I've heard that the limit to an LCD display's life is usually its backlighting; supposedly the backlighting dims gradually over time, making the display harder to read. This is why LCD display manuals recommend you turn the display off or put it to sleep when it's not in use, even though it won't suffer burn-in problems like a CRT. I haven't ever seen an LCD display with backlight problems, however (though most LCD displays seem to take a few minutes after power-on until they reach their normal brightness).
As for dead pixels: Sometimes you can 'un-stick' them by massaging the screen over a dead pixel very gently.
The only problem I've had with my Apple Cinema Display is some mild 'burn-in,' believe it or not. Apparently with any LCD display, if you leave a static image on the screen for a while, the LCD hardware will 'remember' that image and you'll continue to see a faint ghost of it on the screen. I see this most often when I've been in Mac OS X for a few hours, and then I reboot into LinuxPPC -- I can still see the ghost of my Mac OS menu bar at the top of the screen! The ghost stays even if I power down the computer and display for a while. I've been told that the ghost will go away after as much time as it was on the screen to begin with (if the menu bar was there for eight hours, its ghost will fade after eight hours), and that's been borne out by my experience.
I just love the way that they disingeniously talk about a software license 'infecting' a program.
[O]ne of the dominant open source license [sic] -- the GPL -- is the most infectious. It attempts to subject any work that includes GPL-licensed code to the GPL.
Programmer: Here ya go, boss, the latest build of our really important software product...
Manager: [scanning the source code] You idiot! See this line here? 'i++;' That's directly from the Gnu Emacs source! Its GPL License has infected our revision control system! Now we've got to release the whole thing to the world, source and all... there goes the quarter! I *knew* you should have set lawyer traps in the hallways!
Programmer: How DARE they try to take the code I've written and make me give it away for free just because I took code someone else wrote and used it for free!
Everyone expects word processing capability from their operating system. Why does Microsoft include that sucky "Microsoft Write" program in Windows? Why don't they give people what people want, and bundle in Word instead?
Why isn't Norton Utilities bundled in with Windows? Or Excel, or Photoshop? People need these tools, people use these tools. It's a rhetorical question, of course -- I know as well as you do why these aren't bundled.
But have you ever noticed that Microsoft Windows ships with a minimalist word processor, a minimalist paint program, wimpy little scandisk and defragmentation tools... and a great big bloated millions-of-dollars-to-develop millions-of-dollars-to-advertise lots-of-bells-and-whistles web browser?
Now, tell me this: Let's say I make you CEO of a company and task you to market a web browser to compete with Microsoft. How will you do it? by the way, any innovative feature you think up will become part of Microsoft Windows within six months.
Some Microsoft exec once said something to the tune of 'the only possible outcomes of competing with us are that we buy you, someone else buys you, or you go out of business.' I'm looking for the exact quote, but I can't find it any more.
(1) Imagine that a single company made 96% of all the cars on the road.
(2) Imagine that company wanted to own the car stereo market, so they dumped loads of money into R&D and came up with a car stereo which was as good as all the aftermarket ones.
They advertise that they are putting this super car stereo in all their cars for free. This kills the third-party car stereo market. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so the cost is made up for increasing the price of parts for these cars.
If Microsoft shipped a simple, bare-bones, no-bells-and-whistles web browser with their operating system, and then marketed a super-gee-whiz version of their web browser separately, I wouldn't complain. After all, this is what they do with MS Write / MS Word!
Why isn't Microsoft bundling all the functionality of Microsoft Word into every copy of Windows?
Internet Explorer wasn't nearly as good as Netscape Communicator, at least not until version 3 or so. But Microsoft made sure that every copy of Windows came with IE, and that every copy of Windows did NOT come with Netscape. For the vast unwashed majority of Windows users, IE was good enough; they could live with the bugs, it was easier than figuring out how to download and install Netscape.
The same thing is going to happen with MSN, and with any other software Microsoft doesn't feel like having any competition with. Put it on the Windows desktop on every brand-new PC, imply that it's tightly integrated with Windows, make the customer have to jump through hoops to find/download/install the competition, and voila! No more competition.
As long as Windows is available from only one source (Microsoft), and as long as that source has other products it wants to push, you're going to continue to see those products tied to Windows.
Re:NonStandard Widgets and OS X
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Mozilla 0.9 Out
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I'll second this. Mozilla might have a great engine and be totally standards-compliant, but OmniWeb under Mac OS X is simply gorgeous, and has more configuration options than you can shake a stick at. The way OmniWeb's toolbar can be arranged puts Mozilla to shame, OmniWeb's pull-out bookmarks and history drawers are a really neat feature, and my favorite (configurable) feature is being able to command-click on a link to open it in a new window BEHIND the current browser window, for later perusal.
