This technology is convenient, cost-effective, and most of all, good for the environment.
It is convenient because it will require stores to continue buying copies of the same movie to rent out.
It is cost-effective because it is certainly cheaper to purchase new copies of the same disc than to purchase a disc once.
It means that more natural resources will be used up in generating the otherwise unnecessary copies, which will fill our landfills with yet more garbage. Both of these are clearly good for the environment.
In short, I believe this technology should be extended to every area of business. For examples, books will henceforth be printed with ink that disappears the instant it has been read, utilizing chemicals that react to eyesight particles; Cars will ship with full gas tanks, and will turn into pumpkins when out of gas; Microwaves will only heat one dish and then explode; Hammers will disintegrate after hammering one nail, etc. (After all, hammer manufacturers have the right to make a profit on each nail that is being hammered.)
There certainly have been moon landings, but not before 1982, when NASA finally invented the technologies to get past the radiation belt. The world was fooled over a decade before into believing that Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. All the images and whatnot from the various Apollo missions were fakes. I have bulletproof evidence to support this claim: Two different people, who do not know each other, have separately told me that they doubt the moon landings took place.
I made a patch that makes Linux crash immediately upon startup, and I DEMAND that Linus include it in his tree. I will accept no answer except 'yes' and I will whine about it non-stop until it happens to my satisfaction. And, yes, I strongly believe that my whining and complaining, four hours before feature freeze, will cause Linus to include my patch just to shut me up.
In other words, I totally comprehend his message and as such, I'll place his suggestions in effect immediately.
I have an idea. Why don't these IDIOTS at Red Hat just get rid of all the shells and install ONE shell. Just decide on one... whether it is bash or ksh or fuckyoush or whatever, and leave us alone. And do the same for the graphical interface. Fucking idiots.
In other news, Intel has today announced the immediate delivery of their new processor, the Crazium. Touted as being the most technologically advanced processor ever developed, the Crazium is said to execute, in a matter of microseconds, programs that take many hundreds of hours on the most powerful supercomputers.
The Crazium boasts many innovative technologies that will certainly crush all of Intel's competitors. These include:
Simultaneous Multiprocessing, a technology said to allow several hundred instructions to execute through the same physical wires and gates simultaneously. This allows Intel to reduce the transistor count from 948,089,112,552 transistors, as in the Pentium 6, to 14 transistors. (Plans for the next revision include dropping one of the remaining 14 transistors for cost effectiveness.)
Temporal Result Ordering, which uses a built-in fluxcapacitor to efficiently move instructions and data backwards and forwards in time. This allows the processor to execute code during idle cycles and deliver the results to processes that have already finished executing, or will begin executing at some future time. This provides an incredible boost in speed and efficiency because:
The processor can use the result of a computation before the computation itself is executed, and even before the program that contains the computation is loaded into memory.
Computations whose results will be used at some future time can be performed early, before the user even decides to run the program.
SpiritRun Technology, an extension of Temporal Result Ordering, which allows the processor to execute program code by its spirit, rather than its letter. As all programs contain bugs, or programmer errors which lead to undesired program behavior and crashes, this technology will save businesses over $80 billion dollars per year in lost data, staff time and resources. SpiritRun uses Temporal Result Ordering to detect crashes before they occur (again, during idle cycles taking place in the past, present or future) and analyses the program in its entirety to determine the cause of the undesired operation. At this time, the processor automatically corrects the program code to provide the desired operation. This technology also makes all code 100% secure because the processor detects crackers before they're even born and automatically modifies the holes that allowed them access in the first place.
Built-in Photorealism Processing Unit, which generates photorealistic graphics by allocating a parallel universe which physically contains a perfect replica of the object being rendered and a photographer. The photographer takes a perfect photograph of the subject and it is digitally transmitted via the Interverse to the processor. Because the parallel universe has a timeline of its own, completely separated from our perception of time, this information appears to arrive immediately, even though the photography may take several hours in the parallel universe.
