Here is a message from someone who appears to represent Ultracade, giving his side of the argument. Note that he says he does NOT intend to sue the authors of MAME.
The problem is that a TiVo doesn't know what's commercials and what's the real broadcast. So it's not like you'll only see a banner ad when you fastforward through commercials; you'll see it *any time* you fastforward. Meaning, say, if you want to fastforward through a football game to see the highlights, you'll have a banner ad blocking part of the screen while you do so.
*Unless*, of course, TiVo finds some way to reliably distinguish commercials from the actual program you're watching. That would be *terrific*. Imagine if the TiVo could automatically go into fast-forward mode when it saw a commercial break starting, and come back out into Play mode when it saw the show coming back on. If my TiVo could do this, it would be worth seeing a banner ad.
(Yes, it would be even nicer if the TiVo could automatically jump across commercials in the first place - but I don't think you'll ever see this happening.)
What I find most interesting about this whole thing is that it's going to amount to blocking one ad with another. Wasn't there some software that got in trouble for doing that, a few years ago? Where if you browsed to a web page with a Toyota ad on it, the software would hide that ad and show you a Ford ad instead?
Did anyone spot any cameos of (or references to) other Pixar characters in this film?
Toy Story had books with the names of Pixar shorts. Bug's Life had the Pizza Planet truck, and Woody appeared in an "outtake". Toy Story 2 had a Bug's Life calendar, a Bug's Life storybook, and a small appearance by Heimlich. Monsters Inc. had Nemo and Jessie toys. Finding Nemo had a Buzz toy in the dentist's office, the mermaid from Knick Knack on the front of a boat in the fishtank, and Mike appeared during the end credits.
I didn't spot any cameos or references in The Incredibles, nor have I heard about any - does this film break with tradition?
At a conference, a mathematician proves a theorem. Someone in the audience interrupts him: "That proof must be wrong. I have a counterexample to your theorem." The speaker replies, "I don't care, I have another proof for it."
The theme music's good, IMHO; I like its use throughout the episode. And the opening (zoom in on keyhole) is cute, and the premise is interesting.
The voices, however, are terrible. Wade comes off sounding like he's trying to be Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, the black guy sounds like he's trying to be Mr. T, the pointing-guy looks like he's gay but sounds like a used car salesman, and the Sonny Bono guy with the burning stove has a very terrible fake accent.
The voice actors for Sam and Wade/Durnt sound like they're talking too close to their microphones. The voice recordings need to be softened a bit. And the quality of the black guy's voice is very different from the quality of everyone else's voice; he's much fainter.
The pacing is all weird, too... it needs to be tightened up. RvB had terrific pacing - it's odd to see it so off in this.
Can Firefox really be said to be successfully competing against IE? Has Firefox's market share - or, in fact, the combined market share of all Mozilla-based web browsers - gotten into the double-digits yet?
Assume that you have a new terrific idea for a product to run on top of Windows. By the time you are caught on Microsoft's radar you would probably have a fairly large market share. Assuming your product isn't trivial, MS would rather buy you out (if only to get your customers) than try to build an equal product from scratch.
Based on past history, it's more likely for Microsoft to enter a partnership with you, gain access to your trade secrets, then announce a competing product and dissolve the partnership. (It's happened; see Go Corporation.)
And when Microsoft steals your idea anyway, how many years can you stay in business without any revenues until Microsoft runs out of courtroom appeals?
That *does not* mean MS stuff is grandly spectacular, it just means their competitors are more litigious than they are innovative.
How would you compete against Microsoft?
No, really - how would you compete? Say you DO have something that's more terrifically innovative than anything Microsoft offers. And say you're an American following the American dream of trying to capitalize on a great idea and become rich, while meanwhile Microsoft has near-infinite reserves of cash and manpower and lawyers to throw against you if they see you have something which might be profitable to them.
How do you parlay your great idea into a successful business before Microsoft copies your idea, gives it away free with Windows, and chokes off the cash coming into your company? And you get extra points if you can do this without being "litigious."
Doesn't work. The image from the iSight is notoriously dark, especially when using it with iChat which has no way to adjust the webcam's brightness. There needs to be a lot of ambient light for iChat/iSight to give a good picture.
His glowing review almost convinced me, until I got to the end where he similarly praises the Griffin SightLight.
The SightLight is one of the most poorly-conceived products on the market. It's a light for the iSight webcam; it's a ring of white LEDs which mounts around the iSight lens to illuminate you so that people can see you when you're using the webcam in an otherwise dark room. Sounds clever, right?
