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User: Desperado

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  1. Re:If ClarisWorks &c didn't cut it. . on Will Apple and Microsoft Renew their Vows? · · Score: 2

    As a new Mac user (I got an iBook for Christmas) I can't compare Apple Works' file format compatibility a couple releases ago to the current release. But, the version that came bundled with my iBook can import an impressive number of formats including *.doc and it does it very well.

    When I import it looks like an independent conversion engine is invoked.

    Maybe you should put some sample docs on a floppy (well maybe not on a floppy) and try out the conversion capabilites of the iBook version of Apple Works at your nearby Apple store/CompUSA. I think you might be pleasantly surprized.

  2. I'm confused by the Tin Foil Hat Link on Tinfoil Hat Linux: A Distribution for the Paranoid · · Score: 2

    The writeup has a link to Tin Foil Hat which is really a rant on how Liberals and Democrats are insane and cites the Presidential election of 2000 as proof.

    It seems to me that Liberals and Democrats have historically been supporters of an Individual's right to privacy. Which is what this Linux distro. aims to provide. So why put in an inflamatory reference like this?

    Could that link be the best explanation of the origin of the "Tin Foil Hat"? I shure hope it isn't.

  3. Re:*sigh* Same old line. on AOL Time Warner Files Anti-Trust Suit against MS · · Score: 2

    And they needed to KEEP RUNNING. But they didn't. They chose to stagnate. They let Microsoft catch up, and
    clean up their browser, along with adding the ability to properly render buggy code so they would be the "more compatible" browser when netscape would break on poorly written HTML code. They gave Microsoft the chance to play the "embrace and extend" game and were forced to switch into playing catchup themselves. And that's a game Microsoft can play forever.


    IIRC they didn't *choose* to stagnate but they did choose to completely rewrite their browser (something that is almost never a good idea). They needed to stay ahead of IE with features and standards instead of waisting months and months rewriting. This is what let Microsoft catch up.

  4. The tragedy of the Commons on Lawrence Lessig Answers Your Questions · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Dr. Lessig's comparason of the Internet as a Commons created for the free use of all and its gradual co-option by corporate/national interests reminded me of an old poem:

    "The law condemns the man or woman
    Who steals the goose from off the common,
    But lets the greater felon loose
    Who steals the common from the goose."

    We need to focus more on the Commons and how it benefits us all and less on the individual transgressions on the Commons.

  5. Re:as usual, this has nothing to do with Microsoft on Amazon: Linux Saved Us Millions · · Score: 1

    But, both Linux and Microsoft are targeting the corporate servers traditionally the province of mainframes and more recently Unix boxen. So every Linux inroad into this market is a loss for Microsoft. This is where the current battlelines are being drawn and thus the IT press will bring in the Microsoft angle, even if only indirectly.

    It is germain IMO.

  6. Re:as usual, this has nothing to do with Microsoft on Amazon: Linux Saved Us Millions · · Score: 1

    Actually the article does talk about Microsoft and Windows servers.
    From the article:

    "Amazon's disclosure could
    provide hard data for Linux
    proponents who have long argued
    that the open-source software
    can save corporations money
    over the alternatives, such as
    Unix and Microsoft's various
    Windows products. A Microsoft
    representative, however, warned
    that short-term savings seen by
    Amazon could turn into a
    long-term increase in costs."

    So your point that Amazon's shift was from Unix to Linux says nothing about the additional points raised in the article which did certainly draw the comparison to Microsoft's products.

  7. Battery life shouldn't be an issue on Citizen/IBM To Make A Linux Watch · · Score: 1
    Citizen watches makes watches that recharge themselves and have something like a 4 year reserve and power saving features.

    The real issues will be what features can be supported in a device the size of (a presumably largish) wristwatch.

    This may be the PDA equivalent of the dancing bear. It's not that it dances well that's amazing. What's amazing is that it can dance at all.

  8. Re:A simple keystroke logger can be elegant, too on FBI Files Brief on Scarfo Keylogger · · Score: 1
    When the FBI or police has enough evidence to get a search warrant, they then have the right to see the contents of your encrypted files. If they turn up anything related to the scope of the search warrant, then that should be used as evidence against you. Encryption is not to protect you from being convicted of crimes, it is to keep your information secure from outside parties reading it.

    Our constitutional guarentees on unreasonable search and seizures, forced testamony, self incrimination, and court decisions like the Miranda decision indicate to me that I have the right to keep my information private from every outside party even the government.

