> AOL is right on this one. Sorry.
This isn't really about the servers or the software or the cutesy HTML-drenched messages we can send back and forth. This is about AOL's approach to the internet, and the scary fact that it does (and will continue to) succeed.
How does it work? It's very simple. AOL's user base (paying user base, the one they actually give half a damn about) is made up of mostly clueless users who wouldn't know an IM from an e-mail. Joe Blow internet user doesn't know or care how his messages get through, or what freedom fighter groups his beloved provider is pushing out of the way to make it happen.
AOL's community is far from 3l337, so they have nothing to fear when it comes to bad publicity about this. Does little ol' granny know or care that AIM is now restricted to people using specific clients? Nope. Does she care? Nope. And the people at AOL know it. Nobody they care about is affected by this.
Don't get me wrong. I'm as infuriated by these actions as anyone, and I think the big-shot CEOs who make these decisions should be hung. This is totally contrary to the idea of the internet. However, people are forgetting a very important fact that is along these lines: this IS the internet. We don't HAVE to use AIM. If we don't like something, we can build a better whatever-it-is.
In this case, I think Jabber is the way to go. Go out and give it a shot, and screw AOL. If you really need to talk to people from there, use e-mail or IRC or something. Support open standards if you don't like the closed ones, because honestly AOL will never suddenly support open protocols that it isn't forced to. Instead of swimming upstream and fighting their protocol changes, just ignore AOL and support a more worthy cause.
I don't know about other people, but I am getting DAMN tired of AOL and their annoying little control games. First they set up their internal browser to force people to use AOL.com as their home page (not a big deal if you use an external browser, but still, Joe Internet User won't think of that, and is helpless). Then they play those games with MSN to squash compatibility there, and here we are with our beloved clones that aren't usable anymore. Does this sound even remotely familiar? I'll give you two hints: Micro, soft.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if AOL didn't control the two most popular IM services. I remember when ICQ was a struggling "beta" service that actually had some quality and usability to it. Now it's laggy, buggy, and filled with security holes beyond belief. And now we have AIM, which is not an altogether powerful system, but it's always worked well for me. Of course, now it doesn't work at all, simply because I'm not willing to use their "official" client. I use Jabber and GAIM, and now I'm cut off from the people I talk to on there on a regular basis.
With the way this is going, I won't be shocked or saddened if I see AOL/Time Warner in an antitrust case by the government, a la Microsoft. In fact, I look forward to it. This BS has gone on long enough, and it's just not acceptable.
P.S. If you ask me, we should all use IRC anyway.;-) Now THERE is the way to communicate...
> Earthlink could do themselves a big favour by revealing exactly what is being sent.
And possibly their users a great disservice by specifying what it is. "Hello crackers of the 'net, this PGP data is nothing less than the subscriber's credit card info. Have a nice day! Oh, and btw, please don't crack our encryption keys!"
Then again, we're curious anyway, and people will probably attempt to decypher it simply for that reason...
Nautilus, as with a number of GNOME related projects, does not install at all on my Slackware system. I go to the GNOME Installer homepage, and they list Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, YellowDog... everything BUT Slackware. I get the manual installer, and it won't even run.
This is a disturbing trend -- I find a significant number of prominent open source projects that refuse to run (or run, but not well) on all but a few distros. Is this because of laziness? RPMs are easier for the developers to deal with, sure, but you're cutting off a very large portion of the community. Does NOBODY test things on non-RPM or non-DEB distros?
Last time I checked, Slackware was still a very significant part of the Linux community. I choose to use a system that's been around for years, is incredibly stable, and is as much Linux as any other distribution. Yet I can't even try out a lot of these new and interesting software packages. This recent trend of "Red Hat is Linux" and similar approaches to development doesn't strike me as being in line with the whole freedom of choice bit that our community flaunts so much.
