How is this feasible in terms of bandwidth and storage? AltaVista runs on dual OC-48s and some horrendously expensive Alpha cluster(?) or somesuch, and even though they're only categorizing pages (and not storing them), they claim to only have surveyed 30% of all sites.
What kind of technology in terms of storage media and bandwidth is needed for a company to actually mirror all available websites, even when we take robots.txt, password protected sites, and things like database-driven sites into consideration?
It sure seems like a lot of diskspace and bandwidth to me!
... users must be grinning gleefully right now. I kind of share the feeling, since my browser barely supports transitional HTML 4, let alone Javascript or anything fancier.
really bad misspellings, as is needed for anyone braindamaged enough to buy a Microsoft stuffed toy of Satan's assistant Barney?;) (We all know who Satan is, right?)
I think the point about game performance is very well taken. However, the opposite is also true. As far as I'm personally concerned, you don't need anything more than a K6-3 450 to do office tasks. Mail merges don't need a PIII-800 with PC-800 rdram and the i840 to run well.
Given the average hardware spec today, running office apps under WINE may be slower, but won't it still be more than fast enough for almost all normal tasks?
3D has the problem of a controller. First-person shooters are arguably the most successful widely-used implementations of realtime 3d, and just look at the controls to do the simplest things. Cut the crap out like weapon switching, but you'd still have to replace it with a heavy-duty inventory system (think cut and paste). The controls just aren't standardized enough for non FPS users to pick up quickly and easily. (although once you do...;)
Moreover, for the programmers who have seen the light, and now write programs that are almost completely portable without a peep, are locality-aware and UTF8 compliant, the idea of an actual GUI is outright rediculous.
The lowest-common-denominator is still an 80x25 screen, if your idea of computers goes beyond UNIX, Macs, and Windows. Even with only these platforms, writing a gui app that ports painlessly is well-nigh impossible, IMO. STDIN still means keyboard. STDOUT and STDERR still mean my screen. And unless you assume POSIX (UNIX), curses (also mostly UNIX?) or ANSI, you're not going to get much additional functionality beyond printing ascii text and linebreaks. Not even color. GUI? Mouse? Haha!
I don't see why newbies and experts have to use the same interface. They have different needs. A one-size-fits-all approach that would try to find a happy medium, as you sort of suggested with points about not crippling computers by binding them to bad metaphors or phhysical objects is certainly valid, but newbies understand the concept of nested folders a helluva lot better than a directory, as an example. People say 'telephone directory'. But now they don't even say that. They say 'phone book.' Directory? Gets blank looks from computer newbies.
Experts are different. They need to know everything at a lower level, because they like fidding with the controls. 'Letter to Aunt Helga' is no longer the objective. 'Getting my Q3DM13 timedemo with 16 nightmare bots at fastest to get better framerates under X damnit' is now the objective. Experts shouldn't be hobbled by newbie metaphors, I agree.
But I think that instead of a happy middle ground, there should simply be two diff UIs for programs. The 'advanced...' button already kind of does this. Some programs take it further (i.e. Getright for windows). And PLT Scheme from Rice is excellent for this kind of stuff. But none are OS based. The overall OS needs to have a 'dumb' mode, and a 'smart' mode.
That's what I like about Java: I have _no_ idea if this is a standard feature or just some JBuilder gimmick, but you can programming your app to either always look like CDE/Motif/"Metal", or just to conform to what the host OS looks like. That's what I like in terms of consistency.
Then, if you upload the music, they will be able to track down the source of the new digital copy of the music to you.
to a point. Ever been in #cracks or #serialz of EFnet? Seen a '?? get real' followed by h4x0r3d serialz and codes to get the newest realplayer from their own site? Ostensibly as a legit upgrade?
How's this different? Only more bogus names, possible a wee bit more credit card fraud. That's about it. I don't see many far-reach effects, really.
Mr. Asshole of the MPAA simply argued that DeCSS breaks CSS. The DMCA says breaking cryptography is illegal, whether you distribute the protected work or not. In fact, you would think that it was deliberately easy to crack so that you DID crack it simply to get you into a larger legal mess.
