Because the Republican Party IS a bunch of jack-booted thugs. Idiot religious fanatics who want to impose religious beliefs upon everyone.
Sure, they "love" freedom and less-intrusive government, as long as it is a God-fearin' guv'mnt that interfers in a woman's ability to control her own sexuality and reproductive activity. As long as it is freedom based strictly on the rules of the 10 Commandments. As long as it prevents people from seeing or hearing or doing anything "offensive", which is restricted to sexual issues only. Beyond that, be free.
The linux client, like the linux client for setiathome, is NOT a screensaver. It runs all the time in the background. I have it running 24/7 on my home computer and don't even notice it - no performance hit at all. Nice.
I have downloaded the folding@home linux client onto my other computer. Same thing - no screensaver, runs in the background unnoticed.
I've been doing the setiathome thing since it started, inspite of the fact that I KNOW they will not find anything.
Why do I say this? It is not because I do not think that there are technologically competent ETs, which I actually believe most assuredly DO exist. The problem is this particular search - its requirements for success.
This search REQUIRES that an alien species not only be capable of transmitting signals, but it REQUIRES that they run a continuous (running for decades, at least) transmission program in, most reasonably, multiple likely directions at once. They have to build and run a powerful transmitter and simply send signals for decade after decade.
For us to detect these signals, they must be sending in our general direction and for a very long time (a detection event must be replicable, so the transmission has to repeat and repeat).
Problem: Aliens had been transmitting for 100s of years and then stopped. The problem is those signals past earth during the age of the dinosaurs (or one of the subsequent Ice Ages). They have since moved on to other things - perhaps not hearing any replies - or gone extinct (it has been millions to thousands of years, afterall).
A project that is much more likely to work is one that has receivers sensitive enough to detect INCIDENTAL emissions, that is, stray signals not intentionally directed to anyone - radar signals ala our Space Command/Air Defense system. TV transmissions leaking out before the advent of tightbeam, low power transmission via satellite or cable.
We ourselves are becoming quieter and quieter in emissions with every decade. Efficient transmission and sensitive receivers permit low power transmission without degredation of signal quality. Radar is much more efficient now than in its early years. You don't need to blast out a super-high-wattage radar signal to detect or track targets. TV is going more and more to tight-beam satellite or cable and away from high-power broadcast. If any alien species wants to detect us, they best be listening with sensitive ears for a few decades at the the right moment in time when the signals pass by their solar system. After that, good luck.
Maybe AFTER some advanced species detects some of our old transmissions and determines that they are not natural in origin, they would then build a dedicated, high-power transmitter and send at us specifically in the hopes of catching our attention before we go extinct or crash into a new dark age or quit listening.
The best we could hope for in this scenario is that there is an advanced alien species within, say, 70 lightyears of earth, who happened to be listening when our early TV, radar, and radio broadcasts passed through their system. Give them some time to build the transmitter and begin sending and THEN maybe the present setiathome project will find something.
Nontheless, I think it is an interesting distributed computing experiment so I let my CPU do some processing for them.
Being or not being a superpower has NOTHING to do with market. Neither China nor India would need to be superpowers to be a huge market. All they need is an economy. A GOOD economy and a growing middle class with money to spend. That is not the same thing as, or tied to, being a superpower.
Well, it could be done the way supermount works in linux. You put in a floppy and when you access it, it is mounted according to need. When you are done, you push an eject button and it is spit out and unmounted simultaneously.
The mechanical button ALWAYS gives you your disk, regardless of power status of the computer or the existence or non-existence of a trashcan, etc.
Having to resort to a straightened paperclip to get a disk or CD out is really poor design, as far as I am concerned, when there is a software, os, or power problem.
Again, that would work OK in a relatively private and quiet setting but not necessarily in the real setting of most labs. In my building, we have a lot of shared equipment (including spectrometers, protein purification aparatus, etc). This shared equipment isn't often in a private room, but in same space as other people's lab benches and desks.
Students, scientists, techs, are all talking to each other, listening to music, doing experiments, working on computers. If all the computer and lab equipment use is to be voice controlled, there will be interference from your neighbor doing work on his/her computer (by voice) or on another piece of neighboring aparatus (by voice). The poor schmuck at his desk trying to read a journal article or work out an experiment is getting constant distraction from the student on the computer dictating commands, from me using the spec, from the tech using the HPLC, etc, etc. Lots of extraneous noise above and beyond the norm. It would make a lab sound like the work area of a telemarketing firm. Everyone talking and talking and talking...
There may be some use for this in some settings, but I would strongly disagree that it should be the primary means of computer interface (my wife would LOVE that while she is in the next room trying to read or sleep when I am up late at night working at my computer). The distraction level would be equivalent to sitting next to someone who reads their books aloud.
