Hmmm....seems like Blizzard didn't make any move to shut down bnetd until they discovered people playing the Warcraft III beta on it. So it stands to reason that they'll happily allow continued development of bnetd after the Warcraft III beta ends.
In the Worcester, Massachusetts area, I'm paying $30/month for Charter Pipeline. 1M down, 128K up. This is down from $50/month for two reasons:
1) I bought their digital cable service at the same time, which takes $10/mon off the price of Pipeline.
2) I bought the modem, which saves an extra $10/mon. Why wouldn't anyone do this? The price on their Motorola Surfboard is down to $100; you'll make your money back in 10 months.
People also forget that "releasing the source code" entails a pass through it to clean up bad code, no-ops, and, particularly, comments. How many times have you looked though the source code to something and seen comments like:
/* Warning - *MASSIVE* kludge below */
or
/* I had to do it this way because Fred was too
*&^%$ lazy to code for this in the base
libraries */
Companies don't want customers to see this kind of thing, even in ten year old codebases. Even for companies who are willing to release their old binaries, it's hard to justify the time it takes to clean up the source code for release. Personally, I think Borland deserves kudos for treating this as abandonware and releasing the binaries. Let's hope more companies follow suit.
I've done some light hacking on the Dreamcast, and have my Linux box mountable as an NFS volume over a coder's cable (helps when programming for the DC:-)). I've been looking over material on the web for DC hacking for a few months, and I have yet to see anyone actually upgrading the memory of a DC. But why let that stop you?
The two sites I've found helpful for DC hardware info:
1. DCEmulation.com is a general-purpose DIY Dreamcast site. There's a variety of info available here.
2. Dreamcast Programming - Marcus Comstedt's excellent hardware reference for the DC.
If you get anywhere with this, please post your results to DCEmulation.com. I'd love to hear about it.
For anyone else interested in running in booting Linux on their DC, the DC Linux site is here.
Windows users will find a a "burn it and run it" Disk Juggler version of Dreamcast Linux here.
These media-driven boxes look wonderful, but seem to stop one step short of being a general-purpose computing platform.
It seems like this is the direction that the Powers That Be would like everything to go: a set-top box that will replace your stereo, TV, VCR, DVD player, game console, etc. Then add the ability to stream and/or download content (media and web) from a broadband connection. This is very likely the eventual destination of both the X-Box and the PS2. This would encompass about 90% of what the average homeowner does with their PC. It would be easier to use than a PC, though, and definitely take a bite out of the latter's market share.
This would please many companies to no end. Microsoft would sell the box, the latest version of Windows NT/2K/XP would drive it, and transactions consummated over it could be Passport/.NET-driven. The game companies have already moved toward console games, with their high markup value and ease of programming for a completely fixed computing environment.
The content providers (and RIAA and MPAA) would love to see a sealed-box platform, with digital rights management much harder to defeat. This would be the (ostensibly) secure conduit though which they can deliver movies, audio, etc, in pay-for-play format.
I wonder what will become of the general-purpose computer?
For those who don't know about it: O'Reilly keeps a web page of free, open, and/or out-of-print books available online for your edification at http://www.reilly.com/openbook.
The story indicated that UKbetting.com would be off-limits to anyone from the United States, but I was just able to access it successfully from the US, using either:
OS Upgrade = Appl upgrades, back on the treadmill
on
Sunset Clauses in Software
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I recently upgraded to Windows XP, hoping to get a stability boost from the NT engine in XP. I often work from home, and the multitasking required by my work had Win98 bluescreen as often as once an hour. I dreaded the upgrade because of what I knew was going to happen: I am now in the process of reloading my favorite applications one by one to see which ones are going to work and which ones are going to require upgrade in order to run under WinXP.
I couldn't even start the intall program for Easy CD Creator 4 before Windows XP itself told me that my version was out of date and I'd need to upgrade. Even the shrink-wrapped copies of ECDC at BestBuy touted a download you could get to make it XP-compliant (ie, it doesn't even work out of the box).
Music Match Jukebox 4 loads, but hangs my system the minute I try to rip am MP3. I can download the latest version, but in order for it to rip at 160K I have to pay for an upgrade.
I don't even feel the need to get the latest versions of these programs; they're jam-packed with extraneous features I won't use. I need to upgrade for the sole reason that I upgraded my OS.
