The foundation of a free market includes the aspect of a knowledgable consumer that is aware of all choices available to him and the various up/downsides of those choices. However, it's up to the consumer to discover those choices before the purchase is made; while the producers have to make such information available, they by no means are required to thrust that information at the consumer.
Part of the problem with what we call the "free market" today is that consumers are not following the "free market" model, and the parent post is an excellent example of this. Most people will buy the cheapest item or the one with the most brand-recognition or so-forth, instead of knowing what the pros and cons of each choice are. They're passive in their market knowledge and thus it's easy to sway them with marketing and advertizing.
Now, there's nothing stopping a truly informed consumer as in the grandparent post (looking at the 3rd party resellers for a given model) from being empowered as a consumer as per the free market model (*). And more power to those that actually do this, as opposed to making a purchasing decision blindly.
(*) Of course, EULAs that prevent product benchmarks and comparisons and other tactics can get in the way, but for the most part, the information is out there, you just need to find it.
Except that if you read the claims (which are the meat of any patent), they are going after discussions relating to items for sale such that the discussion is pertanent to the offered item. A quick glance, however, would suggest that they also cover discussions relating to auction/non-direct reseller sites (though again, limiting the patent to the discussion of the items for sale, and not the seller or the like...)
...is that Microsoft and Apple spend millions on user interface design, a complete separate process from the coding of the program engine, while Linux/OSS developers will generally worry about the UI last, and in that that UI will be designed by the developers themselves with only the response of various alpha/beta/stable testing to improve it. While both MS and Apple's UI R&D have put out duds, such as Clippy, MS Bob, QT4's control set, and The Dock (for some at least), they have both had a large number of very useful additions to good UI design elements (Apply's consistant Human Interface Guidelines, IE's drop-down toolbar buttons, etc). Even Macromedia and Adobe are big on UI design, and have both had patents filed for some of their design elements. Will anyone on Linux ever devote that much ? Not really, I think, as the average Linux user is more worried about functionality than UI most of the time (delegating the UI handling to their window manager of choice (KDE/Gnome/WM/E!/etc)).
True, OSS doesn't have the money to put into UI research, and while RedHat and the other commercial distros have tried to help out to some extent, it's still a game of catchup with Microsoft most of the time, which is why we seem to be always playing catch up with MS and Apple.
Should this be an area to advance Linux in? Maybe; I do think that with the right minds, new, non-WIMP GUIs could be developed that could be more intuitive for certain functions.
But Linux is trying to gain acceptance by all computer users, and to migrate people from Win or Mac to Linux requires familar surroundings, otherwise, your Linux support person will be running non-stop trying to answer every question under the sun from those that 'just don't get it'. So the 3-paned mail client, the Word- and Excel-lookalikes, and even media players that mimic their Mac or Win equivalent are better poised to help Linux gain market share than some abstract UI that may look good and is more efficient, but otherwise quite different from any standard UI elements.
The other problem is that developers generally make poor UI developers, particularly if the same developer works on the code and the UI. That developer will know exactly how a program is to work and thus may lay out UI elements that make sense to him, but not to the average lay person. Even if a different developer was doing the UI, there's a different mentality that computer programmers have over average computer users that would typically end with the layout being programming reasonably but low on usability. It may behoove OSS developers to get people with graphic art or usability skills on board some projects to help plan out better UI interfaces.
Basically, we need to copy, if we want Linux and OSS to be accepted, but there should be a challenge to more creative developers to build new, unique UIs.
Re:Cassette decks s will continue to sell
on
The Future of the CD
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't disagree with your assessment that, given time, you can force a media shift with the proper technological and marketing ideas. However, another part of the equation that will make it very hard to force people away from CDs is that people have just had to finish the switch from VHS to DVD for movies, and another media switch is NOT going to sit pretty with most people, even though it's in a different market. Sure, the music industry could force a switch ("We aren't makign CD's anymore, you'll have to buy a super-CD which only works in super-CD players"), but more likely than not, you'd have people drop the music purchases before they'd make the switch at this point, since that means more money on hardware and software to work with them, just like the same money spent for DVD playback.
Now, in 5 years, when everyone's done spending to get their 1000" HDTV plasma set with 15.3 dolby surround to watch DVDs perfectly, then a switch to a new music format may not be a big deal. But timing any forced media switch right now, with DVDs still fresh in most people's minds, is not the way to go.
In Cygwin's XFree: "-rootless" gets you windows without any window decorations at all unless you start an X window manager as well in the session, which gives you X type decorations while in Windows. Of late (since start of 2003?), Cygwin now supports "-multiwindow" which is like rootless, but give control of the window decorations and handling to the Windows OS, thus making such windows appear no different from the other apps you have up.
