Reply to 1) In the spirit it was offered, this was not to say "praise be to Sun and IBM," but rather to say "Even these guys, prime targets of Big Business, at least 'get it' on the need for pluralism."
Reply to 2) Sure you get tools... if you pay. Even the purchase of Office gives you VBA... for the pricetag of OFFICE.
I'll take the APIs of Linux over Windows any day. I like universal tools and pipe-ability, where Windows continues to attempt crushing the notion of a console.
Nothing irks me more about APIs than Microsoft's peculiar notion of the 'device metaphor.' In OpenGL, you draw a triangle just as you'd expect... feed it three points. In DirectX, it's make a vertex buffer, connect a feedback call, pipe the points into the vertex buffer, initiate a buffer execute, yadda yadda...
Real Operating systems give you the basics of at least writing scripts. (In Linux, a surprising number of 'user-friendly apps' are nothing more than shell or PERL scripts.) When Bill Gates said goodbye to the command prompt, he said goodbye to a lot of programmers.
As an IT professional, I struggle with the daily problem solving of getting software to work in a Microsoft dominated environment. It amazes me the level of disservice this giant provides to its customers. Yet this settlement takes the cake.
I'm sick of designing databases to see an application crash because Microsoft didn't anticipate an empty result. I'm sick of hearing they're aware of their bugs, but do not fix their application, and would rather you upgrade to their next version at your expense. I'm sick of them misrepresenting their proprietary formats or protocols as "standards."
I'm amazed how they get away with treating their own customers and partners as adversaries. I hope Ralph Nader follows the "content discrimination" scent to this perpetrator. While competitors like Sun and IBM have embraced "pluralism," in a world where many platforms harmoniously cohabit the planet, Microsoft still serves no one but themselves.
The new television campaign brings to mind customers placed on catapults... Sure they can feel the rush of flying when using Microsoft's XP to mix sound, take pictures, and edit video, just like we do on Macs and Linux, but when they find themselves locked in to Bill's software with the support's freshness dating expiring in three years, forced to upgrade or perish... that landing's going to be brutal!
Yet the settlement is another example of lethal idiocy... The double-talk makes very few concessions to ending Microsoft's disservice to the customer, and totally omits the original issue of antitrust. If our federal government is "of like mind" to this lobotomized shell game, may God help us all!
It's ironic how Microsoft got its beginning by writing BASIC for every personal computer in the late 70's. But once Windows got going, they must have asked themselves, "Empower the USER?!? -- What were we thinking!?!" Now their operating system no longer gives you a way to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and write your own applications. BASIC, the debugger, even the DOS-prompt is eliminated. Here's where we want you to go today.
It's been decades since I've seen Bill's name on a piece of software, and the only innovation I've seen from Microsoft is new ways to write licenses. There was even a paper on Microsoft's own web site how some of its programmers discovered new ways that programming languages compared to the legalese of conditional clauses in writing license agreements! Call it 'freedom to inundate.'
It gets pretty messy trying to cram round people into square pigeon holes.
Sometimes it's a cultural shortcoming, but too many people are stuck in the rut of thinking without Set Theory... only one answer per blank to be filled. *NIX variations are a terrific start for departing from this, but sometimes the programmer hasn't learned from history, or just doesn't have the time to do better then M$.
This fits politics, too... The unfair will never 'get' pluralism. Notice how Bin Laden pigeonholes all Americans as faceless criminals deserving of indiscriminant destruction. Meanwhile, NATO forces are trying to bomb the Regime while simultaneously giving humanitarian aid the Afgan people. America is all about a melting pot of cultures cohabiting the planet harmoniously... Not a Monopoly to say "there is but one God, and our one people has the monopoly on what He's about..."
Different models alright... The bug is on PCs whose keyboards are not on the PS/2 "bussing" the mouse (or trackpoint) uses. The kernel checks the keyboard, and if its bussed 5-pin or USB, the ps/@ port '/dev/seraux' is locked out as if inexistant. This adversly effects all ThinkPad models T20/T21/A20, also some Compaqs and similar models.
There is some discussion on MandrakeForum, and somewhere else I read a response that said the person simply recompiled the kernel and it worked. Sadly, the dependencies on the Kernel-source RPM are also wanting... they need a ncurses-devel RPM that is unavailable on the CDs and the FTP sites.
