Even a little thing like the difference between/etc/X11/XF86Config and/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 makes compatability a problem.
I might be wrong, but I believe the XF86Config-4 is a function of X moving to 4.x.x, and not a function of any specific distribution. Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if certain distros varied from this standard in favor of "backward compatibility."
We dont only need a more stable X, but a more recoverable one, and one with more on-the-fly reconfiguration ability. Linux users seem to focus so much on uptime- not having to re-boot -that they dont seem to notice that in order to get many things done you have to close down all the programs you use to work.
I'm not sure what you mean. The only time I have to close programs is when I reboot -- which happens very rarely.
Hell, we need screen for X. I just started using screen, that thing kicks some ass.
Yeah, definitely an amazing program. As far as screen for X, your problem could perhaps be solved by using X on top of VNC? Or launching subsequent X sessions on different terminals, accessible with CTRL+ALT+F8, etc? The former lets you connect to your X session from anywhere on the network; the latter allows multiple people to have totally separate yet concurrent X sessions. You can't both access them at the same time (unless you hook up multiple peripherals), but now you don't need to log off so your wife can run X with her pretty background and fancy window manager.
We need to be able to get back to the console even if X crashes and is no longer accepting input. We need ways to keep working not just keep our "uptime" high.
If X crashes -- which I find slightly rare now that I'm mostly done tweaking it -- have you tried hitting CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to summarily kill the X process? Have you tried using CTRL+ALT+F1 or +F2 to access a command line virtual terminal, from which you can kill the offending program? Lastly, if none of these work, chances are you can SSH in from another machine on your network and clean up that way.
Not everybody likes the same look and feel. Some people like their start-menu, some people dont. The ability to have a consistent look and feel is important. If you want your system to look a certain way, you should be able to make it look and work that way without much work
Agreed, and vehemently so. I guess you can chalk this up to the advantage of the open source model and other related modern buzzwords. When you've got thousands of people developing an OS and window environment from every point on the globe, standards are tough. I would love all windowing bits and keyboard navigation to be perfectly consistent. I dunno if we'll ever get there, though.
and you should be able to switch back and forth like that so that whoever was using it before you can pick up where they left off
See earlier comment about multiple concurrent X sessions.
Hope some of this helps.
Re:I fail to see anything new here?
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 1
Does Ghost etc. support Gigabit Ethernet? USB Ethernet? Token Ring?
I can't speak for the first two, but Ghost definitely supports Token Ring just fine. We used to use Ghost 4 or 5 (5.1?) with Token Ring constantly in a mostly-TR shop. This may have changed with the later revisions of Ghost, although it would surprise me.
And for the record, half of the NICs used were PC-Card/PCMCIA.
reconfiguring your machine to look like the ISPs FTP server and stuff like that
Nitpick: it's a TFTP server, from what I've read.
Most cable modems allow for remote reboot, which means that the modem would reset and retrieve its config file (where the limits are set) from the ISP FTP server. So, just have them reboot the modems by script as soon as they detect anomalies.
The document that I've seen for uncapping cable modems directly negates your above idea by having the uncapper's "shadow" TFTP server appear to be the ISP's TFTP server -- I believe by getting it in the cable modem's ARP cache before the "legimate" TFTP server upon bootup, at which point the cable modem happily snarfs down the modified, uncapped config file across the uncapper's internal LAN. Now you're uncapped and free to summon the FBI guys at will.
And it didn't look all that difficult, either: a fun Sunday afternoon exercise for your average with-it geek. Not that I'm about to try it out on my main connection to the Internet, though.
RenderMonkey is the work of my buddy Chris and an ATI colleague of his named Drew. They're a brilliant pair of dudes who deserve all the glory they get.
Chris also works with me and a few other gifted fools on a fine web project called Megarad, available here. He's not been around much lately; now I know why.
A few months ago, I undertook a single-man campaign to get Slash up and running so I could help realize a goal I and a few friends had together -- a goal that was conceived long before "blog" was a household term. Before "E/N" was a common site format, even.
So I broke down, bought O'Reilly's MySQL/mSQL book, got the Slash code, installed all the various bits and pieces. I was struck almost immediately by the profound lack of decent, in-depth information. Not knowing PERL, and not being a SQL wizard, there were many places where I had to put everything aside and go do something else for a few hours.
As my girlfriend was gone for the week, I was able to pretty much devote every waking minute to getting this thing up and running.;)
I don't remember how long it took me to get everything in place. Two full days, at least -- and by "full," I mean morning-to-morning shifts of hacking, tweaking, install, uninstalling, praying, urinating on various altars, etc.
