I have not purchased a DVD player yet. I probably won't for some time. I have chosen not to with what is going on with DeCSS and all. Still, the complete collection of COSMOS on DVD makes me drool...
I must admit I got a little laugh at the CD though:
All of the Cosmos favorites, including Vangelis, Pachelbel, Louis Armstrong, Mozart, Synergy, Hovhannes, Pink Floyd, Holst, Yamaguchi, Stravinsky, and many others. Specially composed music by Vangelis and Boydsten not available elsewhere.
I mean come on, what was Sagan smoking when he chose those... Errr. Never mind. (Ok, bad joke:)
Hmmm. I would bet that people have said the same about Visual Basic. Now, don't get me wrong, I dislike VB, but you certanly cannot call it a failure, wait... Its proprietary isn't it?
"A R" isn't the best method (unless you are fast with one hand - no pun intended), it is actually better to "P L SWORD" then do multiple "A L"'s - this "combo" of "A L " could be done ULTRA fast, allowing you to kill most creatures near instantly (after, of course, dropping all of the items you picked up, so the monsters would be "forced" to pick up the items before they could attack you, allowing you to attack them easily - game AI wasn't very sophisticated, but hey - the cartridge was only a 4K ROM!!!), because you can easily "roll" the fingers across the keys quickly...
True, one of my friends used it this way.
The thing was I found that the game "banked"
the keyboard strokes, and if you typed fast enough you could have a whole bunch of commands in the buffer, and thus the A L was not needed (IMO). I was just used to A R.:)
Heh, I can still remember the SOUND of the keystrokes... Each command had a "music" all its own. Heh, my friend and I played it enough that whenever we started a game we had a preset number of keystrokes to enter that would kill 4 monsters, get all their stuff, move to a spot where all the monsters would intersect on the level, drop all the stuff, and wait. A spider would be the first on scene, and it could not kill you. Thus we never even lit a torch. Heh, we could clean out the first level without lighting a torch. We played that way too much...
though I would love to see a resurection of Reactoid
Eh, not my favorite.
The true Trs-80.Coco fan would of course be playing Dungeons of Daggorath! You would have to buy a new keyboard after playing though. As anyone who has played it would remember:
A R
A R
A R
M B
P L TORCH
U L
A R
P L flask
D L
A R
...
Now THAT'S classic gaming!
It was done in Australia.
A number of people "invested" in a company that was doing just that.
Each person had to buy tickets though, and they had hired quite a few people to do so. Unfortunaly they were only able to buy 3/4 of the tickets. I saw a room FILLED with tickets. (This was a TV documentary) Fortunatly, they won. It did take them some time to FIND the winning ticket though.
We could do it here in Canada, it is feasable, Canada is a large enough country and we have enough 6/49 outlets to pull something like this off.
Hmm, the great Canadian Slashdotting of the Lotto 6/49!!!
What are you? A child, a dormitory dweller, or the denizen of an asylum? You have only one room???
Of course he has only one room!
You see, with the pace of change in the computer world he only needs one computer and he has been using the same computer for years!
He only needs one room because his computer occupies all the others in his house.
There are pictures around of explosives going off.
I have not seen any on the net, but I saw a bunch of frames in a mag a few years ago that were of a "pineapple" grenade.
It was quite impressive, for the first few frames it just sits there (no pin, no paddle). Then the top of the grenade *dissapears* and it sits there for one or two frames more. Then the grenade body begins to expand and swell. The grenade actually becomes cylindrical, looking more like a can of soup than a grenade at this point. Then it fractures along the "pineapple" lines and begins to break up. There were no more frames than that. I would guess that the camera was destroyed at that point. (Or hopefully behind some VERY heavy glass).
Mr_Flibble:Heh, thats just what I need! An array of these cameras each with 1 GB of ram. Then you could fire bullets at me and I could have the movie pictures work just like the Matrix!!!
Slashdot:That won't work Flibble you know that was just special effects...
Mr_Flibble: Nonsense! I have a bunch of geeks here! ESR over there has one of his guns ready. We have the cameras up, this should rock!
Slashdot: Flibble I don' think that...
Mr_Flibble: Fire away Eric! (Make certain the cameras are rolling!
Slashdot:Wait, Flib's STOP!
ESR:BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG...
