LaTeX is a bit tricky, because several layers of description are all implemented in the same language. Thus, the LaTeX document you write is actually calling a complex set of TeX macros, which actually get down to the level of deciding what characters go where. This means that there's no particular reason you can't mix the levels, and include in your document something that totally screws up the process.
On the other hand, there's a significant subset of LaTeX which is purely semantic (which is why it beats Word, for instance-- you don't have to deal with the layout yourself). This could form a standard document language if it were precisely determined.
Such a setup would probably work well for most applications: the actual layout macros would be internal to the browser, so the document would come out nicely anywhere; the browser could fetch the embedded images (the main problem with distributing.dvi). I'm not sure it would replace HTML, but it could certainly replace ps/pdf (the document format which accurately represents a bad photocopy of your document).
One thing I think should be done more is writing software in reuseable components. That way, if the project gets canceled, you still get something out of it: perhaps you have implementations of a bunch of algorithms which you can just plug in on the next project or something like that.
That way, the work on your canceled project can be considered as work on other projects you hadn't known about when you did it. And if your project doesn't get canceled, you've still gotten more use out of your time spent working.
This is just terrestrial life, not life on earth. Life in the ocean is still much older than this.
What really happened is that life came out of the ocean 2.6 billion years ago, hit the snooze button, and then went back to the ocean for another 1.4 billion years. At least, that's what I would have done.
It's hardly likely that only one side is cheating.
There were reports of a police roadblock stopping black motorists (who are mostly Dem) on the way to vote.
The ballot in Palm Beach County may not have conformed to state standards.
But various weird things happened involving the Dems, too, and the whole thing with lawsuits is getting a bit old (nevermind that, regardless of whether the courts are correctly interpreting state law, they're mostly Dem-appointed).
Since we can't tell exactly what everyone who was elegiable to vote and tried to (i.e., those people whose votes should be considered) would have voted, the process comes down to both sides cheating so that, perhaps, the result will be somewhere close to right. Currently, it looks like more people chose Gore and failed to get counted than chose Bush and failed to get counted.
In the real world, things often don't get done when they're supposed to. A good scheduling app has to take this into account, especially as this interacts with repeated events.
If I don't get something done today, and it doesn't have to be done at a particular day and time, it should roll over to tomorrow. In fact, I should be able to specify how to determine when it rolls over to, so that, if I have to do something on a Thursday, it'll remember me every Thursday until I do it.
If I fail to get a repeating thing done on time, I should be able to specify what happens to the next iteration. For some things, I have to do them on a predictable date, even if I was late the previous time (such as paying my credit card bill). For other things, I want the next date based on when I actually did the thing (my laundry, e.g.).
Some events may be timed based on either of these aspects of different events.
Probably the right thing to do is to keep track of everything you plan to do for a while, and how you decided when to do it. Include all the weird cases (I have to go to the supermarket three days after I go to the convenience store, or 5 days after I go to the supermarket, whichever is later, but no more than 2 weeks after I go to the supermarket, even if I go to the convenience store in between). Come up with a way to have the system include all the cases you found.
Given the security record of MS apps vs. non-MS apps, is being signed by MS actually a positive thing? Back in the days when viruses were mostly executables, this might have made some sense, since you'd at least know when you were suddenly running something that wasn't part of the OS and that you hadn't meant to run.
But now most of the malicious "code" you're likely to run into is actually data which causes (signed) MS code to damage your system. Makes you wonder what the signature is supposed to certify. Back in the days of ActiveX, it was a big deal that there was a signed MS control with a bug that broke security, and they had no way to revoke it. But now, it's a feature.
One problem I see with this is that it means that
both branches have to be ready at the same time in order to make the descision. Neither one has any advantage to being done before the other, so neither will move to stablize. Even if the call to become stable comes from on high, it will be more difficult to synchronize the schedules of the two portions.
The other is that it makes the process of making a stable version harder-- the official version of each part has to be chosen, after everything is working.