How many web surfers out there actually use portals on a regular basis? I don't know anybody who really does. I (and most people I know) have a site like Slashdot that I check out for news when I hop on the net in the morning, and a favorite search engine for finding various things. That's about it.
Portals have never really appealed to me, since they're so litered with advertisements and (often) biased content. And with the advent of things like customizable sidebars in Netscape, where you can have direct feeds to Segfault.org, ZDNet, etc. who wants to bother with a portal that takes up an entire browser window?
As has been said before, more variety is needed. We've got a BUNCH of action games (Heavy Gear II, Soldier of Fortune, Q3, UT, etc.) and a BUNCH of strategy games (SC3K, Heroes III, Kohan, and so forth), which is all well and good. But where's the flight sim? Where's the sports games?
There's ONE decent flight sim for Linux, but it's very difficult to set up (I've never succeeded, and I'm a Linuxer of four years). As for sports, there's only a handful of those, and not a single one is what I want, which is golf. We need these sorts of games, and others, for Linux to really become a viable commercial gaming market.
Don't get me wrong -- I love the games we've got. Heroes III, SC3K, Quake III, etc. are all games I play quite often. And I'm going to play Tribes 2 tons when it comes out. But the world needs variety, and I sure wouldn't mind it either. I've got a flight stick that's been collecting dust since I dumped Windows, because there's no flight sims I can play. And I end up playing Mario Golf all the time, because I'm without a decent computer golf game like Jack Nicklaus.
Granted, I'd rather see great games in these categories as open source than as commercial software. But either way, we need them if Linux is to succeed in the gaming market and thus, in the desktop market.
... if web design could work both ways. If we could have control over design, to make stuff look good if we want to, but still have it viewable anywhere on any device, as fancy (or not) as the user wants.
Sometimes, flashy stuff is good. Some sites are downright beautiful, and it really helps to be able to make content that looks like that. But it'd be nice if that SAME content could render at least passably on Lynx and whatnot, in case you don't really care about the looks. Or better yet, so you could view web pages on your cell phone or Palm without having to rely on shaky translations of the pages.
The main problem with the internet today, and with web browsing specifically, is the mix of commercial attitudes and the "pure" internet attitude. Us netheads want things to be usable anywhere, anytime, on any device. Sure, it's ok if it looks good, but taking away from functionality for looks is nothing that I'm fond of, and I'm sure many people agree. But here come the suits, with their shareholders and boards of directors. They MUST turn a profit somehow, nevermind that it stifles creativity or usability. They make a buck, so it's all good.
I find it disturbing that Nautilus "currently" only supports Red Hat systems. On my Slackware system, the installer doesn't work at all. So, anyone who can't get the installer working has to download confusing source code and package updates. I'm used to downloading and building software, I've been using Linux for four years. But for a piece of software that's supposed to be for the end-user, and supposed to be easy to use, this is not good.
Granted, a lot of people use Red Hat. But there is absolutely no reason why a piece of software, especially open source software, should be limited to one distribution. A lot of Linuxers don't use Red Hat, and won't go anywhere near it -- I'm one of them. I use Slackware and Debian, and it'd be nice if I could try this Nautilus thing out. But so far, it looks like I don't even have a chance, unless I download all the source code and system updates. All that just for a preview, one that still may not work since I'm not on Red Hat? No thanks.
They say they will support "most major distributions" in the future. Why not now? Code and support should be given for those "major" distributions now, so the compatibility problems can be worked out early on, not when you're mired in tons of code that you don't want to change. This strikes me as a very poor development approach, and I don't feel it's consistent with the ways of open source -- to give users a choice.
I've been using Slackware since 1996, when I first started with Linux. I think, overall, it was and still is one of the best distros. I wouldn't recommend it to pure newbies, but it works great for me. I've tried numerous distros, including Red Hat, Caldera, Mandrake, and Storm Linux. None of those has worked as well for me as Slack -- they all had performance or security issues that did not please me.