IMHO, Mozilla's greatest fault is that it's just plain ugly. I really think that writing a standard cross-platform set of widgets for it was a bad design idea from the start. They're spending so much time reinventing the wheel! I feel they should have used each operating system's standard widgets while they worked on getting the engine working, and only then should they have added the cross-platform lowest-common-denominator widgets as an option. But, that's just my opinion.
Mozilla tries really hard to have its own distinct look that's different from the rest of the operating system. OmniWeb, on the other hand, feels like a natural part of the operating system -- its preferences are handled the same exact way as the OS, and it showcases a lot of the GUI design features of the OS.
Or, you can believe that there are some legitimate uses of file-sharing as well as illegitimate ones, and that there's no effective way to prevent the bad uses without unacceptably interfering with the good ones.
Problem is, there are effective ways to prevent misuse of Napster. The most obvious is to make it an opt-in system, rather than an opt-out: prevent Napster from being able to redistribute any mp3's which have not been submitted by their copyright holders. The search engine can verify this by checksumming the mp3 files, and the Napster company can be responsible for obtaining redistributable copies of mp3's from the people who are allowed to give them out.
I just find it interesting that people yell and scream that copyrighted information should be freely redistributable, but then they also yell and scream that personal information must not be freely distributed, for 'privacy' reasons. They're saying that they should have the right to enjoy (without cost) the music/software/book I created, but I shouldn't be able to collect information about their email addresses, their spending habits, their family income, or how many children they have in the house.
I'm building a home (photos are proudly available at "http://homepage.mac.com/brian/") and having it wired for networking. Here are some of my recommendations:
Put an Ethernet jack everywhere you've got a phone jack. I have one phone/net wallplate in each bedroom, two in the master bedroom, and several more scattered around the house, including two or three in the great room and in the kitchen. I don't have any 'smart appliances' yet, but when I have some, they'll plug into my existing Ethernet network. If I ever want a larger network in any room, I can easily add a switch there.
Choose a 'networking closet' which brings all your inside connections together with your connections from the outside world. I'm using part of one of my master bedroom "his/her" closets for this, but other people are putting an air-conditioned rack in their garage. Just make sure the location has some air circulation so heat doesn't build up.
If you're having a builder run the cable for you, make sure he doesn't skip on the wiring. I've seen builders run phone and Ethernet over a single Cat5 cable by tying its leads off to a pair of jacks. This will result in lots of crosstalk and evil noise!
I'm not skimping on my network (thirteen Ethernet jacks in the house), but I don't see any need to wire the house for two networks or to run separate speaker cabling through the house. Any speaker wiring I do is bound to be inadequate in the future (stereo is *so* passé), and I'm sure I'll be able to pipe it over the home network much better. MP3 server, anyone?
My goal is to make my home the perfect place for a LAN party.:-)
Remember when the Quake III q3test game was released for the Mac first, instead of for Windows? The community screamed about this, but Id said that they needed to focus on the game engine before they worried about driver issues. The Mac doesn't have nearly the widely chaotic diversity of video, sound, and controller drivers as Windows does, and therefore the developers didn't have to spend as much time dodging driver incompatibilities while they got the engine itself solid.
Now, fast forward to Tribes 2, which was initially heralded as a Windows/Mac simultaneous release. The Mac version was quietly cancelled last year. The PC version just came out two weeks ago... and large numbers of users complained when it crashed frequently. The release was really only beta-quality, and a handful of patches appeared over the next few days and nights to hastily fix the worst problems.
On the in-game news board, Sierra actually posted an apology for the poor quality of the initial release, but they tried to defend themselves by pointing out the various hardware configurations they had to code for:
2 chipsets (Intel and AMD, from 300MHz to 1.5GHz)
150 video cards, with constantly-changing drivers
50 sound cards
5 OS'es (Win95, Win98, WinMe, WinNT, Win2K), not counting Linux
Various motherboards, RAM configurations, CD-ROM drives, and input devices.
And thus they said they had to test over 75,000 different hardware configurations, so it's inevitable there would be some problems. (Not to mention that they wrote it for OpenGL and for Direct3D!) They end their apology by saying: "So now you can understand why developers are so interested in the Xbox."
I just have to point out that if Sierra had released the game on the Mac first, they would only have had to write it to support OpenGL and InputSprockets, which every Mac ships with support for out-of-the-box. Once they were sure the engine was solid, it would have been much easier at that point to work on the Windows port.
Sure, it would have postponed their Windows profits to release on the Mac first... but how much money has Sierra already lost through returns by people who couldn't get the game to run, through having to pay a support staff to handle the complaints and a dev team to work on patches ASAP, and through the bad word-of-mouth that the game's quality is terrible?
