>I'm using Slackware 9.0Beta and KDE3.1 is
>horribly slow on my baseline testing computer.
>A 256 Meg P-II350. yes that is a lower machine
>but if linux cant run decent on it then what's
>the point...Because Windows 2000 does.
There's a very simple solution to this problem. Don't install the entire Window Manager. If you want apps that normally only work under a particular window manager, simply get the necessary libs.
I haven't used Linux for a while now, but back when I was I ran the Gnome dock as a single application on top of FWVM I think it was. I had GTK+ installed, and some of the rest of the Gnome and KDE libs. I was using gentoo as my file manager, and if I wanted any KDE, GTK, or Gnome apps, ebcause I had the underlying libs I downloaded them. Simple.
In answer to my second point, I've never been able to understand why the Linux community insists on trying to gain universal acceptance for the operating system. UNIX, Linux's parent system, was built around the assumption that the person using it was intelligent. The entire reason why only a tiny minority of the population used it is because only a tiny minority of the population actually are intelligent.
By contrast, Windows was built around the assumption that the person using it was a technophobic idiot who barely knew what s/he was doing.
Ergo, the bottom line is that trying to make Linux universal is only going to result in one thing:- dumbing it down.
Leave Windows for the noobs, technophobes, and mentally lazy. (like me, admittedly. *sheepish grin*) That's what it's there for. UNIX/Linux was meant for a far more intelligent and computer literate audience.
I always thought having only what you did want and none of what you didn't was the whole point of modular programming, and Linux in general.
My first birthday party. I kid you not. I can't remember much from it though...The only real memory was that my parents had bought me a large, metal spinning top for it, and I can remember sitting on the floor with it, trying to get my hands around it, and (presumably in baby talk, since I can't remember the exact thought) basically wondering what the hell it was.
My other memories from childhood mostly consist of images from different events...there are also things which have become stereotypes, in the sense that I can't remember whether they happened several times or only once. I've smoked cannabis several times over the last two years, and I've noticed that my very long term memory has genuinely deteriorated since then, so I can't remember my childhood as well as a could prior to having done that.
Trying to undermine society's *faith* in science? This is interesting. I always thought science didn't require faith...I also thought that was the whole point. You get a result that is quantifiable/observable via the five senses, is also consistently repeatable, and/or holds up mathematically...and being able to do that is it's own proof, (at least according to the theory) right?
I'm always suspicious of people who talk about how we need to have *faith* in the scientific method or reductionist thinking...to me it sounds like these people at least have simply exchanged God's name for Darwin's or Einstein's, instead.
From memory, the Master System wasn't a bad machine. I finished Sonic the Hedgehog on it, and can also remember having a blast with Alex Kidd in Miracle World a few times.
For my money, the greatest console in existence is still the SNES. That console's Super Mario incarnation (Super Mario World) is still the most enjoyable I've played, and it had a number of other awesome games which I still play today...Super Double Dragon, Turtles in Time, Super Castlevania 4, and the Street Fighter 2 series.
A re-release of the Master System could only be a good thing to my mind...I find that as graphical quality improves, gameplay declines at roughly the same level.
>A computer won't selectively enforce the law, >unless told to, but then it becomes its own >proof of corruption. A computer will not lie in >court, unless its records are modified, but the >maliable nature of digital files ensures >greater standards for repudiation.
Haven't you heard of the concept of justice without mercy? There is such a thing...and a simple binary decision on whether a law has been violated or not would in most cases constitute such. Watch an episode of Law and Order sometime if you want to know just how convoluted the law can be, and how necessary it often is to have dynamic interpretations of it. Every case is different, and open and shut cases virtually don't exist.
>It is amazing how far from the constitution >America has wandered.
Not particularly. You may notice that governments in other countries the world over seek to reduce their own constituents' freedoms on a daily basis.
