Reading the article, I was strongly impressed with what a good, ground-level introduction to the concept of "what is genetic programming". I think that showing the science applied to a seemingly simple, common concept (walking, and specifically animating virtual walking) really helps make the big concept here easier to understand.
You know, Frank Miller (Ronin, Sin City, Give Me Liberty, numerous other graphic / comic masterpieces) wrote the screenplays for RoboCop II and III (see here) - you might give them another look. I wonder if you are falling into the unquestioned sequels == bad trap... I thought the whole RC series (so far!) was great, and I am fully looking forward to the Robocop comic mini-series due this summer.
Even the (late eighties / early nineties?) Robocop TV show had its moments - look closely and you could see Subgenius posters hanging tattered on alley walls, things like that.
I'm surprised this thread is not modded higher - until very recently, I got up ay 7 am (or before!) on Saturdays to whatch cartoons with my kid, who is now 7. I know a hell of a lot of people don't dig it, for the both oft-maligned and praised factor in this thread - toy tie-ins - but we watched the freaking hell out of the first three seasons of Digimon. Totally kickass. Then you had in the last couple years these crazy cartoons like Fighting Foodons - not only was that hella f***ed up but also pretty damn funny.
Now, Digimon got re-angled at a younger audience, but the risky cartoons (not risqué, risky - too weird to get popular) have all been cancelled and there's just nothing there. Makes me really sad - I LOVE saturday morning for cartoons, just any cartoons. Spoon up some sugar bombs with the kid before mom wakes up - hell, maybe even wake and bake before I wake the boy up - and watch the hell out of four hours of cartoons.
Also, I agree with other posters that toy tie-ins are totally important! Yes, it's a scam to take your money as a parent, but it rocks to connect with both the cartoon and the kids by having the digivices, the action figures, etc. - it gives you a whole mythology to explore early creativity, etc. I guess in the new family-values world that mythology is provided by religion, but not in my house, bub.
F*** sunday and church, my son and I want cartoons back on track.
I'll get modded down as redundant, but it needs to be said as many times as possible (and I don't see much of it in this thread [reading @ +1]):
A legal remedy here would set a really bad precedent - as a software developer who is not unrealistic about my skill level, I am terrified of software liability becoming either law or accepted assumption.
If MS loses this, I see absolutely no way I could defend myself if, god forbid, a program I wrote or even maintained caused catastrophic dataloss, or in worse cases, physical injury.
Note: Ironically, just *yesterday* I was bitch-slapped, albeit in an odd way, by Slammer: in certain situations, applying one of the hotfixes to SQL server that closes the Slammer vuln. without having SQL Server SP2 installed *completely* horks up SQL Server. The ISP (Rackspace) of a dedicated rack unit I "manage" on contract (client has almost no $$$) installed said hotfix in the process of physical maintenance, so I got a panicked call from my client in NYC that the "server is down". A couple of hours worth of research later, I was fine, but it sucked my afternoon away.
I hate the stacks of dependant/conflicting patches and service packs, not to mention the damn bugs, but I'd prefer to take the risks on this end than be open to litigation of software I write contains bugs.
1. Don't say "don't ask" re: the c-corp decision - it has a big impact. Filing as an LLC (in some states) pushes all the tax burden to your normal personal taxes.
2. Dude, go to the accountant. Spend the $200 or whatever - you'll breathe easier. It's not worth the stress in the low-dollar situation you describe.
3. As others have pointed out, if you really took in less than say 5k and spent the same, the IRS doesn't care, explicitly and literally.
A couple of other (currently low-modded) posts have pointed these things out, but it would seem to me that both the Zope application server and the WebDAV HTTP extensions (incl. various implementations, i.e. Internet Explorer as a client, Zope as a DAV server) would serve as prior art...
I use mine *constantly*. And it's certainly not a status symbol - it's an original Handspring Visor Pro, purchased at pre-release time. It's been beaten down with heavy use, covered with scratches and looks damn old-fashioned and cheap compared to the Compaq etc. units everyone seems to have now.
