sorry to reply to my own post, but it just occured to me to ask if someone knows whether these are the groups that crack Windows/Office/etc?. (now there's software I'll just buy, because even though it's crap I know for sure I need it).
You're actually quite right. I've downloaded warez quite often (with so much crap going about, according to my own dubious morals it's perfectly ok to check out "extended" demos before buying software)and the names on the list mean squat to me. These are not the people who have ripped any game, graphic app or audio app I've ever seen, and as for movies and mp3's, a lot of those are ripped by ordinary home users who rent or buy cd's and dvd's, encode them for their own personal use and then share them. So what makes these groups special, I don't know. Maybe they were just easy to bust...
Actually, no. Serifs were added to fonts because it made the ends of the raised characters on the wooden (later: lead) blocks they used to transfer them to paper less prone to breaking. You'll find, therefore, that sans serif fonts started to be used widely (i.e. for large chunks of text, not just decorative headlines and such) only when offset printing became common (1960's or so, I believe).
It just so happens that serifs make a font easier to read as well, but that's a lucky coincidence (and it actually wasn't true for a long while, as you can attest to if you've ever seen facsimiles of poorly set 17th century texts, where the serifs add clutter rather than facilitate reading).
No problem for most E-mail programs or browsers, since they'll just prompt to save the.EXE file to disk. Not so with IE or OE -- the message/page was hacked up to give the.EXE file an audio/x-wav MIME type, so it got executed right away instead.
Actually, if you use plain ol' media player and leave the settings untouched, such a file will be opened in media player without it getting saved to disk or executed. You won't actually *hear* anything, though...
One of the biggest problems I've faced is that fact that while many users now have anti-virus programs, they are not configured properly.
Of course, if you know what you're doing, even if you run Windows, you don't *need* an AV-program except for scanning things you download off the internet (just to give you that nice, warm, fuzzy "safe" feeling - I've never had such a scan turn up anything.
It's been years for me as well, but I'm absolutely positive I made it work way back when. IIRC you *did* have to do sth special, maybe install a beefed up version of MS DOS and tweak some sys-files or something, I don't remember exactly.
Today's Windows NT/XP isn't all that different from what people already had in the 1970's and 1980's.
The GUI works. It can do cd-quality audio (play it *and* produce it). It lets you play movies. It lets you *edit* (admittedly crappy) movies. 3D-rendered games (remember when you needed a huge USD millions supercomputer to do any 3D graphics at all during the 70's? Get POVray and you can render fairly complex scenes on a standard desktop pc in less time than it took to render a silly teapot back in 1974.
I'm not saying Windows is the best piece of software ever, but I'd much rather use Windows than some clunky 70's OS.
Thanks to Windows and Microsoft's aggressive marketing, everyone and their mom now uses computers for things that were strictly reserved to academia only ten years ago.
Disclaimer: no I don't work for Microsoft and yes, I think the "settlement" is ridiculous: they should've done to MS what they did to IBM, i.e. force them to play nice or else...
Personally, I'd hardly consider Kazaa/FastTrack to be distributed. There's central servers alright, they're called supernodes and they basically do the same thing as Napster's servers: they make the network run more smoothly en efficiently, something no TRUE p2p-network, such as GnuTella, can accomplish. If you're on dialup, you won't be a supernode, but if you're sitting on a nice, fat.edu pipe, chances are you'll be the local server for people in your general area. To date, openFT hasn't implemented this element of what makes Kazaa slightly more usable than GnuTella.
What's more important, Kazaa (and Musiccity/Morpheus etc) run servers themselves to ensure an even greater efficiency. Take them out of the equation and I'll guarantee you Kazaa or any open implementation of the FastTrack protocol will start to suck pretty near as much as GNUtella does (though if it's the only alternative, I'll take it, until some company is foolish enough to set up a new protocol with dedicated servers again). Face it, distributed networking will never be as efficient and sexy as using big, fat central servers. There's just too much overhead involved.