I think a better way of handling alternative versions is to have the official kernel distribution mechanism let you get patched versions:
in addition to (my earlier wish-list item) being able to ask for a kernel source tree without those parts you don't want (drivers for hardware you don't have, filesystem you don't want, platforms you're not on), you should be able to get it with your choice of patches. The patches would be maintained by whoever wrote them, and essentially any patch that applied would be distributed, assuming the patch maintainer had blessed it for the kernel version you were getting. Your standard config tool would keep track of the patches you were using and could get a new version with the same patches.
That way patch versions would be on a somewhat more equal footing with the official version. Furthermore, there would be less pressure to bless the white code with official status from the beginning, since it would still be easy to find. So the default would be to keep the old SCSI code, with both red and white trying to beat an easy target, and both having to deal with modifications to the interface from other sources.
Since a large portion of the industry is doing stuff that's brand new and not too difficult, the primary job requirement is being able to learn a bunch of new stuff and use it. For that, most any college degree is sufficient. The actual information gained in college is unimportant, compared to the ability to gain information.
There is a need for actual EE and CS majors, but that's just to have people who have some perspective on the problems-- most of the people on a project don't need to know much about the subject beforehand, and what they need to start with is a user-level familiarity with computers, which is generally acquired in college regardless of major.
I think the current situation of a Linus-blessed official version with a ton of people's patches available is possibly better than an actual fork; it lets the alternatives acquire the benefits of new versions for a limited amount of updating work, and thus you see competition on which patches get into distributions and into the main kernel rather than competition between "Linux with Performance Monitoring" and "Linux with Journaling Filesystems" and so on.
The Linux model of having a bunch of stuff out there competing does a better job of getting the winners into widespread use than a system where one version may (e.g.) have better drivers but a worse scheduler than another version, because they forked and can no longer just take each other's code when one of them is clearly better.
I think a good set of specified interfaces among parts would make it easier to maintain patches, and thus easier to have patches compete on thier merits; patches which don't depend on any of the interfaces which are changing in a particular release won't have to be updated.
* A distribution mechanism for distributing only the portion of the kernel tree that the user is interested in (i.e., no sun code, no drivers for things I don't have, etc; I can get them later if I want them later)
* A really good way to move functionality out of kernel space without making it non-kernel-like
* Modularity; not enough to prevent principled change of interfaces (e.g., a few which need badly need it each major development release), but enough to prevent constant minor changes due to lack of defined interfaces
* The right primatives for an efficient implementation of POSIX threads
* Video drivers good enough that the XFree86 people don't duplicate them
I used Purify, which was on a year-long license. The license was a major pain, especially for something of that sort, because the IT people didn't keep it up to date (they didn't use it) and didn't pay attention to it. So the license would run out and we'd have to get IT to do all the paperwork to get a new license.
I actually really liked Purify, and I wish we could have continued be using it legitimately, but I actually ended up mostly using it on brief "trial" licenses; we couldn't afford it as a group of individuals, and it was just too much trouble to get it paid for on purchase order.
If MS stops offering the non-limited-time version, I expect there to be days when companies grind to a halt because none of their office software will work until they can get through the paperwork to get a new subscription.
An invisible condom is just the thing for the porn industry. And if that's not tastless enough for you...
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is one of the ingredients in (Tom's of Maine) toothpaste. Doesn't taste much, as far as I can tell. At least, it doesn't taste as much as the relatively mild flavorings they put in.
Re:Why does the CEO matter that much?
on
FRG on W2K: No CoS
·
· Score: 1
Well, then the company has both. But I'd still be worried more about the programmer than the CEO.
Of course it becomes invalid eventually (assuming that copyrights don't keep getting extended forever). I meant that it doesn't become invalid due to lack of holder.
The Kansas Secretary of State, Ron Thornburgh, has been quoted in an AP article as saying that he will prosecute anyone who trades votes in Kansas. He also mentioned that he doesn't know whether it's legal or not.
