Very Star Wars, very Bab5 as well, not very Trek at all. But that's okay; they were going for a different feel. (Though I'd prefer not to have to see "Darth Sidious" again...)
What I would love to have seen was TOS done in this style, though; I do like the movie-like filmwork. I could do without Jolene Blalock, but I think we all could...
Actually, I thought they did a pretty good job of allowing for dramatic license in TOS. The design of NX-01 was IMHO actually as close to the original Enterprise as they could get without looking ridiculously dated (though I thought T'Pol's viewer thingy was hilarious, and a workable tribute to the original even if it served no concievable purpose).
What I didn't like was the greasedown scene -- okay, we know there's more pointy about T'Pol than just her ears, but really!
The "kr" pronunciation actually is a corrupted pronunciation of a sound that's something like a guttural (ch in german, H in Klingon) and a hairball; an Arabic or classic Hebrew (not modern; the pronunciation has changed) speaker would have no problem with it (it relates to the q sound in Semitic langugages), though they might break out in fits of giggles.
Precisely. This "response" is Microsoft obscurantism -- it doesn't even make sense in light of IIS' rather limited popularity; it seems like a marketing play.
See, I use a P2/333. I bought it used for a bit less than $200, and it runs RedHat 7.1 just fine, thankyouverymuch.
But I get the general idea. I call it hardware bloat -- software companies (most notoriously, I'd say, Microsoft and Adobe) that jack up the hardware requirements on the software for no particularly good reason. It's a lot worse in the PC market than it is anywhere else, though I admit us Mac folk have been feeling an awful lot of pressure to go G3 or better with OS X...
Okay, point taken (Perl in particular is huge). But these programs are already available in your everyday average Linux distro; for this particular project they act basically as the equivalent of components like VBA or MFC in MSOffice (i.e. the Microsoft Shared folder someone else mentioned). In other words, I'm talking about building a system with what's already there.
Besides, we had working (if sluggish) WYSIWIG word processors working on the Commodore 64 in 1988 (geoWrite, for those of you who don't remember). Those were pretty full-featured, and everything in them (including the OS (single-tasking, but still) and a separate spell checker program) fit on a double-density floppy. Not that I'm saying we shoudl go back to the floppy swap days, but if the QNX people can cram a near-fully-functional workstation setup in 1.44MB...
Okay, first, yes, I am accusing you of being a Microsoft flak, or at least pretending to be one. Flat out. Because if you aren't you're acting like one.
Second, the point is that anything in favor of a product with the manufacturer's name attached is automatically suspect because it's almost certainly marketing. If RedHat did do a similar page, then it would be just as suspect as Microsoft's Linux Myths page for exactly the same reasons. The report in the article is presumably valid (though for arcane reasons having to do with my views on religion I note that saying your bias is towards the side you're putting down is somewhat transparent as a rhetorical move); however, there is no way in the world that something direct from Redmond's mouth on the subject of a competitor can be taken at face value. (And that goes for anything paid for by a particular company as well; that's why people trust Consumer Reports more than they do other magazines for product reviews.)
The fact is that the guy was very in-depth about it. I'd have liked to see his MSAccess replacement linked to, but oh well.
The problem with desktop applications these days is that they're gigantic for no obvious reason. I still want to see someone write a full-featured office suite that takes up a grand total of no more than a megabyte for the source tarball -- I would be inclined to think that a fairly nice word processor could be put together with nothing more than Perl and Tk, using standard command line tools like ispell for the more specialized services and (I've heard suggested) HTML4+CSS as the file format.
You know, I have to disagree -- with the exception of Greedo shooting first (a very badly rendered addition to ANH as well as a bad idea) and giving the Sarlaac a proper mouth (also a little pointless, especially as it broke a number of fanfics and even a book or two), the special editions were actually very well done. The Ewok village at the end of Jedi is much improved, Cloud city is a much brighter place, the picture quality is vastly enhanced... on the whole, I have no trouble accepting SW:SE as Lucas' definitive vision of the movies.
The only objection I have to the Special Edition versions of the movies is that they gave Lucas license to go crazy in TPM; after all, if he could digitally map Jabba into ANH, he could get away with pretty much anything, which he tried to in TPM. And so we got Jar Jar Binks...
I have to admit I've never seen the point myself, though I don't even own a cell phone.
Frankly, I think WAP is a very marginal sort of tool, almost exclusively a vertical-market sort of toy. The Wireless Web in general to me seems like no more than some hacker's toy that accidently made it out to the general public; the point of surfing on a cell phone in the first place just about escapes me, since the screen is too small to do anything useful or interesting apart from playing snake or sending messages.
