I remember an ad that Apple ran in the 80's sometime about an Apple II that survived a fire. The story goes that some guy's house caught fire, and the case of the Apple II basically melted down. The guy took it to a dealership and asked if there was anything they could do... they took the mobo out, put it into a new case, and boom... the thing worked fine.
The headline for the ad read "Baked Apple." I tried Googling for it, but all I could find was the more recent story of a powerbook baked in an oven
I don't recall any specifics of abusing my own Apple II's, back in the day. I'm sure I had a few "oh shit" moments when I plugged or unplugged something while the machine was on, but I don't think it was as dramatic as hotplugging a floppy. Frankly, I'm just still amazed that my 20 year-old Apple//c can still boot. Hey, wait... it's around it's 20th anniversary... I need to dig it out of the basement and fire it up again...
Basically, lack of air resistance. Flight in the lower atmosphere is basically limited by air friction. The SR-71 Blackhawk flew high up in the atmosphere, and at Mach 3 it heated up so much it would actually expand a measurable amount. Getting much faster than that within the atmosphere would be a major technical challenge.
Get above the atmopshere, and you can pretty much go as fast as you want without worrying about air friction burning you up (well, until it's time to come back down again...). Also, you don't have to keep expending fuel to fight the air friction once you're up there... you're basically coasting.
I learned VAX assembly in college as well... this after toying around with 6502 assembly in high school.
Kinda of a culture shock between the two... not just the 32 registers (I think) of the VAX vs. the 3 of the 6502, but the fact that the VAX had friggin' string handling instructions in assembly! CISC gone totally gonzo. I suspect my Vaxen assembly language textbook is still in my parent's basement someplace.
God, I hate marketing. Why do you have to have yet another number attached to a product? I could never figure what the hell Sun was talking about when they would go off on "Java 2", but then sprinkle in "1.4" or "1.5" when talking about the JDK. or JRE.
Jesus. Just give me a version number so I can track what it's compatible with, and what features it has. If you're bumping up your version number for a product, bump them for all related ones as well, in the same increment. Don't make me try to figure out what version number of the language is supported by which version number of the developer's kit for god's sake. Is it so damn hard?
I thought marketing was suppose to create clarity in the minds of the potential customer. Screwing around with numbering schemes isn't the way to do that. I don't care what your internal taxonomies are. Just label the thing, and stick with it.
I also take it that Sun's marketing/engineering is stealing their "internal" project naming protocols from Apple?
if there's something that the private sector is willing to do for-profit, then the government simply should not compete with them.
Absolutist Libertarian drivel. You mean I can start up any business that dies something the government does, and then force the government not to do it anymore? So, if I start a business of printing IRS tax forms, and want to charge $50/ea. for 1040 forms, I can forc the IRS to stop printing and distributing them free?
Why not let the government do the things it can do efficiently, and for the greater good, and let the private sector worry about the things it can do most efficiently? Free weather data is a huge benefit to all... like a (mostly) free road system. Why privatize it just so someone can extract extra money out of people?
Most of the posts also miss the business model. The government collects the raw data, and that is made freely available. What Accuweather and the like do is turn that raw data into value-added products like maps with pretty colors, icons, etc. They translate the science into a form that average people understand.
No one missed the business model. That Accuweather adds value by interpreting data doesn't perclude other individuals from getting the data the National Weather Service collects and doing the same thing for free. That's what the Accurweather people are asking for... a ban on the free flow of information. They want to privatize this public knowledge under lock and key, so they and they alone can profit from it. People aren't looking to shut down Accuweather... they are just asking for the same priviledge that Accuweather has.
A value-added business model is perfectly fine. But if you cannot make a profit off of a freely available resource that you add value to, then you should find another business model, not try to privatize the free resource.
Your argument that they don't hold the entire system so they shouldn't hold any of it doesn't make sense. Otherwise the analogy could be extended like this: Microsoft owns Windows, so other complanies shouldn't write software for it. Apple owns the OS AND the hardware, so other companies shouldn't write software for it. These are not sentiments often found on/. Why should weather forecasting be any different?
Bogus analogy. Microsoft and Apple own their platforms. And yes, as owners of those platforms, they could close them to outside developers. Windows and OS X systems are open in that anyone can develop software for them. Apple and Microsoft know that if they tried to control the platforms to that level, they'd be sunk, because there's no way for them to develop all of the software people would want on a PC. The market wouldn't tolerate it.