One good example of why I like Slack better: the NVidia drivers. I could not get them to work on Red Hat 6.2 or 7.0. When they did work, they were very crashy. It also took forever to get them to a usable state. But when I dumped RH and put Slackware back on here, the drivers installed flawlessly in minutes.
Also, somebody on here posted: "The thing that utterly frustrates me is that NOTHING COMPILES!" -- I've never had a problem compiling programs on Slackware. In fact, programs I could never get to compile correctly on Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. work just fine on Slack.
I'm not saying Slackware is the best, but it's certainly ONE of the best, especially for server-side uses. Use what ya like; the other distros are good, but I'm sticking to Slack.:-)
People constantly talk about how Freenet needs a graphical interface, how it needs this, needs that. Of course it has room for improvement, that's the way early-development projects are. All things considered, I think it's pretty impressive so far.
The internet and WWW we use today did not magically come into being -- they happened over a number of decades, through the efforts of many people, with many false starts and failures along the way. It had a horrible interface at first, basically none. Interoperability was, at best, horrible. There were only a few machines on the internet, and most of them were for use by select groups or individuals. My point is, everything starts somewhere, and it looks to me like Freenet is following a similar route the original internet did, while learning from some of the mistakes of the past.
Hopefully Freenet will be even more influential than the original world-wide web was (and is). The only major barrier to success that I can see to Freenet becoming the next WWW, will be the lack of commercial presence. That's what helped the WWW boom, and I think it'll be hard to get significant commercial presence on something like Freenet, where ideas are actually exchanged freely instead of locked away behind goofy patents and copyrights. Then again, look how far Apache and Linux got, with basically the same idea...
Personally, I prefer starting out with a lean system, like a basic Slack or Debian setup. I don't like having to rip out all that we-know-what's-best-for-you stuff in other distros, like Caldera.
Of course, for people with slow modem connections, a 6 CD distribution can be a pretty nice deal.
Guess it just depends where you want to start...
Screenshots Not Allowed? Dumb...
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 1
The article mentions some licenses that don't let you post or distribute screen shots in ANY public medium, which I would assume means game magazines and web sites. They're just shooting themselves in the foot with this sort of thing -- most people will not buy a game if they don't see it in their favorite magazine, or if they can't easily find out what it looks like.
And what about clans, tribes, etc. in the various multiplayer games? They like to post screen shots of their exploits on their web sites. Are they expected to pay screenshot license fees or something like that, or risk having their sites shut down? I mean, come on!
What kind of justification do they have for this sort of clause? Screenshots from games can't harm a company's interests in any way that I can think of...
I've been using LaTeX for the last year or so, through this program called LyX (www.lyx.org). Think of it as a GUI front-end to LaTeX, keeping the more complex details out of sight if you don't want them.
Anyway, my point is -- I've found LaTeX to be an incredibly versatile piece of technology, and it works great. I've used it for my term papers, even stuff I've published on the web. I experimented a bit with the language itself without the help of LyX, and I love the flexibility and power.
I'd be thrilled if LaTeX became the standard of the web... So many document formats can be converted to TeX with almost no effort, so why not? This would probably end up being even simpler and clean than the way we do stuff now, converting.doc files into messy, ugly.html files, and so forth.
Of course, there's always the possibility that Microsoft and Netscape (or whoever) would end up trying to "extend" LaTeX/TeX like they did HTML, and we all know how well THAT turned out...
I don't know about others, but personally, I've given up on any hope I had of Netscape becoming a good browser. Mozilla is good, but still, it's lacking in many areas.
Here are some of my complaints so far...
1) Netscape's 6.0 installer is very unstable, and has a hard time coping with download problems because of stalls, etc. In fact, it took me a good four tries to get it to actually finish the install. Why can't we just have a tarball or something?
2) Netscape 6 itself breaks a number of standards supported in Mozilla, and is far too oriented to meet AOL's money-grubbing desires. Pardon me, but the browser should be for the user, not JUST the company. Companies have to make money, but I get tired of every single button or menu I click taking me to the horribly-slow Netscape site.