Built-in Orchestra Sound Unit, which generates sounds for audio applications which rivals that of the greatest orchestras in the world. This works similarly to the Photorealism Processing Unit, except that a parallel universe is created which contains an orchestra. The sound is recorded and transmitted, again, appearing to arrive immediately, even though the orchestra may have practiced the piece for years in the parallel universe.
As you can clearly see, AMD has a lot of catching up to do.
This is the most amazing technological development in the history of all mankind! I believe all the governments of the world should immediately shut down any and all governmental programs, combine to form one united world, and dump all of the resulting resources, in their entirety, into the continuing development and improvement of this amazing technology which will surely bring eternal world peace and salvation to all!
Well, maybe not. But seriously, I've had this dream for probably the longest time to implement a web server plug-in that executes the old text-based adventure game engines that ran games like ADVENT (also known as Adventure and Colossal Cave Adventure), which had first appeared in the good ol' days of the PDP-10. The idea was to add on to the adventure "world" all the time, so that a TEXT BASED GAME would eventually take up many hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk space and provide endless enjoyment for people all over the world. I imagined people from everywhere creating new areas in this virtual world and turning it into some huge, enormous monstrocity. In related news, I also thought that a web-based format would work extraordinarily well for graphical adventure games like Sierra made back in the days. Man, those were the good ol' days. Oh well.
Yeah. And when Microsoft embraces and extends XML so it only works with Windows by obfuscating the format to the extent that nobody wants to parse it except the 20,000 monkeys beating away at Microsoft's very own 20,000 keyboards, nothing good will come of it. Oh well.
The word "forged" does not fit in the phrase "forged headers." I believe a better word is "modified."
As with all computerized information that can be modified, I strongly believe it should not be illegal to modify headers in an email message. The possibility of such modification is extremely useful for the computer professional in fields including programming, debugging and network administration.
Instead of having laws passed to dictate what can be done with a particular tool, I believe resources should instead be spent on securing and strengthening software, and on otherwise improving this field technically. To prevent the reception of email messages that appear to come from a trusted source, all email clients should automatically apply encryption. Nearly all mail sent through the postal service is enclosed in envelopes. I strongly believe the electronic realm would benefit from the electronic equivalent of an envelope.
I can't wait until they make this into a wireless protocol, and then people's pens start getting exploited. Can you wait until even something you write on PAPER ends up on someone's computer in CHINA?!?!!
Yeah. Why am I not surprised? As a matter of opinion, the freedoms of speech and of the press should be 100% pure, untouched freedoms. Sure. So people will go publishing libelous stuff and slandering other people. But I have a solution.
All of our fine Nation's problems stem from the educational system, which has lost all its power, even to the point that teachers are afraid to discipline ANY student in ANY way for fear of getting on national television. As a matter of fact, even private school teachers I know of award A's and B's to students who are obviously failing the class, simply because the school is afraid of parents pulling their children out of the school. Students graduate high school without knowing jack. This has turned into a daycare system rather than an educational one. This leads to problems such as:
People believing EVERYTHING they read.
People believing EVERYTHING they hear.
People expecting the government to take care of everything, entering into every aspect of private citizens' lives and pocketbooks in the process, as opposed to the correct system called individual responsibility.
Fix the educational system, get rid of 90% of the government (thus creating opportunities for private businesses to handle the functions that have no business being in the government), and get rid of the crap that hacks away at our individual freedoms one by one.
With an academic system in place that teaches people to speak and write correctly from day one, and no restrictions on what you can say and write, we'll have a lot of bullshit to filter through, but at least we'll have our freedom, and that's worth more than all the alleged safety in the world.
I learned a really cool word once: Consolidation. According to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, It means:
the act or process of consolidating : the state of being consolidated
the process of uniting : the quality or state of being united; specifically : the unification of two or more corporations by dissolution of existing ones and creation of a single new corporation
pathological alteration of lung tissue from an aerated condition to one of solid consistency
I'm pointing out this vocabulary word because I'm trying to say that all these VICTIM companies must band together in an effort to wipe out these criminals, and furthermore, to take legal action against the government for allowing a ridiculous patent, which was OBVIOUSLY issued in malice, to be issued in the first place.
