Dune is an absolute classic, and probably my favorite book of all time. I'm hoping they don't screw it up.
The obvious comment is: "you mean like they screwed up the film?". However, I'm in a very small minority here, because I actually like the film. Sure, it's not a particularly accuracte representation of the book, but that doesn't make bad, just different. As for it being a favourite book of all time? Well, no, but it's in my top 5, certainly. And I still think the film's good. I dread to think how the LotR film is going to differ from the book (now that is my favourite book of all time), but it may still be OK in its own right. I've got a horrible feeling that it's not going to be, though.
Re:linux is crushing solaris in the enterprise
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Linux 2.2.15 Released
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· Score: 2
Friend, the same copy of Solaris that runs my Sparc 20 can power an E10k. does an out of box linux distro power the same range of equipment?
Actually, yes. I installed Linux from a single CD on my Sparc 4, Sparc 20 and an Ultra Enterprise 4000. The kernel has had support for the starfire for some time, too, although they wouldn't let me near ours with a Linux CD:-( Oh, and the same kernel image can be used on sun4c machines, too, which is more than can be said for Solaris. That said Solaris does currently scale better than Linux.
I write a really cool filesystem driver [...] They stipulate that I have to advertise that they supported it by inserting a "sponsored by Microsoft" message in the write() system call [...] the kernel spinlocks for 15 seconds.
The chances of that ever getting past Linus and into a mainstream kernel are somewhere around zero. If it's distributed as a separate module (as source), it'll be a day (two at the outside) before someone releases a patch to remove the advertising. If it's not distributed as source, I (and many others) won't be using it anyway, so I don't care how much advertising you put in...
I should point out that many of the inebriation Features suggested for driving games already exist in one form or another in the Carmageddon games
And of course, in my favourite tasteless game, Diana Death Driver. It was a driving sim that someone did a while back in Shockwave flash. You had to drive a Mercedes through a Paris tunnel while avoiding the paparazzi...
the first paragraph says you have to have licensed it to read further.
Actually, no it doesn't. It asks you to only look at the information if you have a license, it doesn't demand it. The actual wording is:
Please review this specification only if you licensed and downloaded it from Microsoft Corporation's website; if you did not, please destroy this copy
Note the use of the word "please". I'm free to ignore any requests from Microsoft Corporation, and I choose to do so here. BTW, I didn't agree to any licensing terms to get that information.
If you want a three button mice, go out and buy one from someone who makes just that. Or buy fricking Sun hardware and shut up.
Actually, I've done both. I have Logitech pilot 3 button mice on my PCs, and I also have Sun hardware:-) That doesn't alter the fact that a wheel on a mouse has its uses. I just want it in addition to my existing 3 full size buttons.
Sigh. No. Repeat after me: "Barney sucks"! Wheel mice suck, too. I want a genuine middle button, not a half size one with a fscking wheel in the way. Now if they made a regular 3 button mouse with the wheel on the side (i.e., thumb operated) it would be an entirely different matter.
will two seperate companies be enough to ensure competion?
No. I've been concerned about this for some time. It's certainly a step in the right direction, but the OS company will still have a desktop OS monopoly, and the apps company will still have a monopoly in terms of office suite market share (and hence will be able to block competition by repeatedly changing file formats, etc.).
all new PCs sold in the UK for the last or 2 years have had USB, and it's not expensive to buy a USB card if you dont have it.
True, but please point me to somewhere I can buy a USB card for my SparcStation 4, my DG AViiON or my NeXT Turbo Colorstation (yes, I have all of these running at home). All support 10baseT, but none of them support USB. I hate the fact that everything is so PC-centric these days.
Basically we are stuck with this crap setup until BT are stripped of local loop monopoly
No you're not. You're talking about BTs ISP service, which has all of the faults you describe. So simply don't use it. My ISP is planning to offer ADSL from July without all the BT problems. Of course, they're still limited to the exchanges that BT designate until the local loop is unbundled. Anyway, the basic package will be USB, 50:1 (and no NAT, IIRC). A 10baseT option will be slightly more, but nowhere near the £99/month that BT is quoting. Lower contention rates and faster speeds are also available. http://www.f2s.net for contact details.