Have you tried to develop software for a the PS2, Game Cube, Xbox, or other gaming platform? Those aren't open systems. You have to get the developers kits from the owners of those systems. Do you see the/. crowd howling about that all day?
Accuweather doesn't own the data collected by the national weather service. They have no part in creating that data. Closing the data to the general public because Accuweather wants to protect its business interests would be like Red Hat closing the source to Linux because they want to protect their revenue stream.
On Point 3 - Yes, there are migration costs... There is ALWAYS a migration cost when upgrading
And they always conveniently forget to mention the cost of upgrading your Microsoft products. My current employer lost a boatload of money when they tried to move from NT to Win2k on the server, because a last-minute backwards incompatibility threw a spanner into the works. The project had to be called off, effectiely wasting several months of effort by about half the engineering group. You do the math on how much that cost the company, nevermind the actual license cost.
They also don't mention that in many cases, a great deal of the cost is inspired by Microsoft's lock-in. Your data in their products isn't open... you have to pry it out. If your data was in open formats (i.e. actual, for-real XML) then you'd be able to migrate a lot easier. So, it's a cost really imposed by Microsoft, rather than a cost imposed by any alternative solution. The erverse probably isn't true... once in an open format, there's usually not an 'exit cost' associated with moving to another solution.
according to the law he may be doing absolutely nothing wrong.
Right, but that does not automatically mean that SpamCop is doing anything wrong. The Can Spam act is essentially irrelevant here, because the issue isn't whether spamming is legal, but whether spamming was in breach of the contract with the spammer's ISP. The issue is that SpamCop is ratting out the spammer to his ISP for spamming, and that ISP pulls the spammer's plug. If the ISP has written into its contract with the spammer "no spamming" and he/she/it spams, then that is totally legal. The argument here that SpamCop is interfering with the spammer's business unjustly (which most of us think it isn't). The little razzle-dazzle about "we're complying with the can spam act!" whine by the spammer is irrelevant.
As an analogy: If we're neighbors in an apartment building that forbids pets, and I ratted you out to the landlord because you had a few cats, you won't be getting into trouble with thelandlord because owning cats is illegal... you'll be getting into trouble with the landlord because you've violated your lease.
What the spammer is trying to say here is that under the Can Spam Act, you cannot go directly to the ISP with complaints. You must complain to him first. IANAL, but that sounds like bullshit. If SpamCop was out of the picture and I complained to the ISP directly myself, would I get sued? I don't believe there's any way you could restrain my right of free speech to inform the ISP that his client is in breach of his contract. I also don;t think the ISP would be required to give up my identity to the spammer. As the article said, there isn't a legal requirement to be faced with your accusers in cases such as this.
The original poster assumed that Microsoft is opening the door to spammers. What is unsaid in the article is if these e-mails were actually solicited.
I could see that legit ads (i.e. you definitely signed up to recieve them) might be tossed out with the huge amount of spam. What Microsoft *might* be doing here is saying "OK, you say you are opt-in, we'll let your stuff through, but we're gonna take a bite out of you if you are lying to us."
Unfortunately, the author of the article didn't bother to state exactly what the rules are that Microsoft is imposing. Roast the journalist, not Microsoft (at least, not yet).
You know what would be great? If they engineered the hybrid to detect when it's being rammed by some twit in an SUV, and shunt all of its electrical charge through the other vehicle in the milliseconds after collision.
Sure, your SUV may smash my hybrid, but you'll be extra crispy. Especially if that voltage gets into the coils of the heated seats you got your ass planted on.
Re:Why vim is better than joe (and obviously emacs
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That makes Vim more user friendly than vi (but then, a pointy stick jabbed into your eye is more user friendly than vi). One nice thing about Joe is that the help reminder remains on screen all of the time. The help window also shares the screen with the edit window, so you don't need to bounce back and forth between the help and the text you are editing.
Nano is probably the best choice these days for real naive users, since the basic help (how to save a file, how to exit the editor, etc) appears onscreen by default.
Letting users know how to get out of the editor can be really important. On my college's mainframe, just after we switched to UNIX in the late 80's, we had problems with the system bogging down. It turns out people couldn't figure out how to exit EMACS, so they would hit ^Z to get back to a prompt when they were finished editing. Well, after a few hours of CS students doing edit-compile cycles, the system would run out of virtual memory due to the hundreds of suspended EMACS jobs...
There WAS a Joe for DOS.