Oh yeah. And don't forget to spell "consolidation" twenty five times and to use it in three sentences.
Why in the fuck^H^H^H^Hheck does NASA want to build a fancy shmancy space station 5/6th of the way to the moon if they don't have enough dinero to slop together one right here above our own flippin' planet?
Oh. I feel SO sorry for these poor, unfortunate Hollywood producers and studios! As a matter of fact, I believe their doom will bring down the entire world in an economic crisis worse in its consequences than any global nuclear war. As such, I believe the United States government should immediately raise our taxes by several exponents and give ALL of the tax revenues to the MPAA. This will allow poor children in El Salvador to have a warm meal every evening.
What I don't get about Netscape and its developers is... Why do you folks think that the browser must be the front end to everything? Why shouldn't, for example, a text editor, or email client be the front end to everything? As far as I am concerned, the operating system has evolved to be this front end that everyone is looking for. Back in the day, the operating system did mundane, boring things that users didn't want to think about. But now, the operating system is expected to do everything, plus make cappuccino. So why do we need yet another (entirely too bloated) layer--the web browser--on top of the operating system? A web browser should do just that: Browse the web. Email should happen in a separate program. News in a separate program too. IRC or whatever in yet another separate program... The fact that web browsers need to provide the ability to interact with web pages doesn't necessarily mean that the entire world must work over HTTP port 80. Because there are 65534 more perfectly good ports to work with, and for a good reason.
I would like to relate a recent experience with NETSCAPE 7.0. Please excuse two paragraphs or so of background information...
Those who have read my literature (/. postings) in the past will know that I HATE Windows because it is TRASH. But unfortunately, my mother's work requires her to use Windows due to a proprietary application they use that isn't available on an operating system that actually works. So she has this laptop with Windows XP Home Edition. Now I'll admit that for the rare cases that I must use Windows, there's a crappy old box around here that's running Windows 98 SE. It's pretty crappy, but I removed pretty much all the superfluous junk from the installation, so it doesn't crash more than once in a blue moon^H^H^H^Hscreen or so. So while 98 is not my operating system of choice, it's admittedly not quite THAT bad when there's no other way to get the job done. I've had very minimal experience with setting things up for people on 95, 98, Me, NT, and 2000. All of them were crap. 95b was the best one (it could run for up to six or seven days without a reboot), but doesn't run on new hardware. 98 SE is somewhat usable. Me was probably the worst one I had seen so far... Everything is so complicated, cluttered up, and messy. But then my mother asked me to "make the internet work" on her laptop... And it's running XP.
Now I do have to admit that I was impressed with ONE aspect of Windows XP: You plug in a network cable; it recognizes it and you're on the network. You plug in a ZIP drive, it recognizes it and that's that. You plug in a printer, it's automatically added to your printers thing. I wish somebody'd reverse engineer that and make it work on operating systems. But that was the extent of my good impression. The rest of XP is GARBAGE!!! The multiuser aspect of it is really clunky and crappy. The graphics are REALLY ugly; I had to revert it to the "Classic" look before my vision got damaged. The sounds were as stupid as ever; I had to delete them all. And the thing was as unreliable as software from Microsoft. Oh wait... That
is from Microsoft. Guess that explains it.:)
But I digress... So back to *N*E*T*S*C*A*P*E* I installed Netscape for my mom, because Internet Explorer is trash. Netscape, in my opinion, is lacking in many areas (such as usability), but I'll classify it as software, rather than trash. So I installed it. The install went along pretty smoothly and before I knew it, I had Netscape launched. The new graphics are MUCH nicer than the extremely crappy ones in Communicator 4.x. But the initial screen was SOOOOOO cluttered!!! Buttons and tabs and side bars EVERYWHERE! As an experienced user of computers and web browsers, I couldn't hear myself think, so to speak, in all this optical noise. I immediately turned all that crap off and modified all the settings to my liking, so that my mother, who has much less experience than myself, would actually be able to use the damn thing. And then it happened. The next time I launched Netscape, everything locked up and the disk started crunching and grinding away like there was no tomorrow. Even the ctrl-alt-delete window took forever to show up. I ended up forcefully shutting off the power, because I couldn't even log out. (Yeah yeah... File a bug report--but do you HONESTLY think that my mother knows what a bug report IS, let alone knows how to file one?!!) And this is where the background information on XP comes in... I guess it REMEMBERS what made it crash and when you reboot it (or log out and log back in) it does it over again, consequently putting itself in the same situation and locking up again. That's what happened. Whenever I logged into my mother's account, the whole computer became so unresponsive (from the grinding and whatnot) that I couldn't even open up the huge, cumbersome Start menu. (Mafiasoft. Where do you want to pay today?)