Somewhere I still have a Jupiter Ace... it's probably being kept company by my Sinclair QL
I can do better than that. Although I never had a QL, I do have a BT Merlin Tonto phone. It's basically a QL with a handset bolted onto the side! Complete with twin microdrives and all. It's very cool having a phone that you can program (even if it is in basic). It also had a great UI. Pick up the phone and type a 3 digit mnemonic representing whoever it is you want to call, and it dials the number for you. I just wish there was a modern equivalent...
Re:rob's reality distortion field
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Quad G4 Boards
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· Score: 2
GLGears runs great in my root window on a Celeron 500 with an ancient millineum II 4MB card.
Indeed. In fact, on decent hardware (read: non-Intel), you don't even need that. I used to run the slinky/staircase xlockmore mode whose name I can't remember in my root window. And that was on a HyperSparc 150. It was fine in wireframe, but a bit too slow to be useful when fully shaded. That was more due to memory starvation than anything else, though (I was running a dual headed X server, which chewed up a lot of RAM).
Few people realise that PostScript is a full programming language, not just a page description language for printers (for the uninitiated, it's similar to Forth -- remember the Jupiter Ace?). I used to have a ray tracing program that someone had written in PostScript (in under 2K as well!). Of course, performance wasn't too great...
I know that the PPC is big-endian and x86 is little endian (unless I got that backwards AGAIN). How much of a pain in the ass is this as far as porting code goes? No too bad, as it happens, at least for userland code. I have no experience of kernel level code. I've been running Linux on Sparc hardware (big endian) for nearly 5 years now, and have encountered surprisingly few problems. You do get the occasional jokers that ship source code with inline x86 assembly. Most are fairly reasonable about it, and are prepared to work with you to get a C equivalent written. All it needs is an autoconf check for architecture to determine whether to use the assembly or C version.
Doom certainly wasn't the first 2.5D game. Elite on the Commodore 64 was full 3D, as are a number of flight sims.
Indeed. And in fact, Elite had been out on the BBC Micro for some time before the C64 version was released (in fact, the enhanced version for the BBC Master is still the best version of Elite ever made). There were many 3D games before Doom (or even Wolf3D). There were the freescape games, "Driller" and "Dark Side", and others such as "Mercenary", "Starion", and of course the flight simulators (all the way back to the ZX81 Flight Sim!) I'm getting all nostalgic now -- must be time to dig out the emulators again...
the command-line switch you seek is./mozilla -chrome chrome:///content
The problem with this (as I've been finding out) is that you currently need to quit the browser and restart it with different arguments to change the chrome. Since I'm stuck with having to use the Win32 version at work, that's a real pain. Yes, I suppose I could launch it from a DOS box, but that's more effort that I want to expend. Maybe I'm just too lazy...
If I look at a page side-by-side in N6 and N4.5, N6 wastes *so* much screen space, with those big ugly buttons (sorry) and the sidebar you can't get rid of
Can't get rid of the sidebar, huh? What's wrong with just unselecting "Sidebar" from the "View" menu? It's the first thing I did when I got M14. Works fine for me. BTW, this is with the Win32 version I have in front of me. From memory, the Unix version is all but identical. As for the buttons being too large, just download (or write) a different theme.
With every other Unix version (and Windows NT, since I am at it), I have never seen a drive consistancy check require manual intervention.
Guess you don't have that much Unix experience, then. I've seen this on SCO, Interactive, BSD/OS, SunOS, DG/UX and yes, Linux. Probably others, too, but my memory's a bit hazy... FWIW, SCO was by far the worst for this.
