Oh well. He's got a point. Maybe the belief underlying what he actually said is that established political institutions don't create revolutions... grassroots movements do.
I'm glad that they are digitizing something at least... seems like a good goal to make available things that previously weren't...
And new material will increasingly be published on the web anyway. Physical libraries will eventually realize they have to digitize to stay relevant. I hope they keep all the paper books too though.
I still feel a certain sense of dissatisfaction with ESR's business models... it's always seemed like when you make software free, the means that remain for you to make money are the things that used to be considered drudgery... paper manuals, manufacturing mugs and t-shirts or otherwise making money from advertising, and technical support. These things all serve to distract you from actually writing code. Now ideologically I really like the free software movement. But it's also nice to be able to make money doing what you love most.
Some of ESR's business models are quite legitimate, for instance "widget frosting"... if you're money is made with hardware, then of course the software to support it should be free because it will give you a competitive advantange and you'll sell more hardware.
Now that you have proposed that electronic books should be free too, if future software manuals tend to be in electronic form (as they should, for environmental reasons as well as searchability and portability), then that is one less way in which one can make money to support one's habit of writing free software.
If the world evolves into an "information economy" then that implies that money can be made from information somehow; and I've been wondering if the free software movement is a sign of a shift in value from the software, to the information being processed. But it's also easy to see pay-per-view as one of the more evil inventions of modern times. If it's wrong to sell either information itself, or the software to manipulate it, how are we going to have an information economy? Supported-by-advertising isn't an infinitely extensible business model is it?
I suspect that these issues are not as relevant to you personally as they are to most people, but you probably also have some opinions on how it's possible to write free software for a living.
and I'll buy at least one. So will many others... it'd make a great kiosk machine. And I know of a good local application for several dozen of them too.
I tried to talk the Mozilla team into standard GTK
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Suck On Skins And UI
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We had an email conversation a couple months ago; it was brought on by a question about how to get the preferred font size from the system, to set the font sizes on menus, etc. so that they look more like other GTK apps. And I pointed out that they were going about it the wrong way; GTK apps are not consistent because every developer sets the font the same size, but because you don't have to set the bloody font at all - that's the theme's job. But they've gone off and rolled their own widgets and put in their own Mozilla-specific theme management features. Their excuse is that they want it to look the same on all platforms and have the same features on all platforms; for instance Unix users who don't normally use GTK apps can get a statically linked version that can be themed. And I pointed out that if they just use GTK as it was intended, worst case if the user doesn't have a theme management app, then he has to install themes by hand, by putting them into a directory into his home directory. Not much to ask from somebody who's working suboptimally anyway, not using GTK. It's still better than the current Netscape which requires you to mess with X resources to customize its appearance (and I have never had the time to figure that out - it's too poorly documented). But even after patiently and respectfully explaining this about 3 or 4 times I don't think much of it sunk in because the developer I was talking to continued to ask the same question - how can I get the font size so I can set it on my widgets. Arrrrrggggh.
I don't believe in the concept of standardizing UI's across platforms. The different platforms all have different strengths and weaknesses usability wise, which the users get used to; and there's no point in breaking with their expectations - you just end up with a product that fits equally badly with the other apps on every OS, and wastes the users time using Mozilla's non-standard way of tweaking it so that they can live with it. Instead they should write a really abstract widget abstraction layer, which has implementation in the native widgets of each platform. There should be no custom widgets. Except maybe the toolbar - I have to admit that's kindof slick.
The same shit has happened in the Java world. AWT came first; it made sense. It made applications look like they belonged, most of the time, on the platform they were running on, with no work from the developer. Of course there were issues like font sizes, colors (all apps were grey regardless of your color settings) and layout issues and so on. But then they did this swing thing. In pure Java. The result was slick looks and really slow performance, and the apps don't look like they belong to any environment - you see it come up and instantly say "Oh god, another Java app, might as well go get coffee while this dog wakes itself up". And I'm a Java programmer, I'm supposed to like this stuff.
But then again, it's just new regulation on top of old regulation... I have to wonder if the gov't made sure that it had not put in any obstacles to competition, if we would not see entire cable systems competing with each other, rather than just ISP's competing for bandwidth over the same cables. Not that that would be efficient, but sometimes redundancy can be a good thing too.