I noticed that the other account, that I had originally set up for her out of the mere habit of always giving myself three or four accounts on my BSD boxen, still worked fine, so I logged into it, created yet another new account, moved all her files over, and deleted her original account. Oh yeah, and I removed Netscape and purchased a copy of the newest Opera 6.x for her. Sure, its initial screen is a bit cluttered and I have a few complaints about the increasing complexity and proliferation of seemingly unnecessary features (that other people probably want, just not me), but it's small, fast, and it WORKS. Extremely well, I might add. (It's what I am using right now under FreeBSD with Linux compatibility turned on.) Now she's happy as can be... And I know for a FACT that I will not buy a computer with Windows XP. And I am pretty disappointed with Netscape once again (not so much for the crash, but very much so because of the clutter), as I have been for several years. (Yes, I will continue trying it from time to time, because somewhere deep inside, I believe that it will BECOME a very good, reliable web browser. I just wish it'd become as SMALL as Opera (3 megs or so) and as fast. Netscape is very, very slow.)
I hope if any Netscape developers are reading this, that they'll take this as constructive criticism rather than as flamebait. Oh yeah. And YES, I know the Gecko engine is found in Galeon and several other browsers.
Uh, I think every galaxy has one of these in its center. I further believe that every galaxy will consequently get sucked into its black hole. Once that has been carried out successfully, the now entirely too massive black holes will begin to attract each other, during which the universe will begin collapse in on itself, at which time everything will implode within a matter of mere moments (which will appear to stretch out for billions of years due to time dilation) so that everything becomes an infinitely small and infinitely massive point. At that time, time loops over itself and the big bang happens. (I feel like I've written this before... in another life perhaps.)
That evil corporation consists of 20,000 monkeys knocking away at 20,000 keyboards, plus about 100 of the world's greatest con artists, who market crap as quality software, laugh in the face the law, and pull off God only knows what other crimes. And then, Billy Bob over there pretends he doesn't understand the meaning of the English word "concerned." In my opinion, that company should change its name to Mafiasoft and its mission statement should read, "We aspire to bring down the entire civilized world in a spectacular simultaneous crash of every technological device in existance while hoarding every piece of currency on the planet."
Dominic is a good guy, but... WHY THE HELL DOES THIS NEED TO GET DONE?!?!?! All they need to do is use BSD's very own UFS with SoftUpdates!!! That code has been perfected ages ago in BSD and it WORKS GREAT, with NO performance penalty!!! 10%-15% performance penalty... Bah, humbug. At least in BFS the disk access was such that you could barely hear the hard disk head jumping around. (I am still convinced that hard disks holding a BFS filesystem will last MUCH longer than one holding a crappy DOS or HFS+ or whatever.) Unlike in Windows where it practically wakes up the whole neighborhood.
Oh yeah. And BeOS still rocks, even though it is LONG DEAD! LONG LIVE THE DEAD!
