Most ISPs in that period provided software... I know that when I signed up for my first Internet connection in 1994, they sent me a CD with Trumpet Winsock on it.
right... the VxD and virtual driver model that 95/98/ME used was a steaming pile of donkey turd. In the grand comparison of things, it was a security nightmare.
But consider that it was the first MS OS (for consumer!) that was 100% GUI. Yes, it was really running on top of DOS 7.0. But it also installed and booted up to a GUI, and all of the configuration/tweaking/etc. was a major step forward.
You need to compare it against the alternatives in 1995, not the alternatives in 2008. Yes, NT 4.0 came out in 1994 and had basically the same user interface, but NT was intended for an enterprise and server environment, and was never marketed towards consumers until Windows XP came out.
So.... yes. Windows 95 *was* a high point for MS. It was an enormous step forward for the company.
Anyway. There's already a snowboarding slalom minigame in Wii Fit. It's in the "Balance Games". There's also a ski slalom minigame, and a ski jump minigame.
I work up a sweat when doing the advanced step aerobics or advanced hula hoop games... even some of the yoga exercises, when I do enough of them in succession. I haven't touched the strength exercises, and have no intention of touching them. It's a good addition, but no amount of play on Wii Fit will substitute the level of exercise I get elsewhere. I don't think my heart rate has gotten over 110 when working out on it, but I'm an anomaly in that respect: my resting heart rate is 56-62bpm and my BP is usually around 120/70... highest it's ever been measured was during a military fitness test, at 160/90 (I got out of the army on a medical... knee injury). That said, it's naive to expect that the average Wii owner will have the same level of physical health/strength, and when compared against a generally sedentary lifestyle I think it's very good. It does a good job of getting you active, and breaking that activity up into chunks that are easy for the average person to do, which is where going to the gym generally loses out.
Generally speaking, it's mid-light exercise... but it also adjusts the amount of "fit credits" it gives you.... you get minutes in the bank for every exercise you do, and some of the lighter games will give you 2 minutes in the bank for 5 minutes of play... on average, it takes about 45 minutes of activity to rack up 30 minutes worth of fit credits. Also, it gives a little light show when you hit 30 minutes of fit credits per day, encouraging you to be active at least half an hour a day. And new exercises are unlocked on basis of how many total fit credits you've accumulated since you started. I still haven't unlocked everything, and I've been doing about 35-40 per day, not counting my other exercise.
Honestly... I'd say it's better value than a gym membership. If for no other reason, then because it's the kind of activity that you can squeeze into your day quite easily. Break it up into 5-10 minute blocks, which you really can't do with a gym.
Most of the people posting on this thread don't seem to have actually played the game.... I actually have it. Bought it on Wednesday of last week, and I've been playing it between 30-45 minutes a day. In the last week, I've also attended 10 hours of classes at Jiu Jitsu, and I biked to work on Friday, at 1h15 each way (about 27km each way). I also went swimming on Saturday, about 2km in lengths.
Not everybody who's buying this game is somebody who's overweight and never gets any exercise. Even those who *are* overweight and never get any exercise... I'd rather they play the games that come with Wii Fit than sitting on their ass playing Halo... the games that come with Wii Fit will actually have them getting up and possibly even working up a sweat. I know that I usually work up a sweat by the time I get to the step aerobics in my routine the sweat's usually streaming off (that's about 25 minutes in).
It's better than nothing. But as with any exercise routine, you'll get out of it what you put into it. If you're serious about losing weight then you'll need more than a video game. It's a good start, but it'll require some serious lifestyle changes for any weight loss to take.
There's a couple of major advantages to Wii Fit over going to the gym. You've touched on them yourself... you don't have to deal with asses at the gym, you don't have to deal with grimy sweaty equipment, you can do it in the privacy of your own home... and the personal trainer is actually pretty good. Well voiced, gives realtime encouragement based on your current position, which is limited by the fact that it can only detect your center of balance and not your actual position, but it is still fairly accurate for most situations.
