As other posters have mentioned, it's not cesium gas but cesium metal, and it's not radioactive AFAIK.
I actually have done some consulting for the owner of Cool Chips (on an unrelated project), and have chatted with him about the tech. As I understand it, they are in an early prototype stage: they've built chips that work, but they are in the process of negotiating their first volume contracts and ramping up production. In other words, they are definitely for real, but you may not see them in anything you own for a year or two.
I highly recommend Gary Taubes' comprehensive and scholarly book on "cold fusion", Bad Science. It tells the story you are describing carefully and accurately. It also tells everything about Prof. Hagelstein that I need to know to evaluate his current work. (Hint: it's not flattering.)
Of course, the cold fusion trolls will give you long and involved stories about why Bad Science is bad science reporting. All I can say is: read his book, then read whatever the cold fusion advocates recommend. Isn't too hard for me to guess who is on the side of truth on this one.
At any rate, I pray that there is no cold fusion. From what I know of atomic physics, the only thing less likely than that it exists is that it could exist in a form that doesn't make it possible to build one heck of a bomb out of it.
BTW, Taubes also wrote the New York Times investigative science article that really set off the Atkins diet craze recently. He's one of my favorite science writers: objective and comprehensive.
The point being that (so far as I am aware) no form of "intellectual property law" protected Shakespeare's creative work: he made money by using the work successfully, and by convincing others to contribute to it. It was thoroughly possible in Shakespeare's time to be a productive creative genius and be commercially successful at it, without the benefit of copyright law. Probably still could be, given the chance.
Who will create the next Unreal Tournament when no one feels like paying for them anymore?
The authors of the not-for-profit Unreal Tournament Next Generation, maybe?
Seriously, the argument that people will quit creating because their copyright-based profit "entitlement" is diminished or even eliminated has always seemed totally ludicrous to me.
Creative works existed since long before the existence of copyrights and patents. Every time a new technology was invented to ease distribution of creative works in a new medium ---book press, newspaper press, radio, television, magnetic tape, floppy disk---a host of new work sprung up before there was any clear way to profit from it. Shakespeare is the poster child here, but look at the machinima movement today. Are there commercial computer animations? Well, yes. Yet even given the possibility of making a profit by leveraging existing laws, many of the top machinima creators give their work away.
My personal belief is that the current length, breadth, and assignability of rights under both copyright and patent legislation actually discourages new creative work. Talented creators find that they can make money developing and promoting their existing work (for 20 years or even forever) with far less risk than they incur by creating something entirely new. Skilled entrants to the field are discouraged from participating voluntarily: during the production of new works, they run a high risk of violating the panopoly of legal rights of established creators, without compensating financial reward that would allow them to defend themselves in the legal system. The unrestricted assignability of rights means that rewards of creation often substantially accrue to entities other than the creator. The net effect of all of this is insidious, but clear: there is much material produced, but it is largely highly derivative, often of low quality, and produced by fewer and fewer prominent creators. Indeed, were it not for the fact that folks still continue to create without reasonable expectation of serious profit, professional orchestras (who subsist largely outside the scope of the copyright system) would probably outnumber pop music groups in the United States.
To return to your specific case, note that we have a terrific model for what happens when a commercial game engine is no longer copyrighted. When Id allowed folks to develop successors to Doom, their actions spawned a whole host of free games based on that source---many of them of extremely high quality. The best of these have become major creative and commercial successes in their own right. I would much rather have a novel low-cost game based on the Unreal Tournament framework than "the next Unreal Tournament". Changes to the law might give me just that.
I believe that there are many folks who have felt as I do on these matters. Yet I see them decreasingly voicing their opinion even in the potentially friendly forum that is Slashdot. I do not know whether this is because they are intimidated into silence by the current hostile environment, or gulled by the massive advertising-driven social campaign currently underway. I note with irony the dramatic increase (on Slashdot, no less!) of McCarthyesque "I am not stating that copyright infringement is moral" disclaimers such as yours. History suggests that a society that requires these kinds of disclaimers for participation is rarely on the road to health. I am not stating that copyright infringement is legal: it is obviously not. I do, however, believe copyright and patent infringement to be moral in many cases. I state this in spite of the fact that by doing so I endanger my professional and social status to some degree, because I believe that speaking out for my beliefs may benefit my fellow creators and society as a whole.
