>Digital TV
>is now commonplace in Europe, but it is all broadcast in PAL
>resolution -- broadcasters want to pay for as little bandwidth as
>possible and some of the small-time channels have quite visible MPEG
>artefacts as a result
Just the small time channels? I get them on CBS, one of our big
3 broadcast networks. At first I thought it was my local cable
company, but CBS seems to be the only affected channel.
I tried their digital cable, but that *was* bad everywhere. The
analog signal was actually noticably better on several channels . . .
(most notably, CBS, in which people and body parts left visible
traces. Also, the movie channels froze every couple of minutes . ..)
It doesn't help that they only have coax coming into the house . . .
While I'm meandering, the particularly bad CBS on digital could
be from CBS digitizing, back to analog, then to digital again???
>Apple reserved the first 8 MB of memory address space for Rom, I/O
>stuff, leaving the top 8 MB for programs and the MacOS to run in.
Ahh. I had them backwards:)
>It's interesting that Apple had the foresight at the time (1982?) to
>reserve the bottom of memory for what they thought they needed for
>hardware address space, leaving the sky the limit for adding memory
>above the 16MB barrier when Motorolla overcame that limitation of
>their processors.
It's not so much foresight, I think, as failing to do something
extremely stupid:) As I recall, there's nothing special about
any of the addresses, so they can all be put anywhere you
want at boot time.
Remember the Switcher (pre-multifinder)? On a 512k or 1M machine,
you had multiple programs loaded by having multiple copies of
the system loaded at varying addresses (only one of which could
be at the "normal" load space)
>This is in stark contrast with Intel/IBM/MS that decided to reserve
>memory at 640 MB of memory in the x86, setting an ultimate upper limit
>to never be overcome in real mode.
That's not quite how it happened, though. IBM only claimed 256kb
of address space, anyway. We quickly figured out that 512kb was
workable, and it seems to me that there was a year or two before
someone figured out you could add another 128.
There wasn't really anything hardwired to that space, although the
color and monochrome cards had fixed addresses. These should have
been movable, except that the bios drivers were *so* slow and poor
that everyone had to write to the hardware (If memory serves,
keeping up with a 1200 baud serial port was beyond the bios's
ability, but it may have been a faster [but still slow] speed
where it couldn't hack it.)
Some early mac programs did the same direct to hardware thing, but
a) these got broken hard early on by competitors that didn't, and
b) the toolbox was well enough done tha it generally gave better
performance than custom code anyway.
>Trying to install NetBSD on old 68K based Macs helps you sort all of
>this stuff out.:)
Trying? MacBSD on a IIci was my primary machine for a few months--which
is whent the serious 1-bit display problems on LyX went away (no, I
didn't fix them; I just kept reporting what I couldn't see . ..). However,
the limited display size soon had me using primarily the Linux
box at its side, as I could drive the 17" display at 1024x768 . . .
ONe otf the things that sticks out most inmy memory of the second west
coast computer faire is the votrax attachment. It connected to a
parallel port, and kept telling passerbys, "My name is vo-trax. I can
say an-y-thing."
Oops, s/parallel/Centronics/ above. It's essentially the same thing,
but the terminology was different then (and they were rarely
bidirectional on the 8 bits . ..).
You'd have needed a text=>phoneme dictionary, but this was still
shipping technology in the late 70's. If memory serves, it cost
$700 or so . . .
I think it was the 1903 sears catalog that offered a car capable of all speeds from 0 to 25, noting in the ad that they didn't think the average man had any use for going 45 or 50 as more expensive cars did . . .
While I'm at it, in law school we read a case about "reckless entrustment," in which the owner of the car was being sued for lending it to the driver when he should have known better. Part of the claim was that the driver had a reputation for "driving as fast as 50 miles per hour" . . .
Macos had 24 bit addressing from the start, although I think the early systems or hardware decoded anything with the high bit high as the roms (but it's been a while, and my little brother has my copies of inside mac).