I take notes at meetings, run my schedule with the datebook+ in conjunction w/ Outlook (w/ Samsung Contact on the server side), read e-books, even check transit schedules with the thing.
I know a lot of people have trouble with "graffiti", but I mastered it pretty quickly. I actually had a Palm exec once tell me that I was the fastest graffiti user he had ever seen.
Only problem is that my on-paper handwriting has gone to sh-t - I often automatically do the one-stroke partial letters used by graffiti without thinking!
Grrrrr. I know this will get lost in a sea of comments,having come late to the game, but I have read all the child comments and none says it explicitly:
Thawte used to be a great alternative to Verisign, ***until Verisign up and bought them***!
The prices were raised in August (8/5) to 199. The customer service, while still answered with a "Thawte, can I help you?" is all Verisign, and it SUCKS.
I wouldn't sweat it, I don't post flamebait arguments, but I got so burned on a project that was supposed to be relatively fast - and would have been - had Thawteisign not had their heads so far up their asses.
I agree with so many other posters - really look at your situation, and see if you need simple trust between yourself and know parties, or whether you need blind trust from anonymous parties. If the former is the case, christ, generate your own certs. If the latter is the case, well, shit, maybe Entrust IS better (haven't used them personally) as others have posted, or maybe someone else will come up with a decent offering.
As it is, if what you need is the trust of anonymous users relying on what was installed with their browsers, you are, in my experience, more or less shit out of luck and will have to pay what I think is a damn SSL Cert cartel to get what you need.
I used to actually advocate and explain in lay terms to clients why SSL was worth the paltry sums - imagine the huge burden of both maintaining a constantly queried database of identities and actually verifying those identities! The thing is, Verithawte does neither reliably any more.
-- Bryan "fuckit they're coming to get me anyway so I will use plain text!" White
"If Hollywood kills broadband by buying Congress, we're inconvenienced, but our lives aren't over."
Sure, you and I and our families will still have normal home lives, after the 6 months of bitching re: going back to dialup. However, at this point due to the economics that have evolved in the last decade regarding bandwidth pricing, the death of broadband (accessible broadband - 1.5 MBPS DSL, etc.) will absolutely mean the "death" of a great number of small businesses.
The reliability difference between a T1 line and a "residential" DSL circuit run to 1.5MBPS is much smaller than the attendant price difference. I think there are likely thousands of small businesses with revenue from 100k-1M/yr that totally rely on DSL for office connectivity (I've wired offices of 10+ employees on 768k DSL lines), server bandwidth, everything. I own such a business - if there were even a substantial rise in the LOW cost of our bandwidth, we would have to seriously rebudget our modest expenditures.
Note that most cable customers cannot act as servers - they are run through proxies that immediately prevent such. I, like many DSL subscribers, have the express consent to run servers on my residential line, and in fact pay a very meager fee for multiple IPs to facilitate such (I run multiple mail servers, and NO, not for spam).
I think the death of DSL would have very surprising effects on the national economy due to the affect of such on small business. I like to believe, too, that small business is the foundation of our economy.
Right. Just ran it on RH 7.2 and then attempted to on Slackware 8.0 (which I know to be the more secure of the two boxes, not because of distro choice but because I have actively gone to more length to secure the Slack box, which has been up far longer).
It doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated eval tool at any rate - the site / org seem to be relatively credible, but then that may just be appearance.
I'm not saying that it is good or bad for Zinf to be relevant for this reason, only that it is:
In order to use the "Download Full Album" facility of Emusic.com, you need Freeamp or a workalike (Zinf). Emusic used to support (ugh!) RealJukebox, but now that Real has dropped that in the favor of the nastily licensed RealOne, only Freeamp / Zinf is supported.