As the author of numerous commercially successful creative works, you might think that I would have a vested interest in preserving the current strong patent and copyright prote
Neal Stephenson gave a talk similar to this interview as a keynote last June at Usenix 2004 in San Antonio. Turns out he's also a rocket geek, so I got to chat with him briefly: very nice guy.
You bet. Depends on how many days they've been running. I've rarely seen a complex, long-running C/C++ program that doesn't leak like a sieve. That's after avoiding complex data structures because they're too hard to explicitly manage the memory for. GC-ed programs can leak too (through inadvertent retention of references), but with a modicum of caution they don't in practice---and they are much easier to get correct.
BTW, in answer to your original troll: with a modern generational GC, there will be an overhead of a few MB for the ephemeral generation, as well as an overall overhead of maybe 20% over a well-designed malloc pool for the rest of the generations. Big deal.
There is no longer much of a reason to require explicit deallocation in a programming language. I use a lot of different languages for real work---I like the GC-ed ones.
But, but...the review of the service said it's good: the only piece it got wrong was Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and that was "incredibly difficult".
For pity's sake: "incredibly difficult"?? It's one of the most popular pieces of music in the world. And you just posted a link that should be able to identify it fine.
With its advanced "audio fingerprinting" technology, AT&T has managed to provide a service that will tell me the title and artist of almost any piece of music I don't care about. Isn't fingerprinting what they do to identify miscreants?
One of the problems with "do the time" is that the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the US Constitution has been so narrowly interpreted by the courts that it is essentially useless. I mean, come on: a year in jail for videotaping a movie? If this isn't a clearcut case of massive overkill from an average citizen's point of view, I don't know why. But there's not a chance in a thousand that the defendant, if convicted, will have his conviction overturned for this reason.
Not to mention the privacy consequences of having the projectionist watching people in a darkened theatre with night-vision goggles. I'm sure what he was looking for was illegal videotaping. Uh huh. Our Constitution needs an explicit privacy amendment. Instead, we'll probably end up with flag-burning.
Yes, there is an ancient paranoia text adventure floating around. It's reasonably hilarious. It's a bit buggy, and doesn't seem to have any happy ending---so it's pretty faithful to the original. Have fun, citizen. Fun is mandatory.
I liked this sentence from Nielsen's report: "It's striking, however, that mobile-phone conversations are judged more negatively than loud conversations."
What's striking to me is that Nielsen, after many years of working in human interfaces, doesn't seem to quite get the idea of statistical significance. From the reported data, the values for loud and mobile-phone sure looked to me to be statistically indistinguishable.
I would write the G&M article off as crankery, except I'm sitting a foot away from a problem device.
I bought a Edirol PCR-80 MIDI/USB "keyboard controller" a few weeks ago. The thing has a superbright blue power led behind a Fresnel lens of literally 1/4" diameter. The Fresnel lens spreads the light quite nicely (unlike the blue LEDs the parent poster talks about), and the LED is really amazingly bright: it will literally light up a large room by itself.
Obviously, the LED would be a huge distraction to me and to the entire band while we were trying to play in the evening, so it had to be fixed. A friend and I put down about 5 layers of masking tape and black marker over the top of the LED, and you know what? You can still see it just fine. In fact, it's still arguably too bright, though now livable.
What were the designers thinking? The keyboard also has a reasonable-brightness green LED display used to indicate parameter information, so the power LED (and this cracks me up) doesn't match the other LEDs and doesn't give any irredundant information! (This in spite of the fact that there is actually a legend above it that says in large capital letters "POWER INDICATOR".) It apparently was just put there because the designers hated me.
I almost took the device back just because of the power LED. I'm still not sure I shouldn't have. So I guess I have some sympathy with Mr. Johnson's complaints on the matter.
