Scripting is something I think all interfaces ought to expound with. I really wish that scripting was made a bit more up front than it is right now. Mac has some pretty good scripting because its 100% plain speech (as long as you know the right commands). Linux needs a plain-speech translator for not only scripting but normal typed commands. Fuck learning archaic and sometimes confusing commands (typing lpr foo.text is not an intuitive way to print anything). I want to type "print all documents in directory foo and then delete them" and have it do just that.
I find it disturbing that digerati think themselves so free from all things physical. The virtual world is powered by eletricity running through semiconductors and housed in buildings on rented real estate. The internet may be amorphous but I doubt it would stand up terribly well to a few well placed terrorist actions against fiber optic cables and satillite dishes. Some might say things are so well distributed that small outages are inconcequencial but you'd be hard pressed to handle all the high volume data of the world over phone lines and short range microwave networks. Trip a few wires from eletrical generators and entire sections of the country go dark. This is where the virtual ocean rolls onto the real beach. The cocky ones are body boarders who haven't yet felt what it's like to slam face first into the sand.
I've talked with people before and seen horrible results from outsourced products. Its great for manufacturing but not always good with something strangely artistic like coding. Everyone sees things a bit differently which can lead to alot of problems when it comes down to solving problems. Outsourcing can of course get you a finished result for a lower cost but you don't want to outsource to a bunch of programming houses in order to get something programmed faster. Too many cooks in the kitchen afterall.
1. Design your application to the most specific of details, outline everything you want done and how you'd like it done. Don't leave things up to a guess or some outside programming manager (not to insult anyone but to say that you want your application programmed how you want it programmed).
2. Make sure you keep in synch with the outside house you're working with, if you have changes (keep them few and far between) or additions make them as well documented as everything else and get those revisions to the outside people ASAP.
3. Demand excruciating documentation so if you ever need to work on the code in-house you won't be left into the dark as to how things are working or how things were done.
I feel a bit sorry for people skipping a good education for a high paying job that has no garauntee of being around in five years. Today you may be able to program in modern languages in just a few years they will all be old hat. You'll end up being one of the legacy programmers a company keeps around to maintain old programs that are written in older languages and only one in ten of you will actually have that job. Unless you've got other skills that will allow you another career you're fucked. If you've got a BS is computer science-not JUST programming mind you- you will be able to get another job after your web firm dies when it's venture capital runs out or you simply become obsolete as a programmer. If you program well enough to get a job, go to school as a business major and you'll land yourself a VP job making ten times as much money for less than a quarter of the grunt work. If four years of effort are too much for you to handle go to a trade school or a JC and work towards an Associate's degree or some certificate in a useful field. You may scoff at people in college now but you need to remember that the people who invented the shit you write code for went to college and many of the technologies came about because of colleges. You're riding on someone else's laurels, don't get cocky because you're going to be working for the people who actually diciplined themselves to get a degree.
You must be about 14 and have no real idea how things work. Only a true savant can skip over entirely the things you're "restrained" into taking. IIRC Every accredited University in the country is required to make you take English and higher levels of math. While you think computers are everything and anything, theres plenty more to the world than keyboards and command lines. If you have a degree in anything you can be considered pretty competent in the area of your degree. If you've got some sort of "personal" training you may or may not have the level of skills required for a job. Most CIS and business classes now are set up to provide you with advanced skills for your future job.
The OS running a computer does not mean shit in the real world. You may have religious devotion to a certain kernel and library base or just version of a certain kernel but in the real world where people need to do work, the OS means shit. The OS is for running the hardware, it is what takes your high level commands and smashes them down into something silicon circuits can understand. Porting OS X to x86 hardware would not be all too difficult. The problem lies in where the real work gets done, the applications. Linux could be the best OS ever but if a company or individual needs or wants a program not available on Linux, they won't regard it much if at all. This is what is rarely understood when I see this shit about OS X being ported to x86 or some other chipset. As it stands, OS X will be running on G3 and G4 processors and on standard configuration Macs. If a company wants to write a video editing suite or office suite, they know what hardware they'll have available and also know which special things they can add due to the G4's vector processor. How many programs do you see for Windows with SSE, MMX, or 3DNow! instructions embedded in them? Not a whole lot huh. With the Wintel PC market it is next to impossible to know what sort of configuration to expect so you throw out some lowest common denominators and hope for the best. No one would program anything for OS X on x86 hardware, there is just too much to chance and too many possible configurations available. OS X's port to x86 is also beset by problems with drivers. Just count how many times you've had trouble finding Linux or Windows drivers for a piece of hardware, times that by 20 and you can imagine how difficult said process would be to find OS X drivers. Stop bitching and expecting things to be ported to every piece of electronics ever invented, I'm not boycotting the fact that I can't run Palm OS on an ENIAC.