I spent the weekend downloading both Redhat 7.1 and Mandrake 8.0 for our Divisional Headquarters... That's six CDs in all. It was my hope to use Mandrake as the distribution of choice for my ThinkPad, while using RedHat for the servers, since Lotus Domino is supported when run on RedHat.
Sadly, there is a definite bug in the Mandrake 8.0 release that is just getting recognized: The kernel was compiled with the ps/2 mouse support disabled in many configurations, including ThinkPads. Apparently, they thought that 'no ps/2 keyboard' (i.e. USB keyboard) was thought to mean 'no ps/2 mouse' as well. My ThinkPad could not access the trackpoint device (the keyboard mouse-pointer) in any way... on a kernel level. If you replace kernel-2.4.3-20mdk with kernel-linus2.4-2.4.3-2mdk, you get the ps/2 port back, but you must dig out compatible pcmcia modules for the earlier kernel. (I'm presently switching kernels between a mouseless session and a networkless session.)
It is Wednesday today, and I've been watching the cooker/cooker-fire for a new kernel, but to no avail. IMHO, Redhat got the 7.1 release out a timely way, panicking Mandrake into a premature release.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a featuritis junkie who loves Mandrake otherwise. I just wish this user-friendly distribution ideal for notebook systems were actually ready for this release.
Essentially he argues that Open Source undermines intellectual property (which is true)
You're right to disagree. Open Source is not only innocent of any "destruction of property," but it is a great creator of wealth: The key difference is in just who owns the product. The original investment of time & talent do not vary, but it'll either be the propriety of a secretive few, or it will be an empowering item to the many that share it.
Microsoft gave up on empowering users long ago. They're remembered for Windows and DOS, but it was their licensing of MS-BASIC to every brand of microcomputer that made them pioneers. And the innovation wasn't the software, since basic was someone else's brainchild... it was the licensing approach that made them wealthy... Why let people own software, when you can keep ownership and just license its use?
When every IBM machine had BASIC in its ROMs, the clones could not emulate that. But once GW-BASIC provided the alternative and a Windowing platform could supplant their DOS, Microsoft woke up: "Empower the user?!? WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!?!?" Now to get a development tool from them, you'll have to pay for a bloated suite to get it.
Customers and partners are just adversaries waiting to be taken advantantage.
Proprietary Software (Microsoft's Fave) - Slap a EULA on that puppy, just to cover your ass, essentially saying "We are not in violation of services-not-rendered, because we never claimed it would serve you anyhow in any way!"
Open Source Software - Remove the secrecy of how software works. Now an author's genius, or stupidity, can be seen splendidly arrayed in the emperor's new clothes.
Free (as in Liberty) Software - They can never take this away from us... not by claims of ownership anywho.
Maybe by defending "the American Way" he was refering to driving the native inhabitants off while taking all they own.;-)
I think Train Tracks would be a poor application, at least for the long term. Composites are great for offering a "fall back" where stress is expected to give movement; Composites can act as the "memory material" mentioned in the Washington Post detail. But those "glue packs" are in exhaustable supply, and eventually the material would lose resilience or its predefined shape.
Il'l never forget when a friend was shopping for a Saturn: The Salesguy wanted to demonstrate the composite panels around the Saturn sides. He went to the "tried and true" floor model, and kicked in the door [again], but this time, it didn't pop back out. Was his face red!
An odd sidenote about having composite doors is that you can't stick magnets (ie door signs) against the doors or quarter panels, but you can stick them on the hood or trunk, which are still metal. (At least on the SL-2.)
I've been programming a 3D system as a hobby for some time... Sometimes with actors and sets, but mostly toying with "an aquarium of spaceships, embarking and departing station docks."
With the older cards I've purchased, a distant ship appears to be a bright clump of disfigured pixels. Without the multisampling, the colors/shades chosen are either extremes from the edges of the model, or last-come-last-served colors. Multisampling gives a much better representation of that "region of space." By balancing samples from the model against the portion of samples that hit dead space, the pixels more accurately represent the core model fading at the edges.
Looking past the obvious semantics of "GNU's Not Unix," it is indeed flattering that Raskin should compliment the OS itself.