My only nits about either modes is that you still have a root X window (standard grey crosshatch) that's started minimized but otherwise sits in the process list and can sometimes make quick switching a bit more difficult without activating the wrong X app. I'd wish that the Cygwin X server could be started as a background service such that 1) it stays off the process list, and 2) to get an xterm to a remote computer up, I would simply have to ssh to that computer via putty or cygwin's ssh, point DISPLAY back , and let loose the X applications, as opposed to having to start the X server on Windows manually each time.
Yea, again without checking, "Big Finish Productions" sounds like what's available as a streaming Real feed from BBC, but that you can also buy the CDs with other ones around. I remember that the 'premier' one on the site had both McCoy and (Ace's actress name, can't remember) in it, as well as John Sessions, who, IIRC, is a well known british Shakespearean actor who also got the Whose Line is it Anyway? show off the ground in the UK (Compared to the Drew Carey versions, the original series was very upper brow). It's been a while since I checked, but I would definitely get my hands on those dramas given the quality of the one done on the Real feed.
There's been a few specially written audio dramas written for Doctor Who and featured on BBC's Cult site (can't recall URL presently), which IIRC have used some of the original actors when possible as well as some reasonably famous celebrities for additional voices.
Nearly every great idea or innovation is a result of an "accident", though not necessary the type of accident you'd expect. Brainstorming sessions are meant, for example, to drive your thinking away from the norm and into the crazy and bizarre, something you'd probably consider to be an accident if you did it normally as part of the job, but good brainstorming can result in some fantastic ideas. Even in science, we're encouraged not to stay on a single focus and instead read and learn outside your field because who knows what the merger of ideas could lead to. Even from a standpoint of evolution, most evolution advances are a result of mistakes in the genetic code that leads to improved survival. So having the world's biggest search engine be a result of the a mistake is no big surprise and just goes to show what creative thinking can get you.
I'd argue that there's a subtle difference between Windows and *nix admins. You definitely cannot deny that laziness exists in both camps, however:
With Windows, important updates are typically announced broadly, and/or make use of the MSN Messanger service. Thus, to know that an update to Windows or other MS product exists, you just sit and watch the news (aka PASSIVE or REACTIVE).
With *nix, a lot of updates aren't necessary broadcast fully save for the ones with the most dire consequences. Instead, it's easier to follow BugTrak discussions or your distro's security mailing list as to see what's insecure and what's patched. Which means that you have to actually sign up and deal with the mail that comes through these mailing lists, thus requiring action on the end of the *nix admin (aka ACTIVE)
Now, this is not to say that mailing lists don't exist for Windows, nor that there aren't those admins that wait until it's news at Slashdot then patch, but I'd figure there's more of the REACTIVE type admins for Windows, and more ACTIVE types for Unix simply due to the nature of how those OS operate and the general attitude towards them. And of course, the REACTIVE type of admin person will general be the one to let security holes remain until the situation worsens, as appears to what happened with Slapper.
Thus, while fingers of blame are continually pointed around, they should fall squarely on the shoulders of those REACTIVE system admin types instead of on Symantec or on Microsoft or anyone else. A patch was out by Microsoft 6 months ago, and it fixed the problem. It should not have been an issue whether to patch or not; yes, it wouldn't have been an instant patch (as suggested, you'd patch a mirror of the enterprise server and make sure code works without question before patching the production ones), but it's reasonable to expect that you could verify the patch works and make changes within 6 months.
I agree to some extent that's probably what he meant, but it still comes down to the idea that there's poor separation of content and presenation. Both the average CGI backend (whether perl, python, whatever), PHP, ASP and JSP can suffer from this. Which means that typically the page designer and the web application developer has to be the same person, lest one get their SQL code in the other's HTML (and the other's HTML in the sQL code, etc...). It's not that any of these technologies can't be used to do, say, the Model-View-Controller method of data/presenation separation, but typically these concept is "taught" much later after teaching how to develope the full fledge web app with one source file. Yes, at some point, you should learn how you can do CGI arg parsing and HTML generation with the same script, but that's a nice simple test case to learn how CGI and web requests work. It then becomes a matter of building, or using existing, engines that help to separate the content from presenation.
Right now I'm trying to (re)learn AxKit, which can be used to develop such; I provide an XML document (whether static or from some CGI request), use XSL stylesheets to take the XML to XHTML, then use good CSS practices to mark that up correctly. Other engines, like the Struts engine for JSP, do similar type of things. There's numerous libraries for Perl, Java, Python, etc, that allow one to adapt to existing services to help with that separation (for example, I'm thinking of things like the Template Toolkit for perl).