Given that there is an effective cable monopoly though, I think it's probably a good thing to force them to give us an ISP choice. I know that's what I want... maybe if Cox can be forced to give me another ISP besides @home, I can find one that will let me have a decent domain name, and won't have to keep trying in vain to get DSL just so I can do that.
Well I figured some response was inevitable... but trying to prevent smartening up your dumbed-down appliance is definitely the wrong one. Slashdot put it well: "This is somewhat ironic, as their developer's corner page says 'Netpliance believes in open source development.'" etc. I hate these backhanded, suboptimal responses that are so typical of big companies and indicate a basically sour temperament.
You could offer them at a different price for people who don't want to buy the ISP service, like the cellular telephone retailers do. I think that's the best solution.
Anyway I want one with a touchscreen. If you could make one like the existing product, with this addition, and let me do what I want with it, for a few hundred bucks, I might buy one or several.
Another issue is your unethical environmental stance... you are doing your darndest to make sure it's a single-purpose device. And then you will probably go out of business within a few years, or move on to something else and no longer offer support. So what's supposed to happen to the devices then? You think it's OK to simply let them get tossed into the landfill? you provide no alternative to that. I try very hard not to buy into all the planned obsolescence schemes because I don't believe in them.
There should be no files, only objects, contained in a global memory space which spans transparently across all the computers in the world. In this model a hyperlink is the same thing as a capability (as defined for capability systems such as Eros). All objects in memory are automatically persistent unless they are marked transient; so power outages will not cause lost data, yet you never need to know there is such a thing as a hard disk, nor do you need to organize it. The structures of organization can be completely arbitrary and user-defined, not limited to trees or tables.
Aha, just thought of something.... the wastebasket should be replaced by a fire. Even the tribesman from New Guinea has probably seen fire and has the idea it can be used to destroy things you don't want anymore. Besides it's a good excuse for some cool animation.
Now I think I'm going to go patent the idea. Na-na-na-na-na-na-nah!:-)
It continues to bother me how usability people stereotype things and say "frames are nearly always a bad idea" or "don't make me scroll in my browser". If you are putting a book on line, sure it makes sense to put separate chapters on separate web pages so that the user doesn't have to download the whole thing at once. But scrollbars are not hard to use. I hate it when some news article is arbitrarily broken up into several separate web pages for no good reason other than some "expert" said they should. Usually the pages still require scrolling, and clicking links for the next section besides. It's just stupid. They should not take it upon themselves to assume anything about how big my screen is or how much of the article I'd like to see at once. The web needs more continuity, not less. The fact that a book has pages is a technological limitation, not something to be carried forward.
I'm using an ATA66 IBM drive on the HPT366 controller and it's been stable for 2 weeks so far since I got the motherboard and 2 celeron 366's. (It's not stable when I overclock, but oh well...)
We use it where I work on our Ultra 5's. Everyone likes it. It's stable. However it is a bit slow; takes a while for the corba engine etc. to get going initially.
One, there's no reason great programmers can't be great GUI designers too. Environmental selection may be opposed, but if a hacker applies himself to it, it's possible. But you have to ditch the superior attitude and realize that things have to be much more obvious for others than they are for you.
I _am_ tired of seeing clones of commercial apps. MS does not have a corner on design for usability; matter of fact they make some pretty bad decisions sometimes in that area. So why are we emulating them? Everything they do is not bad but we ought to consider each and every choice, not just go with what looks the most familiar.
Second, the comment about no user feedback isn't quite true - Open Source is touted as encouraging it. Nevertheless users only tend to complain about the bigger problems, not the little nagging ones that they subconsciously find ways around and learn to live with. So it would be beneficial to increase the communications. There should be a way to recruit clueless newbies to do testing. Unfortunately usability testing is hard to virtualize... tends to require a usability engineer to look over the user's shoulder and learn from his mistakes.