Except that using the SightLight is like trying to talk to an automobile headlight two feet in front of your face. And you'd think that in return for being blinded, you could at least be seen better by the person on the other end of the conversation - but no, that's not true; for as retina-piercingly bright as the SightLight is, it does a terrible job of actually lighting you up. A face lit by the SightLight will look ghostly pale and near-dark to the person on the other end, and the user has to be very close to the light to be seen at all.
And all this for $39.95!
I returned mine the very next day, and I now approach Griffin products with skepticism.
Sure, as long as you don't mind someone hitting your rear end as you merge, or as long as you live in a place like Oklahoma with nice friendly drivers...
Most places, highway speeds are 65-75mph and it's not safe to assume that drivers will slow down to let you merge at a slower speed.
I also am a small-l libertarian; I believe in the principles behind the party.
But I think the actual members of the party - the big-L Libertarians - are largely kooks, the sort of people who claim that income tax is optional, or who turn their skin blue.
Where I live, there are lots of highway onramps just past stoplights. That is, you have to stop at a red light, then get up to 65 by the time you're on the highway.
Also, in California, there are lots of onramps which are metered by red lights during rush hours - the light lets exactly two cars onto the ramp every eight seconds, or something like that, and makes you wait your turn.
Microsoft's use of Nevada corporations to avoid approximately $327 million in Washington state taxes while telling voters they need to pay more to fund education
Since when are corporations supposed to fund education?
How about the corporations keep what they earn, and people pay for things as they need them?
It seems like a scam, for the state to tax everyone as much as it wants to pay for an education in a non-competitive market - if you send your kids to private school, you've still got to pay taxes to pay for the public schools you didn't want your kids to go to in the first place. No government has ever done a very good job trying to run schools, so why is Washington even in this business?
Maybe I'm missing something... but where does it say when this Extended Edition will actually be released? It says it can be pre-ordered as of October 1, but when does it ship?
It's not comprehensive like a real dictionary, and anyone can insert bogus data and garbage up the system.
So how would you improve Wikipedia? Would you rather have information not be accessible until it's been verified by an expert as being correct and unbiased?
I've seen some pretty bad stuff, horribly biased, passed off as a real encyclopedia author.
And so you fixed it, right? Or at least made a note on the article's Talk page saying "I noticed these specific points are biased, would someone please work on it?"
It also sucks that people around here tend to insert Wikipedia links, thus inferring that they're somehow authoritative in any way. They're not.
Wikipedia is like Cliff's Notes for news stories. It's not as good as reading the original source material, but it's a great way to quickly get up to speed on the general issues and opinions regarding a topic.
First off, his original review of it links to a "scathing criticism of Gnome 2.6" which says that Gnome 2.6 blows because:
it opens folders into new windows, instead of reusing the current window
there's no way to change individual colors in desktop themes
... and that's it. Two pages of a "scathing criticism" of Gnome 2.6, and that's the best the author could come up with.
Then the FC2 review says that FC2's "admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects." What defects? Well, he doesn't like a bug in the 2.6 kernel's ALSA drivers, a bug in OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, the fact that Gimp 2.0 is missing color management... hey wait, these are all complaints about the open-source software that's included with FC2. Where are the complaints specific to FC2? He doesn't have any.
Then I'm amused that his latest article says that to "fix" FC2, install KDE instead of Gnome. Gee, that sounds more like Gnome-bashing than a constructive review...
Guess what? I *like* FC2. It's much more up-to-date than other Linux distros like SuSE, and package management (especially with the automatic updater) is much easier than with other distros such as Debian (for whom "stable" is ancient, "testing" is fairly outdated, and "unstable" sometimes means "not backwards-compatible with the old version"). I want to be able to run the latest code without fears of hosing my system. Fedora Core lets me.
And I like Gnome, too. It has a much more professional look than KDE, and its settings are much more streamlined as well. KDE suffers from feature bloat and an overabundance of options to configure even the most trivial aspects of the user interface. I don't want to be able to tweak everything; I want to be given an interface which looks sharp without *requiring* me to tweak anything.
Also, by making the user interface more and more bloated, it becomes less and less useable on older hardware. And that used to be one of the strengths of Linux, that you could run the latest distributions of Linux on old hardware and have them still be quite useable.