The RIAA (well, in this case their Dutch counterparts BUMA/STEMRA, actually) are fighting a losing battle, as they probably know very well. At least, they should know this from looking at recent events surrounding napster.
First, there's a thing called GNUtella. Doesn't work very well, but it works, but, well, it doesn't work very well. Then, for a while (how long did Napster actually last? A few months or so?) something comes along that does the same as GNUtella, but it's much easier to use. So everyone switches over, because, well, freedom and decentralization are nice ideas and all, but ease of use is nice too. For a few months, everyone uses the ultra friendly Napster thing 'till the RIAA takes note and sues Napster. Exit Napster. Tons of internet (l)users have, however, by now learnt of the joys of P2P filesharing, so they go to GNUtella, which may suck, but it's still better than nothing.
Along comes FastTrack (KaZaa/Morpheus/Grokster). It's really easy to use, so everyone and their mom installs it. For a few months, users are happy. Then the RIAA takes note, orders FastTrack shutdown... you can finish the rest.
This will keep happening until the RIAA finally gives up. Since that's rather unlikely, the cycle "sucky Gnutella -> nice GUI app -> nice GUI app shut down -> sucky Gnutella" will continue forever.
You're right, I should have taken a closer look before opening my big mouth. I'll still wager, however, that breaking rightclicks by default is rather iffy.
Oh well, I just downloaded the thing, ran it for two minutes to see what it did and then chucked it out. I don't like transparent Word-documents that much, really.
the linked JPEG seems to show all windows the same
It does allow you to give each window a different transparency. Whatever good that does...
It does have the annoying tendency to break rightclicks though, if it's running and you rightclick (normal Windows behavior, I'd say), the program's shortcut menu pops up instead of the menu you'd expect.
Also, clicking on the icon it puts in the taskbar yields a shortcut menu that's hidden from sight (at least in Windows XP): only the top edge of the menu appears, the rest hides somewhere below your actual screen area. But then this kind of thing tends to happen a lot in the New! Improved! Windows, so maybe it's not their fault
Oh well, it's a cute little app, nothing more, so who cares...
1. As Palm aren't in the x86 market there's a chance they may see open source BeOs to be a way to get developers without infringing on their core business.
No there isn't. As has been pointed out many, many times before, there's way too much licenced code in BeOS for anyone to open source it. It just isn't going to happen.
2. PalmOS doesn't scale. It's applications are wonderful and it looks good when compared to CE but lets not kid ourselves about the CPU it's tied to - it's a dog. BeOS is a good replacement.
Again, no. If you've ever seen/used BeOS, you'd know that it was a *desktop* OS. Slim and lightweight, to be sure, but still: a desktop OS and hence not at all suitable for PDA's. For one, there's a shitload of heavily optimised media (sound + video) stuff in it that would be totally useless on a PDA.
If Palm is interested keeping in anything Be has to offer besides the developers, who are, I guess, pretty good, it's the BeIA thingy coupled with BeOS as a desktop developer environment.
The point you seem to be missing is that computer games are (or aren't) art as completed products, on which programmers, designers and what have you collaborated to achieve a final result. Sure, there may be some clever programming or some cute backdrops, but these elements alone do not make a worthwile game. Compare it to a movie, which depends on actors, directors, set designers, camera people, what have you, working together to create a finished product that, I believe, we've accepted by now to be, possibly, "a work of art". The programming alone isn't "art", just like skillful lighting of a set alone isn't. It's the craftsmanship and skill required to get a finished product out in the first place, just as renaissance painters needed to be skilled at mixing dyes (or find someone to do it for them).
Using a PC for audio because you already had it is a fine excuse for kids or hobbyists, but not for professionals.
It would seem that the line between "kids and hobbyists" and "professionals" is getting blurrier by the minute.
