You were probably thinking of 'Salmon of Doubt' which Adams did die whilst writing. The book that was released under the title contains what they could reconstruct from the files on his computer, and various essays and interviews with him.
Unfortunately, Salmon stops just as it's getting interesting. Considering how convoluted and tied-in Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was, it's no wonder it took him ages to write books - very difficult and twisty to get everything to tie in to everything else.
I just heard the first episode, and I enjoyed it. Not quite as manic as the original radio series, but it's managed to blend in where the characters were and where they need to be going. I especially enjoyed the mattresses, I'd forgotten about Zem.
It's not being sold as a mini-computer though, is it? I thought they were pitching it as a video-iPod. You never hear about the OS or RAM in an iPod, just how big the disk is / how much music it might hold. They're selling this as a portable video player that might do some other stuff, so the CPU doesn't really come in to it - the thing can play video, therefore it does it's job.
Personally, I don't think there's a large market for these things. However, I have seen people on long train journeys use laptops to watch films / TV shows, and I've done it myself if I happen to have a laptop with me, so there is some sort of market for the right device. I just tend to think the right device is probably a large PDA rather than what the PMC seems to be.
Peter Jones was the voice and unfortunately he died recently. One of his friends will be the new voice of the guide and is a pretty close match. He also voiced the guide in the radio series, which is worth tracking down if you like his voice. As with each version of HHG the radio series is rather different from the books and TV show.
When all of our computers can talk like Peter Jones, the world will be a better place.
I'm not sure this is a 'free' system. Where I live, I pay for the public libraries through my tax. They're talking about putting publically accessible wifi in the libraries, which I support. When that access is set up I expect to be able to use it when I'm inside the library and, if the signal stretches far enough, if I'm just outside the library. I'm paying for that bandwidth through my tax, so I should be able to use it wherever I sit within it's range.
Bit of confusion because of my mistake in the earlier post...
In the UK you can learn on an automatic, but your license only allows you to drive automatics, you have to take an extra test to get a license that allows you to drive manual as well. If you learn to drive on a manual you can then drive an automatic if you want to.
Usually what happens is everyone learns to drive on manual gearboxes, then buys a car with whatever type they prefer. Manual's still by far outnumber automatics in the UK, probably partly because autos are slightly more expensive when new, so people go for the manual as they know how to use it.
Sorry to cause any confusion with my earlier comment - it certainly didn't make sense.
People with various types of disabilities all ready use joysticks to drive their cars, it's just a later adaptation by specialist companies. With the latest generation of cars with drive-by-wire this is a lot easier, but it's been done for years.
I don't think the steering wheel will disappear any time soon. There are huge advantages to having one over-riding standard in vehicles - once you know how to drive a car you can get in any car and drive it. Learning on a joystick car only to then need to drive someone's steering-wheel car would be very awkward and annoying. A smaller version of this is seen in the UK when someone learns to drive with an automatic gearbox then goes to a manual (stick shift.) It's a whole extra thing to learn and, at least when I learnt to drive, if you didn't learn in an automatic you had to take lessons and another test if you wanted to drive a manual in the future.
Steering wheels are just like keyboards - QWERTY is used everywhere, and we're stuck with it unless you have a special adaptation. Steering wheels are everywhere unless you've got a specialist vehicle (e.g. some fork lift trucks) or had it adapted to your special use.
If White Knight viruses become common there will be viruses designed to attack them as well, it's just making an extra battleground. This has happened with anti-adware products - many of the new trojans and viruses try to stop software like Adaware working.
The answer is to have a secure system, as that's not happening in the Windows world at the moment, then frequent patches to plug the holes and a way to encourage everyone who uses Windows on the net to download them is the way to go, as is installing more secure software (e.g. Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.)
As mentioned in the article, they're using a list compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation. If some of those sites are mixed rather than pure child porn it would mean some of those accesses could be after standard adult-fare rather than the stuff they're trying to block.
You've also got stuff like links which don't make it obvious what's on the other end, malware as mentioned in the summary, or potentially legitimate links which were pointed at the sites before they started hosting child porn. The statistics on attempted accesses would be far more useful if we either knew what the person was actually after, or what they were doing just before trying to access it - i.e. where they'd come from.
Still, that's a heck of a lot of accesses and I doubt they're all either automated or accidental, which is very depressing.