I have been extremely impressed with the value Emusic provides to subscribers for $10/15 per mo. (depending on the length of contract you commit to) - I have downloaded - legally - literally hundreds of cool albums that I would not have risked as a retail purchase or known to look for / find via p2p services.
It is a real pain in the ass to download a 20 song album track by track. Now, again, it may not be a good claim to relevance that Zinf makes it much easier to use Emusic.com, but that's why I have it. -astro
The 5200 was not at all irrelevant. At the time, it had games that could not be produced on any other console - only on the "personal computers" of that day - Atari 400/800, C64, etc. I was positively blown away when I first played games on the 5200 (at a JC Penny store in Fairbanks, Alaska, maybe 1981 (82?)).
There was a huge downturn in consumer spending in the early 1980s, that anyone in their mid-to-late 30s should remember as a fact of teenage life. This absolutely killed the market for game consoles at that time, given that it drove a huge price war among "personal computers".
This was also when Activision in particular rose to what was a huge business empire for the software world at that time - they produced titles for every console platform as well as every "pc" platform at that time that I am aware of. They later bought many of the rest of the companies that produced the classic PC games at that time (i.e. Infocom!).
So what you had was similar, oddly enough, to what we have today - "personal computers" that had as good or better titles than the most advanced consoles at a slightly higher cost (then - C64 for $299, Atari 5200 for $199; today, a PS2 will cost me $200, whereas I can build a K7 900mhz box with Nvidia GForce 4 for ~$300) but in both cases the PCs can do far more than the console.
I have no idea what my original point was at this point, except that maybe folks should look to Activision for where the really sound business model is - ~24 years of success in a time that saw literally hundreds of other HW *and* SW makers go by the wayside.
--astro
Yes, I have a Gamecube. And yes, my current "high end" PC is a 1ghz Duron. And I am happy as a clam with both.
I understand all of the arguments here that exclaim this to be a good thing, but as a small business owner and as someone who has worked for a number of non-profits, the death of unmetered low-speed (I mean DSL, Cable, etc., as compared to T3, etc.) is a killer.
Many small businesses and community organizations can more than get by with an in-house DSL line to their server, or by hosting with their web developer, who is on a similar small pipe. Many, many websites today, still, I believe serve a very small community of people but serve that community well. Once you bring usage metrics into this, I think you may well end up with an upside down model where the zillion small community websites (for a short time) subsidize the fewer sites that have larger audiences. These larger sites would of course be owned by the very people selling you the bandwidth at an ever increasing cost.
Further, this will punch up the price of commercial hosting by increasing demand - some 15% or so of the folks shut out by increasing metered cost would move to commercial-priced, more expensive hosts. That 15% is a huge immediate boom in demand, which will in turn affect pricing.
Again, as someone who has self-hosted (mail and web in the early days, more now) for years, and counseled other small businesses to do the same, I say that this trend just sucks.
I will admit readily that I haven't read many of the comments here, but I have to say this:
Many of you should think twice before hailing Microsoft's downfall should it happen to stem from software fault liability.
Read the article - part of the major point is that a legal precedent could be set that would allow for far greater liability on the part of software developers that deliver flawed code.
Think about that for a second - all of the software that *you* have developed for clients that have pushed the boundaries on budgets and timelines is *totally free of bugs*? Even totally free of bugs that might eat their data one day? Myself, I occasionally lose sleep thinking about a bug that I *know* is in code that I delivered to a client that has no more funding to pay me with to clean up the system.
I personally feel that I have legitimate protection from liability for loss in those situations given that I expose the problem to the client, honestly tell them how much it will cost for me to fix it, and explain that the coverage for corner cases wasn't there given the budget they provided.
Are you ready to stand in court against precedent that you are liable for the business cost of a bug in your code? I'm not.
I am not a MS loyalist in the least (yes, I'm posting this from Win2k, my work platform for clients that I do Win work for) - in fact I wish to see serious stipulations on their bundling and BIOS issues mainly - but I don't think this is the right angle to crucify them on because it will come down and affect me.
