EQ started off well, but was utterly ruined by its topheavy nature and Verant's seeming total indifference to fixing fundamental game problems. Four years on and the UI still sucks, the game mechanics have not changed noticeably and unless you're a twinker spending hours playing a day, repetitively learning trade skills, running from one end of the world to other for some NODROP item, camping for hours for a spawn you'll never advance far. For a while it feels like fun, but after a while it dawns on you that you're just repeating the same actions over and over.
I hope for their sake that Star Wars: Galaxies is different. Fix the damned bugs rather than compounding them, don't let the game economy be screwed, don't let the game get topheavy, and have a 'live' world where there is no need to camp spots or waste hours waiting for something to happen.
The problem with RDF is the concept is incomprehensible to most and the format is extremely long winded and fragile. That's not to say it isn't useful (look at chrome in Mozilla), but it isn't user friendly by any stretch.
An Office format risks the same issues. In order to support all the wacky formatting in documents you'll need a very rich language and that combined with XML could lead to a totally unintelligble format. I haven't looked at the spec, but I hope they make due allowance for people who'll be writing the tools. If they make tool writers wade through shit trying to comprehend what's going on they'll be damaging themselves.
You can bet your boots that is MS settles on XML, they will make developers wade through shit trying to understand the format. Look forward to mixed namespaces, data islands and other garbage to trip up someone expecting to knock out a tool in perl.
And using a Segway on a crowded sidewalk is any better? Or will using one cause even more crowding as well as putting you at the receiving end of a lot of dirty looks and abuse.
As for using the Segway in the summer... If it's such a lovely day, what's the problem in just walking, or taking a leisurely cycle? I don't believe the Segway is going to be a hit at any price, short of bargain basement. It is simply not practical on any level.
Does it have a better chance? No one in America walks (hence the reason for so many fat people) and the few that do actually walk aren't suddenly going to purchase one because A) they can't afford the hugely, disproportionate price, B) they know they'd look an utter dork riding it, C) they actually appreciate the health benefits of walking, D) they recognise how utterly impractical these things are.
I can appreciate that it might have applications in a large warehouse or an oil tanker or something of that nature, but in real life it is just a large, cumbersome nuisance and menace to other pedestrians, not to mention a very tempting target for thieves and vandals.
If the purpose is to get from A to B more rapidly, then a bicycle does a better job and has the added advantage that it retails for a twentieth the price and gets you fit in the process.
The Segway is doomed in its current incarnation, at least for the general public.
The around the issue is to hack the chrome so it doesn't do it. The reason it does do it has to do with good usenet practice - there is a list (whose name escapes me) of stuff that all good email / news software is supposed to enforce and not allowing blank headers is one of them.
That is not the point. The point is that if Mozilla can have a Bayesian filter and it proves effective at catching spam then in a few years *every* mail application and many services such as AOL/MSN/Yahoo etc. will have one too. There will be no more need for the user to set up 20-odd advanced filter rules to filter for crap like $$$, xxx, Nigeria etc., or buy spam filtering shareware or anything else requiring effort - they simply click "this is spam" or whatever on their mail software and it's dealt with.
There was a slashdot article the other day that mentioned the return rate on spam was something like 0.001-0.002%. If a filter that learns can kill 90% of it or more then you can stick an extra 0 in there at least. Let the fuckers burn their money if they wish, but there will be a point when most of them will simply give up.
Perhaps you were using the Wizard mode? The classic mode is better and acts like a drag and drop folder with nice context menus in explorer to zip up a directory or whatever. Sometimes it can be pain such as to correctly replace some file with an updated copy and preserve path info. I recall it has some kind of nag screen, but our company has a site licence so it doesn't bother me.
As for the command line, head over to Info Zip and you'll find the fine command line tools I was referring to. Basically these are just as good as the PK ones, but free and open source.
pkzip/pkunzip were great tools, make no mistake but these days there is little reason to use them unless you're DOS bound. Perfectly fine open source versions exist and the likes of WinZip and XP's own zip folder extension cover the GUI side.
On the subject where the zip format should go, I believe it would be nice to see some new compression algorithms - I believe the header has space to define new types. The bzip2 algorithm would be a lead candidate. It would also be nice to see encryption and signing capabilities incorporated, perhaps based on the Java archive (jar) format.
Another thing that would help compression were if there were something akin to the tar / cabinet file mechanism for compression, where the entire contents and manifest are concatenated and compressed as a single entity rather compressed individually. This would allow for some very tight distributables.
Because at the time, the browser people were more concerned with getting their basic functionality working. But even back then there was demand for such functionality and the concept wasn't exactly novel since X has allowed apps to run inside apps for years.
In fact I ran across a post by Tim Berners Lee in 1993 replying to someone who raised the notion.