It certainly seems to me that threatening citizens who do something legal is a shady practice, especially where it involves elections. If nobody's stepped forward to say they're swapping votes in Kansas yet and challenged Thornburgh to a legal duel, somebody ought to.
There are some titles whose copyright has become lost. For instance, a company goes out of business and its assets get sold off, but nobody buys some of the copyrights or they aren't put up for sale due to not being listed as assets.
The copyright continues to exist, since there's no legal mechanism for it to become invalid. The work is therefore under copyright, but either there is nobody who actually has the rights, or the entity with the rights doesn't know they have them.
In these cases, distribution can still be illegal, but there's nobody with the actual right to bring charges, at least as far as I can tell. Presumably, even the IDSA couldn't do anything about it, since they only can act because the copyright holder is a member.
There is actually some software in this category; a lot of computer companies showed up in the 80s and 90s and then disappeared without a trace. For example, as far as I can tell, nobody holds the copyright on Below the Root. At least at one point, the only company which could have the rights to Robot Odyssey were reportedly denying it, although there have been reports that they admit they have the rights now.
I think there ought to be extreme abandonware sites, which would only distribute software they could not find anyone to prohibit them from distributing; ironically, while I had no trouble finding several programs with extant copyright holders, I couldn't find Below the Root.
Daycare may well be a very good thing for children. It allows them to be around a group of other children, which they would not be in the home. It means that there is a wider variety of adults taking care of them, which is important if their parents aren't actually masters-of-all-trades.
It's important to provide instruction and moral guidence to one's children; after all, this is most of what makes them one's own children and not just some other child. However, most of the janitorial sorts of tasks need not be done by the parents; diaper-changing technique and so forth do not significantly impact a child's character.
Much of what small children will learn is how the world works and how social interaction works. For these, the important things are toys and other children to play with. Daycare can provide these and also some adults to make sure the children get fed and cleaned.
I am somewhat concerned about the idea of IT companies providing standardized daycare; I think it would be more reasonable for them to subsidize daycare of the parents' choice. Onsite could be more convenient, but it would be a pain if the place you wanted to work had daycare you didn't like.
I'd be more concerned about software from a company with a CoS programmer than a CoS CEO. After all, if the only person who wants to insert nasty code is the CEO, chances are he's not going to be able to. If a programmer or a few want to insert nasty code, they could do so without anyone being any the wiser-- and the whole thing will be easier to hide.
Germany probably is reasonable in being suspicious of this program, but they ought to be carefully reviewing all of the programs they use; they should review everything sufficiently that they don't care where it came from.
Didn't IBM recently announce that their entire product line could run Linux? So they presumably can run Linux on this thing... swapping in Linux for AIX probably isn't that hard, although the people who can tune OSes for this probably only know how to tune AIX to be happy. Still, it would make a funny Linux vs. Windows ad.
I think a common problem is that people use floppies primarily for linux boot disks.
These are created with "dd", which doesn't verify at all. It'll tell you if the drive is reporting errors, but it won't check to see that the drive reads the same thing it was supposed to write. So a bad spot that simply fails to write won't necessarily show up until you try using it.
They are also totally non-error-correcting. The image contains a full disk's worth of data, laid out in sequence. For disks with filesystems on them, there's support for avoiding bad blocks by saving data somewhere different if a spot fails. This means that old disks that had problems at the time may have just been used as 1.42M floppies instead of 1.44M and nobody noticed.
This explains why my DOS floppy has been working without problems for ages, while my linux boot disks, on identical media and stored more safely, never last better one use and the next.
I've tried firing up Word 2000 and producing something usable. As soon as I tried to do something nontrivial, I was faced with an interface more complicated than emacs and LaTeX combined. Once I managed to muddle my way through that, I tried to change something and had to reformat my whole document by hand. I tried numbering sections, and ended up with the wrong references, I had to change all the page number references by hand each time I changed anything, etc...
Getting it to look right is further complicated by the fact that Word shows you what it's going to look like, but gives you no way of figuring out how to change anything.