Also, I have a theory about America in particular...namely that the reason why its political system is under such threat these days is precisely because it was so radically libertarian to begin with. In my own country of residence, Australia (as an example of what I mean) the constitution and the political atmosphere at the time of the country's founding was actually (comparitively, anyway) rather conservative...and has remained so ever since.
Facism is very often reactionary, and motivated by fear...it is also very often true that facists like to appear to be appealing to peoples' common sense. If the scales don't start out being tipped quite so radically in the direction of libertarianism, (while still having a fully functional democracy)
there isn't anywhere near as much room for a violent or extreme conservative backlash. Things that start off at one extreme end of the political spectrum have a tendency to be dragged to the extreme of the other end. It is much easier to begin on an even keel and remain so the rest of the way through.
The government doesn't act based on the beliefs of "the citizens." The government acts based on the beliefs of whoever can throw the most money at it...Ergo, the good old white military industrial crew.;-)
Also, there are those of us who don't necessarily think secularisation of education is such a bad thing. In my own ideal society, you'd have private schools of various religious orientations, with the state's offering being secular. The references by ageing Pentecostal fundamentalists to America as "God's country," and insisting that the country have Christianity as the state religion are emotive, irrational, and not based on anything logically sound, be it theological or otherwise.
>The version of Quake 3 that runs under Linux
>actually has a higher frame rate than the
>Windows version.
This actually makes a lot of sense, because with Windows the operating system incurs a fixed amount of overhead on the system, before the game runs. I'm assuming that with Linux the amount of overhead is variable, depending on what you've got installed...another of the benefits of the system, I guess.:)
>The question here is, "Why pay to support a
>company that punishes developers of open source
>software that compliments the commercial
>product?"
The only question I'd have here is whether or not code has actually been stolen from Battle.net in order to make BNetd. If it has, then Blizzard are completely within their rights to sue, IMHO.
I don't have a problem with modifications for games at all, and I also applaud the decision of id software in particular to open the source of their games after they'd made their money. Something I think a lot of people need to realise though, is that developers work extremely hard to produce these games...you only need to read about the development process for Black and White if you want to find that out. The commitment to the game's development in that case destroyed the social lives and relationships of a number of people who were involved with it...they literally did nothing else for something close to two years.
The bottom line is, these people both need and deserve to get paid for their work. This is a different scenario to the one with the RIAA, IMHO where that group are simply tyrants who've demonstrated a willingness to use *any* means, legal or otherwise, to control the consumer.
I honestly don't believe Blizzard are like that, personally. They're simply a creative group of people who while being creative also need to eat and pay the bills, just like the rest of us.
I'm all for open source and GPL software, as much as anyone else, but before slamming game companies if they don't want to open their source, please try and remember that it is their choice, and also that in this day and age, living is an expensive proposition...they do actually need to earn a living.
About five desert spoons of green thai curry paste (measure it to taste, but DON'T overdo it)
250 ml coconut milk
500g of either skinless chicken or lamb, cut into strips
Four *large* mushrooms, well chopped
500g (total) of the following vegetables:- Broccoli, fairly well chopped Miniature sweetcorn Cabbage Carrots Snow peas Bean sprouts (optional)
Vary the amounts of the different vegetables there as you like, so long as it == 500g.
Method:
Pour enough olive oil into a frypan or wok (a wok is definitely better if you've got one) for shallow frying. Mix green curry paste and coconut milk in a bowl, making sure they're well mixed together. Ideally you'd probably want to blend it. Put coconut milk and lamb or chicken into frypan, and cook on medium heat until the lamb/chicken is around half cooked. Add vegetables to lamb/chicken, and continue cooking until meat is firm/cooked through. You really don't want to overcook chicken, as it goes like cotton wool if you do. Serve either on it's own or on a bed of jasmine rice. This will probably make enough for about five people, but if you want enough for one, just use 100g of meat and vegetables, and quarter the amount of curry paste and coconut milk.