Back more than ten years ago I had a Mac Plus running System 6. It had a very useable GUI, with widgets which were the same across all applications, consistent menus, control panels, and generally a solid and stable look-and-feel which made it easy to use. Applications didn't try to reinvent the toolbox; they just used the widgets that the operating system provided. The computer had 1MB of RAM and that was plenty for the operating system, Microsoft Word, and HyperCard to all be running at the same time.
These days I've tried running GNOME or KDE on Linux. They require at least 192MB RAM to run smoothly, and still there are lots of apps which insist on implementing their own widgets (*cough*Mozilla*cough*). Try to run a bare-bones window manager such as icewm, and then you have to deal with all the widgets in every application looking and working completely differently - for example, how come the xterm scrollbar still uses 'left click' to mean 'page up'?!
I want to have a good, consistent Linux window manager which can run in - oh, I'll be generous here, how about 16MB RAM - and provide a good, simple widget set to its applications, and a nice simple set of control panels to configure it all. No bells and whistles necessary, as long as it looks clean out-of-the-box.
Honest question here: why do y'all dislike GNOME so much, and prefer KDE?
I used KDE for a couple of months. I only recently tried GNOME, and I prefer it much more than KDE. The main reason is that KDE seemed to be way too customizable; it was a pain going through the many panels of the many settings windows and figuring out what was where and how to configure it. GNOME seems to be a lot more consistent, and doesn't bother providing ways to customize things that I think are way too trivial to customize. (Who cares what percentage opacity I want on my popup menus? The person who designed the desktop environment should pick one for me that looks good!)
Back when Apple released its first widescreen (1600x1024) LCD "Cinema Display", I got one. But I was disappointed that Apple's DVD player software didn't handle it properly. When I played a widescreen DVD, it would have thick black borders around all four sides, as if it was first matted to fit inside a 4:3 area, then it was matted to fit inside a 16:9 area inside that. Not a big problem, just a silly bug, and an annoyance. So I called Apple tech support. "I just want to make sure you know of this problem, that you log it in the Apple bug database to be fixed in the next rev of the DVD software," I said.
"That's not a bug," said the tech support peon. "Here's a tech note which explains why you'll have bars above and below the picture when you play a widescreen movie on your monitor."
I told him, "That tech note only applies to 4:3 displays. I'm on a widescreen display. It should still give me thin black bars on the top and the bottom, but it shouldn't put bars on the sides as well. This is Apple's high-end monitor and I paid good money for it. I want to see this problem logged as a bug."
He gave up and had second-tier tech support call me back.
"First, I want you to reformat your hard drive and reinstall your operating system, then try it again," the second-tier guy told me. I figured, what the heck, I have backups, doing a reinstall will take less time than trying to convince him I don't need to reinstall. So I reinstalled. The problem remained, of course.
"The problem is that the Mac can only show a movie at up to twice its original size," the second-tier guy told me. "Your Cinema Display is bigger than that."
"Listen," I said. I have a sixteen-by-nine movie. I have a display that's 1600x1024 resolution. The movie is playing in a 1280x720 box in the middle of the screen. Now, what's the biggest resolution a 16x9 movie should be able to play on a 1600x1024 screen?"
There was silence on the line.
"I'll give you the answer. 1600x900. Right? That goes from edge to edge and leaves thin black bars at the top and bottom, each exactly sixty-two pixels tall. Not thick black bars around all four sides like I have now. Right?"
More silence, then: "I'll work on this and call you back."
That's kind of my point. Windows 95 has a desktop environment that's fairly quick, simple, easy to configure, and runs comfortably in 8MB.
With Linux, you can either have a desktop environment that's quick/simple/easy and requires 192MB to run comfortably, *OR* you can fit your applications into 8MB and have them be a kludgy patchwork of many different kinds of ugly widgets which are configured by editing rc files in a text editor.
Older versions of KDE use less memory, but aren't nearly as friendly as Windows 95 is.
Heck, even the Mac Plus had a consistent interface with System 6.0 on a 1MB computer - all of the applications shared the same set of widgets! Why is it that every Linux graphic application insists on implementing its own widget set unless you sacrifice vast swaths of memory to KDE or Gnome? Why can't there be a 'lite' version of KDE which uses only 1MB to give me exactly the sort of consistency I had with my Mac Plus?
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a message from someone who appears to represent Ultracade, giving his side of the argument. Note that he says he does NOT intend to sue the authors of MAME.
