Instead of going ahead with the Delta Clipper, which had working flight tested hardware, they went with the more expensive, riskier, technology of the Lockhead Martin X-33
Not to mention that the DC-X was balls-on cooler looking*, and just plain cooler, than the lumpen Lockheed effort. It looked like a real spaceship.
If they're not going to effectively provide space-access, I'd at least like them to fail with style.
Maybe we should contract NASA out to Italy...
* I'm not sure that `balls-on' is actually a real superlative, but it sounded good at the time
Which is not to say I thought the plot was good for a movie.. it isn't. All I'm saying is games and movies are very different at a core level as far as what story-telling techniques can and should be used, and Square ignored that difference at their own peril.
I think it's also the case that standards are simply lower for game (RPG) plots. You often don't notice as much, because the interactivity sort of grabs you and sweeps you along, but really, if you think about them afterwards, the plots are usually very simplistic and overly melodramatic, and the characters crudely drawn (in the story-telling sense, not the art!).
[But -- silly me -- I still seem to play them anyway...:-]
Re:What about bitter/loner Sims?
on
Virtual Simerica
·
· Score: 2
Because, of course, everything Michael Moore says is true.
Well, certainly much of what he says is true.
It's much more likely that "society" is simply indifferent towards "loners", since the one is about social interaction and the other... isn't.
Sure, but it's more than that, I think. Society tends to be hostile towards anyone who's different, because they challege (perhaps implicitly) the status-quo into which most people have a lot invested. And loners are `different.'
I think the basic point is that they chop down the nice trees (old growth forest) and plant sucky trees (if you've ever seen a tree farm, you'll know what I mean; yech!).
It's like if a company wanted to tear down a bunch of beatiful old stone buildings (which by and large would be far too expensive to build today) to get the stone, and justified it by saying they'd build some tacky prefabs to replace them. Well, great, there's still a roof to protect you from the rain, but wouldn't you feel a bit cheated?
Yeah, salon has some really great stuff -- but they also have huge quantities of crap, and the ratio of good/bad seems much worse than for similar print magazines.
Because of this, I think a micro-payment scheme would be really attractive for readers -- but for the same reason, it might be very bad for salon, if people only payed for 5% of the content!
I have a sort of electronic dictionary thingy that uses the clamshell design -- screen on one half, keyboard on the other. I've owned it for almost nine years, and since I carry it in my backpack and use it constantly, it's beat all to shit: the paint/coating is almost all worn off, the screen is all scratched, the case is cracked, and literally has holes in it (it's well-acquainted with the concept of `flying through the air onto concrete').
The hinge, of all things, still works perfectly -- both mechanically and electronically.
So while I think you're certainly right that moving parts are more likely to be a problem than non-moving parts, it seems that making them durable is quite possible, and since such designs usually offer some nice advantages, it's a reasonable tradeoff in many cases.
Take note that Linus decided to remind us nine times that it is his tree. I am a big fan of Linux, but not so much of Linus. The way he wrote that letter made him seem a bit childish.
I think if you read the entire thread (in the LKML) to which he was responding, you might be a bit less critical.
Basically people were bitching and moaning endlessly because Linus hadn't taken their patches, and he had already responded in less explicit terms trying to tell them why -- but some still didn't seem to get it. This post was Linus getting fed up and explaining his position in a way that no one could fail to understand.
BTW, I should note that this is one huge advantage of the aforementioned embedded systems -- the reset vector jumps directly to the kernel in ROM, no BIOS at all. Just about the only thing it does before the generic linux startup is write a few critical control registers (memory refresh etc) and copy the kernel's data segment to RAM.
I guess you can tell, I really get a kick out of pressing the reset button and BAM! up pops a shell prompt...:-)
Well, it's just like any linux system, I've configured in those drivers that I use -- and in this case, that doesn't include disks:-).... but you're right, the fact that it's not reading stuff off a disk probably accounts for a lot of the speedup.