Profanity aside (and that's hard here), you are completely full of it. Yeah, in the last few years, the only X development that's been done is
Completely revised font support, with arguably higher quality rendering than either Mac or Windows. This gives X apps for the first time the ability to sensibly use the fonts over the network.
A completely new rendering model, with alpha compositing and alpha transparency, that provides arguably higher-quality rendering than Mac or Windows. This gives X apps for the first time the ability to sensibly draw through X, rather than on their own.
A completely new window compositing model, giving applications the ability to peform window system effects Mac and Windows can only dream of. The power of this one is only now becoming apparent.
A new server back-end that is small and efficient enough to run comfortably on ancient laptops, almost completely self configuring, and supports the above-mentioned features.
A ton of library, toolkit, and utility work: too much to detail here.
Note that all of this is in spite of the fact that the politics were a significant hindrance to those getting the development work done. Those folks would much rather have avoided the political squabbling: the most powerful thing about the new X.org/freedesktop.org structure is that now they can. Expect to see even more coolness in the future.
I wish they [X.org] would join wih the freedesktop.org X-server folks and bring true alpha to the desktop...
They already have, and they are. One of the big accomplishments of X.org so far is to split the system into multiple isolated modules: you can now easily package, compile, and run the Kdrive server as an alternative to the X.org server on platforms supported by Kdrive, without affecting the rest of the X tree. Work is underway on several freedesktop.org/X.org projects to bring the Kdrive alpha compositing into the X.org server infrastructure.
This is a correlative study, not a causal one. What I don't think surprising is that the same doctors who are into vid games are into laparoscopic surgery. I suspect that these docs get more practice at each, separately.
(IANAP, but my father was a general surgeon who was one of the first-adopters of laparoscopy in his region. He also enjoyed vid games, and was one of the first adopters in the neighborhood of the Odyssey and Intellivision.)
This will make it all the more impressive when your home's photo is on your cover anyhow.
I doubt it's that hard to cross your PO box with a dozen other databases. Do you use a different box for your Reason account than for other mail? Have you ever given anyone your current geographic address?
Face it, in this modern world it's only a few minutes for a determined adversary from any piece of identifying info to lat/long for the incoming ordinance.
The concluding sentence of the legal paper by the XPde advisor is this: "Trade mark and trade dress are areas of potentially serious legal risk for XPde and similar projects but is beyond the scope of this analysis."
IANAL, but trust me when I say that trademark and trade dress are...complicated. I strongly suspect that the reason the analysis of these issues is not public is because the case is much weaker here, and they don't want to help Microsoft in a potential lawsuit.
In the short term, it's not clear that Microsoft would want to sue. After all, XPde is essentially free advertising for MS, and is probably not cutting into their sales all that much. Having visible but not dangerous direct competitors is good for MS: it helps them disclaim their monopoly status.
The problem is that trademarks must be defended, lest they fall into generic status. This may be enough incentive for MS to put a suit together sometime. I wouldn't want to be a US member of the XPde team: their international status is going to help them come the day.
:-). It is interesting to contrast the style of graphical user interaction in games with that in traditional desktop GUIs. Games are generally about direct manipulation, and have simple, non-modal interfaces. This is true even of non-twitch games: for arcade games, the ideal input device itself is often something other than the mouse or keyboard. I use cgoban to play gnugo fairly regularly. The only part of the process I abhor is the stupid dialogs one has to click through at the beginning. After that, things get sensible again.
That said, the games I play are mostly web-based, e.g. WeBL. The OSS community had a big spate of web-GUI programs a couple of years ago. It has mostly died out, perhaps because programs like CUPS demonstrated that one could do just as ugly and stupid a user interface using web forms as with traditional dialogs. I dunno.
But I'm confident that if game interfaces looked and worked like desktop GUIs, computer gaming would be dead by now.
Since no one ever mods beyond the first hundred articles, I'm talking to myself here, but...
Of course OSS guys are bad at GUIs. They should be. GUIs are the last refuge of the incompetent.
