pIRCh is pretty darn good as a Windoze 9x IRC client. Yeah, it's a lot like mIRC but it doesn't suck as bad. However, it seems to not like NT much...I bluescreened an NT box when trying to use it. Never tried it on 2K, but I suspect similar probs there. Another thing wrong with it is that it hasn't been updated in 2 years.
What I want to see is a Windows and Linux version of IRCle. IRCle kicks ass over any Windows or Linux IRC client you want to throw at me. It's a "classic" MacOS program. I wonder if someone's working on a Cocoa or Carbon version of it....
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Mandrake has a Windoze-based installer for those who want to dual-boot. Just put the install disk into a Windoze system and off you go. It uses GrUB to either boot Windoze or Linux. Mandrake kicks Caldera's ass. Caldera puts apps in funky places that most RPMs aren't expecting. Caldera installs weird software you don't need (How many people still need IPX support?) and doesn't install some stuff that's nice to have, like XChat.
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Watch out...AOL Time Warner has the right to make a US TV version of IC...they bought it from Fuji-TV for serious bucks.
Oh yeah, and the premise of the threatened Columbia movie is as follows: "Can a short-order cook rise from the grills of obscurity to defeat the legendary Iron Chef? He'll soon find out amidst a battlefield of heated stove-top burners."
Sounds about as appetizing as a Natto sundae...
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
...tons of old computers which could be rescued using either NetBSD (old Macs) or Linux or Free/Open/NetBSD (old PCs) and made available to the needy are either thrown into landfills or recycled for the miniscule amounts of precious metals contained on their motherboards.
There is still a tax DISINCENTIVE for businesses to do anything BUT junk old computers. At least here in Panorama City, CA, US where I live Goodwill just opened up a very nice computer clearance center. There's one like it in Orange County, CA, US somewhere (Santa Ana?) and I know there's another place like it in Austin, TX, US. Businesses can take charitable tax deductions for donating computers to Goodwill, which are turned around and sold for cheap to people who can't afford new stuff. But the fact is there aren't enough places like this out there.
We should be refurbing old machines and GIVING THEM AWAY. Sure, 386/486en won't run Linux with GNOME or KDE2 well, but they can run in console mode fine and could prolly be coaxed to run X and a low RAM footprint window manager like fwvm95 or ice or something like that.
The computers don't do any good in landfills or melted down for their raw materials. They can do powerful good if they were only refurbished and redistributed. Crappy PCChips/Cyrix-based diskless boxen like those being sold for cheap in Brazil aren't as useful as a good, solid real computer, even one running a 486.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
The group I played with always stressed character development and the fun of interacting with realistic, believable, consistent, well thought out characters. We could write books about some of our characters!
Yeah, but that's not the usual modus operandi in D&D. Usually the goal is to make your character the baddest ass on the block, and to make sure the other characters and/or the Dungeonmaster doesn't stab you in the back. I have never been in worse dysfunctional situations than in the middle of a cutthroat D&D all-nighter.
D&D a non zero-sum game? Shehyeahright!
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
LA's got cheaper real estate, cheaper cost of living, and plenty of qualified geeks looking for work since it seems all the studios are cleaning house on their Interactive Media divisions.
Come to LA, where you can run your servers 24-7 without risk! Who gives a fat rats ass if you run SETI on all the workstations after 5pm? We got POWER, bay-bee! Los Angeles is power self-sufficient and is even selling power to PG&E and SCE! Oh yeah, if you don't like the City of Los Angeles' business tax regs, Burbank and Glendale also have municipal utilities that supply 100% of their own power needs!
Brought to you by the committee to uplift the LA Geek Community.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Konqueror runs all day without crashing as well. Also, If IE is modular at all it surely uses plugins, too.
IE doesn't use plugins. It uses a proprietary architecture with serious security problems called ActiveX. ActiveX Controls, unlike plugins and Java applets, can run hogwild through your Windozer. They are not limited to a "sandbox."
Hostile ActiveX Controls can behave like a system virus. Anyone with a clue turns ActiveX OFF COMPLETELY.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
PCChips motherboards are the bane of installfests everywhere. The PCChips Consortium is a loose affiliation of the worst manufacturers in Taiwan and in the People's Republic of China. Example member: Amptron. They are responsible for hideous abortions like the VXPro chipset, the VXTwo chipset, the TXTwo chipset, ad nauseam.