In any case, eventually everything was up and running. I should note here that the fastest machine I personally own is a 233mHz with a bit more than 128 MB of RAM; I was trying to run this thing off a p166 with 72 MB of RAM. It seemed sensible at the time, since Linux, when properly tuned, can work wonders. Plus, the site was meant to be fairly low-traffic, at least at first.
Well, ha-ha.
This thing was dog-slow. With all the PERL munging and SQL queries running on the same box, even just me using it from a different machine was roughly as enjoyable as beating myself in my own damn face with a small but dense brick.
Enter PHPNuke, circa version 5.1. The reason you hear people report over and over "it's a ten-minute install" is because, well, it is. Add an hour or so for exploration, bug-checking, tweaking, maybe a day if you want to really cook up a nice theme, and that's pretty much it. Additionally, it's extremely fast on my old hardware.
Granted: PHPNUke doesn't offer Slash's myriad of configuration and control options -- but then, for me, finding documentation for those options was itself an adventure. On the other hand, PHPNuke's documentation and support resources are many and varied, and almost all in French or some other god-awful thing for an American to see at 3:15 AM when something is suddenly mysteriously breaking. However, there are various IRC channels (which are a bit less populated than #slash, to be honest) wherein one may find helpful folks who run a roughly 1 in 10 chance of speaking a language you do. The installed userbase is large enough that any bug you may encounter is almost certain to be reported elsewhere, possibly with a fix already in the works.
The upshot: PHPNuke saved the day! Slash is cool, but, in my opinion, only for those of you who have a serious userbase and plenty of hardware budget.
The site I and my friends eventually got running -- Megarad.com -- is now running PHPNuke 5.4. Apart from a few hiccoughs here and there with upgrades (not to mention the deplorable operating practices and customer service standard of our hoster), things have been very good indeed.
Last I heard, Microsoft wasn't allowing companies, at least not my place of employment, to ghost images.
And last *I* heard, there was nothing they can do to stop you, except refuse to give you support for that particular machine under your existing support contract.
So don't tell them. Pretend your machine wasn't ghosted, present your problem, and if it comes out one way or another that the machine was ghosted, thank the tech and hang the hell up.
My last gig at a fairly sizable company (~35,000 users) was largely spent replacing the then-current ultra-flaky Ghosting process with a honest-to-gosh, real-live dynamic install. That is to say, an NT Unattended Install. If you've never seen one of these, they're pretty cool. Our work allowed you to
walk up to a prospective workstation,
insert a certain floppy,
reboot,
answer a dozen questions off a nice little DOS menu (things such as: future workstation name and domain administrator username [with respective password encrypted and then squirrelled away on the floppy])
reboot again, and
come back in an hour to make sure nothing crazy went wrong.
If nothing crazy went wrong, you'd now have a machine with the approved OS, with all corporate security and usability policies applied, plus whatever apps were specified through the DOS menu -- Lotus Notes, Office, PCAnywhere, IE6, integration with Microsoft's SMS, IBM's PCom, whatever, all configured to meet that particular geographic region's specifications. Pretty sweet.
And it worked on a huge number of combinations of hardware. Last time I remember looking at the compliance chart, there were about thirty machines (laptop, desktop, and a few handheld types) interoperating with almost as many NICs (ISA, PCI, PC Card -- Token Ring and Ethernet).
Of course, this took several years and substantial from some of Microsoft's top consultants to build and (almost) perfect, and suffered a number of false starts. About the time I was ready to seek other employment, there was a rumble around the company that imaging was going to come back, which sounded patently ridiculous at the time, but is maybe less so with some of the more modern imaging packages.
Either way, I learned a hell of a lot there -- and I have a feeling this sort of top-down control would be easier and more fun on Unix or Linux.
Just another fine example of technology you won't get to play with working at your local mom-and-pop ISP, or in all but the most ambitious basement tinkering.
Whoa. How did I get started on all that? Anyway...
Wow, that article was MEGA-RAD!!! It was the ultimate in underground CYBER-NEWS!!! It was a Mega-bitch ass page of radness!!!
Oh, good. My very own tamagotchi.
Funny how you praise the movie fleetingly in the first paragraph, then go on to lambast its shortcomings in great detail for four paragraphs, then grudgingly admit "there was some good stuff too, but I was drunk so don't remember any of it." Well, you sure "remembered" all the stuff you didn't like clear as day.
I didn't praise it "fleetingly." I praised it succinctly. That is, anyone who didn't care to read into my pages of nitpicking minutiae is able to gather the gist of my feelings in one short paragraph. There are many reasons to do this; one of them is to alleviate the risk of just such miscomprehension as you display.