I'm sure Microsoft would lust after the opportunity to do exactly what Apple did: build a well-designed Interface atop a core like OpenBSD. If it weren't for the fact that MS sold their Unix to another company, and are thus contractually obligated not to produce another Unix, their present push toward NT technology would have taken exactly this turn. (And the more I explore NT, the more I see thinly veiled impersonations of Unix.)
My favorite book for getting outside the old paradigms of "files" and "applications" is Computers as Theatre by Dr. Brenda Laurel. "Actors" on a "Stage" makes for a much richer metaphor to the causal whole.
Re:Honestly I feel that OSX for x86 would hurt APP
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OS X on x86?
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By and large I must agree. Apple is a hardware company and always has been since the day the Apple 1 was built in Woz's garage/shop using 6502s in wooden cases. (As I recall, one 6502 was the CPU, the second was a cleverly timed Video generator.) Yet, Apple is, just as importantly, a design company.
Sadly, the hardware side of competition doesn't win Apple the clearest of victories. Some wins include the peaceful, silent design of the fanless system, the artistry of the cases, and the simplicity of the peripheral attachments. But these do not distinguish it enough from its Wintel competitors: The Motorola PowerPC chips perform competitive benchmarks per clockcycle, but the masses want those GigaHertz.
A software-oriented Apple could still sell its strongest point, Design, but that takes development. Taking the new direction of support the x86 platform, with its Tower of Hardware Babel, could be more than Apple is ready to chew... affordably anyhow.
Wizards of the Coast may have downsized, but that does not necessarily mean they aren't growing in terms of financial and publication holdings. They had just released the hardbounds copies of the AD&D Third Edition shortly before acquiring Last Unicorn Games.
FASA was sliding more visibly since the days they lost their Star Trek license. Granted, they had some powerful pieces like ShadowRun, but their overall holdings were slipping.
What downsizing does mean for Wizards is that they've got bosses who felt it better to separate the haves from the have nots. The Owners seem to be doing quite well, regardless of how the workers, artists, and authors are fairing... and such is the nature of today's copyright; that an artist can drown while the distributor can lucritively exploit their work.
FASA was also known for being the one to license the Star Trek trademark into a Role Playing Game. At some point during the Next Generation television series, some disputes arose as to how far that license really extended. Eventually, the license was lost.
A year or three ago, Last Unicorn Games acquired a license for new Star Trek RPGs. Strangely enough, just a week after GenCon in Wisconson, they were bought up in turn by Wizards of the Coast, the ever growing owners of AD&D.
To explain: Feng Shui(pronounced "fung shway") are words from Chinese which literally trandslate as "Wind and Water." Primarily, it is used in architecture and decorating to maximize the comfort of how the environment flows.
It has many applications. On one level, it deals with furnishing, landscapes, and building to increase comfort. On another level, more important to the work my wife and I do, it is about removing offensive stimulii, or balancing the qi/chi/whatever-you-call-energy. This does not mean maximizing efficiency in a machine like manner, because having long straight hallways, or doors evenly opposite each other in halls, can "point" offensive "energy"(noise, flow, stress) at a person.
I've known architects to redirect long hallways, or split them up with fire doors, just to slow the flow of a place into more pleasing directions. Ironically, this seems to parallel electronics in a metaphorical way, balancing "resistances" where an inducer could do harm. Stressful positions, like having your back to the door or world all the time, can make a person paranoid ("Big brother is watching" or "I could be stabbed in the back!"), and such offensive stimulii are called shars, which I think means "poison dart." Feng Shui prescribes remedies, such as having a desk mirror to see who's behind you.
In a world where it's easy to go hard-of-hearing amidst computer equipment, Good Feng Shui should be considered in this design, as it is in any other field of design. Microfans could be far more harmonious, or quiet (yin), than conventional cooling methods.
PS: I've also made little microcontroller "pets" whose LEDs simulate breathing rhythms. It has a cool, soothing energy about it.
My wife and I collaborate on many projects... I produce a lot of art and programs on computer, she had never touched a computer until five years ago, but we're both artists. Anywho, we often produce some party events for the local science fiction community, and have learned what an important contribution Feng Shui adds to an environment's creature comforts.
I've lately heard a lot of good things about how quiet MacIntoshes are. Since I've been making this the year of my Microsoft purge, I have become self-sufficient in GNU/Linux with the help of the local users group. But lately I've become aware just how much noise fills a room with a single tower... or even with no tower and only a 3com Superstack 24port hub, running its fan. Such a harmful shar can be maddening when compounded.
