.33 GHz? The Duron 800?
I suggest that for a computer that nicely balances performance and noise, you should use a Duron chip. Duron chips generally dissipate about half as much power as a Pentium III, while giving 80% to 90% of the performance of an Athlon.
Don't use 7200 RPM hard disk drives!
I sort of agree. But I have found the IBM DeskStar line of 7200 drives to be pretty quiet, so I recommend using one of those if you want a 7200 hard drive.
Forget the above and buy an iMac!!
Actually, I want to build a quiet desktop system using Transmeta Crusoe chips. Ideally 2 or 4 of them. A 600 MHz Crusoe dissipates only 1 or 2 Watts!
The six or seven fans necessary because AMD's design is substandard
Nonsense. AMD's design is just fine. The Athlon is not particularly bad compared to Intel CPUs, given what it does. (And Intel made the Pentium 4 look better than the Athlon basically by
lying.)
And the new Palomino-core Athlons dissipate 20% less heat, thanks to a bit of clever engineering; read more
here.
If you really think the Athlon is substandard, feel free to send your Athlons to me.
Like it or not, open source has not generally produced fundamentally new technologies at the rate Microsoft has. The one exception would lie in the Internet server market (and it is not coincidental that that is the main market where OSS is successful). We tend to spend all our time catching up in other areas.
This is true, but you are overlooking something. The free software community has been spending its time catching up, because it has had so much catching up to do. Linus introduced his early kernels at a time when MS had spent nearly a decade on Windows, and IIRC the free BSD variants came even later than that. KDE wasn't started until 1996, when MS had already had its Windows desktop working for over a dozen years. (For some value of "working", anyway.) GNOME started even later than KDE.
The reason free software is so strong in web serving is that the free operating systems were ready to run web servers by the time web servers were invented; free OSs didn't have to play catch-up at all in that area.
Thanks to RMS and GNU, there was a ready-made suite of great command-line stuff, just waiting for a kernel; but the GUI desktop is another matter. KDE and GNOME both started from close to zero. They had only X11 to build upon. Remember that it took Microsoft about 7 years to get Windows into decent shape; KDE and GNOME did it in much less time. Both have added features and apps at a rapid pace; at this point you can get a newbie up and running on either environment as fast as on Windows. (That newbie has a much better chance of setting up Windows on his own than the free stuff, but setup systems are another area we are playing catchup.)
I think the next couple of years will be very interesting. GNOME and KDE, finally at feature-parity with Windows and with the worst bugs fixed, will have a chance to grow in new directions. The GUI apps available will swell. Don't count the free stuff out of the fight just yet.
In the near future, watch for these things to happen:
Schools and small companies start adopting free software for their business, to save a few dollars per seat
Large companies like Boeing start to use free software as a threat to get Microsoft to lower the per-seat fees: "We could move to Linux and GNOME; you better make us a deal or we'll do it"
PCs start to be available with GNOME and applications pre-installed
When you start to see Boeing setting up GNOME on 30,000 seats at a time, or when you see Gateway and Dell start offering GNOME preinstalled, you will know that the software landscape has shifted. That will be a while, but I think the day is coming.
So we have a drive jacket thingy the size of a large PDA, and drive cartridges that go into it. Why did they even bother to do this? Seems like it would make more sense to just mass-produce a single standard brick that has a hard drive inside, and a 1394 (Firewire) interface.
I'm pretty sure the jacket thingy doesn't have very much on board, and I wonder how many plug-unplug cycles you get before something breaks. And you can get 1394 to USB converters, 1394 to SCSI, etc.
The only advantage to doing it this way is the specific case of SCSI: you can swap out a cartridge without having to reboot. SCSI doesn't do hot-plugging very well. (On many systems you can hot-plug a SCSI device and refresh the bus and all will be well, but on other systems [e.g. WinNT] you must reboot.) This doesn't seem like enough of an advantage to make it worth locking yourself in with Iomega.
steveha
Re:Linux advocacy: VR3 framework for the Desktop?
on
Agenda, Not Hidden
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· Score: 3
I am a Debian user. I don't use dpkg to install new applications; I use apt-get. Even an ordinary user can learn to type "apt-get xmms" if he wants to install xmms.