On the other hand, you can just put
\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
and
\end{document}
around a plain text file and it comes out looking nice with no extra fiddling.
I think Napster would gain a lot of fans among the artists if there was support for official freebie releases from the bands themselves. It would be good if searching for things that the band was distribution turned up the band's own site, so you'd also get other info about the band and such.
Plus, it would be a way for the band to know what effect napster and their freebie releases were having on the fan base: they can say, "X number of people came to our site because of Napster. These people may not have found us directly (i.e., read our actual site, rather than just maybe gotten our CDs) otherwise." For bands that want their fans to know what's up (and remember that bands often care more about concerts than CD sales), this would be a big factor.
Shouldn't be too hard a thing for napster to add; they're just have to verify that the site is actually the band's and see what it's distributing, and make the official site the automatic top result for things that are on it.
There's no particular reason they have to use the exact game, and not just the engine. They could probably not just take out the guns and monsters, but replace them with parts lists and such. And they could probably include a lot of hidden details which would only bloat the size of the map (spend some extra money on RAM, no biggie) and not bog down the simulation, since they're generally hidden and don't have to be rendered or simulated.
The features that the expensive programs have that aren't in Quake seem to be basically restricted to user interface and supplimental information, which aren't really that hard to change (compared to special rendering effects, at least).
Unlike cell phones or, for that matter, books and newspapers ("If you've never apologized to a telephone pole you're wasting valuable reading time."), the UIs on these are actually designed not to distract people who are interacting with the world. They're designed, for the most part, by people who are actually trying to use them while doing other things like giving demos and walking to the kitchen.
I think most non-specialized apps will be too hard to use while moving around or talking, but there can be (and already are) specialized apps that minimize the attention you give to them.
Considering that there's probably something you don't have to carry around if you've got one of these (laptop, binder, clipboard, etc), and you can keep the weight of the batteries distributed over your body (since they're attached to a vest) even when you're using it, it seems to me that this system is getting to be a good use of weight.
Slashdot Mirror
LaTeX is a bit tricky, because several layers of description are all implemented in the same language. Thus, the LaTeX document you write is actually calling a complex set of TeX macros, which actually get down to the level of deciding what characters go where. This means that there's no particular reason you can't mix the levels, and include in your document something that totally screws up the process.
.dvi). I'm not sure it would replace HTML, but it could certainly replace ps/pdf (the document format which accurately represents a bad photocopy of your document).
On the other hand, there's a significant subset of LaTeX which is purely semantic (which is why it beats Word, for instance-- you don't have to deal with the layout yourself). This could form a standard document language if it were precisely determined.
Such a setup would probably work well for most applications: the actual layout macros would be internal to the browser, so the document would come out nicely anywhere; the browser could fetch the embedded images (the main problem with distributing
One thing I think should be done more is writing software in reuseable components. That way, if the project gets canceled, you still get something out of it: perhaps you have implementations of a bunch of algorithms which you can just plug in on the next project or something like that.
That way, the work on your canceled project can be considered as work on other projects you hadn't known about when you did it. And if your project doesn't get canceled, you've still gotten more use out of your time spent working.
This is just terrestrial life, not life on earth. Life in the ocean is still much older than this.
What really happened is that life came out of the ocean 2.6 billion years ago, hit the snooze button, and then went back to the ocean for another 1.4 billion years. At least, that's what I would have done.
It's hardly likely that only one side is cheating.
There were reports of a police roadblock stopping black motorists (who are mostly Dem) on the way to vote.
The ballot in Palm Beach County may not have conformed to state standards.
But various weird things happened involving the Dems, too, and the whole thing with lawsuits is getting a bit old (nevermind that, regardless of whether the courts are correctly interpreting state law, they're mostly Dem-appointed).
Since we can't tell exactly what everyone who was elegiable to vote and tried to (i.e., those people whose votes should be considered) would have voted, the process comes down to both sides cheating so that, perhaps, the result will be somewhere close to right. Currently, it looks like more people chose Gore and failed to get counted than chose Bush and failed to get counted.