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Check SIMTEL's archives. Ages and ages ago there was a version of Joe for DOS, but Joe gave up on it since it was a pain in the ass to develop for DOS with all that 64K memory segment crap.
Anyhow, a quick Google turned up
this file. It's version 2.2, which doesn't have up-to-date features, but it runs.
Re:Why vim is better than joe (and obviously emacs
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# vim works like you think.
Many commands are "mnemonic".
Uh, not the way I think. Not the way most people think. Most people, especially those new to the UNIX platform, have no clue. Does alert you to the help facilities on starting up? Does Vim just let you start typing?
Mnemonics are sweet and all, but they are useless unless you already know the command and you are trying to remember it. Joe was really one of the first editors that made it easy for newbies to get help straight off the bat.
# Speed: CPU-wise, vim is still by far more efficient than joe.
Try running joe on an SGI Indy! Or on a PC/286!
You're talking out of your ass here. Have you tried running joe on a slow platform? I have... 16 Mhz 68000 UNIX systems, under a 80186 (yes, "1", that's not a typo) at 10Mhz under DOS. What's more I've used it over 1200 baud modems, raw telnet connections across the country back when you were lucky to have a 56k baud line shared with an entire campus. It worked perfectly. I'm not saying that Vim can't do that as well, but you obviously have no clue when it comes to Joe's system requirements. Maybe you're thinking it's some offshoot of EMACS?
JOE and I go way back...
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Joe (the Joe in JOE) was my college roomate. He'd stumble in in the middle of the night to rave about this or that optimization, and how he'd figured out the perfect way to do such-and-such.
Technically, the one thing Joe kicked most other editors asses at (except perhaps vi) was its ability to provide a user-friendly text editor environment over slow connections. Joe paid a lot of attention to optimizing the screen redraws to ensure that the minimum number of characters were sent over the pipe. Back in the days of 1200 baud modems and painfully slow cross-country telnet sessions, this made a big difference.
It's funny how JOE (the editor) keeps turning up... I hacked my TiVo recently following all of those instructions on the Internet, and was amused to see that the editor of choice for TiVo hackers is... Joe!
Later today I'll be installing Gentoo on what is going to be my home theater box. The first program I'll emerge? Joe. Simple as that.
I guess this is a good start, but he states that we should avoid "icon creep." The problem is, the sorts of nastiness that spyware can carry out will likely be lumped up with the same icons that most legitimate software will cover.
I.E. think about how many icons Mozilla could be required to have on it... it can be set to start at boot with that quickstart icon thing. It can can be set to send data back home if you've set up the Talkback crash reporting, which will likely send back monitoring information on what else is running on your PC. Mozilla can also certainly display popups (although, granted, at the behest of web sites). I don't think Mozilla does remote control or self updates, but a future release could, in a non-evil way.
If people install Mozilla, then they'll see three or four icons. Think how many other benign pieces of software will have to display those same icons. Now think how many nasty bits of spyware would also display those same icons. If people repeatedly see the same things over again, they aren't going to be on their guard against a program that does the same sort of thing other programs do, but for nefarious purposes.
Personally, I think a good idea would be to have an independent, third-party review board sort of like Underwriter Labs (those UL label folks you find on most eletrical appliances) to label software as having been tested and being up to published standards for respecting privacy and being a good "software citizen." Then we can train the user to look for the "Certified by Software Testing Labs" as being safe.
Such a board would be hard to set up and keep independant of the industry which it serves... but I think it is possible. We could, hopefully, make such a review board practiclke enough that small software firms, and even open/freeware authors could get certification.
One of my favorite aspects of the show was the scale... in Star Trek, it's up the crew of a single ship to Save The Galaxy As We Know It on a weekly basis. Other sci-fi space operas (Babylon 5, Adromeda) have a similar scale: heros out saving the universe.
On Farscape, half the time the crew is struggling to find food, find material to repair Moya after they got her busted up in a previous episode, or just trying to escape whoever is chasing them now. Granted, as the show developed, there were bigger fish to fry, especially concerning the information in Crichton's head. But the scale of the show still mainly revolves around the characters.
It's not perfect... I'm getting tired of the "bad guy converted into ally, comes aboard ship" thing. And always a new uber-baddie around the corner. It's the sort of trap that Trek fell into (no, really, the Borg are the really ultimate bad guys... until the federation defeats them and they meet up with even badder baddies). Even Enterprise has fallen into that trap.