I also love aptitude; it is a text-mode menu-based utility that lets you manage packages. If you don't know that you want xmms, you can use aptitude to look around and see what packages are available, and you can figure out what you want to try.
(By the way, looking around through aptitude was how I discovered that the classic game rogue is available for Debian! I always wanted rogue and never knew where I could get it, and then I basically stumbled across it one day! I love aptitude.)
There are also GUI-based tools. There is gnome-apt, which is not as usable as aptitude yet. There is also the package installer used for Progeny Debian, where you choose things like "Development Tools" and you get a whole bunch of stuff.
I love Debian; it is so easy to manage the packages.
When I was at Microsoft, there was very little code reuse going on. Developers weren't even leveraging each others' code, let alone browsing the Internet looking for code to steal.
I doubt this has changed.
steveha
Re:Can't get rich selling GPL'ed SW
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 2
I agree with you. It's not impossible to make money on open source, but it is impossible to make as much money on open source as you can on closed source. This fact isn't good for companies like Microsoft but it's great for everyone else.
Thank goodness Nautilus has already hit the 1.0 level. Even if this story is true and Eazel is gone, we get to keep Nautilus.
Mozilla took ages to get rolling because the initial source release was such a mess. (It didn't even build when first released.) One of the lessons of open source development: it goes better when the source actually works. It's easier to take something that works and make it work a little bit better, than to take a mess and make it work.
Slightly offtopic, but Microsoft had a system for doing GUI stuff in text: Character Oriented Windows, or COW for short. Imagine the jokes and T-shirts.
You can't get it, of course. It was never offered as a product, or else it would have had some other name.
Gnome is controlled -- c'mon, don't kid yourself -- by two companies.
Ximian and Eazel have exactly as much control over GNOME as IBM used to have over the PC market.
There was a day, years ago, where IBM was the undisputed leader in the PC market. PCs were called "IBM PC compatibles" or "IBM clones". Everyone waited for IBM to come out with a new PC, and then carefully copied it in their own PCs.
All that changed when IBM did two things: 0) they tried to get everyone to buy in on a platform completely controlled by IBM (the Microchannel Architecture or MCA; IBM had patents giving it full ownership of MCA) and 1) they delayed months without releasing a PC based on the Intel 386. Another company (Compaq) took the bold step of releasing a 386-based PC before IBM did, and the rest is history: IBM never got the leadership position back. These days IBM is just another vendor in the PC market.
The situation with GNOME is similar. Ximian and Eazel can lead, and everyone will follow. But if the day ever comes that these companies try to lock people in to a proprietary solution, or if they stop releasing new stuff, then they will lose their leadership position. Others will pick up the development and run with it.
In the case of PCs, it was free-market competition that prevented IBM from forcing the industry to follow its lead. In the case of GNOME, it is the GNU public license and the public release of the source code that prevents Ximian and Eazel from forcing the free software community to follow their lead. The free software license is important, even if Mr. Powell doesn't seem to understand it.
Ximian and Eazel have control of GNOME for exactly as long as they deserve it. We can and will take it away from them if we ever need to.
And that is why his article is ultimately pointless. Eazel and Ximian and the FSF and RMS could all be abducted by aliens tomorrow, and GNOME will still survive and prosper. Mr. Powell can sling his gossip and innuendo, but he's kidding himself if he thinks any of it really matters.
P.S. I am somewhat on the same page with him about the cash donations. The idea of trying to donate cash in a way that keeps the money from going to creditors seems odd, perhaps even immoral. And what good will it do to contribute money to the Eazel company if it will go bankrupt for not paying its creditors?
Emacs Lisp is not a modern Lisp. It is an archaic and *very* poorly designed implementation of a Lisp developed at MIT in the 1960s
This is very interesting. I never paid enough attention to LISP to know any of the above.