In the real world, things often don't get done when they're supposed to. A good scheduling app has to take this into account, especially as this interacts with repeated events.
If I don't get something done today, and it doesn't have to be done at a particular day and time, it should roll over to tomorrow. In fact, I should be able to specify how to determine when it rolls over to, so that, if I have to do something on a Thursday, it'll remember me every Thursday until I do it.
If I fail to get a repeating thing done on time, I should be able to specify what happens to the next iteration. For some things, I have to do them on a predictable date, even if I was late the previous time (such as paying my credit card bill). For other things, I want the next date based on when I actually did the thing (my laundry, e.g.).
Some events may be timed based on either of these aspects of different events.
Probably the right thing to do is to keep track of everything you plan to do for a while, and how you decided when to do it. Include all the weird cases (I have to go to the supermarket three days after I go to the convenience store, or 5 days after I go to the supermarket, whichever is later, but no more than 2 weeks after I go to the supermarket, even if I go to the convenience store in between). Come up with a way to have the system include all the cases you found.
Given the security record of MS apps vs. non-MS apps, is being signed by MS actually a positive thing? Back in the days when viruses were mostly executables, this might have made some sense, since you'd at least know when you were suddenly running something that wasn't part of the OS and that you hadn't meant to run.
But now most of the malicious "code" you're likely to run into is actually data which causes (signed) MS code to damage your system. Makes you wonder what the signature is supposed to certify. Back in the days of ActiveX, it was a big deal that there was a signed MS control with a bug that broke security, and they had no way to revoke it. But now, it's a feature.
One problem I see with this is that it means that
both branches have to be ready at the same time in order to make the descision. Neither one has any advantage to being done before the other, so neither will move to stablize. Even if the call to become stable comes from on high, it will be more difficult to synchronize the schedules of the two portions.
The other is that it makes the process of making a stable version harder-- the official version of each part has to be chosen, after everything is working.
I think a better way of handling alternative versions is to have the official kernel distribution mechanism let you get patched versions:
in addition to (my earlier wish-list item) being able to ask for a kernel source tree without those parts you don't want (drivers for hardware you don't have, filesystem you don't want, platforms you're not on), you should be able to get it with your choice of patches. The patches would be maintained by whoever wrote them, and essentially any patch that applied would be distributed, assuming the patch maintainer had blessed it for the kernel version you were getting. Your standard config tool would keep track of the patches you were using and could get a new version with the same patches.
That way patch versions would be on a somewhat more equal footing with the official version. Furthermore, there would be less pressure to bless the white code with official status from the beginning, since it would still be easy to find. So the default would be to keep the old SCSI code, with both red and white trying to beat an easy target, and both having to deal with modifications to the interface from other sources.
Since a large portion of the industry is doing stuff that's brand new and not too difficult, the primary job requirement is being able to learn a bunch of new stuff and use it. For that, most any college degree is sufficient. The actual information gained in college is unimportant, compared to the ability to gain information.
There is a need for actual EE and CS majors, but that's just to have people who have some perspective on the problems-- most of the people on a project don't need to know much about the subject beforehand, and what they need to start with is a user-level familiarity with computers, which is generally acquired in college regardless of major.
I think the current situation of a Linus-blessed official version with a ton of people's patches available is possibly better than an actual fork; it lets the alternatives acquire the benefits of new versions for a limited amount of updating work, and thus you see competition on which patches get into distributions and into the main kernel rather than competition between "Linux with Performance Monitoring" and "Linux with Journaling Filesystems" and so on.
The Linux model of having a bunch of stuff out there competing does a better job of getting the winners into widespread use than a system where one version may (e.g.) have better drivers but a worse scheduler than another version, because they forked and can no longer just take each other's code when one of them is clearly better.