Personally, I'd much rather hear "kids or hobbyists" music, if we take "kids or hobbyists" to mean Four Tet ("There's nothing, no mixing desk, no effects. Only my computer and my hi-fi. ") or Bogdan Raczynski (who offers, or used to, anyways, tracks in Impulse Tracker (!) format on his website) than "professional music", which, for the most part, is major label schlock such as Britney Spears. To shove PC users automatically into the "kids or hobbyists" camp is ridiculous, and proves that you don't have the slightest clue about what is really going on in music these days.
Now days, if you let your cat or dog run free he/she is liable to bring you a present that could cost you your life.
I'd say your overstating your case here.What you're forgetting to add is that even though your dog or your cat *may* bring you a nasty little surprise, this nasty little surprise isn't anywhere near as lethal today as it was back in the 1300's.
At least, not for well-nourished, healthy "westerners" - IIRC, in the Indian subcontinent Plague epidemics break out every now and then, killing a fair number of people, but those deaths are probably caused more by the fact that the people hit have no stamina whatsoever due to the fact that they're malnourished. The same is true for other "deadly tropical diseases": Dengue fever, Malaria (the ordinary type, not the Malaria Tropica variety, which will kill just about anyone) and Cholera, to name but a few, won't kill a healthy adult, but in third world countries (to be more exact, in third world slums) these diseases, as well as the plague, *do* kill. In the 1300s, most of Europe was comparable to a present-day Calcuttan slum (if not worse), hence the black death took a lot of victims. Today, if you've got access to fair to good medical care, if you haven't been malnourished since (before) birth, contracting the plague will mean that you go see a doctor who gives you an antibiotic of some sort, you'll be feeling really miserable for a few days, and then you're cured.
But yeah, you're right, occasionally dogs and cats do spread the plague bacterium.
The weird thing is they're reporting a decline in the number of infected servers... I don't know about you, but I've found there's actually an *increase* in the number of infected servers that try to get at my computer during the past week or so.
BTW, did you notice the rather large proportion of Linux pc's (not servers) hooked up to the web? Sure, it's not as much as Windows, but still quite a lot... what's up with that?
Re:Training and Planning are the keys.
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
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· Score: 2
KDE is great. It is ready for the desktop. Get your training department's shit together and teach users how to use linux.
You're forgetting the small matter of KDE not supporting MS Office
Personally, I thought the review was fair from a day-to-day non-computer-savvy-user's point of view. And since this type of user most probably is the intended end-user of a product such as KOffice, the developers should probably take ZDNet's little nitpicks to heart and make their program a better one.
A case in point:
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro
Maybe this is one piece of criticism KOffice-programmers might want to take to heart. The difference between Excel being case-insensitive and KSpread being case-sensitive is one example of how people programming for a commercial entity take a slightly bigger interest in the needs of ordinary, non-savvy users than Open Source developers. It's a minor point, to be sure, but how often have you heard the myth flaunted that "the computer crashed because I got one comma misplaced"? KOffice, for now, exhibits some of this behavior, while MSOffice, for the most part (day to day tasks) does not. This is not surprising, as M$ probably spends a large amount of time and money on testing on "ordinary users", whereas the KOffice people don't (can't afford to), so I'm not blaming the latter, but rather, urging them to do something with fair bits of consumer feedback like this.
Hannan Ashrawi (sp???), former Palestinian spokeswoman back when it seemed the peace talks were going somewhere, but since not seen as often in public anymore because she disagrees with the way Arafat is running the Palestinian Authority, just spoke on CNN about the "Palestinians dancing in the street" footage we've all seen.
She claimed the people shown celebrating and dancing are a *very* small minority group and do not in any way represent Palestinians as a whole. Moreover, though small groups of people may have been celebrating when they heard America was hit, celebrations soon subsided when it became clear that possibly thousands had been killed. The general attitude in the West Bank and Gaza is one of horror, disgust and sympathy with American victims.
Bear in mind that Ashrawi (I really should've looked this up, sorry) is one of the most moderate Palestinians around and that she's also one of very few Palestinians with some authority who's got any idea about pr Western style (as in, she knows it's not a good idea to scream "I will sacrifice *all* of my sons for Allah to make Israel suffer the way we suffer" when a suicide bomber's just blown up a kiddie disco in Tel Aviv - it doesn't do the Palestinian cause any good in the Western eye) so she's bound to say something like this.