My Win 98 box is pretty stable and fairly quick on load times, especially IE5. Windows runs well if you know how to use it and don't expect it to do the impossible. Apple producing the hardware and OS is not bad business, the hardware is theirs afterall. Why isn't SGI chided for their old machines running IRIX which they produced or someone tell Sun they ought to stop packaging Solaris on their hardware or else you Linux fanatics will do something crazy.
SMP makes alot of sense in other areas too, if you've ever seen an Origin at work you know what I mean. I dont know what you are getting at by talking about realtime linking of core OS files. Do you want Windows or Linux to run on one processor with MacOS on the other? The problem lies in system bandwidth. Multiple processors provide more protessor time per second but don't usually provide faster data throughput. The limiting factor is the system bus, each processor is sharing the 100 or 133 mhz of bus clock. It would be entirely too unstable for two OS's to run without dedicated hardware for each (like the old Power Macs used to do with PC cards).
Why oh why is this such a big fucking deal? In 2001 the Itanium is going to be spit out of the giant Fabrige egg that is Intel why are you letting the stopgap measure known at the P4 cloud your vision? My old Katmai P3 500 works pretty damn well at most everything I use it for. The so-called P4 is nothing more than a testbed for die techniques and code morphing to be included into later generations of Intel chips. For you and I running Quake 3 we're not going to see terrible improvement in anything. We need to move past this 32-bit kludge we've been stuck in for the past decade. What awaits us is 64-bit gigahertz goodness. Fuck the P4, I want some soma.
All is well in the town of Hackerville when people only create nice and friendly server emulators. Emulators that let you or I or your Aunt to have a larger list of servers to connect to to play our ultra massively amazing multi-player online games. But this is a good use of reverse engineering in order to create alternatives to closed access server deamons. What happens after this though? Say you have a piece of software that updates itself over the net and uses a proprietary method of server-client communication. On the merely principal of the situation someone goes through the enormous effort to reverse engineer said protocol. Once the protocol is published the original creators have no edge of the competition which then incorporates it into their software or some jerkface uses said protocol to maliciously insert virii and bad sorts of things onto people's computers; through a service that is normally trustworthy. If a company gets thrashed due to server emulation is it still such a good thing?
You're thinking of colonization the wrong way. Instead of sending humans and animals to distant planets it would be a much better thing to send a genetic legacy to the far reaches of space. There have been those that have proposed that we are indeed the end result of inter galactic genetic seeding. Arthur Clark being one of those, in the Oddessy series the monoliths were evolutionary guidestones that would eventually get life on Earth to where it needed to be. Thats how you colonize a galaxy.
If you want to communicate to a vast audience you choose the most esoteric medium you possibly can because you can be pretty such that it grants you a large target audience. If you're sending a message to the universe saying "Here I am" you're going to send your message in a way everyone can understand. Take Contact by Carl Sagan, the Vegans sent a repeating signal of prime numbers on a radio frequency to get our attention. That is a good way to grab a listener's attention. A bas way would be to use some exotic form of communication that requires a fantastic mastery of a certain form of technology in order to even see. Actually very recently some astronomers took this idea to another level and have begun to search for lasers being used to communicate. Bright pulses in an easy to spot part of the spectrum (something that wont be confused as a stellar phenomenon). SETI's success will depend on patience, ingenuity and vigilance.
The only egotism here is yours fuckface. You're talking as if theres ten civilizations in the universe and they are all wildly different. A conservative run-through of the Drake equation numbers the total number of civilizations in the galaxy to millions. Thats more civilized cultures than have ever set foot upon this planet in known recorded human history. Many of the cultures here are dissimilar in only a small handful of ways to other ones. If we apply such a pattern to the theorized galactic civilzations, there are thousands upon thousands of cultures similar in many ways to us which means they're going to be using RF for long distance communication. And if you weren't a complete idiot the fact that the radio waves being listened to by SETI have been carefully chosen. Said frequencies are those that pass through the Earth's radio "window", those frequencies that pass through all the layers of atmosphere and actually hit the ground. A planet like ours supporting life civilized life forms like us would have a radio window just like ours. If we were sending a signal out to be seen by the rest of the universe we would send it in said radio window band. You should also be aware that the microwaves that cook your food are RF which stands for radio frequency. You also might want to be aware that it was Marconi and not Morse that did alot of the work in radio transmission.
A light year is several trillion miles in linear distance, the cloest star to Sol is Proxima Centauri which is about 4.2 light years. IIRC the cloest star to Sol with planets is 30 or so light years away. The Drake equation states theres millions of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone (or so). I support this but I also realize the immense size of our Galaxy and our Universe. We've been searching for ET life for a mere speck of time and have only been sending signals out long enough to extend to less than 100 light years. We're not the fucking first and not the fucking last, we're just so far from everyone else that it will take centuries to first make contact, by that time some of our orders from Amazon will be ariving so it will be a time of great rejoicing.