(Of course, this is the same Sierra which refused to release an almost-completed Mac Half-Life, and which cancelled the Babylon 5 game for which special video had been shot with the original series actors. Maybe money grows off trees in their land.)
The behavior described in the article -- duping people, buying lists of stolen passwords, setting up phony web sites -- is barely even the domain of crackers, but still the article has to use the word 'hacker' in its title.
Hackers are people who thrive on being faced with problems and finding clever, innovative solutions to them. Crackers are people who break into computer systems. Confusing the two is like calling every martial-arts student a 'ninja.'
I'm annoyed that MSNBC doesn't understand the difference, and even more peeved that CmdrTaco didn't catch it, either.
The most annoying thing about Star Trek Voyager aliens is that they're so darned one-dimensional and small-minded. No alien guest-star I've seen so far on the show has displayed even a smidgen of emotional complexity, and so every episode turns into a simple situation of good versus nasty, amidst flashy special effects. Most of the aliens are painted as looks-harmless-but-has-secret-agenda. That gets real old real quick.
TNG was good. It took on some interesting concepts (the race where people end their lives at age 60 was a neat idea, I think), and even had a little bit of continuity and character development (Troi becoming a bridge officer, Riker's recurring fear of promotion, Picard's mellowing and acceptance of children and family).
DS9 started with some neat ideas, but it faltered when the producers tried to make it more like a soap opera (and brought in Worf for the ratings). As soon as they tried out B5's idea of making it more serialized, it got better, but I don't think they ever took the serialization far enough (they kept mixing the greater story with the Crisis Of The Week). DS9's ending wasn't terrible, but I think it suffered terribly from not having been planned out much further in advance.
Voyager, on the other hand, has been all about glitz, flash, style, spaceships and menacing aliens and love triangles and big breasts. It's really dumbed down so that audiences who don't like science fiction won't channel-surf away. Even so, the ratings remain terrible!
What I would *love* to see, is an Excelsior serial series. Set right after the Federation-Klingon peace treaty is signed in STVI, as privateers and pirates and forces within Fed and Kli governments threaten to tear the peace to shreds, and the Federation's newest, largest cruiser goes up against its Klingon counterparts...
"Asked how small software companies could compete on products that Microsoft wants to fold into Windows, [Microsoft chief operating officer Bob] Herbold told Bloomberg News they could either fight a losing battle, sell out to Microsoft or a larger company or 'not go into business to begin with.'" - Newsweek, March 1998
Netscape's failure proves that it's impossible to compete against Microsoft if Microsoft decides it wants to have you out of business. Microsoft has near-infinite resources and near-infinite manpower; they can afford to develop workalikes for any company's software products then give these workalikes away for free until the competition is bankrupt.
Microsoft forced Netscape out of business by marketing work-alikes for each of Netscape's products, throwing near-infinite money and manpower at them until they were suitable replacements for Netscape's software, and giving them away for free. (I don't buy the arguments that say Netscape's death was all its own fault -- YOU try playing chess against an opponent who can bring in more pieces at will.)
They were slapped with a consent decree. They ignored it. The only stopped their predation when the full weight of the Department of Justice came down on them, and not even completely then.
Microsoft's tactics throughout the trial were to look like total buffoons, to lie to the judge (remember the faked videotape?), and to make statements which flew in the face of truth. Their tactics worked. They managed to get a reaction from the judge (in the form of annoyed comments made outside the courtroom), and now they're using that to claim that the entire verdict should be thrown out.
In other recent news, Microsoft ran misleading advertisements about WebTV, and got zinged for it by the FTC... and then they ran misleading advertisements about Windows CE, and is being charged with it again.
Microsoft has learned how to break the law: (1) keep flagrantly ignoring the law until slapped with a court order to change its business practices; (2) pay lip service to the court order by making superficial attempts to show compliance; then (3) attack the validity of the court proceedings which resulted in the court order, and seek to have the whole thing overturned.
If a new Battlestar Galactica series is indeed made, I hope they pay homage to Eddie Seidel, Jr., maybe by naming a Battlestar after him or something.
Eddie was a teenage boy who was highly intelligent, very into science fiction, and generally depressed with life -- a description that could probably fit a lot of people here. Except that Eddie was way ahead of his time; he was so wrapped up in Battlestar Galactica and so unable to find anything else in life to relate to, that when the TV series was cancelled in 1979, Eddie committed suicide.
I never knew the kid, but I've known how he felt, and my heart goes out to him and his family.
I agree with you completely. RMS's words are probably doing more harm than good to the cause.