I read the example of the UNIX Users' Group installing Linux/BSD on uni students' machines earlier in this thread, and it really gave me the warm fuzzies, because they're doing it the right way and for the right reasons. They're identifying a need in people, they're showing them how Linux can be better than Windows at satisfying that need, they're following through with tech support, and they're doing it all in a spirit of altruism.
If you want to spread the operating system and gain mainstream acceptance for it, that is how you have to do it. One machine at a time. It's how Bill did it, in all seriousness.
I want to see Linux become a mainstream operating system as much as the next person. But it isn't going to become a reality unless we're willing to fundamentally change some attitudes. We need to get rid of the elitism, and also to be able to see that not everyone is left-brain code oriented. Some people think in pictures...some people might be very good at other things, but their area just doesn't happen to be computers, and that doesn't make them stupid.
It's how people get successfully converted to religions, it's how Bill sold Windows, and it's the only way in the end that you'll have any hope mainstream selling people on Linux. Gnome, KDE, and all the other graphical interfaces have come a long way, and the system *has* matured tremendously...OpenOffice and Mozilla are both outstanding applications, and cases in point...but there's still a huge amount of work to be done. We need better font support, and better game support via WINE. We need to continue to refine the system installation procedures, and clean up the less functional areas of X Windows. We also need to tackle issues like the file system one mentioned here.
I have full confidence that all of these problems *can* be overcome. I've installed Linux a number of times myself, and have been blown away by it's potential. All this defeatist talk about Windows XP aside, you all know that Linux is a vastly superior system to anything Microsoft could ever and will ever conceive, so you don't have any excuse. Bill Gates is also not invincible. I think a lot of people also know that.
I know it sounds cliched, but it is so true that the longest journey begins with a single step.
One machine at a time...one bug, at a time...one feature, at a time...one component, at a time...one challenge, at a time...one person, at a time...one mind, at a time...one heart at a time. Before any of you know it, if you take this approach, you will look back and as I read it put once years ago, you will find that you have all woven a collaborative Finnish tapestry that has covered the world.
>masses could actually start using Linux is >troubling to this group, as it would dilute the >cachet of the club. This is bizarre to say the >least, as mainstream adoption of Linux would >only serve to achieve the first point, respect, >and of course the other obsession, deflation of >microsoft.
Won't happen, precisely because of the aforementioned group. The Linux community itself and their attitude are probably the main reason why I myself no longer use the operating system.
I could say I told you so, but that'd just be obnoxious, so I won't.;-)
A story that has always formed the basis of my philosophy on the virus issue...
Back when I was a nipper I read a story about a farmer in England who had a problem with moles digging up his front lawn once. He called in the mole catcher to deal with the problem, but afterwards a servant came and told him that calling in a professional mole catcher was a bad idea, because they would only catch the adult moles. The baby moles would be left where they were in order to grow up, so that the farmer would need to call the mole catcher again to get rid of them. The servant's advice was to either try and relocate the moles to an area where they wouldn't cause so much damage, or for the farmer to poison them himself.
In nearly 8 years online, with normal usage including IRC, I've only had two viruses. Thr virus problem truly isn't as bad as most people believe...and by downloading virus software, with the lack of regard that companies seem to have for people's privacy these days, I wouldn't be surprised if you were actually getting spyware inside programs that were supposedly meant to be getting rid of such things...it's worth thinking about.
And now for an enlightening and liberating revelation to be given to the UNIX using community in general...or those of you who read this...
"Contrary to popular belief, the sun does not shine out of your collective backside."
I realise that due to the incomprehensible and alien nature of this idea, it may need to be repeated regularly until it is understood and absorbed. As the Jews were commanded to do with Mosaic Law in the Bible, repeat it to yourself when you wake, and when you go to bed...write it on the walls wherever you go...it will serve you well.
Seriously...something the Linux/UNIX community really needs to wake up to in my view is the realisation that you are NOT the last hold-out of human intelligence, as this article suggests. Other people might not be more intelligent than you...but they really don't have to be...because your own arrogance defeats you in what you try to do.