Finally, I'd like to second the comment that using BMI as a measure of anything is approaching idiotic... It's good to keep track of your weight, and how it changes... and that's actually the idea behind Wii Fit: track your weight on a day to day basis so that you're more conscious of what you put into your mouth. There was an interview available on the Nintendo channel that explained this..... Anyway. BMI itself is a fairly useless measurement, because it doesn't keep track of anomalies. There is somebody at my dojo, for example, who weighs 260lbs. This person is 6' tall, giving him a BMI of over 35. Well into the "obese" category. There's just one thing wrong with this definition: This person wears a 32" waist, and has body fat of 13%. Tracking your BMI over time will give you an indication of how much weight you've lost, but it won't actually give anything approaching an indication of how much you still need to lose.:)
You do realize that most airports have windsocks up to help determine current conditions? Or that every single firing range out there has a flag to indicate when it's safe to fire? The people who are actually marksmen (I was, when I was in the military) use the flag as a windsock to determine weather conditions and adjust their firing.
I'm not saying that there's going to be airports or a firing range set up on Mars. But the point is that there's modern applications for a windsock/telltale/weather vane. They're dirt cheap, and incredibly simple devices. If it breaks, you haven't really lost anything. And because there's basically no moving parts, it's a hell of a lot less likely to break than a modern instrument like an anemometer.
Err... I'm almost ashamed to admit that I have the complete works of Simon and Garfunkel (3CD set, literal transcriptions of every LP they released, 2 per disc), and that one isn't on it.
I haven't used the software in a couple of years, but it used to be that it would reactivate itself the next time you ran the software, if you just disabled it with MSConfig.
Pretty good reason to tell it to f-off through its own configuration, no?
Try AbiWord instead of OO.o. It works a lot better with RTF formatting. Also, one of the Summer of Code projects this year is to add OOXML support to it, which would give it a huge leg up on OO.o's editor.
There's other applications... the three most-used applications under MS Office are Outlook, Word, and Excel. Word, I've already covered what I use instead. Excel, I use Gnumeric. For the average user, it's good enough. It does lack some of the more advanced functions, but honestly, aside from reading the docs, I'd never know it.
And as for Outlook, there's Evolution. The hard part in getting people to switch over isn't getting them to switch desktops. That's ancillary. The hard part is getting them to switch applications in the first place. All 3 of those programs have Win32 versions available... the Win32 version of Evolution doesn't work under Vista, but AbiWord and Gnumeric both do. Once people are using open source programs instead of MS Office, the rest will just fall into place.
Try Zenwalk. The only time I've had to go into CLI since installing it was to install the NVidia proprietary drivers. And that was personal preference... there's actually a package in the repository for it.
Just about all of the important configuration options are available through the ZenPanel, and UI tweaks through XFCE's panel. And it supports XFCE's desktop compositor, of shiny video effects/transparency/etc. Unlike Compiz/Fusion (at least, the last time I used it), XFCE's compositor will use OpenGL (and the transparency effect on Terminal is a perfect example of how an accelerated desktop/transparency *should* work), but will allow you to run OpenGL programs/games without slowing down, too. I've tested it with TuxRacer, as well as with SecondLife, the latter being notorious for not working properly....
You still have the problem with guaranteeing compatibility with commercially available software. There's Wine, or if you're more comfortable paying for something that comes with tech. support, there's Crossover and Cedega. Crossover comes with a reasonable guarantee that most of the important office software will work, though it's not compatible with Office 2007 yet.
y'know... somebody throwing facts at you can really suck the joy out of a facetious remark like that.... I think it's safe to say that just about everybody who reads Slashdot has the necessary smarts (if not the knowledge) to realize that the article was meaning to say that the light left a supernova which was 140 years old and travelled 28,000 LY to reach us. The humour in the situation comes from the contrast between what they say, and what they mean.
But explaining that takes away from the humour in saying that either they've figured out how to travel FTL or somebody missed a decimal point in converting units of measure, now, doesn't it?
You lost credibility here. If you're going to add $225 for retail copies of OS/X and iLife to your comparison, then you need to add $250 to your costs on the Apples, to cover the copy of Windows Vista that it doesn't come with. Whether you actually use it or not is irrelevant, it's a question of comparing like for like.