Is anyone looking at updating the Emacs LISP to a modern LISP?
Would RMS agree with you that Emacs LISP is archaic and very poorly designed?
Do the modern LISPs come with an editor as part of the development environment? If so, are any of these editors good enough to be competition to Emacs?
Last question. This is not a flame or a joke; if I'm being silly please set me straight. Since LISP is considered to be a great language for writing programs that can write programs, would it be practical to write some LISP code that would chew up the Emacs LISP and spit out modern LISP?
most people never knew or cared if their computer was "MPC Level 1" or whatever
Oh, really?
When most people are considering buying software, they want to know that it will actually run on their computer. Most people have an easier time recognizing the "MPC" logo on a box, than going down the list and saying "yes, my CD-ROM is at least 2x; yes, my sound card has wave table synthesis; yes, I have at least 16-bit color on my desktop..."
If you want to find out if a game will run on a Linux computer, there is this huge list of libraries you need to check. A guy from id Software said that one reason it was hard to sell Quake 3 Arena for Linux is that it is so hard for customers to get it working or even to know whether their Linux computer is set up to run it.
The TUXBOX certification would mean that any TUXBOX game would, if you boot it up, just plain work. There is value to the customer there.
P.S. I'm fond of Debian. If you use apt-get to download a game, apt-get will make sure that everything the game needs is in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. That is the most candid letter I can ever remember seeing. The polar opposite of the usual marketing BS.
Refreshing!
steveha
My favorite was Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, the one where he gained access to this awesome computer. (Lots of blinky lights on the front, and cool spinning tape drives! Woo!) He decided to use it to do all his homework for him. So he spent hours and hours studying his books, and entering data from his books into the computer so it could do his homework. At the end of the novel he realized that he had spent far more time studying and doing data entry than he would have spent just doing the homework, but he now knew the material so well that he totally aced his tests.
steveha
Either those are old enough to not be under copyright, or else no one cares, because you can get them from web pages. For example, you can get Tom Swift books in Palm DOC format from here:
http://www.dogpatch.org/etext.html#swift.
steveha
Sometime in the 90's I saw, in a bookstore, new Three Investigators books. Reworked a bit, like the new Nancy Drew or other revivals. Now all three boys drove cars, at least two of them had girfriends (I don't think Jupiter Jones, the brilliant nerd, had one), they took karate lessons, etc. They still had their ultra-cool secret headquarters: an old RV buried under a pile of junk in the junkyard Jupiter's uncle owns... no one remembers it or knows it's there, and the Three use secret entrances so no one sees them go in or out.
This was the tag line on the front of the book: "Jupe is the brains. Pete is the muscle. And Bob is Mr. Cool." The old books didn't need snappy slogans like that; they were just interesting.
steveha
Now nVidia is going to make it possible to make an integrated motherboard, and the performance is going to be excellent. The Duron totally crushes the Celeron, the GeForce MX totally crushes the 810 onboard video, and the audio DSPs totally crush everything currently on the market. As long as the price for a Duron plus one of these boards is about the same as the price for a Celeron plus an 810 motherboard, they will sell a whole bunch of these.
steveha
Some people just delight in screwing things up for everyone else. Maybe they feel vengeful against all the total strangers to them; maybe it gives them some stupid sense of power, to annoy so many at once; maybe they just want some attention. But they are out there and they will do it.
I played Unreal Tournament one night, and some of the players on the other team took our flag. But instead of taking it to their home base, they hid it somewhere, and sat around text-chatting to each other. When players on my team asked them to just take the #%!$ flag and have done with it, they denied having the flag, but eventually said "Oh, THIS flag?" Very funny... not. All I could do was find another server. I don't even think they were actually cheating, but they were definitely screwing around with us rather than playing the game.