I don't blame Eolas for trying to cash in, but frankly the patent is ludicrous. Mosaic already had the concept of application helpers for handling unrecognised mime types even back in 1993 so the ability to embed data within the page was just a logical extension of that. X vendors have made a living for years selling widget kits and embedding content in a page is little different.
That's great but when all you want to do is change the indent size or some other innocuous setting, you're screwed unless you want to spend an inordinate amount of time reading how to do it.
There is no excuse for this. I suspect it boils down to a hardcore RTFM attitude in the Emacs community, determined to not make things easy for anyone, especially people who just want to edit a file. The 'Customize Emacs' option is a sick joke. Even XEmacs makes an effort, for example referring to 'syntax highlighting' rather than 'font locking' and other efforts to put some sense into the configuration system. WTF did someone get the name 'font locking' from??? Talk about obtuse.
Most modern editors have the good grace to stick the commonly used settings into a nicely grouped point and click dialog box. Emacs has a graphical mode so it should do likewise.
In general it seems fine, but the UI is excruciatingly slow. A real world example - VNC clients (any client, X or native) run like a slug on my dual CPU 450Mhz Mac, but my 450Mhz laptop which has no fancy hardware runs rings around it.
Of course I'm using 10.1 - I've heard but I would like to see substantiated independently that 10.2 is a lot snappier. I am still mulling if I should acceed to the daylight robbery price Apple is charging to upgrade.
Unfortunately, such talk is moot these days since modern monolithic kernels such as Linux are capable of dynamically loading and unloading drivers - they're called modules.
Anyway, in terms of stability I have yet to see anything that beats Linux. I've been running it for 4 or 5 years in various roles on some terrible hardware and I'm actually taken aback when it crashes it happens that rarely.
Micro kernels are not immune from crashes either. My OS X box crashed once too, which again surprised me since it's been a very stable system.
And by pure, they mean capable of doing fuck all seeing as it won't have X Windows, Apache, Perl, OpenSSH and a bunch of other non-GPL software that makes an OS useful for doing stuff.
I hope you're kidding about emacs. It is quite possibly the most over the top, complicated, baroque, *crufty* editor ever invented. It may be fabulous if you're some lisp freak or want to run a calendar or read email from a split buffer, but it sucks big time if you just want to change the C++ indent style from 2 spaces to 4 - say hello to.emacsrc, major and minor modes and hours of reading info pages. That's not to say I don't like some stuff about it, but frankly these days I'd rather use jed or microemacs which fire up in a fraction of the time.
I suspect the only reason it caught on was because the competition is has even more retarded behaviour (yes vi I'm looking at you).
The Amiga is dead and buried. I suspect there is still a market for Amiga products however because there is a hardened core of fanatics who won't accept reality or make their life easier by accepting the fact and moving on.
Personally I had an Amiga for five years and was all set to buy an A4000 when Commodore hiked the price. I'm glad they did since it allowed me to snap out it and buy a PC instead. I did love my Amiga and it taught me valuable lessons, including a love for the command line, but its day and been and gone. Commodore blew it big time. Besides, moving to the PC meant I could play with OS/2 2.1 and Linux and these were just as much fun.
Nowadays I fire up UAE if I want to run an Amiga. I see no point in a new PPC version.
Sorry, but I have no chip on my shoulder, I'm just making an observation. Go to any creationist website and you'll see ignorance, deceit and downright lies being employed to promote their view. Try drdino.com on for size.
As for being passionate about biology, I'm not that either. But I am passionate when I hear creationist groups trying to pressure schools to accept their unscientific twaddle. I am passionate when some fundamentalist group tries to force its world view on my children. If someone wants their own kids to believe in God, then fine take them to church each sunday. But religion should stay out of school and biology class until such time as there is a scientific evidence to justify it. Evolution has such evidence in spades.
Unfortunately it is not possible to disprove a negative. I could as easily state that there are 45 gods who control the universe, or one for each force of nature, or a god for each letter of the alphabet or fairies at the bottom of the garden or giant incorporeal space hippos or any other nonsense and no one would be able to prove otherwise.
Fortunately science works from evidence. In the absence of any evidence to support the notion of a god and no way to observe or detect a god (or giant incorporeal space hippos), there is no need to require or suppose one.
Personally, I believe that twenty three legged inflatable polka dot space Rhinocerous shat the earth through one of its four backsides. I have as much proof for my belief as you have for yours, which is to say none at all.
On the other hand, evolution has a 150 year mountain of evidence to prove
it. It is a fact, deal with it.
If you believe otherwise, read TalkOrigins.org and explain why they're wrong.
