Never played Myst, but in the same genre, I played the 7th Guest (which came free with a CD-ROM drive) and Riven (which came free with a DVD-ROM drive). The common point I felt about these games - it was like someone said, "We have this new high capacity disk! We need to write a game that fills it up!" and they were nothing more than trying to show how much stuff you could get on a CD-ROM (and then a DVD-ROM).
From where I sit, they certainly seem to have succeeded in owning video, at least for short clips. Every single video clip I get a link from or sent by a friend is WMV. Every single one of them. The only people using MPEG-4 are pirates putting up torrents, and one hold-out called the BBC who still uses Real.
(disclaimer: Yes, I know Slashdot has a lot of different folks on it and not all share those same set of views at the same time, but a lot of them seem to.)
Well, if a lot of them seem to - name ten of them.
PDF is an open, documented format, and anyone can implement it.
In particular: - On Linux, ggv will open PDF documents quickly and very happily, and they didn't need to reverse engineer anything or infringe patents to do it. It's free. - On Windows, there are viewers that aren't Acrobat. - OpenOffice on all plaforms can output PDF. No $400 license needed to generate the PDF. - Scripting tools: GhostScript can be used for the batch generation or batch printing of PDF files. GhostScript is free. Our customers regularly send us thousands of print jobs - usually as PDF, which we run through gs, which is available for many platforms including Windows and Linux. - There are lots of automatic tools for generating PDF on the fly, such as HTMLdoc (a GPLed tool, which is available for Windows, Linux, Mac etc. and includes a GUI). - The Macintosh by default can create output from ANY program as PDF, because you can print to PDF. There are similar print drivers for Windows.
You don't need to pay Adobe any money to read, generate or manipulate PDF files. It's an open format. Many programs can do it. It's only those who know of nothing outside of a Microsoft catalogue who think it's different.
``Why on earth should lots of machines be able to send email from inside a corporation? Surely some smarthosts and block port 25 at the border routers is the way to go.''
Hmm, I don't like that idea. It basically forces you to send your mail through an SMTP server on the same network.
I rather do.
I have all my servers sendmail (or rather Postfix) installations to relay through the server we use as a mail server (also using Postfix). It greatly simplifies administration - each server has a very simple Postfix configuration and the default alias file, and since *all* mail (including mail to localhost) gets routed by the local Postfix to the smarthost:
- you just need one alias file - only one machine (the smart host) needs anything special configuration wise - you can have global rewrite rules in a single config file instead of having to do it on each server - only one machine has to interact with the internet, meaning only one system has to have egress on port 25, simplifying firewall rules - less things interacting with the internet that you have to monitor.
What can Bush do? Him talking about New Orleans won't stop the bodies. Him visiting NO will only intefere with the rescue work ongoing. The right thing for Bush to do is to not intefere and keep well away, and let the disaster relief workers get on with their jobs.
AFAIK, no current operating system is both usable and provides adequate protection mechanisms against viruses
SElinux does (and ships by default turned ON with distros like CentOS 4). SElinux adds the fine-grained permissions which don't just apply to users, but programs too (and even the login method used if you so choose). The 'targeted' policy made by RedHat for RHEL (and thus in CentOS too) prevents things like getting rooted via an exploit in a CGI script allowing an attacker to upload a local root exploit - even if the attacker gets root, SElinux stops them doing anything other than what the vulnerable CGI program was allowed to do (which can be very little).
1. Ice displaces its weight in water. Try this: fill a tall glass with water. Add an ice cube. Mark the level of water. Let it melt. Note how the water level *has not changed*. It won't make the water level go down. 2. Much of the arctic ice is in Greenland. It is on land. When this melts it will add a significant volume of water to the oceans.
If the ice melts, the global water level will go UP due to the ice on Greenland melting.
Twenty years ago (1985) my school geography classrooms had many posters up about global warming, saying pretty much the same thing that's being said now.
If they want impulse buyers, they definitely DO NOT want to raise the price. The current pricing serves impulse buying very well - raise the price and many impulse buyers will stop.
No, a decade ago it was Windows 95 that was going to be a big opportunity for OS/2 to make headway. Linux in 1995 had a windowing system but no desktop as such (in those days, you usually used Open Look or FVWM, and it was really a method to have several shell sessions on screen at once or perhaps play a networked game of xpilot).
Not quite. Linux had a rudimentary but workable TCP/IP stack (Net1) back in 1993. Microsoft hadn't even acknowledged the existence of the Internet in 1993.
No, humans (nor any terrestrial multicelled organism) cannot live in the current Mars climate. The atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide at very low pressures. Were you to step outside, your time of useful consciousness would be measured in seconds (and no, holding your breath won't work - you wouldn't be able to hold an almost 15 psi differential in your lungs).