At system 6.0.something (i don't hink it was.0), apple started going "32 bit clean"
This comes from the nature of the early 68xxx processors. The original design had a 16 bit data path, 16 bit ALU (wait, it was 32, wasn't it? it could do 32 bit operations, but did it do that by using the same alu on each half? it's been too long . ..) , and 32 bit registers (usable as high and low 16 bit registers). Motorola clearly labeled which registers/paths/whathave you would grow to 32 bits in future expansion.
Given that a 32 bit register was addressing a 24 bit address space (there were only 24 pins for addresses; this was still DIP packaging for the processor), it left 8 bits which were tempting to use.
Apple told developers not to use those bits, as they were reserved. Programs that followed the directive were generally executable on later machines, while those that weren't needed to be rewritten. The two biggest violators, in order? Apple and Microsoft . . .
Sometime around the IIX and SE/30, the ROM's became "32 bit clean" and other
software was similarly designated. Such machines could generally (but not always, iirc) go past 16M of memory. Roms could be retrofitted to some models
to allow such software.
I want to say that it was system 7 that required 32 bit clean roms, but it's
been a while, and I'm not certain. There were certainly significant
differences between systems 1-6 and 7, but it really wasn't a 16/32 transition. The original 68k was a 16 bit chip in the same sense that the 8088 was an 8 bit--data path, and not much more. For most intents & purposes, the macos was a 32 bit os with a bit of 24 bit crippling from the start.
For crying out loud. First they took away my toggle switches, and then the whole front panel.
Then the machines started taking it upon themselves to boot a DOS or TOS without even a "by your leave," let alone a keyboard command from the monitor.
Then they took the monitor.
NOw you want to take my boot sequence from me?
evil, evil, evil.
The *only* change that should happen in the current *nix boot sequences is to ad Majel Barrret's voice announcing key checkpoints , such as "going multiuser" and daemon initialization . . .:)
>(Of course, that may be because they're crippled by
>having to learn FORTRAN. B-)
Ahem. God wrote the world in Fortran, thank you:) It's the one
true language, and will be in use long past the time when
c, perl, and emacs go the way of vacuum tubes (ok, so we can't
predict what it will look like, or how it will work, but we know
it will be called "Fortran":)
>Now, taking some classes in engineering or physics on top of a CS
>degree is good exercise for the mind. I actually tried to do a double
>degree in CS and physics,
Ahh, now *there*'s a real degree, and a little CS on the side for
entertainment:) Not that I'm biased . . .
> If I were to start over, I would take several classes in discrete logic
> and automa theory, but otherwise pursue a business or liberal arts degree.
Believe me, given the reasons you expressed, you *don't* want to sit
through a business degree. The liberal arts, including math, would
make much better choices.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was looking for a summer job before college. One place I called asked if I could write an MIS system. I misunderstood, thinking they meant "IMSAI", and showed up, resume in hand (not knowing any better:).
Anyway, I was hired, and surprised to find them using Osbores, but I kept my mouth shut. Six months later, I finally asked what MIS meant.
They all started laughing. "You wrote one, and now you want to know what one is?":)
Years later, before leaving law, I looked at an MBA. One of the prerequisite clases they insisted I'd have to take was "Introduction to MIS Systems." They didn't care that I'd written two in the last six months just because I needed them around my office . . . I didn't get that degree, and instead got a real one:)
hawk, err, dochawk, oh, whatever. There's just two many letters after my name. Any more and I think I have to become a Jesuit . . .:)
>You seem to be familiar with FreeBSD, how
>easy is downgrading there? (I don't mean downgrading just one package,
>I mean going back a distribution version, or downgrading a suite of
>interconnected packages).
I don't think there is, but I've never felt a need under FreeBSD, as
I have three or four with debian. The central distribution, as a
single piece, is much more comprehnsive (containing the kernel, most
of the utilities (which comve from GNU *and* other places on linuces),
and some other things is a single piece; as far as I know, even
upgrading a single utility is very difficult (you could mess with the
cvs tree and only grab the source for that one, I think, but you're
playing with fire here.). I'd be hard-pressed to do a partial
binary upgrade (and even if you grabbed the pieces, it would be hard
to pull off. You really need to recompile to keep the kernel tables
and utilities (such as ps) in sync.