I've never had that problem myself, whenever I've posted to newsgroups, with the current version or 2 beta, it's gone to the correct newsgroup and thread. It takes a few hours to turn up, but that's not too unusual with usenet.
I don't know whether people have tripped over some effectively private newsgroups that still get spidered for useful info. For instance, the Macromedia newsgroups (which also mirror the content of their support forums) apparently reject posts from some news services.
You can have a look at what Google are doing with their new version of Groups via the Groups 2 beta
From what I've seen, it's basically putting something like Yahoo groups on top of the existing Usenet-archive system they're running, with some interface changes that are shared with GMail (e.g. putting a star on threads so they can be tracked easily, single sign-in for GMail and Groups.)
I'm not sure this is a great idea unless there it is obvious what is a Usenet newsgroup and what is solely a Google group. I find Usenet very helpful and Google aren't the only people archiving it, so I'd like to be sure that where I'm posting info is getting archived in multiple places rather than going in an internal system, as Yahoo have.
New cut incorporating 55 minutes of footage shot for the 'Enter The Matrix' game"
But is it enough to make it a good film?
I like this product, it shows they really want to suck as much money from the fans as possible while the second and third film still have some residual hype going. Having the mass of extra material will set a level that many other production companies will try to match in the future, just for bulk. It's just a shame it isn't for a better set of films.
Microsoft got in the position to be a monopoly partly by offering what people want. They weren't the top seller of word processing software or spreadsheet software ten years ago. I would say they used their virtual monopoly on the desktop to make Internet Explorer the most used browser in the world, but Word and Excel got to the top mainly through ease of use and integration between them. It's since Office got so popular MS has been able to build up their huge warchest of money and do lots of very dubious stuff.
Windows is indeed very insecure. So why are people still using it? Presumably because of either ignorance or fear of the alternatives, or because they're still willing to get it because it's what they know or like and put up with the problems. Maybe they feel the price of the software is worth paying because they think it does exactly what they want, in a consistent manner.
From what I can tell of watching people use their computers, often what people want is one good app. to do whatever their current task is, not lots of choice.
The only people I know who use more than one web browser are web designers/developers checking pages out.
Multiple editors? I've seen that, but only to handle different languages, and only rarely.
Multiple word processors? Never seen that.
For most people, having one set of programs that cover exactly what they want to do is what they want. That's partly why Microsoft have done so well. Get a PC with Windows and Office and you can browse the web, do your e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet stuff. It even integrates relatively well between the apps. That's covered the vast majority of computer users in offices worldwide.
Going through a Mandrake install you get at least half a dozen options for each application. Really, what I want is one set of applications, each of which are very good at what they do, quality over quantity.
I've seen several people start using OS X over the last year. By choosing the Apple platform, they're generally getting less choice, unless they get down and dirty on the command line. But, I get lots of positive comments from them because they've got a set of good quality programs bundled with the OS, each of which does something specific very well, and although there's a more limited number of programs on offer, they tend to be perceived as being of good quality.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed with the number of open source applications bundled in with distributions, and the huge number of others you can download and add. But really, one smaller set of really good apps is what I'd like, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
You're mixing up software and hardware there, and the two are very different.
Lots and lots of people never open their computers. For them, the iMac / eMac are fine, just like laptops are.
People do buy cars where they can't open the bonnet - Audi's A2 has a hatch where you can put oil and water which is separate from the main bonnet, so people don't have to open it. These days, so many engine parts are linked together via computer and are just unplugged and thrown out when they go wrong, there's not much point opening the bonnet anyway. Do I want a car where I can't open the bonnet? No, but then again, these cars are not aimed at me as a market.
Should someone fix their own computer that has got a virus? Yes. Should someone inside a company who's job is not computer support? Probably not, they might make a mess of something else when they think they're fixing it - I've seen that happen plenty of times. Should a computer be more resistent to viruses so the problem doesn't come up? I think we all know the answer to that one.
Having to teach people how to bring their menu up, or their task bar, or whatever, for the nth time is very annoying. Then again, if you do tech support, it's part of the job. This is partly why I got out of tech support and got in to making websites/software that were more usable - trying to fix the problem at source.
Sadly, in the UK films now do have a message before the film saying you musn't record it and that you might be under surveillance to check that you're not recording it.
Personally, I'm sick of being patronised by messages like this. I've just paid good money to get in, and I don't need to be told not to take a damned video copy of what I'm watching. Plus, by the time films come out over here they're always on the internet all ready, generally high quality copies from preview disks and not from personal filming at all.