Mr_Flibble Crazyidiot@AOL.com Connection reset by peer...
I think the lack of a keyboard is bad, but I guess needed in such an environment. I wonder how they make the monitor work? The interesting thing is that (despite the I/O connections) you could waterproof a current computer with something as simple as epoxy.
Back in the '80's the guy who taught me BASIC on a TRS 80 was working on some sort of encrypted security sensor (I was allowed to see it, and only know a little of what it did, but hey, I was 11 at the time!) Anyways, since the sensor and its electronics had to be in a variable environment, what he did was encase the electronics in epoxy. The small board and chips easially fit inside an ice cube, and thats exactly how he encased them. He left the wires for the power and sensors out of the ice cube tray, then poured epoxy into the trays. Bingo. Totally encased eletronics. Now this did not look too great, but it worked...
You could do a similar thing with todays electronics though. the only problem would be the power supply and peripherals (and TOTAL lack of upgrades....) (Cooling would be easy, use a water-soluble material to mould around the heatsink, when the epoxy sets, wash away the mould, leaving a hole to the outside.
Thats my theory anyways. I think epoxy would work. (At least to a depth of 30 feet, I don't know if it could handle the pressure of say 150 feet. You would have to design the system carefully for those depths!)
Of course, I guess that simple pressure cases could do this just as easially simply hook the system up to the bcd and it should work for keeping the system properly pressurized...
Just some random geeky thoughts...
I feel like encasing one of my 486's in epoxy now to try that out....
So,if the DMCA "bans the circumvision of technical protection measures like encryption systems and other methods designed to prevent access to copyrighted works" then I can copyright my Emails and encrypt them! If carnivore or the NSA decrypt my Email, then they are breaking the law and they will have to stand up to Jack Valenti!. Ha! Valenti and his lawyers will protect me!
What? Uh, No sir. Never heard of DeCSS, nope, never bought a T-shirt of it neither. Nope nope!/me hides his stack of 2600 mags.
Exactly, its the motherboards. I wonder if they are running into trouble? I hope not, because I have been specifically holding out for a dual AMD system. It sure feels like a long wait...
(Some twit will probably miss the point of my post and mark me as a troll, but I think the point needs to be made...)
I suppose you don't mind then if all your private information is given out to people you hardly know.
Please then answer the following questions for Slashdot:
What is your full name and age?
What is your mailing address?
What is your Home address?
What are your phone numbers?
What is your SIN number?
What are your credit card numbers?
What is your sex life like, (please describe in livid detail)?
What is your standing police record?
What drugs have you used?
Do you drink? If so, how often.
How often do you have sexual thoughts?
How ofted do you masturbate?
What do you think about when you do?
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Privacy is important.
So, I have a question. Does it really matter if they watch you? I don't know. How about you answer those questions and you tell me???
Its wierd. I get a good deal of "I hacked your firewall, you suck" reply's to my sig. Sometimes they get modded UP sometimes down, sometimes left alone.
So, I don't hate you, I WuB j00.
I WuB j00 very much.;)
It's okay. I figure the user interface in a year or two will be equal on Linux, BSD, BeOS, Mac and Windows.
You are probably correct in that. But (IMO) the *nix community has to kill X off and build a new server from the ground up. Still, I am probably like you in that when working on servers I don't use a GUI, I don't need -or want- one. GUI's take too long currently for administrative tasks.
But I ran bash on my Win98 box Bash for Windows? Cool! Where did you score that? The idea occured to me that it might be out there but I never actually thought to look. This will be a good addition to my Win98 workstation, which along with PuTTY will make 98 actually useful for me at work. Time to fire up google....
For the whole of its existence, the Macintosh operating system has been a prime example of consistency and graceful design. And for the whole of its existence, the Unix operating system has been, um, not.
Hey, hey! I beg to differ!
That's like saying Sendmail is not graceful... Oh... Wait...;)
WaveLAN kicks ass! You NEED WaveLAN. Except of course when
#insmod wavelan fails on your gateway and you sit there bitching about the damn WaveLAN card as I was last night. (Damaged card due to faulty power supply... It was a long shift yesterday...):)
I chose the question based on that.
I knew the stack was separate. The whole point of the question was to see how much the presenter knew, not getting an answer to the question.