I do think that there's a place for it, but for the most part it's about as useful as a CueCat.
I wasn't talking about people from KY in general, I was talking about militia rednecks from KY. I could have just as easily said Kansas, or Nebraska, or New Hampshire...
Read some history yourself. Half of us had no say in the matter and the truth is that nobody really knows for certain who won because the margin of victory is just so much statistical noise....
...though why Office 98? It's a well-executed program, but it's a monstrosity...
A simple desktop is not a bad idea, and it's sort of a shame that what he's doing doesn't really apply to OS X (there's a reason Apple hides the Unix directories from public view -- it can get very confusing).
I have one particular thing I've always done on Macs that's worth mentioning, though -- I keep a tabful of aliases down on the bottom corner of the screen of both of my Macs (near the trash, but just far enough away) that lead to various important applications on my system (BBEdit, Netscape, Stuffit, etc.). It's a great convenience factor for me, and since it all snaps out of the way it manages to avoid ugly desktop clutter.
I don't know -- is it a troll if the information is just a little off?
"Fly-by-wire" means the controls are connected by an electronic connection to the control surfaces instead of a physical connection, no more, no less. The system you are referring to is a warning system, not a control system, and I suspect it was probably going crazy in the cockpit when it hit.
As for the rest of it, I really don't think this was a sophisticated attack at all; even a dozen militia rednecks from Kentucky could have pulled this one off. Granted, we know the hijackers were of Middle Eastern descent -- a few could have been American citizens, but that's sort of irrelevant -- but I'm saying that it *could* have been a domestic operation. All that was needed was a sufficient number of people willing to be duped and die for a cause. Give them innocuous weapons (box cutters) and a connection to get the (rumored) mace on board and you're all set. Some smarts are required, but only on the parts of a couple of the conspirators.
In a world where politics has become so polarized, I don't think that would be too tough for anyone.
Okay, CMU-CL... and then someone writes a Dylan front end for it.
Eh, religious wars... Lisp is a good language, no doubt. It's one of the two or three oldest still in current use (does it in fact predate both Fortran and Cobol?), but all those parens...
Yes, but just because they were guilty before doesn't mean they're guilty now.
That said, I think the situation is something like this: the Taliban probably would never have signed off on something like this (they have their hands full oppressing their own people -- to those who didn't manage to pick out the news stories going on between the WTC/Pentagon coverage, Kabul is burning even as we speak), know they don't have what it takes to take on the US, and are probably wishing this whole mess just goes away. They are scared, and are probably seriously reconsidering the wisdom of harboring bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden, on the other hand... well, he *claims* he had nothing to do with it, but certainly approved of what happened. I don't know if it is necessarily fair to *blame* him per se for what happened (it could be that it was just a handful of his followers doing something they think the boss would like -- this was not a particularly sophisticated attack by my estimation), but we've certainly got more than enough reason to haul his ass in for questioning.
I think that the Taliban will turn him over eventually, especially if the little internal rebellion thing (could be CIA-inspired, you never know, but...) they're dealing with proves a bit too much for them. They're talking the talk right now, but I can guarandamntee you that they're scared shitless.
People thinking we should start bombing now are missing the point. There are nuclear powers in the region, particularly Pakistan and Israel and very possibly Iraq. The people celebrating this act of terror in the streets of the Middle East are as much decieved about us (if not more so) as many of us are about them, for many of the same reasons, and can't be held culpable because their governments try to prevent them from knowing any better. The thing to do is to twist the arms of the Taliban without getting violent, have them turn over bin Laden by convincing them that he's a liability, and let the man rot for the rest of his life in solitary in Colorado.
You make all this sound like it's somehow a bad thing...
Actually, I like some of those ideas, since I'm a bit of a retrocomputing enthusiast myself. And an ELKS port to the PDP-11 is probably doable, especially with those ancient DEC techies kicking around.
Porting ITS to modern hardware, though... go look through the ITS tech reference. I thought of doing it to learn a little about OS hacking. It frightened me.
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Very Star Wars, very Bab5 as well, not very Trek at all. But that's okay; they were going for a different feel. (Though I'd prefer not to have to see "Darth Sidious" again...)
What I would love to have seen was TOS done in this style, though; I do like the movie-like filmwork. I could do without Jolene Blalock, but I think we all could...
/Brian
Actually, I thought they did a pretty good job of allowing for dramatic license in TOS. The design of NX-01 was IMHO actually as close to the original Enterprise as they could get without looking ridiculously dated (though I thought T'Pol's viewer thingy was hilarious, and a workable tribute to the original even if it served no concievable purpose).
