However not quite long enough to remove the chip from the shoulder obviously
Mostly due to seeing hypocracy - people from the USA making digs at Australians about penal colonies either know less about their own history than the average Australian does about the history of the USA, or are just being annoying bastards.
To those who are ignorant - who do you think worked in those tobacco planations before the American colonies got slaves? Why do you think Australia was set up as a penal colony in the first place - it was because convicts could no longer be shipped to America. Hence the chip.
The proportion of the population descended from convicts in both places is trivial.
Movie execs are such honourble citizens and such great contributors to the society.
After all they pay tax don't they? Well, I'm sure one of them has to - not every film like "Forest Gump" bombs on paper (but does incredibly well in reality) for tax reasons.
Meanwhile, in the physical world we've been trying to do as much as possible by computer. Using a lathe or milling machine by hand certainly gives you a lot of feedback when the speeds are wrong - but even a relatively inexperienced operator knows what a decent cutting speed in numbers of rpm (as well as by "feel" and sound). Hence numerically controlled machine tools have been run for decades using "G code" programs, instead of the initial aproach - which was to copy the actions of a skilled operator. It really is easier to program the things than to try to get perfect results by hand.
In the case of metal machining a lot of feedback is in the form of sound and vision, which we certainly can do now - or tactile feedback in the form of resistance to motion (which is a bit harder to implement without mice squashing fingers). However, I find it hard to type without audible and tactile feedback (that interface in the final fantasy movie would be a pain to use without putting your hand all of the way through the controls).
I can just see the next version of a GUI - instead of annoying greyed out menu items you have a window in the way which you can't move no matter how hard you push!
They certainly are - a few years back they actually starting writing their own software from scratch instead of just buying other applications (like excel) and altering them a bit. They actually learned from the lessons of IBM and now actually do research, instead of just writing software. Still - most of what is called research (almost everywhere - not just MS) is just product development.
I'm talking about making a keyboard manager of sorts, that will always run, when a keyboard is hooked up. And a clipboard manager that does the same thing.
It sounds like modifying "gpm" may give you a clipboard between tty* and X - "gpm" can already be used as a mouse driver by XFree86, so it may not take much work - maybe just editing the configuration files of gpm and XFree86 (that's if gpm supports your mouse).
As for the keyboard manager - I still think the best bet would be a script to translate the bindings you use in a tty to your window manager of choice. You really want something that can put the text in the correct window, and if you write a keyboard manager to do that (keeping track of mouse focus as well as keyboard events) then you have written a window manager.
Can you get the script to catch key-events before anything else on the system does?
What I mean is just a simple script that tells everything that gets keyboard and mouse events to behave the same way - just something that translates configuration files. You only run it when you add in a new window manager or change what keys you've mapped.
How much additional space will it require due to Perl?
Not a lot really - but you could just easily use bash, csh, awk, sed, java or whatever you normally use - you are just handling text, and only need to do it when you make changes.
considder the idea that X might not be the best thing
X is actually less than you thought it was at the start of the discussion - the window manager handles most of the stuff you are talking about (and gnome and KDE have there own clipboards, since gnome people wanted to copy MS OLE and KDE people wanted to copy CDE and "mwm"). There are better implementations of X than XFree86 (even on linux), but only on the right hardware. The good thing is that X is getting extended all of the time, but stuff like X in a web browser window isn't going to be seen in many places for a while. I like X because it can be networked, and I have more control over it than with win* (so I can actually use all the display modes that the monitor and video card can do) other people like or hate it for various reasons ; eg. XFree86 is a pain to configure by editing the file, and some configuration programs only let you have a single resolution. Lately I've been getting the rpms of XFree - and the configuration file spat out by the configuration program still needs editing by hand. Adding in stuff like mouse wheel scrolling in apps still needs to be configured by hand.