Evolution concepts are not flawed, especially if you've put more effort into studying them than switching on the Discovery channel. Evolution is a more complex process than just the fittest surviving. Biological organisms strive for homeostasis, the point where they function best at. If you run around and start burning up calories your body will sweat and dialate capilaries in order to shunt the heat produced by the extra expenditure of energy. This is merely a simple example of an organism adjusting it's internal processes to maintain homeostasis. When evironmental conditions around an organism change which cause it to adapt and stay in such a state that new set of biological criteria will be addended to the DNA of said organism and eventually get passed onto progeny. After a few generations the adaptation will become a staple part of that organisms characteristics. Darwin originally proposed that random mutation was the key to evolution but he did not fully grasps the sub-cellular chemistry of biological organisms. Humans are not misfits of any sort. The monkeys living on the coast of modern day Somalia started moving into the water for short stints to gather food and escape from predatores. Evidence of this can be seen in the slight webs of skin between our fingers and our downwardly sloped noses which facilitate surface swimming. Such factors led to us having oposable thumbs and a greater adeptness for using our brains for problem solving (like using rocks to crack open shellfish or using stucks to pry shells open) when they began to stray from the water they kept their afinity for tools. From there we see an increased use of tools as the homo genus spread around adapting to more and more areas leaving their monkey cousins behind. Over the years we lost our fur and developed more complex brains due to our increase use of tools. We first use of technology is what retarded some of our more primal characteristics such as claws. We didn't need technology to survive originally, we've just built our society around it and couldn't fathom not using tools to asist what we left behind on the shores of Africa.
at 6 AM when I'm leaving for San Jose in a few hours? What the article makes clear and something I've tried arguing for a while is that computer interfaces for the most part in the past decade have become horrible abominations. Grab the research papers about the eye movements and clicking habits of users of particular websites. People tend not to click things that have no text label denoting their function and tend to avoid colourful text as they've become accustomed to avoiding flashy advertisements. The same can be said of computer programs. The success of many man-made tools can be linked to their innate intuitiveness. If you know what a hammer is used for you can pretty easily guess the proper operation of it. If a hammer were designed with the same parameters and programs and websites it would end up being a metal rod that made the working end indistingushible from the controlling end. Computer interfaces for the most part are notoriously bad with a few exceptions such as the Mac style GUI (by which I mean labeled icons that are specifically not apart of the background desktop) which has been copied with varying degrees of success. Linux has just begun to move into the ease of use part of the interface game. A massive rethinking of how people ought to interact with computers needs to take place; it would be a good idea for the Linux guys who are still fresh out of the dugout to spearhead such a rethinking.
Go look at some of the more popular websites on the net (start with MSN and then move to Yahoo! or Google). With MSN you're left wondering where exactly to look and click in order to get where you want to go. On Yahoo! and Google you only really have funtional information. Now open up a terminal and stare at it for a second. There isn't alot to the CLI is there? In order to use the computer you need to know a laundry list of sometimes rather cryptic commands. Why not be able to just type "I want to go to Yahoo!" and a browser will fire up and go to Yahoo!'s site. How come X requires so many different mouse buttons (still) in order for you to use it properly. Why do keyboard commands and mouse clicks do different things in X and apps running inside a WM? I know the technical reasons for it, I'm pretty well versed in them actually. I want to know why the interface is still like that though. The whole reason we have personal computers is because they allow us to do a large variety of tasks with a simple imput of a software program. If they are REALLY personal and easy why is there a whole industry existing just to write books on how to use computers? I think a good place to look for interface inspiration is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The computer onboard the Enterprise responded like a personal assistant and performed functions with a plain English request. Even the manual controls on the glass control panels manipulated itself around so the user of the terminal was presented with all relavant information and changed when different data presented itself. We need to start work on that.
Dude, you're completely missing the point. None gives a flying fuck about customizing your workspace, whether it's XML, HTML, TCL or anything else. What is being said is that the Linux interfaces lack clear definition in what is and isn't a button, what is and isn't a picture, and what is and isn't something you're supposed to read. Look at the numbers regarding the design of major websites, users skip over colourful text and rarely click active images unless they have a text label saying what they are. An interface needs a business end and usability end which is something XML widget placement is irrelevant to.