From what I understand of the current/. crowd, this may come down on you a hell of a lot more - do you carry terribly expensive Omissions and Errors insurance? I didn't think so.
Not only was th 1st ed outdated, it contained massive amounts of blatant errata, and even worse, abhorrent coding practices that stuck with me for a LONG time (I learned my first Perl wrestling with the 1st ed examples to get them to work).
Again, here here. The Trackman Marble and its recent "+" descendant simply rule. Luckily, I didn't have to pay for my +; I was proposing on a contract w/ the mfg, and let slip that the first trackman I ever purchased - over 5 years ago - had finally worn out. Left the building with my new one.
I use them at home on 3 machines, at work on 2, and hell yeah they work great for Quake, whatever version. I can appear almost totally sedentary - motionless except for my right hand - and rip it up.
Ehhh, this whole thing does not impress me at all. Anyone that even thinks for a moment that this is out of the ordinary (kid uses word taking spelling instructions from dad) isn't a digital worker with a 3 year old.
My kid knows better than to send empty e-mail, at any rate... I've sent more than my share of "I qwerty you too" e-mails in reply.:)
However, and this is the reason for my reply to this particular message, my son is *almost* as comfortable with our Linux box as the win 98. And that's fairly cool, as my Linux box is old, slow, and configured with a pretty cryptically configured OLD distribution of Afterstep (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).
I tell you, it's every bit as likely for Simon to say "Dad, can I go look at pbs dot org [nick dot com/cartoonnetwork dot com]?" as it is for him to beg to watch Digimon or Dexter AGAIN.
I took my family to San Francisco a little over a week ago, and Simon says to my adult friend who put us up: "Why is your computer so DAMN slow? You should get DSL like my dad." I swear. No fooling. Gotta work on my language around the boy.
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Reading the article, I was strongly impressed with what a good, ground-level introduction to the concept of "what is genetic programming". I think that showing the science applied to a seemingly simple, common concept (walking, and specifically animating virtual walking) really helps make the big concept here easier to understand.
Good article.
You know, Frank Miller (Ronin, Sin City, Give Me Liberty, numerous other graphic / comic masterpieces) wrote the screenplays for RoboCop II and III (see here) - you might give them another look. I wonder if you are falling into the unquestioned sequels == bad trap... I thought the whole RC series (so far!) was great, and I am fully looking forward to the Robocop comic mini-series due this summer.
Even the (late eighties / early nineties?) Robocop TV show had its moments - look closely and you could see Subgenius posters hanging tattered on alley walls, things like that.
It's what you do to PostgreSQL database tables in the course of normal maintenance. I don't quite understand how this robot will do that.
I'm surprised this thread is not modded higher - until very recently, I got up ay 7 am (or before!) on Saturdays to whatch cartoons with my kid, who is now 7. I know a hell of a lot of people don't dig it, for the both oft-maligned and praised factor in this thread - toy tie-ins - but we watched the freaking hell out of the first three seasons of Digimon. Totally kickass. Then you had in the last couple years these crazy cartoons like Fighting Foodons - not only was that hella f***ed up but also pretty damn funny.
Now, Digimon got re-angled at a younger audience, but the risky cartoons (not risqué, risky - too weird to get popular) have all been cancelled and there's just nothing there. Makes me really sad - I LOVE saturday morning for cartoons, just any cartoons. Spoon up some sugar bombs with the kid before mom wakes up - hell, maybe even wake and bake before I wake the boy up - and watch the hell out of four hours of cartoons.
Also, I agree with other posters that toy tie-ins are totally important! Yes, it's a scam to take your money as a parent, but it rocks to connect with both the cartoon and the kids by having the digivices, the action figures, etc. - it gives you a whole mythology to explore early creativity, etc. I guess in the new family-values world that mythology is provided by religion, but not in my house, bub.
F*** sunday and church, my son and I want cartoons back on track.