The problem is that a TiVo doesn't know what's commercials and what's the real broadcast. So it's not like you'll only see a banner ad when you fastforward through commercials; you'll see it *any time* you fastforward. Meaning, say, if you want to fastforward through a football game to see the highlights, you'll have a banner ad blocking part of the screen while you do so.
*Unless*, of course, TiVo finds some way to reliably distinguish commercials from the actual program you're watching. That would be *terrific*. Imagine if the TiVo could automatically go into fast-forward mode when it saw a commercial break starting, and come back out into Play mode when it saw the show coming back on. If my TiVo could do this, it would be worth seeing a banner ad.
(Yes, it would be even nicer if the TiVo could automatically jump across commercials in the first place - but I don't think you'll ever see this happening.)
What I find most interesting about this whole thing is that it's going to amount to blocking one ad with another. Wasn't there some software that got in trouble for doing that, a few years ago? Where if you browsed to a web page with a Toyota ad on it, the software would hide that ad and show you a Ford ad instead?
Did anyone spot any cameos of (or references to) other Pixar characters in this film?
Toy Story had books with the names of Pixar shorts.
Bug's Life had the Pizza Planet truck, and Woody appeared in an "outtake".
Toy Story 2 had a Bug's Life calendar, a Bug's Life storybook, and a small appearance by Heimlich.
Monsters Inc. had Nemo and Jessie toys.
Finding Nemo had a Buzz toy in the dentist's office, the mermaid from Knick Knack on the front of a boat in the fishtank, and Mike appeared during the end credits.
I didn't spot any cameos or references in The Incredibles, nor have I heard about any - does this film break with tradition?
At a conference, a mathematician proves a theorem. Someone in the audience interrupts him: "That proof must be wrong. I have a counterexample to your theorem." The speaker replies, "I don't care, I have another proof for it."
The theme music's good, IMHO; I like its use throughout the episode. And the opening (zoom in on keyhole) is cute, and the premise is interesting.
The voices, however, are terrible. Wade comes off sounding like he's trying to be Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, the black guy sounds like he's trying to be Mr. T, the pointing-guy looks like he's gay but sounds like a used car salesman, and the Sonny Bono guy with the burning stove has a very terrible fake accent.
The voice actors for Sam and Wade/Durnt sound like they're talking too close to their microphones. The voice recordings need to be softened a bit. And the quality of the black guy's voice is very different from the quality of everyone else's voice; he's much fainter.
The pacing is all weird, too... it needs to be tightened up. RvB had terrific pacing - it's odd to see it so off in this.
Wow, I envy your starry-eyed optimism.
Can Firefox really be said to be successfully competing against IE? Has Firefox's market share - or, in fact, the combined market share of all Mozilla-based web browsers - gotten into the double-digits yet?
Assume that you have a new terrific idea for a product to run on top of Windows. By the time you are caught on Microsoft's radar you would probably have a fairly large market share. Assuming your product isn't trivial, MS would rather buy you out (if only to get your customers) than try to build an equal product from scratch.
Based on past history, it's more likely for Microsoft to enter a partnership with you, gain access to your trade secrets, then announce a competing product and dissolve the partnership. (It's happened; see Go Corporation.)
And when Microsoft steals your idea anyway, how many years can you stay in business without any revenues until Microsoft runs out of courtroom appeals?
Firefox is a good example of how if a competitive product is released that people actually have a good reason to use, it will be adopted.
Outside of the circle of people who are techy enough to read Slashdot - how many other people are using Firefox?
Are there any grandmothers out there who said, "Oh, I'd rather use Firefox than IE"?
That *does not* mean MS stuff is grandly spectacular, it just means their competitors are more litigious than they are innovative.
How would you compete against Microsoft?
No, really - how would you compete? Say you DO have something that's more terrifically innovative than anything Microsoft offers. And say you're an American following the American dream of trying to capitalize on a great idea and become rich, while meanwhile Microsoft has near-infinite reserves of cash and manpower and lawyers to throw against you if they see you have something which might be profitable to them.
How do you parlay your great idea into a successful business before Microsoft copies your idea, gives it away free with Windows, and chokes off the cash coming into your company? And you get extra points if you can do this without being "litigious."
Really - tell me - I want to know.
Doesn't work. The image from the iSight is notoriously dark, especially when using it with iChat which has no way to adjust the webcam's brightness. There needs to be a lot of ambient light for iChat/iSight to give a good picture.
His glowing review almost convinced me, until I got to the end where he similarly praises the Griffin SightLight.