    In this case the FBI had, in my opinion, the equivalent of an illegal wire tap.

    Strong encryption technology is under attack because it can provide privacy to criminals and terrorists as well as everyone else who desires privacy. In this modern world of street corner cameras and face recognition, and attempts to "outsource" illegal survaillance by getting from cooperative foreign governments we need, more than ever, to have our hard won freedoms defended by our elected officials, our law enforcement officers and our court system.

  9. Re:So sad... on Berkely Breathed Interview · · Score: 1
    But it's not hopeless.

    I enjoy Sylvia by Nicole Hollander which almost got bumped from my daily paper but was saved by popular demand. They did move it off the comic pages tho (not unlike Doonsbury which unfortunately I don't get). A link to her (slow) website will give you a taste of her work.

  10. Re:Are you serious? on Is The U.S. No Longer The Choice For Freedom? · · Score: 1

    You can't have safety and freedom, even at the cost of QoL.

    Of course you can. I think you mean that if the *Government* guarantees your safety then it would impinge on your freedom. However, as an individual, you could have safety and freedom by making some QoL decisions like moving to a low risk neighborhood or state. Fortify yourself, take martial arts training ... whatever. Depending on your QoL needs, it seems to me you could, in fact, have all three - Freedom, Safety and Quality of Life just don't ask the government to do it for you.

  11. Re:In the beginning, the command line was invented on The Origin Of The Shell · · Score: 1
    Yes, thanks for the research and link. It was Stephen Groskey whom I met at B-R in the late '70s. Claim 6 seems to be the one overing the cursor, although you are correct that it isn't completely clear that a visible character is meant here.

  12. Re:In the beginning, the command line was invented on The Origin Of The Shell · · Score: 1
    well, it might *seem* like a joke but there really is (was?) a B-R engineer who they said "invented" the cursor. Now I realize this seems preposterous but nevertheless it's what they claimed. It probably involved a patent....

    Anyway, it is funny but no funnier than some recent "inventions" I could mention.

  13. Re:In the beginning, the command line was invented on The Origin Of The Shell · · Score: 1
    Yes, but how did you know where to type? That was the problem solved by the invention of the cursor or little flashing green blob on the otherwise blank screen.

    I actually met the Bunker-Ramo engineer, I can no longer remember his name, who invented the cursor. Other B-R engineers seemingly held him in great awe.

    So the Multics engineers who invented runcom were standing on the shoulders of such true giants as the father of the cursor.

  14. God I loved this book on Stranger In a Strange Land · · Score: 1
    when I was barely in my 20's and it was the 60's. All my friends loved it too. We started grokking everything.

    I ran across it again on my book shelves a few years ago and decided to reread it. That was a mistake. Tom Wolfe is correct - you can't go home again. Thirty years of growing up was just too much, and the magic was gone.

    If you're young and idealistic this book can make you soar and if you're not...well you'll hate it.

  15. Re:Does Alien Life Exist?? on Alien Life Found On Earth? · · Score: 1
    This link gives a pretty good rebuttal to the notion that with so many planets in the universe there just has to be a lot of intelligences out there.

    The question is: if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?

  16. Re:Getting the best out of people on CIA Chat Room Violates The Company's Policy · · Score: 1
    CIA or not, if 160 employees decide to break the rules in this way, isn't it just a sign that their employers aren't providing them with the (legitimate) resources to do their job effectively?

    The article spoke of passing around jokes and the like...this doesn't sound like a part of doing their job effectively.

    I am surprised that 160 CIA employees would get together to use a secret chat room. Evidentally they could all keep a secret though. Seems like someone would have slipped up and spilled the beans. Terrible judgement but can keep a secret...one out of two isn't bad.

  17. Re:Thankfully it's not complete :) on Visual Map of Unix history · · Score: 1
    Just to add a little to the babble, I owned a Z80 S-100 UNIX-like system based on the functionality of V7 with some Berkeley stuff called Micronix from Morrow Designs back in the mid '80s. It was quite nice and had CPM functionality added (CPM calls mapped to UNIX) and supported well behaved CPM programs running alongside UNIX programs. Quite a bit like the VMUnix functionality we have today only included in the kernel.

    It was pretty advanced for the time, the hardware supported memory beyond 64K and had memory mapping and memory protect hardware. My system had two 8" Qume floppys and two 5" hard sectored floppys and no HD for about 2.8MB of disk space. The kernel was under 64KB.