3) Netscape 6 is very unstable, yet the Mozilla code it is based off of runs much more smoothly. Looks like all those commercial tie-ins are causing Netscape to sink under its own commercial weight.
I had high hopes for Netscape. But it just doesn't cut it. I use the Opera for Linux port now, which, even though it is still in the alpha stage technically, can run circles around anything Netscape or Mozilla puts out. Sure there's no Java or plug-in support yet (neither of which I'm desperately needing), and it occasionally crashes, but at least it doesn't have all those weird glitches and standards issues that Netscape has.
On the Linux side, I think it's time we all start looking for or working on something better. I think the BrowseX browser looks particularly promising. It's open source, very capable already, and with some more development, could give the closed commercial browsers run for their money. But whatever happens, I honestly don't think Netscape will ever get much better. AOL simply has its priorities wrong, and has done a disservice to everyone by not coming through on a viable alternative browser. -----
Anything that can go wr
Yeah, I had a Creative Labs card that had a 3Dfx Banshee chipset, and it worked great. But when I got a Voodoo 5, made by 3Dfx of course, it was a major disappointment. I sent it back and got a GeForce 2 MX, which I've been much happier with.
3Dfx had no competition when it came to the V4 and V5 setups, so they could make relatively shoddy products and (try to) charge whatever price they felt like. But you know, I paid $300 for that Voodoo 5, and when a low-end $100 Nvidia-powered card can perform infinitely better, that doesn't say much for 3Dfx's abilities as a video board maker.
I'm glad they're going back to the way things were, and staying out of the business of monopolizing board designs based on their chipset. Still, I'm not sure I'll buy from 3Dfx in the foreseeable future anyway. I had a lot of confidence in them before they became the only source for 3Dfx-based boards, and I lost much of it in my recent experiences with them.
Now if Nvidia would just open up their drivers, I would be totally happy...;-) -----
Anything that can go wr
I must say, I'm very disappointed in Mozilla and Netscape. Not only has this "cutting edge" browser taken so damn long to get this far, it's still not very good. It still lacks needed features, is unstable so much as to almost make Windows seem bug-free, and it's bloated beyond belief.
The previous Mozilla milestone I downloaded would freeze up at random points, mostly while viewing large pages, screw up images (actually inserting images from OTHER sites), etc. And, when I tried to use Netscape 6 Preview 3, I spent two hours downloading the damn thing over my sucky 33.6 connection, only to get an indecypherable error when I try to run it.
This reflects very badly on the open source community, and while it was a nice try, Mozilla and Netscape only have a few more nails to go in their collective coffin. Hopefully some other open source project will do better, or (*closed source shudder*) maybe Opera, which is shaping up nice.
I'll admit, some of Yahoo's practices don't thrill me, but some of their services are good. And, from this, their software is too. Unlike AIM and ICQ, which have little (or sucky) "official" support for Linux, Messenger for Linux is very slick and nicely done. I don't use the service itself all that much, but this is a quality piece of software, and I applaud Yahoo for the effort they put into it. Nice job. -----
Despite the fact that I prefer console mode and apps to GUIs, I think the X Window System is excellent. Sure, it's not perfect, and the wide range of widgets and such that vary between applications... well, those confuse the heck out of new users.
But if you ask me, I'd rather have the flexibility and small dose of confusion than have a standard, rigid interface. X is great because it's flexible, and lets program authors (as well as users, in many cases), to mold their interface and application experiences to whatever they want.
X lets your desktop have personality and power, and that is what makes it great. -----
Slashdot Mirror
"Serious Security Flaw in MSIE 5.01, 5.5"
Flaw? Singular?
> AOL is right on this one. Sorry.
This isn't really about the servers or the software or the cutesy HTML-drenched messages we can send back and forth. This is about AOL's approach to the internet, and the scary fact that it does (and will continue to) succeed.