I think he falls under the traitor catagory because he invented the robots to begin with, thus condeming the human race to suffering, etc., etc.
He did NOT invent the robots. No one invented those robots except themselves. Think about it. The terminator comes from the future, leaves a piece of itself behind which is what is used to design the the computer/robots. They are self-creating. No one, de novo, came up with the neat new design, they merely looked at the design of the chip and used that to guide their designs...so who ultimately created that chip design which was used as a basis for itself? No one.
One of the many fun time paradoxes that permeates the whole idea of the movie. Another? Well, the future computer that takes over and builds the terminators, et al, can only come into existence if it sends a terminator into the past, which then leaves a piece of itself behind. That piece is the basis of itself and the computer (see above). Not only that, the computer MUST realize that it's mission fails even before it sends the terminator into the past (TWICE!) because if it DIDN'T fail, there would no reason in the future to send a terminator into the past because the target (the mother or the kid) would be dead and not exist in the computer's world to threaten it. Thus, the very fact that the kid grew up to be a thorn in the side of the computer so that it would consider sending a terminator into the past to prevent his future existence entirely means a priori that the mission is a failure. If it ISN'T a failure, then what point would there be in sending a terminator into the past? The success of the mission would mean that the computer wouldn't even have a need to send anything back in time...and so on and so on.
A logical computer brain would have to realize that the desired mission is a failure before it is even attempted because it is entertaining the idea against a specific contemporary target in the first place.
Re:reverse engineering
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EULA In Games
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Install linuxppc and install the available (and contentious) linux opensource dvd software and play your dvd, then take a screenshot under linux. Endrun the Apple nonsense and do what you want.
It doesn't necessarily work that way. Lack of apps, for one thing, killed OS/2. There is a problem here. People will come to linux if it has the ease of use they need/want AND if it has the apps they want but for the apps to appear from the vendors, they require a demand that would be worthy of the effort.
So, people do not go to linux in droves because they can't work with the apps that they need/want/desire - because they are used to them AND because it is necessary to inter-operate with colleagues and customers. Vendors wont produce software for linux because the people aren't there to support the cost.
No, GPL and the like is not the answer to everything. ALL GPL projects that seek to bring equivalent function to linux that people enjoy on their Macs or with Windoze are ALWAYS merely playing slow catchup to the commercial offerings for the other platforms or OSes. By the time the SLOW development of a GPL app gets to the point of having a useful product, the users are using something beyond it in the Mac and Windoze world.
This is PARTICULARLY true of games. Loki is great, and so has been id's support, however, games in linux invariably come too late after the same game has come to 'doze so that the demand for it is low. People who would otherwise PREFER a linux version go with the 'doze version simply because it comes out first and they do not want to wait months (or longer) for a native linux version.
By the time a great new game finally gets to linux, the next big game is out on 'doze and people want THAT one, not the now old game just now coming out for linux.
The problem is that the linux port comes too late so that what was perhaps a high demand has spent itself for the windoze version - why wait 6 months or so for a native linux version when you can get that COOL game NOW and play it on 'doze?
IF game companies would simply release their stuff simultaneously for linux and doze (and macs) on the same CD, then there wouldn't be a problem. There would be buyers, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be clear WHAT platform or OS they are purchasing for.
So, you will be more productive in an office loaded with people yacking at their computers? You will like your environment more when people have to chatter at their computer? Noise, noise, noise and lots of distraction.
Send private emails via voice. Eh? What's the point of making them private then if you are going to broadcast the content to the office/coworkers, etc by yacking out loud to your computer?
Ever work in a scientific lab? Want to try to do scientific data manipulation, paper writing, etc, by having to talk out loud - along with all your fellow labmates? Wont work and totally undesireable. We have 3 computers per lab bay in my bio lab. They are used constantly. I don't want to be distracted with the constant chatter that would be required to handle a primary voice-driven interface. I would have to yell "SHUT THE F*CK UP!" all the time so I could think and get my research done.
Voice input the norm? No. Frickin'. Way. And no thank you!! Just what we need, an office full of people at their computers yacking and chattering like crazy. Just what I want and need. A person sitting next to me in the lab working at our computers and having to talk to do it. Noise, noise, noise. Distraction, distraction, distraction.
In addition, it is bad enough to have to listen to half of some idiot's cell phone conversation everywhere. I don't want to hear their personal emails and I don't want them to hear mine. It doesn't matter whether or not they or I am saying/sending anything trivial, it is simply not for general public consumption what I send. This in addition to the amount of emails sent would lead to MORE CHATTER AND DISTRACTING, INNANE NOISE. Keyboards leave much to be desired but they are quiet, innocuous, and better than voice for general use.