Microsoft's rise to prominence is a case in point. Ok, so Red Hat and other groups have come up with decent user interfaces now...but it's been slow going...primarily because of a group of CLI die-hards who consider a coherent interface to be an insult to human intelligence.
Gates is scum...and worse than scum...I will agree with anyone here who says that...but the Gates' and the lawyers of this world will win for as long as the people holding the alternatives are too tripped up by their own arrogance, and have attitudes like,
"If you can't figure out what all of our cryptic commands mean, you don't deserve to use a computer."
Think about it, guys...after a certain amount of exposure to the Internet (5+ years) a particular stereotype has developed in my head...one which I've unfortunately found to have no small number of adherents...what I refer to as,
"The elitist UNIX-using asshole." Someone who uses text only UNIX and who looks down their nose at anyone who uses any other operating system under the sun...with the possible slight exception of the AmigaOS. Sound familiar, anyone?
Discussing whether or not the X Files ought to get the chop in general is something I can get somewhat sociological about.
Way back in the early 90s, (prolly between 91 or so at the very earliest, and 94) society at large began discovering Usenet, and in particular groups like alt.paranormal, alt.alien.visitors, and alt.conspiracy. Although demented, the conspiracy theories and alien visitation stuff showing up in these groups provided some fairly fertile inspiration for good science fiction. It's my guess that either Carter himself, or whoever told him about it, downloaded fairly substantial wads of this stuff and began spinning it into the episode storylines of what we came to know as the X Files. The Lone Gunmen in particular are a net stereotype...three reclusive, highly intelligent geeks who spend most of their time in dark bedrooms in front of screens, away from civilised humanity. *grin* Sound familiar?
Anywayz, back then all of this stuff was new and different. The whole nerd lifestyle thing hadn't seeped into the public awareness as something special, and for a while there was a kind of deliciously grim fascination in the idea that a coalition of the Greys and the UN were trying to take over the world. The MJ-12 documents and Milton William Cooper's diseased ramblings in particular would have provided Carter with some great inspiration on the UFO side.
These days however, we're seven years into the X Files. The above mentioned conspiracy theory has been done on the show, not only once, but over and over and over again. Not only that, but I get the feeling that Usenet has once more sunk into it's deserved place in universal awareness...basically that of an online asylum for the mentally ill, for the most part. For most of us, the X Files is no longer relevant...back when we were new to the net, taking our first tentative steps out into the online world, Carter was able to cash in on the momentary novelty of a somewhat deranged (but highly entertaining) element of it. But we've seen the novelty, IT has come up out of the sewers for several encore performances, and the Greys would have abducted enough people by now to depopulate the planet. As an earlier poster in this thread said, it's grown old.
Slashdot Mirror
>horribly slow on my baseline testing computer.
>A 256 Meg P-II350. yes that is a lower machine
>but if linux cant run decent on it then what's
>the point...Because Windows 2000 does.
There's a very simple solution to this problem. Don't install the entire Window Manager. If you want apps that normally only work under a particular window manager, simply get the necessary libs.
I haven't used Linux for a while now, but back when I was I ran the Gnome dock as a single application on top of FWVM I think it was. I had GTK+ installed, and some of the rest of the Gnome and KDE libs. I was using gentoo as my file manager, and if I wanted any KDE, GTK, or Gnome apps, ebcause I had the underlying libs I downloaded them. Simple.
In answer to my second point, I've never been able to understand why the Linux community insists on trying to gain universal acceptance for the operating system. UNIX, Linux's parent system, was built around the assumption that the person using it was intelligent. The entire reason why only a tiny minority of the population used it is because only a tiny minority of the population actually are intelligent.
By contrast, Windows was built around the assumption that the person using it was a technophobic idiot who barely knew what s/he was doing.
Ergo, the bottom line is that trying to make Linux universal is only going to result in one thing:- dumbing it down.