Why the hell do you need funding for a project that zillions of folks are doing for FREE by donating their computational resources to the cause?
Oh, and another thing. You know how Microsoft puts ads all over Slashdot? Well, every time I see one, I click on it to get Slashdot some money (and to cause Microsoft to have to spend money) but I never look at the content^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgarbage they are advertising. In other words, I click, and after their trash finishes loading, I click the back button. Thanks, Microsoft. Where do you want to bang your head against the wall today? (I'm saying this because there was one such ad on this page when I opened it.)
Sing to the tune of "We're Following the Leader" from Disney's Peter Pan:
The government is stupid, is stupid, is stupid, the government is stupid, in everything they do.
That's what happens when one part of the government doesn't allow another part of itself to get its job done. And you wonder why it takes years to get a stamp on a piece of paper or something stupid like that.
I am SO upset right now that you simply cannot imagine what I am going through. First of all, I use Minix on three of my four computers. Minix is certainly NOT dead, and I don't know why so many people think that it is. It's the most retarded thing I have ever heard of.
I dunno, man. It looks to me like BSD is alive and well, and doing better each day. As a matter of fact, back in the BeOS days (since R3, when I bought my first BeOS CD, and up until the dot com crash), I used FreeBSD and SuSE Linux for all my serious stuff, and ran much of my desktop stuff on BeOS. When Be, Inc. turned to poop, I blew BeOS off my desktops and installed FreeBSD with XFree instead. As a matter of fact, I doubt I still have Linux installed anywhere, as I became so happy with the well-structured FreeBSD filesystem that I blew Linux off as well. And I must've updated FreeBSD about 4 times since those days. So if anything is dead, it's not BSD, that's for sure.
I have to second this fine person's suggestion for a Powershot A40. My sister recently invested in one and I have personally used this camera. It is very easy to use and just about any picture you take will come out magnificently, regardless of how skilled you are in photography. For a digital camera, the pictures are of very high quality. Even my camera, which is about six times the price, won't take pictures this nice unless you really understand film types, lighting situations and exposure settings. Just my two cents on this matter.
Slashdot Mirror
This technology is convenient, cost-effective, and most of all, good for the environment.
It is convenient because it will require stores to continue buying copies of the same movie to rent out.
It is cost-effective because it is certainly cheaper to purchase new copies of the same disc than to purchase a disc once.
It means that more natural resources will be used up in generating the otherwise unnecessary copies, which will fill our landfills with yet more garbage. Both of these are clearly good for the environment.
In short, I believe this technology should be extended to every area of business. For examples, books will henceforth be printed with ink that disappears the instant it has been read, utilizing chemicals that react to eyesight particles; Cars will ship with full gas tanks, and will turn into pumpkins when out of gas; Microwaves will only heat one dish and then explode; Hammers will disintegrate after hammering one nail, etc. (After all, hammer manufacturers have the right to make a profit on each nail that is being hammered.)
There certainly have been moon landings, but not before 1982, when NASA finally invented the technologies to get past the radiation belt. The world was fooled over a decade before into believing that Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. All the images and whatnot from the various Apollo missions were fakes. I have bulletproof evidence to support this claim: Two different people, who do not know each other, have separately told me that they doubt the moon landings took place.
In other words, I totally comprehend his message and as such, I'll place his suggestions in effect immediately.
I have an idea. Why don't these IDIOTS at Red Hat just get rid of all the shells and install ONE shell. Just decide on one... whether it is bash or ksh or fuckyoush or whatever, and leave us alone. And do the same for the graphical interface. Fucking idiots.
- Simultaneous Multiprocessing, a technology said to allow several hundred instructions to execute through the same physical wires and gates simultaneously. This allows Intel to reduce the transistor count from 948,089,112,552 transistors, as in the Pentium 6, to 14 transistors. (Plans for the next revision include dropping one of the remaining 14 transistors for cost effectiveness.)