How does it work? It's very simple. AOL's user base (paying user base, the one they actually give half a damn about) is made up of mostly clueless users who wouldn't know an IM from an e-mail. Joe Blow internet user doesn't know or care how his messages get through, or what freedom fighter groups his beloved provider is pushing out of the way to make it happen.
AOL's community is far from 3l337, so they have nothing to fear when it comes to bad publicity about this. Does little ol' granny know or care that AIM is now restricted to people using specific clients? Nope. Does she care? Nope. And the people at AOL know it. Nobody they care about is affected by this.
Don't get me wrong. I'm as infuriated by these actions as anyone, and I think the big-shot CEOs who make these decisions should be hung. This is totally contrary to the idea of the internet. However, people are forgetting a very important fact that is along these lines: this IS the internet. We don't HAVE to use AIM. If we don't like something, we can build a better whatever-it-is.
In this case, I think Jabber is the way to go. Go out and give it a shot, and screw AOL. If you really need to talk to people from there, use e-mail or IRC or something. Support open standards if you don't like the closed ones, because honestly AOL will never suddenly support open protocols that it isn't forced to. Instead of swimming upstream and fighting their protocol changes, just ignore AOL and support a more worthy cause.
I don't know about other people, but I am getting DAMN tired of AOL and their annoying little control games. First they set up their internal browser to force people to use AOL.com as their home page (not a big deal if you use an external browser, but still, Joe Internet User won't think of that, and is helpless). Then they play those games with MSN to squash compatibility there, and here we are with our beloved clones that aren't usable anymore. Does this sound even remotely familiar? I'll give you two hints: Micro, soft.
;-) Now THERE is the way to communicate...
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if AOL didn't control the two most popular IM services. I remember when ICQ was a struggling "beta" service that actually had some quality and usability to it. Now it's laggy, buggy, and filled with security holes beyond belief. And now we have AIM, which is not an altogether powerful system, but it's always worked well for me. Of course, now it doesn't work at all, simply because I'm not willing to use their "official" client. I use Jabber and GAIM, and now I'm cut off from the people I talk to on there on a regular basis.
With the way this is going, I won't be shocked or saddened if I see AOL/Time Warner in an antitrust case by the government, a la Microsoft. In fact, I look forward to it. This BS has gone on long enough, and it's just not acceptable.
P.S. If you ask me, we should all use IRC anyway.
> Earthlink could do themselves a big favour by revealing exactly what is being sent.
And possibly their users a great disservice by specifying what it is. "Hello crackers of the 'net, this PGP data is nothing less than the subscriber's credit card info. Have a nice day! Oh, and btw, please don't crack our encryption keys!"
Then again, we're curious anyway, and people will probably attempt to decypher it simply for that reason...
Nautilus, as with a number of GNOME related projects, does not install at all on my Slackware system. I go to the GNOME Installer homepage, and they list Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, YellowDog... everything BUT Slackware. I get the manual installer, and it won't even run.
This is a disturbing trend -- I find a significant number of prominent open source projects that refuse to run (or run, but not well) on all but a few distros. Is this because of laziness? RPMs are easier for the developers to deal with, sure, but you're cutting off a very large portion of the community. Does NOBODY test things on non-RPM or non-DEB distros?
Last time I checked, Slackware was still a very significant part of the Linux community. I choose to use a system that's been around for years, is incredibly stable, and is as much Linux as any other distribution. Yet I can't even try out a lot of these new and interesting software packages. This recent trend of "Red Hat is Linux" and similar approaches to development doesn't strike me as being in line with the whole freedom of choice bit that our community flaunts so much.
How many web surfers out there actually use portals on a regular basis? I don't know anybody who really does. I (and most people I know) have a site like Slashdot that I check out for news when I hop on the net in the morning, and a favorite search engine for finding various things. That's about it.