Great, a new thin laptop from Toshiba. But it's still full size in the other dimensions. I'm looking for a replacement for my aging Libretto, but Toshiba don't seem interested in bringing out new models with a Libretto-like form factor any more. The only other alternative at the moment is the smaller Sony Vaio models, which I don't like as much, and don't exactly have a stellar spec anyway, particularly for the price. Sigh. I hate the non-upgradability of laptops. I've put a 6GB disk in the Libretto, but the CPU is soldered directly to the motherboard, and I'm at the maximum memory it'll handle already:-(
The Gimp has the most goddammed awful GUI in the world, very illogical and poorly laid out.
Well I for one like the Gimp UI. I find it both logical and intuitive. That's not to say it's perfect, but it's far from awful, IMHO. And before you ask, yes, I have tried other alternatives (currently, CorelDRAW is one of my favourite interfaces). Perhaps this is just another example of the differences between the hacker brain and the end user brain. While Gimp may be obvious to me, end users will think differently than I do, and hence may have problems that I can't see.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious comment is: "you mean like they screwed up the film?". However, I'm in a very small minority here, because I actually like the film. Sure, it's not a particularly accuracte representation of the book, but that doesn't make bad, just different. As for it being a favourite book of all time? Well, no, but it's in my top 5, certainly. And I still think the film's good. I dread to think how the LotR film is going to differ from the book (now that is my favourite book of all time), but it may still be OK in its own right. I've got a horrible feeling that it's not going to be, though.
Actually, yes. I installed Linux from a single CD on my Sparc 4, Sparc 20 and an Ultra Enterprise 4000. The kernel has had support for the starfire for some time, too, although they wouldn't let me near ours with a Linux CD :-( Oh, and the same kernel image can be used on sun4c machines, too, which is more than can be said for Solaris. That said Solaris does currently scale better than Linux.
The chances of that ever getting past Linus and into a mainstream kernel are somewhere around zero. If it's distributed as a separate module (as source), it'll be a day (two at the outside) before someone releases a patch to remove the advertising. If it's not distributed as source, I (and many others) won't be using it anyway, so I don't care how much advertising you put in...
And of course, in my favourite tasteless game, Diana Death Driver. It was a driving sim that someone did a while back in Shockwave flash. You had to drive a Mercedes through a Paris tunnel while avoiding the paparazzi...
Actually, no it doesn't. It asks you to only look at the information if you have a license, it doesn't demand it. The actual wording is:
Note the use of the word "please". I'm free to ignore any requests from Microsoft Corporation, and I choose to do so here. BTW, I didn't agree to any licensing terms to get that information.
Actually, I've done both. I have Logitech pilot 3 button mice on my PCs, and I also have Sun hardware :-) That doesn't alter the fact that a wheel on a mouse has its uses. I just want it in addition to my existing 3 full size buttons.
Sigh. No. Repeat after me: "Barney sucks"! Wheel mice suck, too. I want a genuine middle button, not a half size one with a fscking wheel in the way. Now if they made a regular 3 button mouse with the wheel on the side (i.e., thumb operated) it would be an entirely different matter.
No. I've been concerned about this for some time. It's certainly a step in the right direction, but the OS company will still have a desktop OS monopoly, and the apps company will still have a monopoly in terms of office suite market share (and hence will be able to block competition by repeatedly changing file formats, etc.).
No, but it will be by the time BT Openworld launches.
True, but please point me to somewhere I can buy a USB card for my SparcStation 4, my DG AViiON or my NeXT Turbo Colorstation (yes, I have all of these running at home). All support 10baseT, but none of them support USB. I hate the fact that everything is so PC-centric these days.
No you're not. You're talking about BTs ISP service, which has all of the faults you describe. So simply don't use it. My ISP is planning to offer ADSL from July without all the BT problems. Of course, they're still limited to the exchanges that BT designate until the local loop is unbundled. Anyway, the basic package will be USB, 50:1 (and no NAT, IIRC). A 10baseT option will be slightly more, but nowhere near the £99/month that BT is quoting. Lower contention rates and faster speeds are also available. http://www.f2s.net for contact details.
So pick a different ISP that *does* let you have servers.