During a period when I was trying to find a SANE bitty box, I came across ASUS' version. It doesn't come cheap, and it's hard to find, but it's based on the solid-as-a-rock Intel BX chipset and has either a flip-chip socket or a Slot 1 CPU connector.
It would be great if someone did a bitty box based on Socket A and designed for Duron...the Duron would be an ideal chip for such a box.
Anyway...DON'T fsck around with the BookPC! You will live to regret it! Particularly if you want to use it with Linux.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
The Glassbook bit which has been talked about here in the past, and clairified. Read Aloud is to tell the software not to allow voice synths to read the content aloud.
If that's the case, then the Glassbook license violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. If voice synths can't read the content, that shuts out blind people.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
I recently started looking into the matter (by coincidence) and come to find out there are several which simply *will never* be seen again due to ethnic stereotyping and the like. Do a search for 'Tokio Jokio','Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips', and 'All This and Rabbit Stew.' And even more from the pre-looney tunes era (Harmon-Ising) which are even more blatantly so. Should they be shown? A moral dilemna arises. They *should* be available *somewhere* as a matter of history....
Indeed. Actually, it would have been cool if Ken Burns had included "Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarves" (caricature of Cab Calloway as Prince Chawmin', lots of West Coast Swing musicians on the soundtrack) and "Tin Pan Alley Cats" (Protagonist modeled on Fats Waller) as part of the "Jazz" episode covering the WWII years.
Both cartoons, once you get past their very mild and NOT mean-spirited stereotypes, were literally love letters to Jazz by master cartoonist/rabid Jazz fan Bob Clampett. They rock HARD and it's a shame that they are on the official AOL Time Warner "Banned List". The caricatures in the two cartoons were direct caricatures of either famous Jazz musicians Clampett admired or real Jazz musicians Clampett knew because he frequented Swing clubs on Central Ave. in LA when he wasn't cranking out cartoons in Termite Terrace, WB's animated shorts studio.
If you want to see truly mean-spirited, evil stereotypes, watch beloved, celebrated WB cartoonist Chuck Jones' "Angel Puss." Everyone loves Jones and castigates Clampett for "Coal Black" but "Angel Puss" is a cartoon only a KKK Kleagle could love. A stereotypical "pickaninny" boy is given "two bits" to drown a cat. Makes my fsckn skin crawl just thinking about it.
Thing is, you can't judge these cartoons on their merits anymore, because stupid AOL Time Warner is SITTING ON THEM in their vaults. They should grow a backbone and make these cartoons available again.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
1.) Summer 2001: Eva movie is coming out! Don't know which one it is, no details, although I'll lay odds it's Death And Rebirth.
2.)Honneamise is indeed out on DVD. Bilingual Japanese/English, with the remixed soundtrack. It's going on the "gotta get" list...that is, when I have a JOB again, dammit...
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Royal Space Force: The Wings Of Honneamise was the first great opus by the wild gang of Otaku turned animators called Gainax. Gainax later gave us Nadia, the series that some claim the upcoming Disney movie Atlantis is based on, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, the awesome series that has been incredibly influential on everything that came out after it from Japan.
It was sort of like The Right Stuff, but set on a planet where a great conflict not dissimilar to World War II had been raging for decades, not years. Aside from one nonsequitur rape scene which could be excised without screwing up the plot, I believe it could become THE breakthrough movie for Japanese animation in the US. Without that one flash of skin, it's fine for family viewing.
Someone's got to sit Tom Hanks down and get him to see the movie...his love of the history of spaceflight would really get him excited about it. Maybe his Playtone Productions could bankroll a theatrical re-release in the US.
In 1997 Gainax did a 10th Anniversary re-release of Honneamise in Japan. It included THX sound and a remix of the score done by the incomparable Ryuchi Sakamoto. So there is a high-quality digitally remastered version available to work from.
Since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon proved that US audiences WILL sit through a subbed movie if it kicks enough ass, a dub might not be necessary. However, an intelligently-done dub that preserves Sakamoto's score and the sound effects and uses a well-written dubscript (Mononoke Hime is a worthy example...it is lovely prose, although Miyazaki's own translated words are sheer poetry) wouldn't be bad. In fact, Hanks would be a great voice for Shiro Lhadatt, the misfit kid turned fly guy.
I don't know WHO has the rights to Honneamise...I think it's Manga Entertainment but I don't know for sure. But Honneamise is as important, if not MORE important to the history of Japanese Animation than Akira. It deserves an US theatrical rerelease.