Printing should not need GUI configuration. Why on earth should it? The devices are mostly connected by USB or network these days, and even the parallel port ones can mostly be easily probed. The print dialogs in the apps take care of pretty much everything else. The printing user should be able to just turn on the computer and use the printer. But no...
Check out the printer interface on the Mac sometime. No, no: not OS X. The 128K Mac. It's basically what I just said. The printers were either smart enough that they could handle whatever the Mac threw at them, or they didn't work at all. As a result, the Mac was a dream for printing---until PC commodity HW got so high-volume = cheap it couldn't be ignored. But even now, the big miracle isn't the clever GUI design for Mac print config: it's the fact that there's so little config, not much GUI is needed.
Heck, look at what the X Window System is doing. Graphical configuration? No. The core X developers are trying as hard as they can to DDC monitors, PCI-id vid cards, and autoprobe mice. Good GUIs are hard, and no one wants to configure this stuff. Just make the SW do the right thing without pressing buttons. Note that Knoppix/X pretty much manages this. On random cruddy commodity PC HW.
Move to a Mac if you like. I have better things to do with my life than navigate menu trees. I have code to write, and games to play, and e-mail to send. I have a life. I don't want a GUI.
I've been building from source since the late 80s. What has happened is, I've gotten old, and tired of the same ol' repetition and screwups. These days, I always try the Deb package first. 95 times out of 100, that works fine. Even if it doesn't, the infrastructure to build is typically installable as Deb packages.
It's not even the compile time that's so significant. It's the pain of figuring out somebody's config/build system, and the even greater pain of configuring the thing once its installed. Deb packages make these problems mostly go away.
Go ahead and build from source if you like. Someday you'll get old too.
I believe it was Jim Gettys who once pointed out that the accelerometers (which were in at least prototype iPaq sleeves) allow the device to keep the screen image right-side-up all the way to the ground:-). Put a paniced call for help on there for a poignant moment, and add an audio scream for effect.
Further, AFAIK most modern 802.11 chipsets can be run as WAPs simply by providing appropriate software. Why do I need a backpack rather than using my Zaurus, exactly?
Slashdot Mirror
As other posters have mentioned, it's not cesium gas but cesium metal, and it's not radioactive AFAIK.
I actually have done some consulting for the owner of Cool Chips (on an unrelated project), and have chatted with him about the tech. As I understand it, they are in an early prototype stage: they've built chips that work, but they are in the process of negotiating their first volume contracts and ramping up production. In other words, they are definitely for real, but you may not see them in anything you own for a year or two.
I highly recommend Gary Taubes' comprehensive and scholarly book on "cold fusion", Bad Science. It tells the story you are describing carefully and accurately. It also tells everything about Prof. Hagelstein that I need to know to evaluate his current work. (Hint: it's not flattering.)
Of course, the cold fusion trolls will give you long and involved stories about why Bad Science is bad science reporting. All I can say is: read his book, then read whatever the cold fusion advocates recommend. Isn't too hard for me to guess who is on the side of truth on this one.
At any rate, I pray that there is no cold fusion. From what I know of atomic physics, the only thing less likely than that it exists is that it could exist in a form that doesn't make it possible to build one heck of a bomb out of it.
BTW, Taubes also wrote the New York Times investigative science article that really set off the Atkins diet craze recently. He's one of my favorite science writers: objective and comprehensive.
Forget virus. I'll take Small Soldiers for 1000, Alex!
The point being that (so far as I am aware) no form of "intellectual property law" protected Shakespeare's creative work: he made money by using the work successfully, and by convincing others to contribute to it. It was thoroughly possible in Shakespeare's time to be a productive creative genius and be commercially successful at it, without the benefit of copyright law. Probably still could be, given the chance.
Who will create the next Unreal Tournament when no one feels like paying for them anymore? The authors of the not-for-profit Unreal Tournament Next Generation, maybe?
Seriously, the argument that people will quit creating because their copyright-based profit "entitlement" is diminished or even eliminated has always seemed totally ludicrous to me.