I wanted to see if I got back a response like, "No, the kernel and the stack are separate" or "I believe IPv6 is forthcoming" or "what kind of question is that?"
As you just caught me on the question, I wondered if she would catch me on the question. You can choose to believe that or not, but it was the point.
Here is an interesting story about Microsoft, and it (slightly) involves IPV6.
I went to "Microsoft's Big Day" back in March I believe. This event was (at our town at any rate) just a big propaganda machine for Windows 2000 and Office 2000.
The hotel where it took place was initally crowded with people from the buisnesses from town, but with each intermission (the "seminar" lasted a whole day).
Basically the lectures went over the features of Win2k and why you should buy it for your buisness, same thing for Office. The main presenter (other than the boring laywer who read from the EULA... No, I am not joking)was a woman who seemed quite knowlegeable about NT. She was quite sharp I thought.
I decided to test how sharp.
I walked up to her during an intermission, where people were asking very very basic questions.
My turn came up and I asked:
"When will the Windows 2000 kernel support IPv6? Currently it only supports IPv4, and thats a serious issue with the looming IP shortage."
Just for a second her eyes went a little wide - the first question all day that she had not been able to answer. She glanced quickly at a person nearby sitting in the front row, then looked back at me and said "I don't know".
This was fine, I did not expect her to be able to answer the question, I wanted to see her true level of knowledge, whether she was plain PR or a techie at heart.
Now what got interesting is that the fellow to my left who was sitting in the front row of the presentation (dressed in "plain" clothes)and had been the man that the presenter had glanced at, got up and began to praise Windows 2000. He mentioned how "No operating system supports IPv6".
I replied, "Funny, Linux and BSD support it."
He did not believe me at first, and addressed the *nix idea with a wave of his hand, as if the *nix OSes were naught but a bother.
We then argued about IPv6 and it's importance, and how it loads routers etc, etc, etc. But, as we did so I noticed that he was leading me further away from the people asking questions to the presenters (I was winning the argument because I had just read Understanding IP Addressing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know.) I was also declaring things like: "Well, Linux can do that! What do you mean that Windows can't?" Which seemed to irk him.
(Ok, before someone tells me to read the Advocacy-how-to, I was very polite about it, and not derogitory to MS, I was doing it in more of a "Gee, I thought Windows could do that too... You mean it can't?" Besides, YOU try sitting through an 8 hour MS propaganda session and see if you don't snap!:)
We finished arguing, I "won" not that it was really important. I did not really care. Still, what I thought was *really* interesting was that I did not recognize him. I live in a small town, and I know ALL the computer people here. They all know me as the local Linux geek. I never saw this guy before, and he *WAS* knowlegable, he *DID* know what IPv6 was, and was able to discuss it. I would have known if there was a guy like this in town.
I waited until the very end of the seminar, when everyone was leaving. I watched this "plainclothes" guy, (all the MS people had Microsoft shirts on). The "plainclothes" guy left in the same van that the MS people left in. I have not seen him in town since.
Is the Gnome crew going for a full "suite" based around Gnome? I know that this is obvious... but hear me out.
Emacs, as you may know is a powerful (some say bloated, but then these people actually like vi...) tool. You can stay in it all day and get numerous things done. As useful as it is, it is textonly (x version not withstanding).
It seems to me that this "simple" file browser is doing for Gnome what Emacs does. It looks to do everything. This is something that MS has been going for (with the internet/desktop browser integration into windows.) The problem with this idea has been that, in the past no one has gotten it right because there are too many propritary standards to get in the way (like quicktime vs realaudio vs windowsmedia...) and you must launch a separate application to view each.
If it pans out, this certanly looks like the first good shot at providing a "do all" program for Linux (or any OS that I know of for that matter) that is GUI based. I still have this feeling that this is exactly what MS has been chasing - total integration.
I think that the GPL version will win out however.
Why? Nothing propritary to get in the way. If its propritary, you can be sure it won't be easially integrated with the GPL ideals/software. (Nvidia drivers not withstanding either.)
You have all heard the paraphrasing:
First they laugh at Linux...
I thought that the fighting stage began some time ago...
It sure looks to me like we (*nix/open source community) are beginning to win. While the article claims that MS is using this to move people *FROM* linux *TO* windows, and not as a "Oh my god, what if we loose the OS war?"... Come on...