I played CounterStrike one night, and some guy had an invisibility hack. It was a bomb-planting level and he was a Terrorist. What happened was that the CTs would kill all the Ts but the invisible one, and then the level would just drag on and on until time ran out. This guy would run right next to me, making a clicking sound (I'm pretty sure he was toggling his flashlight off and on; it sounded like the flashlight click). I tried spraying bullets around, but I don't think he was "there" to hit. Everyone, including all the other Ts, wanted to vote him off but we couldn't make it work.
I've played CS on servers where Friendly Fire was enabled, and guys would run around killing their teammates. But that's not the worst. Some guys would shoot you just enough times to really hurt you, but not kill you, so the server would never kick them off. If you killed them, the server would kick you off. You couldn't win, and we couldn't get voting off to work.
I have other examples, but in all cases just being able to vote the moron off the server would keep the cheater from ruining the game for everyone else.
More subtle cheats, like ones to see through walls, are impossible to prove; but the truly obnoxious and outrageous stuff would be shut down cold. And that's a good thing.
steveha
http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/idr/i dr010529_1_n.shtml
I like it. This nicely end-runs the problem of library compatability for C++/C/whatever. And under Linux, at least, firing up a new process is fast, and you only run the import filter when opening a new document, so there would be no issues with speed.
steveha
Odds are against you. Corel sells WordPerfect for money; if AbiWord and the rest become viable contenders, who wants to spend the money for WordPerfect? It is arguably in Corel's best interest for all the free word processors to have lousy filters for as long as possible.
How are the WordPerfect filters? If they suck, then Corel could rationally join the filter crew, since good filters would then benefit Corel as much as anyone else. At least in that scenario there is some clear benefit to Corel.
Of course, if the decision is made by a stereotypical boss figure, Corel will mind its own fish and stay out. Why do something new and different? Could be risky. Continuing to do the same thing is always seen as safe.
steveha
The stelae and three statues were to be taken to the government antiquities laboratory in Alexandria for desalinization treatment before being sent on an international tour at the end of 2003
Does anyone know how you desalinate stone objects like statues? And why it is necessary?
steveha
Do you want the fastest possible video card? Then you buy a GeForce. But the GeForce runs hot. I like the Radeon; it's close to the performance of a GeForce 2, and it runs cooler. (Also, ATI has published all the info needed for free drivers, while nVidia has not, but that's another thread.)
Do you want the fastest possible CPU? Then you get an Athlon 1.33 GHz, but that runs hot. I like the Duron; a Duron 850 will be close to the performance of an Athlon 800, but it runs much cooler.
Do you want the fastest possible hard disk? Then you get a 10,000 RPM drive or at least a 7,200 RPM drive. But if you want quiet, get a quality 5,400 RPM drive (maybe from IBM). I bought a Quantum lct15 drive; that is the quietest drive you can get. It turns out that it is only 4,400 RPM! I do notice that disk-intensive operations are a bit slow on it, but most of the time the system runs totally fast (since it has 256 MB of RAM, my applications, once loaded, stay resident in RAM).
As others have said, the PC Power and Cooling "Silencer" power supplies are indeed quieter. They don't move as much air, but if your system doesn't run too hot they will do fine.
I'm typing this on a system I built for my wife, using the above ideas. Duron 850, lct15 hard disk, Radeon CPU, PC Power and Cooling power supply, 256 MB of RAM. By far the noisiest thing is the CPU fan. By the way, I didn't put in a case fan; the power supply fan is adequate to keep the whole system cool!
One last idea. I haven't done this yet, but I think it will work very well. Small, high-RPM fans make more noise than big, low-RPM fans. I want to disconnect the CPU fan, and put in a big flexible plastic hose over the CPU heat sink; the other end of the hose will go to a 80mm case fan. I was thinking of using the vent hose from a clothes dryer for this. I figure I can use plastic tie-wraps to attach the hose to the case and to the CPU heat sink.
steveha
Which Pentium -- the Pentium 4? III? II?
Which Athlon -- the Athlon 1.33 GHz? The Duron 800?