When my desktop debian systems boot, the major obvious time hogs during initial startup I've noticed are:
BIOS
X + Gnome stuff
Postfix
(1) is by far the worst, and is probably mostly unnecessary; I assume it's caused by 15-year-old crap legacy code + ultra-conservative operation (long timeouts etc) intended to deal with crap legacy devices. (2) I guess is unavoidable (right now anyway); X & Gnome are just big bloated systems. (3) Confuses me, I don't know why a MTA takes so long to start up (though I love Postfix generally); probably whatever it's doing could be safely done in the background though.
I think a desktop system that just got rid of the legacy BIOS and used something a bit more reasonable would be much more pleasant to boot...
This thing is fantastic. It's amazing the things you can fit into 50 megs - basically every command line program you'd want except Emacs and man pages, plus minimal X support.
Geez, only one more zero and they could have fit in emacs too....
You're entitled to your opinion, and surely lots of people agree with you.
However, speaking as an American who grew up in our car-oriented society, and have also spent a significant amount of time living in countries with better public transportation, I can confidently say that cars really, really, suck. Well, not the cars themselves, but the effect they have on the structure of our cities, and lifestyles.
Sure, they're great if you have to move something heavy, or the weather's horrible, or you live on a farm, but they have one huge glaring flaw, and it's not the pollution they produce or the energy they consume; the basic problem with cars is they take too much space.
If only a few people own cars, it doesn't matter, and it's great for those people who own them. But when everybody owns them, they start to take over; the entire physical landscape starts to be focused on providing for cars, and the loser is almost always people.
The American `solution' to this problem has been generally to decrease population density. Now, whether this his good or not is a personal things (some people like cities, some don't), but the low-density resulting from cars is more often than not a twisted, ugly, sort of thing -- you know what I'm talking about, every road 8-lanes and endless strip-malls -- rather than the Arcadia that people seem to have imagined during the 50s.
Anyway, think what you will; I've seen both sides, and I'm behind public transportation 100%.
So time-to-load is significant when your OS does so much. SOLOS might load in nanoseconds but it doesn't do what a modern OS does.
Hmmm, well, how about linux? My embedded boards boot linux (2.4.x or 2.5.x) to a shell in less than a second -- and much of that time seems to be the timing loop that computes `bogomips' and the time required to send all the boot messages to the serial console (running at 115200 baud).
[oh, also, these boards are pretty pokey, by modern standards: the fastest one has a 200MHz processor, the slowest 50MHz (the latter with no cache, and lots of wait-states for main memory access!)]
Re:so XFree86 = usage stattistics?
on
The End Of Minix?
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· Score: 2
Everything else you could argue, but not the web.
You can argue about anything...:-)
But seriously, it's simply not true that the web is a `GUI only' experience.
Sure, lynx is pretty sucky, but there are much better text-mode browsers out there, such as `links' and `w3m'.
In fact, I usually use `links' in an xterm even though I'm running under X, simply because it's much faster, and in my estimation, gives me a better `web experience' (and my machine isn't slow either)! The one thing that's got me using Mozilla again these days is tabbed browsing (sure it's a simple, almost trivial idea, but boy tabs are handy).
There are always going to be sites out that aren't usable unless you have a graphical browser -- but at least today, the majority of those I use work just fine (and often are actually better) with a reasonable text-mode browser.
Morever, those sites that are `graphical only' quite often suck even with a graphical browser (you know the sort, each page a single GIF, or composed entirely of a giant flash animation; yuck!).
Re:Installation not so hard -- and not so importan
on
Libranet 2.7 Released
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure how much better this could be done. A developers task that does not include a GUI library seems lacking; and GUI library will logically depend on X stuff.
I'm not sure I agree about the `no GUI library == lacking', but...
It would be nice if there could be automatically-derived tasks, e.g., `install x-developer if the developer and x tasks are both selected'.
Re:This may be new in the USA
on
Shop Till It Drops
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yeah, Japan's the place for this sort of thing.