Jim Allchin's original diatribe that open-source software is un-American was written in short words which any red-blooded hick could understand: free software is dangerous for business. His argument may not make sense, but we're not the intended audience. The people who make most of the PC-buying decisions for corporate America aren't necessarily people who understand how PC's work, and Jim Allchin's words could probably spook a great many of them into being skeptical of open-source software. There's enough misinformation out there already; people who don't read Slashdot seem to think that free software is like the free love movement of the 1960's.
Richard Stallman's response didn't help matters any. He focuses on how the GNU GPL is different from the "open source" license, and how GNU/Linux is different from Linux... huh? Who cares? More importantly, anyone who didn't already understand the distinction isn't going to pick it up from RMS's article.
What RMS doesn't understand is that this battle won't be won all at once. The free software comunity needs to coexist with the proprietary world, and wean users gradually off proprietary software by offering superior alternatives. If RMS insists on stubbornly making it an all-or-nothing deal, he's most likely going to end up with nothing.
By the way, the correct name of the operating system is "Linux," not "GNU/Linux." It was named "Linux" by Linus Torvalds. The only person I've ever seen call it "GNU/Linux" has been Richard Stallman. Yes, much of Linux is based on GNU software, but what happens when we use GNU software on other computers? Does Solaris become GNU/Solaris, and do we rename Windows 2000 to GNU/Windows 2000? How much GNU software must be present on a computer before Richard Stallman decides the operating system must have a GNU prepended to its name?
This article about a fifth Trek series is old news; the idea has been tossed around for about a year now. I remember seeing reports from people about two years ago when they were contacted by Paramount researchers to get their opinions of a few new story ideas. One of these ideas was this 'founding of the Federation' concept; other ideas were 'a team of crack Federation commandos goes into dangerous situations' and 'a Trek spaceship journeys through time,' if I remember correctly.
Voyager was so absolutely terrible that I don't care about Star Trek any more. Among Voyager's sins were making the characters one-dimensional and then making them repeatedly behave out of character, and completely ignoring the consequences of past events. It was very shallow Trek, written for people with short attention spans and no background in science fiction.
A Pern series could be really cool, and could be unlike anything else that's been on TV before. Pern, if you're not familiar with it, is a planet in a series of books far in the future; a colony ship from Earth lands on this remote planet and is soon beset by environmental problems which cut the colony off from the rest of civilization. Over centuries, technology is gradually lost and science is forgotten, and the people revert to a feudal caste-based society and forget their past. Adventure, romance, and some of the strongest female characters I've seen in literature; it's remarkable stuff, really!
I'm thrilled to see X applications finally making use of anti-aliased fonts... but these screenshots look terrible! The anti-aliased text looks clumsy and disproportionate.
I've been using "SmoothType" on my Mac for several years now, and its output is absolutely gorgeous, bordering on print quality. It can be downloaded from 'http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/smoothtype.html' . I've posted an example of what part of the slashdot home page looks like on my computer at ' http://www.enchanter.net/moz-smooth.png".
There once was a man who worked at a furniture store. One day he got a phonecall from a customer.
"I want a table. What do I do?" asked the customer.
"We have many kinds of tables here, you might want to come browse the showroom," replied the man who worked at the furniture store.
"No, I mean, what do I do?" asked the customer again.
Somewhat confused, the man who worked at the furniture store replied, "To get here, all you have to do it take the first exit off the turnpike..."
"No, you don't understand," insisted the customer. "There is a Toyota Celica in my driveway. The keys are in my hand. What do I do?"
The reply of the man who worked at the furniture store has been lost to history, but the customer's response is clearly remembered:
"All I want is a table! Why do I have to know how to drive a car? Why does this have to be so hard?"
The same tale re-enacts itself every day, whenever someone tries to accomplish something with the use of a computer.
The novice whines that he does not know how to use a mouse. The fool masters the computer instead of getting his work done. The wise man watches the fish in the stream.
The other side of speech recognition is speech synthesis. What's the current state of speech synthesis on Linux? Is there any open-source software which does a good job of it, so far?
The best speech synthesis I've found so far is the software which somes with Mac OS, but it hasn't been updated for several years and it's still very clumsy. Rumor had it that Apple has had a greatly enhanced version under wraps for many years now, but that they're not releasing it because there doesn't seem to be any need for it yet.
The Spam Bouncer, a procmail script to identify incoming spam and either tag it, move it to a different mailbox file, or bounce it.
SpamCop, to file official complaints about the spam that gets through.
Sugarplum, to stick lots of irrelevant fake email addresses (and the addresses of other spammers) up on my web pages. If spammers want to harvest addresses from MY pages, they're going to fill up their databases with useless data and end up spamming each other.