However, if you think about it, she may, partly, be right. I myself have only seen that footage with the guy handing out free food to passersby (you know which footage I mean). Consider that in the 22 hrs since it happened, there hasn't been any new footage of Palestinians dancing in the street. It's always the same clip. If this celebration was going on on any substantial scale, I should think we would've seen more footage of it.
Disclaimer: I'm not Palestinian, nor am I Israeli, nor am I sympathetic to either cause (in the sense that I don't believe either people should be destroyed to give the other Lebensraum)
To say that it is unfair to defend a belief system is to say that there is no point in having beliefs. If you owned a piece of land and someone was forcefully threatening to take that land away you would do everything in your means to keep that land. Even if it means a call to arms.
But this isn't about defending beliefs, the WTC and the Pentagon weren't bombed because the terrorists who did it are opposed to democracy or capitalism... the reason the US has been targeted is that it is (perceived to be) supportive of Israel/not doing enough to solve the Middle East crisis. Through some twists of logic "American government doesn't tell Israel to stop gunning down our kids" (which they do to Palestinian kids - not that they don't have a reason to do so, I suppose) becomes "all Americans are evil - let's destroy them".
You can't seriously claim that "lackadaisical treatment of the Middle East problem" is a belief which it is your right to defend...
Of course I'm not saying flying an airplane into a building is a good thing to do, and I do think the US would be justified in retaliating for this attack, but I hope today's attack also serves as a wake up call to the Bush gov't to perform a more active role in finding a solution for the Middle East problem.
Yes, I do think this bombing has something to do with the Middle East - only a religious fanatic who's into suicide bombing would be disrespectful enough of human life to wilfully murder 266 airplane passengers *and* thousands of WTC-dwellers. You could argue that Timothey McVeigh killed a fair number of people as well, but he was acting on his own, This attack was coordinated in such a way that it suggests a well organized group being responsible for it. The only well-organized groups who are capable of such an attack *and* who have such disrespect human life are fundamentalists.
Well, in order to actually beat Japan soundly, win the war, and stop the Pacific bickering over land issues, it was estimated it would take over 200,000 US soldiers (mostly under the age of 25) to take Japan by conventional methods. Dropping two nukes (it would have only been one if their leader hadn't been so stubborn) was more humane.
Not quite... you're more or less right about the *first* bomb. That was dropped to give the Japanese that last push towards surrendering. The *second* bomb, however, wasn't necessary - the Japanese had seen what damage one lousy American bomb was capable of, and were about to surrender. The reason the americans decided to drop it anyway was because this bomb was using a different technique, and they wanted to see what this technique was capable of. Talk about cynical...
A) Cheap alternative for desktop users -- users say "they wished they had something better without having to pay big big bucks." Win2k is, what, perhaps $200. PetrOS will have to sell for $50 or less, then.
And it'll be obsolete the moment MS changes an API. Or the moment MS makes MSIE crash when it detects PetrOS.
is what you'll most likely do should you come accross the only piece of equipment in existence today that actually uses this technology: the force feedback mouse. If you haven't tried it: it vibrates if you place the mousepointer on something that can be clicked. If you run into the edge of a window, it, well, also vibrates.
hardly the most exciting "user experience".
somehow, I don't see them get from "vibrate" to "within 10 years, shoppers will be able to "feel" a piece of silk or other fabric simply by rubbing their finger over a computer screen" (article). if we're supposed to be able to mimic "the feel of silk" in ten years, right now we should've been able to "feel the shape of a woman's tits", i should think. and i'm pretty sure the porn industry would've picked up on this if it were possible.
i wouldn't expect this technology to come into existence within the next ten years if i were you. nor twenty or thirty.
Slashdot Mirror
sorry to reply to my own post, but it just occured to me to ask if someone knows whether these are the groups that crack Windows/Office/etc?. (now there's software I'll just buy, because even though it's crap I know for sure I need it).