What I didn't like was the greasedown scene -- okay, we know there's more pointy about T'Pol than just her ears, but really!
/Brian
The "kr" pronunciation actually is a corrupted pronunciation of a sound that's something like a guttural (ch in german, H in Klingon) and a hairball; an Arabic or classic Hebrew (not modern; the pronunciation has changed) speaker would have no problem with it (it relates to the q sound in Semitic langugages), though they might break out in fits of giggles.
/Brian
Precisely. This "response" is Microsoft obscurantism -- it doesn't even make sense in light of IIS' rather limited popularity; it seems like a marketing play.
/Brian
Nnnot quite. The older versions of Darwin are (as is MkLinux) but the Darwin driver model is based on something specific to Darwin/X called IOKit.
/Brian
See, I use a P2/333. I bought it used for a bit less than $200, and it runs RedHat 7.1 just fine, thankyouverymuch.
But I get the general idea. I call it hardware bloat -- software companies (most notoriously, I'd say, Microsoft and Adobe) that jack up the hardware requirements on the software for no particularly good reason. It's a lot worse in the PC market than it is anywhere else, though I admit us Mac folk have been feeling an awful lot of pressure to go G3 or better with OS X...
/Brian
Okay, point taken (Perl in particular is huge). But these programs are already available in your everyday average Linux distro; for this particular project they act basically as the equivalent of components like VBA or MFC in MSOffice (i.e. the Microsoft Shared folder someone else mentioned). In other words, I'm talking about building a system with what's already there.
Besides, we had working (if sluggish) WYSIWIG word processors working on the Commodore 64 in 1988 (geoWrite, for those of you who don't remember). Those were pretty full-featured, and everything in them (including the OS (single-tasking, but still) and a separate spell checker program) fit on a double-density floppy. Not that I'm saying we shoudl go back to the floppy swap days, but if the QNX people can cram a near-fully-functional workstation setup in 1.44MB...
/Brian
Okay, first, yes, I am accusing you of being a Microsoft flak, or at least pretending to be one. Flat out. Because if you aren't you're acting like one.
Second, the point is that anything in favor of a product with the manufacturer's name attached is automatically suspect because it's almost certainly marketing. If RedHat did do a similar page, then it would be just as suspect as Microsoft's Linux Myths page for exactly the same reasons. The report in the article is presumably valid (though for arcane reasons having to do with my views on religion I note that saying your bias is towards the side you're putting down is somewhat transparent as a rhetorical move); however, there is no way in the world that something direct from Redmond's mouth on the subject of a competitor can be taken at face value. (And that goes for anything paid for by a particular company as well; that's why people trust Consumer Reports more than they do other magazines for product reviews.)
/Brian
/Brian
The fact is that the guy was very in-depth about it. I'd have liked to see his MSAccess replacement linked to, but oh well.
The problem with desktop applications these days is that they're gigantic for no obvious reason. I still want to see someone write a full-featured office suite that takes up a grand total of no more than a megabyte for the source tarball -- I would be inclined to think that a fairly nice word processor could be put together with nothing more than Perl and Tk, using standard command line tools like ispell for the more specialized services and (I've heard suggested) HTML4+CSS as the file format.
Nobody seems to have tried, though...
/Brian
Is this an astroturf attempt or just flat out flamebait?
Do I really have to explain to you that the equivalent document from Red Hat would have no more validity?
Honestly, I'd rather be modding you down, but I don't have moderator access today...
/Brian
I don't know; calling the attack droids "thin clients" is probably funnier than anything in the movie...
/Brian
You know, I have to disagree -- with the exception of Greedo shooting first (a very badly rendered addition to ANH as well as a bad idea) and giving the Sarlaac a proper mouth (also a little pointless, especially as it broke a number of fanfics and even a book or two), the special editions were actually very well done. The Ewok village at the end of Jedi is much improved, Cloud city is a much brighter place, the picture quality is vastly enhanced... on the whole, I have no trouble accepting SW:SE as Lucas' definitive vision of the movies.
The only objection I have to the Special Edition versions of the movies is that they gave Lucas license to go crazy in TPM; after all, if he could digitally map Jabba into ANH, he could get away with pretty much anything, which he tried to in TPM. And so we got Jar Jar Binks...
/Brian
I have to admit I've never seen the point myself, though I don't even own a cell phone.
Frankly, I think WAP is a very marginal sort of tool, almost exclusively a vertical-market sort of toy. The Wireless Web in general to me seems like no more than some hacker's toy that accidently made it out to the general public; the point of surfing on a cell phone in the first place just about escapes me, since the screen is too small to do anything useful or interesting apart from playing snake or sending messages.