Besides the ones you often hear about (porn, etc), some wierd ones I've seen in japan include:
A machine selling cookies & other snacks -- not the usual little packs, but huge family-sized boxes; the delivery-door was about 15" x 15"!
A machine selling full-sized bottles of Whisky (all japanese brands though)
... and my favorite:
A machine selling potted plants -- fairly large, leafy ones (like a foot high), complete with a big clay flowerpot. It looked like it had a fairly elaborate mechanism to deliver the plants to a little door (well actually a pretty big door) without harming them.
The wierd thing is that all of the above were not in obvious `specialty' locations (e.g., near a nursery for the plants), but just in front of fairly average train stations, or just on the street in the middle of nowhere!
Things don't seem to work the way you describe in practice. That is, there seems almost no connection between software innovation and patents.
By and large, the most patents seem to be gotten by huge corporations (who have both the resources to deal with patenting, and the extra motivation because of the `patent portfolio' concept), but they don't seem to be churning out revolutionary algorithms; since they do get patents, you can see what this implies about the quality of those patents! Whatever edge software from such companies has, is mostly due simply to the large amount of resources they have to polish it.
Morever, there is a vibrant culture of software innovation among those who usually don't patent software, e.g., academia and the free-software community.
Given the clearly harmful effects of software patents, this suggests that the current software patent system, by and large, simply doesn't work as intended.
I think there are situations where software patents are appropriate, for particularly revolutionary and hard-won algorithms. The suggestion made in other comments that they should just raise the bar substantially, is a good one.
There are also areas in which there seem (to my inexpert eye) to be more `valid' patents, e.g., fields like computer graphics.
[note that to my eternal shame, I hold a software patent; I consider it a good example of a patent that probably shouldn't have been granted (in two countries!)...]
In real workplace, its "a un-managable and difficult person"
I think as long as you're a decent employee, that's not really true. Certainly every time I've chosen to make a stand at work, my boss has backed down and said `OK' -- and that has even been the case in extremely low-level jobs (e.g., washing dishes at a restaurant one summer).
Um, in what sense did janet become part of the internet? As I understand it, `the internet' refers to the linking of a bunch of disparate local- and wide-area networks all using a common set of protocols (TCP/IP etc), but I thought that janet was basically a completely home-grown UK network that was pretty much incompatible with anyone else, and which eventually died.
I worked at a british university in the early 90s, and we were connected via janet to other universities in the UK. It had its own clients, protocols, etc., and it all sucked. It really, really sucked -- it was slow, dysfunctional, and horribly inconvenient, even for the simple needs I had (file transfer, some remote access, etc), and I was amazed that anyone would put up with it. As I found out later, there were actually regulations which forbade using anything except janet.
During my time there, the pressure to change made adoption of standard internet protocols and connectivity increasingly possible, though that didn't really happen until after I had left.
So... what role did janet play in the internet (I really am curious; perhaps there's more to it than I realize)? Did they just throw out all the old protocols but keep the name `janet'?
Wonder when Linus will get tired of "tar"? After all, its about as standard as "dump" is in any UNIX distribution. Maybe some file buffer cache change will render tar unusable, and we'll be told to use say.. dd? Or maybe cat.
Um, do you understand the difference between dump and tar?
Tar (and cpio, etc.), works via the normal user filesystem interface, which is very stable and well-defined. Dump, on the other hand, looks at the underlying disk, and so is extremely sensitive to changes in the way the filesystem works. As a result, it's not very robust (though it can be speedy).
Linus's advice is very good. Hopefully dump will just go away altogether; its time has gone.
Ok, well I realize that part of the grammar police's job (whoo, note the apostrophe!) is to be mindlessly pedantic and constantly out of touch with how people actually use language, but c'mon (again!) -- `A foo's a foo' is a common everyday idiom that even you can't (!) have missed.
Methinks you've (...) been spending too much time down at the linguistic donut shop (overindulging in ripe, sweaty, heaving adjectives)....