Point by point refutations already exist at TalkOrigins.org. Unfortunately, Creationists are so profoundly stupid and ignorant, that even when confronted with the irrefutable evidence for evolution they will just conveniently ignore it and bleat the same old lies that evolution is 'just a theory', 'no proof', 'irreducible complexity', 'intelligent design' blah blah. It doesn't matter that there is mountains and mountains of proof for evolution and not a single scrap for ID or any of the other nonsense they believe. The site goes through these and much besides.
One has to wonder if they are willfully or unconciously lying to themselves and others about this. It certainly doesn't say much for their faith or their thought processes that they'd rather live in a woo-woo land of lies and self-denial than confront reality.
It would be very straightforward to produce an XML format which is all but unintelligible even if it is visible.
For proof, just take a look at the likes of chrome or RDF to see how unintelligible open formats are. Even with the specs in front of you, it takes a good while to understand the nuances. Now imagine if MS invented their own office format and never bothered to document how it was specified, threw in other crap such as data islands, bizarre entities, binary encoded data, mix and match namespaces and other wackiness and no one would have the first clue how to do anything useful with it. Sure it could be parsed because its XML, but what good is that if you don't know what you're parsing?
Erm, it doesn't have 200,000 bugs right now, that is for its entire lifetime, for the last 3 years. If you want to see how many there are now, open http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/reports.cgi (not via Slashdot) and find out. I will save you the trouble and tell you there are 28992 open bugs. Compare that the IE / Windows figures - oops you can't because they are hidden. Who knows what bugs are in your operating system?
That figure represents all feature work, enhancements, dupes, metabugs, Chimera, CCK. Mozilla.org, Bugzilla (bugs about Bugzilla), internationalization, platform specific, mail/news, browser, embedding, chrome, documentation and actual bugs in existence. The number of genuine bugs of any importance in the browser is likely to be a small fraction of the total.
Who said Mozilla was perfect? The difference is you can see what bugs are open, assess their importance and see when they are fixed. If a bug bothers you that much, you can even take the patch and retroactively apply it to a branch, e.g. 1.0.x or wait for the next nightly of course. You don't have to wait months for the next 'service pack' or listen to MS or whoever when they fob you off saying an exploit is 'theoretical'.
Of course, security issues are hidden in Bugzilla until they are made public, but that once they become public knowledge (e.g. through The Register article) they are are unlocked. The locked phase is just a period of grace to allow the problem to be worked on privately without alerting every script kiddie to its existence.
Did anyone own one of these? It was a wacky ZX81-like computer with a membrane keyboard and 4k. of memory. Instead of programming in BASIC you wrote in Forth. Needless to say it didn't catch on!
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I hope for their sake that Star Wars: Galaxies is different. Fix the damned bugs rather than compounding them, don't let the game economy be screwed, don't let the game get topheavy, and have a 'live' world where there is no need to camp spots or waste hours waiting for something to happen.
An Office format risks the same issues. In order to support all the wacky formatting in documents you'll need a very rich language and that combined with XML could lead to a totally unintelligble format. I haven't looked at the spec, but I hope they make due allowance for people who'll be writing the tools. If they make tool writers wade through shit trying to comprehend what's going on they'll be damaging themselves.
You can bet your boots that is MS settles on XML, they will make developers wade through shit trying to understand the format. Look forward to mixed namespaces, data islands and other garbage to trip up someone expecting to knock out a tool in perl.
As for using the Segway in the summer... If it's such a lovely day, what's the problem in just walking, or taking a leisurely cycle? I don't believe the Segway is going to be a hit at any price, short of bargain basement. It is simply not practical on any level.
I can appreciate that it might have applications in a large warehouse or an oil tanker or something of that nature, but in real life it is just a large, cumbersome nuisance and menace to other pedestrians, not to mention a very tempting target for thieves and vandals.
If the purpose is to get from A to B more rapidly, then a bicycle does a better job and has the added advantage that it retails for a twentieth the price and gets you fit in the process.
The Segway is doomed in its current incarnation, at least for the general public.
The around the issue is to hack the chrome so it doesn't do it. The reason it does do it has to do with good usenet practice - there is a list (whose name escapes me) of stuff that all good email / news software is supposed to enforce and not allowing blank headers is one of them.
There was a slashdot article the other day that mentioned the return rate on spam was something like 0.001-0.002%. If a filter that learns can kill 90% of it or more then you can stick an extra 0 in there at least. Let the fuckers burn their money if they wish, but there will be a point when most of them will simply give up.
Mozilla 1.3 is adding support for Bayesian spam filters
As for the command line, head over to Info Zip and you'll find the fine command line tools I was referring to. Basically these are just as good as the PK ones, but free and open source.