As for lambasting its shortcomings in great detail, well, I cared about this movie. I loved the books. Me and a billion other random scifi geeks all waited anxiously to see how it would work out. As I made abundantly clear in the comment, I liked the movie. Hell, I loved it. Did I have a few reservations about it after seeing it? Yes.
I didn't "grudgingly admit" anything, nor did I claim to be unable to remember any of the good stuff. I saved the good stuff for last, because I genuinely respect the work done on this movie (which is more than I can say for your feeble, anonymous comment). What I couldn't remember -- and what will become clear to you if you actually give it a real read -- is that there is plenty of good stuff. What I couldn't remember were the two ways in which the movie improved on the book.
Yes, I remembered the stuff I didn't like "clear as day." This seems to trouble you; I have little idea why, and I care less. In any case, you have your own issues to work out.
You've got postmodern hipster disease, bad.
And you, my sallow-faced random idiot, have illiterate jackass disease. Here's to you encysting!
I would certainly buy the boxed set if they had a version of the movie without the CGI in Galadriel's ring speech. Cate Blanchett certainly didn't need it and I weep for what the scene could have been...
Hear, hear. I detested that part. It was everything I had hoped the movie wouldn't be: schlocky, unbelievable, and ugly. It screams Disney-style pandering. The bit in the beginning where Frodo mistrusts Gandalf's intentions for a bit was just as bad, although shorter and less cartoony.
In the book, these moments were described in a manner that forced the reader to visualize his own scene. I realize Jackson et.al. probably had a tough time transferring this to the screen -- and that I am no director -- but wouldn't it have been simpler, purer, and more in line with the noble grace of the book itself to have the actor actually *act* "foreboding and terrible," or "titanic and angered," or whatever? Even a narrowed brow and a stilted voice would have sufficed for me. As it was, there are now two legitimately cringe-worthy moments in this piece of film, which I otherwise loved.
Well, speak up then! The guy doing the documentary is nothing if not open to comments and information. If you were to email him and let him know what a thriving portion of the BBS subculture the art scene was, I'd be profoundly surprised if he didn't incorporate it.
In fact, this is such a good idea I've just had that I'm going to make sure he finds out. The cool thing about the art scene is that it's a visual medium, so it'll be perfect for the film. We might see some good shit popping up onscreen!
That whole art scene back in the day was well beyond my skills; I was more into learning the details of the phone system, etc. But to me, art was like magic, and it pretty much still is.
Anyway, I was lucky enough a few years ago to meet one of the old-schoolers from that scene. He has some printouts of ASCII and ANSI art that are just amazing.
Today, we've got a little website together. It's fun, and keeps me reminded quite often of the good things about the old days.
These are interesting articles, and I agree with some of this guy's ideas, but he's resting on his laurels if he thinks he can make such widely-sweeping generalizations without actually citing real studies. Sure, he keeps mentioning some study, but where is it? We're not even sure who tested what; all we're really offered is the fact that this guy is really, really sure that the mouse is faster than the keyboard.
He's wrong on that point. In fact -- his illustrious career notwithstanding -- it looks an awful lot like he's got his head just a little bit up his ass.
Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia!
"High-level cognitive function?" "Amnesia?" Those are very weighty terms to be throwing around without serious evidential backup.
For what it's worth, here's how one can use accelerator keys to speed up editing HTML inside Notepad on Windows and intermittently testing it in Netscape:
{make desired changes to HTML inside Notepad}
Alt+F, S
Alt+Tab
F5
{looks good?}
Alt+Tab
{repeat}
I'll leave the tedious mouse-based process as an exercise to whoever can't tell -- just by thinking about it -- how laborious it's going to be. (Claims that my mind is blanking out and I'm thus unable to accurately judge time will be glazed over by "amnesia! Real amnesia!")
If you know how to use proper accelerator keys -- keys such as Page Up, Ctrl+Page Up, Shift+{any cursor key} -- then the mouse loses another presumed advantage: large-field navigatory speed. There's no reason whatsoever to diddle with the scrollbar or thumb in Notepad if I can get to the top of the file in a single two-key keypress.
Now, there are plenty of ways in which a mouse is faster than the keyboard, but I'm not convinced accelerator keys is one of them; I won't be convinced until I'm offered sophisticated cognition studies that prove it. Having someone tell me that I'm experiencing amnesia and am simply "forgetting" how long it takes to do a Ctrl+V to paste some text simply makes me realize how hard it must have been for scientists to listen to "prophets" nod that the Earth was, of course, flat.
Here's one of his ideas that I wholeheartedly agree with:
Guideline: All command-keys should be user-specifiable. The developer can and should supply an initial set, but the user should be able to overrule those choices.