However, this is a very interesting cockup, and the author wrote the story well:
Mike O'Brien The Aerospace Corporation ============= Subj: Just extracted this from the WAR_STORIES notefile. Long but amusing.
VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. In
my business, I am frequently called by small sites
and startups having VAX problems. So when a friend of
mine in an Extremely Large Financial Institution
(ELFI) called me one day to ask for help, I was
intrigued because this outfit is a really major VAX
user - they have several large herds of VAXen - and
plenty of sharp VAXherds to take care of them.
So I went to see what sort of an ELFI mess they had
gotten into. It seems they had shoved a small 750
with two RA60's running a single application, PC
style, into a data center with two IBM 3090's and
just about all the rest of the disk drives in the
world. The computer room was so big it had three
street addresses. The operators had only IBM
experience and, to quote my friend, they were having
"a little trouble adjusting to the VAX", were a bit
hostile towards it and probably needed some help with
system management. Hmmm, Hostility... Sigh.
Well, I thought it was pretty ridiculous for an
outfit with all that VAX muscle elsewhere to isolate
a dinky old 750 in their Big Blue Country, and said
so bluntly. But my friend patiently explained that
although small, it was an "extremely sensitive and
confidential application." It seems that the 750 had
originally been properly clustered with the rest of a
herd and in the care of one of their best VAXherds.
But the trouble started when the Chief User went to
visit his computer and its
I didn't think the Sun 4 (i.e. original SPARC systems) came out until at least the early 90s... how come you have a 1983 manufacturing date on the thing?
Nothing unfortunate about needing 200-240v power. Countries with properly designed electricity distribution use this voltage by default:-)
(Just kidding, but when I lived in the US, I found 120v just too weedy. You can't run a good electric kettle off it, you need a separate 220v feed for a dryer or electric oven, and the supply at the sockets could deliver less than half the power than the sockets back home).
HD DVD technologies will probably take years to go anywhere anyway, regardless of DRM or no DRM.
Why was the CD a big success? It offered enormous convenience over the existing forms (records and tapes) and an enormous leap in quality - cracks and pops gone. Wow and flutter gone from tapes. No rewinding necessary.
Why was DVD a big success fairly quickly? It wasn't just the improved quality over VHS. Mostly it was the ease of use. A small disc that doesn't have to be rewound, doesn't snag, doesn't have tracking that goes out of alignment, and the quality was much much better.
But for most people, DVD is good enough. A new format will offer no extra convenience, and will cost a lot to buy - certainly for a fair while (high quality displays have always been expensive). Therefore, high definition disc formats will probably be relegated for years, perhaps decades, to the audio/videophile segment - a very small fraction of the market. Just like LaserDisc really. For everyone else, normal DVDs are cheap and good enough.
That would be a complete disaster. Apple sells on "it just works". A non-optimized crippled version of the OS would be an anathema. It would damage Apple's reputation.
Apple's goal is not to be a parts-bucket company for parts-bucket machines (a major cause of unreliability on normal PCs).
Britain passed the Clean Air Act several decades ago. One of the provisions was for fireplaces - you must burn smokeless fuels in cities because coal burning fireplaces were a MAJOR cause of smog in the winter.
Slashdot Mirror
Never played Myst, but in the same genre, I played the 7th Guest (which came free with a CD-ROM drive) and Riven (which came free with a DVD-ROM drive). The common point I felt about these games - it was like someone said, "We have this new high capacity disk! We need to write a game that fills it up!" and they were nothing more than trying to show how much stuff you could get on a CD-ROM (and then a DVD-ROM).
From where I sit, they certainly seem to have succeeded in owning video, at least for short clips. Every single video clip I get a link from or sent by a friend is WMV. Every single one of them. The only people using MPEG-4 are pirates putting up torrents, and one hold-out called the BBC who still uses Real.
Obviously this guy wasn't a Slashdotter, or he'd have linked to our favorite image... the Goatse Guy!
Well, if a lot of them seem to - name ten of them.
Ah, OK, it was just a blind assertion after all!
PDF is an open, documented format, and anyone can implement it.
In particular:
- On Linux, ggv will open PDF documents quickly and very happily, and they didn't need to reverse engineer anything or infringe patents to do it. It's free.
- On Windows, there are viewers that aren't Acrobat.
- OpenOffice on all plaforms can output PDF. No $400 license needed to generate the PDF.
- Scripting tools: GhostScript can be used for the batch generation or batch printing of PDF files. GhostScript is free. Our customers regularly send us thousands of print jobs - usually as PDF, which we run through gs, which is available for many platforms including Windows and Linux.
- There are lots of automatic tools for generating PDF on the fly, such as HTMLdoc (a GPLed tool, which is available for Windows, Linux, Mac etc. and includes a GUI).