The SightLight is one of the most poorly-conceived products on the market. It's a light for the iSight webcam; it's a ring of white LEDs which mounts around the iSight lens to illuminate you so that people can see you when you're using the webcam in an otherwise dark room. Sounds clever, right?
Except that using the SightLight is like trying to talk to an automobile headlight two feet in front of your face. And you'd think that in return for being blinded, you could at least be seen better by the person on the other end of the conversation - but no, that's not true; for as retina-piercingly bright as the SightLight is, it does a terrible job of actually lighting you up. A face lit by the SightLight will look ghostly pale and near-dark to the person on the other end, and the user has to be very close to the light to be seen at all.
And all this for $39.95!
I returned mine the very next day, and I now approach Griffin products with skepticism.
Sure, as long as you don't mind someone hitting your rear end as you merge, or as long as you live in a place like Oklahoma with nice friendly drivers...
Most places, highway speeds are 65-75mph and it's not safe to assume that drivers will slow down to let you merge at a slower speed.
I agree completely.
I also am a small-l libertarian; I believe in the principles behind the party.
But I think the actual members of the party - the big-L Libertarians - are largely kooks, the sort of people who claim that income tax is optional, or who turn their skin blue.
Where I live, there are lots of highway onramps just past stoplights. That is, you have to stop at a red light, then get up to 65 by the time you're on the highway.
Also, in California, there are lots of onramps which are metered by red lights during rush hours - the light lets exactly two cars onto the ramp every eight seconds, or something like that, and makes you wait your turn.
Zero to sixty in twenty seconds?
These things are going to need all the crash protection they can get. They're going to get flattened on any highway on-ramp.
Microsoft's use of Nevada corporations to avoid approximately $327 million in Washington state taxes while telling voters they need to pay more to fund education
Since when are corporations supposed to fund education?
How about the corporations keep what they earn, and people pay for things as they need them?
It seems like a scam, for the state to tax everyone as much as it wants to pay for an education in a non-competitive market - if you send your kids to private school, you've still got to pay taxes to pay for the public schools you didn't want your kids to go to in the first place. No government has ever done a very good job trying to run schools, so why is Washington even in this business?
Maybe I'm missing something... but where does it say when this Extended Edition will actually be released? It says it can be pre-ordered as of October 1, but when does it ship?
It's not comprehensive like a real dictionary, and anyone can insert bogus data and garbage up the system.
So how would you improve Wikipedia? Would you rather have information not be accessible until it's been verified by an expert as being correct and unbiased?
I've seen some pretty bad stuff, horribly biased, passed off as a real encyclopedia author.
And so you fixed it, right? Or at least made a note on the article's Talk page saying "I noticed these specific points are biased, would someone please work on it?"
It also sucks that people around here tend to insert Wikipedia links, thus inferring that they're somehow authoritative in any way. They're not.
Wikipedia is like Cliff's Notes for news stories. It's not as good as reading the original source material, but it's a great way to quickly get up to speed on the general issues and opinions regarding a topic.
First off, his original review of it links to a "scathing criticism of Gnome 2.6" which says that Gnome 2.6 blows because:
Then the FC2 review says that FC2's "admirable qualities cannot save it from its congenital defects." What defects? Well, he doesn't like a bug in the 2.6 kernel's ALSA drivers, a bug in OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, the fact that Gimp 2.0 is missing color management... hey wait, these are all complaints about the open-source software that's included with FC2. Where are the complaints specific to FC2? He doesn't have any.
Then I'm amused that his latest article says that to "fix" FC2, install KDE instead of Gnome. Gee, that sounds more like Gnome-bashing than a constructive review...
Guess what? I *like* FC2. It's much more up-to-date than other Linux distros like SuSE, and package management (especially with the automatic updater) is much easier than with other distros such as Debian (for whom "stable" is ancient, "testing" is fairly outdated, and "unstable" sometimes means "not backwards-compatible with the old version"). I want to be able to run the latest code without fears of hosing my system. Fedora Core lets me.
And I like Gnome, too. It has a much more professional look than KDE, and its settings are much more streamlined as well. KDE suffers from feature bloat and an overabundance of options to configure even the most trivial aspects of the user interface. I don't want to be able to tweak everything; I want to be given an interface which looks sharp without *requiring* me to tweak anything.
Also, by making the user interface more and more bloated, it becomes less and less useable on older hardware. And that used to be one of the strengths of Linux, that you could run the latest distributions of Linux on old hardware and have them still be quite useable.