There has got to be a more efficient way to "recycle" wasted energy in a system... particularly in notepads. If a modern CPU generates 25watts of energy into raw heat, and a fan is required to cool it, reducing battery life, there's got to be a way to use that more efficiently. If the CPU heat can not only run its own fans, but maybe also backlight a display or something else useful, then the waste of heat and noise are replaced with greater efficiency.
This very sort of component would be just what is needed to build the Liquid Metal Guy from Terminator 2... on the right scale. If you think about it, the movable components would have to be on the same scale as organic cells more or less. They'd also need some kind of peer-to-peer network to coordinate their composition as well as distribute memory. (A tall order, but this is a much-needed step.)
The Philosophy of the design has a lot of merit too. I remember a music composition program called Bars and Pipes on my old Amiga. It made numerous effects possible, and easy, by letting you drop the gizmos of your choice into the pipeline. It's also a reason I'm migrating development from Windows over to Linux, because the latter has a much better grasp of piping one universal tool's output into the input of another.
All About Product Placement
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I too got a kick out of the Red Fedora, the cameos by folks like Miguel De Icaza, and the Gnome Desktop everywhere...
...but then it hit me; This movie is all about product placement. If it had anything to do with Science Fiction or Fantasy, there would have been a lot more imagination displayed, rather than reading like some exercise in lucid dreaming. Cliche's abound, like the infamous running the clock down to detonation, or pointing the deadly sesame seed. Instead, it was just a minor work in fiction without much effort.
The real purpose of the movie was Product Placement. Pepsi products and Pringles, Gnome, Open Source Software, Open Source Ideologies, Open Source Celebraties, Apple Hardware, Cars of Status, and houses doing tricks from Xerox labs twenty years ago.
If you're polarized on topics like Capitalism or Coca Cola, you'll like find the movie polarizing too. But if you're just out to see an action flick with fast talk and the occassional the-more-you-look--the-more-you-see layers of detail, it's a cool little flick.
Milo! That's got sesame seeds! What were you thinking!?!
If these mobile processors emit 25 watts of energy, and are designed for mobile units, why not put that to good use? At that wattage, you could get things to incandesce, or maybe more efficiently cause it to flouresce. Why not backlight your LCD with it?
You'd even still have your energy-saver if the backlight and processor "sleep" at the same time!
There are plenty of books and reports about how today's economy is based on Human Attention. With advertizers working to capture eyeballs and telemarketters clamoring for your ear, it's no wonder that, as a human race, we must develop tools and rules for Attention Management.
As a personal rule, I do not accept telephone solicitation. For many, filtration software is a needed tool for communication sanity. Too often, the Attention Market has you at a disadvantage, ready to commit you to a purchase, legally obligating you to a recorded whisper of "okay." Meanwhile, you often have no such record of their verbal promises, if you have need of committing them to rendering services. And while Spam on email at least gives you written record, the company's credentials are often every-bit-as-nebulous.
If nothing guarantees success like having Human Attention lavished on a project, then does Love indeed make the world go around?
I hear ya! I've been concerned about my current ThinkPad warming my blood tempurature. (Our cats love to rest beside the warmth of the fan's out-vent!)
I would consider it well worth the reduced battery life to include some Peltier Devices just for the underside, so I don't go sterile!
...Or better yet, how about a matrix of heating elements that could adjust the redistribution of heat, frying the bacon more levelly, or brown those pancakes to an even perfection! (And we hackers know the importance of flat food!)
An Anti-Burn Element (like Anti-Lock Brakes on a car) would not only leave less scoring on the food, but would it not also leave less charred mess on the pan, making cleaning much easier?
If using loadlin, the difficulty you may encounter is that loadlin boots a copy of the kernel from your Windows partition.
Without a floppy copy of the new kernel, or a backup of the old one to fall back onto, you may find yourself in an awkward Catch-22:
The new kernel will steal away the file systems. Loadlin will boot the old copy of the kernel from the Windows partition. The old kernel will not be able to run the File System modules for reading the Windows partition (VFAT). You can find yourself unable to write the new kernel to either the floppy or Windows partition in order to get it booting in the same version as the FS's.
Once you've got the new kernel into place, be sure to write it to windows or floppy before the impending reboot.