I think a good set of specified interfaces among parts would make it easier to maintain patches, and thus easier to have patches compete on thier merits; patches which don't depend on any of the interfaces which are changing in a particular release won't have to be updated.
* A distribution mechanism for distributing only the portion of the kernel tree that the user is interested in (i.e., no sun code, no drivers for things I don't have, etc; I can get them later if I want them later)
* A really good way to move functionality out of kernel space without making it non-kernel-like
* Modularity; not enough to prevent principled change of interfaces (e.g., a few which need badly need it each major development release), but enough to prevent constant minor changes due to lack of defined interfaces
* The right primatives for an efficient implementation of POSIX threads
* Video drivers good enough that the XFree86 people don't duplicate them
I used Purify, which was on a year-long license. The license was a major pain, especially for something of that sort, because the IT people didn't keep it up to date (they didn't use it) and didn't pay attention to it. So the license would run out and we'd have to get IT to do all the paperwork to get a new license.
I actually really liked Purify, and I wish we could have continued be using it legitimately, but I actually ended up mostly using it on brief "trial" licenses; we couldn't afford it as a group of individuals, and it was just too much trouble to get it paid for on purchase order.
If MS stops offering the non-limited-time version, I expect there to be days when companies grind to a halt because none of their office software will work until they can get through the paperwork to get a new subscription.
An invisible condom is just the thing for the porn industry. And if that's not tastless enough for you...
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is one of the ingredients in (Tom's of Maine) toothpaste. Doesn't taste much, as far as I can tell. At least, it doesn't taste as much as the relatively mild flavorings they put in.
Well, then the company has both. But I'd still be worried more about the programmer than the CEO.
Of course it becomes invalid eventually (assuming that copyrights don't keep getting extended forever). I meant that it doesn't become invalid due to lack of holder.
The Kansas Secretary of State, Ron Thornburgh, has been quoted in an AP article as saying that he will prosecute anyone who trades votes in Kansas. He also mentioned that he doesn't know whether it's legal or not.
It certainly seems to me that threatening citizens who do something legal is a shady practice, especially where it involves elections. If nobody's stepped forward to say they're swapping votes in Kansas yet and challenged Thornburgh to a legal duel, somebody ought to.
There are some titles whose copyright has become lost. For instance, a company goes out of business and its assets get sold off, but nobody buys some of the copyrights or they aren't put up for sale due to not being listed as assets.
The copyright continues to exist, since there's no legal mechanism for it to become invalid. The work is therefore under copyright, but either there is nobody who actually has the rights, or the entity with the rights doesn't know they have them.
In these cases, distribution can still be illegal, but there's nobody with the actual right to bring charges, at least as far as I can tell. Presumably, even the IDSA couldn't do anything about it, since they only can act because the copyright holder is a member.
There is actually some software in this category; a lot of computer companies showed up in the 80s and 90s and then disappeared without a trace. For example, as far as I can tell, nobody holds the copyright on Below the Root. At least at one point, the only company which could have the rights to Robot Odyssey were reportedly denying it, although there have been reports that they admit they have the rights now.
I think there ought to be extreme abandonware sites, which would only distribute software they could not find anyone to prohibit them from distributing; ironically, while I had no trouble finding several programs with extant copyright holders, I couldn't find Below the Root.
Daycare may well be a very good thing for children. It allows them to be around a group of other children, which they would not be in the home. It means that there is a wider variety of adults taking care of them, which is important if their parents aren't actually masters-of-all-trades.
It's important to provide instruction and moral guidence to one's children; after all, this is most of what makes them one's own children and not just some other child. However, most of the janitorial sorts of tasks need not be done by the parents; diaper-changing technique and so forth do not significantly impact a child's character.
Much of what small children will learn is how the world works and how social interaction works. For these, the important things are toys and other children to play with. Daycare can provide these and also some adults to make sure the children get fed and cleaned.
I am somewhat concerned about the idea of IT companies providing standardized daycare; I think it would be more reasonable for them to subsidize daycare of the parents' choice. Onsite could be more convenient, but it would be a pain if the place you wanted to work had daycare you didn't like.