Portals have never really appealed to me, since they're so litered with advertisements and (often) biased content. And with the advent of things like customizable sidebars in Netscape, where you can have direct feeds to Segfault.org, ZDNet, etc. who wants to bother with a portal that takes up an entire browser window?
What do you guys think?
"G'day! You're under 'rest for forwardin' me mate's joke!"
RIAA: All your song are belong to us
As has been said before, more variety is needed. We've got a BUNCH of action games (Heavy Gear II, Soldier of Fortune, Q3, UT, etc.) and a BUNCH of strategy games (SC3K, Heroes III, Kohan, and so forth), which is all well and good. But where's the flight sim? Where's the sports games?
There's ONE decent flight sim for Linux, but it's very difficult to set up (I've never succeeded, and I'm a Linuxer of four years). As for sports, there's only a handful of those, and not a single one is what I want, which is golf. We need these sorts of games, and others, for Linux to really become a viable commercial gaming market.
Don't get me wrong -- I love the games we've got. Heroes III, SC3K, Quake III, etc. are all games I play quite often. And I'm going to play Tribes 2 tons when it comes out. But the world needs variety, and I sure wouldn't mind it either. I've got a flight stick that's been collecting dust since I dumped Windows, because there's no flight sims I can play. And I end up playing Mario Golf all the time, because I'm without a decent computer golf game like Jack Nicklaus.
Granted, I'd rather see great games in these categories as open source than as commercial software. But either way, we need them if Linux is to succeed in the gaming market and thus, in the desktop market.
Let's think about the possibilities, shall we?
etc.
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There's no way this would ever work well. Nice try, Napster, but no cigar.
... I'd have no problem with it. It's *twitch* not like I'm *twitch* addicted to my computer or anything... *twitch twitch*
... if web design could work both ways. If we could have control over design, to make stuff look good if we want to, but still have it viewable anywhere on any device, as fancy (or not) as the user wants.
Sometimes, flashy stuff is good. Some sites are downright beautiful, and it really helps to be able to make content that looks like that. But it'd be nice if that SAME content could render at least passably on Lynx and whatnot, in case you don't really care about the looks. Or better yet, so you could view web pages on your cell phone or Palm without having to rely on shaky translations of the pages.
The main problem with the internet today, and with web browsing specifically, is the mix of commercial attitudes and the "pure" internet attitude. Us netheads want things to be usable anywhere, anytime, on any device. Sure, it's ok if it looks good, but taking away from functionality for looks is nothing that I'm fond of, and I'm sure many people agree. But here come the suits, with their shareholders and boards of directors. They MUST turn a profit somehow, nevermind that it stifles creativity or usability. They make a buck, so it's all good.
Hey, I am NOT forgetful! I own two handhelds, laptop, and a desktop, and I keep track of all my stuff on... Err, what were we talking about again?
I find it disturbing that Nautilus "currently" only supports Red Hat systems. On my Slackware system, the installer doesn't work at all. So, anyone who can't get the installer working has to download confusing source code and package updates. I'm used to downloading and building software, I've been using Linux for four years. But for a piece of software that's supposed to be for the end-user, and supposed to be easy to use, this is not good.
Granted, a lot of people use Red Hat. But there is absolutely no reason why a piece of software, especially open source software, should be limited to one distribution. A lot of Linuxers don't use Red Hat, and won't go anywhere near it -- I'm one of them. I use Slackware and Debian, and it'd be nice if I could try this Nautilus thing out. But so far, it looks like I don't even have a chance, unless I download all the source code and system updates. All that just for a preview, one that still may not work since I'm not on Red Hat? No thanks.
They say they will support "most major distributions" in the future. Why not now? Code and support should be given for those "major" distributions now, so the compatibility problems can be worked out early on, not when you're mired in tons of code that you don't want to change. This strikes me as a very poor development approach, and I don't feel it's consistent with the ways of open source -- to give users a choice.