I've only done a handful of upgrades, most of them to Mandrake. (6.0 through 7.2 and now 7.2-2.4.0)
If you're not using loadlin to bootstrap from Windows, it should be cake. (Utterly painless if you're using the MandrakeUpdate.) However, if you do use loadlin, you really ought to make sure you've got boot floppies and a backup of the original kernel. Beyond that, I don't forsee much problem on an unmodified RH6.2.
In a quick survey of our IT Department, it's unanimous... We've all thought they mistreat everyone equally!
Microsoft's policies always reminded me of the worst in Steven Seigal movies... It's him against the world, and even his closest partners are like wolves under his pecking order.
Look at the bundling agreements, the EULAs, the cryptic product key codes, etc. They regard us as guilty until proven innocent. When employees, OEMs, VARs, and especially customers are viewed as adversaries, what do you expect? It's not hard to prove Microsoft takes advantage of as many as they can... But it's hard to prove driscimination when they're abusing everyone!
First of all, it was a marketing fiasco. The Win95 family, known by a year in its version number, became WinME while the NT family, known by two letters, became 2000. On top of that, MS was very disappointed in sales.
Second, it moved to account based security like Unix/Posix/etc, making it a poor choice for the average consumer. The only ones benefitting from this are IT managers and server vendors... Average customers suffer a loss of time and effort in the learning curve and extra steps for installation.
Hardware designed for Win98 broke big time under W2K. Of course, even an upgrade from 95 to 98 made some Diamond cards like the EDGE3D break, but W2K was a whole new paradigm most engineers were not willing to keep up with.
An interesting litmus test for W2K are the criticisms Microsoft leveled against LINUX on its Truth-dot website. 'It suffers extraordinary delays as the OS checks the disk for errors in the event of a blackout, costing valuable minutes of downtime.' Believe it or not, they were talking about Linux, which I've rearely rebooted, when it's even more applicable to W2K, which can take a half hour on a SMP Netfinity 5000 just running scandisk (and that is done upon reboot, unlike Win9x which does it online).
Slashdot Mirror
Reply to 1) In the spirit it was offered, this was not to say "praise be to Sun and IBM," but rather to say "Even these guys, prime targets of Big Business, at least 'get it' on the need for pluralism."
Reply to 2) Sure you get tools... if you pay. Even the purchase of Office gives you VBA... for the pricetag of OFFICE.
I'll take the APIs of Linux over Windows any day. I like universal tools and pipe-ability, where Windows continues to attempt crushing the notion of a console.
Nothing irks me more about APIs than Microsoft's peculiar notion of the 'device metaphor.' In OpenGL, you draw a triangle just as you'd expect... feed it three points. In DirectX, it's make a vertex buffer, connect a feedback call, pipe the points into the vertex buffer, initiate a buffer execute, yadda yadda...
Real Operating systems give you the basics of at least writing scripts. (In Linux, a surprising number of 'user-friendly apps' are nothing more than shell or PERL scripts.) When Bill Gates said goodbye to the command prompt, he said goodbye to a lot of programmers.
As an IT professional, I struggle with the daily problem solving of getting software to work in a Microsoft dominated environment. It amazes me the level of disservice this giant provides to its customers. Yet this settlement takes the cake.
I'm sick of designing databases to see an application crash because Microsoft didn't anticipate an empty result. I'm sick of hearing they're aware of their bugs, but do not fix their application, and would rather you upgrade to their next version at your expense. I'm sick of them misrepresenting their proprietary formats or protocols as "standards."
I'm amazed how they get away with treating their own customers and partners as adversaries. I hope Ralph Nader follows the "content discrimination" scent to this perpetrator. While competitors like Sun and IBM have embraced "pluralism," in a world where many platforms harmoniously cohabit the planet, Microsoft still serves no one but themselves.
The new television campaign brings to mind customers placed on catapults... Sure they can feel the rush of flying when using Microsoft's XP to mix sound, take pictures, and edit video, just like we do on Macs and Linux, but when they find themselves locked in to Bill's software with the support's freshness dating expiring in three years, forced to upgrade or perish... that landing's going to be brutal!
Yet the settlement is another example of lethal idiocy... The double-talk makes very few concessions to ending Microsoft's disservice to the customer, and totally omits the original issue of antitrust. If our federal government is "of like mind" to this lobotomized shell game, may God help us all!