I want to say that the ports collection is independent of the
stable/current trees entirely. That is, I believe it's a single tree.
As a whole, I prefer it to dpkg/apt, but theres' definitely pieces
I"d like added from the debian side of things.
>
>This is probably a troll, but i'll respond anyway.
Good heavens, I'm old usenet. If I were going to troll, I'd be
far more subtle about it:)
>AFAIK, there aren't
>any remaining KDE licensing issues with the newer versions of KDE.
>
I'm actually coming from the other direction. Most or all of the
legal problems never really existed. The *only* ones that could
exist were situations (if they existed; I'm told they do, but I've
never verified it) in which GPL code was used in KDE. In spite of
the protestations of the authors, KDE was not GPL, but QGPL (quasi-
GPL). As their actions conflicted with the bolierplate terms of
the license, those terms were not part of the license. As a
legal issue, it is not possible for authors to violate their
own license.
There are many more projects which are QGPL, their authors' statements
of GPL notwithstanding. I wrote the qualification to LyX's license
to handle this a couple of years ago (wow, that long already?).
>Realistically, if I do "upgrade" to
>unstable, am I really going to have much more than a handful or two
>"bad" packages which will require going back to the original version?[A
yes. there are oodles of packages that depend upon the numbering
in stable. If you're downstepping even small number of packages,
this tends to get you (and the requirements of a certain version
I've found to be wrong more often than not, but how do you know this
ahead of time for an individual package ?)
>Of course, that would require the original poster to read the man pages.
>Horrors.
Either that, or force the current poster to read the original post:)
It's not a question of downgrading a single package, but of the
entire distribution.
Besides, this is debian we're talking about. Expecting useful
things in a man page rather than having to use that wretched info
is hardly rational. In this particular case, the --force-downgrade
is soert of documented, under --force-things, and there's a
downgrade in the list of things.
Anyway, this wouldn't solve the problem of changing over the entire
distribution, and would require manually downloading corresponding
(not always the same) packages from stable over a 14k modem . . .
It's not that unstable is generally unstable, but that occasionally it will bite you--bad. I found this to be about twice a year. But losing my system for most of a day while I repaired it, or used another machine to keep up on mailing lists to figure out *how* to repair it, got to be too much. I used stable through about 1.1 (bo? it's been a while). After that, the bites got to be too much.
THis new "testing" branch would have solved, I believe, all of the "gotchas" I faced (but probably wouldn't have caught the change in how fvwm functioned; I was apparently the first to file the bug/change, and I think I fought it for more than two week).
WHereas for the last few releases, runining debian unstable will give your random brekaings, as well as sudden, erratic, changes inpolicy that change the way your machine works.
I'd be hard pressed to expalain why, but I pointed this new installation to unstable yesterday. . After letting it run two entire nights, I now find the explanation for behavior and inconsistencies that are beyond what you usually see with unstable . . .
Now how in the world do I back it down from unstable to testing?
Stuff like this is a significant factor in my shift from debian to FreeBSD (no, not the only one; I like the way bsd utilities work better than GNU in most of the cases where I perceive a difference; object to the code-hoarding of the GPL, prefer the ports and makeworld, etc.). But this installlation is supposed to go in the kids computer, and stay pretty much stuck once it stabilizes (and once I get my replacement hard disk for this machine--until then, I keep the drive). FOr what the kids need, running a fairly standard Linux has more advantages than running bsd--ironically, it's binary compatibility with pre-packaged binariess. OH, that's why I went to unstable--I wanted the newere kde for them (and yes, I *am* deliberately ducking the license issues here--you can find plenty elsewhere that I've written aabout that issue)
I just tried it. I even turned javascript on. It seems to be a site that *doesn't* work with javasript.
It loaded properly without it. OK, well sort of . From viewing in both lynx and netscape, it seems that those things on the side are supposed to be ads--but if junkbuster was getting them, they'd be broken images rather than question marks . . .
It seems to have some of those stupid menus that only work with javascript. It has links that only work with javascript.