All other apps combined, I'm running about 50/50 - half of my stable of frequently-used programs run under XP; half don't.
Granted, I could create a system partition for my old copy of Win98SE, load the program there, and keep going. I could cobble together a script of command-line utilities to do some of the same things under Linux (or maybe find a decent screen-driven app, but most are lacking in completeness and/or integration). Or I can knuckle under and ante up to maintain status quo.
*Sigh.* If I ever needed a kick in the pants to migrate more of my day-to-day functionality to my Linux partition, it arrived on my doorstep yesterday.
There are unsafe levels of x-ray radation that one is not supposed to be exposed to over the course of one's life. Many chronically ill people bump into that limit. Depending on the clinical effectiveness of this, the sonic flashlight could become the x-ray machine's safer, cheaper brother, although my guess is that, like MRI or CT scans, it will augment rather than replace many of the imaging methods currently in use.
I've got an annoying registry corruption on my Win98SE box. Apparently somehwere in the registry is recorded that I have a certain Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime DLL that is either corrupted or gone. The error message won't tell me which one (there are several versions; newer versions of MSVC++ come with new sets of runtime libraries, which get distributed with applications written in MSVC++). This has broken a half dozen major applications on my box. Reinstalling one or more of the apps won't help; the system thinks the DLL is there, so it won't reload it when reinstalling an app that needs it. Anyone know where in the reigstry one would look to correct this? Sort of that, I'll need to reload the partition.
So push the release date out a week or two...
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 2
Why push a major release out the door sans 2/3 of the documetation rather than wait a week or two to get the authors' okay and send everything out at once?
Barring that, send the doc out two weeks after the distribution. Two weeks from now, the enduser can update his or her documentation by opening a shell and typing "apt-get upgrade". Why is this becoming a major ideological flamewar? Am I missing something here?
It is current practice of some US states to sell driver's license pictures and other personal data from their database to private firms, for various reasons. This practice should be illegal, or at the very least carefully monitored at the federal level.
This was the first news reader I ever used, and I have yet to find one I like as much. It seems like each newsreader I come across has three "panes" - one to display the newsgroups, one for the headers of the currently active newsgroup, and one for the message currently being viewed. NR/2 had these in separate windows, so you could place them and overlap them as you saw fit, allowing you to maximize your screen real estate. Has anyone found a reader like this for Linux?
I beliebve his name was acutally Karel Capek. He'd written several novels that would be construed as SF at the time; the only one I've ever actually seen in print was "War with the Newts".
This really depends on what you intend to do inside that window manager. I recently put Debian 2.2 r4 stable on a 32 MB P-120 box. I have Gnome launching under Windowmaker. Runs great. If I try to run something big under it, say, Mozilla, the disk swapping starts immediately and a page load of Slashdot takes 30 seconds or so via cable modem. Launching a second session of Mozilla or accessing the mail client will leave me with a 3-5 minute wait just to bring the window up. I avoid this by using Balsa for mail, and running Mozilla by itself when I want to browse the web. Certainly I could alleaviate some of the waiting by going with a less resource-hungry browser.
In short, A decent window manager like Windomaker can run Gnome on a resource-limited box; you just have to stick to smaller applications and/or avoid multitasking on the desktop if you're going to run an advanced window manager or desktop environment.
A way for Microsoft to build good karma?
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 1
It seems like the Xbox is gearing up to be "the" gift this holiday season. This brings back memories of seasons past where companies or individuals would give a PS2 (or something) to a local radio station, which would auction it off for charity - all the while plugging away for the donor company. I remember one major Boston radio station literally begging for a PS2 last year, literally saying "if you can get us one to auction off, we will plug your company in a major way".
Microsoft should consider cutting out the middleman and give a certain number of Xboxes to radio stations to auction off to charity. The cost to Microsoft would probably be a fraction of what they'd bring on a radio auction at a decent sized station, It would give them lots of favorable free press. It would build momentum for the Xbox. And both the radio stations and the local charities would benefit.
Can you imagine if Firestone attempted to include an "End User License Agreement" with each tire purchase?
"I Agree to not hold Firestone, its board of directors, employees, associates, etc, liable for any damage or death incurred when my defect-ridden tires blow out on the highway at 100+ KPH, regardless of any foreknowledge on the part of Firestone."
Choose one:
| I Agree! | | I Diasagree! |
In all fairness to Firestone: would you be comfortable signing an agreement like this from any provider of a product upon which your life depends?