It's ironic how Microsoft got its beginning by writing BASIC for every personal computer in the late 70's. But once Windows got going, they must have asked themselves, "Empower the USER?!? -- What were we thinking!?!" Now their operating system no longer gives you a way to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and write your own applications. BASIC, the debugger, even the DOS-prompt is eliminated. Here's where we want you to go today.
It's been decades since I've seen Bill's name on a piece of software, and the only innovation I've seen from Microsoft is new ways to write licenses. There was even a paper on Microsoft's own web site how some of its programmers discovered new ways that programming languages compared to the legalese of conditional clauses in writing license agreements! Call it 'freedom to inundate.'
Sometimes it's a cultural shortcoming, but too many people are stuck in the rut of thinking without Set Theory... only one answer per blank to be filled. *NIX variations are a terrific start for departing from this, but sometimes the programmer hasn't learned from history, or just doesn't have the time to do better then M$.
This fits politics, too... The unfair will never 'get' pluralism. Notice how Bin Laden pigeonholes all Americans as faceless criminals deserving of indiscriminant destruction. Meanwhile, NATO forces are trying to bomb the Regime while simultaneously giving humanitarian aid the Afgan people. America is all about a melting pot of cultures cohabiting the planet harmoniously... Not a Monopoly to say "there is but one God, and our one people has the monopoly on what He's about..."
Harmony is a good thing.
There is some discussion on MandrakeForum, and somewhere else I read a response that said the person simply recompiled the kernel and it worked. Sadly, the dependencies on the Kernel-source RPM are also wanting... they need a ncurses-devel RPM that is unavailable on the CDs and the FTP sites.
Sadly, there is a definite bug in the Mandrake 8.0 release that is just getting recognized: The kernel was compiled with the ps/2 mouse support disabled in many configurations, including ThinkPads. Apparently, they thought that 'no ps/2 keyboard' (i.e. USB keyboard) was thought to mean 'no ps/2 mouse' as well. My ThinkPad could not access the trackpoint device (the keyboard mouse-pointer) in any way... on a kernel level. If you replace kernel-2.4.3-20mdk with kernel-linus2.4-2.4.3-2mdk, you get the ps/2 port back, but you must dig out compatible pcmcia modules for the earlier kernel. (I'm presently switching kernels between a mouseless session and a networkless session.)
It is Wednesday today, and I've been watching the cooker/cooker-fire for a new kernel, but to no avail. IMHO, Redhat got the 7.1 release out a timely way, panicking Mandrake into a premature release.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a featuritis junkie who loves Mandrake otherwise. I just wish this user-friendly distribution ideal for notebook systems were actually ready for this release.
You're right to disagree. Open Source is not only innocent of any "destruction of property," but it is a great creator of wealth: The key difference is in just who owns the product. The original investment of time & talent do not vary, but it'll either be the propriety of a secretive few, or it will be an empowering item to the many that share it.
Microsoft gave up on empowering users long ago. They're remembered for Windows and DOS, but it was their licensing of MS-BASIC to every brand of microcomputer that made them pioneers. And the innovation wasn't the software, since basic was someone else's brainchild... it was the licensing approach that made them wealthy... Why let people own software, when you can keep ownership and just license its use?
When every IBM machine had BASIC in its ROMs, the clones could not emulate that. But once GW-BASIC provided the alternative and a Windowing platform could supplant their DOS, Microsoft woke up: "Empower the user?!? WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!?!?" Now to get a development tool from them, you'll have to pay for a bloated suite to get it.
Customers and partners are just adversaries waiting to be taken advantantage.
- Proprietary Software (Microsoft's Fave) - Slap a EULA on that puppy, just to cover your ass, essentially saying "We are not in violation of services-not-rendered, because we never claimed it would serve you anyhow in any way!"
- Open Source Software - Remove the secrecy of how software works. Now an author's genius, or stupidity, can be seen splendidly arrayed in the emperor's new clothes.
- Free (as in Liberty) Software - They can never take this away from us... not by claims of ownership anywho.
Maybe by defending "the American Way" he was refering to driving the native inhabitants off while taking all they own.Il'l never forget when a friend was shopping for a Saturn: The Salesguy wanted to demonstrate the composite panels around the Saturn sides. He went to the "tried and true" floor model, and kicked in the door [again], but this time, it didn't pop back out. Was his face red!