I must admit I just don't get Eazel (yet). It appears to me that all it is is a file browser. What the hell do I care about a fancy file browser? I have that with konqueror, and honestly, I can't see any real difference other than look (HUGE icons, like everything in Gnome...WAY too frickin' huge like everyone has vision problems).
Would someone explain to me why Eazel, a mere file browser (web browser?) is in the company of full GUIs like the doze interface IDEA and the MacOS X reality? It is just an app that can be run on an interface system...like gnome or kde for instance.
Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it.
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The Future Of The GUI?
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Err, gnustep isn't innovation. It is copying/cloning Next. Berlin is rather innovative but it isn't even in the catagory of vapor yet. It is in such extreme alpha state that it is practically not worth mentioning. It is FAR, FAR from being end-useable, plus it will suffer, unfortunately, from the huge dependence of almost all things linux on X.
I would LOVE to ditch X and go with something smaller, faster, better, but unless the major distros get behind Berlin, it will be ready for prime time around the time that Golgotha is (yeah, right - but even then golgotha is so much more developed).
How many guys are working on Berlin? Two? Three? I'm holding my breath on it's release in even beta format, I tell you.
Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it.
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The Future Of The GUI?
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Well, you took the words right out of my keyboard. As much as I like linux - unless I want to play some game linux is the only thing I use for EVERYTHING else - it is NOT innovative. Don't get me wrong, I like it and it is nicely functional, but everthing in it is cloned from old unix or copied from windoze or the mac. The Gimp? A clone of photoshop. KDE and Gnome? Both borrow heavily from windoze (and one could argue from OS/2 Warp). You can even make KDE pretend to look like Aqua OR the old MacOS.
As I think about it, I can't bring to mind ANY innovative design or software package that is really something only in linux and not preexistent in windoze or the mac world.
I will keep on using linux, that is a fact, but I honestly cannot say there is innovation there. It is a good game of catchup, but not of "catch ME!" with linux. Certainly not yet, at any rate.
I've got a trashcan on my KDE desktop, had one on my Gnome desktop, have one on a 'doze desktop, I had variants (a shredder, a black hole, etc) on my OS/2 Warp desktop and, of course, have it on the desktop of the macs in the lab I work in.
Don't use it. Ever. See no point to it other than as a pixel decoration to take up space on the desktop. It annoys me, as a matter of fact, that when I DELETE something, it isn't actually deleted but is placed in the damn trashcan and STILL takes up hdd space.
I DELETE items and expect/want them to DELETE, not merely move to another desktop location and yet remain on the harddrive.
The control bar is a similar waste. I have NEVER seen any of the users in my lab actually use it either, and some of them are of the fundamentalist Mac religious sect.
Permitting mac users even just a fragment of the customizability that is possible in linux and X is a step in the right direction, at least. They do NOT know (the people at apple) what is best for ME or anyone else for that matter. Only the user knows what is best for them. Give the owner the ability to change EVERYTHING if they desire, to make THEIR frickin' computer work the way THEY want it to, not the way Jobs says it must.
I AM the "darkside" and will never give up linux. As for VMWare...got it. You cannot play any games thru it, however. It is OK is you want to run Office or some other doze app without rebooting, but then, many of the major apps are now runnable under wine or VERY close (including office).
Real nice. A slashdot editor/writer can't get it working properly. I download it and decompress it and try it, as per the readme that comes with it, and it totally dicks up my X session. No mouse, no keyboard (except Ctrl-Alt-Bkspc so I can restart my X session). Some linux game...wont even run on linux.
The hell you say. In the lab I work in at my university, there is a G3 and two iMacs, while I have my IBM Thinkpad with linux installed. The G3 is slooow and unstable. It crashes quite often. One of the iMacs has a PARTICULAR stability bug inspite of it having the same software and hardware as the second iMac. Both are prone to lockups (they are updated on MacOS). We have almost a weekly visit from someone on the university IT staff, checking to see if we are having any problems for that week. About 30% of the time, we are but inspite of repeated attempts on their part, the problems remain.
Meanwhile, me on my lowly ThinkPad with linux never crashes. The only problem I have had with it was setting an incorrect hdparm flag, easily corrected, which played hell with booting.
My stepdaughter has an older Mac, a Performa, at home. I have my homebuilt Athlon with linux. She does practically NOTHING with her computer but do wordprocessing now and again, or a little web browsing. You'd think there would NEVER be a problem with that, especially since she just leaves well enough alone. Nope. With her doing NOTHING to dork up that Performa, it occassionally dorks itself up and it is I who must fix it. The only problems I EVER run into with my box are self-inflicted with my constant experimentation and tweaking. When I leave it all alone, problems simply do not exist...ever.