S I tried turning on javascript. Instead of the site, I get a banner add surrounded by some of the script that is supposed to load it.
Nope, this isn't a site legitimately using javascript:)
Mosaic, Netscape 3 and earlier, etc., have a window by window option for image loading, rather than having it buried in slow-loading preference windows that affect all windows. Also, you can use alt-I to cause them to load.
> The problem with turning off Javascript is that some sites use
> Javascript legitimately.
Really? I have yet to meet one. The closest I've seen is a conference
registration that used it to come up wiht a subtotal. However, this could
have been done on the server as well.
With that half an exception, I have yet to see a use of javascript that
didn't boil down to advertising, laziness, incompetence, or showing off.
Plain and simply, if your site can't deliver its content (graphical
and sound content excepted, of course) under lynx, your site is wrong,
not the user's browser's capabilities.
Oh, and I have seen a single use of java that wasn't abusive, too--
it's an animation as part of a statistics text that repeatedly
draws a sample, showing hte results.
I'm not sure that it's even one of the few--off the cuff, I can't recall any others that he supported.
I think microsoft's chances are very slim. If the fact that a judge was
underwhelmend and annoyed by the incompetence and misconduct of the
attorney's before him became grounds for reversal, the system would
be in *big* trouble. Ruling against you is not a sign of bias . . .
Slashdot Mirror
>Digital TV
.)
>is now commonplace in Europe, but it is all broadcast in PAL
>resolution -- broadcasters want to pay for as little bandwidth as
>possible and some of the small-time channels have quite visible MPEG
>artefacts as a result
Just the small time channels? I get them on CBS, one of our big
3 broadcast networks. At first I thought it was my local cable
company, but CBS seems to be the only affected channel.
I tried their digital cable, but that *was* bad everywhere. The
analog signal was actually noticably better on several channels . . .
(most notably, CBS, in which people and body parts left visible
traces. Also, the movie channels froze every couple of minutes . .
It doesn't help that they only have coax coming into the house . . .
While I'm meandering, the particularly bad CBS on digital could
be from CBS digitizing, back to analog, then to digital again???
hawk
> I'm sick of waiting and I'm sick of watching NASA shoot little AIBOs
:)
> at that planet and then watching them crash and burn.
Yeah, let's shoot big manned AIBO's, and watch those crash and burn instead
>Apple reserved the first 8 MB of memory address space for Rom, I/O
:)
:) As I recall, there's nothing special about
:)
.). However,
>stuff, leaving the top 8 MB for programs and the MacOS to run in.
Ahh. I had them backwards
>It's interesting that Apple had the foresight at the time (1982?) to
>reserve the bottom of memory for what they thought they needed for
>hardware address space, leaving the sky the limit for adding memory
>above the 16MB barrier when Motorolla overcame that limitation of
>their processors.
It's not so much foresight, I think, as failing to do something
extremely stupid
any of the addresses, so they can all be put anywhere you
want at boot time.
Remember the Switcher (pre-multifinder)? On a 512k or 1M machine,
you had multiple programs loaded by having multiple copies of
the system loaded at varying addresses (only one of which could
be at the "normal" load space)
>This is in stark contrast with Intel/IBM/MS that decided to reserve
>memory at 640 MB of memory in the x86, setting an ultimate upper limit
>to never be overcome in real mode.
That's not quite how it happened, though. IBM only claimed 256kb
of address space, anyway. We quickly figured out that 512kb was
workable, and it seems to me that there was a year or two before
someone figured out you could add another 128.
There wasn't really anything hardwired to that space, although the
color and monochrome cards had fixed addresses. These should have
been movable, except that the bios drivers were *so* slow and poor
that everyone had to write to the hardware (If memory serves,
keeping up with a 1200 baud serial port was beyond the bios's
ability, but it may have been a faster [but still slow] speed
where it couldn't hack it.)
Some early mac programs did the same direct to hardware thing, but
a) these got broken hard early on by competitors that didn't, and
b) the toolbox was well enough done tha it generally gave better
performance than custom code anyway.