You're actually quite right. I've downloaded warez quite often (with so much crap going about, according to my own dubious morals it's perfectly ok to check out "extended" demos before buying software)and the names on the list mean squat to me. These are not the people who have ripped any game, graphic app or audio app I've ever seen, and as for movies and mp3's, a lot of those are ripped by ordinary home users who rent or buy cd's and dvd's, encode them for their own personal use and then share them. So what makes these groups special, I don't know. Maybe they were just easy to bust...
Actually, no. Serifs were added to fonts because it made the ends of the raised characters on the wooden (later: lead) blocks they used to transfer them to paper less prone to breaking. You'll find, therefore, that sans serif fonts started to be used widely (i.e. for large chunks of text, not just decorative headlines and such) only when offset printing became common (1960's or so, I believe).
It just so happens that serifs make a font easier to read as well, but that's a lucky coincidence (and it actually wasn't true for a long while, as you can attest to if you've ever seen facsimiles of poorly set 17th century texts, where the serifs add clutter rather than facilitate reading).
No problem for most E-mail programs or browsers, since they'll just prompt to save the .EXE file to disk. Not so with IE or OE -- the message/page was hacked up to give the .EXE file an audio/x-wav MIME type, so it got executed right away instead.
...
Actually, if you use plain ol' media player and leave the settings untouched, such a file will be opened in media player without it getting saved to disk or executed. You won't actually *hear* anything, though
One of the biggest problems I've faced is that fact that while many users now have anti-virus programs, they are not configured properly.
Of course, if you know what you're doing, even if you run Windows, you don't *need* an AV-program except for scanning things you download off the internet (just to give you that nice, warm, fuzzy "safe" feeling - I've never had such a scan turn up anything.
It's been years for me as well, but I'm absolutely positive I made it work way back when. IIRC you *did* have to do sth special, maybe install a beefed up version of MS DOS and tweak some sys-files or something, I don't remember exactly.
Ok, I'll feed the troll...
...
Today's Windows NT/XP isn't all that different from what people already had in the 1970's and 1980's.
The GUI works. It can do cd-quality audio (play it *and* produce it). It lets you play movies. It lets you *edit* (admittedly crappy) movies. 3D-rendered games (remember when you needed a huge USD millions supercomputer to do any 3D graphics at all during the 70's? Get POVray and you can render fairly complex scenes on a standard desktop pc in less time than it took to render a silly teapot back in 1974.
I'm not saying Windows is the best piece of software ever, but I'd much rather use Windows than some clunky 70's OS.
Thanks to Windows and Microsoft's aggressive marketing, everyone and their mom now uses computers for things that were strictly reserved to academia only ten years ago.
Disclaimer: no I don't work for Microsoft and yes, I think the "settlement" is ridiculous: they should've done to MS what they did to IBM, i.e. force them to play nice or else
Since when is Win 3.11 80386 required? I've seen tons of 286-es that run Win 3.11 just fine, Word v.Old as well.
Personally, I'd hardly consider Kazaa/FastTrack to be distributed. There's central servers alright, they're called supernodes and they basically do the same thing as Napster's servers: they make the network run more smoothly en efficiently, something no TRUE p2p-network, such as GnuTella, can accomplish. If you're on dialup, you won't be a supernode, but if you're sitting on a nice, fat .edu pipe, chances are you'll be the local server for people in your general area. To date, openFT hasn't implemented this element of what makes Kazaa slightly more usable than GnuTella.
What's more important, Kazaa (and Musiccity/Morpheus etc) run servers themselves to ensure an even greater efficiency. Take them out of the equation and I'll guarantee you Kazaa or any open implementation of the FastTrack protocol will start to suck pretty near as much as GNUtella does (though if it's the only alternative, I'll take it, until some company is foolish enough to set up a new protocol with dedicated servers again). Face it, distributed networking will never be as efficient and sexy as using big, fat central servers. There's just too much overhead involved.
... really.