I haven't had a virus or Trojan or anything like that that I know of in over 5 years.
There. Fixed that for you.
Service Packs are more than functionality upgrades. They also include fixes for security issues. You'd do well to keep your computer up to date... leaving security holes unpatched is just asking for trouble.
I've got a combo 5.25"/3.5" drive... fits in a standard 5.25" drive bay. Modern computers do support it, but only one of the drives is seen. I need to set a jumper on the drive to switch between the 5.25" being A: and the 3.5" being A: in order to use it.
I've used it as recently as a month ago, when it was the only floppy drive I had lying around and I needed to flash the BIOS on a new motherboard so it'd support a quad core processor.
Except that chaos theory dictates that there's imperceptable differences will affect the outcome, while Einstein's definition says that you're doing the same thing over and over under the same circumstances.
He's also largely talking about the macro, not the micro. Use the example from Jurassic Park when discussing chaos theory... put a drop of water on your hand, and you can't tell which way it'll roll because you can't control microfissures in your skin, or differences in your blood pressure, or any number of things that can affect the outcome.
Using a coin toss as an example... part of chaos theory says that there's going to be factors you simply can't control... shifts in air pressure, thermal pockets in the air, differences in how you toss the coin, sudden gusts small enough that you can't perceive them, but big enough to affect how the coin rolls in the sky.
Einstein, by contrast, was talking about the more obviously predictable.... like putting a beaker containing 300ml of water over a bunsen burner and expecting it to not eventually boil.:)
And... if I wanted my personal webmail portal on Google, I'd actually have content besides the SquirrelMail front page... *shrugs*
You missed the part where I said the forums were served up from a subdomain which has robots, and you apparently missed out on the idea that it's possible to serve up multiple domains from a single server. killerbob.ca is where my e-mail goes. The page I'm talking about shows up first in Google when you search for it, under an awful lot of possible search keys (not just the domain).
I've got nothing to do with the bear community... ironically, I do have something to do with LGBT in general, but more to do with the L... but if he wants to make money off it, more power to him. If it were actually a business for me, I'd be more concerned about it showing up high on Google.
That works great, until one of your friends makes a typo and sends a message to lupmy@yourdomain.com instead of lumpy.... they get no confirmation that the message they sent to you didn't go through... because it *did* go through. It just went straight into your spam filter.
I could make it sound worse than it is, by making this fictional friend your significant other, and creating some kind of facetious situation in which your relationship will end if you don't respond to said message... but you get the idea.
It's your choice. But I get very few spam messages in my inbox, and I don't use a catch-all. I have SpamAssassin updating itself automatically by a cron job, and that works pretty well.
You're talking about CAPTCHA.... most CAPTCHA algorithms have been compromised. Also, most forums that actually use it have a working e-mail address listed on the CAPTCHA page, asking people to e-mail the admins if they have problems with it. I've created accounts manually on the forums I administer, for people who have problems with CAPTCHA.
One of the main reasons forums don't get hit by spammers is because the admin staff knows what they're doing. They lock down threads, respond quickly, and keep the software up to date. Temporary bans, and permanent bans... You also need a working e-mail address in order to register, which blocks an awful lot of spam. Finally, there's over 150 domains on the banlist for my forums... some of the most popularly used (by spammers) freebie e-mail accounts, like mail.ru.
Oh... and it helps to have a robots.txt file. Mine looks like this:
User-agent: * Disallow:/
The forums are served up from a subdomain... the actual site shows up in search engines, but having the separate domain with robots.txt helps keep the forums off the search engines. If they don't know you're there, then they can't spam you.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Most ISPs in that period provided software... I know that when I signed up for my first Internet connection in 1994, they sent me a CD with Trumpet Winsock on it.
The lever? (simple machine, not the soap... though this being /., the soap is probably the more important innovation....)
right... the VxD and virtual driver model that 95/98/ME used was a steaming pile of donkey turd. In the grand comparison of things, it was a security nightmare.