To me showing the message is putting the idea in people's minds of taking a copy. Why aren't the copyright notices enough any more?
How many spammer-style SEOs are going to spend their time clicking on the little rainbow 'feedback' links for their sites and choosing "Is exactly what I was looking for"?
Whatever's gathered from that is going to be a nightmare to administrate as it's so open to abuse, even if it's only there during the beta period.
Not really, it's widely known that Google sees the number of links in to a site which are from sites that are highly linked to themselves, and there are lots of other guesses about what Google has as parts of their algorithm. What's secret is exactly what rating is given to each part of the page.
It seems pretty sensible that to beat Google they're first trying to imitate its' current methods as closely as possible, even if it's just to stop people switching away from MSN search when they realise Google can be their home page instead.
Shockwave was created to let people view Director content easily. Flash was for animations, especially vector based stuff.
Flash has got a lot better / quicker over recent years so you can do a lot more in it than you used to, but Shockwave is still used for a lot of heavily graphical games as it suits the content more.
Re:What does Linux give Iraq that other OS's do no
on
Linux in Iraq
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· Score: 1
I've got Mandrake 9 on my K2-400, which is just over four years old, it seems to run fine. Admittedly, it's got more RAM than a lot of PCs of that vintage: 256Mb.
Re:What does Linux give Iraq that other OS's do no
on
Linux in Iraq
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· Score: 1
Well, a lot of Linux runs better on older hardware than current versions of Windows, and I would expect most of the hardware in Iraq at the moment or in the near future is going to be older because it's either cheaper or because it's been donated from the West.
It would be great for an Iraq version of Linux to become popular over there - give the technical people of Iraq something to get behind and feel part of, with no problems with licensing once the country is back together.
Yahoo and AOL don't like receiving e-mail from servers which they can't do reverse DNS on, they either mark the mail as spam or bounce it. Are you sure Hotmail isn't doing the same thing to you?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in just over a month you can just buy the series on CD. Given the amount of time/hassle that'll save you every week, should be a bargin.
You were probably thinking of 'Salmon of Doubt' which Adams did die whilst writing. The book that was released under the title contains what they could reconstruct from the files on his computer, and various essays and interviews with him.
Unfortunately, Salmon stops just as it's getting interesting. Considering how convoluted and tied-in Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was, it's no wonder it took him ages to write books - very difficult and twisty to get everything to tie in to everything else.
I just heard the first episode, and I enjoyed it. Not quite as manic as the original radio series, but it's managed to blend in where the characters were and where they need to be going. I especially enjoyed the mattresses, I'd forgotten about Zem.
Bodes well for the rest of the series!
He's been messing with that too.
Relevant quote: "...but the good news is that these add-ons don't suck."
Personally I'd be happy if he'd concentrate on 'improving' his old films and hire a good script writer to work on his new ones.
It's not being sold as a mini-computer though, is it? I thought they were pitching it as a video-iPod. You never hear about the OS or RAM in an iPod, just how big the disk is / how much music it might hold. They're selling this as a portable video player that might do some other stuff, so the CPU doesn't really come in to it - the thing can play video, therefore it does it's job.
Personally, I don't think there's a large market for these things. However, I have seen people on long train journeys use laptops to watch films / TV shows, and I've done it myself if I happen to have a laptop with me, so there is some sort of market for the right device. I just tend to think the right device is probably a large PDA rather than what the PMC seems to be.
Peter Jones was the voice and unfortunately he died recently. One of his friends will be the new voice of the guide and is a pretty close match. He also voiced the guide in the radio series, which is worth tracking down if you like his voice. As with each version of HHG the radio series is rather different from the books and TV show.
When all of our computers can talk like Peter Jones, the world will be a better place.
I'm not sure this is a 'free' system. Where I live, I pay for the public libraries through my tax. They're talking about putting publically accessible wifi in the libraries, which I support. When that access is set up I expect to be able to use it when I'm inside the library and, if the signal stretches far enough, if I'm just outside the library. I'm paying for that bandwidth through my tax, so I should be able to use it wherever I sit within it's range.
Bit of confusion because of my mistake in the earlier post...
In the UK you can learn on an automatic, but your license only allows you to drive automatics, you have to take an extra test to get a license that allows you to drive manual as well. If you learn to drive on a manual you can then drive an automatic if you want to.