Well, if you wish it to, how about some evidence that it's wrong? Otherwise there's no reason to value your statement over common wisdom, which is that MS is losing a buttload of money on the xbox hardware.
Small correction: The name is `Happy Hacking Keyboard'.
(n.b. I'm pretty sure the name `Happy Hacking' was inspired by RMS -- it's one of his typical parting phrases, and the manufacturer gave him a free keyboard...)
The newest H.H. keyboard model includes -- gasp! -- arrow keys, which add.4 inch to the size (though they're pretty minimal, kind of like the small arrow keys you often find on laptops)! Completely unnecessary, IMO; I'm very happy using the FN-key on my H.H. to get arrow keys and home/end/&c when I need them.
... and as we all know, MS Word is an entirely unreadable format. Come on... openoffice does a fine job at readin Word files, for instance - they're not perfect filters, but for reading a document you don't need the layout to be 100% perfect do you?
`Fine job'? The latest time I needed to view a word document, it happened to be written in Japanese, and used tables. Now, openoffice claims to support Japanese, but in this case, only managed to display about 1% of the text correctly. 1%!
Morever, it's perfectly reasonable to hold a government body to higher standards than an average company -- the government is supposed to think about more than just convenience (read the recent letter from the Peruvian congressman for a more eloquent take on this). There are many more universal formats out there, which at least are documented well enough so that people can write proper viewers for them (e.g., PDF, RTF, HTML, text files...).
[If there's a better way to view word files without word, I'd appreciate some pointers, incidentally. Antiword and openoffice seem to do OK on simple docs, but...]
Wind River chairman of the board and co-founder Jerry Fiddler told EE Times that the company no longer considers Linux to be a strong presence in the embedded market. "Linux is a phantasm," he said. "Software isn't free, and companies are beginning to realize that."
If anyone knows the embedded arena, it's Wind River.
Yeah, but if anyone has a vested interest in casting doubt upon embedded Linux, it's also Wind River...
Note, I'm not saying they're intentionally spreading FUD, just to take what they say with a grain of salt -- they're hardly an impartial observer!
[for anyone who doesn't know, W.R. is one of the biggest (the biggest?) vendors of proprietary embedded OSs]
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of going ahead with the Delta Clipper, which had working flight tested hardware, they went with the more expensive, riskier, technology of the Lockhead Martin X-33
Not to mention that the DC-X was balls-on cooler looking*, and just plain cooler, than the lumpen Lockheed effort. It looked like a real spaceship.
If they're not going to effectively provide space-access, I'd at least like them to fail with style.
Maybe we should contract NASA out to Italy...
* I'm not sure that `balls-on' is actually a real superlative, but it sounded good at the time
Which is not to say I thought the plot was good for a movie.. it isn't. All I'm saying is games and movies are very different at a core level as far as what story-telling techniques can and should be used, and Square ignored that difference at their own peril.
:-]
I think it's also the case that standards are simply lower for game (RPG) plots. You often don't notice as much, because the interactivity sort of grabs you and sweeps you along, but really, if you think about them afterwards, the plots are usually very simplistic and overly melodramatic, and the characters crudely drawn (in the story-telling sense, not the art!).
[But -- silly me -- I still seem to play them anyway...
Because, of course, everything Michael Moore says is true.
Well, certainly much of what he says is true.
It's much more likely that "society" is simply indifferent towards "loners", since the one is about social interaction and the other... isn't.
Sure, but it's more than that, I think. Society tends to be hostile towards anyone who's different, because they challege (perhaps implicitly) the status-quo into which most people have a lot invested. And loners are `different.'
I think the basic point is that they chop down the nice trees (old growth forest) and plant sucky trees (if you've ever seen a tree farm, you'll know what I mean; yech!).
It's like if a company wanted to tear down a bunch of beatiful old stone buildings (which by and large would be far too expensive to build today) to get the stone, and justified it by saying they'd build some tacky prefabs to replace them. Well, great, there's still a roof to protect you from the rain, but wouldn't you feel a bit cheated?