And finally, Web Ad Blocking is a site which provides a new 'hosts' file which redirects major web page ad sites to 127.0.0.1, which removes a whole lot of banner ads from web pages.
Sigh... doesn't anyone ever bother to actually read the FCC ruling?
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Cable/Public_Notices/20 01/fcc01011.txt: D. Technical Performance: All contracts between AOL Time Warner and unaffiliated ISPs for access to Time Warner's cable systems shall contain a clause warranting that, to the extent AOL Time
Warner provides any Quality of Service mechanisms, caching services, technical support customer services, multicasting capabilities, address management and other technical functions of the cable system that affect customers' experience with their ISP, AOL Time Warner must provide them in a manner that does not discriminate in favor of AOL Time Warner's affiliated ISPs on the basis of affiliation.
2035: Genetic selection and manipulation having become widespread and intensely controversial by now, standards are finally signed into law to set limits on exactly what genetic traits are allowed to be detected and influenced in a developing human fetus.
2040: The last conventional automobiles are retired from service, having been gradually replaced by electric vehicles driven by computer.
2050: Cybernetics enters popular culture. A simple operation to add a small computer to your brain can dramatically enhance your math skills or your memory, allow you to mentally control other computer devices via radio waves, or let you communicate telepathically (via encrypted radio waves) with other people using the same device.
2080: Quantum-based matter transference is proven to work reliably, although it will be another twenty-five years before it is able to safely teleport humans.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that the limit to an LCD display's life is usually its backlighting; supposedly the backlighting dims gradually over time, making the display harder to read. This is why LCD display manuals recommend you turn the display off or put it to sleep when it's not in use, even though it won't suffer burn-in problems like a CRT. I haven't ever seen an LCD display with backlight problems, however (though most LCD displays seem to take a few minutes after power-on until they reach their normal brightness).
As for dead pixels: Sometimes you can 'un-stick' them by massaging the screen over a dead pixel very gently.
The only problem I've had with my Apple Cinema Display is some mild 'burn-in,' believe it or not. Apparently with any LCD display, if you leave a static image on the screen for a while, the LCD hardware will 'remember' that image and you'll continue to see a faint ghost of it on the screen. I see this most often when I've been in Mac OS X for a few hours, and then I reboot into LinuxPPC -- I can still see the ghost of my Mac OS menu bar at the top of the screen! The ghost stays even if I power down the computer and display for a while. I've been told that the ghost will go away after as much time as it was on the screen to begin with (if the menu bar was there for eight hours, its ghost will fade after eight hours), and that's been borne out by my experience.
Interestingly enough, these designs bear a striking similarity to Apple's 'Pomona' prototypes from 1993.
Pomona saw the light of day as the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, but the prototypes are where the real similarity lies.
I just love the way that they disingeniously talk about a software license 'infecting' a program.
[O]ne of the dominant open source license [sic] -- the GPL -- is the most infectious. It attempts to subject any work that includes GPL-licensed code to the GPL.
Programmer: Here ya go, boss, the latest build of our really important software product...
Manager: [scanning the source code] You idiot! See this line here? 'i++;' That's directly from the Gnu Emacs source! Its GPL License has infected our revision control system! Now we've got to release the whole thing to the world, source and all... there goes the quarter! I *knew* you should have set lawyer traps in the hallways!
Programmer: How DARE they try to take the code I've written and make me give it away for free just because I took code someone else wrote and used it for free!
Everyone expects word processing capability from their operating system. Why does Microsoft include that sucky "Microsoft Write" program in Windows? Why don't they give people what people want, and bundle in Word instead?
Why isn't Norton Utilities bundled in with Windows? Or Excel, or Photoshop? People need these tools, people use these tools. It's a rhetorical question, of course -- I know as well as you do why these aren't bundled.
But have you ever noticed that Microsoft Windows ships with a minimalist word processor, a minimalist paint program, wimpy little scandisk and defragmentation tools... and a great big bloated millions-of-dollars-to-develop millions-of-dollars-to-advertise lots-of-bells-and-whistles web browser?
Now, tell me this: Let's say I make you CEO of a company and task you to market a web browser to compete with Microsoft. How will you do it? by the way, any innovative feature you think up will become part of Microsoft Windows within six months.
Some Microsoft exec once said something to the tune of 'the only possible outcomes of competing with us are that we buy you, someone else buys you, or you go out of business.' I'm looking for the exact quote, but I can't find it any more.
The difference is:
(1) Imagine that a single company made 96% of all the cars on the road.
(2) Imagine that company wanted to own the car stereo market, so they dumped loads of money into R&D and came up with a car stereo which was as good as all the aftermarket ones.