- Temporal Result Ordering, which uses a built-in fluxcapacitor to efficiently move instructions and data backwards and forwards in time. This allows the processor to execute code during idle cycles and deliver the results to processes that have already finished executing, or will begin executing at some future time. This provides an incredible boost in speed and efficiency because:
- The processor can use the result of a computation before the computation itself is executed, and even before the program that contains the computation is loaded into memory.
- Computations whose results will be used at some future time can be performed early, before the user even decides to run the program.
- SpiritRun Technology, an extension of Temporal Result Ordering, which allows the processor to execute program code by its spirit, rather than its letter. As all programs contain bugs, or programmer errors which lead to undesired program behavior and crashes, this technology will save businesses over $80 billion dollars per year in lost data, staff time and resources. SpiritRun uses Temporal Result Ordering to detect crashes before they occur (again, during idle cycles taking place in the past, present or future) and analyses the program in its entirety to determine the cause of the undesired operation. At this time, the processor automatically corrects the program code to provide the desired operation. This technology also makes all code 100% secure because the processor detects crackers before they're even born and automatically modifies the holes that allowed them access in the first place.
- Built-in Photorealism Processing Unit, which generates photorealistic graphics by allocating a parallel universe which physically contains a perfect replica of the object being rendered and a photographer. The photographer takes a perfect photograph of the subject and it is digitally transmitted via the Interverse to the processor. Because the parallel universe has a timeline of its own, completely separated from our perception of time, this information appears to arrive immediately, even though the photography may take several hours in the parallel universe.
- Built-in Orchestra Sound Unit, which generates sounds for audio applications which rivals that of the greatest orchestras in the world. This works similarly to the Photorealism Processing Unit, except that a parallel universe is created which contains an orchestra. The sound is recorded and transmitted, again, appearing to arrive immediately, even though the orchestra may have practiced the piece for years in the parallel universe.
As you can clearly see, AMD has a lot of catching up to do.Well, maybe not. But seriously, I've had this dream for probably the longest time to implement a web server plug-in that executes the old text-based adventure game engines that ran games like ADVENT (also known as Adventure and Colossal Cave Adventure), which had first appeared in the good ol' days of the PDP-10. The idea was to add on to the adventure "world" all the time, so that a TEXT BASED GAME would eventually take up many hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk space and provide endless enjoyment for people all over the world. I imagined people from everywhere creating new areas in this virtual world and turning it into some huge, enormous monstrocity. In related news, I also thought that a web-based format would work extraordinarily well for graphical adventure games like Sierra made back in the days. Man, those were the good ol' days. Oh well.
Yeah. And when Microsoft embraces and extends XML so it only works with Windows by obfuscating the format to the extent that nobody wants to parse it except the 20,000 monkeys beating away at Microsoft's very own 20,000 keyboards, nothing good will come of it. Oh well.
As with all computerized information that can be modified, I strongly believe it should not be illegal to modify headers in an email message. The possibility of such modification is extremely useful for the computer professional in fields including programming, debugging and network administration.
Instead of having laws passed to dictate what can be done with a particular tool, I believe resources should instead be spent on securing and strengthening software, and on otherwise improving this field technically. To prevent the reception of email messages that appear to come from a trusted source, all email clients should automatically apply encryption. Nearly all mail sent through the postal service is enclosed in envelopes. I strongly believe the electronic realm would benefit from the electronic equivalent of an envelope.
I can't wait until they make this into a wireless protocol, and then people's pens start getting exploited. Can you wait until even something you write on PAPER ends up on someone's computer in CHINA?!?!!
All of our fine Nation's problems stem from the educational system, which has lost all its power, even to the point that teachers are afraid to discipline ANY student in ANY way for fear of getting on national television. As a matter of fact, even private school teachers I know of award A's and B's to students who are obviously failing the class, simply because the school is afraid of parents pulling their children out of the school. Students graduate high school without knowing jack. This has turned into a daycare system rather than an educational one. This leads to problems such as:
- People believing EVERYTHING they read.
- People believing EVERYTHING they hear.