I would think that the point that is being missed is that it's easy to write do-everything pages that don't separate content and form, but web apps that have good content/presentation separation are typically much easier to maintain and much easier to augement with new features.
Now, as to how this can be done with XP (without having read the book), I question, since I would imagine that the advice suggests that the designer and the programmer are sitting at the same terminal by the usual XP philosophy. But that's a mystery left to the book.
Count Zero wasn't bad, in the sense that he knows how to take several plot threads, seemingly disjointed, and slowly, but surely, weave them together, hinting at the events from the other threads, until the finale of the book. He did the same quite well in Neuro and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
But, one thing that annoys me with Gibson is that his writing style has gotten 'easier' to read since Neuromancer. It took me several times through Neuromancer to understand everything that is going on in the book in the grand sense of things thanks to unique verbal constructions and new terminology that only makes sense on multiple readings, and even then, there's probably small details that I'd catch on the next reading. I even remember having to reread some paragraphs just to make sure I understood what I could, that's how complex his language was then. Count Zero wasn't quite as deep with the text, though it did warrent a couple of rereads to catch all the details, and some of the complex verbage was still there. But Mona Lisa Overdrive, while requiring a few rereads to make sure you got all the details, lacked the deep structure in the writing, making it very easy (maybe too easy?) to read, and why some think this was his weakest work.
What I find interesting from this review and one elsewhere (Salon? Wired?) is that the plot sounds like a mirror of that in Count Zero with the art dealer looking for the maker of the shadow boxes. IMO, that part of the plot in CZ got the weakest treatment, despite being the darkest part of the entire story, and it did deserve another relook, maybe that's what happened here with Pattern Recognition.
Spirited Away is practically a shoe-in for this, but Lilo & Stitch and Ice Age are viable competitors. Spirit, while doing an OK job at the box office, was sorta so-so after Dreamworks' last two big animation features, Road to El Dorado and Shrek. Treasure Planet was considered a flop by most conservative standards, and due to it's failure, several changes appear to be underfoot at Disney, including cutting back on various DVD features (for example, rumor had it that there was planned a 2-disc edition of L&S due out around now, in addition to the single disk that you can get now; reports now say that Disney will be hard pressed to release any 2-disk feature again save for their Classics series (Snow White, B&tB, etc)).
Ice Age does have rough edges but for a first shot full-length feature, it works quite well, though I doubt it'll win (maybe it's there to be the sole CGI-animation representative?)
Lilo and Stitch was probably Disney's best and tightest work since TLM and B&tB: they took out the musical numbers, focused on comedy and timing and plot, and brough together good characters and good voice talent to make it work. (And my understanding is also that this was not a big budget film, pre-marketing/advertizing fees, compared to previous Disney ventures). No, it's not as good as Spirited AWay, but the elements that got B&tB the Best Picture Oscar nomination are there in L&S, and by and far, the race will be between these two films.
Notice that most of the episodes on that list are pre-1996 (Season 8, IIRC), with only 5 or 6 of the 25 from latter seasons?
There's a good reason for this: Seasons 7-9 was during the transition of the writing and production from one staff to another; the original staff had nearly all been there since the concept of the Simpson on the Trace Ullman show, while the new staff was much less versed with the humble beginnings of the show.
Most long-time Simpsons fans that were on the net prior to that change immediately saw the changes that the show had made, and over the course of a few seasons, the fans no longer cared for the show. (I know a few of these people well, including some long time alt.tv.simpsons posters that simply dropped the show like a hot potato). The show became more cartoon-y, and less of a animated family sit-com. (That is, these people saw OFF as a show that could have been done live action if they really tried, but worked better as a cartoon; nowadays, most episodes can't be done live action as they involve too many abuses of the cartoon laws of physics). Plus there were changes in the emotional tone of the stories; the early seasons (at least from 3-7) had a good mix of comedy and emotion, but nearly all of the last 5 or 6 seasons have been strictly out and out comedy. They also changed the characters somewhat, making Homer more of a doofus as opposed to a not-so-bright father trying to do his best for the family, and making Lisa a political busybody, and most recently, dumbing down Marge. Too much focus on the external characters as well, and giving Homer all these crazy antics to do. Sure, if that's the way the show started as, then maybe it would be funny, but it's not the same as what most of us long-time fans would consider to be the heart of the Simpsons.
What's amazing is that there's very few mainstream publications that mention how poor the Simpsons are *today* compared to a decade ago. They all praise the show, it constantly wins awards, etc. The problem is, the Simpsons is a cornerstone of FOX, and to remove it would cause significant problems for its ratings battle on Sunday nights.