They advertise that they are putting this super car stereo in all their cars for free. This kills the third-party car stereo market. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so the cost is made up for increasing the price of parts for these cars.
If Microsoft shipped a simple, bare-bones, no-bells-and-whistles web browser with their operating system, and then marketed a super-gee-whiz version of their web browser separately, I wouldn't complain. After all, this is what they do with MS Write / MS Word!
Why isn't Microsoft bundling all the functionality of Microsoft Word into every copy of Windows?
Internet Explorer wasn't nearly as good as Netscape Communicator, at least not until version 3 or so. But Microsoft made sure that every copy of Windows came with IE, and that every copy of Windows did NOT come with Netscape. For the vast unwashed majority of Windows users, IE was good enough; they could live with the bugs, it was easier than figuring out how to download and install Netscape.
The same thing is going to happen with MSN, and with any other software Microsoft doesn't feel like having any competition with. Put it on the Windows desktop on every brand-new PC, imply that it's tightly integrated with Windows, make the customer have to jump through hoops to find/download/install the competition, and voila! No more competition.
As long as Windows is available from only one source (Microsoft), and as long as that source has other products it wants to push, you're going to continue to see those products tied to Windows.
I'll second this. Mozilla might have a great engine and be totally standards-compliant, but OmniWeb under Mac OS X is simply gorgeous, and has more configuration options than you can shake a stick at. The way OmniWeb's toolbar can be arranged puts Mozilla to shame, OmniWeb's pull-out bookmarks and history drawers are a really neat feature, and my favorite (configurable) feature is being able to command-click on a link to open it in a new window BEHIND the current browser window, for later perusal.
IMHO, Mozilla's greatest fault is that it's just plain ugly. I really think that writing a standard cross-platform set of widgets for it was a bad design idea from the start. They're spending so much time reinventing the wheel! I feel they should have used each operating system's standard widgets while they worked on getting the engine working, and only then should they have added the cross-platform lowest-common-denominator widgets as an option. But, that's just my opinion.
Mozilla tries really hard to have its own distinct look that's different from the rest of the operating system. OmniWeb, on the other hand, feels like a natural part of the operating system -- its preferences are handled the same exact way as the OS, and it showcases a lot of the GUI design features of the OS.
Problem is, there are effective ways to prevent misuse of Napster. The most obvious is to make it an opt-in system, rather than an opt-out: prevent Napster from being able to redistribute any mp3's which have not been submitted by their copyright holders. The search engine can verify this by checksumming the mp3 files, and the Napster company can be responsible for obtaining redistributable copies of mp3's from the people who are allowed to give them out.
I just find it interesting that people yell and scream that copyrighted information should be freely redistributable, but then they also yell and scream that personal information must not be freely distributed, for 'privacy' reasons. They're saying that they should have the right to enjoy (without cost) the music/software/book I created, but I shouldn't be able to collect information about their email addresses, their spending habits, their family income, or how many children they have in the house.
http://www.sabrina-online.com/1999-02.html
It's a fun cartoon strip. :-)
My goal is to make my home the perfect place for a LAN party. :-)
Now, fast forward to Tribes 2, which was initially heralded as a Windows/Mac simultaneous release. The Mac version was quietly cancelled last year. The PC version just came out two weeks ago... and large numbers of users complained when it crashed frequently. The release was really only beta-quality, and a handful of patches appeared over the next few days and nights to hastily fix the worst problems.
On the in-game news board, Sierra actually posted an apology for the poor quality of the initial release, but they tried to defend themselves by pointing out the various hardware configurations they had to code for:
And thus they said they had to test over 75,000 different hardware configurations, so it's inevitable there would be some problems. (Not to mention that they wrote it for OpenGL and for Direct3D!) They end their apology by saying: "So now you can understand why developers are so interested in the Xbox."
I just have to point out that if Sierra had released the game on the Mac first, they would only have had to write it to support OpenGL and InputSprockets, which every Mac ships with support for out-of-the-box. Once they were sure the engine was solid, it would have been much easier at that point to work on the Windows port.
Sure, it would have postponed their Windows profits to release on the Mac first... but how much money has Sierra already lost through returns by people who couldn't get the game to run, through having to pay a support staff to handle the complaints and a dev team to work on patches ASAP, and through the bad word-of-mouth that the game's quality is terrible?
(Of course, this is the same Sierra which refused to release an almost-completed Mac Half-Life, and which cancelled the Babylon 5 game for which special video had been shot with the original series actors. Maybe money grows off trees in their land.)
The behavior described in the article -- duping people, buying lists of stolen passwords, setting up phony web sites -- is barely even the domain of crackers, but still the article has to use the word 'hacker' in its title.