I've been investigating the concept of metawidgets myself. The idea is for the program to express in a high-level way what kind of controls are to be presented to the user, and let a universal client piece make the decisions about how to organize them. Because apps should be designed differently depending on the target user, and the target hardware. What's practical on a big screen with a mouse isn't necessarily practical with a touchscreen or a wearable or a PDA. And I'm not just talking about real estate allocation - things like Fitts's Law (which is the reason MacOS has a menubar at the top of the screen - if you throw your mouse in the general direction, you will hit the top of the screen and be able to pull down a menu without putting much time into positioning it more precisely than that, at least in the vertical direction). More about that is prominently featured at asktog.com (which I'm unaffiliated with, but it impressed me).
There's a journal entry about metawidgets at my home page. I'm also working on a prototype implementation, very slowly... I intend to use XML for the UI description.
A final comment which I know is likely to be unpopular is that a really big part of the problem is the Unix "everything is a file" metaphor. Files are useless until you load them into memory, parse them and create some objects or structures which represent the content; then you can do something with it. And there are too many ways to organize content within a file. The Mac resource fork, the Windows registry or (in Win2K) directory service, or a relational database are all inherently better because they impose a finer grained organization, and this has the potential of making it easier to write newbie-friendly GUI tools for changing settings. Of course in every case the implementation has been bungled badly too; the registry's biggest fault IMO is the use of meaningless keys (long sequences of letters and numbers) so that you can't easily find the setting you're looking for. Imagine if all keys were human readable, and if there were an "expert mode" setting which is off by default (which exposes gory details you don't want newbies messing with or having to wade through); you could use regedit on a more regular basis. It would just look like the preferences dialog in Netscape, but with prefs for all apps there in one tree instead of every app having to write their own unique little prefs dialogs with unique ideosyncracies. Every key should be text, and every value should be a component - like a JavaBean. The means of viewing and editing the content of these values would be provided for the common types, and for new types which get invented, custom viewers would have to be written. But those viewers should become reusable components too, not part of the application that they came with.
I have built several using old desktop-style cases and full-extension drawer slides available at Home Depot for about $15 a pair. You also need some angle-brackets (available in the section of HD where they have joist hangers and stuff like that). But it's a bit involved; I have tried several different methods for different situations. It helps a lot if your rack has rails at the back, as well as the front. Anyway to me, easy access is a must; I have to be able to slide the computer out on a whim to upgrade hardware. Mounting it at a convenient height, it ends up being much easier to deal with upgrades than with the typical desktop or tower. I can be poking around inside one of my PC's in just a few seconds, and with no tools involved (since I don't normally screw down the top part of the case).
I've even cut out replacement front panels out of sheet steel complete with nice chrome rack handles (also available at HD disguised as cabinet/drawer handles). I suppose I'll have to put up a web page about this some day...
My dad's Christmas present last year was a Linux gateway in one of my custom rack cases. He already has ham radio equipment in racks so it fit right in. It uses the new PPPD auto-dial feature to provide on-demand 'net access via the gateway at my house (I put in a modem on the second line for family PPP). I even put a 5-pin DIN on the front of the case for the keyboard; cannibalized a cable from a dead keyboard to run from there to the back of the PC.
Bah. Debian was known for having a great installer back when Slackware was king. It's why I switched after all. They're not being elite, just resting on their laurels. But then, Corel has one of the easiest installers, and being Debian-based, I could hope that the Debian mainstream will just adopt it. The QT package selector really puts dselect to shame too... but I wish it was based on gtk instead.
I probably wouldn't have voted for him before, just because he's an old hardened politician, how could he possibly have much ethics left. But definitely not now. A coworker was telling me what bad environmental policy he has too.
Thank goodness the issues are at least real this year. And so are at least some of the candidates. Not since Carter have we put up with such mediocrity and unsubstantial softsoap. Looks like we finally woke up.
It would take some fast-moving mirrors to get the resolution very high though. And, you'd need a blue laser to get full color... still very expensive AFAIK. But I will want to build one some day if such displays don't get cheap before I get around to it.
It's also cool that with a laser display you can do either raster or vector graphics. So far vector graphics seem to be done more often because of the slow scanning speeds that mechanical mirror deflectors are capable of.
My latest idea is to use a laser display to paint messages on other people's cars on the freeway. Stuck behind some slowpoke conspiracy of cars going the same speed across all the lanes? Well now you can let everyone else know just what you think of them.