Hear, hear!
Interface design is crucial. This discussion has prompted me to post an article about this over on Megarad. Hopefully, it'll generate some more good debate, and we'll all get a little smarter about it.
NT4. Go back and re-read. Then post as something other than an AC -- perhaps "gay crab" would be a creative nickname?
I won't bother going into how XP is a gross subset of 2k, as it would apparently be lost on you. Suffice to say, it is. And, guess what? I think it's crude and unattractive. Prove me wrong. This time, I expect slightly better comprehension, both of this post and of the subject at hand.
(In the interest of all-out disclosure, this comment is an edited form of one I posted here yesterday.)
I've seen the new face of Windows, and it's AOL by Microsoft. Avoid it like the plague it's rapidly becoming part of.
In the interest of marketability, I've tried to make a history of being able to support all reasonably modern versions of Windows. Windows 3.1, I know. Windows 9x, I'm very very good at. Nt 3.5x, yeah. NT 4, I'm the kung-fu master. 2000, I dig and am one good long study of AD away from being better than anyone else in my company, including the guys in charge of the AD.
Windows ME? XP? No thanks. My Microsoft OS support track stops here. I don't want to support it. I don't want to learn it. Anyone running it, I don't want to be involved with. It's ugly, it's stupid, and I can't really believe it's meant to be directional for anyone but people who would use AOL otherwise. It certainly has no place in a serious computing environment, in my opinion.
The rate at which Microsoft continues to pump out new operating systems shows they really are doing it all for the nookie. Compare and contrast Windows 95 and Windows 98. What was in 98 that shouldn't have been a free upgrade to 95, based on what the majority of computer-savvy people seem to consider reasonable software practice?
They're doing the same thing with their MCSE exams; dump out five times as many as are necessary, knowing somewhere, some buzzword-boggled boss will pay for a class or two just to be on the safe side, or to be compliant with whatever new decision has come down the pike from the VIPs on high.
Don't get me wrong: I'm sure XP has some cool features. It almost has to, by definition -- not even Microsoft is bold enough to dump out a "new" OS without adding something innovative or worthwhile. The install technology, in particular, is pretty cool -- but, just like the majority of the other "improvements" in XP, it doesn't really solve any problems for which there are not already excellent solutions.
The point is that they've not keyed their special enhanced behaviors to respond to certain states the Quake3 code brings about, but to the actual name of the executable, and the strings found therein.
That alone, in my mind, smacks heavily of benchmark shenanigans.
If they were to optimize their driver for certain intensive routines within the Quake3 code, that might well be a controversial move, but it at least would be an above-board one, and one clearly based on their target audience's focus.
To check the name of the file being run, or to munge for strings inside the executable, seems perverse and shady.
I'm posting this mostly to correct any misconceptions I might have about the way service packs work, so please feel free to correct me wherever I need it.
It's my understanding, given to me by a top Microsoft consultant (this guy was a fricking wizard), that service packs only replace files that actually exist on the target computer; that is to say, if you don't use, for instance, some Novell DLLs, they don't get placed onto your system.
Now, while Compaq or whoever are handing you a custom solution, they're not handing you custom code, are they? They don't rewrite lsass.exe, for instance, right? So whatever combination of Microsoft code they give you should be detected and updated properly by the logic in the service pack. Or so it seems to me at first blush.
Like I said, please correct me anywhere I've screwed up.
Yeah, I'd love to help. Preferably in the concept-and-design department, although my HTML skills aren't too rusty if that's where help would be most useful.
I miss freeboxen. I have the dubious distinction of having claimed one of the first few pieces of hardware offered on it: a video card the site owner, jlincoln, was trying to get rid of to help get the donation ball rolling. I never used it. I've got it wrapped here in plastic, and every couple of hours I unwrap it and kiss it, and kiss it, and kiss it.
That's not exactly true, I guess: I promptly threw it in an old, dusty-ass P120 and haven't gotten around to shoehorning FreeBSD on it...
Damn, I loved freeboxen, though, which is essentially the reason I'd like to help you make swapboxen a reality.
A couple of years ago, when I was subscribed to the cypherpunks mailing list and sometime after the Great Detweiler Hue-and-Cry, I came across mention on the list of a piece of software called "Medusa's Tentacles" that is engineered to do this sort of thing. It is apparently written in response to Detweiler's rants. (Detweiler's a great character, and whether he's for real or not, he made it into net.legends, and is entertaining as hell.)