It is a suprising fact that you possess the mental facilities to type yet don't possess the ability to think clearly. A good deal of the most sucessful and valuated companies in the world are service companies. You better hurry up and tell MediaOne and AOL that people aren't REALLY going to pay for service and they will be out of business when VC money runs out. Of course the Linux start-ups that do the same thing as everyone else with merely a different logo and shell command for printing will die quickly and painlessly. There are companies however that have been around or just starting that will make alot of money because they're going something different. Helix is one of those companies. Helix is just the front end for the services they plan to offer on a subscription basis as the article (if you read it, remember top to bottom and left to right). The biggest arena for Helix is in the Application Service business which is just now starting to pop up and turn into a viable industry. While HTML frontends work decently for ASPs for now, they will really become popular if they are transparent to the user.
One posibility is a photo editing ASP, you have your collection of pictures which you highlight and click the button to send them to an ASP that will perform certain filters and such on and then store them online so your grandparents can type in the URL and see Junior's first birthday party. Using a web based front end would work but if you could click a button on your desktop and have everything taken care of you'd be much more apt to use it. GNOME's design allows for this sort of networked object handling and can do a pretty good job of it. A small monthly service fee for a variety of performed services is a very successful business model, it has worked for AOL for years now making them billions of dollars.
I'm sick and tired of seeing AlphaLinux running only on Alpha chips, why can't those crazy busters get a clue and start porting their code to other chipsets? Theres lots of us out here that are dying to see AlphaLinux released for the x86 and PPC.
I hope people stop developing the Netwinder so no one has to worry about set-top user friendly computers anymore. The last thing we need isa departure from hastily built caseless POS Linux boxes. I don't know what i would do without my space heater often confused for a file server. While we're at killing off simplicty, why the fuck are you still using X, you don't need a GUI you pussy. Web-TV is stupid because it has a Microsoft logo, I hate it with a passion. It really gets your point across when you scold a computer neophyte because they like the Windows Start button and cute sounds when they click things. Kick a puppy while you're at it.
Just to add another voice to all those which have told you're full of jackpoo SuSE comes with a nice utility called YaST which stands for yet another setup tool. Has has several nice features such as system configuration and package handling. YaST which as of 6.4 comes in an X based GUI version (as opposed to ASCII GUI) which allows you to update your whole system from SuSE's ftp servers. I think YaST is a bit more useful than the Windows Update because it lets you control the package management better. The Windows Update won't run a conflict catcher like YaST does which sometimes causes problems with things. The only real important difference in my opinion is that Windows Update is web based because they have a browser that is tightly integrated with the OS which with monopoly argumentsaside is a good thing because it means less third party dependence.
The fact that you listed off more than one device connection ought to tell you all you need to know. USB stands for UNIVERSAL serial bus as in it works on any type of computer no matter which sort of processor or computer you have. If periphrial manufacturers can make a single product that works on multiple system architectures they have just entered several markets and saved themselves money.
Can you count? In order to make things a little more palitable for those who were not trained using SysV SuSE decided to go numerologically. 0 is halt, S for single user mode, 1 for multi-user no network, 2 for multi-user and network, 3 for multi-user with network and XDM starting at boot with 6 being reboot. 1, 2, and of course 3 for the main init modes people are going to be using. SysV wasn't designed for uninitiated users while SuSE's market is a gaggle of uninitiated users.
SGI's transposition to IA-32 has got to be one of the worst mistakes in the company's history. SGI Linux boxes are not worth the exorbant amount of money they cost consumers. You can get IA-32 workstations from almost anyone that support PCI 2.1 and UDMA standards. The NUMA system used in the MIPS based Origin boxes was something thats pretty limited to MIPS. Their Intel machines are no more powerful than anyone else's Intel machines, the only real difference is the price. Please stop bringing SGI into these sorts of conversations. Their adoption of Windows NT was a PR stunt as was their adoption of Linux. The only reason they ported Linux to their Origins was to give a little life into a product they're no longer working on improving. An Origin running Linux won't be any faster than it was running Irix but it will have a larger library of programs that will run on it with a minimum of tweaking. No one is really developing for Irix anymore and SGI knows that operating systems don't mean nearly as much as the actual applications do. They're now merely opening up and/or porting their software and such so whoever ends up buying them won't own some important pieces of software like Maya and OpenGL.
Uh, the binaries that come in packages such as RPM are most often compiled using GCC. This means that installing from either source or RPM gets you about the same quality of a compilation and performance. The part that makes RPMs undesirable at times is the variety of directory trees and configurations out and about. A package designed for RedHat might not work in SuSE, Caldera, or your home spun distro. Go hoot yourself.
Voxels in consumer products can actually prove to be useful. Treating things with actual mathematical volume and substance can add to the realism of 3D environments like water and the like, things act differently as they pass through such things where in Quake you just define different universe properties to a certain area. A boulder as a three dimensional construct could have better physical properties, large enough that Lara Croft's mass couldnt easily move it, said boulder could also be blown up without storing a 3D model for the smaller pieces of rock.