Sure it's great to try and predict all the consequences but it's also wise to remember that all new technology has this same characteristic - the ability to be used for good and evil. I don't think that any possible bad consequence is enough to justify not going forward with the research. We will deal with the consequences as they occur, just as we have always done. In the long term the consequences of all the things which we do to ourselves tend to be positive, because that's what we collectively want. Natural selection continues to work in spite of our greater intelligence and greater ability to shoot ourselves in the collective foot. You cannot stop evolution, and that's what this is, more than any of our other technologies.
Our most dangerous invention so far, the bomb, had positive consequences too, even though the US gov't chooses to thwart them. The French figured it out. (nuclear power generation that is)
That's a big one for me when I'm tired. I lost count of how many analogies I came up with for why the alarm clock was ringing. Some of them seemed deeply technical at the time (debugging a program or fixing some mechanical device). Sometimes I've pretended that I already got up, and completely convinced myself that I had while in fact being asleep.
The DIA canvas was just released as a component for just this purpose. But, DIA has the look-and-feel of Visio not a typical CAD program. Not that that's a bad thing - it's much less cumbersome. But probably not as full-featured either. And of course it's not 3D.
On a cheap celeron board of mine which had SCSI until recently, I tried to install an IDE drive. I started with a 17 gig Seagate. I managed to install Linux with no hitches (other than it took several tries to make it boot - it's always a wrestle with these big drives). This system's BIOS correctly detects the size of the drive, but, if I have the BIOS detect it and then boot with a Debian rescue disk to do an install, fdisk can only see 8.someodd gigs. So the solution which worked on another system, which I also used on this one, is to tell the BIOS there is no primary hard drive, and let Linux detect it on its own; then fdisk sees the whole thing and I can partition it. After Linux is installed, I have to set the BIOS back to auto-detect in order to be able to boot off the hard drive, but the BIOS then detects it as being in LBA mode, and Linux boots just fine. On my main system I haver no problems at all doing it this way. I used a 10 meg partition for/boot near the beginning of the drive (right after a little DOS partition in case I need some occasional DOS tool like the 3c509 setup utility for instance) and I put my kernels in/boot. swap is at the end of the drive, and all the space in the middle is the root partition. Well, the system boots and runs fine, but as it warms up, it gets an increasing number of errors like this:
hda: status timeout: status=0x80 { Busy } hda: drive not ready for command ide0: reset: success
Eventually the time spent "not ready" gets to be minutes at a time and the system becomes useless; also I hear some extreme seek noises like it's bumping its heads against the case or something. But I don't know if IDE drives can actually do that if they're given out-of-range sector commands or whatever. The drive is not overheating; the case has a serious fan blowing air right on it and the drive is only a tiny bit warmer than room temperature. Anyway after a few days of this abuse (over several weeks - I had the system powered off a lot due to not being able to solve this problem) the Seagate died; the BIOS wouldn't detect it anymore on boot. Since it was nearly new I returned it and got an IBM 20 gig drive instead. But I'm getting the same errors and noises. I have tried a 2.0.36 kernel, 2.2.13, and 2.3.24 (or was it 34? the latest as of a couple weeks ago anyway). The 2.3 series kernel actually detected the controller properly; the others said it was an unknown controller or something like that but it worked about the same regardless of which kernel. I'm afraid to keep trying to use it because I think the problem caused some kind of physical damage to the Seagate drive.
These violent-sounding product names are starting to get old. The hyperbole is so intense it's getting redundant - don't fury and rage mean just about the same thing?
Yeah I was like that in college too, and I really regret it now. The 4 years you spend getting a degree will be the best _ever_ for meeting women. If you blow it, it will be much harder later, when you have to go out of your way to meet people with similar interests rather than being part of a huge throng of hundreds or thousands of them every day. Besides you get older and maybe uglier too as time goes on. And, if you are into the whole pair-bonding thing then it could end up being just as meaningful in life long-term as the education you are getting. So don't let your education get in the way of socializing; consider them to be of equal importance, because long-term they probably are.
I'd still rather have a Newton I think, but they were always too expensive back then, and now they are discontinued. $1000 for something you can easily drop or lose is way too much. But I still think discontinuing it was Apple's worst decision ever; Jobs probably did it for personal reasons rather than rational ones, because it makes no sense at all. Somebody should buy the technology and put them back into production.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first reaction.