In translation: ...
Well, OK, that paragraph doesn't actually contain any information, but I suppose the impression it's supposed to induce is: `Trust us.'
Great.
Yeah, salon has some really great stuff -- but they also have huge quantities of crap, and the ratio of good/bad seems much worse than for similar print magazines.
Because of this, I think a micro-payment scheme would be really attractive for readers -- but for the same reason, it might be very bad for salon, if people only payed for 5% of the content!
I have a sort of electronic dictionary thingy that uses the clamshell design -- screen on one half, keyboard on the other. I've owned it for almost nine years, and since I carry it in my backpack and use it constantly, it's beat all to shit: the paint/coating is almost all worn off, the screen is all scratched, the case is cracked, and literally has holes in it (it's well-acquainted with the concept of `flying through the air onto concrete').
The hinge, of all things, still works perfectly -- both mechanically and electronically.
So while I think you're certainly right that moving parts are more likely to be a problem than non-moving parts, it seems that making them durable is quite possible, and since such designs usually offer some nice advantages, it's a reasonable tradeoff in many cases.
Take note that Linus decided to remind us nine times that it is his tree. I am a big fan of Linux, but not so much of Linus. The way he wrote that letter made him seem a bit childish.
I think if you read the entire thread (in the LKML) to which he was responding, you might be a bit less critical.
Basically people were bitching and moaning endlessly because Linus hadn't taken their patches, and he had already responded in less explicit terms trying to tell them why -- but some still didn't seem to get it. This post was Linus getting fed up and explaining his position in a way that no one could fail to understand.
BTW, I should note that this is one huge advantage of the aforementioned embedded systems -- the reset vector jumps directly to the kernel in ROM, no BIOS at all. Just about the only thing it does before the generic linux startup is write a few critical control registers (memory refresh etc) and copy the kernel's data segment to RAM.
:-)
I guess you can tell, I really get a kick out of pressing the reset button and BAM! up pops a shell prompt...
When my desktop debian systems boot, the major obvious time hogs during initial startup I've noticed are:
(1) is by far the worst, and is probably mostly unnecessary; I assume it's caused by 15-year-old crap legacy code + ultra-conservative operation (long timeouts etc) intended to deal with crap legacy devices. (2) I guess is unavoidable (right now anyway); X & Gnome are just big bloated systems. (3) Confuses me, I don't know why a MTA takes so long to start up (though I love Postfix generally); probably whatever it's doing could be safely done in the background though.
I think a desktop system that just got rid of the legacy BIOS and used something a bit more reasonable would be much more pleasant to boot...
This thing is fantastic. It's amazing the things you can fit into 50 megs - basically every command line program you'd want except Emacs and man pages, plus minimal X support.
Geez, only one more zero and they could have fit in emacs too....
You're entitled to your opinion, and surely lots of people agree with you.
However, speaking as an American who grew up in our car-oriented society, and have also spent a significant amount of time living in countries with better public transportation, I can confidently say that cars really, really, suck. Well, not the cars themselves, but the effect they have on the structure of our cities, and lifestyles.
Sure, they're great if you have to move something heavy, or the weather's horrible, or you live on a farm, but they have one huge glaring flaw, and it's not the pollution they produce or the energy they consume; the basic problem with cars is they take too much space.
If only a few people own cars, it doesn't matter, and it's great for those people who own them. But when everybody owns them, they start to take over; the entire physical landscape starts to be focused on providing for cars, and the loser is almost always people.
The American `solution' to this problem has been generally to decrease population density. Now, whether this his good or not is a personal things (some people like cities, some don't), but the low-density resulting from cars is more often than not a twisted, ugly, sort of thing -- you know what I'm talking about, every road 8-lanes and endless strip-malls -- rather than the Arcadia that people seem to have imagined during the 50s.
Anyway, think what you will; I've seen both sides, and I'm behind public transportation 100%.