I think this list is at least some nod to how the Simpsons had good quality shows to start, and that the last several season have been 'blah' since. There have been good episodes of the last few seasons, or ones that could have worked; I do think "Homer's Phobia" is a good one to be on the list though a bit too high, if nothing else for the classic steel mill scene, and "A Day In the Life" which showed the same events, but from Homer's, Bart's, and Lisa's POV, could have worked if the zany adventures were held back a bit. But really, just like TNG and DS9 and the rest of the Trek universe, the Simpsons need to be retired. To see even 2 more seasons come out of the current staff is going to pull down the overall quality of the show even more.
While I don't think we always agree with Bill Gates, his vision for.NET required that there existed a $30/month high speed (download, presumably) connection for every home, and I'd doubt that they haven't run the numbers to make sure this is the price point for the average user. But this would probably be a 768/128 RADSL or limited cable solution, without the ability to run servers or hook up multiple computers (*). As a power user that wants more than what this theorhetical average is, I would gladly pay more for more service features, including but not limited to more bandwidth (down and up), a server-friendly policy, multiple computers, some form of service guarentee, etc. Tiered pricing or a pick-and-choose package is the way that broadband sales have to go to get the average cost down yet still satisfy the power users. In other words, one-size-fits-all plans will have to go by the wayside in order to get broader acceptance of broadband.
(*) While limiting the number of computers behind a single connection to 1 can make some sense, the image that Microsoft and the big PC makers certainly don't agree, as they see a computer in every room, or wireless appliances, etc, all which take the form of another IP address behind the NAT. For an ISP to limit the growth of the networked house would be stupid, just like if the power company said that you could only plug in one appliance at a time over all the sockets in your house. Customer demand is growing for home networks, and to deny this will hurt ISPs that don't allow for it.
There's still plenty of good reasons for floppies. Most device drivers can still fit onto one floppy disk, and thus the comparitive cost of CD vs floppy media would make it stupid to burn 1M of data onto a 650M CD. Secondly, floppies are still perfect rescue disk media: you can usually get any hard drive and optical media controllers onto one, such that you can delete nasty files or run checkdisk to make sure things are ok.
However, both of these purposes have been "surplanted" by Microsoft's OS tools and monolithic device driver packages (read: Creative Labs). If your MS OS goes bad, you're supposed to plug in the CD Rom and use their tools to fix the problem, but this is sometimes not enough, or not advanced enough (eg , you're left with the extreme ends of choices of just doing a scandisk, or doing a complete reformat/reinstall of Windows). Advanced users know what programs to run and what specific files to tackle if something goes wrong. And because all Dell machines are Windows based, they don't consider the Linux users, where floppy rescue disks are still the norm.
Plus there's still the fact that floppies are good for the transferring of some media types, like short word processing documents and pictures. Particularly if we're talking parents and grandparents that have that donated pre-Pentium computer without a CD rom or the like, the floppy is an excellent way to get those types of things to them.
Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy? I'd rather see the choice of a floppy as an option to add on, rather that remove it all together or keeping it as a standard feature, but there's still plenty of reasons for floppy use.
I read elsewhere that when JSRF was released as a separate title, it got snubbed (mind you, I think it was one of the first Xbox games, then THPS3 and Halo came around, and bamph, it was pulled out of distrobution). Yet, all the press on the game after the fact now that it's bundled with the Xbox gives it rave reviews, not necessarily the reason to buy the Xbox, but certainly adds to the value of it.
Here's a link to a PDF version of the bill on the HoRep's website (It's H.R. 107 in the 108th Congress): Proposed bill. Of interest is what the last two pages have (the rest is just deliniating what mislabeling of a copy-protected disk is and punishable for) -- while it goes in the right direciton for fair uses, it still leaves open the question of "significant noninfringing use" of a hardware/software product, getting us right back to the VHS case. Also, interestingly enough, note the header on the PDF file: it's based off an XML document, apparently, so I wonder how much Boucher's office has adopted to technology, or if the HoReps now has a nice XML/DocBook type of technology for building up new bills.
Could this also be used to build 'icons' with stateful representations of the objects they are supposed to represent? For example, instead of just 'empty' and 'full' for Trash/Recycle, could you have folders icons that have 'empty', 'sparse', 'full', and 'stuffed'? Or icons that reflect the read/write nature of the folder with respect to the user? Or even more down the road, icons that aren't pointing directly to files/folders but as system objects (as say down the/dev tree), such as a clock, a CPU meter, etc...? Yes, we have that functionality through many means, such as WM's dockapps, or by using shaped windows to simulate that. But if you look at the Mac OS X Dock, or the various things you can do with ObjectDesktop by StarDock systems on the Windows side, they reflect the ideas that I'm thining about here. Sure, it's nice to have, in WM , the status of my system along the right side easy to see, but I'd like it better if I could have a better control over how those are appearing on my desktop, and if I could make them true icons, draggable and placable whereever I want, that would be great.