Hackers are people who thrive on being faced with problems and finding clever, innovative solutions to them. Crackers are people who break into computer systems. Confusing the two is like calling every martial-arts student a 'ninja.'
I'm annoyed that MSNBC doesn't understand the difference, and even more peeved that CmdrTaco didn't catch it, either.
The most annoying thing about Star Trek Voyager aliens is that they're so darned one-dimensional and small-minded. No alien guest-star I've seen so far on the show has displayed even a smidgen of emotional complexity, and so every episode turns into a simple situation of good versus nasty, amidst flashy special effects. Most of the aliens are painted as looks-harmless-but-has-secret-agenda. That gets real old real quick.
TNG was good. It took on some interesting concepts (the race where people end their lives at age 60 was a neat idea, I think), and even had a little bit of continuity and character development (Troi becoming a bridge officer, Riker's recurring fear of promotion, Picard's mellowing and acceptance of children and family).
DS9 started with some neat ideas, but it faltered when the producers tried to make it more like a soap opera (and brought in Worf for the ratings). As soon as they tried out B5's idea of making it more serialized, it got better, but I don't think they ever took the serialization far enough (they kept mixing the greater story with the Crisis Of The Week). DS9's ending wasn't terrible, but I think it suffered terribly from not having been planned out much further in advance.
Voyager, on the other hand, has been all about glitz, flash, style, spaceships and menacing aliens and love triangles and big breasts. It's really dumbed down so that audiences who don't like science fiction won't channel-surf away. Even so, the ratings remain terrible!
What I would *love* to see, is an Excelsior serial series. Set right after the Federation-Klingon peace treaty is signed in STVI, as privateers and pirates and forces within Fed and Kli governments threaten to tear the peace to shreds, and the Federation's newest, largest cruiser goes up against its Klingon counterparts...
"Asked how small software companies could compete on products that Microsoft wants to fold into Windows, [Microsoft chief operating officer Bob] Herbold told Bloomberg News they could either fight a losing battle, sell out to Microsoft or a larger company or 'not go into business to begin with.'" - Newsweek, March 1998
Netscape's failure proves that it's impossible to compete against Microsoft if Microsoft decides it wants to have you out of business. Microsoft has near-infinite resources and near-infinite manpower; they can afford to develop workalikes for any company's software products then give these workalikes away for free until the competition is bankrupt.
http://HoaxBusters.ciac.org/
They were slapped with a consent decree. They ignored it. The only stopped their predation when the full weight of the Department of Justice came down on them, and not even completely then.
Microsoft's tactics throughout the trial were to look like total buffoons, to lie to the judge (remember the faked videotape?), and to make statements which flew in the face of truth. Their tactics worked. They managed to get a reaction from the judge (in the form of annoyed comments made outside the courtroom), and now they're using that to claim that the entire verdict should be thrown out.
In other recent news, Microsoft ran misleading advertisements about WebTV, and got zinged for it by the FTC... and then they ran misleading advertisements about Windows CE, and is being charged with it again.
Microsoft has learned how to break the law: (1) keep flagrantly ignoring the law until slapped with a court order to change its business practices; (2) pay lip service to the court order by making superficial attempts to show compliance; then (3) attack the validity of the court proceedings which resulted in the court order, and seek to have the whole thing overturned.
Hey, it's worked so far!
Eddie was a teenage boy who was highly intelligent, very into science fiction, and generally depressed with life -- a description that could probably fit a lot of people here. Except that Eddie was way ahead of his time; he was so wrapped up in Battlestar Galactica and so unable to find anything else in life to relate to, that when the TV series was cancelled in 1979, Eddie committed suicide.
I never knew the kid, but I've known how he felt, and my heart goes out to him and his family.
Jim Allchin's original diatribe that open-source software is un-American was written in short words which any red-blooded hick could understand: free software is dangerous for business. His argument may not make sense, but we're not the intended audience. The people who make most of the PC-buying decisions for corporate America aren't necessarily people who understand how PC's work, and Jim Allchin's words could probably spook a great many of them into being skeptical of open-source software. There's enough misinformation out there already; people who don't read Slashdot seem to think that free software is like the free love movement of the 1960's.
Richard Stallman's response didn't help matters any. He focuses on how the GNU GPL is different from the "open source" license, and how GNU/Linux is different from Linux... huh? Who cares? More importantly, anyone who didn't already understand the distinction isn't going to pick it up from RMS's article.
What RMS doesn't understand is that this battle won't be won all at once. The free software comunity needs to coexist with the proprietary world, and wean users gradually off proprietary software by offering superior alternatives. If RMS insists on stubbornly making it an all-or-nothing deal, he's most likely going to end up with nothing.