On a certain aspect of your statement I would say you are correct, but then the same holds true on all the homebuilts I have ever had (4). The HARDWARE rarely croaks. The problems are ALWAYS software/OS-related. I would think that OS-X will get beyond typical Apple software/OS problems seeing as how it is built on a rock-solid, ABSOLUTELY trustworthy unix foundation, which means that new Macs with OS-X on them will be as stable as my homebuilts and my laptop...but the hardware, like ALL hardware, will remain a rare source of problem (I have had ONE cdrom croak on me in the history of computers and one 14" monitor from long-ago. ONE cdrom, ONE monitor. Nothing else...although my present old 15" monitor is slowly giving up the ghost, like any monitor will do after a long enough period of time, even an Mac monitor - I've seen that happen twice two in my time with them).
On the whole, I would say you will "get the chicks" on Macs by having to CONSTANTLY fix their stability issues/software issues, and with OS-X, the settings will remain a mystery with the bulk of the great unwashed (male and female alike). So I would say your ability to "get the girls" remains as unchanged on the Mac as it is on the PC-side. There is ALWAYS the need by ignorant users for someone with a computer clue to help them get past their errors or their ignorance or the bad design decisions made by companies like M$ and Apple (with their pre-OS-X/Darwin Crapple MacOS). Fear not for your "love life". People still have problem programming their VCR and you think they will be able to setup networking?
OK... On a sidenote here, just how many of your 1300+ fonts do you actually use? Perhaps 3 or 4. The rest are garbage taking up space. MOST people use, at most, 3 or 4 fonts at different times, NEVER looking at wingdings or the other odd balls. Let's see, times, times roman, helvetica or arial, perhaps symbols if you must do science or math writing. That about covers it. The rest is nonsense and it doesn't matter if you have 1300 or 500, they are garbage.
You can get as many fonts as you want for linux, just like for doze. The question is, why would you WANT to? Practically NO ONE has ANY use for the vast majority of fonts that are installed by default (doze OR linux). What a weak "problem" you have with linux vs 'doze on this count.
I would say this...you can find a gazillion math and scientific apps for linux that simply do not exist for doze (and they are free and they often derive from MIT, Princeton, Berkely, the NIH, etc)...those that DO exist for 'doze cost a buttload. You can't do proper science with 'doze. What a loser OS.
You certainly could engineer a simple organism (algae, bacteria) to generate oxygen under the conditions that are present on Mars. That is how it started on earth, afterall, though the early earth's environment was different than the present Martian situation...
The problem is one of time. It would take many thousands of years to generate enough atmospheric pressure and oxygen to make an unpressurized, unhelmeted walk-about remotely possible. Doable? Yes. In a generation or two? Not a chance.
Corporations SHOULDN'T Have any rights. Corporations are inanimate collections of individual citizens who each themselves have rights. It pisses ME off whenever free speech and other Constitutional rights are mentioned in regards to non-people like companies.
Uh-uh. Individual people have rights, not corporations.
IF the Greens (and Nader) were actually reasonably, rational people instead of a bunch of hormone-addled, irrational teens and twenty-somethings, then they would have made a RATIONAL and concerted effort to trade votes. They WOULD have won 5% nationally (at least) AND Gore, who is MUCH closer to Greens on environmental and labor issues than Bush is. You Greens would have gotten what you wanted (instead of NOT getting what you wanted...3% nationally) and the Supreme Court wouldn't be up for nazi takeover and the environment wouldn't be for sale to industry.
Naderites DID give the election to Bush and did NOT get their 5%. They got nothing. What you should have done, besides concerted, organized vote trading, is actually put up some people for LOCAL elections. You didn't even get THAT and THAT was where you were more likely to make any gain at all. You don't get ANY federal funds. You gave the Supreme Court to the Republican Nazis, and you sold the environment to the oil industry. Congratulations. Job well done. Morons.
Oh sad child. Trojan smojan. This TYPE of exploit would NOT work on unix. Period. A user can run a binary, even a trojan, but all it will do is affect THEIR PERSONAL stuff. It will not do anything to the system. It will not do anything but, at worst, delete their own personal files. The other users and the system itself are quite safe from harm.
Ergo, it IS NT's, W2000's, W2000ME's, and M$'s fault (for making a crappy oses) for allowing a mere user to crap all over the system, all over other users on the system, all over the network.
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Because the Republican Party IS a bunch of jack-booted thugs. Idiot religious fanatics who want to impose religious beliefs upon everyone.