>Trying to install NetBSD on old 68K based Macs helps you sort all of
>this stuff out.
Trying? MacBSD on a IIci was my primary machine for a few months--which
is whent the serious 1-bit display problems on LyX went away (no, I
didn't fix them; I just kept reporting what I couldn't see . .
the limited display size soon had me using primarily the Linux
box at its side, as I could drive the 17" display at 1024x768 . . .
hawk
>Text-to-voice has existed for over a decade,
.).
and that's for very loud values of "decade"
ONe otf the things that sticks out most inmy memory of the second west
coast computer faire is the votrax attachment. It connected to a
parallel port, and kept telling passerbys, "My name is vo-trax. I can
say an-y-thing."
Oops, s/parallel/Centronics/ above. It's essentially the same thing,
but the terminology was different then (and they were rarely
bidirectional on the 8 bits . .
You'd have needed a text=>phoneme dictionary, but this was still
shipping technology in the late 70's. If memory serves, it cost
$700 or so . . .
hawk
Strange that you should choose that example . . .
I think it was the 1903 sears catalog that offered a car capable of all speeds from 0 to 25, noting in the ad that they didn't think the average man had any use for going 45 or 50 as more expensive cars did . . .
While I'm at it, in law school we read a case about "reckless entrustment," in which the owner of the car was being sued for lending it to the driver when he should have known better. Part of the claim was that the driver had a reputation for "driving as fast as 50 miles per hour" . . .
That sounds right.
/me brushes more dust off brain
wait a minute, wasn't that a third party utility that let you do that? and eventually apple bought it and included it?
I never really followed it that much, becasue my 030 macs were all 32 bit clean, while it just didn't matter on my 68k models . . .
hawk
err, not quite.
.0), apple started going "32 bit clean"
.) , and 32 bit registers (usable as high and low 16 bit registers). Motorola clearly labeled which registers/paths/whathave you would grow to 32 bits in future expansion.
Macos had 24 bit addressing from the start, although I think the early systems or hardware decoded anything with the high bit high as the roms (but it's been a while, and my little brother has my copies of inside mac).
At system 6.0.something (i don't hink it was
This comes from the nature of the early 68xxx processors. The original design had a 16 bit data path, 16 bit ALU (wait, it was 32, wasn't it? it could do 32 bit operations, but did it do that by using the same alu on each half? it's been too long . .
Given that a 32 bit register was addressing a 24 bit address space (there were only 24 pins for addresses; this was still DIP packaging for the processor), it left 8 bits which were tempting to use.
Apple told developers not to use those bits, as they were reserved. Programs that followed the directive were generally executable on later machines, while those that weren't needed to be rewritten. The two biggest violators, in order? Apple and Microsoft . . .
Sometime around the IIX and SE/30, the ROM's became "32 bit clean" and other
software was similarly designated. Such machines could generally (but not always, iirc) go past 16M of memory. Roms could be retrofitted to some models
to allow such software.
I want to say that it was system 7 that required 32 bit clean roms, but it's
been a while, and I'm not certain. There were certainly significant
differences between systems 1-6 and 7, but it really wasn't a 16/32 transition. The original 68k was a 16 bit chip in the same sense that the 8088 was an 8 bit--data path, and not much more. For most intents & purposes, the macos was a 32 bit os with a bit of 24 bit crippling from the start.
hawk, dusting off old memory cells.
. . . lwn.net was running shockwave on a server and got fouled up from a time-travel game . . .
hawk
It's not just unnecessary, it's *evil*.
:)
For crying out loud. First they took away my toggle switches, and then the whole front panel.
Then the machines started taking it upon themselves to boot a DOS or TOS without even a "by your leave," let alone a keyboard command from the monitor.
Then they took the monitor.
NOw you want to take my boot sequence from me?
evil, evil, evil.
The *only* change that should happen in the current *nix boot sequences is to ad Majel Barrret's voice announcing key checkpoints , such as "going multiuser" and daemon initialization . . .
hawk, crankier than usual
it also explains why He could make it in 6 days instead of 6 years :)
>(Of course, that may be because they're crippled by
:) It's the one
:)
:) Not that I'm biased . . .