I tracked it down and played with it a bit -- its purpose is to help determine how much similarity a given anonymous message contains to a series of posts by a known author. If the resulting number is high, it indicates a likelihood that the anonymous post was, in fact, written by that known author. This is to keep people from generating 'tentacles of medusa,' and engaging in pseudoanonymity.
To quote from the included doc:
Medusa isn't going to help you catch smart anonymous posters, it will only detect ignorant ones. Why? Because smart anonymous posters will feed all their personal posts to Medusa, and then before posting any anonymous posts, they will check their posts with Medusa to help them change their posts enough so that Medusa will not be able to tell that they wrote it. This is the true purpose of Medusa, to strengthen the anonymity afforded to us by anonymous remailers, and not to help take it away from us.
It's alpha code. Back when I originally found it (circa 1996), I emailed the authors to see if they had any updates, but they denied any intent to continue working on it. But -- get this -- it comes with source, so someone might improve upon it. (If anyone wants to continue the work on this, I'm not bad with interface design and I wouldn't mind furthering the development of this code. Contact me through the above email address.)
Disclaimer: as nifty as I personally think this code is, I am the most amateur and self-taught of linguists; its results might be pure bunk. Additionally, I don't remember the relationship of the code authors to the cypherpunk group, so no endorsements other than my own should be assumed.
Also Disclaimer: obtaining this code is left as an exercise to the reader. It's out there, and if you're savvy enough to operate the thing, you're savvy enough to locate it, as well. It took me about ten lazy minutes to discover it yesterday, when this topic reminded me of its existence. This disclaimer shall be negated for all inquiries including offers of Corn Chex cereal, Sam Adams beer, and Battlestar Galactica posters.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what you mean. The only time I have to close programs is when I reboot -- which happens very rarely.
Yeah, definitely an amazing program. As far as screen for X, your problem could perhaps be solved by using X on top of VNC? Or launching subsequent X sessions on different terminals, accessible with CTRL+ALT+F8, etc? The former lets you connect to your X session from anywhere on the network; the latter allows multiple people to have totally separate yet concurrent X sessions. You can't both access them at the same time (unless you hook up multiple peripherals), but now you don't need to log off so your wife can run X with her pretty background and fancy window manager.
If X crashes -- which I find slightly rare now that I'm mostly done tweaking it -- have you tried hitting CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to summarily kill the X process? Have you tried using CTRL+ALT+F1 or +F2 to access a command line virtual terminal, from which you can kill the offending program? Lastly, if none of these work, chances are you can SSH in from another machine on your network and clean up that way.
Agreed, and vehemently so. I guess you can chalk this up to the advantage of the open source model and other related modern buzzwords. When you've got thousands of people developing an OS and window environment from every point on the globe, standards are tough. I would love all windowing bits and keyboard navigation to be perfectly consistent. I dunno if we'll ever get there, though.
See earlier comment about multiple concurrent X sessions.
Hope some of this helps.
And for the record, half of the NICs used were PC-Card/PCMCIA.
The document that I've seen for uncapping cable modems directly negates your above idea by having the uncapper's "shadow" TFTP server appear to be the ISP's TFTP server -- I believe by getting it in the cable modem's ARP cache before the "legimate" TFTP server upon bootup, at which point the cable modem happily snarfs down the modified, uncapped config file across the uncapper's internal LAN. Now you're uncapped and free to summon the FBI guys at will.
And it didn't look all that difficult, either: a fun Sunday afternoon exercise for your average with-it geek. Not that I'm about to try it out on my main connection to the Internet, though.
RenderMonkey is the work of my buddy Chris and an ATI colleague of his named Drew. They're a brilliant pair of dudes who deserve all the glory they get.
Chris also works with me and a few other gifted fools on a fine web project called Megarad, available here. He's not been around much lately; now I know why.
Good work, you guys!
A few months ago, I undertook a single-man campaign to get Slash up and running so I could help realize a goal I and a few friends had together -- a goal that was conceived long before "blog" was a household term. Before "E/N" was a common site format, even.
;)
So I broke down, bought O'Reilly's MySQL/mSQL book, got the Slash code, installed all the various bits and pieces. I was struck almost immediately by the profound lack of decent, in-depth information. Not knowing PERL, and not being a SQL wizard, there were many places where I had to put everything aside and go do something else for a few hours.
As my girlfriend was gone for the week, I was able to pretty much devote every waking minute to getting this thing up and running.
I don't remember how long it took me to get everything in place. Two full days, at least -- and by "full," I mean morning-to-morning shifts of hacking, tweaking, install, uninstalling, praying, urinating on various altars, etc.