Uh huh. True to a point only, however. Sure, we have the DCMA, and other fun laws. You see groups like Razor1911, Phrozen Crew, Hybrid, etc. get carted off to jail? Mmmnope. They can't really just try to make an example of someone, because everyone knows that they don't have the resources to go after all the pirates. Not even close.
If DeCSS had been distributed anonymously, and people had just 'meekly' shut down their sites when the MPAA threatened, and then put up others, they still wouldn't be able to put up the fire. As long as Geocities, and FortuneCity, and AngelFire, and Tripod, and the myriad of other free hosting services (anonymous, no less) are around, they'll never get rid of us. Tough for them, eh?
Open source hardware design specs are also beginning (and some are fairly along, as well.) Let's see them try to take that out. It's like trying to take out Vorbis and PNG -- wouldn't work.
Not every person can deal with sexist attitudes that many women encounter in tech-related jobs, and so some women choose not to deal with it and persue other careers. While I think this is sad, I personally know two women who left the computer science field because of sexism and other social pressures they continually faced from their peers. It does happen.
That's true. But the opposite is also true: guys would love to see more girls/women in the technology-related fields, and would go pretty far to help them out. (Far from discriminating against women). I have a female friend at MIT in the Intro CS program, and essentially, when she walks into the lab(s), there's this mental 'OMG, it's a GIRL! YAY!' thing that all the guys go through. From what she's told me, at least, everyone (all guys, as it were) have been extremely helpful, etc.
I'm uncertain of the editorial powers of the Slashdot team, but note that the stuff in italics was submitted by a reader. The stuff that wasn't italicized seemed OK to me.
I think it just ends up being that Slashdot editors might have chosen a better submission (I'm sure more than 1 person submitted that article to/.) that was less 'misleading.'
But it's got nothing to do with the editors not reading the article. Timothy didn't write the submission. Karutt or somesuch did.
DirectX rul3z now, regardless of how shitty it used to be. [List-o-technical-reasons why DirectX/3D is better.]
OpenGL sux0res. Lotsa proprietary extensions and shit.
... ...
End summary.
What our good friend forgot to mention is that
a) Hungarian notation is, well, hellishly hard to understand, and that with this lovely notation, you don't need them funny characters above the numeric keys, or the languages Perl, INTERCAL, Brain**ck, or Malbolge to create write-only code.
b) DirectX/3D is under MS influence (control, as it were), and that MS doesn't have much of a rep for releasing documentation that accurately reflects the underlying API. Not to mention that NT (at least previously) had a problem of keeping updated in terms of DirectX, whereas it ran OpenGL just fine.
c) Or that while The Gamers(tm) run mostly Windows machines, that The Gamers(tm) make up a tiny fraction of the software market, especially in terms of revenue. Of the remaining population, not everyone runs Windows 9X/NT/2000/Whatever, and writing in OpenGL means that your apps can be ported to whatever platform has OGL support.
I don't see all the hoopla about DirectX. Maybe it's just me, but I've always valued things like ANSI C, ANSI C++, and Java, because of their portability. Sure, some languages may be better, or more elegant for certain things, but writing in languages that are standardized and portable gives you great flexibility, and allows 'laziness'.
Is the C family of languages the best for programming? Um... not by a long shot. At least that's IMHO. Do I use them? Yes.
Same goes for OpenGL. Is it necessarily the best in terms of features? Well, maybe not. Do I use it? Yes. Why? See the above reasons. 'nuff said.
I guess that since I do all my browsing through a Stanford proxy (mmm, vBNS), use Proximitron and no cookies, along with a browser that barely supports HTML 3, I really don't have a whole lot to worry about, eh?
Oh, I agree, reading docs is just awful. I really prefer tutorial-style learning of the interface and controls, as the game progresses. FF7 or FF8 come to mind as games that teach you as the game progresses.