Sure, they "love" freedom and less-intrusive government, as long as it is a God-fearin' guv'mnt that interfers in a woman's ability to control her own sexuality and reproductive activity. As long as it is freedom based strictly on the rules of the 10 Commandments. As long as it prevents people from seeing or hearing or doing anything "offensive", which is restricted to sexual issues only. Beyond that, be free.
THAT is the Republican Party.
The linux client, like the linux client for setiathome, is NOT a screensaver. It runs all the time in the background. I have it running 24/7 on my home computer and don't even notice it - no performance hit at all. Nice.
I have downloaded the folding@home linux client onto my other computer. Same thing - no screensaver, runs in the background unnoticed.
I've been doing the setiathome thing since it started, inspite of the fact that I KNOW they will not find anything.
Why do I say this? It is not because I do not think that there are technologically competent ETs, which I actually believe most assuredly DO exist. The problem is this particular search - its requirements for success.
This search REQUIRES that an alien species not only be capable of transmitting signals, but it REQUIRES that they run a continuous (running for decades, at least) transmission program in, most reasonably, multiple likely directions at once. They have to build and run a powerful transmitter and simply send signals for decade after decade.
For us to detect these signals, they must be sending in our general direction and for a very long time (a detection event must be replicable, so the transmission has to repeat and repeat).
Problem: Aliens had been transmitting for 100s of years and then stopped. The problem is those signals past earth during the age of the dinosaurs (or one of the subsequent Ice Ages). They have since moved on to other things - perhaps not hearing any replies - or gone extinct (it has been millions to thousands of years, afterall).
A project that is much more likely to work is one that has receivers sensitive enough to detect INCIDENTAL emissions, that is, stray signals not intentionally directed to anyone - radar signals ala our Space Command/Air Defense system. TV transmissions leaking out before the advent of tightbeam, low power transmission via satellite or cable.
We ourselves are becoming quieter and quieter in emissions with every decade. Efficient transmission and sensitive receivers permit low power transmission without degredation of signal quality. Radar is much more efficient now than in its early years. You don't need to blast out a super-high-wattage radar signal to detect or track targets. TV is going more and more to tight-beam satellite or cable and away from high-power broadcast. If any alien species wants to detect us, they best be listening with sensitive ears for a few decades at the the right moment in time when the signals pass by their solar system. After that, good luck.
Maybe AFTER some advanced species detects some of our old transmissions and determines that they are not natural in origin, they would then build a dedicated, high-power transmitter and send at us specifically in the hopes of catching our attention before we go extinct or crash into a new dark age or quit listening.
The best we could hope for in this scenario is that there is an advanced alien species within, say, 70 lightyears of earth, who happened to be listening when our early TV, radar, and radio broadcasts passed through their system. Give them some time to build the transmitter and begin sending and THEN maybe the present setiathome project will find something.
Nontheless, I think it is an interesting distributed computing experiment so I let my CPU do some processing for them.
Being or not being a superpower has NOTHING to do with market. Neither China nor India would need to be superpowers to be a huge market. All they need is an economy. A GOOD economy and a growing middle class with money to spend. That is not the same thing as, or tied to, being a superpower.
Yeah! Instead of playing loser games like Quake I/II/III or Half-Life, play the free/open source...err, freeciv? GNUChess? Sokaban? Tetris?
Yeah! Those opensource, free games beat the crap out of the commercial games. And the graphics, sound, etc, are just as good.
OK, time to wake up and face reality. Opensource/free games bite in comparison to commercial offerings.
Well, it could be done the way supermount works in linux. You put in a floppy and when you access it, it is mounted according to need. When you are done, you push an eject button and it is spit out and unmounted simultaneously.
The mechanical button ALWAYS gives you your disk, regardless of power status of the computer or the existence or non-existence of a trashcan, etc.
Having to resort to a straightened paperclip to get a disk or CD out is really poor design, as far as I am concerned, when there is a software, os, or power problem.
Again, that would work OK in a relatively private and quiet setting but not necessarily in the real setting of most labs. In my building, we have a lot of shared equipment (including spectrometers, protein purification aparatus, etc). This shared equipment isn't often in a private room, but in same space as other people's lab benches and desks.
Students, scientists, techs, are all talking to each other, listening to music, doing experiments, working on computers. If all the computer and lab equipment use is to be voice controlled, there will be interference from your neighbor doing work on his/her computer (by voice) or on another piece of neighboring aparatus (by voice). The poor schmuck at his desk trying to read a journal article or work out an experiment is getting constant distraction from the student on the computer dictating commands, from me using the spec, from the tech using the HPLC, etc, etc. Lots of extraneous noise above and beyond the norm. It would make a lab sound like the work area of a telemarketing firm. Everyone talking and talking and talking...