I thought the "UNIX Way"
Yes, the unix way of lots of little programs that are all very good at what they do - and everything is a file. X is a different (and very large) beast - and certainly was running on VMS (among others) a long time ago. It does, however, load stuff in modules that can be enabled or disabled - keeping things small if necessary. I used to run X displayed on a very low end intel machine with all of the apps running on a very high end SGI machine, and for six months I ran X on an NT4 box with the enlightement window manager running remotely from a linux box (I didn't want to go back to "twm"). For most people the networking aspect doesn't matter - hence the "berlin" project.
Re:X is not what you think it is - docs may help
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why have the WINDOW manager handle MOUSE and KEYBOARD?
Because that is what it does - it takes user input so that you can iconify windows, and more importantly so that the text you type ends up getting fed to the correct application (as represented by the application's window). Everything else is just "window dressing" and keeping things tidy on the screen.
The keyboard manager idea that you are talking about is the window manager. Maybe universal keybindings across window managers are a quick perl script away (although remapping to similar, but different behaviour (eg. iconify instead of rolling up windows into their titlebars) may be a pain, since many window managers have very different features).
You skipped the question "why would I have to learn how to use VI and edit a conf-file JUST to change my screen resolution?"
Because you don't, you can use whatever editor you like, or the distributions install program, or XF86Config (the program not the file), or start X by specifying a resolution, or another configuration program I can't recall the name of - or just a combination of three keys if you distro has set up X properly. CTRL ALT + and CTRL ALT - (with the plus and minus on the keypad) will do the switching, so long as you have more than one video mode available (one distro had a bug or design decision where it only set up one video mode - an extreme pain really).
Why? Why can't you just start the TV-out from inside X? Why do you have to do it the hard way?
Um, because you doing it when you are starting X, and telling X where you want it to be. You can of course, be running X on your monitor and start another version of X on your TV, but if your video card can't do that it wont. The different "screen" sections allow you to set up X to display optimised for different monitors. And no folks - MS windows will not magically dectect my TV either (and I shouldn't expect it too) I have to got through a series of menus to get it to work properly, which is impossible on some TVs without using a monitor to do the initial configuration - hence I dont like the GUI confiuration aproach in inital setup of a video device. In my opinion (from using mice on screens at the wrong resoution - often containing nothing recognisable as a pointer) you want to be able to due such a setup from a text display that will show up on the worst monitor you have.
Using a text-editor and CLI to modify a GUI
In this case you are not changing the GUI, but the actual display - the GUI is the menus etc, and is a pain to modify by text file (".fvwmrc" and enlightenment theme files for example). With earlier versions of MS windows I was very happy that I had "win.ini" to edit when the monitor was changed, or dodgy setting made the display unusable. In later MS operating sytems we have had "safe mode" for when the video plays up.
Think of the text display as "safe mode", and use it to start monitors that cannot handle the resolutions you want. It's a pity there's no "-screen CrapMonitor" setting in XF86Config, you'll have to add your own - but the comments in the file should make it trivially easy. You could just start X at a lower resolution, but it is a good idea to edit the configuration file so that X doesn't even attempt to push the other monitor past its rated specs (see the comments in the file for the HSync and VSync for a very low end monitor).
Linux is a unix clone, not a mac or MS windows clone, hence the emphasis on configuration files and command line options. In a lot of cases it's a pain to implement all the possible command line options in a GUI (see dvdrip vs transcode or any GUI CD writing program vs the command line tools they call), hence most things fall back to the command line when you try to do something a little different. I think it's worth it, for all those times I've found the menu option in an MS program for something I want to do, and it has been "greyed out", and there's no docs that will help me enable that again. The "go do it, and dont hassle me" option, instead of clicking in many menus and waiting at different stages, is ultimately why I don't exclusively use a GUI. In linux, if you want to set up and administer a box and add a variety of things you usually can't avoid the command line or configuration files even if you want to - that's what a mac is for. Similarly, if you don't want to stuff around with editing the registry on MS windows you either get soemone else to do it, or re-format and reinstall. All of those MSCE's are around for that reason - MS windows isnt simple either.
However, someone may see your post (or similar) and consider it while they are writing their GUI configuration files. Until then, you actually have to know what hardware you are using, and tell the computer - it can't always tell on its own (eg. consider what a mess "plug and play" was).