So why do we put up with this in mission-critical software?
Re:Great, but there are some issues
on
Rune for Linux Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had 128M RAM on a PIII-700 with a 256M swap and a 32MB nVidia graphics board, and Rune *would not run* until I increased the size of my swapfile. Which, seeing as I had a swap partition, forced me to allocate an additional swap partition (so I stole a gigabyte from my Win98SE paritition 8-P).
It ran, but took forever to cache the levels in the swap file. The graphics were a little choppy as well. I later added an extra 128M of RAM (for a total of 256M RAM), and both these problems went away.
Once I made it past that hurdle, I enjoyed the game so much I went back and ordered the expansion pack. Go Loki!
1) An autonomic virus, written with the capability to "heal itself" once installed. Does this make sense? It seems to me that some existing virii already have some self-healing properties, such as those that hide a copy of themselves on a user's HD and insert a registry key in a Winodws registry to have themselves restored at reboot time. Thoughts?
2) A virus designed to insert itself into an autonomic system would conceivably be able to use the system's "self-healing" properties to protect itself (a funny memory springs to mind. I went to remove Outlook Express from my Win2K box at work, and discovered that Win2K does not have the option to uninstall Outlook Express. Undaunted, I went into the folder the executable was in and deleted it. Within five seconds, the system detected my "user error" in deleting a system file, and restored it. It took me a while to figure out how to prevent this, but it really threw me for a loop when I first saw it happen).
I'd be inclined to say it won't be popular becuase it requires too much training on behalf of the end user. Who wants to have to learn how to use a device-specific ten-fingered code just to use a cell phone? At least the PDA-specific handwriting schemes like Jot and Graffiti are at least somewhat similar to english. I'm sure there's a decent cell phone UI out there waiting to be discovered. Alas, I'm also sure that this isn't it.
This gets more complicated than it sounds. My first thought would be that the right thing to do would be to attach a copy of one of the numerous "anti-Nimda" programs to the e-mail. But then the Black Hats would be sending similar e-mails that have trojan programs attached, and there always seems to be a large pool of internet newbies ready to blindly run them...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm....seems like Blizzard didn't make any move to shut down bnetd until they discovered people playing the Warcraft III beta on it. So it stands to reason that they'll happily allow continued development of bnetd after the Warcraft III beta ends.
Right? Right...
Even tech ladies like jewelry! The analytical chemist in my life is getting a diamond ring and dinner at a cozy restaurant.
In the Worcester, Massachusetts area, I'm paying $30/month for Charter Pipeline. 1M down, 128K up. This is down from $50/month for two reasons:
1) I bought their digital cable service at the same time, which takes $10/mon off the price of Pipeline.
2) I bought the modem, which saves an extra $10/mon. Why wouldn't anyone do this? The price on their Motorola Surfboard is down to $100; you'll make your money back in 10 months.
People also forget that "releasing the source code" entails a pass through it to clean up bad code, no-ops, and, particularly, comments. How many times have you looked though the source code to something and seen comments like:
/* Warning - *MASSIVE* kludge below */
or
/* I had to do it this way because Fred was too
*&^%$ lazy to code for this in the base
libraries */
Companies don't want customers to see this kind of thing, even in ten year old codebases. Even for companies who are willing to release their old binaries, it's hard to justify the time it takes to clean up the source code for release. Personally, I think Borland deserves kudos for treating this as abandonware and releasing the binaries. Let's hope more companies follow suit.
I've done some light hacking on the Dreamcast, and have my Linux box mountable as an NFS volume over a coder's cable (helps when programming for the DC :-)). I've been looking over material on the web for DC hacking for a few months, and I have yet to see anyone actually upgrading the memory of a DC. But why let that stop you?
The two sites I've found helpful for DC hardware info:
1. DCEmulation.com is a general-purpose DIY Dreamcast site. There's a variety of info available here.
2. Dreamcast Programming - Marcus Comstedt's excellent hardware reference for the DC.
If you get anywhere with this, please post your results to DCEmulation.com. I'd love to hear about it.
For anyone else interested in running in booting Linux on their DC, the DC Linux site is here.
Windows users will find a a "burn it and run it" Disk Juggler version of Dreamcast Linux here.
xmame is also a standard part of the DC Linux distro. You still have to add your own ROM's though.
These media-driven boxes look wonderful, but seem to stop one step short of being a general-purpose computing platform.