Leave Windows for the noobs, technophobes, and mentally lazy. (like me, admittedly. *sheepish grin*) That's what it's there for. UNIX/Linux was meant for a far more intelligent and computer literate audience.
I always thought having only what you did want and none of what you didn't was the whole point of modular programming, and Linux in general.
My first birthday party. I kid you not. I can't remember much from it though...The only real memory was that my parents had bought me a large, metal spinning top for it, and I can remember sitting on the floor with it, trying to get my hands around it, and (presumably in baby talk, since I can't remember the exact thought) basically wondering what the hell it was.
My other memories from childhood mostly consist of images from different events...there are also things which have become stereotypes, in the sense that I can't remember whether they happened several times or only once.
I've smoked cannabis several times over the last two years, and I've noticed that my very long term memory has genuinely deteriorated since then, so I can't remember my childhood as well as a could prior to having done that.
I'm always suspicious of people who talk about how we need to have *faith* in the scientific method or reductionist thinking...to me it sounds like these people at least have simply exchanged God's name for Darwin's or Einstein's, instead.
Faith is something for religion.
From memory, the Master System wasn't a bad machine. I finished Sonic the Hedgehog on it, and can also remember having a blast with Alex Kidd in Miracle World a few times.
For my money, the greatest console in existence is still the SNES. That console's Super Mario incarnation (Super Mario World) is still the most enjoyable I've played, and it had a number of other awesome games which I still play today...Super Double Dragon, Turtles in Time, Super Castlevania 4, and the Street Fighter 2 series.
A re-release of the Master System could only be a good thing to my mind...I find that as graphical quality improves, gameplay declines at roughly the same level.
Haven't you heard of the concept of justice without mercy? There is such a thing...and a simple binary decision on whether a law has been violated or not would in most cases constitute such. Watch an episode of Law and Order sometime if you want to know just how convoluted the law can be, and how necessary it often is to have dynamic interpretations of it. Every case is different, and open and shut cases virtually don't exist.
Not particularly. You may notice that governments in other countries the world over seek to reduce their own constituents' freedoms on a daily basis.
Also, I have a theory about America in particular...namely that the reason why its political system is under such threat these days is precisely because it was so radically libertarian to begin with. In my own country of residence, Australia (as an example of what I mean) the constitution and the political atmosphere at the time of the country's founding was actually (comparitively, anyway) rather conservative...and has remained so ever since.
Facism is very often reactionary, and motivated by fear...it is also very often true that facists like to appear to be appealing to peoples' common sense. If the scales don't start out being tipped quite so radically in the direction of libertarianism, (while still having a fully functional democracy) there isn't anywhere near as much room for a violent or extreme conservative backlash. Things that start off at one extreme end of the political spectrum have a tendency to be dragged to the extreme of the other end. It is much easier to begin on an even keel and remain so the rest of the way through.
The government doesn't act based on the beliefs of "the citizens." The government acts based on the beliefs of whoever can throw the most money at it...Ergo, the good old white military industrial crew. ;-)
Also, there are those of us who don't necessarily think secularisation of education is such a bad thing. In my own ideal society, you'd have private schools of various religious orientations, with the state's offering being secular. The references by ageing Pentecostal fundamentalists to America as "God's country," and insisting that the country have Christianity as the state religion are emotive, irrational, and not based on anything logically sound, be it theological or otherwise.
>actually has a higher frame rate than the
>Windows version.
This actually makes a lot of sense, because with Windows the operating system incurs a fixed amount of overhead on the system, before the game runs. I'm assuming that with Linux the amount of overhead is variable, depending on what you've got installed...another of the benefits of the system, I guess. :)
>company that punishes developers of open source
>software that compliments the commercial
>product?"
The only question I'd have here is whether or not code has actually been stolen from Battle.net in order to make BNetd. If it has, then Blizzard are completely within their rights to sue, IMHO.