Why the hell are you importing Acrobat files into a document? An Acrobat file is an end-product, not an exchange format. It's like you're saying "I hope they discontinue hammers because it really hurts when I smash my head in with them." If something is painful to do, it's a sign that you shouldn't be doing it.
Besides, Frame is one of the few systems where you can even import PDF pages in the first place. Try it with Word. Then shall ye know pain.
The user interface is stale, yes, and there are tons of features it could really use (like, say, the ability to undo more than one single thing). That Adobe is neglacting the product is a great shame, but as others have said, since it's not a major cash cow for them, they don't have the incentive to update it like they do PhotoShop. Even though most professional tech writers use Frame, that's still not a large market. And since they haven't done jack to update it recently, I bet few people bother to upgrade. We have version 6 where I work, and no real pressing need to upgrade to 7.
After one of my nephews downloaded a file called "Pamela Anderson Fucking.exe" that totally hosed the system when run, I decided to junk Win 98, upgrade to Win XP, then lock down the system. Only I have the admin password. Everyone else's account has the least amount of privs that I could give them. FInally, I went out and Bought Norton Anti-virus and set it to auto update the virus definitions.
Then I told them, "the next time I have to do this, I'm installing Linux. AND I'll install a network blocker to ensure you can only get to G rated web sites."
Between those two things, the PC hasn't had any issues. I check regularly with AdAware.
From the "other" article about San Bruno mentioned in the posting:
The city should also consider looking in audio crossing signals for the hearing impaired and signs that count down the number of seconds left to cross, Victor said.
Ah, so in addition to buttons that don't work, we'll give the deaf audio signals they can't hear. Brilliant.
With just one or two spare gyros, I doubt any group would be able to use the Hubble for very long.
After the gyros give out, you'll have a very large hunk of hardware travelling at thousands of miles per hour that's completely out of control. Even in orbit, with less stuff to crash into, that's a Really Really Bad Thing.
Boosting hubble out to a permenent orbit (or at least out to one that would last 50 years or so until we would presumably have craft more capable of either fetching it or enshrining it) would be a huge cost. We have nothing on the shelf to do it now, and it would be cheaper to just dump the thing into the ocean.
What I think we should be developing, in addition to a shuttle replacement, is robotic repair vehicles that we could use in case of a backup, or in cases of hardware that we really don't want people risking their lives for. Hubble, certainly, has intrinsic and sentimental value that people would be willing to take a risk to save. Somehow, I sort of doubt anyone wants to risk their lives repairing generic communications satillite #5 so soccer moms can continue to yak on their cell phones while causing mayhem in their SUVs.
That means that we'd have to design satillites for easy repair using robots (more modular, easier access, etc.) Modularity probably wouldn't be a bad thing, anyhow. I suspect if we can develop robots that can (mostly, sorta) work on Mars, we can develop ones for earth orbit that can swap in and out some modules.
What does this have to do with money? Humans are naturally curious.
Look at past colonization efforts. They had everything to do with money. Why did the Spanish crown back Columbus? Why did the various European royalty back the other exploratory voyages? Why were the European colonies in the New World chartered by governments?
The only exception we've seen to this was the exploration of Antartica and perhaps the early space race. In both cases, those were done for national pride. The space race, arguably, was also done with at least a perephrial profit motive. They also didn't result in a real colonization, either.
No robot yet built can outdo a dude in a suit.
Tell that to the Russian's robotic lander on Venus... no dude in a suit, no matter how good the suit was, would have lasted even a microsecond on the surface of that world. Robots are simply the best choice for many tasks. If they weren't so well suited to some tasks, then why have they replaced human workers in so many tasks here on earth? One of those tasks is surviving in inhospital environments. That's what Mars is.
Humans will have a place on Mars, but why not let the robots pave the way? The plans involving robotic landers set up a base camp... even refine fuel for a colony or a return trip before the humans get there seems more sensible to me. Sure, it will probably take longer than a heroic dude in a suit who's probably going to snuff it in the first year or so on Mars, but it seems to me to be the most sensible way to go about it.
Personally, I think all we'll get out of this hoo-ha from Bush's speech is (if we're really lucky) a new manned launch system. Let's get to orbit on a reliable basis before we worry much about Mars.
The thing is, are you sure that GCC is equally optimized for both platforms? If the support for code generation on the G5, say, is lackluster in GCC, your results won't reflect which processor is truely faster.
Of course... does it really make a difference? Really, what you are worried about is real-world performance of these things, unless you are just into pissing contests for bragging rights (which, come to think of it, mose die-hard adherents to one or the other platform seem to be).