Creative works existed since long before the existence of copyrights and patents. Every time a new technology was invented to ease distribution of creative works in a new medium ---book press, newspaper press, radio, television, magnetic tape, floppy disk---a host of new work sprung up before there was any clear way to profit from it. Shakespeare is the poster child here, but look at the machinima movement today. Are there commercial computer animations? Well, yes. Yet even given the possibility of making a profit by leveraging existing laws, many of the top machinima creators give their work away.
My personal belief is that the current length, breadth, and assignability of rights under both copyright and patent legislation actually discourages new creative work. Talented creators find that they can make money developing and promoting their existing work (for 20 years or even forever) with far less risk than they incur by creating something entirely new. Skilled entrants to the field are discouraged from participating voluntarily: during the production of new works, they run a high risk of violating the panopoly of legal rights of established creators, without compensating financial reward that would allow them to defend themselves in the legal system. The unrestricted assignability of rights means that rewards of creation often substantially accrue to entities other than the creator. The net effect of all of this is insidious, but clear: there is much material produced, but it is largely highly derivative, often of low quality, and produced by fewer and fewer prominent creators. Indeed, were it not for the fact that folks still continue to create without reasonable expectation of serious profit, professional orchestras (who subsist largely outside the scope of the copyright system) would probably outnumber pop music groups in the United States.
To return to your specific case, note that we have a terrific model for what happens when a commercial game engine is no longer copyrighted. When Id allowed folks to develop successors to Doom, their actions spawned a whole host of free games based on that source---many of them of extremely high quality. The best of these have become major creative and commercial successes in their own right. I would much rather have a novel low-cost game based on the Unreal Tournament framework than "the next Unreal Tournament". Changes to the law might give me just that.
I believe that there are many folks who have felt as I do on these matters. Yet I see them decreasingly voicing their opinion even in the potentially friendly forum that is Slashdot. I do not know whether this is because they are intimidated into silence by the current hostile environment, or gulled by the massive advertising-driven social campaign currently underway. I note with irony the dramatic increase (on Slashdot, no less!) of McCarthyesque "I am not stating that copyright infringement is moral" disclaimers such as yours. History suggests that a society that requires these kinds of disclaimers for participation is rarely on the road to health. I am not stating that copyright infringement is legal: it is obviously not. I do, however, believe copyright and patent infringement to be moral in many cases. I state this in spite of the fact that by doing so I endanger my professional and social status to some degree, because I believe that speaking out for my beliefs may benefit my fellow creators and society as a whole.
As the author of numerous commercially successful creative works, you might think that I would have a vested interest in preserving the current strong patent and copyright prote
Neal Stephenson gave a talk similar to this interview as a keynote last June at Usenix 2004 in San Antonio. Turns out he's also a rocket geek, so I got to chat with him briefly: very nice guy.
Either. I have way more UNIX/Linux experience, though. Do you think there's a major difference of some kind between platforms in this regard?
You bet. Depends on how many days they've been running. I've rarely seen a complex, long-running C/C++ program that doesn't leak like a sieve. That's after avoiding complex data structures because they're too hard to explicitly manage the memory for. GC-ed programs can leak too (through inadvertent retention of references), but with a modicum of caution they don't in practice---and they are much easier to get correct.
BTW, in answer to your original troll: with a modern generational GC, there will be an overhead of a few MB for the ephemeral generation, as well as an overall overhead of maybe 20% over a well-designed malloc pool for the rest of the generations. Big deal.
There is no longer much of a reason to require explicit deallocation in a programming language. I use a lot of different languages for real work---I like the GC-ed ones.
But, but...the review of the service said it's good: the only piece it got wrong was Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and that was "incredibly difficult".
For pity's sake: "incredibly difficult"?? It's one of the most popular pieces of music in the world. And you just posted a link that should be able to identify it fine.
With its advanced "audio fingerprinting" technology, AT&T has managed to provide a service that will tell me the title and artist of almost any piece of music I don't care about. Isn't fingerprinting what they do to identify miscreants?