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Scripting is something I think all interfaces ought to expound with. I really wish that scripting was made a bit more up front than it is right now. Mac has some pretty good scripting because its 100% plain speech (as long as you know the right commands). Linux needs a plain-speech translator for not only scripting but normal typed commands. Fuck learning archaic and sometimes confusing commands (typing lpr foo.text is not an intuitive way to print anything). I want to type "print all documents in directory foo and then delete them" and have it do just that.
I find it disturbing that digerati think themselves so free from all things physical. The virtual world is powered by eletricity running through semiconductors and housed in buildings on rented real estate. The internet may be amorphous but I doubt it would stand up terribly well to a few well placed terrorist actions against fiber optic cables and satillite dishes. Some might say things are so well distributed that small outages are inconcequencial but you'd be hard pressed to handle all the high volume data of the world over phone lines and short range microwave networks. Trip a few wires from eletrical generators and entire sections of the country go dark. This is where the virtual ocean rolls onto the real beach. The cocky ones are body boarders who haven't yet felt what it's like to slam face first into the sand.
I've talked with people before and seen horrible results from outsourced products. Its great for manufacturing but not always good with something strangely artistic like coding. Everyone sees things a bit differently which can lead to alot of problems when it comes down to solving problems. Outsourcing can of course get you a finished result for a lower cost but you don't want to outsource to a bunch of programming houses in order to get something programmed faster. Too many cooks in the kitchen afterall.
1. Design your application to the most specific of details, outline everything you want done and how you'd like it done. Don't leave things up to a guess or some outside programming manager (not to insult anyone but to say that you want your application programmed how you want it programmed).
2. Make sure you keep in synch with the outside house you're working with, if you have changes (keep them few and far between) or additions make them as well documented as everything else and get those revisions to the outside people ASAP.
3. Demand excruciating documentation so if you ever need to work on the code in-house you won't be left into the dark as to how things are working or how things were done.
I feel a bit sorry for people skipping a good education for a high paying job that has no garauntee of being around in five years. Today you may be able to program in modern languages in just a few years they will all be old hat. You'll end up being one of the legacy programmers a company keeps around to maintain old programs that are written in older languages and only one in ten of you will actually have that job. Unless you've got other skills that will allow you another career you're fucked. If you've got a BS is computer science-not JUST programming mind you- you will be able to get another job after your web firm dies when it's venture capital runs out or you simply become obsolete as a programmer. If you program well enough to get a job, go to school as a business major and you'll land yourself a VP job making ten times as much money for less than a quarter of the grunt work. If four years of effort are too much for you to handle go to a trade school or a JC and work towards an Associate's degree or some certificate in a useful field. You may scoff at people in college now but you need to remember that the people who invented the shit you write code for went to college and many of the technologies came about because of colleges. You're riding on someone else's laurels, don't get cocky because you're going to be working for the people who actually diciplined themselves to get a degree.
You must be about 14 and have no real idea how things work. Only a true savant can skip over entirely the things you're "restrained" into taking. IIRC Every accredited University in the country is required to make you take English and higher levels of math. While you think computers are everything and anything, theres plenty more to the world than keyboards and command lines. If you have a degree in anything you can be considered pretty competent in the area of your degree. If you've got some sort of "personal" training you may or may not have the level of skills required for a job. Most CIS and business classes now are set up to provide you with advanced skills for your future job.
The OS running a computer does not mean shit in the real world. You may have religious devotion to a certain kernel and library base or just version of a certain kernel but in the real world where people need to do work, the OS means shit. The OS is for running the hardware, it is what takes your high level commands and smashes them down into something silicon circuits can understand. Porting OS X to x86 hardware would not be all too difficult. The problem lies in where the real work gets done, the applications. Linux could be the best OS ever but if a company or individual needs or wants a program not available on Linux, they won't regard it much if at all. This is what is rarely understood when I see this shit about OS X being ported to x86 or some other chipset. As it stands, OS X will be running on G3 and G4 processors and on standard configuration Macs. If a company wants to write a video editing suite or office suite, they know what hardware they'll have available and also know which special things they can add due to the G4's vector processor. How many programs do you see for Windows with SSE, MMX, or 3DNow! instructions embedded in them? Not a whole lot huh. With the Wintel PC market it is next to impossible to know what sort of configuration to expect so you throw out some lowest common denominators and hope for the best. No one would program anything for OS X on x86 hardware, there is just too much to chance and too many possible configurations available. OS X's port to x86 is also beset by problems with drivers. Just count how many times you've had trouble finding Linux or Windows drivers for a piece of hardware, times that by 20 and you can imagine how difficult said process would be to find OS X drivers. Stop bitching and expecting things to be ported to every piece of electronics ever invented, I'm not boycotting the fact that I can't run Palm OS on an ENIAC.