For real-world, you'd just configure and tweak the systems the way you anticiptae they would be used. In most case,s you'd run OS X on the G5. For the Opteron... well, you'd either be running XP for desktop stuff (perhaps Linux in certain specific cases... such as some graphics workstations for software that has a Linux port) or maybe running Linux as a server.
Got a chorus of people recommending Spire here... but are they water resistent? I have a backpack now with a padded laptop area, but my bigest fear is getting caught in the rain rather than dropping the thing. I went to the Spire website, and they say nothing about water resistance/tightness.
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I remember an ad that Apple ran in the 80's sometime about an Apple II that survived a fire. The story goes that some guy's house caught fire, and the case of the Apple II basically melted down. The guy took it to a dealership and asked if there was anything they could do... they took the mobo out, put it into a new case, and boom... the thing worked fine.
The headline for the ad read "Baked Apple." I tried Googling for it, but all I could find was the more recent story of a powerbook baked in an oven
I don't recall any specifics of abusing my own Apple II's, back in the day. I'm sure I had a few "oh shit" moments when I plugged or unplugged something while the machine was on, but I don't think it was as dramatic as hotplugging a floppy. Frankly, I'm just still amazed that my 20 year-old Apple //c can still boot. Hey, wait... it's around it's 20th anniversary... I need to dig it out of the basement and fire it up again...
Basically, lack of air resistance. Flight in the lower atmosphere is basically limited by air friction. The SR-71 Blackhawk flew high up in the atmosphere, and at Mach 3 it heated up so much it would actually expand a measurable amount. Getting much faster than that within the atmosphere would be a major technical challenge.
Get above the atmopshere, and you can pretty much go as fast as you want without worrying about air friction burning you up (well, until it's time to come back down again...). Also, you don't have to keep expending fuel to fight the air friction once you're up there... you're basically coasting.
I learned VAX assembly in college as well... this after toying around with 6502 assembly in high school.
Kinda of a culture shock between the two... not just the 32 registers (I think) of the VAX vs. the 3 of the 6502, but the fact that the VAX had friggin' string handling instructions in assembly! CISC gone totally gonzo. I suspect my Vaxen assembly language textbook is still in my parent's basement someplace.
God, I hate marketing. Why do you have to have yet another number attached to a product? I could never figure what the hell Sun was talking about when they would go off on "Java 2", but then sprinkle in "1.4" or "1.5" when talking about the JDK. or JRE.
Jesus. Just give me a version number so I can track what it's compatible with, and what features it has. If you're bumping up your version number for a product, bump them for all related ones as well, in the same increment. Don't make me try to figure out what version number of the language is supported by which version number of the developer's kit for god's sake. Is it so damn hard?
I thought marketing was suppose to create clarity in the minds of the potential customer. Screwing around with numbering schemes isn't the way to do that. I don't care what your internal taxonomies are. Just label the thing, and stick with it.
I also take it that Sun's marketing/engineering is stealing their "internal" project naming protocols from Apple?
Absolutist Libertarian drivel. You mean I can start up any business that dies something the government does, and then force the government not to do it anymore? So, if I start a business of printing IRS tax forms, and want to charge $50/ea. for 1040 forms, I can forc the IRS to stop printing and distributing them free?
Why not let the government do the things it can do efficiently, and for the greater good, and let the private sector worry about the things it can do most efficiently? Free weather data is a huge benefit to all... like a (mostly) free road system. Why privatize it just so someone can extract extra money out of people?
No one missed the business model. That Accuweather adds value by interpreting data doesn't perclude other individuals from getting the data the National Weather Service collects and doing the same thing for free. That's what the Accurweather people are asking for... a ban on the free flow of information. They want to privatize this public knowledge under lock and key, so they and they alone can profit from it. People aren't looking to shut down Accuweather... they are just asking for the same priviledge that Accuweather has.
A value-added business model is perfectly fine. But if you cannot make a profit off of a freely available resource that you add value to, then you should find another business model, not try to privatize the free resource.
Bogus analogy. Microsoft and Apple own their platforms. And yes, as owners of those platforms, they could close them to outside developers. Windows and OS X systems are open in that anyone can develop software for them. Apple and Microsoft know that if they tried to control the platforms to that level, they'd be sunk, because there's no way for them to develop all of the software people would want on a PC. The market wouldn't tolerate it.
Have you tried to develop software for a the PS2, Game Cube, Xbox, or other gaming platform? Those aren't open systems. You have to get the developers kits from the owners of those systems. Do you see the /. crowd howling about that all day?