In any case, eventually everything was up and running. I should note here that the fastest machine I personally own is a 233mHz with a bit more than 128 MB of RAM; I was trying to run this thing off a p166 with 72 MB of RAM. It seemed sensible at the time, since Linux, when properly tuned, can work wonders. Plus, the site was meant to be fairly low-traffic, at least at first.
Well, ha-ha.
This thing was dog-slow. With all the PERL munging and SQL queries running on the same box, even just me using it from a different machine was roughly as enjoyable as beating myself in my own damn face with a small but dense brick.
Enter PHPNuke, circa version 5.1. The reason you hear people report over and over "it's a ten-minute install" is because, well, it is. Add an hour or so for exploration, bug-checking, tweaking, maybe a day if you want to really cook up a nice theme, and that's pretty much it. Additionally, it's extremely fast on my old hardware.
Granted: PHPNUke doesn't offer Slash's myriad of configuration and control options -- but then, for me, finding documentation for those options was itself an adventure. On the other hand, PHPNuke's documentation and support resources are many and varied, and almost all in French or some other god-awful thing for an American to see at 3:15 AM when something is suddenly mysteriously breaking. However, there are various IRC channels (which are a bit less populated than #slash, to be honest) wherein one may find helpful folks who run a roughly 1 in 10 chance of speaking a language you do. The installed userbase is large enough that any bug you may encounter is almost certain to be reported elsewhere, possibly with a fix already in the works.
The upshot: PHPNuke saved the day! Slash is cool, but, in my opinion, only for those of you who have a serious userbase and plenty of hardware budget.
The site I and my friends eventually got running -- Megarad.com -- is now running PHPNuke 5.4. Apart from a few hiccoughs here and there with upgrades (not to mention the deplorable operating practices and customer service standard of our hoster), things have been very good indeed.
So don't tell them. Pretend your machine wasn't ghosted, present your problem, and if it comes out one way or another that the machine was ghosted, thank the tech and hang the hell up.
My last gig at a fairly sizable company (~35,000 users) was largely spent replacing the then-current ultra-flaky Ghosting process with a honest-to-gosh, real-live dynamic install. That is to say, an NT Unattended Install. If you've never seen one of these, they're pretty cool. Our work allowed you to
If nothing crazy went wrong, you'd now have a machine with the approved OS, with all corporate security and usability policies applied, plus whatever apps were specified through the DOS menu -- Lotus Notes, Office, PCAnywhere, IE6, integration with Microsoft's SMS, IBM's PCom, whatever, all configured to meet that particular geographic region's specifications. Pretty sweet.
And it worked on a huge number of combinations of hardware. Last time I remember looking at the compliance chart, there were about thirty machines (laptop, desktop, and a few handheld types) interoperating with almost as many NICs (ISA, PCI, PC Card -- Token Ring and Ethernet).
Of course, this took several years and substantial from some of Microsoft's top consultants to build and (almost) perfect, and suffered a number of false starts. About the time I was ready to seek other employment, there was a rumble around the company that imaging was going to come back, which sounded patently ridiculous at the time, but is maybe less so with some of the more modern imaging packages.
Either way, I learned a hell of a lot there -- and I have a feeling this sort of top-down control would be easier and more fun on Unix or Linux.
Just another fine example of technology you won't get to play with working at your local mom-and-pop ISP, or in all but the most ambitious basement tinkering.
Whoa. How did I get started on all that? Anyway...
I didn't praise it "fleetingly." I praised it succinctly. That is, anyone who didn't care to read into my pages of nitpicking minutiae is able to gather the gist of my feelings in one short paragraph. There are many reasons to do this; one of them is to alleviate the risk of just such miscomprehension as you display.
As for lambasting its shortcomings in great detail, well, I cared about this movie. I loved the books. Me and a billion other random scifi geeks all waited anxiously to see how it would work out. As I made abundantly clear in the comment, I liked the movie. Hell, I loved it. Did I have a few reservations about it after seeing it? Yes.
I didn't "grudgingly admit" anything, nor did I claim to be unable to remember any of the good stuff. I saved the good stuff for last, because I genuinely respect the work done on this movie (which is more than I can say for your feeble, anonymous comment). What I couldn't remember -- and what will become clear to you if you actually give it a real read -- is that there is plenty of good stuff. What I couldn't remember were the two ways in which the movie improved on the book.
Yes, I remembered the stuff I didn't like "clear as day." This seems to trouble you; I have little idea why, and I care less. In any case, you have your own issues to work out.
And you, my sallow-faced random idiot, have illiterate jackass disease. Here's to you encysting!