I'll get modded down as redundant, but it needs to be said as many times as possible (and I don't see much of it in this thread [reading @ +1]):
A legal remedy here would set a really bad precedent - as a software developer who is not unrealistic about my skill level, I am terrified of software liability becoming either law or accepted assumption.
If MS loses this, I see absolutely no way I could defend myself if, god forbid, a program I wrote or even maintained caused catastrophic dataloss, or in worse cases, physical injury.
Note: Ironically, just *yesterday* I was bitch-slapped, albeit in an odd way, by Slammer: in certain situations, applying one of the hotfixes to SQL server that closes the Slammer vuln. without having SQL Server SP2 installed *completely* horks up SQL Server. The ISP (Rackspace) of a dedicated rack unit I "manage" on contract (client has almost no $$$) installed said hotfix in the process of physical maintenance, so I got a panicked call from my client in NYC that the "server is down". A couple of hours worth of research later, I was fine, but it sucked my afternoon away.
I hate the stacks of dependant/conflicting patches and service packs, not to mention the damn bugs, but I'd prefer to take the risks on this end than be open to litigation of software I write contains bugs.
--astro
1. Don't say "don't ask" re: the c-corp decision - it has a big impact. Filing as an LLC (in some states) pushes all the tax burden to your normal personal taxes.
2. Dude, go to the accountant. Spend the $200 or whatever - you'll breathe easier. It's not worth the stress in the low-dollar situation you describe.
3. As others have pointed out, if you really took in less than say 5k and spent the same, the IRS doesn't care, explicitly and literally.
A couple of other (currently low-modded) posts have pointed these things out, but it would seem to me that both the Zope application server and the WebDAV HTTP extensions (incl. various implementations, i.e. Internet Explorer as a client, Zope as a DAV server) would serve as prior art...
Ironically, the title of SoaD's new disc is "Steal This Album"...
I use mine *constantly*. And it's certainly not a status symbol - it's an original Handspring Visor Pro, purchased at pre-release time. It's been beaten down with heavy use, covered with scratches and looks damn old-fashioned and cheap compared to the Compaq etc. units everyone seems to have now.
I take notes at meetings, run my schedule with the datebook+ in conjunction w/ Outlook (w/ Samsung Contact on the server side), read e-books, even check transit schedules with the thing.
I know a lot of people have trouble with "graffiti", but I mastered it pretty quickly. I actually had a Palm exec once tell me that I was the fastest graffiti user he had ever seen.
Only problem is that my on-paper handwriting has gone to sh-t - I often automatically do the one-stroke partial letters used by graffiti without thinking!
Grrrrr. I know this will get lost in a sea of comments,having come late to the game, but I have read all the child comments and none says it explicitly:
Thawte used to be a great alternative to Verisign, ***until Verisign up and bought them***!
The prices were raised in August (8/5) to 199. The customer service, while still answered with a "Thawte, can I help you?" is all Verisign, and it SUCKS.
I wouldn't sweat it, I don't post flamebait arguments, but I got so burned on a project that was supposed to be relatively fast - and would have been - had Thawteisign not had their heads so far up their asses.
I agree with so many other posters - really look at your situation, and see if you need simple trust between yourself and know parties, or whether you need blind trust from anonymous parties. If the former is the case, christ, generate your own certs. If the latter is the case, well, shit, maybe Entrust IS better (haven't used them personally) as others have posted, or maybe someone else will come up with a decent offering.
As it is, if what you need is the trust of anonymous users relying on what was installed with their browsers, you are, in my experience, more or less shit out of luck and will have to pay what I think is a damn SSL Cert cartel to get what you need.
I used to actually advocate and explain in lay terms to clients why SSL was worth the paltry sums - imagine the huge burden of both maintaining a constantly queried database of identities and actually verifying those identities! The thing is, Verithawte does neither reliably any more.