Even more so, using XML and SVG, it would be very easy to create additional icons without a lot of programming behind it. You may need to a SAX reader to take the stateful information into some form, but after that, it's just XSLT transformations into SVG, and voila, you have an easy way to make cool meters/icons.
I haven't seen this feature on FilePlanet, but I don't doubt it doesn't exist. In fact, I think this is an excellent use of P2P technology, for game demos and patches that easily border on 20-100-300megs. Ever sinces sites like FilePlanet have used their queuing methods and/or pay-for-personal-dl-servers, getting such patches and updates can be tedious and annoying at times. And now that theren't arent many FTP mirrors of sites (I remember cdrom.com 's planetquake mirrors from way back), it's even worse. P2P clients with game patches would do the trick, though I suspect with most of them behind 128k or lower upload caps, you'd need a LOT of p2p clients to effectively get reasonable download rates for the larger files from a network.
Of course, there's the issue that some patches or demos are 'exclusive' or prevent you from redistributing unless you're a big-name site through their EULA, which would make a ad hoc P2P network unable to offer a file.
Yes, there is, but the data has to be ideal for 'compression' to work; Run Length Encoding comes to mind (eg: "aaaaaaaaaa" compared to "10a"). Heck, everyone uses zip and gzip and bz2 files, which are compression, but nothing gets lost, thus lossless.
However, the compression mostly happens for highly idealized data (such as written text); binary files or music/image files where the randomness of successive bits is very high, and thus lossless compression can't happen.
I don't disagree that a lossless compression scheme that gets 50% compression is highly questionable, but it's definitely not out of the realm of possibility.
Not worth the effort for a whole new story, but MS is appealling the judge's decision in the MS vs Sun case, reported by Cnet. MS claims that the injuction (Remember, the case has yet to be settled; the judge, though, deemed that Sun may be victorious in the case, and thus ordered the inclusion of Java as part of the injunction for Sun) would "inflict serious harm" in the various Windows products it would need to include Java in.
As others have pointed out, it's Sierra that is under Vivendi. But there's been an interesting rumor on the gaming groups that Half-Life 2 will be initially an Xbox exclusive, with the PC/Mac versions to be released at a later time (eg, like Halo). This is simply a rumor on the net, but if this rumor on the byout is true, there's definite positives for MS and the XBox if they get this.
No, "Googol" is 10^100. (1 followed by 100 zeroes). "Google" derived it's name from googol but changed the spelling as a pun and to distinquish it's name from a common english word.
Tetris, Snood, Bejeweled will always fill a niche in the gaming market that you'll rarely find filled by major developers, in that these are the types of games people play when they want a quick diversion, or don't want to upgrade to the latest & greatest hardware, or just to have something more intellicully stimulating than most FPSs without the time commitment of RPGs and RTS games. They load fast, are easy to learn, require few resources, and yet can be addictive and fun to play. There's more of them being made all the time by the same type of people that specialize in shareware, PopCap being a prime example of a group working off their success. And with the easy of programming these things thanks to the simplicity of Flash and/or Java, there's a lot more people getting involved with these as well.
Sure, not all the games are equally challenging, and not every game will be met with the same appriciation as others, but it's definite a niche that needs to be filled and it's being filled quite well.
See this previous story on how the cable systems and the HDTV makers have come to some agreement (yet to be approved by the FCC) on HDTV broadcasts including consumers' rights. It would not be surprising that TiVo waited for the agreement to be confirmed before it announced it's plans, lest we get to the point right before delivery to find that the HDTV standard won't allow for TiVo to work right because of the multitudes of formats and other problems.
Also, this confirms with the information on what people will be able to record from HDTV signals. The plan in the above article stated that there would be no restrictions on recording over-the-air broadcasts (read: your local stations), while you could only time shift PPV events by 90 minutes and not save the recording. I'd suspect that other cable stations, basic and premium, would have some restrictions between those cases.
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Part of the problem with what we call the "free market" today is that consumers are not following the "free market" model, and the parent post is an excellent example of this. Most people will buy the cheapest item or the one with the most brand-recognition or so-forth, instead of knowing what the pros and cons of each choice are. They're passive in their market knowledge and thus it's easy to sway them with marketing and advertizing.
Now, there's nothing stopping a truly informed consumer as in the grandparent post (looking at the 3rd party resellers for a given model) from being empowered as a consumer as per the free market model (*). And more power to those that actually do this, as opposed to making a purchasing decision blindly.
(*) Of course, EULAs that prevent product benchmarks and comparisons and other tactics can get in the way, but for the most part, the information is out there, you just need to find it.