An odd sidenote about having composite doors is that you can't stick magnets (ie door signs) against the doors or quarter panels, but you can stick them on the hood or trunk, which are still metal. (At least on the SL-2.)
With the older cards I've purchased, a distant ship appears to be a bright clump of disfigured pixels. Without the multisampling, the colors/shades chosen are either extremes from the edges of the model, or last-come-last-served colors. Multisampling gives a much better representation of that "region of space." By balancing samples from the model against the portion of samples that hit dead space, the pixels more accurately represent the core model fading at the edges.
I'm sure Microsoft would lust after the opportunity to do exactly what Apple did: build a well-designed Interface atop a core like OpenBSD. If it weren't for the fact that MS sold their Unix to another company, and are thus contractually obligated not to produce another Unix, their present push toward NT technology would have taken exactly this turn. (And the more I explore NT, the more I see thinly veiled impersonations of Unix.)
My favorite book for getting outside the old paradigms of "files" and "applications" is Computers as Theatre by Dr. Brenda Laurel. "Actors" on a "Stage" makes for a much richer metaphor to the causal whole.
Sadly, the hardware side of competition doesn't win Apple the clearest of victories. Some wins include the peaceful, silent design of the fanless system, the artistry of the cases, and the simplicity of the peripheral attachments. But these do not distinguish it enough from its Wintel competitors: The Motorola PowerPC chips perform competitive benchmarks per clockcycle, but the masses want those GigaHertz.
A software-oriented Apple could still sell its strongest point, Design, but that takes development. Taking the new direction of support the x86 platform, with its Tower of Hardware Babel, could be more than Apple is ready to chew... affordably anyhow.
FASA was sliding more visibly since the days they lost their Star Trek license. Granted, they had some powerful pieces like ShadowRun, but their overall holdings were slipping.
What downsizing does mean for Wizards is that they've got bosses who felt it better to separate the haves from the have nots. The Owners seem to be doing quite well, regardless of how the workers, artists, and authors are fairing... and such is the nature of today's copyright; that an artist can drown while the distributor can lucritively exploit their work.
A year or three ago, Last Unicorn Games acquired a license for new Star Trek RPGs. Strangely enough, just a week after GenCon in Wisconson, they were bought up in turn by Wizards of the Coast, the ever growing owners of AD&D.
It has many applications. On one level, it deals with furnishing, landscapes, and building to increase comfort. On another level, more important to the work my wife and I do, it is about removing offensive stimulii, or balancing the qi/chi/whatever-you-call-energy. This does not mean maximizing efficiency in a machine like manner, because having long straight hallways, or doors evenly opposite each other in halls, can "point" offensive "energy"(noise, flow, stress) at a person.
I've known architects to redirect long hallways, or split them up with fire doors, just to slow the flow of a place into more pleasing directions. Ironically, this seems to parallel electronics in a metaphorical way, balancing "resistances" where an inducer could do harm. Stressful positions, like having your back to the door or world all the time, can make a person paranoid ("Big brother is watching" or "I could be stabbed in the back!"), and such offensive stimulii are called shars , which I think means "poison dart." Feng Shui prescribes remedies, such as having a desk mirror to see who's behind you.
In a world where it's easy to go hard-of-hearing amidst computer equipment, Good Feng Shui should be considered in this design, as it is in any other field of design. Microfans could be far more harmonious, or quiet (yin), than conventional cooling methods.
PS: I've also made little microcontroller "pets" whose LEDs simulate breathing rhythms. It has a cool, soothing energy about it.
I've lately heard a lot of good things about how quiet MacIntoshes are. Since I've been making this the year of my Microsoft purge, I have become self-sufficient in GNU/Linux with the help of the local users group. But lately I've become aware just how much noise fills a room with a single tower... or even with no tower and only a 3com Superstack 24port hub, running its fan. Such a harmful shar can be maddening when compounded.
There has got to be a more efficient way to "recycle" wasted energy in a system... particularly in notepads. If a modern CPU generates 25watts of energy into raw heat, and a fan is required to cool it, reducing battery life, there's got to be a way to use that more efficiently. If the CPU heat can not only run its own fans, but maybe also backlight a display or something else useful, then the waste of heat and noise are replaced with greater efficiency.