So time-to-load is significant when your OS does so much. SOLOS might load in nanoseconds but it doesn't do what a modern OS does.
Hmmm, well, how about linux? My embedded boards boot linux (2.4.x or 2.5.x) to a shell in less than a second -- and much of that time seems to be the timing loop that computes `bogomips' and the time required to send all the boot messages to the serial console (running at 115200 baud).
[oh, also, these boards are pretty pokey, by modern standards: the fastest one has a 200MHz processor, the slowest 50MHz (the latter with no cache, and lots of wait-states for main memory access!)]
Everything else you could argue, but not the web.
:-)
You can argue about anything...
But seriously, it's simply not true that the web is a `GUI only' experience.
Sure, lynx is pretty sucky, but there are much better text-mode browsers out there, such as `links' and `w3m'.
In fact, I usually use `links' in an xterm even though I'm running under X, simply because it's much faster, and in my estimation, gives me a better `web experience' (and my machine isn't slow either)! The one thing that's got me using Mozilla again these days is tabbed browsing (sure it's a simple, almost trivial idea, but boy tabs are handy).
There are always going to be sites out that aren't usable unless you have a graphical browser -- but at least today, the majority of those I use work just fine (and often are actually better) with a reasonable text-mode browser.
Morever, those sites that are `graphical only' quite often suck even with a graphical browser (you know the sort, each page a single GIF, or composed entirely of a giant flash animation; yuck!).
I'm not sure how much better this could be done. A developers task that does not include a GUI library seems lacking; and GUI library will logically depend on X stuff.
...
I'm not sure I agree about the `no GUI library == lacking', but
It would be nice if there could be automatically-derived tasks, e.g., `install x-developer if the developer and x tasks are both selected'.
Besides the ones you often hear about (porn, etc), some wierd ones I've seen in japan include:
- A machine selling potted plants -- fairly large, leafy ones (like a foot high), complete with a big clay flowerpot. It looked like it had a fairly elaborate mechanism to deliver the plants to a little door (well actually a pretty big door) without harming them.
The wierd thing is that all of the above were not in obvious `specialty' locations (e.g., near a nursery for the plants), but just in front of fairly average train stations, or just on the street in the middle of nowhere!I do not understand...
Monopoly bad. Capitalism good. Intellectual property theft bad. Innovation good. Secrets bad. Patents all good.
... no.
Got it?
Well,
Things don't seem to work the way you describe in practice. That is, there seems almost no connection between software innovation and patents.
By and large, the most patents seem to be gotten by huge corporations (who have both the resources to deal with patenting, and the extra motivation because of the `patent portfolio' concept), but they don't seem to be churning out revolutionary algorithms; since they do get patents, you can see what this implies about the quality of those patents! Whatever edge software from such companies has, is mostly due simply to the large amount of resources they have to polish it.
Morever, there is a vibrant culture of software innovation among those who usually don't patent software, e.g., academia and the free-software community.
Given the clearly harmful effects of software patents, this suggests that the current software patent system, by and large, simply doesn't work as intended.
I think there are situations where software patents are appropriate, for particularly revolutionary and hard-won algorithms. The suggestion made in other comments that they should just raise the bar substantially, is a good one.
There are also areas in which there seem (to my inexpert eye) to be more `valid' patents, e.g., fields like computer graphics.
[note that to my eternal shame, I hold a software patent; I consider it a good example of a patent that probably shouldn't have been granted (in two countries!)...]
In real workplace, its "a un-managable and difficult person"
I think as long as you're a decent employee, that's not really true. Certainly every time I've chosen to make a stand at work, my boss has backed down and said `OK' -- and that has even been the case in extremely low-level jobs (e.g., washing dishes at a restaurant one summer).
[If you're an idiot of course, all bets are off!]
Um, in what sense did janet become part of the internet? As I understand it, `the internet' refers to the linking of a bunch of disparate local- and wide-area networks all using a common set of protocols (TCP/IP etc), but I thought that janet was basically a completely home-grown UK network that was pretty much incompatible with anyone else, and which eventually died.