I agree that print manuals are a necessary evil for some genres, however: it's really hard to fly a plane in USAF or somesuch without knowing a great deal of information. And the learning curve is required to be steep, I guess. Any less and you tend to make big craters.:-) (Or the game isn't a _real_ flightsim, by some people's standards.)
I don't get the impression that what's being talked about is 'protecting' the tech-savvie user from themselves; but rather protecting the typical user from their ignorance. There isn't a good reason to retain telnet for passworded account logins;
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems that free SSH clients are rare and far in between for the Mac OS? My school _does_ only allow access to some machines by ssh, but they also have a few alphas standing by with telnet as a proxy into those ssh machines for the Mac users who don't want to shell out the $$ to buy a commercial ssh package.
If we tout linux as desktop-ready before it can actually compete we run the risk of further entrenching the notion that our beloved OS is a toy for propellerheads and nothing more.
I beg to differ. It _is_ Linux ready. I'm a Windowshead who recently saw the light, and today got SuSE 6.4 in the mail. Sure, installation took a hellish 3 hours of copying files, but it was quite painless in terms of intellect needed overall.
Some dicking around with sax for X config, and some more fiddling with YaST2 (fiddling = total 10 min), and I'm multitasking in X listening to my favorite mp3s while reading instructions on installing JBuilder Pro and porting my Win32 perlscripts.
All this for someone who's never touched an X terminal before, and screamed at the thought of killing processes with -9 using PID. IMHO, Linux has gotten to be extremely easy to use. I can't see how to make it easier!
Slashdot Mirror
How is this feasible in terms of bandwidth and storage? AltaVista runs on dual OC-48s and some horrendously expensive Alpha cluster(?) or somesuch, and even though they're only categorizing pages (and not storing them), they claim to only have surveyed 30% of all sites.
What kind of technology in terms of storage media and bandwidth is needed for a company to actually mirror all available websites, even when we take robots.txt, password protected sites, and things like database-driven sites into consideration?
It sure seems like a lot of diskspace and bandwidth to me!
... users must be grinning gleefully right now. I kind of share the feeling, since my browser barely supports transitional HTML 4, let alone Javascript or anything fancier.
really bad misspellings, as is needed for anyone braindamaged enough to buy a Microsoft stuffed toy of Satan's assistant Barney? ;) (We all know who Satan is, right?)
I think the point about game performance is very well taken. However, the opposite is also true. As far as I'm personally concerned, you don't need anything more than a K6-3 450 to do office tasks. Mail merges don't need a PIII-800 with PC-800 rdram and the i840 to run well.
Given the average hardware spec today, running office apps under WINE may be slower, but won't it still be more than fast enough for almost all normal tasks?
And however good Wine is, it will never be as good as Win32 on Win32. That's just a fact.
Well, is this necessarily true, I wonder? Can't Linux's efficiency close the gap, and possibly even one day beat MS at their own game?
Nothing personal against Mr. Steed, but he is starting to sound disturbingly like Romero. Shrug.
Um, isn't this kind of like Sega's GD-ROMs for the dreamcast? Or is this extremely different, technologically?
13 feet stride? Um, my strides are about 4 feet in length. 13 feet stride is the kind of thing needed only by Dennis Rodman and such.
System Shock 2 has about the best 'utilitarian' GUI I can think of, and could probably be the most easily adapted to non-gaming needs.
3D has the problem of a controller. First-person shooters are arguably the most successful widely-used implementations of realtime 3d, and just look at the controls to do the simplest things. Cut the crap out like weapon switching, but you'd still have to replace it with a heavy-duty inventory system (think cut and paste). The controls just aren't standardized enough for non FPS users to pick up quickly and easily. (although once you do ... ;)
Moreover, for the programmers who have seen the light, and now write programs that are almost completely portable without a peep, are locality-aware and UTF8 compliant, the idea of an actual GUI is outright rediculous.