Accuweather doesn't own the data collected by the national weather service. They have no part in creating that data. Closing the data to the general public because Accuweather wants to protect its business interests would be like Red Hat closing the source to Linux because they want to protect their revenue stream.
And they always conveniently forget to mention the cost of upgrading your Microsoft products. My current employer lost a boatload of money when they tried to move from NT to Win2k on the server, because a last-minute backwards incompatibility threw a spanner into the works. The project had to be called off, effectiely wasting several months of effort by about half the engineering group. You do the math on how much that cost the company, nevermind the actual license cost.
They also don't mention that in many cases, a great deal of the cost is inspired by Microsoft's lock-in. Your data in their products isn't open... you have to pry it out. If your data was in open formats (i.e. actual, for-real XML) then you'd be able to migrate a lot easier. So, it's a cost really imposed by Microsoft, rather than a cost imposed by any alternative solution. The erverse probably isn't true... once in an open format, there's usually not an 'exit cost' associated with moving to another solution.
Yeah, go test it on the file server. No one is logged into that, right?
Heh... reminds me of that deoderant commercial... "Mandrake: strong enough for a man, but made for a woman"
Right, but that does not automatically mean that SpamCop is doing anything wrong. The Can Spam act is essentially irrelevant here, because the issue isn't whether spamming is legal, but whether spamming was in breach of the contract with the spammer's ISP. The issue is that SpamCop is ratting out the spammer to his ISP for spamming, and that ISP pulls the spammer's plug. If the ISP has written into its contract with the spammer "no spamming" and he/she/it spams, then that is totally legal. The argument here that SpamCop is interfering with the spammer's business unjustly (which most of us think it isn't). The little razzle-dazzle about "we're complying with the can spam act!" whine by the spammer is irrelevant.
As an analogy: If we're neighbors in an apartment building that forbids pets, and I ratted you out to the landlord because you had a few cats, you won't be getting into trouble with thelandlord because owning cats is illegal... you'll be getting into trouble with the landlord because you've violated your lease.
What the spammer is trying to say here is that under the Can Spam Act, you cannot go directly to the ISP with complaints. You must complain to him first. IANAL, but that sounds like bullshit. If SpamCop was out of the picture and I complained to the ISP directly myself, would I get sued? I don't believe there's any way you could restrain my right of free speech to inform the ISP that his client is in breach of his contract. I also don;t think the ISP would be required to give up my identity to the spammer. As the article said, there isn't a legal requirement to be faced with your accusers in cases such as this.
The original poster assumed that Microsoft is opening the door to spammers. What is unsaid in the article is if these e-mails were actually solicited.
I could see that legit ads (i.e. you definitely signed up to recieve them) might be tossed out with the huge amount of spam. What Microsoft *might* be doing here is saying "OK, you say you are opt-in, we'll let your stuff through, but we're gonna take a bite out of you if you are lying to us."
Unfortunately, the author of the article didn't bother to state exactly what the rules are that Microsoft is imposing. Roast the journalist, not Microsoft (at least, not yet).
You know what would be great? If they engineered the hybrid to detect when it's being rammed by some twit in an SUV, and shunt all of its electrical charge through the other vehicle in the milliseconds after collision.
Sure, your SUV may smash my hybrid, but you'll be extra crispy. Especially if that voltage gets into the coils of the heated seats you got your ass planted on.
That makes Vim more user friendly than vi (but then, a pointy stick jabbed into your eye is more user friendly than vi). One nice thing about Joe is that the help reminder remains on screen all of the time. The help window also shares the screen with the edit window, so you don't need to bounce back and forth between the help and the text you are editing.
Nano is probably the best choice these days for real naive users, since the basic help (how to save a file, how to exit the editor, etc) appears onscreen by default.
Letting users know how to get out of the editor can be really important. On my college's mainframe, just after we switched to UNIX in the late 80's, we had problems with the system bogging down. It turns out people couldn't figure out how to exit EMACS, so they would hit ^Z to get back to a prompt when they were finished editing. Well, after a few hours of CS students doing edit-compile cycles, the system would run out of virtual memory due to the hundreds of suspended EMACS jobs...
Check SIMTEL's archives. Ages and ages ago there was a version of Joe for DOS, but Joe gave up on it since it was a pain in the ass to develop for DOS with all that 64K memory segment crap.