The Philosophy of the design has a lot of merit too. I remember a music composition program called Bars and Pipes on my old Amiga. It made numerous effects possible, and easy, by letting you drop the gizmos of your choice into the pipeline. It's also a reason I'm migrating development from Windows over to Linux, because the latter has a much better grasp of piping one universal tool's output into the input of another.
The real purpose of the movie was Product Placement. Pepsi products and Pringles, Gnome, Open Source Software, Open Source Ideologies, Open Source Celebraties, Apple Hardware, Cars of Status, and houses doing tricks from Xerox labs twenty years ago.
If you're polarized on topics like Capitalism or Coca Cola, you'll like find the movie polarizing too. But if you're just out to see an action flick with fast talk and the occassional the-more-you-look--the-more-you-see layers of detail, it's a cool little flick.
Milo! That's got sesame seeds! What were you thinking!?!
If these mobile processors emit 25 watts of energy, and are designed for mobile units, why not put that to good use? At that wattage, you could get things to incandesce, or maybe more efficiently cause it to flouresce. Why not backlight your LCD with it?
You'd even still have your energy-saver if the backlight and processor "sleep" at the same time!
As a personal rule, I do not accept telephone solicitation. For many, filtration software is a needed tool for communication sanity. Too often, the Attention Market has you at a disadvantage, ready to commit you to a purchase, legally obligating you to a recorded whisper of "okay." Meanwhile, you often have no such record of their verbal promises, if you have need of committing them to rendering services. And while Spam on email at least gives you written record, the company's credentials are often every-bit-as-nebulous.
If nothing guarantees success like having Human Attention lavished on a project, then does Love indeed make the world go around?
I would consider it well worth the reduced battery life to include some Peltier Devices just for the underside, so I don't go sterile!
An Anti-Burn Element (like Anti-Lock Brakes on a car) would not only leave less scoring on the food, but would it not also leave less charred mess on the pan, making cleaning much easier?
Mmmmm, pancakes...
Without a floppy copy of the new kernel, or a backup of the old one to fall back onto, you may find yourself in an awkward Catch-22:
The new kernel will steal away the file systems. Loadlin will boot the old copy of the kernel from the Windows partition. The old kernel will not be able to run the File System modules for reading the Windows partition (VFAT). You can find yourself unable to write the new kernel to either the floppy or Windows partition in order to get it booting in the same version as the FS's.
Once you've got the new kernel into place, be sure to write it to windows or floppy before the impending reboot.
If you're not using loadlin to bootstrap from Windows, it should be cake. (Utterly painless if you're using the MandrakeUpdate.) However, if you do use loadlin, you really ought to make sure you've got boot floppies and a backup of the original kernel. Beyond that, I don't forsee much problem on an unmodified RH6.2.
Microsoft's policies always reminded me of the worst in Steven Seigal movies... It's him against the world, and even his closest partners are like wolves under his pecking order.
Look at the bundling agreements, the EULAs, the cryptic product key codes, etc. They regard us as guilty until proven innocent. When employees, OEMs, VARs, and especially customers are viewed as adversaries, what do you expect? It's not hard to prove Microsoft takes advantage of as many as they can... But it's hard to prove driscimination when they're abusing everyone!
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First of all, it was a marketing fiasco. The Win95 family, known by a year in its version number, became WinME while the NT family, known by two letters, became 2000. On top of that, MS was very disappointed in sales.
- Second, it moved to account based security like Unix/Posix/etc, making it a poor choice for the average consumer. The only ones benefitting from this are IT managers and server vendors... Average customers suffer a loss of time and effort in the learning curve and extra steps for installation.
- Hardware designed for Win98 broke big time under W2K. Of course, even an upgrade from 95 to 98 made some Diamond cards like the EDGE3D break, but W2K was a whole new paradigm most engineers were not willing to keep up with.
An interesting litmus test for W2K are the criticisms Microsoft leveled against LINUX on its Truth-dot website. 'It suffers extraordinary delays as the OS checks the disk for errors in the event of a blackout, costing valuable minutes of downtime.' Believe it or not, they were talking about Linux, which I've rearely rebooted, when it's even more applicable to W2K, which can take a half hour on a SMP Netfinity 5000 just running scandisk (and that is done upon reboot, unlike Win9x which does it online).