On the subject where the zip format should go, I believe it would be nice to see some new compression algorithms - I believe the header has space to define new types. The bzip2 algorithm would be a lead candidate. It would also be nice to see encryption and signing capabilities incorporated, perhaps based on the Java archive (jar) format.
Another thing that would help compression were if there were something akin to the tar / cabinet file mechanism for compression, where the entire contents and manifest are concatenated and compressed as a single entity rather compressed individually. This would allow for some very tight distributables.
In fact I ran across a post by Tim Berners Lee in 1993 replying to someone who raised the notion.
I don't blame Eolas for trying to cash in, but frankly the patent is ludicrous. Mosaic already had the concept of application helpers for handling unrecognised mime types even back in 1993 so the ability to embed data within the page was just a logical extension of that. X vendors have made a living for years selling widget kits and embedding content in a page is little different.
There is no excuse for this. I suspect it boils down to a hardcore RTFM attitude in the Emacs community, determined to not make things easy for anyone, especially people who just want to edit a file. The 'Customize Emacs' option is a sick joke. Even XEmacs makes an effort, for example referring to 'syntax highlighting' rather than 'font locking' and other efforts to put some sense into the configuration system. WTF did someone get the name 'font locking' from??? Talk about obtuse.
Most modern editors have the good grace to stick the commonly used settings into a nicely grouped point and click dialog box. Emacs has a graphical mode so it should do likewise.
Of course I'm using 10.1 - I've heard but I would like to see substantiated independently that 10.2 is a lot snappier. I am still mulling if I should acceed to the daylight robbery price Apple is charging to upgrade.
Anyway, in terms of stability I have yet to see anything that beats Linux. I've been running it for 4 or 5 years in various roles on some terrible hardware and I'm actually taken aback when it crashes it happens that rarely.
Micro kernels are not immune from crashes either. My OS X box crashed once too, which again surprised me since it's been a very stable system.
And by pure, they mean capable of doing fuck all seeing as it won't have X Windows, Apache, Perl, OpenSSH and a bunch of other non-GPL software that makes an OS useful for doing stuff.
I suspect the only reason it caught on was because the competition is has even more retarded behaviour (yes vi I'm looking at you).
Personally I had an Amiga for five years and was all set to buy an A4000 when Commodore hiked the price. I'm glad they did since it allowed me to snap out it and buy a PC instead. I did love my Amiga and it taught me valuable lessons, including a love for the command line, but its day and been and gone. Commodore blew it big time. Besides, moving to the PC meant I could play with OS/2 2.1 and Linux and these were just as much fun.
Nowadays I fire up UAE if I want to run an Amiga. I see no point in a new PPC version.
As for being passionate about biology, I'm not that either. But I am passionate when I hear creationist groups trying to pressure schools to accept their unscientific twaddle. I am passionate when some fundamentalist group tries to force its world view on my children. If someone wants their own kids to believe in God, then fine take them to church each sunday. But religion should stay out of school and biology class until such time as there is a scientific evidence to justify it. Evolution has such evidence in spades.
Fortunately science works from evidence. In the absence of any evidence to support the notion of a god and no way to observe or detect a god (or giant incorporeal space hippos), there is no need to require or suppose one.
it. It is a fact, deal with it.On the other hand, evolution has a 150 year mountain of evidence to prove
If you believe otherwise, read TalkOrigins.org and explain why they're wrong.
One has to wonder if they are willfully or unconciously lying to themselves and others about this. It certainly doesn't say much for their faith or their thought processes that they'd rather live in a woo-woo land of lies and self-denial than confront reality.
For proof, just take a look at the likes of chrome or RDF to see how unintelligible open formats are. Even with the specs in front of you, it takes a good while to understand the nuances. Now imagine if MS invented their own office format and never bothered to document how it was specified, threw in other crap such as data islands, bizarre entities, binary encoded data, mix and match namespaces and other wackiness and no one would have the first clue how to do anything useful with it. Sure it could be parsed because its XML, but what good is that if you don't know what you're parsing?
That figure represents all feature work, enhancements, dupes, metabugs, Chimera, CCK. Mozilla.org, Bugzilla (bugs about Bugzilla), internationalization, platform specific, mail/news, browser, embedding, chrome, documentation and actual bugs in existence. The number of genuine bugs of any importance in the browser is likely to be a small fraction of the total.
Of course, security issues are hidden in Bugzilla until they are made public, but that once they become public knowledge (e.g. through The Register article) they are are unlocked. The locked phase is just a period of grace to allow the problem to be worked on privately without alerting every script kiddie to its existence.
Did anyone own one of these? It was a wacky ZX81-like computer with a membrane keyboard and 4k. of memory. Instead of programming in BASIC you wrote in Forth. Needless to say it didn't catch on!