I don't know ANYONE that has gone from Linux to move on towards Windows. I sure do know a whole bunch of people who are going the other way however.
Lets see what happens in round two... When this software gets released. Would it not be ironic if MS Office for Linux was terribly unstable/slow because of its design around proprietary MS APIs?
Imagine, MS loosing its main cash cow (Office, not any version of windows) because it did not run on the OS of choice? (dreaming of a Linux future)
I actually would NOT like to see this happen, I think that competition is good, and I hope Star Office/ WP suite/MS Office all start competing.
Still, if it bombs, I won't be one of the people crying over it either...
I have never liked Cowpland. He is too damn flamboyant. As for the friends I have in Ottawa (some of whom work for Corel) they don't much like him either. From what I hear of meeting him in person he is very full of himself, but in a non flattering kind of way.
What gives me the right to say this apart from having friends at Corel and being a Canadian? Not much I guess other than that I never considered taking a job at Corel because he was there.
I guess what I am really saying is that the "rumor mill" around Ottawa never had anything really nice to say about him, it always seemed that he liked to jump on the newest technology/idea and use it to get ahead.
This is what I saw as soon as I heard that Corel was going to support Linux. My immediate thought was: "Aw, shit. Here goes Cowpland again, trying to take on Microsoft again." I was really worried that his involvement would be a black mark on the Linux community. Fortunatly I was wrong.
I realize that the above is pure speculation, and I don't have any concrete evidence to back it up. I will say though, that my friends in Ottawa hold the same opinion that I do. (I mainly got it from them, and portraits of Cowpland and his spouse in Macleans).
Thats my opinion and I am sticking to it.
Flame away (or just moderate carelessly, which ever suits you best.)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn my eyes!
When I first read the title I saw:
"Mir to crash into Public!"
I suppose that would be a showstopper for one of the FOX disaster shows...
I have not purchased a DVD player yet. I probably won't for some time. I have chosen not to with what is going on with DeCSS and all. Still, the complete collection of COSMOS on DVD makes me drool...
:)
I must admit I got a little laugh at the CD though:
All of the Cosmos favorites, including Vangelis, Pachelbel, Louis Armstrong, Mozart, Synergy, Hovhannes, Pink Floyd, Holst, Yamaguchi, Stravinsky, and many others. Specially composed music by Vangelis and Boydsten not available elsewhere.
I mean come on, what was Sagan smoking when he chose those... Errr. Never mind. (Ok, bad joke
On another note I will take this little slashdot moment to promote what is IMO Sagan's greatest book: The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark. If you have not read it, you should.
C# is doomed because it is proprietary.
Hmmm. I would bet that people have said the same about Visual Basic. Now, don't get me wrong, I dislike VB, but you certanly cannot call it a failure, wait... Its proprietary isn't it?
"A R" isn't the best method (unless you are fast with one hand - no pun intended), it is actually better to "P L SWORD" then do multiple "A L"'s - this "combo" of "A L " could be done ULTRA fast, allowing you to kill most creatures near instantly (after, of course, dropping all of the items you picked up, so the monsters would be "forced" to pick up the items before they could attack you, allowing you to attack them easily - game AI wasn't very sophisticated, but hey - the cartridge was only a 4K ROM!!!), because you can easily "roll" the fingers across the keys quickly... True, one of my friends used it this way. The thing was I found that the game "banked" the keyboard strokes, and if you typed fast enough you could have a whole bunch of commands in the buffer, and thus the A L was not needed (IMO). I was just used to A R. :)
Heh, I can still remember the SOUND of the keystrokes... Each command had a "music" all its own. Heh, my friend and I played it enough that whenever we started a game we had a preset number of keystrokes to enter that would kill 4 monsters, get all their stuff, move to a spot where all the monsters would intersect on the level, drop all the stuff, and wait. A spider would be the first on scene, and it could not kill you. Thus we never even lit a torch. Heh, we could clean out the first level without lighting a torch. We played that way too much...
though I would love to see a resurection of Reactoid
Eh, not my favorite.
The true Trs-80.Coco fan would of course be playing Dungeons of Daggorath! You would have to buy a new keyboard after playing though. As anyone who has played it would remember:
A R
A R
A R
M B
P L TORCH
U L
A R
P L flask
D L
A R
...