Y'know, I've wondered about the OS bloat, too.
Back more than ten years ago I had a Mac Plus running System 6. It had a very useable GUI, with widgets which were the same across all applications, consistent menus, control panels, and generally a solid and stable look-and-feel which made it easy to use. Applications didn't try to reinvent the toolbox; they just used the widgets that the operating system provided. The computer had 1MB of RAM and that was plenty for the operating system, Microsoft Word, and HyperCard to all be running at the same time.
These days I've tried running GNOME or KDE on Linux. They require at least 192MB RAM to run smoothly, and still there are lots of apps which insist on implementing their own widgets (*cough*Mozilla*cough*). Try to run a bare-bones window manager such as icewm, and then you have to deal with all the widgets in every application looking and working completely differently - for example, how come the xterm scrollbar still uses 'left click' to mean 'page up'?!
I want to have a good, consistent Linux window manager which can run in - oh, I'll be generous here, how about 16MB RAM - and provide a good, simple widget set to its applications, and a nice simple set of control panels to configure it all. No bells and whistles necessary, as long as it looks clean out-of-the-box.
Honest question here: why do y'all dislike GNOME so much, and prefer KDE?
I used KDE for a couple of months. I only recently tried GNOME, and I prefer it much more than KDE. The main reason is that KDE seemed to be way too customizable; it was a pain going through the many panels of the many settings windows and figuring out what was where and how to configure it. GNOME seems to be a lot more consistent, and doesn't bother providing ways to customize things that I think are way too trivial to customize. (Who cares what percentage opacity I want on my popup menus? The person who designed the desktop environment should pick one for me that looks good!)
Three words: Enhanced for Widescreen
Back when Apple released its first widescreen (1600x1024) LCD "Cinema Display", I got one. But I was disappointed that Apple's DVD player software didn't handle it properly. When I played a widescreen DVD, it would have thick black borders around all four sides, as if it was first matted to fit inside a 4:3 area, then it was matted to fit inside a 16:9 area inside that. Not a big problem, just a silly bug, and an annoyance. So I called Apple tech support. "I just want to make sure you know of this problem, that you log it in the Apple bug database to be fixed in the next rev of the DVD software," I said.
"That's not a bug," said the tech support peon. "Here's a tech note which explains why you'll have bars above and below the picture when you play a widescreen movie on your monitor."
I told him, "That tech note only applies to 4:3 displays. I'm on a widescreen display. It should still give me thin black bars on the top and the bottom, but it shouldn't put bars on the sides as well. This is Apple's high-end monitor and I paid good money for it. I want to see this problem logged as a bug."
He gave up and had second-tier tech support call me back.
"First, I want you to reformat your hard drive and reinstall your operating system, then try it again," the second-tier guy told me. I figured, what the heck, I have backups, doing a reinstall will take less time than trying to convince him I don't need to reinstall. So I reinstalled. The problem remained, of course.
"The problem is that the Mac can only show a movie at up to twice its original size," the second-tier guy told me. "Your Cinema Display is bigger than that."
"Listen," I said. I have a sixteen-by-nine movie. I have a display that's 1600x1024 resolution. The movie is playing in a 1280x720 box in the middle of the screen. Now, what's the biggest resolution a 16x9 movie should be able to play on a 1600x1024 screen?"
There was silence on the line.
"I'll give you the answer. 1600x900. Right? That goes from edge to edge and leaves thin black bars at the top and bottom, each exactly sixty-two pixels tall. Not thick black bars around all four sides like I have now. Right?"
More silence, then: "I'll work on this and call you back."
He never called me back.
That's kind of my point. Windows 95 has a desktop environment that's fairly quick, simple, easy to configure, and runs comfortably in 8MB.
With Linux, you can either have a desktop environment that's quick/simple/easy and requires 192MB to run comfortably, *OR* you can fit your applications into 8MB and have them be a kludgy patchwork of many different kinds of ugly widgets which are configured by editing rc files in a text editor.
Older versions of KDE use less memory, but aren't nearly as friendly as Windows 95 is.
Heck, even the Mac Plus had a consistent interface with System 6.0 on a 1MB computer - all of the applications shared the same set of widgets! Why is it that every Linux graphic application insists on implementing its own widget set unless you sacrifice vast swaths of memory to KDE or Gnome? Why can't there be a 'lite' version of KDE which uses only 1MB to give me exactly the sort of consistency I had with my Mac Plus?