One of the problems with "do the time" is that the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the US Constitution has been so narrowly interpreted by the courts that it is essentially useless. I mean, come on: a year in jail for videotaping a movie? If this isn't a clearcut case of massive overkill from an average citizen's point of view, I don't know why. But there's not a chance in a thousand that the defendant, if convicted, will have his conviction overturned for this reason.
Not to mention the privacy consequences of having the projectionist watching people in a darkened theatre with night-vision goggles. I'm sure what he was looking for was illegal videotaping. Uh huh. Our Constitution needs an explicit privacy amendment. Instead, we'll probably end up with flag-burning.
Were you one of the T&T guys, maybe? I'd guess Rick Loomis or Michael Stackpole?
Yes, there is an ancient paranoia text adventure floating around. It's reasonably hilarious. It's a bit buggy, and doesn't seem to have any happy ending---so it's pretty faithful to the original. Have fun, citizen. Fun is mandatory.
I liked this sentence from Nielsen's report: "It's striking, however, that mobile-phone conversations are judged more negatively than loud conversations."
What's striking to me is that Nielsen, after many years of working in human interfaces, doesn't seem to quite get the idea of statistical significance. From the reported data, the values for loud and mobile-phone sure looked to me to be statistically indistinguishable.
I would write the G&M article off as crankery, except I'm sitting a foot away from a problem device.
I bought a Edirol PCR-80 MIDI/USB "keyboard controller" a few weeks ago. The thing has a superbright blue power led behind a Fresnel lens of literally 1/4" diameter. The Fresnel lens spreads the light quite nicely (unlike the blue LEDs the parent poster talks about), and the LED is really amazingly bright: it will literally light up a large room by itself.
Obviously, the LED would be a huge distraction to me and to the entire band while we were trying to play in the evening, so it had to be fixed. A friend and I put down about 5 layers of masking tape and black marker over the top of the LED, and you know what? You can still see it just fine. In fact, it's still arguably too bright, though now livable.
What were the designers thinking? The keyboard also has a reasonable-brightness green LED display used to indicate parameter information, so the power LED (and this cracks me up) doesn't match the other LEDs and doesn't give any irredundant information! (This in spite of the fact that there is actually a legend above it that says in large capital letters "POWER INDICATOR".) It apparently was just put there because the designers hated me.
I almost took the device back just because of the power LED. I'm still not sure I shouldn't have. So I guess I have some sympathy with Mr. Johnson's complaints on the matter.
Not to nitpick, but coal mining is the number 2 most dangerous occupation in the world IIRC. Commercial fishing is substantially more dangerous.
Profanity aside (and that's hard here), you are completely full of it. Yeah, in the last few years, the only X development that's been done is
Note that all of this is in spite of the fact that the politics were a significant hindrance to those getting the development work done. Those folks would much rather have avoided the political squabbling: the most powerful thing about the new X.org/freedesktop.org structure is that now they can. Expect to see even more coolness in the future.
Yes, I know. IHBT.
I wish they [X.org] would join wih the freedesktop.org X-server folks and bring true alpha to the desktop...
They already have, and they are. One of the big accomplishments of X.org so far is to split the system into multiple isolated modules: you can now easily package, compile, and run the Kdrive server as an alternative to the X.org server on platforms supported by Kdrive, without affecting the rest of the X tree. Work is underway on several freedesktop.org/X.org projects to bring the Kdrive alpha compositing into the X.org server infrastructure.
This is a correlative study, not a causal one. What I don't think surprising is that the same doctors who are into vid games are into laparoscopic surgery. I suspect that these docs get more practice at each, separately.
(IANAP, but my father was a general surgeon who was one of the first-adopters of laparoscopy in his region. He also enjoyed vid games, and was one of the first adopters in the neighborhood of the Odyssey and Intellivision.)
This will make it all the more impressive when your home's photo is on your cover anyhow.
I doubt it's that hard to cross your PO box with a dozen other databases. Do you use a different box for your Reason account than for other mail? Have you ever given anyone your current geographic address?