My Win 98 box is pretty stable and fairly quick on load times, especially IE5. Windows runs well if you know how to use it and don't expect it to do the impossible. Apple producing the hardware and OS is not bad business, the hardware is theirs afterall. Why isn't SGI chided for their old machines running IRIX which they produced or someone tell Sun they ought to stop packaging Solaris on their hardware or else you Linux fanatics will do something crazy.
SMP makes alot of sense in other areas too, if you've ever seen an Origin at work you know what I mean. I dont know what you are getting at by talking about realtime linking of core OS files. Do you want Windows or Linux to run on one processor with MacOS on the other? The problem lies in system bandwidth. Multiple processors provide more protessor time per second but don't usually provide faster data throughput. The limiting factor is the system bus, each processor is sharing the 100 or 133 mhz of bus clock. It would be entirely too unstable for two OS's to run without dedicated hardware for each (like the old Power Macs used to do with PC cards).
Why oh why is this such a big fucking deal? In 2001 the Itanium is going to be spit out of the giant Fabrige egg that is Intel why are you letting the stopgap measure known at the P4 cloud your vision? My old Katmai P3 500 works pretty damn well at most everything I use it for. The so-called P4 is nothing more than a testbed for die techniques and code morphing to be included into later generations of Intel chips. For you and I running Quake 3 we're not going to see terrible improvement in anything. We need to move past this 32-bit kludge we've been stuck in for the past decade. What awaits us is 64-bit gigahertz goodness. Fuck the P4, I want some soma.
All is well in the town of Hackerville when people only create nice and friendly server emulators. Emulators that let you or I or your Aunt to have a larger list of servers to connect to to play our ultra massively amazing multi-player online games. But this is a good use of reverse engineering in order to create alternatives to closed access server deamons. What happens after this though? Say you have a piece of software that updates itself over the net and uses a proprietary method of server-client communication. On the merely principal of the situation someone goes through the enormous effort to reverse engineer said protocol. Once the protocol is published the original creators have no edge of the competition which then incorporates it into their software or some jerkface uses said protocol to maliciously insert virii and bad sorts of things onto people's computers; through a service that is normally trustworthy. If a company gets thrashed due to server emulation is it still such a good thing?
You're thinking of colonization the wrong way. Instead of sending humans and animals to distant planets it would be a much better thing to send a genetic legacy to the far reaches of space. There have been those that have proposed that we are indeed the end result of inter galactic genetic seeding. Arthur Clark being one of those, in the Oddessy series the monoliths were evolutionary guidestones that would eventually get life on Earth to where it needed to be. Thats how you colonize a galaxy.
If you want to communicate to a vast audience you choose the most esoteric medium you possibly can because you can be pretty such that it grants you a large target audience. If you're sending a message to the universe saying "Here I am" you're going to send your message in a way everyone can understand. Take Contact by Carl Sagan, the Vegans sent a repeating signal of prime numbers on a radio frequency to get our attention. That is a good way to grab a listener's attention. A bas way would be to use some exotic form of communication that requires a fantastic mastery of a certain form of technology in order to even see. Actually very recently some astronomers took this idea to another level and have begun to search for lasers being used to communicate. Bright pulses in an easy to spot part of the spectrum (something that wont be confused as a stellar phenomenon). SETI's success will depend on patience, ingenuity and vigilance.
The only egotism here is yours fuckface. You're talking as if theres ten civilizations in the universe and they are all wildly different. A conservative run-through of the Drake equation numbers the total number of civilizations in the galaxy to millions. Thats more civilized cultures than have ever set foot upon this planet in known recorded human history. Many of the cultures here are dissimilar in only a small handful of ways to other ones. If we apply such a pattern to the theorized galactic civilzations, there are thousands upon thousands of cultures similar in many ways to us which means they're going to be using RF for long distance communication. And if you weren't a complete idiot the fact that the radio waves being listened to by SETI have been carefully chosen. Said frequencies are those that pass through the Earth's radio "window", those frequencies that pass through all the layers of atmosphere and actually hit the ground. A planet like ours supporting life civilized life forms like us would have a radio window just like ours. If we were sending a signal out to be seen by the rest of the universe we would send it in said radio window band. You should also be aware that the microwaves that cook your food are RF which stands for radio frequency. You also might want to be aware that it was Marconi and not Morse that did alot of the work in radio transmission.
A light year is several trillion miles in linear distance, the cloest star to Sol is Proxima Centauri which is about 4.2 light years. IIRC the cloest star to Sol with planets is 30 or so light years away. The Drake equation states theres millions of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone (or so). I support this but I also realize the immense size of our Galaxy and our Universe. We've been searching for ET life for a mere speck of time and have only been sending signals out long enough to extend to less than 100 light years. We're not the fucking first and not the fucking last, we're just so far from everyone else that it will take centuries to first make contact, by that time some of our orders from Amazon will be ariving so it will be a time of great rejoicing.