    The permutations of what Bell Labs and Dennis Richie started surely are practically unbelievable and it keeps on getting better.

  18. Re:It's ready for the desktop in my house on SuSE clarifies "Linux on the desktop" Statement · · Score: 1
    Not a problem. Just purchase a box with Linux already installed.

    No one else in my family could have installed NT or Win9x on a raw machine. If they could, SuSE or presumably some other Distro. would not be any harder and would require fewer reboots.

    By the way, SuSE recognized all my hardware, configured X and let me configure my modem all from the setup/admin program YAST.

  19. It's ready for the desktop in my house on SuSE clarifies "Linux on the desktop" Statement · · Score: 3
    Here's my story.

    I partitioned my NT 4.0 machine and installed SuSE 6.0 for my use. It worked well but I would boot back to NT for my family (wife and daughter) to use. I recompiled kernels, generally messed with the OS and eventually upgraded to 6.1 in yet another partition. Still booting back to NT when I got off the machine.

    Needless to say, I got tired of this and built my own SuSE 6.2 box for myself to avoid the constant booting. Well, do I now have my own machine to putz around with? No. The family is more than likely to be using the SuSE box...seems that it's faster and has some games they like better than the ones that came with NT!

    I do have a box to use most times but it's often the NT box because someone's using the SuSE box. I'd say it's ready for the home desktop.

    The only complaints I get is that some web sites have plugins that aren't Linux compatible but that's changing in some quarters.

    Of all the OS installs I've done, I'd say SuSE installs went smoother than NT installs and I've never had to reinstall SuSE because it wasn't working right. Wish I could say that about NT. Currently it isn't really working right but I hate doing NT installs so I'm living with it. I know it'll get worse and I'll have to bite the bullet and fix it someday....

    I'm going to put it off as long as possible though.

  20. Re:Fun stuff! on Ball Lightning Explained? · · Score: 4

    I too wonder how it can appear in airplanes. A few years ago I was in a DC-10 late one night circling DFW waiting to get a slot to land during a severe thunderstorm. I, and other passengers, saw ball lightening float down the aisle between our seats and exit the rear bulkhead of the aircraft. Where it went after that I have no idea. Scared the *** out of me.

  21. Definately the GNU Manifesto on Ask Slashdot: Significant Documents of the Internet · · Score: 3

    I first saw the GNU Mainfesto by Richard Stallman in Dr. Dobbs' Journal in 1985 (I think) and I wrote Richard to see what I could do and got a letter back which just overwhelmed me with what he wanted to do. Overwhelmed in the sense that I sat on the sidelines because I didn't think I could do any of the things he listed. Write a compiler, recode UNIX utilities, create an operating system. I wasn't up to any of these. But I was caught up in the vision.

    I'm glad there were many others caught up in the vision who were not overwhelmed and made the dream a reality. Would it have happened without the manifesto? I doubt it.

  22. There was some competition to MSDOS besides DRDOS on 10 years ago -- "Competition undermining Microsoft" · · Score: 1

    There was also the Z system or ZCPR which ran all the msdos apps just fine, added a unix like file system, search paths, alias' support etc. and came with the source code so you could adapt it to new chips, make improvements etc.

    Kinda like a linux in it's own way.

    As long as I'm showing my "age" before the Z system, I ran an S-100 box by Morrow Designs which had Z-80 processor and Micronix which was Morrow designs' "unix" it was mostly version 7 with some Berkley enhancements. It also had a MSDOS shell that trapped the MSDOS BIOS calls and mapped them to Micronix calls. Worked real well too. Could run any well designed MSDOS application and multi-task them too. It was lots of fun but George Morrow couldn't get it to go mainstream and as so many early hobbiest companies did back then, simply faded away.

    I'd like to blame it's demise on Micro$oft but ....

    Those were fun times, and so are these just in a different way.

    John

  23. GNU is asking for credit where credit is due on RMS Immature, Slashdot and Community Arrogant? · · Score: 1
    Welllll, sort of. There is also some envy here I think. RMS has gotten a lot of recognition over the years but all the ink is now flowing in Linus's direction.

    Well too bad Richard.

    If Chippindale built a table we all liked to do our work on should we be required to also recognize the suppliers of the tools used to build the table?

    The Stanley-DeWalt/Chippindale table perhaps?

  24. Just Doin' What they do best on Linux and Lawyers · · Score: 1

    turning a wonderful positive thing,free software, into a movement designed to impoverish a whole class of people, IP lawyers. Do you suppose they'll sue?