Anyhow, a quick Google turned up this file. It's version 2.2, which doesn't have up-to-date features, but it runs.
Uh, not the way I think. Not the way most people think. Most people, especially those new to the UNIX platform, have no clue. Does alert you to the help facilities on starting up? Does Vim just let you start typing?
Mnemonics are sweet and all, but they are useless unless you already know the command and you are trying to remember it. Joe was really one of the first editors that made it easy for newbies to get help straight off the bat.
You're talking out of your ass here. Have you tried running joe on a slow platform? I have... 16 Mhz 68000 UNIX systems, under a 80186 (yes, "1", that's not a typo) at 10Mhz under DOS. What's more I've used it over 1200 baud modems, raw telnet connections across the country back when you were lucky to have a 56k baud line shared with an entire campus. It worked perfectly. I'm not saying that Vim can't do that as well, but you obviously have no clue when it comes to Joe's system requirements. Maybe you're thinking it's some offshoot of EMACS?
Joe (the Joe in JOE) was my college roomate. He'd stumble in in the middle of the night to rave about this or that optimization, and how he'd figured out the perfect way to do such-and-such.
Technically, the one thing Joe kicked most other editors asses at (except perhaps vi) was its ability to provide a user-friendly text editor environment over slow connections. Joe paid a lot of attention to optimizing the screen redraws to ensure that the minimum number of characters were sent over the pipe. Back in the days of 1200 baud modems and painfully slow cross-country telnet sessions, this made a big difference.
It's funny how JOE (the editor) keeps turning up... I hacked my TiVo recently following all of those instructions on the Internet, and was amused to see that the editor of choice for TiVo hackers is... Joe!
Later today I'll be installing Gentoo on what is going to be my home theater box. The first program I'll emerge? Joe. Simple as that.
Everyone knows that the major Windows apps are:
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to tracking down that 2 or clubs I need to finish up my work for today...
I guess this is a good start, but he states that we should avoid "icon creep." The problem is, the sorts of nastiness that spyware can carry out will likely be lumped up with the same icons that most legitimate software will cover.
I.E. think about how many icons Mozilla could be required to have on it... it can be set to start at boot with that quickstart icon thing. It can can be set to send data back home if you've set up the Talkback crash reporting, which will likely send back monitoring information on what else is running on your PC. Mozilla can also certainly display popups (although, granted, at the behest of web sites). I don't think Mozilla does remote control or self updates, but a future release could, in a non-evil way.
If people install Mozilla, then they'll see three or four icons. Think how many other benign pieces of software will have to display those same icons. Now think how many nasty bits of spyware would also display those same icons. If people repeatedly see the same things over again, they aren't going to be on their guard against a program that does the same sort of thing other programs do, but for nefarious purposes.
Personally, I think a good idea would be to have an independent, third-party review board sort of like Underwriter Labs (those UL label folks you find on most eletrical appliances) to label software as having been tested and being up to published standards for respecting privacy and being a good "software citizen." Then we can train the user to look for the "Certified by Software Testing Labs" as being safe.
Such a board would be hard to set up and keep independant of the industry which it serves... but I think it is possible. We could, hopefully, make such a review board practiclke enough that small software firms, and even open/freeware authors could get certification.
One of my favorite aspects of the show was the scale... in Star Trek, it's up the crew of a single ship to Save The Galaxy As We Know It on a weekly basis. Other sci-fi space operas (Babylon 5, Adromeda) have a similar scale: heros out saving the universe. On Farscape, half the time the crew is struggling to find food, find material to repair Moya after they got her busted up in a previous episode, or just trying to escape whoever is chasing them now. Granted, as the show developed, there were bigger fish to fry, especially concerning the information in Crichton's head. But the scale of the show still mainly revolves around the characters. It's not perfect... I'm getting tired of the "bad guy converted into ally, comes aboard ship" thing. And always a new uber-baddie around the corner. It's the sort of trap that Trek fell into (no, really, the Borg are the really ultimate bad guys... until the federation defeats them and they meet up with even badder baddies). Even Enterprise has fallen into that trap.
Why the hell are you importing Acrobat files into a document? An Acrobat file is an end-product, not an exchange format. It's like you're saying "I hope they discontinue hammers because it really hurts when I smash my head in with them." If something is painful to do, it's a sign that you shouldn't be doing it. Besides, Frame is one of the few systems where you can even import PDF pages in the first place. Try it with Word. Then shall ye know pain. The user interface is stale, yes, and there are tons of features it could really use (like, say, the ability to undo more than one single thing). That Adobe is neglacting the product is a great shame, but as others have said, since it's not a major cash cow for them, they don't have the incentive to update it like they do PhotoShop. Even though most professional tech writers use Frame, that's still not a large market. And since they haven't done jack to update it recently, I bet few people bother to upgrade. We have version 6 where I work, and no real pressing need to upgrade to 7.