I've been using Slackware since 1996, when I first started with Linux. I think, overall, it was and still is one of the best distros. I wouldn't recommend it to pure newbies, but it works great for me. I've tried numerous distros, including Red Hat, Caldera, Mandrake, and Storm Linux. None of those has worked as well for me as Slack -- they all had performance or security issues that did not please me.
:-)
One good example of why I like Slack better: the NVidia drivers. I could not get them to work on Red Hat 6.2 or 7.0. When they did work, they were very crashy. It also took forever to get them to a usable state. But when I dumped RH and put Slackware back on here, the drivers installed flawlessly in minutes.
Also, somebody on here posted: "The thing that utterly frustrates me is that NOTHING COMPILES!" -- I've never had a problem compiling programs on Slackware. In fact, programs I could never get to compile correctly on Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. work just fine on Slack.
I'm not saying Slackware is the best, but it's certainly ONE of the best, especially for server-side uses. Use what ya like; the other distros are good, but I'm sticking to Slack.
How many of those Y2K patches are going to fail in years not ending in 0? :)
People constantly talk about how Freenet needs a graphical interface, how it needs this, needs that. Of course it has room for improvement, that's the way early-development projects are. All things considered, I think it's pretty impressive so far.
The internet and WWW we use today did not magically come into being -- they happened over a number of decades, through the efforts of many people, with many false starts and failures along the way. It had a horrible interface at first, basically none. Interoperability was, at best, horrible. There were only a few machines on the internet, and most of them were for use by select groups or individuals. My point is, everything starts somewhere, and it looks to me like Freenet is following a similar route the original internet did, while learning from some of the mistakes of the past.
Hopefully Freenet will be even more influential than the original world-wide web was (and is). The only major barrier to success that I can see to Freenet becoming the next WWW, will be the lack of commercial presence. That's what helped the WWW boom, and I think it'll be hard to get significant commercial presence on something like Freenet, where ideas are actually exchanged freely instead of locked away behind goofy patents and copyrights. Then again, look how far Apache and Linux got, with basically the same idea...
Personally, I prefer starting out with a lean system, like a basic Slack or Debian setup. I don't like having to rip out all that we-know-what's-best-for-you stuff in other distros, like Caldera.
Of course, for people with slow modem connections, a 6 CD distribution can be a pretty nice deal.
Guess it just depends where you want to start...
The article mentions some licenses that don't let you post or distribute screen shots in ANY public medium, which I would assume means game magazines and web sites. They're just shooting themselves in the foot with this sort of thing -- most people will not buy a game if they don't see it in their favorite magazine, or if they can't easily find out what it looks like.
And what about clans, tribes, etc. in the various multiplayer games? They like to post screen shots of their exploits on their web sites. Are they expected to pay screenshot license fees or something like that, or risk having their sites shut down? I mean, come on!
What kind of justification do they have for this sort of clause? Screenshots from games can't harm a company's interests in any way that I can think of...
I've been using LaTeX for the last year or so, through this program called LyX (www.lyx.org). Think of it as a GUI front-end to LaTeX, keeping the more complex details out of sight if you don't want them.
.doc files into messy, ugly .html files, and so forth.
Anyway, my point is -- I've found LaTeX to be an incredibly versatile piece of technology, and it works great. I've used it for my term papers, even stuff I've published on the web. I experimented a bit with the language itself without the help of LyX, and I love the flexibility and power.
I'd be thrilled if LaTeX became the standard of the web... So many document formats can be converted to TeX with almost no effort, so why not? This would probably end up being even simpler and clean than the way we do stuff now, converting
Of course, there's always the possibility that Microsoft and Netscape (or whoever) would end up trying to "extend" LaTeX/TeX like they did HTML, and we all know how well THAT turned out...
-----
Anything that can go wr
Here are some of my complaints so far...
1) Netscape's 6.0 installer is very unstable, and has a hard time coping with download problems because of stalls, etc. In fact, it took me a good four tries to get it to actually finish the install. Why can't we just have a tarball or something?