... you can finish the rest.
The RIAA (well, in this case their Dutch counterparts BUMA/STEMRA, actually) are fighting a losing battle, as they probably know very well. At least, they should know this from looking at recent events surrounding napster.
First, there's a thing called GNUtella. Doesn't work very well, but it works, but, well, it doesn't work very well. Then, for a while (how long did Napster actually last? A few months or so?) something comes along that does the same as GNUtella, but it's much easier to use. So everyone switches over, because, well, freedom and decentralization are nice ideas and all, but ease of use is nice too. For a few months, everyone uses the ultra friendly Napster thing 'till the RIAA takes note and sues Napster. Exit Napster. Tons of internet (l)users have, however, by now learnt of the joys of P2P filesharing, so they go to GNUtella, which may suck, but it's still better than nothing.
Along comes FastTrack (KaZaa/Morpheus/Grokster). It's really easy to use, so everyone and their mom installs it. For a few months, users are happy. Then the RIAA takes note, orders FastTrack shutdown
This will keep happening until the RIAA finally gives up. Since that's rather unlikely, the cycle "sucky Gnutella -> nice GUI app -> nice GUI app shut down -> sucky Gnutella" will continue forever.
You're right, I should have taken a closer look before opening my big mouth. I'll still wager, however, that breaking rightclicks by default is rather iffy.
Oh well, I just downloaded the thing, ran it for two minutes to see what it did and then chucked it out. I don't like transparent Word-documents that much, really.
the linked JPEG seems to show all windows the same
...
...
It does allow you to give each window a different transparency. Whatever good that does
It does have the annoying tendency to break rightclicks though, if it's running and you rightclick (normal Windows behavior, I'd say), the program's shortcut menu pops up instead of the menu you'd expect.
Also, clicking on the icon it puts in the taskbar yields a shortcut menu that's hidden from sight (at least in Windows XP): only the top edge of the menu appears, the rest hides somewhere below your actual screen area. But then this kind of thing tends to happen a lot in the New! Improved! Windows, so maybe it's not their fault
Oh well, it's a cute little app, nothing more, so who cares
1. As Palm aren't in the x86 market there's a chance they may see open source BeOs to be a way to get developers without infringing on their core business.
No there isn't. As has been pointed out many, many times before, there's way too much licenced code in BeOS for anyone to open source it. It just isn't going to happen.
2. PalmOS doesn't scale. It's applications are wonderful and it looks good when compared to CE but lets not kid ourselves about the CPU it's tied to - it's a dog. BeOS is a good replacement.
Again, no. If you've ever seen/used BeOS, you'd know that it was a *desktop* OS. Slim and lightweight, to be sure, but still: a desktop OS and hence not at all suitable for PDA's. For one, there's a shitload of heavily optimised media (sound + video) stuff in it that would be totally useless on a PDA.
If Palm is interested keeping in anything Be has to offer besides the developers, who are, I guess, pretty good, it's the BeIA thingy coupled with BeOS as a desktop developer environment.
The point you seem to be missing is that computer games are (or aren't) art as completed products, on which programmers, designers and what have you collaborated to achieve a final result. Sure, there may be some clever programming or some cute backdrops, but these elements alone do not make a worthwile game. Compare it to a movie, which depends on actors, directors, set designers, camera people, what have you, working together to create a finished product that, I believe, we've accepted by now to be, possibly, "a work of art". The programming alone isn't "art", just like skillful lighting of a set alone isn't. It's the craftsmanship and skill required to get a finished product out in the first place, just as renaissance painters needed to be skilled at mixing dyes (or find someone to do it for them).
Using a PC for audio because you already had it is a fine excuse for kids or hobbyists, but not for professionals.
It would seem that the line between "kids and hobbyists" and "professionals" is getting blurrier by the minute.