Oh well. He's got a point. Maybe the belief underlying what he actually said is that established political institutions don't create revolutions... grassroots movements do.
I'm glad that they are digitizing something at least... seems like a good goal to make available things that previously weren't...
And new material will increasingly be published on the web anyway. Physical libraries will eventually realize they have to digitize to stay relevant. I hope they keep all the paper books too though.
I still feel a certain sense of dissatisfaction with ESR's business models... it's always seemed like when you make software free, the means that remain for you to make money are the things that used to be considered drudgery... paper manuals, manufacturing mugs and t-shirts or otherwise making money from advertising, and technical support. These things all serve to distract you from actually writing code. Now ideologically I really like the free software movement. But it's also nice to be able to make money doing what you love most.
Some of ESR's business models are quite legitimate, for instance "widget frosting"... if you're money is made with hardware, then of course the software to support it should be free because it will give you a competitive advantange and you'll sell more hardware.
Now that you have proposed that electronic books should be free too, if future software manuals tend to be in electronic form (as they should, for environmental reasons as well as searchability and portability), then that is one less way in which one can make money to support one's habit of writing free software.
If the world evolves into an "information economy" then that implies that money can be made from information somehow; and I've been wondering if the free software movement is a sign of a shift in value from the software, to the information being processed. But it's also easy to see pay-per-view as one of the more evil inventions of modern times. If it's wrong to sell either information itself, or the software to manipulate it, how are we going to have an information economy? Supported-by-advertising isn't an infinitely extensible business model is it?
I suspect that these issues are not as relevant to you personally as they are to most people, but you probably also have some opinions on how it's possible to write free software for a living.
and I'll buy at least one. So will many others...
it'd make a great kiosk machine. And I know of a good local application for several dozen of them too.
We had an email conversation a couple months ago; it was brought on by a question about how to get the preferred font size from the system, to set the font sizes on menus, etc. so that they look more like other GTK apps. And I pointed out that they were going about it the wrong way; GTK apps are not consistent because every developer sets the font the same size, but because you don't have to set the bloody font at all - that's the theme's job. But they've gone off and rolled their own widgets and put in their own Mozilla-specific theme management features. Their excuse is that they want it to look the same on all platforms and have the same features on all platforms; for instance Unix users who don't normally use GTK apps can get a statically linked version that can be themed. And I pointed out that if they just use GTK as it was intended, worst case if the user doesn't have a theme management app, then he has to install themes by hand, by putting them into a directory into his home directory. Not much to ask from somebody who's working suboptimally anyway, not using GTK. It's still better than the current Netscape which requires you to mess with X resources to customize its appearance (and I have never had the time to figure that out - it's too poorly documented). But even after patiently and respectfully explaining this about 3 or 4 times I don't think much of it sunk in because the developer I was talking to continued to ask the same question - how can I get the font size so I can set it on my widgets. Arrrrrggggh.
I don't believe in the concept of standardizing UI's across platforms. The different platforms all have different strengths and weaknesses usability wise, which the users get used to; and there's no point in breaking with their expectations - you just end up with a product that fits equally badly with the other apps on every OS, and wastes the users time using Mozilla's non-standard way of tweaking it so that they can live with it. Instead they should write a really abstract widget abstraction layer, which has implementation in the native widgets of each platform. There should be no custom widgets. Except maybe the toolbar - I have to admit that's kindof slick.
The same shit has happened in the Java world. AWT came first; it made sense. It made applications look like they belonged, most of the time, on the platform they were running on, with no work from the developer. Of course there were issues like font sizes, colors (all apps were grey regardless of your color settings) and layout issues and so on. But then they did this swing thing. In pure Java. The result was slick looks and really slow performance, and the apps don't look like they belong to any environment - you see it come up and instantly say "Oh god, another Java app, might as well go get coffee while this dog wakes itself up". And I'm a Java programmer, I'm supposed to like this stuff.
But then again, it's just new regulation on top of old regulation... I have to wonder if the gov't made sure that it had not put in any obstacles to competition, if we would not see entire cable systems competing with each other, rather than just ISP's competing for bandwidth over the same cables. Not that that would be efficient, but sometimes redundancy can be a good thing too.