>having to learn FORTRAN. B-)
Ahem. God wrote the world in Fortran, thank you
true language, and will be in use long past the time when
c, perl, and emacs go the way of vacuum tubes (ok, so we can't
predict what it will look like, or how it will work, but we know
it will be called "Fortran"
>Now, taking some classes in engineering or physics on top of a CS
>degree is good exercise for the mind. I actually tried to do a double
>degree in CS and physics,
Ahh, now *there*'s a real degree, and a little CS on the side for
entertainment
> If I were to start over, I would take several classes in discrete logic
> and automa theory, but otherwise pursue a business or liberal arts degree.
Believe me, given the reasons you expressed, you *don't* want to sit
through a business degree. The liberal arts, including math, would
make much better choices.
hawk
Nearly 20 years ago, I was looking for a summer job before college. One place I called asked if I could write an MIS system. I misunderstood, thinking they meant "IMSAI", and showed up, resume in hand (not knowing any better :).
:)
:)
:)
Anyway, I was hired, and surprised to find them using Osbores, but I kept my mouth shut. Six months later, I finally asked what MIS meant.
They all started laughing. "You wrote one, and now you want to know what one is?"
Years later, before leaving law, I looked at an MBA. One of the prerequisite clases they insisted I'd have to take was "Introduction to MIS Systems." They didn't care that I'd written two in the last six months just because I needed them around my office . . . I didn't get that degree, and instead got a real one
hawk, err, dochawk, oh, whatever. There's just two many letters after my name. Any more and I think I have to become a Jesuit . . .
>You seem to be familiar with FreeBSD, how
:)
>easy is downgrading there? (I don't mean downgrading just one package,
>I mean going back a distribution version, or downgrading a suite of
>interconnected packages).
I don't think there is, but I've never felt a need under FreeBSD, as
I have three or four with debian. The central distribution, as a
single piece, is much more comprehnsive (containing the kernel, most
of the utilities (which comve from GNU *and* other places on linuces),
and some other things is a single piece; as far as I know, even
upgrading a single utility is very difficult (you could mess with the
cvs tree and only grab the source for that one, I think, but you're
playing with fire here.). I'd be hard-pressed to do a partial
binary upgrade (and even if you grabbed the pieces, it would be hard
to pull off. You really need to recompile to keep the kernel tables
and utilities (such as ps) in sync.
I want to say that the ports collection is independent of the
stable/current trees entirely. That is, I believe it's a single tree.
As a whole, I prefer it to dpkg/apt, but theres' definitely pieces
I"d like added from the debian side of things.
>
>This is probably a troll, but i'll respond anyway.
Good heavens, I'm old usenet. If I were going to troll, I'd be
far more subtle about it
>AFAIK, there aren't
>any remaining KDE licensing issues with the newer versions of KDE.
>
I'm actually coming from the other direction. Most or all of the
legal problems never really existed. The *only* ones that could
exist were situations (if they existed; I'm told they do, but I've
never verified it) in which GPL code was used in KDE. In spite of
the protestations of the authors, KDE was not GPL, but QGPL (quasi-
GPL). As their actions conflicted with the bolierplate terms of
the license, those terms were not part of the license. As a
legal issue, it is not possible for authors to violate their
own license.
There are many more projects which are QGPL, their authors' statements
of GPL notwithstanding. I wrote the qualification to LyX's license
to handle this a couple of years ago (wow, that long already?).
>Realistically, if I do "upgrade" to
>unstable, am I really going to have much more than a handful or two
>"bad" packages which will require going back to the original version?[A
yes. there are oodles of packages that depend upon the numbering
in stable. If you're downstepping even small number of packages,
this tends to get you (and the requirements of a certain version
I've found to be wrong more often than not, but how do you know this
ahead of time for an individual package ?)
hawk
>Of course, that would require the original poster to read the man pages.
:)
>Horrors.
Either that, or force the current poster to read the original post
It's not a question of downgrading a single package, but of the
entire distribution.