Face it, in this modern world it's only a few minutes for a determined adversary from any piece of identifying info to lat/long for the incoming ordinance.
The concluding sentence of the legal paper by the XPde advisor is this: "Trade mark and trade dress are areas of potentially serious legal risk for XPde and similar projects but is beyond the scope of this analysis."
IANAL, but trust me when I say that trademark and trade dress are...complicated. I strongly suspect that the reason the analysis of these issues is not public is because the case is much weaker here, and they don't want to help Microsoft in a potential lawsuit.
In the short term, it's not clear that Microsoft would want to sue. After all, XPde is essentially free advertising for MS, and is probably not cutting into their sales all that much. Having visible but not dangerous direct competitors is good for MS: it helps them disclaim their monopoly status.
The problem is that trademarks must be defended, lest they fall into generic status. This may be enough incentive for MS to put a suit together sometime. I wouldn't want to be a US member of the XPde team: their international status is going to help them come the day.
:-). It is interesting to contrast the style of graphical user interaction in games with that in traditional desktop GUIs. Games are generally about direct manipulation, and have simple, non-modal interfaces. This is true even of non-twitch games: for arcade games, the ideal input device itself is often something other than the mouse or keyboard. I use cgoban to play gnugo fairly regularly. The only part of the process I abhor is the stupid dialogs one has to click through at the beginning. After that, things get sensible again.
That said, the games I play are mostly web-based, e.g. WeBL. The OSS community had a big spate of web-GUI programs a couple of years ago. It has mostly died out, perhaps because programs like CUPS demonstrated that one could do just as ugly and stupid a user interface using web forms as with traditional dialogs. I dunno.
But I'm confident that if game interfaces looked and worked like desktop GUIs, computer gaming would be dead by now.
Since no one ever mods beyond the first hundred articles, I'm talking to myself here, but...
Of course OSS guys are bad at GUIs. They should be. GUIs are the last refuge of the incompetent.
Printing should not need GUI configuration. Why on earth should it? The devices are mostly connected by USB or network these days, and even the parallel port ones can mostly be easily probed. The print dialogs in the apps take care of pretty much everything else. The printing user should be able to just turn on the computer and use the printer. But no...
Check out the printer interface on the Mac sometime. No, no: not OS X. The 128K Mac. It's basically what I just said. The printers were either smart enough that they could handle whatever the Mac threw at them, or they didn't work at all. As a result, the Mac was a dream for printing---until PC commodity HW got so high-volume = cheap it couldn't be ignored. But even now, the big miracle isn't the clever GUI design for Mac print config: it's the fact that there's so little config, not much GUI is needed.
Heck, look at what the X Window System is doing. Graphical configuration? No. The core X developers are trying as hard as they can to DDC monitors, PCI-id vid cards, and autoprobe mice. Good GUIs are hard, and no one wants to configure this stuff. Just make the SW do the right thing without pressing buttons. Note that Knoppix/X pretty much manages this. On random cruddy commodity PC HW.
Move to a Mac if you like. I have better things to do with my life than navigate menu trees. I have code to write, and games to play, and e-mail to send. I have a life. I don't want a GUI.
I've been building from source since the late 80s. What has happened is, I've gotten old, and tired of the same ol' repetition and screwups. These days, I always try the Deb package first. 95 times out of 100, that works fine. Even if it doesn't, the infrastructure to build is typically installable as Deb packages.
It's not even the compile time that's so significant. It's the pain of figuring out somebody's config/build system, and the even greater pain of configuring the thing once its installed. Deb packages make these problems mostly go away.
Go ahead and build from source if you like. Someday you'll get old too.
I believe it was Jim Gettys who once pointed out that the accelerometers (which were in at least prototype iPaq sleeves) allow the device to keep the screen image right-side-up all the way to the ground :-). Put a paniced call for help on there for a poignant moment, and add an audio scream for effect.
Excellent question.
Further, AFAIK most modern 802.11 chipsets can be run as WAPs simply by providing appropriate software. Why do I need a backpack rather than using my Zaurus, exactly?