But consider that it was the first MS OS (for consumer!) that was 100% GUI. Yes, it was really running on top of DOS 7.0. But it also installed and booted up to a GUI, and all of the configuration/tweaking/etc. was a major step forward.
You need to compare it against the alternatives in 1995, not the alternatives in 2008. Yes, NT 4.0 came out in 1994 and had basically the same user interface, but NT was intended for an enterprise and server environment, and was never marketed towards consumers until Windows XP came out.
So.... yes. Windows 95 *was* a high point for MS. It was an enormous step forward for the company.
Responding to an AC... big mistake.....
Anyway. There's already a snowboarding slalom minigame in Wii Fit. It's in the "Balance Games". There's also a ski slalom minigame, and a ski jump minigame.
I work up a sweat when doing the advanced step aerobics or advanced hula hoop games... even some of the yoga exercises, when I do enough of them in succession. I haven't touched the strength exercises, and have no intention of touching them. It's a good addition, but no amount of play on Wii Fit will substitute the level of exercise I get elsewhere. I don't think my heart rate has gotten over 110 when working out on it, but I'm an anomaly in that respect: my resting heart rate is 56-62bpm and my BP is usually around 120/70... highest it's ever been measured was during a military fitness test, at 160/90 (I got out of the army on a medical... knee injury). That said, it's naive to expect that the average Wii owner will have the same level of physical health/strength, and when compared against a generally sedentary lifestyle I think it's very good. It does a good job of getting you active, and breaking that activity up into chunks that are easy for the average person to do, which is where going to the gym generally loses out.
Generally speaking, it's mid-light exercise... but it also adjusts the amount of "fit credits" it gives you.... you get minutes in the bank for every exercise you do, and some of the lighter games will give you 2 minutes in the bank for 5 minutes of play... on average, it takes about 45 minutes of activity to rack up 30 minutes worth of fit credits. Also, it gives a little light show when you hit 30 minutes of fit credits per day, encouraging you to be active at least half an hour a day. And new exercises are unlocked on basis of how many total fit credits you've accumulated since you started. I still haven't unlocked everything, and I've been doing about 35-40 per day, not counting my other exercise.
Honestly... I'd say it's better value than a gym membership. If for no other reason, then because it's the kind of activity that you can squeeze into your day quite easily. Break it up into 5-10 minute blocks, which you really can't do with a gym.
Well... I *have* been asked what kind of dressing I wanted with my salad after ordering a caesar salad at McD's....
Me: *raises eyebrow* Caesar?
Girl behind the counter: That's a kind of dressing?
Me: *waits patiently while girl checks*
Girl: oh. Wow. I didn't know that! *slaps forehead*
Me: *dies inside*
Most of the people posting on this thread don't seem to have actually played the game.... I actually have it. Bought it on Wednesday of last week, and I've been playing it between 30-45 minutes a day. In the last week, I've also attended 10 hours of classes at Jiu Jitsu, and I biked to work on Friday, at 1h15 each way (about 27km each way). I also went swimming on Saturday, about 2km in lengths.
:)
Not everybody who's buying this game is somebody who's overweight and never gets any exercise. Even those who *are* overweight and never get any exercise... I'd rather they play the games that come with Wii Fit than sitting on their ass playing Halo... the games that come with Wii Fit will actually have them getting up and possibly even working up a sweat. I know that I usually work up a sweat by the time I get to the step aerobics in my routine the sweat's usually streaming off (that's about 25 minutes in).
It's better than nothing. But as with any exercise routine, you'll get out of it what you put into it. If you're serious about losing weight then you'll need more than a video game. It's a good start, but it'll require some serious lifestyle changes for any weight loss to take.
There's a couple of major advantages to Wii Fit over going to the gym. You've touched on them yourself... you don't have to deal with asses at the gym, you don't have to deal with grimy sweaty equipment, you can do it in the privacy of your own home... and the personal trainer is actually pretty good. Well voiced, gives realtime encouragement based on your current position, which is limited by the fact that it can only detect your center of balance and not your actual position, but it is still fairly accurate for most situations.