- The Macintosh by default can create output from ANY program as PDF, because you can print to PDF. There are similar print drivers for Windows.
You don't need to pay Adobe any money to read, generate or manipulate PDF files. It's an open format. Many programs can do it. It's only those who know of nothing outside of a Microsoft catalogue who think it's different.
I rather do.
I have all my servers sendmail (or rather Postfix) installations to relay through the server we use as a mail server (also using Postfix). It greatly simplifies administration - each server has a very simple Postfix configuration and the default alias file, and since *all* mail (including mail to localhost) gets routed by the local Postfix to the smarthost:
- you just need one alias file
- only one machine (the smart host) needs anything special configuration wise
- you can have global rewrite rules in a single config file instead of having to do it on each server
- only one machine has to interact with the internet, meaning only one system has to have egress on port 25, simplifying firewall rules
- less things interacting with the internet that you have to monitor.
What can Bush do? Him talking about New Orleans won't stop the bodies. Him visiting NO will only intefere with the rescue work ongoing. The right thing for Bush to do is to not intefere and keep well away, and let the disaster relief workers get on with their jobs.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt - the dangerous radioactivity doesn't actually last that long.
Galveston is not 'cute'. It's desperately awful. I used to live not far from there. The place is run down and decaying.
Make a GSM phone and you don't have to find a carrier - all the subscriber needs to do is buy the phone and insert their SIM. Carrier be damned!
1. Ice displaces its weight in water. Try this: fill a tall glass with water. Add an ice cube. Mark the level of water. Let it melt. Note how the water level *has not changed*. It won't make the water level go down.
2. Much of the arctic ice is in Greenland. It is on land. When this melts it will add a significant volume of water to the oceans.
If the ice melts, the global water level will go UP due to the ice on Greenland melting.
Twenty years ago (1985) my school geography classrooms had many posters up about global warming, saying pretty much the same thing that's being said now.
If they want impulse buyers, they definitely DO NOT want to raise the price. The current pricing serves impulse buying very well - raise the price and many impulse buyers will stop.
No, a decade ago it was Windows 95 that was going to be a big opportunity for OS/2 to make headway. Linux in 1995 had a windowing system but no desktop as such (in those days, you usually used Open Look or FVWM, and it was really a method to have several shell sessions on screen at once or perhaps play a networked game of xpilot).
Not quite. Linux had a rudimentary but workable TCP/IP stack (Net1) back in 1993. Microsoft hadn't even acknowledged the existence of the Internet in 1993.
I hope for your sake that the company in question is not MISYS...BCPL and Tripos, yeuch!
No, humans (nor any terrestrial multicelled organism) cannot live in the current Mars climate. The atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide at very low pressures. Were you to step outside, your time of useful consciousness would be measured in seconds (and no, holding your breath won't work - you wouldn't be able to hold an almost 15 psi differential in your lungs).
However, this is a very interesting cockup, and the author wrote the story well:
I didn't think the Sun 4 (i.e. original SPARC systems) came out until at least the early 90s... how come you have a 1983 manufacturing date on the thing?
Nothing unfortunate about needing 200-240v power. Countries with properly designed electricity distribution use this voltage by default :-)
(Just kidding, but when I lived in the US, I found 120v just too weedy. You can't run a good electric kettle off it, you need a separate 220v feed for a dryer or electric oven, and the supply at the sockets could deliver less than half the power than the sockets back home).
HD DVD technologies will probably take years to go anywhere anyway, regardless of DRM or no DRM.
Why was the CD a big success? It offered enormous convenience over the existing forms (records and tapes) and an enormous leap in quality - cracks and pops gone. Wow and flutter gone from tapes. No rewinding necessary.
Why was DVD a big success fairly quickly? It wasn't just the improved quality over VHS. Mostly it was the ease of use. A small disc that doesn't have to be rewound, doesn't snag, doesn't have tracking that goes out of alignment, and the quality was much much better.
But for most people, DVD is good enough. A new format will offer no extra convenience, and will cost a lot to buy - certainly for a fair while (high quality displays have always been expensive). Therefore, high definition disc formats will probably be relegated for years, perhaps decades, to the audio/videophile segment - a very small fraction of the market. Just like LaserDisc really. For everyone else, normal DVDs are cheap and good enough.
Instead of whining about people whining about dupes, why not just not read the comments of people whining about the dupes?
That would be a complete disaster. Apple sells on "it just works". A non-optimized crippled version of the OS would be an anathema. It would damage Apple's reputation.
Apple's goal is not to be a parts-bucket company for parts-bucket machines (a major cause of unreliability on normal PCs).
Britain passed the Clean Air Act several decades ago. One of the provisions was for fireplaces - you must burn smokeless fuels in cities because coal burning fireplaces were a MAJOR cause of smog in the winter.