Given that there is an effective cable monopoly though, I think it's probably a good thing to force them to give us an ISP choice. I know that's what I want... maybe if Cox can be forced to give me another ISP besides @home, I can find one that will let me have a decent domain name, and won't have to keep trying in vain to get DSL just so I can do that.
(copy of my email to them)
Well I figured some response was inevitable... but trying to prevent smartening up your dumbed-down appliance is definitely the wrong one. Slashdot put it well: "This is somewhat ironic, as their developer's corner page says 'Netpliance believes in open source development.'" etc. I hate these backhanded, suboptimal responses that are so typical of big companies and indicate a basically sour temperament.
You could offer them at a different price for people who don't want to buy the ISP service, like the cellular telephone retailers do. I think that's the best solution.
Anyway I want one with a touchscreen. If you could make one like the existing product, with this addition, and let me do what I want with it, for a few hundred bucks, I might buy one or several.
Another issue is your unethical environmental stance... you are doing your darndest to make sure it's a single-purpose device. And then you will probably go out of business within a few years, or move on to something else and no longer offer support. So what's supposed to happen to the devices then? You think it's OK to simply let them get tossed into the landfill? you provide no alternative to that. I try very hard not to buy into all the planned obsolescence schemes because I don't believe in them.
There should be no files, only objects, contained in a global memory space which spans transparently across all the computers in the world. In this model a hyperlink is the same thing as a capability (as defined for capability systems such as Eros). All objects in memory are automatically persistent unless they are marked transient; so power outages will not cause lost data, yet you never need to know there is such a thing as a hard disk, nor do you need to organize it. The structures of organization can be completely arbitrary and user-defined, not limited to trees or tables.
Aha, just thought of something.... the wastebasket should be replaced by a fire. Even the tribesman from New Guinea has probably seen fire and has the idea it can be used to destroy things you don't want anymore. Besides it's a good excuse for some cool animation.
:-)
Now I think I'm going to go patent the idea. Na-na-na-na-na-na-nah!
It continues to bother me how usability people stereotype things and say "frames are nearly always a bad idea" or "don't make me scroll in my browser". If you are putting a book on line, sure it makes sense to put separate chapters on separate web pages so that the user doesn't have to download the whole thing at once. But scrollbars are not hard to use. I hate it when some news article is arbitrarily broken up into several separate web pages for no good reason other than some "expert" said they should. Usually the pages still require scrolling, and clicking links for the next section besides. It's just stupid. They should not take it upon themselves to assume anything about how big my screen is or how much of the article I'd like to see at once. The web needs more continuity, not less. The fact that a book has pages is a technological limitation, not something to be carried forward.
I'm using an ATA66 IBM drive on the HPT366 controller and it's been stable for 2 weeks so far since I got the motherboard and 2 celeron 366's. (It's not stable when I overclock, but oh well...)
We use it where I work on our Ultra 5's. Everyone likes it. It's stable. However it is a bit slow; takes a while for the corba engine etc. to get going initially.
It concerns me too, and I have a few comments.
One, there's no reason great programmers can't be great GUI designers too. Environmental selection may be opposed, but if a hacker applies himself to it, it's possible. But you have to ditch the superior attitude and realize that things have to be much more obvious for others than they are for you.
I _am_ tired of seeing clones of commercial apps. MS does not have a corner on design for usability; matter of fact they make some pretty bad decisions sometimes in that area. So why are we emulating them? Everything they do is not bad but we ought to consider each and every choice, not just go with what looks the most familiar.
Second, the comment about no user feedback isn't quite true - Open Source is touted as encouraging it. Nevertheless users only tend to complain about the bigger problems, not the little nagging ones that they subconsciously find ways around and learn to live with. So it would be beneficial to increase the communications. There should be a way to recruit clueless newbies to do testing. Unfortunately usability testing is hard to virtualize... tends to require a usability engineer to look over the user's shoulder and learn from his mistakes.
I've been investigating the concept of metawidgets myself. The idea is for the program to express in a high-level way what kind of controls are to be presented to the user, and let a universal client piece make the decisions about how to organize them. Because apps should be designed differently depending on the target user, and the target hardware. What's practical on a big screen with a mouse isn't necessarily practical with a touchscreen or a wearable or a PDA. And I'm not just talking about real estate allocation - things like Fitts's Law (which is the reason MacOS has a menubar at the top of the screen - if you throw your mouse in the general direction, you will hit the top of the screen and be able to pull down a menu without putting much time into positioning it more precisely than that, at least in the vertical direction). More about that is prominently featured at asktog.com (which I'm unaffiliated with, but it impressed me).