Except that if you read the claims (which are the meat of any patent), they are going after discussions relating to items for sale such that the discussion is pertanent to the offered item. A quick glance, however, would suggest that they also cover discussions relating to auction/non-direct reseller sites (though again, limiting the patent to the discussion of the items for sale, and not the seller or the like...)
True, OSS doesn't have the money to put into UI research, and while RedHat and the other commercial distros have tried to help out to some extent, it's still a game of catchup with Microsoft most of the time, which is why we seem to be always playing catch up with MS and Apple. Should this be an area to advance Linux in? Maybe; I do think that with the right minds, new, non-WIMP GUIs could be developed that could be more intuitive for certain functions.
But Linux is trying to gain acceptance by all computer users, and to migrate people from Win or Mac to Linux requires familar surroundings, otherwise, your Linux support person will be running non-stop trying to answer every question under the sun from those that 'just don't get it'. So the 3-paned mail client, the Word- and Excel-lookalikes, and even media players that mimic their Mac or Win equivalent are better poised to help Linux gain market share than some abstract UI that may look good and is more efficient, but otherwise quite different from any standard UI elements.
The other problem is that developers generally make poor UI developers, particularly if the same developer works on the code and the UI. That developer will know exactly how a program is to work and thus may lay out UI elements that make sense to him, but not to the average lay person. Even if a different developer was doing the UI, there's a different mentality that computer programmers have over average computer users that would typically end with the layout being programming reasonably but low on usability. It may behoove OSS developers to get people with graphic art or usability skills on board some projects to help plan out better UI interfaces.
Basically, we need to copy, if we want Linux and OSS to be accepted, but there should be a challenge to more creative developers to build new, unique UIs.
Now, in 5 years, when everyone's done spending to get their 1000" HDTV plasma set with 15.3 dolby surround to watch DVDs perfectly, then a switch to a new music format may not be a big deal. But timing any forced media switch right now, with DVDs still fresh in most people's minds, is not the way to go.
My only nits about either modes is that you still have a root X window (standard grey crosshatch) that's started minimized but otherwise sits in the process list and can sometimes make quick switching a bit more difficult without activating the wrong X app. I'd wish that the Cygwin X server could be started as a background service such that 1) it stays off the process list, and 2) to get an xterm to a remote computer up, I would simply have to ssh to that computer via putty or cygwin's ssh, point DISPLAY back , and let loose the X applications, as opposed to having to start the X server on Windows manually each time.
Yea, again without checking, "Big Finish Productions" sounds like what's available as a streaming Real feed from BBC, but that you can also buy the CDs with other ones around. I remember that the 'premier' one on the site had both McCoy and (Ace's actress name, can't remember) in it, as well as John Sessions, who, IIRC, is a well known british Shakespearean actor who also got the Whose Line is it Anyway? show off the ground in the UK (Compared to the Drew Carey versions, the original series was very upper brow). It's been a while since I checked, but I would definitely get my hands on those dramas given the quality of the one done on the Real feed.
There's been a few specially written audio dramas written for Doctor Who and featured on BBC's Cult site (can't recall URL presently), which IIRC have used some of the original actors when possible as well as some reasonably famous celebrities for additional voices.
Nearly every great idea or innovation is a result of an "accident", though not necessary the type of accident you'd expect. Brainstorming sessions are meant, for example, to drive your thinking away from the norm and into the crazy and bizarre, something you'd probably consider to be an accident if you did it normally as part of the job, but good brainstorming can result in some fantastic ideas. Even in science, we're encouraged not to stay on a single focus and instead read and learn outside your field because who knows what the merger of ideas could lead to. Even from a standpoint of evolution, most evolution advances are a result of mistakes in the genetic code that leads to improved survival. So having the world's biggest search engine be a result of the a mistake is no big surprise and just goes to show what creative thinking can get you.
With Windows, important updates are typically announced broadly, and/or make use of the MSN Messanger service. Thus, to know that an update to Windows or other MS product exists, you just sit and watch the news (aka PASSIVE or REACTIVE).
With *nix, a lot of updates aren't necessary broadcast fully save for the ones with the most dire consequences. Instead, it's easier to follow BugTrak discussions or your distro's security mailing list as to see what's insecure and what's patched. Which means that you have to actually sign up and deal with the mail that comes through these mailing lists, thus requiring action on the end of the *nix admin (aka ACTIVE)
Now, this is not to say that mailing lists don't exist for Windows, nor that there aren't those admins that wait until it's news at Slashdot then patch, but I'd figure there's more of the REACTIVE type admins for Windows, and more ACTIVE types for Unix simply due to the nature of how those OS operate and the general attitude towards them. And of course, the REACTIVE type of admin person will general be the one to let security holes remain until the situation worsens, as appears to what happened with Slapper.