I don't have a problem with modifications for games at all, and I also applaud the decision of id software in particular to open the source of their games after they'd made their money. Something I think a lot of people need to realise though, is that developers work extremely hard to produce these games...you only need to read about the development process for Black and White if you want to find that out. The commitment to the game's development in that case destroyed the social lives and relationships of a number of people who were involved with it...they literally did nothing else for something close to two years.
The bottom line is, these people both need and deserve to get paid for their work. This is a different scenario to the one with the RIAA, IMHO where that group are simply tyrants who've demonstrated a willingness to use *any* means, legal or otherwise, to control the consumer.
I honestly don't believe Blizzard are like that, personally. They're simply a creative group of people who while being creative also need to eat and pay the bills, just like the rest of us.
I'm all for open source and GPL software, as much as anyone else, but before slamming game companies if they don't want to open their source, please try and remember that it is their choice, and also that in this day and age, living is an expensive proposition...they do actually need to earn a living.
About five desert spoons of green thai curry paste (measure it to taste, but DON'T overdo it)
250 ml coconut milk
500g of either skinless chicken or lamb, cut into strips
Four *large* mushrooms, well chopped
500g (total) of the following vegetables:-
Broccoli, fairly well chopped
Miniature sweetcorn
Cabbage
Carrots
Snow peas
Bean sprouts (optional)
Vary the amounts of the different vegetables there as you like, so long as it == 500g.
Method:
Pour enough olive oil into a frypan or wok (a wok is definitely better if you've got one) for shallow frying.
Mix green curry paste and coconut milk in a bowl, making sure they're well mixed together. Ideally you'd probably want to blend it.
Put coconut milk and lamb or chicken into frypan, and cook on medium heat until the lamb/chicken is around half cooked.
Add vegetables to lamb/chicken, and continue cooking until meat is firm/cooked through. You really don't want to overcook chicken, as it goes like cotton wool if you do.
Serve either on it's own or on a bed of jasmine rice. This will probably make enough for about five people, but if you want enough for one, just use 100g of meat and vegetables, and quarter the amount of curry paste and coconut milk.
If you want to spread the operating system and gain mainstream acceptance for it, that is how you have to do it. One machine at a time. It's how Bill did it, in all seriousness.
I want to see Linux become a mainstream operating system as much as the next person. But it isn't going to become a reality unless we're willing to fundamentally change some attitudes. We need to get rid of the elitism, and also to be able to see that not everyone is left-brain code oriented. Some people think in pictures...some people might be very good at other things, but their area just doesn't happen to be computers, and that doesn't make them stupid. It's how people get successfully converted to religions, it's how Bill sold Windows, and it's the only way in the end that you'll have any hope mainstream selling people on Linux.
Gnome, KDE, and all the other graphical interfaces have come a long way, and the system *has* matured tremendously...OpenOffice and Mozilla are both outstanding applications, and cases in point...but there's still a huge amount of work to be done. We need better font support, and better game support via WINE. We need to continue to refine the system installation procedures, and clean up the less functional areas of X Windows. We also need to tackle issues like the file system one mentioned here.
I have full confidence that all of these problems *can* be overcome. I've installed Linux a number of times myself, and have been blown away by it's potential. All this defeatist talk about Windows XP aside, you all know that Linux is a vastly superior system to anything Microsoft could ever and will ever conceive, so you don't have any excuse. Bill Gates is also not invincible. I think a lot of people also know that.
I know it sounds cliched, but it is so true that the longest journey begins with a single step.
One machine at a time...one bug, at a time...one feature, at a time...one component, at a time...one challenge, at a time...one person, at a time...one mind, at a time...one heart at a time. Before any of you know it, if you take this approach, you will look back and as I read it put once years ago, you will find that you have all woven a collaborative Finnish tapestry that has covered the world.
Won't happen, precisely because of the aforementioned group. The Linux community itself and their attitude are probably the main reason why I myself no longer use the operating system.
A story that has always formed the basis of my philosophy on the virus issue...