-- Bryan "fuckit they're coming to get me anyway so I will use plain text!" White
You mistake an important piece here:
Sure, you and I and our families will still have normal home lives, after the 6 months of bitching re: going back to dialup. However, at this point due to the economics that have evolved in the last decade regarding bandwidth pricing, the death of broadband (accessible broadband - 1.5 MBPS DSL, etc.) will absolutely mean the "death" of a great number of small businesses.
The reliability difference between a T1 line and a "residential" DSL circuit run to 1.5MBPS is much smaller than the attendant price difference. I think there are likely thousands of small businesses with revenue from 100k-1M/yr that totally rely on DSL for office connectivity (I've wired offices of 10+ employees on 768k DSL lines), server bandwidth, everything. I own such a business - if there were even a substantial rise in the LOW cost of our bandwidth, we would have to seriously rebudget our modest expenditures.
Note that most cable customers cannot act as servers - they are run through proxies that immediately prevent such. I, like many DSL subscribers, have the express consent to run servers on my residential line, and in fact pay a very meager fee for multiple IPs to facilitate such (I run multiple mail servers, and NO, not for spam ).
I think the death of DSL would have very surprising effects on the national economy due to the affect of such on small business. I like to believe, too, that small business is the foundation of our economy.
--astro
Right. Just ran it on RH 7.2 and then attempted to on Slackware 8.0 (which I know to be the more secure of the two boxes, not because of distro choice but because I have actively gone to more length to secure the Slack box, which has been up far longer).
It doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated eval tool at any rate - the site / org seem to be relatively credible, but then that may just be appearance.
I'm not saying that it is good or bad for Zinf to be relevant for this reason, only that it is:
In order to use the "Download Full Album" facility of Emusic.com, you need Freeamp or a workalike (Zinf). Emusic used to support (ugh!) RealJukebox, but now that Real has dropped that in the favor of the nastily licensed RealOne, only Freeamp / Zinf is supported.
I have been extremely impressed with the value Emusic provides to subscribers for $10/15 per mo. (depending on the length of contract you commit to) - I have downloaded - legally - literally hundreds of cool albums that I would not have risked as a retail purchase or known to look for / find via p2p services.
It is a real pain in the ass to download a 20 song album track by track. Now, again, it may not be a good claim to relevance that Zinf makes it much easier to use Emusic.com, but that's why I have it. -astro
The 5200 was not at all irrelevant. At the time, it had games that could not be produced on any other console - only on the "personal computers" of that day - Atari 400/800, C64, etc. I was positively blown away when I first played games on the 5200 (at a JC Penny store in Fairbanks, Alaska, maybe 1981 (82?)).
There was a huge downturn in consumer spending in the early 1980s, that anyone in their mid-to-late 30s should remember as a fact of teenage life. This absolutely killed the market for game consoles at that time, given that it drove a huge price war among "personal computers".
This was also when Activision in particular rose to what was a huge business empire for the software world at that time - they produced titles for every console platform as well as every "pc" platform at that time that I am aware of. They later bought many of the rest of the companies that produced the classic PC games at that time (i.e. Infocom!).
So what you had was similar, oddly enough, to what we have today - "personal computers" that had as good or better titles than the most advanced consoles at a slightly higher cost (then - C64 for $299, Atari 5200 for $199; today, a PS2 will cost me $200, whereas I can build a K7 900mhz box with Nvidia GForce 4 for ~$300) but in both cases the PCs can do far more than the console.
I have no idea what my original point was at this point, except that maybe folks should look to Activision for where the really sound business model is - ~24 years of success in a time that saw literally hundreds of other HW *and* SW makers go by the wayside.
--astro
Yes, I have a Gamecube. And yes, my current "high end" PC is a 1ghz Duron. And I am happy as a clam with both.
I understand all of the arguments here that exclaim this to be a good thing, but as a small business owner and as someone who has worked for a number of non-profits, the death of unmetered low-speed (I mean DSL, Cable, etc., as compared to T3, etc.) is a killer.