Oh yeah, don't get me started about the unavailability Stateside of the two Evangelion movies, Death And Rebirth and End Of Evangelion...
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Anime is also the romanization of the Japanese katakana for the word they use for animation. ----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
First off: love your pseudonym. Nuku Nuku kicks ass.
Second: I have to disagree with your comment about Streamline: not every movie they dubbed got cut. They did a great job on My Neighbor Totoro. They didn't treat Castle Of Cagliostro well, but Totoro was nicely done.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Well here I was, going in here to convey my appreciation that Malda actually said something NICE about BSD, when I hear this crap.
MacOS isn't perfect, but I find it crashes less and allows me to be more productive than when I'm on Windows 9x with its supposed preemptive, multithreaded OS. It's also got more mature apps than Linux. For instance, The GIMP is good but it's no Photoshop.
I'm no newbie.
MacOS X is going to fix all the criticisms you mention. Preemptive Multitasking, Multithreading, xNIX-style memory allocation and task control, etc. And they're even fixing the blasted Aqua interface to work more like classic MacOS. Just watch.
Besides, tell me the G4 Minitower isn't sweet hardware! If you can't stand MacOS, there's always LinuxPPC. Or DebianPPC. Or SuSE PPC. Or Yellow Dog Linux. Or whatever PPC Linux distro you want to run. And the G4 Minitower really kicks ass running under Linux.
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
66mhz 486? Jesus, are you running the Hubble Telescope??
As the wise old UNIX programmer from the Dilbert cartoons once said:
Here's a quarter, kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.
Well, to give you an example of how a 66MHz 486DX2 would be useful: dirt cheap NAT/Firewall box. Yes, the Linksys box is going for less than $100 in the two-port (one for the network, the other for the Internet) configuration, but I was able to get an old DX2-50 box for $30 from a friend.
I have two NE2000 NICs sitting around, a CD-ROM and an ISA IDE card that originally came with another CD-ROM...these are parts in my parts pile so they're technically free.(as in Beer.) Linux or FreeBSD or OpenBSD are all free OSes.(both as in Beer and as in Libertas.) So I'll have a NAT/Firewall box for $30. And one more computer will be saved from the landfill and made useful again..
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Obvious quesion: are all those computers counted x86-based computers?
Consider that the Apple share of computer sales have gone up again to around 7 to 10%, thanks to the iMac's popularity. That doesn't account for all of the 25%, but it knocks it down a bit.
Another obvious question: what if the remaining x86 computers were running alternative operating systems?
What if, indeed. There's Linux, of course. There's also the BSD derivatives. There's Solaris x86. There's BeOS. That won't account for everything else, but it probably narrows the real rate of piracy down to less than 5%, 10% at most.
MICROS~1, again, is clueless.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
COMMENTARY
Nielsen on Usability: The Seven Sins of Copy Protection Tools
By Jakob Nielsen and Susan Farrell
Copy protection always fails, sometimes even before a product is released, but it keeps coming back in new forms. From lost passwords to broken dongles, the user always feels the pain.
The latest scheme, Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), puts ID numbers on disks and drives. IBM is working to make sure CPRM will be part of every new hard disk by next summer. The 4C Entity owns CPRM, the same group that brought
us CSS2, a DVD audio protection scheme that was immediately cracked and has since been withdrawn.
After the first wave of protest, hardware manufacturers agreed to let users turn off hard drive protection. But the average user can't install software using written instructions, so opting out might not be realistic for most
people. Anything that makes computers harder to use should be rejected on the drawing board, because if it ever goes to market, it will be rejected by the users, who already have more complexity than they can deal with on their desktops now.
Here's what is wrong with copy protection:
1) It creates more incompatibilities. It creates problems between compliant and noncomplaint media and drives. On the user side, products that worked before will stop working, and new purchases might never work.
2) Data will be lost. Copyright protection interferes with backup and restore operations, for example when a hard drive fails and a new disk must use backed-up data. Backup, a critical task that is difficult for most users, will become
even more onerous, and thus less frequently done.
3) It costs more. Any business with more than a few machines tends to install the same software on multiple computers, to save time and effort. Unique installations for each machine cause delay and extra work. Businesses will have to pay for
new hardware, more system administration time, and more user support.
4) It stifles innovation that consumers want. It threatens some of the newest and most popular business models such as those used by TiVo and ReplayTV (which save TV content for later play) and Napster-like peer-to-peer networks.
5) It threatens fair use and the ability to quote material within the limits that are well permitted by law.