Back when I was a nipper I read a story about a farmer in England who had a problem with moles digging up his front lawn once. He called in the mole catcher to deal with the problem, but afterwards a servant came and told him that calling in a professional mole catcher was a bad idea, because they would only catch the adult moles. The baby moles would be left where they were in order to grow up, so that the farmer would need to call the mole catcher again to get rid of them. The servant's advice was to either try and relocate the moles to an area where they wouldn't cause so much damage, or for the farmer to poison them himself.
In nearly 8 years online, with normal usage including IRC, I've only had two viruses. Thr virus problem truly isn't as bad as most people believe...and by downloading virus software, with the lack of regard that companies seem to have for people's privacy these days, I wouldn't be surprised if you were actually getting spyware inside programs that were supposedly meant to be getting rid of such things...it's worth thinking about.
"Contrary to popular belief, the sun does not shine out of your collective backside."
I realise that due to the incomprehensible and alien nature of this idea, it may need to be repeated regularly until it is understood and absorbed. As the Jews were commanded to do with Mosaic Law in the Bible, repeat it to yourself when you wake, and when you go to bed...write it on the walls wherever you go...it will serve you well.
Seriously...something the Linux/UNIX community really needs to wake up to in my view is the realisation that you are NOT the last hold-out of human intelligence, as this article suggests. Other people might not be more intelligent than you...but they really don't have to be...because your own arrogance defeats you in what you try to do.
Microsoft's rise to prominence is a case in point. Ok, so Red Hat and other groups have come up with decent user interfaces now...but it's been slow going...primarily because of a group of CLI die-hards who consider a coherent interface to be an insult to human intelligence.
Gates is scum...and worse than scum...I will agree with anyone here who says that...but the Gates' and the lawyers of this world will win for as long as the people holding the alternatives are too tripped up by their own arrogance, and have attitudes like,
"If you can't figure out what all of our cryptic commands mean, you don't deserve to use a computer."
Think about it, guys...after a certain amount of exposure to the Internet (5+ years) a particular stereotype has developed in my head...one which I've unfortunately found to have no small number of adherents...what I refer to as,
"The elitist UNIX-using asshole." Someone who uses text only UNIX and who looks down their nose at anyone who uses any other operating system under the sun...with the possible slight exception of the AmigaOS. Sound familiar, anyone?
Way back in the early 90s, (prolly between 91 or so at the very earliest, and 94) society at large began discovering Usenet, and in particular groups like alt.paranormal, alt.alien.visitors, and alt.conspiracy.
Although demented, the conspiracy theories and alien visitation stuff showing up in these groups provided some fairly fertile inspiration for good science fiction.
It's my guess that either Carter himself, or whoever told him about it, downloaded fairly substantial wads of this stuff and began spinning it into the episode storylines of what we came to know as the X Files. The Lone Gunmen in particular are a net stereotype...three reclusive, highly intelligent geeks who spend most of their time in dark bedrooms in front of screens, away from civilised humanity. *grin*
Sound familiar?
Anywayz, back then all of this stuff was new and different. The whole nerd lifestyle thing hadn't seeped into the public awareness as something special, and for a while there was a kind of deliciously grim fascination in the idea that a coalition of the Greys and the UN were trying to take over the world. The MJ-12 documents and Milton William Cooper's diseased ramblings in particular would have provided Carter with some great inspiration on the UFO side.
These days however, we're seven years into the X Files. The above mentioned conspiracy theory has been done on the show, not only once, but over and over and over again. Not only that, but I get the feeling that Usenet has once more sunk into it's deserved place in universal awareness...basically that of an online asylum for the mentally ill, for the most part.
For most of us, the X Files is no longer relevant...back when we were new to the net, taking our first tentative steps out into the online world, Carter was able to cash in on the momentary novelty of a somewhat deranged (but highly entertaining) element of it. But we've seen the novelty, IT has come up out of the sewers for several encore performances, and the Greys would have abducted enough people by now to depopulate the planet. As an earlier poster in this thread said, it's grown old.