Personally, I'd much rather hear "kids or hobbyists" music, if we take "kids or hobbyists" to mean Four Tet ("There's nothing, no mixing desk, no effects. Only my computer and my hi-fi. ") or Bogdan Raczynski (who offers, or used to, anyways, tracks in Impulse Tracker (!) format on his website) than "professional music", which, for the most part, is major label schlock such as Britney Spears. To shove PC users automatically into the "kids or hobbyists" camp is ridiculous, and proves that you don't have the slightest clue about what is really going on in music these days.
Now days, if you let your cat or dog run free he/she is liable to bring you a present that could cost you your life.
I'd say your overstating your case here.What you're forgetting to add is that even though your dog or your cat *may* bring you a nasty little surprise, this nasty little surprise isn't anywhere near as lethal today as it was back in the 1300's.
At least, not for well-nourished, healthy "westerners" - IIRC, in the Indian subcontinent Plague epidemics break out every now and then, killing a fair number of people, but those deaths are probably caused more by the fact that the people hit have no stamina whatsoever due to the fact that they're malnourished. The same is true for other "deadly tropical diseases": Dengue fever, Malaria (the ordinary type, not the Malaria Tropica variety, which will kill just about anyone) and Cholera, to name but a few, won't kill a healthy adult, but in third world countries (to be more exact, in third world slums) these diseases, as well as the plague, *do* kill. In the 1300s, most of Europe was comparable to a present-day Calcuttan slum (if not worse), hence the black death took a lot of victims. Today, if you've got access to fair to good medical care, if you haven't been malnourished since (before) birth, contracting the plague will mean that you go see a doctor who gives you an antibiotic of some sort, you'll be feeling really miserable for a few days, and then you're cured.
But yeah, you're right, occasionally dogs and cats do spread the plague bacterium.
Get drivers. Format C:. Reinstall from scratch. Install Office 97. Done.
But then you knew that, right?
The weird thing is they're reporting a decline in the number of infected servers ... I don't know about you, but I've found there's actually an *increase* in the number of infected servers that try to get at my computer during the past week or so.
... what's up with that?
BTW, did you notice the rather large proportion of Linux pc's (not servers) hooked up to the web? Sure, it's not as much as Windows, but still quite a lot
KDE is great. It is ready for the desktop. Get your training department's shit together and teach users how to use linux.
You're forgetting the small matter of KDE not supporting MS Office
Personally, I thought the review was fair from a day-to-day non-computer-savvy-user's point of view. And since this type of user most probably is the intended end-user of a product such as KOffice, the developers should probably take ZDNet's little nitpicks to heart and make their program a better one.
A case in point:
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro
Maybe this is one piece of criticism KOffice-programmers might want to take to heart. The difference between Excel being case-insensitive and KSpread being case-sensitive is one example of how people programming for a commercial entity take a slightly bigger interest in the needs of ordinary, non-savvy users than Open Source developers. It's a minor point, to be sure, but how often have you heard the myth flaunted that "the computer crashed because I got one comma misplaced"? KOffice, for now, exhibits some of this behavior, while MSOffice, for the most part (day to day tasks) does not. This is not surprising, as M$ probably spends a large amount of time and money on testing on "ordinary users", whereas the KOffice people don't (can't afford to), so I'm not blaming the latter, but rather, urging them to do something with fair bits of consumer feedback like this.
Hannan Ashrawi (sp???), former Palestinian spokeswoman back when it seemed the peace talks were going somewhere, but since not seen as often in public anymore because she disagrees with the way Arafat is running the Palestinian Authority, just spoke on CNN about the "Palestinians dancing in the street" footage we've all seen.
She claimed the people shown celebrating and dancing are a *very* small minority group and do not in any way represent Palestinians as a whole. Moreover, though small groups of people may have been celebrating when they heard America was hit, celebrations soon subsided when it became clear that possibly thousands had been killed. The general attitude in the West Bank and Gaza is one of horror, disgust and sympathy with American victims.