- People expecting the government to take care of everything, entering into every aspect of private citizens' lives and pocketbooks in the process, as opposed to the correct system called individual responsibility.
Fix the educational system, get rid of 90% of the government (thus creating opportunities for private businesses to handle the functions that have no business being in the government), and get rid of the crap that hacks away at our individual freedoms one by one.With an academic system in place that teaches people to speak and write correctly from day one, and no restrictions on what you can say and write, we'll have a lot of bullshit to filter through, but at least we'll have our freedom, and that's worth more than all the alleged safety in the world.
- the act or process of consolidating : the state of being consolidated
- the process of uniting : the quality or state of being united; specifically : the unification of two or more corporations by dissolution of existing ones and creation of a single new corporation
- pathological alteration of lung tissue from an aerated condition to one of solid consistency
(Aside: I have a feeling the third definition doesn't fit in this current discussion. Link: http://www.britannica.com/dictionary?book=DictionI'm pointing out this vocabulary word because I'm trying to say that all these VICTIM companies must band together in an effort to wipe out these criminals, and furthermore, to take legal action against the government for allowing a ridiculous patent, which was OBVIOUSLY issued in malice, to be issued in the first place.
Oh yeah. And don't forget to spell "consolidation" twenty five times and to use it in three sentences.
Why in the fuck^H^H^H^Hheck does NASA want to build a fancy shmancy space station 5/6th of the way to the moon if they don't have enough dinero to slop together one right here above our own flippin' planet?
Instead of sending it to these two guys, why don't we just mail them to the homes of AOL executives by the thousands?
Oh. I feel SO sorry for these poor, unfortunate Hollywood producers and studios! As a matter of fact, I believe their doom will bring down the entire world in an economic crisis worse in its consequences than any global nuclear war. As such, I believe the United States government should immediately raise our taxes by several exponents and give ALL of the tax revenues to the MPAA. This will allow poor children in El Salvador to have a warm meal every evening.
I would like to relate a recent experience with NETSCAPE 7.0. Please excuse two paragraphs or so of background information...
But I digress... So back to *N*E*T*S*C*A*P*E* I installed Netscape for my mom, because Internet Explorer is trash. Netscape, in my opinion, is lacking in many areas (such as usability), but I'll classify it as software, rather than trash. So I installed it. The install went along pretty smoothly and before I knew it, I had Netscape launched. The new graphics are MUCH nicer than the extremely crappy ones in Communicator 4.x. But the initial screen was SOOOOOO cluttered!!! Buttons and tabs and side bars EVERYWHERE! As an experienced user of computers and web browsers, I couldn't hear myself think, so to speak, in all this optical noise. I immediately turned all that crap off and modified all the settings to my liking, so that my mother, who has much less experience than myself, would actually be able to use the damn thing. And then it happened. The next time I launched Netscape, everything locked up and the disk started crunching and grinding away like there was no tomorrow. Even the ctrl-alt-delete window took forever to show up. I ended up forcefully shutting off the power, because I couldn't even log out. (Yeah yeah... File a bug report--but do you HONESTLY think that my mother knows what a bug report IS, let alone knows how to file one?!!) And this is where the background information on XP comes in... I guess it REMEMBERS what made it crash and when you reboot it (or log out and log back in) it does it over again, consequently putting itself in the same situation and locking up again. That's what happened. Whenever I logged into my mother's account, the whole computer became so unresponsive (from the grinding and whatnot) that I couldn't even open up the huge, cumbersome Start menu. (Mafiasoft. Where do you want to pay today?)