Now THAT'S classic gaming!
It was done in Australia.
A number of people "invested" in a company that was doing just that.
Each person had to buy tickets though, and they had hired quite a few people to do so. Unfortunaly they were only able to buy 3/4 of the tickets. I saw a room FILLED with tickets. (This was a TV documentary) Fortunatly, they won. It did take them some time to FIND the winning ticket though.
We could do it here in Canada, it is feasable, Canada is a large enough country and we have enough 6/49 outlets to pull something like this off.
Hmm, the great Canadian Slashdotting of the Lotto 6/49!!!
:)
My computer keeps my room warm during the winter.
==============================================
"my room" ??
What are you? A child, a dormitory dweller, or the denizen of an asylum? You have only one room???
Of course he has only one room!
You see, with the pace of change in the computer world he only needs one computer and he has been using the same computer for years!
He only needs one room because his computer occupies all the others in his house.
His computer is ENIAC.
Gambling, or Lottery's are just a tax on people who cannot do math.
There are pictures around of explosives going off.
I have not seen any on the net, but I saw a bunch of frames in a mag a few years ago that were of a "pineapple" grenade.
It was quite impressive, for the first few frames it just sits there (no pin, no paddle). Then the top of the grenade *dissapears* and it sits there for one or two frames more. Then the grenade body begins to expand and swell. The grenade actually becomes cylindrical, looking more like a can of soup than a grenade at this point. Then it fractures along the "pineapple" lines and begins to break up. There were no more frames than that. I would guess that the camera was destroyed at that point. (Or hopefully behind some VERY heavy glass).
Mr_Flibble:Heh, thats just what I need! An array of these cameras each with 1 GB of ram. Then you could fire bullets at me and I could have the movie pictures work just like the Matrix!!!
Slashdot:That won't work Flibble you know that was just special effects...
Mr_Flibble: Nonsense! I have a bunch of geeks here! ESR over there has one of his guns ready. We have the cameras up, this should rock!
Slashdot: Flibble I don' think that...
Mr_Flibble: Fire away Eric! (Make certain the cameras are rolling!
Slashdot:Wait, Flib's STOP!
ESR:BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG...
Mr_Flibble Crazyidiot@AOL.com Connection reset by peer...
LOL!
That is one of the best reply's I have ever had to my sig!
I think the lack of a keyboard is bad, but I guess needed in such an environment. I wonder how they make the monitor work? The interesting thing is that (despite the I/O connections) you could waterproof a current computer with something as simple as epoxy.
Back in the '80's the guy who taught me BASIC on a TRS 80 was working on some sort of encrypted security sensor (I was allowed to see it, and only know a little of what it did, but hey, I was 11 at the time!) Anyways, since the sensor and its electronics had to be in a variable environment, what he did was encase the electronics in epoxy. The small board and chips easially fit inside an ice cube, and thats exactly how he encased them. He left the wires for the power and sensors out of the ice cube tray, then poured epoxy into the trays. Bingo. Totally encased eletronics. Now this did not look too great, but it worked...
You could do a similar thing with todays electronics though. the only problem would be the power supply and peripherals (and TOTAL lack of upgrades....) (Cooling would be easy, use a water-soluble material to mould around the heatsink, when the epoxy sets, wash away the mould, leaving a hole to the outside.
Thats my theory anyways. I think epoxy would work. (At least to a depth of 30 feet, I don't know if it could handle the pressure of say 150 feet. You would have to design the system carefully for those depths!)
Of course, I guess that simple pressure cases could do this just as easially simply hook the system up to the bcd and it should work for keeping the system properly pressurized...
Just some random geeky thoughts...
I feel like encasing one of my 486's in epoxy now to try that out....
So,if the DMCA "bans the circumvision of technical protection measures like encryption systems and other methods designed to prevent access to copyrighted works" then I can copyright my Emails and encrypt them! If carnivore or the NSA decrypt my Email, then they are breaking the law and they will have to stand up to Jack Valenti!. Ha! Valenti and his lawyers will protect me!
/me hides his stack of 2600 mags.
What? Uh, No sir. Never heard of DeCSS, nope, never bought a T-shirt of it neither. Nope nope!