6) It doesn't work. Every popular copy-protected program ever released has been cracked, so it will penalize home users and businesses for no good reason. Treating users as if they were data pirates just makes them mad. Real data pirates
get excited about new copy-protection schemes, because they present a new challenge.
7) It could slow down the Net. Internet improvements often involve more caching, proxies, and content negotiation for multiple devices -- in other words: copying. Even if only trusted systems are used, those systems would be under tight
control, the opposite of the kind of open Internet we know
today.
Copy protection makes things harder to use, and people hate it. Early phonograph records had printed licenses that forbade their resale. People believe, no matter what the fine print says, that if they buy a thing, it's theirs. Books can
be given away after use. Software can be used on both desktop and laptop. A CD can be taped and played in the car. A magazine can be read for free in the library. People need to share data among the many devices they own. Any content payment scheme that doesn't allow for the time-honored ways people actually use information is doomed and should be rejected.
(Dr. Jakob Nielsen is principal of Nielsen Norman Group ( http://www.nngroup.com/ ) and author of "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity." E-mail: jakob@useit.com. Susan Farrell is a user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen on Usability appears in this newsletter every Monday.)
Slashdot Mirror
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
What I want to see is a Windows and Linux version of IRCle. IRCle kicks ass over any Windows or Linux IRC client you want to throw at me. It's a "classic" MacOS program. I wonder if someone's working on a Cocoa or Carbon version of it....
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Oh yeah, and the premise of the threatened Columbia movie is as follows: "Can a short-order cook rise from the grills of obscurity to defeat the legendary Iron Chef? He'll soon find out amidst a battlefield of heated stove-top burners."
Sounds about as appetizing as a Natto sundae...
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
There is still a tax DISINCENTIVE for businesses to do anything BUT junk old computers. At least here in Panorama City, CA, US where I live Goodwill just opened up a very nice computer clearance center. There's one like it in Orange County, CA, US somewhere (Santa Ana?) and I know there's another place like it in Austin, TX, US. Businesses can take charitable tax deductions for donating computers to Goodwill, which are turned around and sold for cheap to people who can't afford new stuff. But the fact is there aren't enough places like this out there.
We should be refurbing old machines and GIVING THEM AWAY. Sure, 386/486en won't run Linux with GNOME or KDE2 well, but they can run in console mode fine and could prolly be coaxed to run X and a low RAM footprint window manager like fwvm95 or ice or something like that.
The computers don't do any good in landfills or melted down for their raw materials. They can do powerful good if they were only refurbished and redistributed. Crappy PCChips/Cyrix-based diskless boxen like those being sold for cheap in Brazil aren't as useful as a good, solid real computer, even one running a 486.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Yeah, but that's not the usual modus operandi in D&D. Usually the goal is to make your character the baddest ass on the block, and to make sure the other characters and/or the Dungeonmaster doesn't stab you in the back. I have never been in worse dysfunctional situations than in the middle of a cutthroat D&D all-nighter.
D&D a non zero-sum game? Shehyeahright!
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
LA's got cheaper real estate, cheaper cost of living, and plenty of qualified geeks looking for work since it seems all the studios are cleaning house on their Interactive Media divisions.
Come to LA, where you can run your servers 24-7 without risk! Who gives a fat rats ass if you run SETI on all the workstations after 5pm? We got POWER, bay-bee! Los Angeles is power self-sufficient and is even selling power to PG&E and SCE! Oh yeah, if you don't like the City of Los Angeles' business tax regs, Burbank and Glendale also have municipal utilities that supply 100% of their own power needs!
Brought to you by the committee to uplift the LA Geek Community.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
IE doesn't use plugins. It uses a proprietary architecture with serious security problems called ActiveX. ActiveX Controls, unlike plugins and Java applets, can run hogwild through your Windozer. They are not limited to a "sandbox."
Hostile ActiveX Controls can behave like a system virus. Anyone with a clue turns ActiveX OFF COMPLETELY.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
PCChips motherboards are the bane of installfests everywhere. The PCChips Consortium is a loose affiliation of the worst manufacturers in Taiwan and in the People's Republic of China. Example member: Amptron. They are responsible for hideous abortions like the VXPro chipset, the VXTwo chipset, the TXTwo chipset, ad nauseam.
During a period when I was trying to find a SANE bitty box, I came across ASUS' version. It doesn't come cheap, and it's hard to find, but it's based on the solid-as-a-rock Intel BX chipset and has either a flip-chip socket or a Slot 1 CPU connector.