2) Netscape 6 itself breaks a number of standards supported in Mozilla, and is far too oriented to meet AOL's money-grubbing desires. Pardon me, but the browser should be for the user, not JUST the company. Companies have to make money, but I get tired of every single button or menu I click taking me to the horribly-slow Netscape site.
3) Netscape 6 is very unstable, yet the Mozilla code it is based off of runs much more smoothly. Looks like all those commercial tie-ins are causing Netscape to sink under its own commercial weight.
I had high hopes for Netscape. But it just doesn't cut it. I use the Opera for Linux port now, which, even though it is still in the alpha stage technically, can run circles around anything Netscape or Mozilla puts out. Sure there's no Java or plug-in support yet (neither of which I'm desperately needing), and it occasionally crashes, but at least it doesn't have all those weird glitches and standards issues that Netscape has.
On the Linux side, I think it's time we all start looking for or working on something better. I think the BrowseX browser looks particularly promising. It's open source, very capable already, and with some more development, could give the closed commercial browsers run for their money. But whatever happens, I honestly don't think Netscape will ever get much better. AOL simply has its priorities wrong, and has done a disservice to everyone by not coming through on a viable alternative browser.
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Anything that can go wr
Yeah, I had a Creative Labs card that had a 3Dfx Banshee chipset, and it worked great. But when I got a Voodoo 5, made by 3Dfx of course, it was a major disappointment. I sent it back and got a GeForce 2 MX, which I've been much happier with.
;-)
3Dfx had no competition when it came to the V4 and V5 setups, so they could make relatively shoddy products and (try to) charge whatever price they felt like. But you know, I paid $300 for that Voodoo 5, and when a low-end $100 Nvidia-powered card can perform infinitely better, that doesn't say much for 3Dfx's abilities as a video board maker.
I'm glad they're going back to the way things were, and staying out of the business of monopolizing board designs based on their chipset. Still, I'm not sure I'll buy from 3Dfx in the foreseeable future anyway. I had a lot of confidence in them before they became the only source for 3Dfx-based boards, and I lost much of it in my recent experiences with them.
Now if Nvidia would just open up their drivers, I would be totally happy...
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Anything that can go wr
I must say, I'm very disappointed in Mozilla and Netscape. Not only has this "cutting edge" browser taken so damn long to get this far, it's still not very good. It still lacks needed features, is unstable so much as to almost make Windows seem bug-free, and it's bloated beyond belief.
The previous Mozilla milestone I downloaded would freeze up at random points, mostly while viewing large pages, screw up images (actually inserting images from OTHER sites), etc. And, when I tried to use Netscape 6 Preview 3, I spent two hours downloading the damn thing over my sucky 33.6 connection, only to get an indecypherable error when I try to run it.
This reflects very badly on the open source community, and while it was a nice try, Mozilla and Netscape only have a few more nails to go in their collective coffin. Hopefully some other open source project will do better, or (*closed source shudder*) maybe Opera, which is shaping up nice.
*sigh*
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I'll admit, some of Yahoo's practices don't thrill me, but some of their services are good. And, from this, their software is too. Unlike AIM and ICQ, which have little (or sucky) "official" support for Linux, Messenger for Linux is very slick and nicely done. I don't use the service itself all that much, but this is a quality piece of software, and I applaud Yahoo for the effort they put into it. Nice job.
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Despite the fact that I prefer console mode and apps to GUIs, I think the X Window System is excellent. Sure, it's not perfect, and the wide range of widgets and such that vary between applications... well, those confuse the heck out of new users.
But if you ask me, I'd rather have the flexibility and small dose of confusion than have a standard, rigid interface. X is great because it's flexible, and lets program authors (as well as users, in many cases), to mold their interface and application experiences to whatever they want.
X lets your desktop have personality and power, and that is what makes it great.
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