Thus, while fingers of blame are continually pointed around, they should fall squarely on the shoulders of those REACTIVE system admin types instead of on Symantec or on Microsoft or anyone else. A patch was out by Microsoft 6 months ago, and it fixed the problem. It should not have been an issue whether to patch or not; yes, it wouldn't have been an instant patch (as suggested, you'd patch a mirror of the enterprise server and make sure code works without question before patching the production ones), but it's reasonable to expect that you could verify the patch works and make changes within 6 months.
Right now I'm trying to (re)learn AxKit, which can be used to develop such; I provide an XML document (whether static or from some CGI request), use XSL stylesheets to take the XML to XHTML, then use good CSS practices to mark that up correctly. Other engines, like the Struts engine for JSP, do similar type of things. There's numerous libraries for Perl, Java, Python, etc, that allow one to adapt to existing services to help with that separation (for example, I'm thinking of things like the Template Toolkit for perl).
I would think that the point that is being missed is that it's easy to write do-everything pages that don't separate content and form, but web apps that have good content/presentation separation are typically much easier to maintain and much easier to augement with new features.
Now, as to how this can be done with XP (without having read the book), I question, since I would imagine that the advice suggests that the designer and the programmer are sitting at the same terminal by the usual XP philosophy. But that's a mystery left to the book.
But, one thing that annoys me with Gibson is that his writing style has gotten 'easier' to read since Neuromancer. It took me several times through Neuromancer to understand everything that is going on in the book in the grand sense of things thanks to unique verbal constructions and new terminology that only makes sense on multiple readings, and even then, there's probably small details that I'd catch on the next reading. I even remember having to reread some paragraphs just to make sure I understood what I could, that's how complex his language was then. Count Zero wasn't quite as deep with the text, though it did warrent a couple of rereads to catch all the details, and some of the complex verbage was still there. But Mona Lisa Overdrive, while requiring a few rereads to make sure you got all the details, lacked the deep structure in the writing, making it very easy (maybe too easy?) to read, and why some think this was his weakest work.
What I find interesting from this review and one elsewhere (Salon? Wired?) is that the plot sounds like a mirror of that in Count Zero with the art dealer looking for the maker of the shadow boxes. IMO, that part of the plot in CZ got the weakest treatment, despite being the darkest part of the entire story, and it did deserve another relook, maybe that's what happened here with Pattern Recognition.
Ice Age does have rough edges but for a first shot full-length feature, it works quite well, though I doubt it'll win (maybe it's there to be the sole CGI-animation representative?)
Lilo and Stitch was probably Disney's best and tightest work since TLM and B&tB: they took out the musical numbers, focused on comedy and timing and plot, and brough together good characters and good voice talent to make it work. (And my understanding is also that this was not a big budget film, pre-marketing/advertizing fees, compared to previous Disney ventures). No, it's not as good as Spirited AWay, but the elements that got B&tB the Best Picture Oscar nomination are there in L&S, and by and far, the race will be between these two films.
There's a good reason for this: Seasons 7-9 was during the transition of the writing and production from one staff to another; the original staff had nearly all been there since the concept of the Simpson on the Trace Ullman show, while the new staff was much less versed with the humble beginnings of the show.
Most long-time Simpsons fans that were on the net prior to that change immediately saw the changes that the show had made, and over the course of a few seasons, the fans no longer cared for the show. (I know a few of these people well, including some long time alt.tv.simpsons posters that simply dropped the show like a hot potato). The show became more cartoon-y, and less of a animated family sit-com. (That is, these people saw OFF as a show that could have been done live action if they really tried, but worked better as a cartoon; nowadays, most episodes can't be done live action as they involve too many abuses of the cartoon laws of physics). Plus there were changes in the emotional tone of the stories; the early seasons (at least from 3-7) had a good mix of comedy and emotion, but nearly all of the last 5 or 6 seasons have been strictly out and out comedy. They also changed the characters somewhat, making Homer more of a doofus as opposed to a not-so-bright father trying to do his best for the family, and making Lisa a political busybody, and most recently, dumbing down Marge. Too much focus on the external characters as well, and giving Homer all these crazy antics to do. Sure, if that's the way the show started as, then maybe it would be funny, but it's not the same as what most of us long-time fans would consider to be the heart of the Simpsons.
What's amazing is that there's very few mainstream publications that mention how poor the Simpsons are *today* compared to a decade ago. They all praise the show, it constantly wins awards, etc. The problem is, the Simpsons is a cornerstone of FOX, and to remove it would cause significant problems for its ratings battle on Sunday nights.