It seems like this is the direction that the Powers That Be would like everything to go: a set-top box that will replace your stereo, TV, VCR, DVD player, game console, etc. Then add the ability to stream and/or download content (media and web) from a broadband connection. This is very likely the eventual destination of both the X-Box and the PS2. This would encompass about 90% of what the average homeowner does with their PC. It would be easier to use than a PC, though, and definitely take a bite out of the latter's market share.
This would please many companies to no end. Microsoft would sell the box, the latest version of Windows NT/2K/XP would drive it, and transactions consummated over it could be Passport/.NET-driven. The game companies have already moved toward console games, with their high markup value and ease of programming for a completely fixed computing environment.
The content providers (and RIAA and MPAA) would love to see a sealed-box platform, with digital rights management much harder to defeat. This would be the (ostensibly) secure conduit though which they can deliver movies, audio, etc, in pay-for-play format.
I wonder what will become of the general-purpose computer?
For those who don't know about it: O'Reilly keeps a web page of free, open, and/or out-of-print books available online for your edification at http://www.reilly.com/openbook.
http://www.ukbetting.com
or
http://www.ukbetting.co.uk.
I recently upgraded to Windows XP, hoping to get a stability boost from the NT engine in XP. I often work from home, and the multitasking required by my work had Win98 bluescreen as often as once an hour. I dreaded the upgrade because of what I knew was going to happen: I am now in the process of reloading my favorite applications one by one to see which ones are going to work and which ones are going to require upgrade in order to run under WinXP.
I couldn't even start the intall program for Easy CD Creator 4 before Windows XP itself told me that my version was out of date and I'd need to upgrade. Even the shrink-wrapped copies of ECDC at BestBuy touted a download you could get to make it XP-compliant (ie, it doesn't even work out of the box).
Music Match Jukebox 4 loads, but hangs my system the minute I try to rip am MP3. I can download the latest version, but in order for it to rip at 160K I have to pay for an upgrade.
I don't even feel the need to get the latest versions of these programs; they're jam-packed with extraneous features I won't use. I need to upgrade for the sole reason that I upgraded my OS.
All other apps combined, I'm running about 50/50 - half of my stable of frequently-used programs run under XP; half don't.
Granted, I could create a system partition for my old copy of Win98SE, load the program there, and keep going. I could cobble together a script of command-line utilities to do some of the same things under Linux (or maybe find a decent screen-driven app, but most are lacking in completeness and/or integration). Or I can knuckle under and ante up to maintain status quo.
*Sigh.* If I ever needed a kick in the pants to migrate more of my day-to-day functionality to my Linux partition, it arrived on my doorstep yesterday.
The Anti-Cybersquatting Corporate Protection Act?
There are unsafe levels of x-ray radation that one is not supposed to be exposed to over the course of one's life. Many chronically ill people bump into that limit. Depending on the clinical effectiveness of this, the sonic flashlight could become the x-ray machine's safer, cheaper brother, although my guess is that, like MRI or CT scans, it will augment rather than replace many of the imaging methods currently in use.
I've got an annoying registry corruption on my Win98SE box. Apparently somehwere in the registry is recorded that I have a certain Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime DLL that is either corrupted or gone. The error message won't tell me which one (there are several versions; newer versions of MSVC++ come with new sets of runtime libraries, which get distributed with applications written in MSVC++). This has broken a half dozen major applications on my box. Reinstalling one or more of the apps won't help; the system thinks the DLL is there, so it won't reload it when reinstalling an app that needs it. Anyone know where in the reigstry one would look to correct this? Sort of that, I'll need to reload the partition.
Why push a major release out the door sans 2/3 of the documetation rather than wait a week or two to get the authors' okay and send everything out at once?
Barring that, send the doc out two weeks after the distribution. Two weeks from now, the enduser can update his or her documentation by opening a shell and typing "apt-get upgrade". Why is this becoming a major ideological flamewar? Am I missing something here?
It is current practice of some US states to sell driver's license pictures and other personal data from their database to private firms, for various reasons. This practice should be illegal, or at the very least carefully monitored at the federal level.
...and 600 monkeys, 600 typewriters and 600 years later, you'll end up with a superior Linux VM...