Finally, I'd like to second the comment that using BMI as a measure of anything is approaching idiotic... It's good to keep track of your weight, and how it changes... and that's actually the idea behind Wii Fit: track your weight on a day to day basis so that you're more conscious of what you put into your mouth. There was an interview available on the Nintendo channel that explained this..... Anyway. BMI itself is a fairly useless measurement, because it doesn't keep track of anomalies. There is somebody at my dojo, for example, who weighs 260lbs. This person is 6' tall, giving him a BMI of over 35. Well into the "obese" category. There's just one thing wrong with this definition: This person wears a 32" waist, and has body fat of 13%. Tracking your BMI over time will give you an indication of how much weight you've lost, but it won't actually give anything approaching an indication of how much you still need to lose.
DSL offers a live CD that's actually usable, supports network, and can be used to get used to the interface, etc.
:)
Personally, I have Zenwalk on my computer. I've been using it for over a year, after switching from Slackware. I love it.
You do realize that most airports have windsocks up to help determine current conditions? Or that every single firing range out there has a flag to indicate when it's safe to fire? The people who are actually marksmen (I was, when I was in the military) use the flag as a windsock to determine weather conditions and adjust their firing.
I'm not saying that there's going to be airports or a firing range set up on Mars. But the point is that there's modern applications for a windsock/telltale/weather vane. They're dirt cheap, and incredibly simple devices. If it breaks, you haven't really lost anything. And because there's basically no moving parts, it's a hell of a lot less likely to break than a modern instrument like an anemometer.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was wondering.
Err... I'm almost ashamed to admit that I have the complete works of Simon and Garfunkel (3CD set, literal transcriptions of every LP they released, 2 per disc), and that one isn't on it.
I haven't used the software in a couple of years, but it used to be that it would reactivate itself the next time you ran the software, if you just disabled it with MSConfig.
Pretty good reason to tell it to f-off through its own configuration, no?
Try AbiWord instead of OO.o. It works a lot better with RTF formatting. Also, one of the Summer of Code projects this year is to add OOXML support to it, which would give it a huge leg up on OO.o's editor.
There's other applications... the three most-used applications under MS Office are Outlook, Word, and Excel. Word, I've already covered what I use instead. Excel, I use Gnumeric. For the average user, it's good enough. It does lack some of the more advanced functions, but honestly, aside from reading the docs, I'd never know it.
And as for Outlook, there's Evolution. The hard part in getting people to switch over isn't getting them to switch desktops. That's ancillary. The hard part is getting them to switch applications in the first place. All 3 of those programs have Win32 versions available... the Win32 version of Evolution doesn't work under Vista, but AbiWord and Gnumeric both do. Once people are using open source programs instead of MS Office, the rest will just fall into place.
Try Zenwalk. The only time I've had to go into CLI since installing it was to install the NVidia proprietary drivers. And that was personal preference... there's actually a package in the repository for it.
Just about all of the important configuration options are available through the ZenPanel, and UI tweaks through XFCE's panel. And it supports XFCE's desktop compositor, of shiny video effects/transparency/etc. Unlike Compiz/Fusion (at least, the last time I used it), XFCE's compositor will use OpenGL (and the transparency effect on Terminal is a perfect example of how an accelerated desktop/transparency *should* work), but will allow you to run OpenGL programs/games without slowing down, too. I've tested it with TuxRacer, as well as with SecondLife, the latter being notorious for not working properly....
http://www.zenwalk.org/
You still have the problem with guaranteeing compatibility with commercially available software. There's Wine, or if you're more comfortable paying for something that comes with tech. support, there's Crossover and Cedega. Crossover comes with a reasonable guarantee that most of the important office software will work, though it's not compatible with Office 2007 yet.
Why go to the trouble of adapting chumby when there's already Damn Small Linux?
y'know... somebody throwing facts at you can really suck the joy out of a facetious remark like that.... I think it's safe to say that just about everybody who reads Slashdot has the necessary smarts (if not the knowledge) to realize that the article was meaning to say that the light left a supernova which was 140 years old and travelled 28,000 LY to reach us. The humour in the situation comes from the contrast between what they say, and what they mean.