The lowest-common-denominator is still an 80x25 screen, if your idea of computers goes beyond UNIX, Macs, and Windows. Even with only these platforms, writing a gui app that ports painlessly is well-nigh impossible, IMO. STDIN still means keyboard. STDOUT and STDERR still mean my screen. And unless you assume POSIX (UNIX), curses (also mostly UNIX?) or ANSI, you're not going to get much additional functionality beyond printing ascii text and linebreaks. Not even color. GUI? Mouse? Haha!
I don't see why newbies and experts have to use the same interface. They have different needs. A one-size-fits-all approach that would try to find a happy medium, as you sort of suggested with points about not crippling computers by binding them to bad metaphors or phhysical objects is certainly valid, but newbies understand the concept of nested folders a helluva lot better than a directory, as an example. People say 'telephone directory'. But now they don't even say that. They say 'phone book.' Directory? Gets blank looks from computer newbies.
Experts are different. They need to know everything at a lower level, because they like fidding with the controls. 'Letter to Aunt Helga' is no longer the objective. 'Getting my Q3DM13 timedemo with 16 nightmare bots at fastest to get better framerates under X damnit' is now the objective. Experts shouldn't be hobbled by newbie metaphors, I agree.
But I think that instead of a happy middle ground, there should simply be two diff UIs for programs. The 'advanced...' button already kind of does this. Some programs take it further (i.e. Getright for windows). And PLT Scheme from Rice is excellent for this kind of stuff. But none are OS based. The overall OS needs to have a 'dumb' mode, and a 'smart' mode.
That's what I like about Java: I have _no_ idea if this is a standard feature or just some JBuilder gimmick, but you can programming your app to either always look like CDE/Motif/"Metal", or just to conform to what the host OS looks like. That's what I like in terms of consistency.
Then, if you upload the music, they will be able to track down the source of the new digital copy of the music to you.
to a point. Ever been in #cracks or #serialz of EFnet? Seen a '?? get real' followed by h4x0r3d serialz and codes to get the newest realplayer from their own site? Ostensibly as a legit upgrade?
How's this different? Only more bogus names, possible a wee bit more credit card fraud. That's about it. I don't see many far-reach effects, really.
Mr. Asshole of the MPAA simply argued that DeCSS breaks CSS. The DMCA says breaking cryptography is illegal, whether you distribute the protected work or not. In fact, you would think that it was deliberately easy to crack so that you DID crack it simply to get you into a larger legal mess.
Uh huh. True to a point only, however. Sure, we have the DCMA, and other fun laws. You see groups like Razor1911, Phrozen Crew, Hybrid, etc. get carted off to jail? Mmmnope. They can't really just try to make an example of someone, because everyone knows that they don't have the resources to go after all the pirates. Not even close.
If DeCSS had been distributed anonymously, and people had just 'meekly' shut down their sites when the MPAA threatened, and then put up others, they still wouldn't be able to put up the fire. As long as Geocities, and FortuneCity, and AngelFire, and Tripod, and the myriad of other free hosting services (anonymous, no less) are around, they'll never get rid of us. Tough for them, eh?
Open source hardware design specs are also beginning (and some are fairly along, as well.) Let's see them try to take that out. It's like trying to take out Vorbis and PNG -- wouldn't work.
Waiting for the ./ effect on Peer 2 Peer right now.
Not every person can deal with sexist attitudes that many women encounter in tech-related jobs, and so some women choose not to deal with it and persue other careers. While I think this is sad, I personally know two women who left the computer science field because of sexism and other social pressures they continually faced from their peers. It does happen.
That's true. But the opposite is also true: guys would love to see more girls/women in the technology-related fields, and would go pretty far to help them out. (Far from discriminating against women). I have a female friend at MIT in the Intro CS program, and essentially, when she walks into the lab(s), there's this mental 'OMG, it's a GIRL! YAY!' thing that all the guys go through. From what she's told me, at least, everyone (all guys, as it were) have been extremely helpful, etc.
I'm uncertain of the editorial powers of the Slashdot team, but note that the stuff in italics was submitted by a reader. The stuff that wasn't italicized seemed OK to me.