This was the first news reader I ever used, and I have yet to find one I like as much. It seems like each newsreader I come across has three "panes" - one to display the newsgroups, one for the headers of the currently active newsgroup, and one for the message currently being viewed. NR/2 had these in separate windows, so you could place them and overlap them as you saw fit, allowing you to maximize your screen real estate. Has anyone found a reader like this for Linux?
I beliebve his name was acutally Karel Capek. He'd written several novels that would be construed as SF at the time; the only one I've ever actually seen in print was "War with the Newts".
This really depends on what you intend to do inside that window manager. I recently put Debian 2.2 r4 stable on a 32 MB P-120 box. I have Gnome launching under Windowmaker. Runs great. If I try to run something big under it, say, Mozilla, the disk swapping starts immediately and a page load of Slashdot takes 30 seconds or so via cable modem. Launching a second session of Mozilla or accessing the mail client will leave me with a 3-5 minute wait just to bring the window up. I avoid this by using Balsa for mail, and running Mozilla by itself when I want to browse the web. Certainly I could alleaviate some of the waiting by going with a less resource-hungry browser.
In short, A decent window manager like Windomaker can run Gnome on a resource-limited box; you just have to stick to smaller applications and/or avoid multitasking on the desktop if you're going to run an advanced window manager or desktop environment.
It seems like the Xbox is gearing up to be "the" gift this holiday season. This brings back memories of seasons past where companies or individuals would give a PS2 (or something) to a local radio station, which would auction it off for charity - all the while plugging away for the donor company. I remember one major Boston radio station literally begging for a PS2 last year, literally saying "if you can get us one to auction off, we will plug your company in a major way".
Microsoft should consider cutting out the middleman and give a certain number of Xboxes to radio stations to auction off to charity. The cost to Microsoft would probably be a fraction of what they'd bring on a radio auction at a decent sized station, It would give them lots of favorable free press. It would build momentum for the Xbox. And both the radio stations and the local charities would benefit.
Can you imagine if Firestone attempted to include an "End User License Agreement" with each tire purchase?
"I Agree to not hold Firestone, its board of directors, employees, associates, etc, liable for any damage or death incurred when my defect-ridden tires blow out on the highway at 100+ KPH, regardless of any foreknowledge on the part of Firestone."
Choose one:
| I Agree! | | I Diasagree! |
In all fairness to Firestone: would you be comfortable signing an agreement like this from any provider of a product upon which your life depends?
So why do we put up with this in mission-critical software?
I had 128M RAM on a PIII-700 with a 256M swap and a 32MB nVidia graphics board, and Rune *would not run* until I increased the size of my swapfile. Which, seeing as I had a swap partition, forced me to allocate an additional swap partition (so I stole a gigabyte from my Win98SE paritition 8-P).
It ran, but took forever to cache the levels in the swap file. The graphics were a little choppy as well. I later added an extra 128M of RAM (for a total of 256M RAM), and both these problems went away.
Once I made it past that hurdle, I enjoyed the game so much I went back and ordered the expansion pack. Go Loki!
Two possibilities rear their ugly heads here:
1) An autonomic virus, written with the capability to "heal itself" once installed. Does this make sense? It seems to me that some existing virii already have some self-healing properties, such as those that hide a copy of themselves on a user's HD and insert a registry key in a Winodws registry to have themselves restored at reboot time. Thoughts?
2) A virus designed to insert itself into an autonomic system would conceivably be able to use the system's "self-healing" properties to protect itself (a funny memory springs to mind. I went to remove Outlook Express from my Win2K box at work, and discovered that Win2K does not have the option to uninstall Outlook Express. Undaunted, I went into the folder the executable was in and deleted it. Within five seconds, the system detected my "user error" in deleting a system file, and restored it. It took me a while to figure out how to prevent this, but it really threw me for a loop when I first saw it happen).
I'd be inclined to say it won't be popular becuase it requires too much training on behalf of the end user. Who wants to have to learn how to use a device-specific ten-fingered code just to use a cell phone? At least the PDA-specific handwriting schemes like Jot and Graffiti are at least somewhat similar to english. I'm sure there's a decent cell phone UI out there waiting to be discovered. Alas, I'm also sure that this isn't it.
This gets more complicated than it sounds. My first thought would be that the right thing to do would be to attach a copy of one of the numerous "anti-Nimda" programs to the e-mail. But then the Black Hats would be sending similar e-mails that have trojan programs attached, and there always seems to be a large pool of internet newbies ready to blindly run them...