Many small businesses and community organizations can more than get by with an in-house DSL line to their server, or by hosting with their web developer, who is on a similar small pipe. Many, many websites today, still, I believe serve a very small community of people but serve that community well. Once you bring usage metrics into this, I think you may well end up with an upside down model where the zillion small community websites (for a short time) subsidize the fewer sites that have larger audiences. These larger sites would of course be owned by the very people selling you the bandwidth at an ever increasing cost.
Further, this will punch up the price of commercial hosting by increasing demand - some 15% or so of the folks shut out by increasing metered cost would move to commercial-priced, more expensive hosts. That 15% is a huge immediate boom in demand, which will in turn affect pricing.
Again, as someone who has self-hosted (mail and web in the early days, more now) for years, and counseled other small businesses to do the same, I say that this trend just sucks.
Disagree with me at will...
-astro
I will admit readily that I haven't read many of the comments here, but I have to say this:
/. crowd, this may come down on you a hell of a lot more - do you carry terribly expensive Omissions and Errors insurance? I didn't think so.
Many of you should think twice before hailing Microsoft's downfall should it happen to stem from software fault liability.
Read the article - part of the major point is that a legal precedent could be set that would allow for far greater liability on the part of software developers that deliver flawed code.
Think about that for a second - all of the software that *you* have developed for clients that have pushed the boundaries on budgets and timelines is *totally free of bugs*? Even totally free of bugs that might eat their data one day? Myself, I occasionally lose sleep thinking about a bug that I *know* is in code that I delivered to a client that has no more funding to pay me with to clean up the system.
I personally feel that I have legitimate protection from liability for loss in those situations given that I expose the problem to the client, honestly tell them how much it will cost for me to fix it, and explain that the coverage for corner cases wasn't there given the budget they provided.
Are you ready to stand in court against precedent that you are liable for the business cost of a bug in your code? I'm not.
I am not a MS loyalist in the least (yes, I'm posting this from Win2k, my work platform for clients that I do Win work for) - in fact I wish to see serious stipulations on their bundling and BIOS issues mainly - but I don't think this is the right angle to crucify them on because it will come down and affect me.
From what I understand of the current
-astro
Sorry, your BeOS theory doesn't fly -- the same bug (have to login twice before it sticks) exists under Win2k w/ IE5x as well. Drives me crazy. astro
Not only was th 1st ed outdated, it contained massive amounts of blatant errata, and even worse, abhorrent coding practices that stuck with me for a LONG time (I learned my first Perl wrestling with the 1st ed examples to get them to work).
Again, here here. The Trackman Marble and its recent "+" descendant simply rule. Luckily, I didn't have to pay for my +; I was proposing on a contract w/ the mfg, and let slip that the first trackman I ever purchased - over 5 years ago - had finally worn out. Left the building with my new one.
I use them at home on 3 machines, at work on 2, and hell yeah they work great for Quake, whatever version. I can appear almost totally sedentary - motionless except for my right hand - and rip it up.
Ehhh, this whole thing does not impress me at all. Anyone that even thinks for a moment that this is out of the ordinary (kid uses word taking spelling instructions from dad) isn't a digital worker with a 3 year old.
:)
My kid knows better than to send empty e-mail, at any rate... I've sent more than my share of "I qwerty you too" e-mails in reply.
However, and this is the reason for my reply to this particular message, my son is *almost* as comfortable with our Linux box as the win 98. And that's fairly cool, as my Linux box is old, slow, and configured with a pretty cryptically configured OLD distribution of Afterstep (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).
I tell you, it's every bit as likely for Simon to say "Dad, can I go look at pbs dot org [nick dot com/cartoonnetwork dot com]?" as it is for him to beg to watch Digimon or Dexter AGAIN.
I took my family to San Francisco a little over a week ago, and Simon says to my adult friend who put us up: "Why is your computer so DAMN slow? You should get DSL like my dad." I swear. No fooling. Gotta work on my language around the boy.
astro