I suggest that for a computer that nicely balances performance and noise, you should use a Duron chip. Duron chips generally dissipate about half as much power as a Pentium III, while giving 80% to 90% of the performance of an Athlon.
Don't use 7200 RPM hard disk drives!
I sort of agree. But I have found the IBM DeskStar line of 7200 drives to be pretty quiet, so I recommend using one of those if you want a 7200 hard drive.
Forget the above and buy an iMac!!
Actually, I want to build a quiet desktop system using Transmeta Crusoe chips. Ideally 2 or 4 of them. A 600 MHz Crusoe dissipates only 1 or 2 Watts!
steveha
Nonsense. AMD's design is just fine. The Athlon is not particularly bad compared to Intel CPUs, given what it does. (And Intel made the Pentium 4 look better than the Athlon basically by lying.)
And the new Palomino-core Athlons dissipate 20% less heat, thanks to a bit of clever engineering; read more here.
If you really think the Athlon is substandard, feel free to send your Athlons to me.
steveha
This is true, but you are overlooking something. The free software community has been spending its time catching up, because it has had so much catching up to do. Linus introduced his early kernels at a time when MS had spent nearly a decade on Windows, and IIRC the free BSD variants came even later than that. KDE wasn't started until 1996, when MS had already had its Windows desktop working for over a dozen years. (For some value of "working", anyway.) GNOME started even later than KDE.
The reason free software is so strong in web serving is that the free operating systems were ready to run web servers by the time web servers were invented; free OSs didn't have to play catch-up at all in that area.
Thanks to RMS and GNU, there was a ready-made suite of great command-line stuff, just waiting for a kernel; but the GUI desktop is another matter. KDE and GNOME both started from close to zero. They had only X11 to build upon. Remember that it took Microsoft about 7 years to get Windows into decent shape; KDE and GNOME did it in much less time. Both have added features and apps at a rapid pace; at this point you can get a newbie up and running on either environment as fast as on Windows. (That newbie has a much better chance of setting up Windows on his own than the free stuff, but setup systems are another area we are playing catchup.)
I think the next couple of years will be very interesting. GNOME and KDE, finally at feature-parity with Windows and with the worst bugs fixed, will have a chance to grow in new directions. The GUI apps available will swell. Don't count the free stuff out of the fight just yet.
In the near future, watch for these things to happen:
Schools and small companies start adopting free software for their business, to save a few dollars per seat
Large companies like Boeing start to use free software as a threat to get Microsoft to lower the per-seat fees: "We could move to Linux and GNOME; you better make us a deal or we'll do it"
PCs start to be available with GNOME and applications pre-installed
When you start to see Boeing setting up GNOME on 30,000 seats at a time, or when you see Gateway and Dell start offering GNOME preinstalled, you will know that the software landscape has shifted. That will be a while, but I think the day is coming.
steveha
I'm pretty sure the jacket thingy doesn't have very much on board, and I wonder how many plug-unplug cycles you get before something breaks. And you can get 1394 to USB converters, 1394 to SCSI, etc.
The only advantage to doing it this way is the specific case of SCSI: you can swap out a cartridge without having to reboot. SCSI doesn't do hot-plugging very well. (On many systems you can hot-plug a SCSI device and refresh the bus and all will be well, but on other systems [e.g. WinNT] you must reboot.) This doesn't seem like enough of an advantage to make it worth locking yourself in with Iomega.
steveha
I also love aptitude; it is a text-mode menu-based utility that lets you manage packages. If you don't know that you want xmms, you can use aptitude to look around and see what packages are available, and you can figure out what you want to try.
(By the way, looking around through aptitude was how I discovered that the classic game rogue is available for Debian! I always wanted rogue and never knew where I could get it, and then I basically stumbled across it one day! I love aptitude.)
There are also GUI-based tools. There is gnome-apt, which is not as usable as aptitude yet. There is also the package installer used for Progeny Debian, where you choose things like "Development Tools" and you get a whole bunch of stuff.