Bear in mind that Ashrawi (I really should've looked this up, sorry) is one of the most moderate Palestinians around and that she's also one of very few Palestinians with some authority who's got any idea about pr Western style (as in, she knows it's not a good idea to scream "I will sacrifice *all* of my sons for Allah to make Israel suffer the way we suffer" when a suicide bomber's just blown up a kiddie disco in Tel Aviv - it doesn't do the Palestinian cause any good in the Western eye) so she's bound to say something like this.
However, if you think about it, she may, partly, be right. I myself have only seen that footage with the guy handing out free food to passersby (you know which footage I mean). Consider that in the 22 hrs since it happened, there hasn't been any new footage of Palestinians dancing in the street. It's always the same clip. If this celebration was going on on any substantial scale, I should think we would've seen more footage of it.
Disclaimer: I'm not Palestinian, nor am I Israeli, nor am I sympathetic to either cause (in the sense that I don't believe either people should be destroyed to give the other Lebensraum)
To say that it is unfair to defend a belief system is to say that there is no point in having beliefs. If you owned a piece of land and someone was forcefully threatening to take that land away you would do everything in your means to keep that land. Even if it means a call to arms.
... the reason the US has been targeted is that it is (perceived to be) supportive of Israel/not doing enough to solve the Middle East crisis. Through some twists of logic "American government doesn't tell Israel to stop gunning down our kids" (which they do to Palestinian kids - not that they don't have a reason to do so, I suppose) becomes "all Americans are evil - let's destroy them".
...
But this isn't about defending beliefs, the WTC and the Pentagon weren't bombed because the terrorists who did it are opposed to democracy or capitalism
You can't seriously claim that "lackadaisical treatment of the Middle East problem" is a belief which it is your right to defend
Of course I'm not saying flying an airplane into a building is a good thing to do, and I do think the US would be justified in retaliating for this attack, but I hope today's attack also serves as a wake up call to the Bush gov't to perform a more active role in finding a solution for the Middle East problem.
Yes, I do think this bombing has something to do with the Middle East - only a religious fanatic who's into suicide bombing would be disrespectful enough of human life to wilfully murder 266 airplane passengers *and* thousands of WTC-dwellers. You could argue that Timothey McVeigh killed a fair number of people as well, but he was acting on his own, This attack was coordinated in such a way that it suggests a well organized group being responsible for it. The only well-organized groups who are capable of such an attack *and* who have such disrespect human life are fundamentalists.
Well, in order to actually beat Japan soundly, win the war, and stop the Pacific bickering over land issues, it was estimated it would take over 200,000 US soldiers (mostly under the age of 25) to take Japan by conventional methods. Dropping two nukes (it would have only been one if their leader hadn't been so stubborn) was more humane.
... you're more or less right about the *first* bomb. That was dropped to give the Japanese that last push towards surrendering. The *second* bomb, however, wasn't necessary - the Japanese had seen what damage one lousy American bomb was capable of, and were about to surrender. The reason the americans decided to drop it anyway was because this bomb was using a different technique, and they wanted to see what this technique was capable of. Talk about cynical ...
Not quite
A) Cheap alternative for desktop users -- users say "they wished they had something better without having to pay big big bucks." Win2k is, what, perhaps $200. PetrOS will have to sell for $50 or less, then.
And it'll be obsolete the moment MS changes an API. Or the moment MS makes MSIE crash when it detects PetrOS.
you're right. (cough) DR-DOS. (cough)
is what you'll most likely do should you come accross the only piece of equipment in existence today that actually uses this technology: the force feedback mouse. If you haven't tried it: it vibrates if you place the mousepointer on something that can be clicked. If you run into the edge of a window, it, well, also vibrates.
hardly the most exciting "user experience".
somehow, I don't see them get from "vibrate" to "within 10 years, shoppers will be able to "feel" a piece of silk or other fabric simply by rubbing their finger over a computer screen" (article). if we're supposed to be able to mimic "the feel of silk" in ten years, right now we should've been able to "feel the shape of a woman's tits", i should think. and i'm pretty sure the porn industry would've picked up on this if it were possible.
i wouldn't expect this technology to come into existence within the next ten years if i were you. nor twenty or thirty.