After one of my nephews downloaded a file called "Pamela Anderson Fucking.exe" that totally hosed the system when run, I decided to junk Win 98, upgrade to Win XP, then lock down the system. Only I have the admin password. Everyone else's account has the least amount of privs that I could give them. FInally, I went out and Bought Norton Anti-virus and set it to auto update the virus definitions. Then I told them, "the next time I have to do this, I'm installing Linux. AND I'll install a network blocker to ensure you can only get to G rated web sites." Between those two things, the PC hasn't had any issues. I check regularly with AdAware.
From the "other" article about San Bruno mentioned in the posting:
Ah, so in addition to buttons that don't work, we'll give the deaf audio signals they can't hear. Brilliant.
With just one or two spare gyros, I doubt any group would be able to use the Hubble for very long. After the gyros give out, you'll have a very large hunk of hardware travelling at thousands of miles per hour that's completely out of control. Even in orbit, with less stuff to crash into, that's a Really Really Bad Thing. Boosting hubble out to a permenent orbit (or at least out to one that would last 50 years or so until we would presumably have craft more capable of either fetching it or enshrining it) would be a huge cost. We have nothing on the shelf to do it now, and it would be cheaper to just dump the thing into the ocean. What I think we should be developing, in addition to a shuttle replacement, is robotic repair vehicles that we could use in case of a backup, or in cases of hardware that we really don't want people risking their lives for. Hubble, certainly, has intrinsic and sentimental value that people would be willing to take a risk to save. Somehow, I sort of doubt anyone wants to risk their lives repairing generic communications satillite #5 so soccer moms can continue to yak on their cell phones while causing mayhem in their SUVs. That means that we'd have to design satillites for easy repair using robots (more modular, easier access, etc.) Modularity probably wouldn't be a bad thing, anyhow. I suspect if we can develop robots that can (mostly, sorta) work on Mars, we can develop ones for earth orbit that can swap in and out some modules.
Look at past colonization efforts. They had everything to do with money. Why did the Spanish crown back Columbus? Why did the various European royalty back the other exploratory voyages? Why were the European colonies in the New World chartered by governments?
The only exception we've seen to this was the exploration of Antartica and perhaps the early space race. In both cases, those were done for national pride. The space race, arguably, was also done with at least a perephrial profit motive. They also didn't result in a real colonization, either.
Tell that to the Russian's robotic lander on Venus... no dude in a suit, no matter how good the suit was, would have lasted even a microsecond on the surface of that world. Robots are simply the best choice for many tasks. If they weren't so well suited to some tasks, then why have they replaced human workers in so many tasks here on earth? One of those tasks is surviving in inhospital environments. That's what Mars is.
Humans will have a place on Mars, but why not let the robots pave the way? The plans involving robotic landers set up a base camp... even refine fuel for a colony or a return trip before the humans get there seems more sensible to me. Sure, it will probably take longer than a heroic dude in a suit who's probably going to snuff it in the first year or so on Mars, but it seems to me to be the most sensible way to go about it.
Personally, I think all we'll get out of this hoo-ha from Bush's speech is (if we're really lucky) a new manned launch system. Let's get to orbit on a reliable basis before we worry much about Mars.
The thing is, are you sure that GCC is equally optimized for both platforms? If the support for code generation on the G5, say, is lackluster in GCC, your results won't reflect which processor is truely faster. Of course... does it really make a difference? Really, what you are worried about is real-world performance of these things, unless you are just into pissing contests for bragging rights (which, come to think of it, mose die-hard adherents to one or the other platform seem to be). For real-world, you'd just configure and tweak the systems the way you anticiptae they would be used. In most case,s you'd run OS X on the G5. For the Opteron... well, you'd either be running XP for desktop stuff (perhaps Linux in certain specific cases... such as some graphics workstations for software that has a Linux port) or maybe running Linux as a server.
Got a chorus of people recommending Spire here... but are they water resistent? I have a backpack now with a padded laptop area, but my bigest fear is getting caught in the rain rather than dropping the thing. I went to the Spire website, and they say nothing about water resistance/tightness.