I love Debian; it is so easy to manage the packages.
steveha
I doubt this has changed.
steveha
steveha
Mozilla took ages to get rolling because the initial source release was such a mess. (It didn't even build when first released.) One of the lessons of open source development: it goes better when the source actually works. It's easier to take something that works and make it work a little bit better, than to take a mess and make it work.
Eazel, thanks for Nautilus.
steveha
You can't get it, of course. It was never offered as a product, or else it would have had some other name.
steveha
http://dynabook.com/pc/catalog/libretto/010507l1/i ndex_j.htm
Why do you say that Mr. Tito is "spoiled"? What bad thing has he done to make you say this about him?
steveha
Gnome is controlled -- c'mon, don't kid yourself -- by two companies.
Ximian and Eazel have exactly as much control over GNOME as IBM used to have over the PC market.
There was a day, years ago, where IBM was the undisputed leader in the PC market. PCs were called "IBM PC compatibles" or "IBM clones". Everyone waited for IBM to come out with a new PC, and then carefully copied it in their own PCs.
All that changed when IBM did two things: 0) they tried to get everyone to buy in on a platform completely controlled by IBM (the Microchannel Architecture or MCA; IBM had patents giving it full ownership of MCA) and 1) they delayed months without releasing a PC based on the Intel 386. Another company (Compaq) took the bold step of releasing a 386-based PC before IBM did, and the rest is history: IBM never got the leadership position back. These days IBM is just another vendor in the PC market.
The situation with GNOME is similar. Ximian and Eazel can lead, and everyone will follow. But if the day ever comes that these companies try to lock people in to a proprietary solution, or if they stop releasing new stuff, then they will lose their leadership position. Others will pick up the development and run with it.
In the case of PCs, it was free-market competition that prevented IBM from forcing the industry to follow its lead. In the case of GNOME, it is the GNU public license and the public release of the source code that prevents Ximian and Eazel from forcing the free software community to follow their lead. The free software license is important, even if Mr. Powell doesn't seem to understand it.
Ximian and Eazel have control of GNOME for exactly as long as they deserve it. We can and will take it away from them if we ever need to.
And that is why his article is ultimately pointless. Eazel and Ximian and the FSF and RMS could all be abducted by aliens tomorrow, and GNOME will still survive and prosper. Mr. Powell can sling his gossip and innuendo, but he's kidding himself if he thinks any of it really matters.
P.S. I am somewhat on the same page with him about the cash donations. The idea of trying to donate cash in a way that keeps the money from going to creditors seems odd, perhaps even immoral. And what good will it do to contribute money to the Eazel company if it will go bankrupt for not paying its creditors?
steveha
This is very interesting. I never paid enough attention to LISP to know any of the above.
Is anyone looking at updating the Emacs LISP to a modern LISP?
Would RMS agree with you that Emacs LISP is archaic and very poorly designed?
Do the modern LISPs come with an editor as part of the development environment? If so, are any of these editors good enough to be competition to Emacs?
Last question. This is not a flame or a joke; if I'm being silly please set me straight. Since LISP is considered to be a great language for writing programs that can write programs, would it be practical to write some LISP code that would chew up the Emacs LISP and spit out modern LISP?
steveha
Oh, really?
When most people are considering buying software, they want to know that it will actually run on their computer. Most people have an easier time recognizing the "MPC" logo on a box, than going down the list and saying "yes, my CD-ROM is at least 2x; yes, my sound card has wave table synthesis; yes, I have at least 16-bit color on my desktop..."
If you want to find out if a game will run on a Linux computer, there is this huge list of libraries you need to check. A guy from id Software said that one reason it was hard to sell Quake 3 Arena for Linux is that it is so hard for customers to get it working or even to know whether their Linux computer is set up to run it.
The TUXBOX certification would mean that any TUXBOX game would, if you boot it up, just plain work. There is value to the customer there.
P.S. I'm fond of Debian. If you use apt-get to download a game, apt-get will make sure that everything the game needs is in place.
steveha