By the way, the correct name of the operating system is "Linux," not "GNU/Linux." It was named "Linux" by Linus Torvalds. The only person I've ever seen call it "GNU/Linux" has been Richard Stallman. Yes, much of Linux is based on GNU software, but what happens when we use GNU software on other computers? Does Solaris become GNU/Solaris, and do we rename Windows 2000 to GNU/Windows 2000? How much GNU software must be present on a computer before Richard Stallman decides the operating system must have a GNU prepended to its name?
Voyager was so absolutely terrible that I don't care about Star Trek any more. Among Voyager's sins were making the characters one-dimensional and then making them repeatedly behave out of character, and completely ignoring the consequences of past events. It was very shallow Trek, written for people with short attention spans and no background in science fiction.
However, one of the 'More Headlines' on the Trek article page caught my eye: "Pern Pilot Preps For March." "http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2001 -02/16/14.00.tv" (Note that it's prepping to start shooting in March, not air in March.)
A Pern series could be really cool, and could be unlike anything else that's been on TV before. Pern, if you're not familiar with it, is a planet in a series of books far in the future; a colony ship from Earth lands on this remote planet and is soon beset by environmental problems which cut the colony off from the rest of civilization. Over centuries, technology is gradually lost and science is forgotten, and the people revert to a feudal caste-based society and forget their past. Adventure, romance, and some of the strongest female characters I've seen in literature; it's remarkable stuff, really!
So, who cares about Trek? I want Pern!
I've been using "SmoothType" on my Mac for several years now, and its output is absolutely gorgeous, bordering on print quality. It can be downloaded from 'http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/smoothtype.html' . I've posted an example of what part of the slashdot home page looks like on my computer at ' http://www.enchanter.net/moz-smooth.png".
"I want a table. What do I do?" asked the customer.
"We have many kinds of tables here, you might want to come browse the showroom," replied the man who worked at the furniture store.
"No, I mean, what do I do?" asked the customer again.
Somewhat confused, the man who worked at the furniture store replied, "To get here, all you have to do it take the first exit off the turnpike..."
"No, you don't understand," insisted the customer. "There is a Toyota Celica in my driveway. The keys are in my hand. What do I do?"
The reply of the man who worked at the furniture store has been lost to history, but the customer's response is clearly remembered:
"All I want is a table! Why do I have to know how to drive a car? Why does this have to be so hard?"
The same tale re-enacts itself every day, whenever someone tries to accomplish something with the use of a computer.
The novice whines that he does not know how to use a mouse. The fool masters the computer instead of getting his work done. The wise man watches the fish in the stream.
The other side of speech recognition is speech synthesis. What's the current state of speech synthesis on Linux? Is there any open-source software which does a good job of it, so far?
The best speech synthesis I've found so far is the software which somes with Mac OS, but it hasn't been updated for several years and it's still very clumsy. Rumor had it that Apple has had a greatly enhanced version under wraps for many years now, but that they're not releasing it because there doesn't seem to be any need for it yet.
The Spam Bouncer, a procmail script to identify incoming spam and either tag it, move it to a different mailbox file, or bounce it.
SpamCop, to file official complaints about the spam that gets through.
Sugarplum, to stick lots of irrelevant fake email addresses (and the addresses of other spammers) up on my web pages. If spammers want to harvest addresses from MY pages, they're going to fill up their databases with useless data and end up spamming each other.
And finally, Web Ad Blocking is a site which provides a new 'hosts' file which redirects major web page ad sites to 127.0.0.1, which removes a whole lot of banner ads from web pages.
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Cable/Public_Notices/20 01/fcc01011.txt: D. Technical Performance: All contracts between AOL Time Warner and unaffiliated ISPs for access to Time Warner's cable systems shall contain a clause warranting that, to the extent AOL Time
Warner provides any Quality of Service mechanisms, caching services, technical support customer services, multicasting capabilities, address management and other technical functions of the cable system that affect customers' experience with their ISP, AOL Time Warner must provide them in a manner that does not discriminate in favor of AOL Time Warner's affiliated ISPs on the basis of affiliation.
2035: Genetic selection and manipulation having become widespread and intensely controversial by now, standards are finally signed into law to set limits on exactly what genetic traits are allowed to be detected and influenced in a developing human fetus.
2040: The last conventional automobiles are retired from service, having been gradually replaced by electric vehicles driven by computer.
2050: Cybernetics enters popular culture. A simple operation to add a small computer to your brain can dramatically enhance your math skills or your memory, allow you to mentally control other computer devices via radio waves, or let you communicate telepathically (via encrypted radio waves) with other people using the same device.
2080: Quantum-based matter transference is proven to work reliably, although it will be another twenty-five years before it is able to safely teleport humans.