There may be some use for this in some settings, but I would strongly disagree that it should be the primary means of computer interface (my wife would LOVE that while she is in the next room trying to read or sleep when I am up late at night working at my computer). The distraction level would be equivalent to sitting next to someone who reads their books aloud.
He did NOT invent the robots. No one invented those robots except themselves. Think about it. The terminator comes from the future, leaves a piece of itself behind which is what is used to design the the computer/robots. They are self-creating. No one, de novo, came up with the neat new design, they merely looked at the design of the chip and used that to guide their designs...so who ultimately created that chip design which was used as a basis for itself? No one.
One of the many fun time paradoxes that permeates the whole idea of the movie. Another? Well, the future computer that takes over and builds the terminators, et al, can only come into existence if it sends a terminator into the past, which then leaves a piece of itself behind. That piece is the basis of itself and the computer (see above). Not only that, the computer MUST realize that it's mission fails even before it sends the terminator into the past (TWICE!) because if it DIDN'T fail, there would no reason in the future to send a terminator into the past because the target (the mother or the kid) would be dead and not exist in the computer's world to threaten it. Thus, the very fact that the kid grew up to be a thorn in the side of the computer so that it would consider sending a terminator into the past to prevent his future existence entirely means a priori that the mission is a failure. If it ISN'T a failure, then what point would there be in sending a terminator into the past? The success of the mission would mean that the computer wouldn't even have a need to send anything back in time...and so on and so on.
A logical computer brain would have to realize that the desired mission is a failure before it is even attempted because it is entertaining the idea against a specific contemporary target in the first place.
Install linuxppc and install the available (and contentious) linux opensource dvd software and play your dvd, then take a screenshot under linux. Endrun the Apple nonsense and do what you want.
It doesn't necessarily work that way. Lack of apps, for one thing, killed OS/2. There is a problem here. People will come to linux if it has the ease of use they need/want AND if it has the apps they want but for the apps to appear from the vendors, they require a demand that would be worthy of the effort.
So, people do not go to linux in droves because they can't work with the apps that they need/want/desire - because they are used to them AND because it is necessary to inter-operate with colleagues and customers. Vendors wont produce software for linux because the people aren't there to support the cost.
No, GPL and the like is not the answer to everything. ALL GPL projects that seek to bring equivalent function to linux that people enjoy on their Macs or with Windoze are ALWAYS merely playing slow catchup to the commercial offerings for the other platforms or OSes. By the time the SLOW development of a GPL app gets to the point of having a useful product, the users are using something beyond it in the Mac and Windoze world.
This is PARTICULARLY true of games. Loki is great, and so has been id's support, however, games in linux invariably come too late after the same game has come to 'doze so that the demand for it is low. People who would otherwise PREFER a linux version go with the 'doze version simply because it comes out first and they do not want to wait months (or longer) for a native linux version.
By the time a great new game finally gets to linux, the next big game is out on 'doze and people want THAT one, not the now old game just now coming out for linux.
The problem is that the linux port comes too late so that what was perhaps a high demand has spent itself for the windoze version - why wait 6 months or so for a native linux version when you can get that COOL game NOW and play it on 'doze? IF game companies would simply release their stuff simultaneously for linux and doze (and macs) on the same CD, then there wouldn't be a problem. There would be buyers, plain and simple, and it wouldn't be clear WHAT platform or OS they are purchasing for.
That would specifically be illegal in Georgia.
So, you will be more productive in an office loaded with people yacking at their computers? You will like your environment more when people have to chatter at their computer? Noise, noise, noise and lots of distraction.
Send private emails via voice. Eh? What's the point of making them private then if you are going to broadcast the content to the office/coworkers, etc by yacking out loud to your computer?
Ever work in a scientific lab? Want to try to do scientific data manipulation, paper writing, etc, by having to talk out loud - along with all your fellow labmates? Wont work and totally undesireable. We have 3 computers per lab bay in my bio lab. They are used constantly. I don't want to be distracted with the constant chatter that would be required to handle a primary voice-driven interface. I would have to yell "SHUT THE F*CK UP!" all the time so I could think and get my research done.
Voice input the norm? No. Frickin'. Way. And no thank you!! Just what we need, an office full of people at their computers yacking and chattering like crazy. Just what I want and need. A person sitting next to me in the lab working at our computers and having to talk to do it. Noise, noise, noise. Distraction, distraction, distraction.