Hear, hear. I detested that part. It was everything I had hoped the movie wouldn't be: schlocky, unbelievable, and ugly. It screams Disney-style pandering. The bit in the beginning where Frodo mistrusts Gandalf's intentions for a bit was just as bad, although shorter and less cartoony.
In the book, these moments were described in a manner that forced the reader to visualize his own scene. I realize Jackson et.al. probably had a tough time transferring this to the screen -- and that I am no director -- but wouldn't it have been simpler, purer, and more in line with the noble grace of the book itself to have the actor actually *act* "foreboding and terrible," or "titanic and angered," or whatever? Even a narrowed brow and a stilted voice would have sufficed for me. As it was, there are now two legitimately cringe-worthy moments in this piece of film, which I otherwise loved.
I wrote more on this here.
Well, speak up then! The guy doing the documentary is nothing if not open to comments and information. If you were to email him and let him know what a thriving portion of the BBS subculture the art scene was, I'd be profoundly surprised if he didn't incorporate it.
In fact, this is such a good idea I've just had that I'm going to make sure he finds out. The cool thing about the art scene is that it's a visual medium, so it'll be perfect for the film. We might see some good shit popping up onscreen!
That whole art scene back in the day was well beyond my skills; I was more into learning the details of the phone system, etc. But to me, art was like magic, and it pretty much still is.
Anyway, I was lucky enough a few years ago to meet one of the old-schoolers from that scene. He has some printouts of ASCII and ANSI art that are just amazing.
Today, we've got a little website together. It's fun, and keeps me reminded quite often of the good things about the old days.
has already sent every one of my fellow employees all over the globe 27 copies of this thing.
.scr.
It's been going on for over two hours now. I can't help but wonder if he's still over there trying to run that damn
Thanks, boss.
on Anthrax over here. It's well-written, concise, and debunks a lot of the current Anthrax hype in a very sensible way.
Not terribly on-topic, but definitely related.
These are interesting articles, and I agree with some of this guy's ideas, but he's resting on his laurels if he thinks he can make such widely-sweeping generalizations without actually citing real studies. Sure, he keeps mentioning some study, but where is it? We're not even sure who tested what; all we're really offered is the fact that this guy is really, really sure that the mouse is faster than the keyboard.
He's wrong on that point. In fact -- his illustrious career notwithstanding -- it looks an awful lot like he's got his head just a little bit up his ass.
Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia!
"High-level cognitive function?" "Amnesia?" Those are very weighty terms to be throwing around without serious evidential backup.
For what it's worth, here's how one can use accelerator keys to speed up editing HTML inside Notepad on Windows and intermittently testing it in Netscape:
{make desired changes to HTML inside Notepad}
Alt+F, S
Alt+Tab
F5
{looks good?}
Alt+Tab
{repeat}
I'll leave the tedious mouse-based process as an exercise to whoever can't tell -- just by thinking about it -- how laborious it's going to be. (Claims that my mind is blanking out and I'm thus unable to accurately judge time will be glazed over by "amnesia! Real amnesia!")
If you know how to use proper accelerator keys -- keys such as Page Up, Ctrl+Page Up, Shift+{any cursor key} -- then the mouse loses another presumed advantage: large-field navigatory speed. There's no reason whatsoever to diddle with the scrollbar or thumb in Notepad if I can get to the top of the file in a single two-key keypress.
Now, there are plenty of ways in which a mouse is faster than the keyboard, but I'm not convinced accelerator keys is one of them; I won't be convinced until I'm offered sophisticated cognition studies that prove it. Having someone tell me that I'm experiencing amnesia and am simply "forgetting" how long it takes to do a Ctrl+V to paste some text simply makes me realize how hard it must have been for scientists to listen to "prophets" nod that the Earth was, of course, flat.
Here's one of his ideas that I wholeheartedly agree with:
Guideline: All command-keys should be user-specifiable. The developer can and should supply an initial set, but the user should be able to overrule those choices.
Hear, hear!
Interface design is crucial. This discussion has prompted me to post an article about this over on Megarad. Hopefully, it'll generate some more good debate, and we'll all get a little smarter about it.
NT4. Go back and re-read. Then post as something other than an AC -- perhaps "gay crab" would be a creative nickname?
I won't bother going into how XP is a gross subset of 2k, as it would apparently be lost on you. Suffice to say, it is. And, guess what? I think it's crude and unattractive. Prove me wrong. This time, I expect slightly better comprehension, both of this post and of the subject at hand.
(In the interest of all-out disclosure, this comment is an edited form of one I posted here yesterday.)
I've seen the new face of Windows, and it's AOL by Microsoft. Avoid it like the plague it's rapidly becoming part of.