:)
But explaining that takes away from the humour in saying that either they've figured out how to travel FTL or somebody missed a decimal point in converting units of measure, now, doesn't it?
You deserve a cookie.
You lost credibility here. If you're going to add $225 for retail copies of OS/X and iLife to your comparison, then you need to add $250 to your costs on the Apples, to cover the copy of Windows Vista that it doesn't come with. Whether you actually use it or not is irrelevant, it's a question of comparing like for like.
Ahh... but if we remove China from the map, we can actually have an excuse to put "Here, thar be dragons" on the map!
There. Fixed that for you.
Service Packs are more than functionality upgrades. They also include fixes for security issues. You'd do well to keep your computer up to date... leaving security holes unpatched is just asking for trouble.
I've got a combo 5.25"/3.5" drive... fits in a standard 5.25" drive bay. Modern computers do support it, but only one of the drives is seen. I need to set a jumper on the drive to switch between the 5.25" being A: and the 3.5" being A: in order to use it.
I've used it as recently as a month ago, when it was the only floppy drive I had lying around and I needed to flash the BIOS on a new motherboard so it'd support a quad core processor.
Except that chaos theory dictates that there's imperceptable differences will affect the outcome, while Einstein's definition says that you're doing the same thing over and over under the same circumstances.
:)
He's also largely talking about the macro, not the micro. Use the example from Jurassic Park when discussing chaos theory... put a drop of water on your hand, and you can't tell which way it'll roll because you can't control microfissures in your skin, or differences in your blood pressure, or any number of things that can affect the outcome.
Using a coin toss as an example... part of chaos theory says that there's going to be factors you simply can't control... shifts in air pressure, thermal pockets in the air, differences in how you toss the coin, sudden gusts small enough that you can't perceive them, but big enough to affect how the coin rolls in the sky.
Einstein, by contrast, was talking about the more obviously predictable.... like putting a beaker containing 300ml of water over a bunsen burner and expecting it to not eventually boil.
And... if I wanted my personal webmail portal on Google, I'd actually have content besides the SquirrelMail front page... *shrugs*
You missed the part where I said the forums were served up from a subdomain which has robots, and you apparently missed out on the idea that it's possible to serve up multiple domains from a single server. killerbob.ca is where my e-mail goes. The page I'm talking about shows up first in Google when you search for it, under an awful lot of possible search keys (not just the domain).
I've got nothing to do with the bear community... ironically, I do have something to do with LGBT in general, but more to do with the L... but if he wants to make money off it, more power to him. If it were actually a business for me, I'd be more concerned about it showing up high on Google.
There's a solution to physical spam.
http://www.reddotcampaign.ca/
And in the USA:
http://www.forestethics.org/
I don't get junk mail in my box. Haven't for a long time.
That works great, until one of your friends makes a typo and sends a message to lupmy@yourdomain.com instead of lumpy.... they get no confirmation that the message they sent to you didn't go through... because it *did* go through. It just went straight into your spam filter.
I could make it sound worse than it is, by making this fictional friend your significant other, and creating some kind of facetious situation in which your relationship will end if you don't respond to said message... but you get the idea.
It's your choice. But I get very few spam messages in my inbox, and I don't use a catch-all. I have SpamAssassin updating itself automatically by a cron job, and that works pretty well.
One of the main reasons forums don't get hit by spammers is because the admin staff knows what they're doing. They lock down threads, respond quickly, and keep the software up to date. Temporary bans, and permanent bans... You also need a working e-mail address in order to register, which blocks an awful lot of spam. Finally, there's over 150 domains on the banlist for my forums... some of the most popularly used (by spammers) freebie e-mail accounts, like mail.ru.
Oh... and it helps to have a robots.txt file. Mine looks like this:
The forums are served up from a subdomain... the actual site shows up in search engines, but having the separate domain with robots.txt helps keep the forums off the search engines. If they don't know you're there, then they can't spam you.