In addition, it is bad enough to have to listen to half of some idiot's cell phone conversation everywhere. I don't want to hear their personal emails and I don't want them to hear mine. It doesn't matter whether or not they or I am saying/sending anything trivial, it is simply not for general public consumption what I send. This in addition to the amount of emails sent would lead to MORE CHATTER AND DISTRACTING, INNANE NOISE. Keyboards leave much to be desired but they are quiet, innocuous, and better than voice for general use.
I must admit I just don't get Eazel (yet). It appears to me that all it is is a file browser. What the hell do I care about a fancy file browser? I have that with konqueror, and honestly, I can't see any real difference other than look (HUGE icons, like everything in Gnome...WAY too frickin' huge like everyone has vision problems).
Would someone explain to me why Eazel, a mere file browser (web browser?) is in the company of full GUIs like the doze interface IDEA and the MacOS X reality? It is just an app that can be run on an interface system...like gnome or kde for instance.
Err, gnustep isn't innovation. It is copying/cloning Next. Berlin is rather innovative but it isn't even in the catagory of vapor yet. It is in such extreme alpha state that it is practically not worth mentioning. It is FAR, FAR from being end-useable, plus it will suffer, unfortunately, from the huge dependence of almost all things linux on X.
I would LOVE to ditch X and go with something smaller, faster, better, but unless the major distros get behind Berlin, it will be ready for prime time around the time that Golgotha is (yeah, right - but even then golgotha is so much more developed).
How many guys are working on Berlin? Two? Three? I'm holding my breath on it's release in even beta format, I tell you.
Well, you took the words right out of my keyboard. As much as I like linux - unless I want to play some game linux is the only thing I use for EVERYTHING else - it is NOT innovative. Don't get me wrong, I like it and it is nicely functional, but everthing in it is cloned from old unix or copied from windoze or the mac. The Gimp? A clone of photoshop. KDE and Gnome? Both borrow heavily from windoze (and one could argue from OS/2 Warp). You can even make KDE pretend to look like Aqua OR the old MacOS.
As I think about it, I can't bring to mind ANY innovative design or software package that is really something only in linux and not preexistent in windoze or the mac world.
I will keep on using linux, that is a fact, but I honestly cannot say there is innovation there. It is a good game of catchup, but not of "catch ME!" with linux. Certainly not yet, at any rate.
I've got a trashcan on my KDE desktop, had one on my Gnome desktop, have one on a 'doze desktop, I had variants (a shredder, a black hole, etc) on my OS/2 Warp desktop and, of course, have it on the desktop of the macs in the lab I work in.
Don't use it. Ever. See no point to it other than as a pixel decoration to take up space on the desktop. It annoys me, as a matter of fact, that when I DELETE something, it isn't actually deleted but is placed in the damn trashcan and STILL takes up hdd space.
I DELETE items and expect/want them to DELETE, not merely move to another desktop location and yet remain on the harddrive.
The control bar is a similar waste. I have NEVER seen any of the users in my lab actually use it either, and some of them are of the fundamentalist Mac religious sect.
Permitting mac users even just a fragment of the customizability that is possible in linux and X is a step in the right direction, at least. They do NOT know (the people at apple) what is best for ME or anyone else for that matter. Only the user knows what is best for them. Give the owner the ability to change EVERYTHING if they desire, to make THEIR frickin' computer work the way THEY want it to, not the way Jobs says it must.
I AM the "darkside" and will never give up linux. As for VMWare...got it. You cannot play any games thru it, however. It is OK is you want to run Office or some other doze app without rebooting, but then, many of the major apps are now runnable under wine or VERY close (including office).
Real nice. A slashdot editor/writer can't get it working properly. I download it and decompress it and try it, as per the readme that comes with it, and it totally dicks up my X session. No mouse, no keyboard (except Ctrl-Alt-Bkspc so I can restart my X session). Some linux game...wont even run on linux.
The hell you say. In the lab I work in at my university, there is a G3 and two iMacs, while I have my IBM Thinkpad with linux installed. The G3 is slooow and unstable. It crashes quite often. One of the iMacs has a PARTICULAR stability bug inspite of it having the same software and hardware as the second iMac. Both are prone to lockups (they are updated on MacOS). We have almost a weekly visit from someone on the university IT staff, checking to see if we are having any problems for that week. About 30% of the time, we are but inspite of repeated attempts on their part, the problems remain.
Meanwhile, me on my lowly ThinkPad with linux never crashes. The only problem I have had with it was setting an incorrect hdparm flag, easily corrected, which played hell with booting.