In the interest of marketability, I've tried to make a history of being able to support all reasonably modern versions of Windows. Windows 3.1, I know. Windows 9x, I'm very very good at. Nt 3.5x, yeah. NT 4, I'm the kung-fu master. 2000, I dig and am one good long study of AD away from being better than anyone else in my company, including the guys in charge of the AD.
Windows ME? XP? No thanks. My Microsoft OS support track stops here. I don't want to support it. I don't want to learn it. Anyone running it, I don't want to be involved with. It's ugly, it's stupid, and I can't really believe it's meant to be directional for anyone but people who would use AOL otherwise. It certainly has no place in a serious computing environment, in my opinion.
The rate at which Microsoft continues to pump out new operating systems shows they really are doing it all for the nookie. Compare and contrast Windows 95 and Windows 98. What was in 98 that shouldn't have been a free upgrade to 95, based on what the majority of computer-savvy people seem to consider reasonable software practice?
They're doing the same thing with their MCSE exams; dump out five times as many as are necessary, knowing somewhere, some buzzword-boggled boss will pay for a class or two just to be on the safe side, or to be compliant with whatever new decision has come down the pike from the VIPs on high.
Don't get me wrong: I'm sure XP has some cool features. It almost has to, by definition -- not even Microsoft is bold enough to dump out a "new" OS without adding something innovative or worthwhile. The install technology, in particular, is pretty cool -- but, just like the majority of the other "improvements" in XP, it doesn't really solve any problems for which there are not already excellent solutions.
The point is that they've not keyed their special enhanced behaviors to respond to certain states the Quake3 code brings about, but to the actual name of the executable, and the strings found therein.
That alone, in my mind, smacks heavily of benchmark shenanigans.
If they were to optimize their driver for certain intensive routines within the Quake3 code, that might well be a controversial move, but it at least would be an above-board one, and one clearly based on their target audience's focus.
To check the name of the file being run, or to munge for strings inside the executable, seems perverse and shady.
It's my understanding, given to me by a top Microsoft consultant (this guy was a fricking wizard), that service packs only replace files that actually exist on the target computer; that is to say, if you don't use, for instance, some Novell DLLs, they don't get placed onto your system.
Now, while Compaq or whoever are handing you a custom solution, they're not handing you custom code, are they? They don't rewrite lsass.exe, for instance, right? So whatever combination of Microsoft code they give you should be detected and updated properly by the logic in the service pack. Or so it seems to me at first blush.
Like I said, please correct me anywhere I've screwed up.
-vasudeva,
parenting http://users.downcity.net/~vasudeva/,
helping birth http://www.megarad.com
Why don't all you stingy motherfucks buy us something nice?
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Yeah, I'd love to help. Preferably in the concept-and-design department, although my HTML skills aren't too rusty if that's where help would be most useful.
I miss freeboxen. I have the dubious distinction of having claimed one of the first few pieces of hardware offered on it: a video card the site owner, jlincoln, was trying to get rid of to help get the donation ball rolling. I never used it. I've got it wrapped here in plastic, and every couple of hours I unwrap it and kiss it, and kiss it, and kiss it.
That's not exactly true, I guess: I promptly threw it in an old, dusty-ass P120 and haven't gotten around to shoehorning FreeBSD on it...
Damn, I loved freeboxen, though, which is essentially the reason I'd like to help you make swapboxen a reality.
Werd.
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I tracked it down and played with it a bit -- its purpose is to help determine how much similarity a given anonymous message contains to a series of posts by a known author. If the resulting number is high, it indicates a likelihood that the anonymous post was, in fact, written by that known author. This is to keep people from generating 'tentacles of medusa,' and engaging in pseudoanonymity.
To quote from the included doc:
It's alpha code. Back when I originally found it (circa 1996), I emailed the authors to see if they had any updates, but they denied any intent to continue working on it. But -- get this -- it comes with source , so someone might improve upon it. (If anyone wants to continue the work on this, I'm not bad with interface design and I wouldn't mind furthering the development of this code. Contact me through the above email address.)
Disclaimer: as nifty as I personally think this code is, I am the most amateur and self-taught of linguists; its results might be pure bunk. Additionally, I don't remember the relationship of the code authors to the cypherpunk group, so no endorsements other than my own should be assumed.
Also Disclaimer: obtaining this code is left as an exercise to the reader. It's out there, and if you're savvy enough to operate the thing, you're savvy enough to locate it, as well. It took me about ten lazy minutes to discover it yesterday, when this topic reminded me of its existence. This disclaimer shall be negated for all inquiries including offers of Corn Chex cereal, Sam Adams beer, and Battlestar Galactica posters.
Word.
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