I think this list is at least some nod to how the Simpsons had good quality shows to start, and that the last several season have been 'blah' since. There have been good episodes of the last few seasons, or ones that could have worked; I do think "Homer's Phobia" is a good one to be on the list though a bit too high, if nothing else for the classic steel mill scene, and "A Day In the Life" which showed the same events, but from Homer's, Bart's, and Lisa's POV, could have worked if the zany adventures were held back a bit. But really, just like TNG and DS9 and the rest of the Trek universe, the Simpsons need to be retired. To see even 2 more seasons come out of the current staff is going to pull down the overall quality of the show even more.
(*) While limiting the number of computers behind a single connection to 1 can make some sense, the image that Microsoft and the big PC makers certainly don't agree, as they see a computer in every room, or wireless appliances, etc, all which take the form of another IP address behind the NAT. For an ISP to limit the growth of the networked house would be stupid, just like if the power company said that you could only plug in one appliance at a time over all the sockets in your house. Customer demand is growing for home networks, and to deny this will hurt ISPs that don't allow for it.
However, both of these purposes have been "surplanted" by Microsoft's OS tools and monolithic device driver packages (read: Creative Labs). If your MS OS goes bad, you're supposed to plug in the CD Rom and use their tools to fix the problem, but this is sometimes not enough, or not advanced enough (eg , you're left with the extreme ends of choices of just doing a scandisk, or doing a complete reformat/reinstall of Windows). Advanced users know what programs to run and what specific files to tackle if something goes wrong. And because all Dell machines are Windows based, they don't consider the Linux users, where floppy rescue disks are still the norm.
Plus there's still the fact that floppies are good for the transferring of some media types, like short word processing documents and pictures. Particularly if we're talking parents and grandparents that have that donated pre-Pentium computer without a CD rom or the like, the floppy is an excellent way to get those types of things to them.
Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy? I'd rather see the choice of a floppy as an option to add on, rather that remove it all together or keeping it as a standard feature, but there's still plenty of reasons for floppy use.
I read elsewhere that when JSRF was released as a separate title, it got snubbed (mind you, I think it was one of the first Xbox games, then THPS3 and Halo came around, and bamph, it was pulled out of distrobution). Yet, all the press on the game after the fact now that it's bundled with the Xbox gives it rave reviews, not necessarily the reason to buy the Xbox, but certainly adds to the value of it.
Here's a link to a PDF version of the bill on the HoRep's website (It's H.R. 107 in the 108th Congress): Proposed bill. Of interest is what the last two pages have (the rest is just deliniating what mislabeling of a copy-protected disk is and punishable for) -- while it goes in the right direciton for fair uses, it still leaves open the question of "significant noninfringing use" of a hardware/software product, getting us right back to the VHS case. Also, interestingly enough, note the header on the PDF file: it's based off an XML document, apparently, so I wonder how much Boucher's office has adopted to technology, or if the HoReps now has a nice XML/DocBook type of technology for building up new bills.
Even more so, using XML and SVG, it would be very easy to create additional icons without a lot of programming behind it. You may need to a SAX reader to take the stateful information into some form, but after that, it's just XSLT transformations into SVG, and voila, you have an easy way to make cool meters/icons.
Of course, there's the issue that some patches or demos are 'exclusive' or prevent you from redistributing unless you're a big-name site through their EULA, which would make a ad hoc P2P network unable to offer a file.
However, the compression mostly happens for highly idealized data (such as written text); binary files or music/image files where the randomness of successive bits is very high, and thus lossless compression can't happen.
I don't disagree that a lossless compression scheme that gets 50% compression is highly questionable, but it's definitely not out of the realm of possibility.
Not worth the effort for a whole new story, but MS is appealling the judge's decision in the MS vs Sun case, reported by Cnet. MS claims that the injuction (Remember, the case has yet to be settled; the judge, though, deemed that Sun may be victorious in the case, and thus ordered the inclusion of Java as part of the injunction for Sun) would "inflict serious harm" in the various Windows products it would need to include Java in.
No, "Googol" is 10^100. (1 followed by 100 zeroes). "Google" derived it's name from googol but changed the spelling as a pun and to distinquish it's name from a common english word.
Sure, not all the games are equally challenging, and not every game will be met with the same appriciation as others, but it's definite a niche that needs to be filled and it's being filled quite well.
Also, this confirms with the information on what people will be able to record from HDTV signals. The plan in the above article stated that there would be no restrictions on recording over-the-air broadcasts (read: your local stations), while you could only time shift PPV events by 90 minutes and not save the recording. I'd suspect that other cable stations, basic and premium, would have some restrictions between those cases.