My stepdaughter has an older Mac, a Performa, at home. I have my homebuilt Athlon with linux. She does practically NOTHING with her computer but do wordprocessing now and again, or a little web browsing. You'd think there would NEVER be a problem with that, especially since she just leaves well enough alone. Nope. With her doing NOTHING to dork up that Performa, it occassionally dorks itself up and it is I who must fix it. The only problems I EVER run into with my box are self-inflicted with my constant experimentation and tweaking. When I leave it all alone, problems simply do not exist...ever.
On a certain aspect of your statement I would say you are correct, but then the same holds true on all the homebuilts I have ever had (4). The HARDWARE rarely croaks. The problems are ALWAYS software/OS-related. I would think that OS-X will get beyond typical Apple software/OS problems seeing as how it is built on a rock-solid, ABSOLUTELY trustworthy unix foundation, which means that new Macs with OS-X on them will be as stable as my homebuilts and my laptop...but the hardware, like ALL hardware, will remain a rare source of problem (I have had ONE cdrom croak on me in the history of computers and one 14" monitor from long-ago. ONE cdrom, ONE monitor. Nothing else...although my present old 15" monitor is slowly giving up the ghost, like any monitor will do after a long enough period of time, even an Mac monitor - I've seen that happen twice two in my time with them).
On the whole, I would say you will "get the chicks" on Macs by having to CONSTANTLY fix their stability issues/software issues, and with OS-X, the settings will remain a mystery with the bulk of the great unwashed (male and female alike). So I would say your ability to "get the girls" remains as unchanged on the Mac as it is on the PC-side. There is ALWAYS the need by ignorant users for someone with a computer clue to help them get past their errors or their ignorance or the bad design decisions made by companies like M$ and Apple (with their pre-OS-X/Darwin Crapple MacOS). Fear not for your "love life". People still have problem programming their VCR and you think they will be able to setup networking?
OK... On a sidenote here, just how many of your 1300+ fonts do you actually use? Perhaps 3 or 4. The rest are garbage taking up space. MOST people use, at most, 3 or 4 fonts at different times, NEVER looking at wingdings or the other odd balls. Let's see, times, times roman, helvetica or arial, perhaps symbols if you must do science or math writing. That about covers it. The rest is nonsense and it doesn't matter if you have 1300 or 500, they are garbage.
You can get as many fonts as you want for linux, just like for doze. The question is, why would you WANT to? Practically NO ONE has ANY use for the vast majority of fonts that are installed by default (doze OR linux). What a weak "problem" you have with linux vs 'doze on this count.
I would say this...you can find a gazillion math and scientific apps for linux that simply do not exist for doze (and they are free and they often derive from MIT, Princeton, Berkely, the NIH, etc)...those that DO exist for 'doze cost a buttload. You can't do proper science with 'doze. What a loser OS.
You certainly could engineer a simple organism (algae, bacteria) to generate oxygen under the conditions that are present on Mars. That is how it started on earth, afterall, though the early earth's environment was different than the present Martian situation...
The problem is one of time. It would take many thousands of years to generate enough atmospheric pressure and oxygen to make an unpressurized, unhelmeted walk-about remotely possible. Doable? Yes. In a generation or two? Not a chance.
Corporations SHOULDN'T Have any rights. Corporations are inanimate collections of individual citizens who each themselves have rights. It pisses ME off whenever free speech and other Constitutional rights are mentioned in regards to non-people like companies.
Uh-uh. Individual people have rights, not corporations.
IF the Greens (and Nader) were actually reasonably, rational people instead of a bunch of hormone-addled, irrational teens and twenty-somethings, then they would have made a RATIONAL and concerted effort to trade votes. They WOULD have won 5% nationally (at least) AND Gore, who is MUCH closer to Greens on environmental and labor issues than Bush is. You Greens would have gotten what you wanted (instead of NOT getting what you wanted...3% nationally) and the Supreme Court wouldn't be up for nazi takeover and the environment wouldn't be for sale to industry.
Naderites DID give the election to Bush and did NOT get their 5%. They got nothing. What you should have done, besides concerted, organized vote trading, is actually put up some people for LOCAL elections. You didn't even get THAT and THAT was where you were more likely to make any gain at all. You don't get ANY federal funds. You gave the Supreme Court to the Republican Nazis, and you sold the environment to the oil industry. Congratulations. Job well done. Morons.
Oh sad child. Trojan smojan. This TYPE of exploit would NOT work on unix. Period. A user can run a binary, even a trojan, but all it will do is affect THEIR PERSONAL stuff. It will not do anything to the system. It will not do anything but, at worst, delete their own personal files. The other users and the system itself are quite safe from harm.
Ergo, it IS NT's, W2000's, W2000ME's, and M$'s fault (for making a crappy oses) for allowing a mere user to crap all over the system, all over other users on the system, all over the network.