It would be great if someone did a bitty box based on Socket A and designed for Duron...the Duron would be an ideal chip for such a box.
Anyway...DON'T fsck around with the BookPC! You will live to regret it! Particularly if you want to use it with Linux.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
If that's the case, then the Glassbook license violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. If voice synths can't read the content, that shuts out blind people.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Indeed. Actually, it would have been cool if Ken Burns had included "Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarves" (caricature of Cab Calloway as Prince Chawmin', lots of West Coast Swing musicians on the soundtrack) and "Tin Pan Alley Cats" (Protagonist modeled on Fats Waller) as part of the "Jazz" episode covering the WWII years.
Both cartoons, once you get past their very mild and NOT mean-spirited stereotypes, were literally love letters to Jazz by master cartoonist/rabid Jazz fan Bob Clampett. They rock HARD and it's a shame that they are on the official AOL Time Warner "Banned List". The caricatures in the two cartoons were direct caricatures of either famous Jazz musicians Clampett admired or real Jazz musicians Clampett knew because he frequented Swing clubs on Central Ave. in LA when he wasn't cranking out cartoons in Termite Terrace, WB's animated shorts studio.
If you want to see truly mean-spirited, evil stereotypes, watch beloved, celebrated WB cartoonist Chuck Jones' "Angel Puss." Everyone loves Jones and castigates Clampett for "Coal Black" but "Angel Puss" is a cartoon only a KKK Kleagle could love. A stereotypical "pickaninny" boy is given "two bits" to drown a cat. Makes my fsckn skin crawl just thinking about it.
Thing is, you can't judge these cartoons on their merits anymore, because stupid AOL Time Warner is SITTING ON THEM in their vaults. They should grow a backbone and make these cartoons available again.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
1.) Summer 2001: Eva movie is coming out! Don't know which one it is, no details, although I'll lay odds it's Death And Rebirth.
2.)Honneamise is indeed out on DVD. Bilingual Japanese/English, with the remixed soundtrack. It's going on the "gotta get" list...that is, when I have a JOB again, dammit...
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
It was released briefly in a few theatres towards the end of the 1980s...'89 or '90 if memory serves me right.
Has Manga Entertainment put out a DVD yet?
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
It was sort of like The Right Stuff, but set on a planet where a great conflict not dissimilar to World War II had been raging for decades, not years. Aside from one nonsequitur rape scene which could be excised without screwing up the plot, I believe it could become THE breakthrough movie for Japanese animation in the US. Without that one flash of skin, it's fine for family viewing.
Someone's got to sit Tom Hanks down and get him to see the movie...his love of the history of spaceflight would really get him excited about it. Maybe his Playtone Productions could bankroll a theatrical re-release in the US.
In 1997 Gainax did a 10th Anniversary re-release of Honneamise in Japan. It included THX sound and a remix of the score done by the incomparable Ryuchi Sakamoto. So there is a high-quality digitally remastered version available to work from.
Since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon proved that US audiences WILL sit through a subbed movie if it kicks enough ass, a dub might not be necessary. However, an intelligently-done dub that preserves Sakamoto's score and the sound effects and uses a well-written dubscript (Mononoke Hime is a worthy example...it is lovely prose, although Miyazaki's own translated words are sheer poetry) wouldn't be bad. In fact, Hanks would be a great voice for Shiro Lhadatt, the misfit kid turned fly guy.
I don't know WHO has the rights to Honneamise...I think it's Manga Entertainment but I don't know for sure. But Honneamise is as important, if not MORE important to the history of Japanese Animation than Akira. It deserves an US theatrical rerelease.
Oh yeah, don't get me started about the unavailability Stateside of the two Evangelion movies, Death And Rebirth and End Of Evangelion...
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Anime is also the romanization of the Japanese katakana for the word they use for animation.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Second: I have to disagree with your comment about Streamline: not every movie they dubbed got cut. They did a great job on My Neighbor Totoro. They didn't treat Castle Of Cagliostro well, but Totoro was nicely done.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Besides, tell me the G4 Minitower isn't sweet hardware! If you can't stand MacOS, there's always LinuxPPC. Or DebianPPC. Or SuSE PPC. Or Yellow Dog Linux. Or whatever PPC Linux distro you want to run. And the G4 Minitower really kicks ass running under Linux.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
As the wise old UNIX programmer from the Dilbert cartoons once said:
Here's a quarter, kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.