I do think that there's a place for it, but for the most part it's about as useful as a CueCat.
/Brian
Touche.
(And now to try and get this comment up without hitting the lameness filter...)
/Brian
I wasn't talking about people from KY in general, I was talking about militia rednecks from KY. I could have just as easily said Kansas, or Nebraska, or New Hampshire...
/Brian
I had actually heard Lisp was the oldest, but thanks...
/Brian
Read some history yourself. Half of us had no say in the matter and the truth is that nobody really knows for certain who won because the margin of victory is just so much statistical noise....
/Brian
...though why Office 98? It's a well-executed program, but it's a monstrosity...
A simple desktop is not a bad idea, and it's sort of a shame that what he's doing doesn't really apply to OS X (there's a reason Apple hides the Unix directories from public view -- it can get very confusing).
I have one particular thing I've always done on Macs that's worth mentioning, though -- I keep a tabful of aliases down on the bottom corner of the screen of both of my Macs (near the trash, but just far enough away) that lead to various important applications on my system (BBEdit, Netscape, Stuffit, etc.). It's a great convenience factor for me, and since it all snaps out of the way it manages to avoid ugly desktop clutter.
/Brian
Okay, fair, but how many other states have dank cement pits for holding people two nasty to be allowed to become martyrs?
/Brian
I don't know -- is it a troll if the information is just a little off?
"Fly-by-wire" means the controls are connected by an electronic connection to the control surfaces instead of a physical connection, no more, no less. The system you are referring to is a warning system, not a control system, and I suspect it was probably going crazy in the cockpit when it hit.
As for the rest of it, I really don't think this was a sophisticated attack at all; even a dozen militia rednecks from Kentucky could have pulled this one off. Granted, we know the hijackers were of Middle Eastern descent -- a few could have been American citizens, but that's sort of irrelevant -- but I'm saying that it *could* have been a domestic operation. All that was needed was a sufficient number of people willing to be duped and die for a cause. Give them innocuous weapons (box cutters) and a connection to get the (rumored) mace on board and you're all set. Some smarts are required, but only on the parts of a couple of the conspirators.
In a world where politics has become so polarized, I don't think that would be too tough for anyone.
/Brian
Okay, CMU-CL... and then someone writes a Dylan front end for it.
Eh, religious wars... Lisp is a good language, no doubt. It's one of the two or three oldest still in current use (does it in fact predate both Fortran and Cobol?), but all those parens...
/Brian
Yes, but just because they were guilty before doesn't mean they're guilty now.
That said, I think the situation is something like this: the Taliban probably would never have signed off on something like this (they have their hands full oppressing their own people -- to those who didn't manage to pick out the news stories going on between the WTC/Pentagon coverage, Kabul is burning even as we speak), know they don't have what it takes to take on the US, and are probably wishing this whole mess just goes away. They are scared, and are probably seriously reconsidering the wisdom of harboring bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden, on the other hand... well, he *claims* he had nothing to do with it, but certainly approved of what happened. I don't know if it is necessarily fair to *blame* him per se for what happened (it could be that it was just a handful of his followers doing something they think the boss would like -- this was not a particularly sophisticated attack by my estimation), but we've certainly got more than enough reason to haul his ass in for questioning.
I think that the Taliban will turn him over eventually, especially if the little internal rebellion thing (could be CIA-inspired, you never know, but...) they're dealing with proves a bit too much for them. They're talking the talk right now, but I can guarandamntee you that they're scared shitless.
People thinking we should start bombing now are missing the point. There are nuclear powers in the region, particularly Pakistan and Israel and very possibly Iraq. The people celebrating this act of terror in the streets of the Middle East are as much decieved about us (if not more so) as many of us are about them, for many of the same reasons, and can't be held culpable because their governments try to prevent them from knowing any better. The thing to do is to twist the arms of the Taliban without getting violent, have them turn over bin Laden by convincing them that he's a liability, and let the man rot for the rest of his life in solitary in Colorado.
/Brian
People, turn to whoever you wish to turn to. I choose both God and man myself, but the point is to find support where you can get it.
/Brian
I still think the whole Linux-on-PDA idea is horribly misguided -- maybe ELKS, but not a full-blown Linux.
Maybe that's what we'll get out of this deal though...
/Brian
You make all this sound like it's somehow a bad thing...
Actually, I like some of those ideas, since I'm a bit of a retrocomputing enthusiast myself. And an ELKS port to the PDP-11 is probably doable, especially with those ancient DEC techies kicking around.
Porting ITS to modern hardware, though... go look through the ITS tech reference. I thought of doing it to learn a little about OS hacking. It frightened me.
/Brian