Not available for my NeXT black hardware, that's what :-( But essentially, I agree with what you're saying.
I can do better than that. Although I never had a QL, I do have a BT Merlin Tonto phone. It's basically a QL with a handset bolted onto the side! Complete with twin microdrives and all. It's very cool having a phone that you can program (even if it is in basic). It also had a great UI. Pick up the phone and type a 3 digit mnemonic representing whoever it is you want to call, and it dials the number for you. I just wish there was a modern equivalent...
Indeed. In fact, on decent hardware (read: non-Intel), you don't even need that. I used to run the slinky/staircase xlockmore mode whose name I can't remember in my root window. And that was on a HyperSparc 150. It was fine in wireframe, but a bit too slow to be useful when fully shaded. That was more due to memory starvation than anything else, though (I was running a dual headed X server, which chewed up a lot of RAM).
Few people realise that PostScript is a full programming language, not just a page description language for printers (for the uninitiated, it's similar to Forth -- remember the Jupiter Ace?). I used to have a ray tracing program that someone had written in PostScript (in under 2K as well!). Of course, performance wasn't too great...
I know that the PPC is big-endian and x86 is little endian (unless I got that backwards AGAIN). How much of a pain in the ass is this as far as porting code goes? No too bad, as it happens, at least for userland code. I have no experience of kernel level code. I've been running Linux on Sparc hardware (big endian) for nearly 5 years now, and have encountered surprisingly few problems. You do get the occasional jokers that ship source code with inline x86 assembly. Most are fairly reasonable about it, and are prepared to work with you to get a C equivalent written. All it needs is an autoconf check for architecture to determine whether to use the assembly or C version.
Surely that ought to be ilttel neidna? :-)
Indeed. And in fact, Elite had been out on the BBC Micro for some time before the C64 version was released (in fact, the enhanced version for the BBC Master is still the best version of Elite ever made). There were many 3D games before Doom (or even Wolf3D). There were the freescape games, "Driller" and "Dark Side", and others such as "Mercenary", "Starion", and of course the flight simulators (all the way back to the ZX81 Flight Sim!) I'm getting all nostalgic now -- must be time to dig out the emulators again...
The problem with this (as I've been finding out) is that you currently need to quit the browser and restart it with different arguments to change the chrome. Since I'm stuck with having to use the Win32 version at work, that's a real pain. Yes, I suppose I could launch it from a DOS box, but that's more effort that I want to expend. Maybe I'm just too lazy...
Can't get rid of the sidebar, huh? What's wrong with just unselecting "Sidebar" from the "View" menu? It's the first thing I did when I got M14. Works fine for me. BTW, this is with the Win32 version I have in front of me. From memory, the Unix version is all but identical. As for the buttons being too large, just download (or write) a different theme.
Guess you don't have that much Unix experience, then. I've seen this on SCO, Interactive, BSD/OS, SunOS, DG/UX and yes, Linux. Probably others, too, but my memory's a bit hazy... FWIW, SCO was by far the worst for this.
At a guess, anyone that needs to use a Xeon as opposed to a regular PIII.
Great, a new thin laptop from Toshiba. But it's still full size in the other dimensions. I'm looking for a replacement for my aging Libretto, but Toshiba don't seem interested in bringing out new models with a Libretto-like form factor any more. The only other alternative at the moment is the smaller Sony Vaio models, which I don't like as much, and don't exactly have a stellar spec anyway, particularly for the price. Sigh. I hate the non-upgradability of laptops. I've put a 6GB disk in the Libretto, but the CPU is soldered directly to the motherboard, and I'm at the maximum memory it'll handle already :-(
Well I for one like the Gimp UI. I find it both logical and intuitive. That's not to say it's perfect, but it's far from awful, IMHO. And before you ask, yes, I have tried other alternatives (currently, CorelDRAW is one of my favourite interfaces). Perhaps this is just another example of the differences between the hacker brain and the end user brain. While Gimp may be obvious to me, end users will think differently than I do, and hence may have problems that I can't see.