Evolution concepts are not flawed, especially if you've put more effort into studying them than switching on the Discovery channel. Evolution is a more complex process than just the fittest surviving. Biological organisms strive for homeostasis, the point where they function best at. If you run around and start burning up calories your body will sweat and dialate capilaries in order to shunt the heat produced by the extra expenditure of energy. This is merely a simple example of an organism adjusting it's internal processes to maintain homeostasis. When evironmental conditions around an organism change which cause it to adapt and stay in such a state that new set of biological criteria will be addended to the DNA of said organism and eventually get passed onto progeny. After a few generations the adaptation will become a staple part of that organisms characteristics. Darwin originally proposed that random mutation was the key to evolution but he did not fully grasps the sub-cellular chemistry of biological organisms. Humans are not misfits of any sort. The monkeys living on the coast of modern day Somalia started moving into the water for short stints to gather food and escape from predatores. Evidence of this can be seen in the slight webs of skin between our fingers and our downwardly sloped noses which facilitate surface swimming. Such factors led to us having oposable thumbs and a greater adeptness for using our brains for problem solving (like using rocks to crack open shellfish or using stucks to pry shells open) when they began to stray from the water they kept their afinity for tools. From there we see an increased use of tools as the homo genus spread around adapting to more and more areas leaving their monkey cousins behind. Over the years we lost our fur and developed more complex brains due to our increase use of tools. We first use of technology is what retarded some of our more primal characteristics such as claws. We didn't need technology to survive originally, we've just built our society around it and couldn't fathom not using tools to asist what we left behind on the shores of Africa.
at 6 AM when I'm leaving for San Jose in a few hours? What the article makes clear and something I've tried arguing for a while is that computer interfaces for the most part in the past decade have become horrible abominations. Grab the research papers about the eye movements and clicking habits of users of particular websites. People tend not to click things that have no text label denoting their function and tend to avoid colourful text as they've become accustomed to avoiding flashy advertisements. The same can be said of computer programs. The success of many man-made tools can be linked to their innate intuitiveness. If you know what a hammer is used for you can pretty easily guess the proper operation of it. If a hammer were designed with the same parameters and programs and websites it would end up being a metal rod that made the working end indistingushible from the controlling end. Computer interfaces for the most part are notoriously bad with a few exceptions such as the Mac style GUI (by which I mean labeled icons that are specifically not apart of the background desktop) which has been copied with varying degrees of success. Linux has just begun to move into the ease of use part of the interface game. A massive rethinking of how people ought to interact with computers needs to take place; it would be a good idea for the Linux guys who are still fresh out of the dugout to spearhead such a rethinking.
Go look at some of the more popular websites on the net (start with MSN and then move to Yahoo! or Google). With MSN you're left wondering where exactly to look and click in order to get where you want to go. On Yahoo! and Google you only really have funtional information. Now open up a terminal and stare at it for a second. There isn't alot to the CLI is there? In order to use the computer you need to know a laundry list of sometimes rather cryptic commands. Why not be able to just type "I want to go to Yahoo!" and a browser will fire up and go to Yahoo!'s site. How come X requires so many different mouse buttons (still) in order for you to use it properly. Why do keyboard commands and mouse clicks do different things in X and apps running inside a WM? I know the technical reasons for it, I'm pretty well versed in them actually. I want to know why the interface is still like that though. The whole reason we have personal computers is because they allow us to do a large variety of tasks with a simple imput of a software program. If they are REALLY personal and easy why is there a whole industry existing just to write books on how to use computers? I think a good place to look for interface inspiration is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The computer onboard the Enterprise responded like a personal assistant and performed functions with a plain English request. Even the manual controls on the glass control panels manipulated itself around so the user of the terminal was presented with all relavant information and changed when different data presented itself. We need to start work on that.
Dude, you're completely missing the point. None gives a flying fuck about customizing your workspace, whether it's XML, HTML, TCL or anything else. What is being said is that the Linux interfaces lack clear definition in what is and isn't a button, what is and isn't a picture, and what is and isn't something you're supposed to read. Look at the numbers regarding the design of major websites, users skip over colourful text and rarely click active images unless they have a text label saying what they are. An interface needs a business end and usability end which is something XML widget placement is irrelevant to.