I noticed that the other account, that I had originally set up for her out of the mere habit of always giving myself three or four accounts on my BSD boxen, still worked fine, so I logged into it, created yet another new account, moved all her files over, and deleted her original account. Oh yeah, and I removed Netscape and purchased a copy of the newest Opera 6.x for her. Sure, its initial screen is a bit cluttered and I have a few complaints about the increasing complexity and proliferation of seemingly unnecessary features (that other people probably want, just not me), but it's small, fast, and it WORKS. Extremely well, I might add. (It's what I am using right now under FreeBSD with Linux compatibility turned on.) Now she's happy as can be... And I know for a FACT that I will not buy a computer with Windows XP. And I am pretty disappointed with Netscape once again (not so much for the crash, but very much so because of the clutter), as I have been for several years. (Yes, I will continue trying it from time to time, because somewhere deep inside, I believe that it will BECOME a very good, reliable web browser. I just wish it'd become as SMALL as Opera (3 megs or so) and as fast. Netscape is very, very slow.)
I hope if any Netscape developers are reading this, that they'll take this as constructive criticism rather than as flamebait. Oh yeah. And YES, I know the Gecko engine is found in Galeon and several other browsers.
Dude. I believe this is a hoax. Nice try.
Uh, I think every galaxy has one of these in its center. I further believe that every galaxy will consequently get sucked into its black hole. Once that has been carried out successfully, the now entirely too massive black holes will begin to attract each other, during which the universe will begin collapse in on itself, at which time everything will implode within a matter of mere moments (which will appear to stretch out for billions of years due to time dilation) so that everything becomes an infinitely small and infinitely massive point. At that time, time loops over itself and the big bang happens. (I feel like I've written this before... in another life perhaps.)
That evil corporation consists of 20,000 monkeys knocking away at 20,000 keyboards, plus about 100 of the world's greatest con artists, who market crap as quality software, laugh in the face the law, and pull off God only knows what other crimes. And then, Billy Bob over there pretends he doesn't understand the meaning of the English word "concerned." In my opinion, that company should change its name to Mafiasoft and its mission statement should read, "We aspire to bring down the entire civilized world in a spectacular simultaneous crash of every technological device in existance while hoarding every piece of currency on the planet."
Oh yeah. And BeOS still rocks, even though it is LONG DEAD! LONG LIVE THE DEAD!
Oh, and another thing. You know how Microsoft puts ads all over Slashdot? Well, every time I see one, I click on it to get Slashdot some money (and to cause Microsoft to have to spend money) but I never look at the content^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgarbage they are advertising. In other words, I click, and after their trash finishes loading, I click the back button. Thanks, Microsoft. Where do you want to bang your head against the wall today? (I'm saying this because there was one such ad on this page when I opened it.)
The government is stupid,
is stupid,
is stupid,
the government is stupid,
in everything they do.
That's what happens when one part of the government doesn't allow another part of itself to get its job done. And you wonder why it takes years to get a stamp on a piece of paper or something stupid like that.
Why are you people doing everything you can dream of to COMPLETELY DESTROY creativity and electronic freedom?
I am SO upset right now that you simply cannot imagine what I am going through. First of all, I use Minix on three of my four computers. Minix is certainly NOT dead, and I don't know why so many people think that it is. It's the most retarded thing I have ever heard of.
I dunno, man. It looks to me like BSD is alive and well, and doing better each day. As a matter of fact, back in the BeOS days (since R3, when I bought my first BeOS CD, and up until the dot com crash), I used FreeBSD and SuSE Linux for all my serious stuff, and ran much of my desktop stuff on BeOS. When Be, Inc. turned to poop, I blew BeOS off my desktops and installed FreeBSD with XFree instead. As a matter of fact, I doubt I still have Linux installed anywhere, as I became so happy with the well-structured FreeBSD filesystem that I blew Linux off as well. And I must've updated FreeBSD about 4 times since those days. So if anything is dead, it's not BSD, that's for sure.
I have to second this fine person's suggestion for a Powershot A40. My sister recently invested in one and I have personally used this camera. It is very easy to use and just about any picture you take will come out magnificently, regardless of how skilled you are in photography. For a digital camera, the pictures are of very high quality. Even my camera, which is about six times the price, won't take pictures this nice unless you really understand film types, lighting situations and exposure settings. Just my two cents on this matter.