Usually what happens is everyone learns to drive on manual gearboxes, then buys a car with whatever type they prefer. Manual's still by far outnumber automatics in the UK, probably partly because autos are slightly more expensive when new, so people go for the manual as they know how to use it.
Sorry to cause any confusion with my earlier comment - it certainly didn't make sense.
Oops, sorry about that: sentence should either be "if you learnt in an automatic..." or "if you didn't learn in a manual..."
Must learn to read the preview properly!
People with various types of disabilities all ready use joysticks to drive their cars, it's just a later adaptation by specialist companies. With the latest generation of cars with drive-by-wire this is a lot easier, but it's been done for years.
I don't think the steering wheel will disappear any time soon. There are huge advantages to having one over-riding standard in vehicles - once you know how to drive a car you can get in any car and drive it. Learning on a joystick car only to then need to drive someone's steering-wheel car would be very awkward and annoying. A smaller version of this is seen in the UK when someone learns to drive with an automatic gearbox then goes to a manual (stick shift.) It's a whole extra thing to learn and, at least when I learnt to drive, if you didn't learn in an automatic you had to take lessons and another test if you wanted to drive a manual in the future.
Steering wheels are just like keyboards - QWERTY is used everywhere, and we're stuck with it unless you have a special adaptation. Steering wheels are everywhere unless you've got a specialist vehicle (e.g. some fork lift trucks) or had it adapted to your special use.
If White Knight viruses become common there will be viruses designed to attack them as well, it's just making an extra battleground. This has happened with anti-adware products - many of the new trojans and viruses try to stop software like Adaware working.
The answer is to have a secure system, as that's not happening in the Windows world at the moment, then frequent patches to plug the holes and a way to encourage everyone who uses Windows on the net to download them is the way to go, as is installing more secure software (e.g. Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.)
As mentioned in the article, they're using a list compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation. If some of those sites are mixed rather than pure child porn it would mean some of those accesses could be after standard adult-fare rather than the stuff they're trying to block.
You've also got stuff like links which don't make it obvious what's on the other end, malware as mentioned in the summary, or potentially legitimate links which were pointed at the sites before they started hosting child porn. The statistics on attempted accesses would be far more useful if we either knew what the person was actually after, or what they were doing just before trying to access it - i.e. where they'd come from.
Still, that's a heck of a lot of accesses and I doubt they're all either automated or accidental, which is very depressing.
I've never had that problem myself, whenever I've posted to newsgroups, with the current version or 2 beta, it's gone to the correct newsgroup and thread. It takes a few hours to turn up, but that's not too unusual with usenet.
I don't know whether people have tripped over some effectively private newsgroups that still get spidered for useful info. For instance, the Macromedia newsgroups (which also mirror the content of their support forums) apparently reject posts from some news services.
You can have a look at what Google are doing with their new version of Groups via the Groups 2 beta
From what I've seen, it's basically putting something like Yahoo groups on top of the existing Usenet-archive system they're running, with some interface changes that are shared with GMail (e.g. putting a star on threads so they can be tracked easily, single sign-in for GMail and Groups.)
I'm not sure this is a great idea unless there it is obvious what is a Usenet newsgroup and what is solely a Google group. I find Usenet very helpful and Google aren't the only people archiving it, so I'd like to be sure that where I'm posting info is getting archived in multiple places rather than going in an internal system, as Yahoo have.
"Matrix Reloaded Extended Version (190 minutes)
New cut incorporating 55 minutes of footage shot for the 'Enter The Matrix' game"
But is it enough to make it a good film?
I like this product, it shows they really want to suck as much money from the fans as possible while the second and third film still have some residual hype going. Having the mass of extra material will set a level that many other production companies will try to match in the future, just for bulk. It's just a shame it isn't for a better set of films.
Microsoft got in the position to be a monopoly partly by offering what people want. They weren't the top seller of word processing software or spreadsheet software ten years ago. I would say they used their virtual monopoly on the desktop to make Internet Explorer the most used browser in the world, but Word and Excel got to the top mainly through ease of use and integration between them. It's since Office got so popular MS has been able to build up their huge warchest of money and do lots of very dubious stuff.
Windows is indeed very insecure. So why are people still using it? Presumably because of either ignorance or fear of the alternatives, or because they're still willing to get it because it's what they know or like and put up with the problems. Maybe they feel the price of the software is worth paying because they think it does exactly what they want, in a consistent manner.