I'd be more concerned about software from a company with a CoS programmer than a CoS CEO. After all, if the only person who wants to insert nasty code is the CEO, chances are he's not going to be able to. If a programmer or a few want to insert nasty code, they could do so without anyone being any the wiser-- and the whole thing will be easier to hide.
Germany probably is reasonable in being suspicious of this program, but they ought to be carefully reviewing all of the programs they use; they should review everything sufficiently that they don't care where it came from.
Didn't IBM recently announce that their entire product line could run Linux? So they presumably can run Linux on this thing... swapping in Linux for AIX probably isn't that hard, although the people who can tune OSes for this probably only know how to tune AIX to be happy. Still, it would make a funny Linux vs. Windows ad.
I think a common problem is that people use floppies primarily for linux boot disks.
These are created with "dd", which doesn't verify at all. It'll tell you if the drive is reporting errors, but it won't check to see that the drive reads the same thing it was supposed to write. So a bad spot that simply fails to write won't necessarily show up until you try using it.
They are also totally non-error-correcting. The image contains a full disk's worth of data, laid out in sequence. For disks with filesystems on them, there's support for avoiding bad blocks by saving data somewhere different if a spot fails. This means that old disks that had problems at the time may have just been used as 1.42M floppies instead of 1.44M and nobody noticed.
This explains why my DOS floppy has been working without problems for ages, while my linux boot disks, on identical media and stored more safely, never last better one use and the next.
I've tried firing up Word 2000 and producing something usable. As soon as I tried to do something nontrivial, I was faced with an interface more complicated than emacs and LaTeX combined. Once I managed to muddle my way through that, I tried to change something and had to reformat my whole document by hand. I tried numbering sections, and ended up with the wrong references, I had to change all the page number references by hand each time I changed anything, etc...
Getting it to look right is further complicated by the fact that Word shows you what it's going to look like, but gives you no way of figuring out how to change anything.
On the other hand, you can just put
\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
and
\end{document}
around a plain text file and it comes out looking nice with no extra fiddling.
I think Napster would gain a lot of fans among the artists if there was support for official freebie releases from the bands themselves. It would be good if searching for things that the band was distribution turned up the band's own site, so you'd also get other info about the band and such.
Plus, it would be a way for the band to know what effect napster and their freebie releases were having on the fan base: they can say, "X number of people came to our site because of Napster. These people may not have found us directly (i.e., read our actual site, rather than just maybe gotten our CDs) otherwise." For bands that want their fans to know what's up (and remember that bands often care more about concerts than CD sales), this would be a big factor.
Shouldn't be too hard a thing for napster to add; they're just have to verify that the site is actually the band's and see what it's distributing, and make the official site the automatic top result for things that are on it.
There's no particular reason they have to use the exact game, and not just the engine. They could probably not just take out the guns and monsters, but replace them with parts lists and such. And they could probably include a lot of hidden details which would only bloat the size of the map (spend some extra money on RAM, no biggie) and not bog down the simulation, since they're generally hidden and don't have to be rendered or simulated.
The features that the expensive programs have that aren't in Quake seem to be basically restricted to user interface and supplimental information, which aren't really that hard to change (compared to special rendering effects, at least).
Unlike cell phones or, for that matter, books and newspapers ("If you've never apologized to a telephone pole you're wasting valuable reading time."), the UIs on these are actually designed not to distract people who are interacting with the world. They're designed, for the most part, by people who are actually trying to use them while doing other things like giving demos and walking to the kitchen.
I think most non-specialized apps will be too hard to use while moving around or talking, but there can be (and already are) specialized apps that minimize the attention you give to them.
Considering that there's probably something you don't have to carry around if you've got one of these (laptop, binder, clipboard, etc), and you can keep the weight of the batteries distributed over your body (since they're attached to a vest) even when you're using it, it seems to me that this system is getting to be a good use of weight.