Well, to give you an example of how a 66MHz 486DX2 would be useful: dirt cheap NAT/Firewall box. Yes, the Linksys box is going for less than $100 in the two-port (one for the network, the other for the Internet) configuration, but I was able to get an old DX2-50 box for $30 from a friend.
I have two NE2000 NICs sitting around, a CD-ROM and an ISA IDE card that originally came with another CD-ROM...these are parts in my parts pile so they're technically free.(as in Beer.) Linux or FreeBSD or OpenBSD are all free OSes.(both as in Beer and as in Libertas.) So I'll have a NAT/Firewall box for $30. And one more computer will be saved from the landfill and made useful again..
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Consider that the Apple share of computer sales have gone up again to around 7 to 10%, thanks to the iMac's popularity. That doesn't account for all of the 25%, but it knocks it down a bit.
Another obvious question: what if the remaining x86 computers were running alternative operating systems?
What if, indeed. There's Linux, of course. There's also the BSD derivatives. There's Solaris x86. There's BeOS. That won't account for everything else, but it probably narrows the real rate of piracy down to less than 5%, 10% at most.
MICROS~1, again, is clueless.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
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http://www.msgeek.org/ -- Because you can't keep a geek grrl down!
Yeah...that doesn't work AT ALL. I tried to upgrade with the 7.2 CDs, and I was left with a largely unusable machine.
However, when I reformatted and reinstalled, 7.2 Final was just ducky.
This seems to be the program for Windoze too: don't upgrade over a previous version.
However, with MacOS all you need to do is update the SCSI driver and install the new OS over the old and you are good to go. Go figure.
----
COMMENTARY
Nielsen on Usability: The Seven Sins of Copy Protection Tools
By Jakob Nielsen and Susan Farrell
Copy protection always fails, sometimes even before a product is released, but it keeps coming back in new forms. From lost passwords to broken dongles, the user always feels the pain.
The latest scheme, Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), puts ID numbers on disks and drives. IBM is working to make sure CPRM will be part of every new hard disk by next summer. The 4C Entity owns CPRM, the same group that brought us CSS2, a DVD audio protection scheme that was immediately cracked and has since been withdrawn.
After the first wave of protest, hardware manufacturers agreed to let users turn off hard drive protection. But the average user can't install software using written instructions, so opting out might not be realistic for most people. Anything that makes computers harder to use should be rejected on the drawing board, because if it ever goes to market, it will be rejected by the users, who already have more complexity than they can deal with on their desktops now.
Here's what is wrong with copy protection:
1) It creates more incompatibilities. It creates problems between compliant and noncomplaint media and drives. On the user side, products that worked before will stop working, and new purchases might never work.
2) Data will be lost. Copyright protection interferes with backup and restore operations, for example when a hard drive fails and a new disk must use backed-up data. Backup, a critical task that is difficult for most users, will become even more onerous, and thus less frequently done.
3) It costs more. Any business with more than a few machines tends to install the same software on multiple computers, to save time and effort. Unique installations for each machine cause delay and extra work. Businesses will have to pay for new hardware, more system administration time, and more user support.
4) It stifles innovation that consumers want. It threatens some of the newest and most popular business models such as those used by TiVo and ReplayTV (which save TV content for later play) and Napster-like peer-to-peer networks.
5) It threatens fair use and the ability to quote material within the limits that are well permitted by law.
6) It doesn't work. Every popular copy-protected program ever released has been cracked, so it will penalize home users and businesses for no good reason. Treating users as if they were data pirates just makes them mad. Real data pirates get excited about new copy-protection schemes, because they present a new challenge.
7) It could slow down the Net. Internet improvements often involve more caching, proxies, and content negotiation for multiple devices -- in other words: copying. Even if only trusted systems are used, those systems would be under tight control, the opposite of the kind of open Internet we know today.
Copy protection makes things harder to use, and people hate it. Early phonograph records had printed licenses that forbade their resale. People believe, no matter what the fine print says, that if they buy a thing, it's theirs. Books can be given away after use. Software can be used on both desktop and laptop. A CD can be taped and played in the car. A magazine can be read for free in the library. People need to share data among the many devices they own. Any content payment scheme that doesn't allow for the time-honored ways people actually use information is doomed and should be rejected.
(Dr. Jakob Nielsen is principal of Nielsen Norman Group ( http://www.nngroup.com/ ) and author of "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity." E-mail: jakob@useit.com. Susan Farrell is a user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen on Usability appears in this newsletter every Monday.)
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