There's a journal entry about metawidgets at my home page. I'm also working on a prototype implementation, very slowly... I intend to use XML for the UI description.
A final comment which I know is likely to be unpopular is that a really big part of the problem is the Unix "everything is a file" metaphor. Files are useless until you load them into memory, parse them and create some objects or structures which represent the content; then you can do something with it. And there are too many ways to organize content within a file. The Mac resource fork, the Windows registry or (in Win2K) directory service, or a relational database are all inherently better because they impose a finer grained organization, and this has the potential of making it easier to write newbie-friendly GUI tools for changing settings. Of course in every case the implementation has been bungled badly too; the registry's biggest fault IMO is the use of meaningless keys (long sequences of letters and numbers) so that you can't easily find the setting you're looking for. Imagine if all keys were human readable, and if there were an "expert mode" setting which is off by default (which exposes gory details you don't want newbies messing with or having to wade through); you could use regedit on a more regular basis. It would just look like the preferences dialog in Netscape, but with prefs for all apps there in one tree instead of every app having to write their own unique little prefs dialogs with unique ideosyncracies. Every key should be text, and every value should be a component - like a JavaBean. The means of viewing and editing the content of these values would be provided for the common types, and for new types which get invented, custom viewers would have to be written. But those viewers should become reusable components too, not part of the application that they came with.
I have built several using old desktop-style cases and full-extension drawer slides available at Home Depot for about $15 a pair. You also need some angle-brackets (available in the section of HD where they have joist hangers and stuff like that). But it's a bit involved; I have tried several different methods for different situations. It helps a lot if your rack has rails at the back, as well as the front. Anyway to me, easy access is a must; I have to be able to slide the computer out on a whim to upgrade hardware. Mounting it at a convenient height, it ends up being much easier to deal with upgrades than with the typical desktop or tower. I can be poking around inside one of my PC's in just a few seconds, and with no tools involved (since I don't normally screw down the top part of the case).
I've even cut out replacement front panels out of sheet steel complete with nice chrome rack handles (also available at HD disguised as cabinet/drawer handles). I suppose I'll have to put up a web page about this some day...
My dad's Christmas present last year was a Linux gateway in one of my custom rack cases. He already has ham radio equipment in racks so it fit right in. It uses the new PPPD auto-dial feature to provide on-demand 'net access via the gateway at my house (I put in a modem on the second line for family PPP). I even put a 5-pin DIN on the front of the case for the keyboard; cannibalized a cable from a dead keyboard to run from there to the back of the PC.
It has a multimedia processor unit alongside the ALU and FP units. Presumably MMX instructions do retain some speed at least.
Bah. Debian was known for having a great installer back when Slackware was king. It's why I switched after all. They're not being elite, just resting on their laurels. But then, Corel has one of the easiest installers, and being Debian-based, I could hope that the Debian mainstream will just adopt it. The QT package selector really puts dselect to shame too... but I wish it was based on gtk instead.
I probably wouldn't have voted for him before, just because he's an old hardened politician, how could he possibly have much ethics left. But definitely not now. A coworker was telling me what bad environmental policy he has too.
Thank goodness the issues are at least real this year. And so are at least some of the candidates. Not since Carter have we put up with such mediocrity and unsubstantial softsoap. Looks like we finally woke up.
It's also cool that with a laser display you can do either raster or vector graphics. So far vector graphics seem to be done more often because of the slow scanning speeds that mechanical mirror deflectors are capable of.
My latest idea is to use a laser display to paint messages on other people's cars on the freeway. Stuck behind some slowpoke conspiracy of cars going the same speed across all the lanes? Well now you can let everyone else know just what you think of them.