I worked at a british university in the early 90s, and we were connected via janet to other universities in the UK. It had its own clients, protocols, etc., and it all sucked. It really, really sucked -- it was slow, dysfunctional, and horribly inconvenient, even for the simple needs I had (file transfer, some remote access, etc), and I was amazed that anyone would put up with it. As I found out later, there were actually regulations which forbade using anything except janet.
During my time there, the pressure to change made adoption of standard internet protocols and connectivity increasingly possible, though that didn't really happen until after I had left.
So... what role did janet play in the internet (I really am curious; perhaps there's more to it than I realize)? Did they just throw out all the old protocols but keep the name `janet'?
Wonder when Linus will get tired of "tar"? After all, its about as standard as "dump" is in any UNIX distribution. Maybe some file buffer cache change will render tar unusable, and we'll be told to use say.. dd? Or maybe cat.
Um, do you understand the difference between dump and tar?
Tar (and cpio, etc.), works via the normal user filesystem interface, which is very stable and well-defined. Dump, on the other hand, looks at the underlying disk, and so is extremely sensitive to changes in the way the filesystem works. As a result, it's not very robust (though it can be speedy).
Linus's advice is very good. Hopefully dump will just go away altogether; its time has gone.
Ok, well I realize that part of the grammar police's job (whoo, note the apostrophe!) is to be mindlessly pedantic and constantly out of touch with how people actually use language, but c'mon (again!) -- `A foo's a foo' is a common everyday idiom that even you can't (!) have missed.
Methinks you've (...) been spending too much time down at the linguistic donut shop (overindulging in ripe, sweaty, heaving adjectives)....
Why the fuck won't this myth die!?
Well, if you wish it to, how about some evidence that it's wrong? Otherwise there's no reason to value your statement over common wisdom, which is that MS is losing a buttload of money on the xbox hardware.
Small correction: The name is `Happy Hacking Keyboard'.
.4 inch to the size (though they're pretty minimal, kind of like the small arrow keys you often find on laptops)! Completely unnecessary, IMO; I'm very happy using the FN-key on my H.H. to get arrow keys and home/end/&c when I need them.
(n.b. I'm pretty sure the name `Happy Hacking' was inspired by RMS -- it's one of his typical parting phrases, and the manufacturer gave him a free keyboard...)
The newest H.H. keyboard model includes -- gasp! -- arrow keys, which add
... and as we all know, MS Word is an entirely unreadable format. Come on... openoffice does a fine job at readin Word files, for instance - they're not perfect filters, but for reading a document you don't need the layout to be 100% perfect do you?
...]
`Fine job'? The latest time I needed to view a word document, it happened to be written in Japanese, and used tables. Now, openoffice claims to support Japanese, but in this case, only managed to display about 1% of the text correctly. 1%!
Morever, it's perfectly reasonable to hold a government body to higher standards than an average company -- the government is supposed to think about more than just convenience (read the recent letter from the Peruvian congressman for a more eloquent take on this). There are many more universal formats out there, which at least are documented well enough so that people can write proper viewers for them (e.g., PDF, RTF, HTML, text files...).
[If there's a better way to view word files without word, I'd appreciate some pointers, incidentally. Antiword and openoffice seem to do OK on simple docs, but
Wind River chairman of the board and co-founder Jerry Fiddler told EE Times that the company no longer considers Linux to be a strong presence in the embedded market. "Linux is a phantasm," he said. "Software isn't free, and companies are beginning to realize that."
If anyone knows the embedded arena, it's Wind River.
Yeah, but if anyone has a vested interest in casting doubt upon embedded Linux, it's also Wind River...
Note, I'm not saying they're intentionally spreading FUD, just to take what they say with a grain of salt -- they're hardly an impartial observer!
[for anyone who doesn't know, W.R. is one of the biggest (the biggest?) vendors of proprietary embedded OSs]