Exactly, its the motherboards. I wonder if they are running into trouble? I hope not, because I have been specifically holding out for a dual AMD system. It sure feels like a long wait...
(Some twit will probably miss the point of my post and mark me as a troll, but I think the point needs to be made...)
I suppose you don't mind then if all your private information is given out to people you hardly know.
Please then answer the following questions for Slashdot:
What is your full name and age?
What is your mailing address?
What is your Home address?
What are your phone numbers?
What is your SIN number?
What are your credit card numbers?
What is your sex life like, (please describe in livid detail)?
What is your standing police record?
What drugs have you used?
Do you drink? If so, how often.
How often do you have sexual thoughts?
How ofted do you masturbate?
What do you think about when you do?
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Privacy is important.
So, I have a question. Does it really matter if they watch you? I don't know. How about you answer those questions and you tell me???
Because /etc/hosts is to easy Therefore not geeky enough! You just have to get in there and mess with the zonefiles!
:)
Its wierd. I get a good deal of "I hacked your firewall, you suck" reply's to my sig. Sometimes they get modded UP sometimes down, sometimes left alone.
;)
So, I don't hate you, I WuB j00.
I WuB j00 very much.
It's okay. I figure the user interface in a year or two will be equal on Linux, BSD, BeOS, Mac and Windows.
You are probably correct in that. But (IMO) the *nix community has to kill X off and build a new server from the ground up. Still, I am probably like you in that when working on servers I don't use a GUI, I don't need -or want- one. GUI's take too long currently for administrative tasks.
But I ran bash on my Win98 box Bash for Windows? Cool! Where did you score that? The idea occured to me that it might be out there but I never actually thought to look. This will be a good addition to my Win98 workstation, which along with PuTTY will make 98 actually useful for me at work. Time to fire up google....
For the whole of its existence, the Macintosh operating system has been a prime example of consistency and graceful design. And for the whole of its existence, the Unix operating system has been, um, not.
;)
Hey, hey! I beg to differ!
That's like saying Sendmail is not graceful... Oh... Wait...
WaveLAN kicks ass! You NEED WaveLAN. :)
Except of course when
#insmod wavelan
fails on your gateway and you sit there bitching about the damn WaveLAN card as I was last night. (Damaged card due to faulty power supply... It was a long shift yesterday...)
I chose the question based on that.
I knew the stack was separate. The whole point of the question was to see how much the presenter knew, not getting an answer to the question.
I wanted to see if I got back a response like, "No, the kernel and the stack are separate" or "I believe IPv6 is forthcoming" or "what kind of question is that?"
As you just caught me on the question, I wondered if she would catch me on the question. You can choose to believe that or not, but it was the point.
Here is an interesting story about Microsoft, and it (slightly) involves IPV6.
I went to "Microsoft's Big Day" back in March I believe. This event was (at our town at any rate) just a big propaganda machine for Windows 2000 and Office 2000.
The hotel where it took place was initally crowded with people from the buisnesses from town, but with each intermission (the "seminar" lasted a whole day).
Basically the lectures went over the features of Win2k and why you should buy it for your buisness, same thing for Office. The main presenter (other than the boring laywer who read from the EULA... No, I am not joking)was a woman who seemed quite knowlegeable about NT. She was quite sharp I thought.
I decided to test how sharp.
I walked up to her during an intermission, where people were asking very very basic questions.
My turn came up and I asked:
"When will the Windows 2000 kernel support IPv6?
Currently it only supports IPv4, and thats a serious issue with the looming IP shortage."
Just for a second her eyes went a little wide - the first question all day that she had not been able to answer. She glanced quickly at a person nearby sitting in the front row, then looked back at me and said "I don't know".
This was fine, I did not expect her to be able to answer the question, I wanted to see her true level of knowledge, whether she was plain PR or a techie at heart.
Now what got interesting is that the fellow to my left who was sitting in the front row of the presentation (dressed in "plain" clothes)and had been the man that the presenter had glanced at, got up and began to praise Windows 2000. He mentioned how "No operating system supports IPv6".