Besides, this is debian we're talking about. Expecting useful
things in a man page rather than having to use that wretched info
is hardly rational. In this particular case, the --force-downgrade
is soert of documented, under --force-things, and there's a
downgrade in the list of things.
Anyway, this wouldn't solve the problem of changing over the entire
distribution, and would require manually downloading corresponding
(not always the same) packages from stable over a 14k modem . . .
hawk
6. When Al Gore is sworn in as president
:)
[duck]
It's not that unstable is generally unstable, but that occasionally it will bite you--bad. I found this to be about twice a year. But losing my system for most of a day while I repaired it, or used another machine to keep up on mailing lists to figure out *how* to repair it, got to be too much. I used stable through about 1.1 (bo? it's been a while). After that, the bites got to be too much.
THis new "testing" branch would have solved, I believe, all of the "gotchas" I faced (but probably wouldn't have caught the change in how fvwm functioned; I was apparently the first to file the bug/change, and I think I fought it for more than two week).
hawk
WHereas for the last few releases, runining debian unstable will give your random brekaings, as well as sudden, erratic, changes inpolicy that change the way your machine works.
I'd be hard pressed to expalain why, but I pointed this new installation to unstable yesterday. . After letting it run two entire nights, I now find the explanation for behavior and inconsistencies that are beyond what you usually see with unstable . . .
Now how in the world do I back it down from unstable to testing?
Stuff like this is a significant factor in my shift from debian to FreeBSD (no, not the only one; I like the way bsd utilities work better than GNU in most of the cases where I perceive a difference; object to the code-hoarding of the GPL, prefer the ports and makeworld, etc.). But this installlation is supposed to go in the kids computer, and stay pretty much stuck once it stabilizes (and once I get my replacement hard disk for this machine--until then, I keep the drive). FOr what the kids need, running a fairly standard Linux has more advantages than running bsd--ironically, it's binary compatibility with pre-packaged binariess. OH, that's why I went to unstable--I wanted the newere kde for them (and yes, I *am* deliberately ducking the license issues here--you can find plenty elsewhere that I've written aabout that issue)
hawk
I just tried it. I even turned javascript on. It seems to be a site that *doesn't* work with javasript.
:)
It loaded properly without it. OK, well sort of . From viewing in both lynx and netscape, it seems that those things on the side are supposed to be ads--but if junkbuster was getting them, they'd be broken images rather than question marks . . .
It seems to have some of those stupid menus that only work with javascript. It has links that only work with javascript.
S I tried turning on javascript. Instead of the site, I get a banner add surrounded by some of the script that is supposed to load it.
Nope, this isn't a site legitimately using javascript
hawk
Mosaic, Netscape 3 and earlier, etc., have a window by window option for image loading, rather than having it buried in slow-loading preference windows that affect all windows. Also, you can use alt-I to cause them to load.
hawk
Have you ever found one of those sites that had content worth seeing, or even worth turning javascript on for?
hawk, who just managed to end a sentence with two prepositions
> The problem with turning off Javascript is that some sites use
> Javascript legitimately.
Really? I have yet to meet one. The closest I've seen is a conference
registration that used it to come up wiht a subtotal. However, this could
have been done on the server as well.
With that half an exception, I have yet to see a use of javascript that
didn't boil down to advertising, laziness, incompetence, or showing off.
Plain and simply, if your site can't deliver its content (graphical
and sound content excepted, of course) under lynx, your site is wrong,
not the user's browser's capabilities.
Oh, and I have seen a single use of java that wasn't abusive, too--
it's an animation as part of a statistics text that repeatedly
draws a sample, showing hte results.
hawk
I'm not sure that it's even one of the few--off the cuff, I can't recall any others that he supported.
I think microsoft's chances are very slim. If the fact that a judge was
underwhelmend and annoyed by the incompetence and misconduct of the
attorney's before him became grounds for reversal, the system would
be in *big* trouble. Ruling against you is not a sign of bias . . .
hawk
Heck, I never quite succeeded in a fully functional 3.1 installation . . . I hve to resort to the default reinstallation . . .
hawk