/.) that was less 'misleading.'
I think it just ends up being that Slashdot editors might have chosen a better submission (I'm sure more than 1 person submitted that article to
But it's got nothing to do with the editors not reading the article. Timothy didn't write the submission. Karutt or somesuch did.
Summary of the above:
...
...
... not by a long shot. At least that's IMHO. Do I use them? Yes.
DirectX rul3z now, regardless of how shitty it used to be. [List-o-technical-reasons why DirectX/3D is better.]
OpenGL sux0res. Lotsa proprietary extensions and shit.
End summary.
What our good friend forgot to mention is that
a) Hungarian notation is, well, hellishly hard to understand, and that with this lovely notation, you don't need them funny characters above the numeric keys, or the languages Perl, INTERCAL, Brain**ck, or Malbolge to create write-only code.
b) DirectX/3D is under MS influence (control, as it were), and that MS doesn't have much of a rep for releasing documentation that accurately reflects the underlying API. Not to mention that NT (at least previously) had a problem of keeping updated in terms of DirectX, whereas it ran OpenGL just fine.
c) Or that while The Gamers(tm) run mostly Windows machines, that The Gamers(tm) make up a tiny fraction of the software market, especially in terms of revenue. Of the remaining population, not everyone runs Windows 9X/NT/2000/Whatever, and writing in OpenGL means that your apps can be ported to whatever platform has OGL support.
I don't see all the hoopla about DirectX. Maybe it's just me, but I've always valued things like ANSI C, ANSI C++, and Java, because of their portability. Sure, some languages may be better, or more elegant for certain things, but writing in languages that are standardized and portable gives you great flexibility, and allows 'laziness'.
Is the C family of languages the best for programming? Um
Same goes for OpenGL. Is it necessarily the best in terms of features? Well, maybe not. Do I use it? Yes. Why? See the above reasons. 'nuff said.
Such a program already exists. Try doing your research first.
@guard (or Atguard, as it were).
No, it's not free (either definition). And it's for Windows. Oh well.
Any decent pirate should be able to find a copy.
I guess that since I do all my browsing through a Stanford proxy (mmm, vBNS), use Proximitron and no cookies, along with a browser that barely supports HTML 3, I really don't have a whole lot to worry about, eh?
Oh, I agree, reading docs is just awful. I really prefer tutorial-style learning of the interface and controls, as the game progresses. FF7 or FF8 come to mind as games that teach you as the game progresses.
:-) (Or the game isn't a _real_ flightsim, by some people's standards.)
I agree that print manuals are a necessary evil for some genres, however: it's really hard to fly a plane in USAF or somesuch without knowing a great deal of information. And the learning curve is required to be steep, I guess. Any less and you tend to make big craters.
I don't get the impression that what's being talked about is 'protecting' the tech-savvie user from themselves; but rather protecting the typical user from their ignorance. There isn't a good reason to retain telnet for passworded account logins;
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems that free SSH clients are rare and far in between for the Mac OS? My school _does_ only allow access to some machines by ssh, but they also have a few alphas standing by with telnet as a proxy into those ssh machines for the Mac users who don't want to shell out the $$ to buy a commercial ssh package.
If we tout linux as desktop-ready before it can actually compete we run the risk of further entrenching the notion that our beloved OS is a toy for propellerheads and nothing more.
I beg to differ. It _is_ Linux ready. I'm a Windowshead who recently saw the light, and today got SuSE 6.4 in the mail. Sure, installation took a hellish 3 hours of copying files, but it was quite painless in terms of intellect needed overall.
Some dicking around with sax for X config, and some more fiddling with YaST2 (fiddling = total 10 min), and I'm multitasking in X listening to my favorite mp3s while reading instructions on installing JBuilder Pro and porting my Win32 perlscripts.
All this for someone who's never touched an X terminal before, and screamed at the thought of killing processes with -9 using PID. IMHO, Linux has gotten to be extremely easy to use. I can't see how to make it easier!