It is a suprising fact that you possess the mental facilities to type yet don't possess the ability to think clearly. A good deal of the most sucessful and valuated companies in the world are service companies. You better hurry up and tell MediaOne and AOL that people aren't REALLY going to pay for service and they will be out of business when VC money runs out. Of course the Linux start-ups that do the same thing as everyone else with merely a different logo and shell command for printing will die quickly and painlessly. There are companies however that have been around or just starting that will make alot of money because they're going something different. Helix is one of those companies. Helix is just the front end for the services they plan to offer on a subscription basis as the article (if you read it, remember top to bottom and left to right). The biggest arena for Helix is in the Application Service business which is just now starting to pop up and turn into a viable industry. While HTML frontends work decently for ASPs for now, they will really become popular if they are transparent to the user.
One posibility is a photo editing ASP, you have your collection of pictures which you highlight and click the button to send them to an ASP that will perform certain filters and such on and then store them online so your grandparents can type in the URL and see Junior's first birthday party. Using a web based front end would work but if you could click a button on your desktop and have everything taken care of you'd be much more apt to use it. GNOME's design allows for this sort of networked object handling and can do a pretty good job of it. A small monthly service fee for a variety of performed services is a very successful business model, it has worked for AOL for years now making them billions of dollars.
I'm sick and tired of seeing AlphaLinux running only on Alpha chips, why can't those crazy busters get a clue and start porting their code to other chipsets? Theres lots of us out here that are dying to see AlphaLinux released for the x86 and PPC.
I hope people stop developing the Netwinder so no one has to worry about set-top user friendly computers anymore. The last thing we need isa departure from hastily built caseless POS Linux boxes. I don't know what i would do without my space heater often confused for a file server. While we're at killing off simplicty, why the fuck are you still using X, you don't need a GUI you pussy. Web-TV is stupid because it has a Microsoft logo, I hate it with a passion. It really gets your point across when you scold a computer neophyte because they like the Windows Start button and cute sounds when they click things. Kick a puppy while you're at it.
Just to add another voice to all those which have told you're full of jackpoo SuSE comes with a nice utility called YaST which stands for yet another setup tool. Has has several nice features such as system configuration and package handling. YaST which as of 6.4 comes in an X based GUI version (as opposed to ASCII GUI) which allows you to update your whole system from SuSE's ftp servers. I think YaST is a bit more useful than the Windows Update because it lets you control the package management better. The Windows Update won't run a conflict catcher like YaST does which sometimes causes problems with things. The only real important difference in my opinion is that Windows Update is web based because they have a browser that is tightly integrated with the OS which with monopoly argumentsaside is a good thing because it means less third party dependence.
The fact that you listed off more than one device connection ought to tell you all you need to know. USB stands for UNIVERSAL serial bus as in it works on any type of computer no matter which sort of processor or computer you have. If periphrial manufacturers can make a single product that works on multiple system architectures they have just entered several markets and saved themselves money.
Can you count? In order to make things a little more palitable for those who were not trained using SysV SuSE decided to go numerologically. 0 is halt, S for single user mode, 1 for multi-user no network, 2 for multi-user and network, 3 for multi-user with network and XDM starting at boot with 6 being reboot. 1, 2, and of course 3 for the main init modes people are going to be using. SysV wasn't designed for uninitiated users while SuSE's market is a gaggle of uninitiated users.
SGI's transposition to IA-32 has got to be one of the worst mistakes in the company's history. SGI Linux boxes are not worth the exorbant amount of money they cost consumers. You can get IA-32 workstations from almost anyone that support PCI 2.1 and UDMA standards. The NUMA system used in the MIPS based Origin boxes was something thats pretty limited to MIPS. Their Intel machines are no more powerful than anyone else's Intel machines, the only real difference is the price. Please stop bringing SGI into these sorts of conversations. Their adoption of Windows NT was a PR stunt as was their adoption of Linux. The only reason they ported Linux to their Origins was to give a little life into a product they're no longer working on improving. An Origin running Linux won't be any faster than it was running Irix but it will have a larger library of programs that will run on it with a minimum of tweaking. No one is really developing for Irix anymore and SGI knows that operating systems don't mean nearly as much as the actual applications do. They're now merely opening up and/or porting their software and such so whoever ends up buying them won't own some important pieces of software like Maya and OpenGL.
Uh, the binaries that come in packages such as RPM are most often compiled using GCC. This means that installing from either source or RPM gets you about the same quality of a compilation and performance. The part that makes RPMs undesirable at times is the variety of directory trees and configurations out and about. A package designed for RedHat might not work in SuSE, Caldera, or your home spun distro. Go hoot yourself.
Voxels in consumer products can actually prove to be useful. Treating things with actual mathematical volume and substance can add to the realism of 3D environments like water and the like, things act differently as they pass through such things where in Quake you just define different universe properties to a certain area. A boulder as a three dimensional construct could have better physical properties, large enough that Lara Croft's mass couldnt easily move it, said boulder could also be blown up without storing a 3D model for the smaller pieces of rock.