From what I can tell of watching people use their computers, often what people want is one good app. to do whatever their current task is, not lots of choice.
The only people I know who use more than one web browser are web designers/developers checking pages out.
Multiple editors? I've seen that, but only to handle different languages, and only rarely.
Multiple word processors? Never seen that.
For most people, having one set of programs that cover exactly what they want to do is what they want. That's partly why Microsoft have done so well. Get a PC with Windows and Office and you can browse the web, do your e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet stuff. It even integrates relatively well between the apps. That's covered the vast majority of computer users in offices worldwide.
Going through a Mandrake install you get at least half a dozen options for each application. Really, what I want is one set of applications, each of which are very good at what they do, quality over quantity.
I've seen several people start using OS X over the last year. By choosing the Apple platform, they're generally getting less choice, unless they get down and dirty on the command line. But, I get lots of positive comments from them because they've got a set of good quality programs bundled with the OS, each of which does something specific very well, and although there's a more limited number of programs on offer, they tend to be perceived as being of good quality.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed with the number of open source applications bundled in with distributions, and the huge number of others you can download and add. But really, one smaller set of really good apps is what I'd like, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
You're mixing up software and hardware there, and the two are very different.
Lots and lots of people never open their computers. For them, the iMac / eMac are fine, just like laptops are.
People do buy cars where they can't open the bonnet - Audi's A2 has a hatch where you can put oil and water which is separate from the main bonnet, so people don't have to open it. These days, so many engine parts are linked together via computer and are just unplugged and thrown out when they go wrong, there's not much point opening the bonnet anyway. Do I want a car where I can't open the bonnet? No, but then again, these cars are not aimed at me as a market.
Should someone fix their own computer that has got a virus? Yes. Should someone inside a company who's job is not computer support? Probably not, they might make a mess of something else when they think they're fixing it - I've seen that happen plenty of times. Should a computer be more resistent to viruses so the problem doesn't come up? I think we all know the answer to that one.
Having to teach people how to bring their menu up, or their task bar, or whatever, for the nth time is very annoying. Then again, if you do tech support, it's part of the job. This is partly why I got out of tech support and got in to making websites/software that were more usable - trying to fix the problem at source.
Sadly, in the UK films now do have a message before the film saying you musn't record it and that you might be under surveillance to check that you're not recording it.
Personally, I'm sick of being patronised by messages like this. I've just paid good money to get in, and I don't need to be told not to take a damned video copy of what I'm watching. Plus, by the time films come out over here they're always on the internet all ready, generally high quality copies from preview disks and not from personal filming at all.
To me showing the message is putting the idea in people's minds of taking a copy. Why aren't the copyright notices enough any more?
How many spammer-style SEOs are going to spend their time clicking on the little rainbow 'feedback' links for their sites and choosing "Is exactly what I was looking for"?
Whatever's gathered from that is going to be a nightmare to administrate as it's so open to abuse, even if it's only there during the beta period.
Not really, it's widely known that Google sees the number of links in to a site which are from sites that are highly linked to themselves, and there are lots of other guesses about what Google has as parts of their algorithm. What's secret is exactly what rating is given to each part of the page.
It seems pretty sensible that to beat Google they're first trying to imitate its' current methods as closely as possible, even if it's just to stop people switching away from MSN search when they realise Google can be their home page instead.
Shockwave was created to let people view Director content easily. Flash was for animations, especially vector based stuff.
Flash has got a lot better / quicker over recent years so you can do a lot more in it than you used to, but Shockwave is still used for a lot of heavily graphical games as it suits the content more.
I've got Mandrake 9 on my K2-400, which is just over four years old, it seems to run fine. Admittedly, it's got more RAM than a lot of PCs of that vintage: 256Mb.
Well, a lot of Linux runs better on older hardware than current versions of Windows, and I would expect most of the hardware in Iraq at the moment or in the near future is going to be older because it's either cheaper or because it's been donated from the West.
It would be great for an Iraq version of Linux to become popular over there - give the technical people of Iraq something to get behind and feel part of, with no problems with licensing once the country is back together.
Yahoo and AOL don't like receiving e-mail from servers which they can't do reverse DNS on, they either mark the mail as spam or bounce it. Are you sure Hotmail isn't doing the same thing to you?