Sure it's great to try and predict all the consequences but it's also wise to remember that all new technology has this same characteristic - the ability to be used for good and evil. I don't think that any possible bad consequence is enough to justify not going forward with the research. We will deal with the consequences as they occur, just as we have always done. In the long term the consequences of all the things which we do to ourselves tend to be positive, because that's what we collectively want. Natural selection continues to work in spite of our greater intelligence and greater ability to shoot ourselves in the collective foot. You cannot stop evolution, and that's what this is, more than any of our other technologies.
Our most dangerous invention so far, the bomb, had positive consequences too, even though the US gov't chooses to thwart them. The French figured it out. (nuclear power generation that is)
That's a big one for me when I'm tired. I lost count of how many analogies I came up with for why the alarm clock was ringing. Some of them seemed deeply technical at the time (debugging a program or fixing some mechanical device). Sometimes I've pretended that I already got up, and completely convinced myself that I had while in fact being asleep.
The DIA canvas was just released as a component for just this purpose. But, DIA has the look-and-feel of Visio not a typical CAD program. Not that that's a bad thing - it's much less cumbersome. But probably not as full-featured either. And of course it's not 3D.
On a cheap celeron board of mine which had SCSI until recently, I tried to install an IDE drive. I started with a 17 gig Seagate. I managed to install Linux with no hitches (other than it took several tries to make it boot - it's always a wrestle with these big drives). This system's BIOS correctly detects the size of the drive, but, if I have the BIOS detect it and then boot with a Debian rescue disk to do an install, fdisk can only see 8.someodd gigs. So the solution which worked on another system, which I also used on this one, is to tell the BIOS there is no primary hard drive, and let Linux detect it on its own; then fdisk sees the whole thing and I can partition it. After Linux is installed, I have to set the BIOS back to auto-detect in order to be able to boot off the hard drive, but the BIOS then detects it as being in LBA mode, and Linux boots just fine. On my main system I haver no problems at all doing it this way. I used a 10 meg partition for /boot near the beginning of the drive (right after a little DOS partition in case I need some occasional DOS tool like the 3c509 setup utility for instance) and I put my kernels in /boot. swap is at the end of the drive, and all the space in the middle is the root partition. Well, the system boots and runs fine, but as it warms up, it gets an increasing number of errors like this:
hda: status timeout: status=0x80 { Busy }
hda: drive not ready for command
ide0: reset: success
Eventually the time spent "not ready" gets to be minutes at a time and the system becomes useless; also I hear some extreme seek noises like it's bumping its heads against the case or something. But I don't know if IDE drives can actually do that if they're given out-of-range sector commands or whatever. The drive is not overheating; the case has a serious fan blowing air right on it and the drive is only a tiny bit warmer than room temperature. Anyway after a few days of this abuse (over several weeks - I had the system powered off a lot due to not being able to solve this problem) the Seagate died; the BIOS wouldn't detect it anymore on boot. Since it was nearly new I returned it and got an IBM 20 gig drive instead. But I'm getting the same errors and noises. I have tried a 2.0.36 kernel, 2.2.13, and 2.3.24 (or was it 34? the latest as of a couple weeks ago anyway). The 2.3 series kernel actually detected the controller properly; the others said it was an unknown controller or something like that but it worked about the same regardless of which kernel. I'm afraid to keep trying to use it because I think the problem caused some kind of physical damage to the Seagate drive.
Any clues?
These violent-sounding product names are starting to get old. The hyperbole is so intense it's getting redundant - don't fury and rage mean just about the same thing?
Yeah I was like that in college too, and I really regret it now. The 4 years you spend getting a degree will be the best _ever_ for meeting women. If you blow it, it will be much harder later, when you have to go out of your way to meet people with similar interests rather than being part of a huge throng of hundreds or thousands of them every day. Besides you get older and maybe uglier too as time goes on. And, if you are into the whole pair-bonding thing then it could end up being just as meaningful in life long-term as the education you are getting. So don't let your education get in the way of socializing; consider them to be of equal importance, because long-term they probably are.
Good riddance then; this issue would have come up sooner or later anyhow. If she can't handle a real geek then find someone who can.
I'd still rather have a Newton I think, but they were always too expensive back then, and now they are discontinued. $1000 for something you can easily drop or lose is way too much. But I still think discontinuing it was Apple's worst decision ever; Jobs probably did it for personal reasons rather than rational ones, because it makes no sense at all. Somebody should buy the technology and put them back into production.