I replied, "Funny, Linux and BSD support it." He did not believe me at first, and addressed the *nix idea with a wave of his hand, as if the *nix OSes were naught but a bother. We then argued about IPv6 and it's importance, and how it loads routers etc, etc, etc. But, as we did so I noticed that he was leading me further away from the people asking questions to the presenters (I was winning the argument because I had just read Understanding IP Addressing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know.) I was also declaring things like: "Well, Linux can do that! What do you mean that Windows can't?" Which seemed to irk him.
(Ok, before someone tells me to read the Advocacy-how-to, I was very polite about it, and not derogitory to MS, I was doing it in more of a "Gee, I thought Windows could do that too... You mean it can't?" Besides, YOU try sitting through an 8 hour MS propaganda session and see if you don't snap!:)
We finished arguing, I "won" not that it was really important. I did not really care. Still, what I thought was *really* interesting was that I did not recognize him. I live in a small town, and I know ALL the computer people here. They all know me as the local Linux geek. I never saw this guy before, and he *WAS* knowlegable, he *DID* know what IPv6 was, and was able to discuss it. I would have known if there was a guy like this in town.
I waited until the very end of the seminar, when everyone was leaving. I watched this "plainclothes" guy, (all the MS people had Microsoft shirts on). The "plainclothes" guy left in the same van that the MS people left in. I have not seen him in town since.
Interesting don't you think?
Is the Gnome crew going for a full "suite" based around Gnome? I know that this is obvious... but hear me out.
Emacs, as you may know is a powerful (some say bloated, but then these people actually like vi...) tool. You can stay in it all day and get numerous things done. As useful as it is, it is textonly (x version not withstanding).
It seems to me that this "simple" file browser is doing for Gnome what Emacs does. It looks to do everything. This is something that MS has been going for (with the internet/desktop browser integration into windows.) The problem with this idea has been that, in the past no one has gotten it right because there are too many propritary standards to get in the way (like quicktime vs realaudio vs windowsmedia...) and you must launch a separate application to view each.
If it pans out, this certanly looks like the first good shot at providing a "do all" program for Linux (or any OS that I know of for that matter) that is GUI based. I still have this feeling that this is exactly what MS has been chasing - total integration.
I think that the GPL version will win out however.
Why? Nothing propritary to get in the way. If its propritary, you can be sure it won't be easially integrated with the GPL ideals/software. (Nvidia drivers not withstanding either.)
You have all heard the paraphrasing:
First they laugh at Linux...
I thought that the fighting stage began some time ago...
It sure looks to me like we (*nix/open source community) are beginning to win. While the article claims that MS is using this to move people *FROM* linux *TO* windows, and not as a "Oh my god, what if we loose the OS war?"... Come on...
I don't know ANYONE that has gone from Linux to move on towards Windows. I sure do know a whole bunch of people who are going the other way however.
Lets see what happens in round two... When this software gets released. Would it not be ironic if MS Office for Linux was terribly unstable/slow because of its design around proprietary MS APIs?
Imagine, MS loosing its main cash cow (Office, not any version of windows) because it did not run on the OS of choice? (dreaming of a Linux future)
I actually would NOT like to see this happen, I think that competition is good, and I hope Star Office/ WP suite/MS Office all start competing.
Still, if it bombs, I won't be one of the people crying over it either...
I am probably going to get slammed for this...
I have never liked Cowpland. He is too damn flamboyant. As for the friends I have in Ottawa (some of whom work for Corel) they don't much like him either. From what I hear of meeting him in person he is very full of himself, but in a non flattering kind of way.
What gives me the right to say this apart from having friends at Corel and being a Canadian? Not much I guess other than that I never considered taking a job at Corel because he was there.
I guess what I am really saying is that the "rumor mill" around Ottawa never had anything really nice to say about him, it always seemed that he liked to jump on the newest technology/idea and use it to get ahead.
This is what I saw as soon as I heard that Corel was going to support Linux. My immediate thought was: "Aw, shit. Here goes Cowpland again, trying to take on Microsoft again." I was really worried that his involvement would be a black mark on the Linux community. Fortunatly I was wrong.
I realize that the above is pure speculation, and I don't have any concrete evidence to back it up. I will say though, that my friends in Ottawa hold the same opinion that I do. (I mainly got it from them, and portraits of Cowpland and his spouse in Macleans).
Thats my opinion and I am sticking to it.
Flame away (or just moderate carelessly, which ever suits you best.)