Being able to tell the machine what strange things you expect it to diplay on before turning that display on is a huge bonus. Who knows what the standard for the next generation of cheap flat screens is going to be? Or even the next digital TV standard?
Re:X is not what you think it is - docs may help
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Oh, right, I forgot. A GUI is not supposed to be "intuitive"
I think the biggest failure of the GUI is that users expect instant gratification, and expect to be able to go in with no knowledge whatsoever - while of course the reality is that you have to at least know how the GUI is structured to be able to use it. On a MS GUI, you have to be able to visualise where the required menu shortcut is, or continually bring up menus at random until you find the one you want. On a command line interface you have to use something like "apropos" , man pages or HOWTOs to acheive the same thing. In both cases you get knowledge of how to do things - either the "visual" knowledge of where to go with the mouse, or a memory of a string of text in the second case. These are two completely different things, so saying that one is easier than the other depends entirely on what the user finds simpler (visual memory, or being able to remember words). The hassle with a GUI is that once you've learned where everything is you have problems when you are confronted with a different GUI, so if different GUIs put things in different menus all of that learned knowledge has to be learned again. IMHO that is why MS Office was so succesful - the menus are now more or less the same throughout the applications, and cutting and pasting usually works sanely across all of those applications. People use this as an argument for a common desktop environment across *nix (like CDE for example), but the "perfect GUI" varies wildly from user to user, so few people use CDE today (or have even heard about it).
I mark some text with the mouse, and depending on the program, the text goes into the clipboard. Other programs want me to use ctrl+c, some ctrl+insert some want me to right click and select copy and others have no apparent way of copying the text at all.
This hasn't really got anything to do with X - highlight and copy with the middle mouse button is using X alone, everything else is just how those who designed the other programs wanted things to be. Netscape (which I'm using now to cut and paste your comments) is very happy to take text that way, as well as CTRL C, CTRL V. Also since you are using gnome and KDE progams things will be done in different ways between the two programs for silly political reasons which were resolved long ago in the past (and yes, they were silly, mainly due to the fact that the people involved would rather program than communicate (not a big problem) and were quick to demonise others (a problem)).
The UI is run by a number of "daemons"/"servers".
in this section, you more or less listed components of X, without video and networking and various other layers, plus the window manager which handles placement and appearance of windows (contents, size etc are still handled by X).
If people want to write their own server... without having to use a clipboard- or mouse-server you DON'T want.
It looks like what you are describing here is a window manager (plus clipboard), and many others have had the same idea - hence the large number of window managers. Your mouse events (including gestures if you wish, although I don't know a window manager that uses them yet) and key combinations are dealt with by the window manager anyway. The clipboard is a different story - for historical reasons the gnome people tried to do a MS style clipboard, changed to other things and that gives you the gnome clipboard you have now. KDE took a different approach, which gives you the KDE clipboard. The X clipboard was designed over a decade ago and hasn't been changed much - hence three clipboards. Each does different things according to what the devlopers liked, and KDE and gnome don't play well together due to past political reasons (but hopefully their clipboards will be compatable in the future) - while KDE at least, talks to the X clipboard.
Could I design this system, including the API? Probably, but it'd be a lot better, if I had some help, as I'm not that good a developer.
Check out the list of window mangagers on freshmeat - I'm sure there's many that would appreciate your suggestions or help. There may even be ones with gesture implemented or on the way.
and if I hook it up to a monitor that can't do 1600x1200@75Hz
Aha - now it makes sense! Just start X in a different resolution when you start it from the command line. Read how to do it once and put it in a one line script called "xgo" or something. The other option is to edit the/etc/XF86Config file (if you're using linux that will be the one) and add in a screen section for low end monitors. For example, when I want to display X on my TV I start it up with "startx -- -screen TVout".
X is not what you think it is - docs may help
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Also - why can't I use X without using the mouse?
Probably because you have not looked for any documentation on doing so. Half the window managers on *nix allow you to configure keyboard shortcuts to do such things as mouse events. I had one machine with a dodgy serial interface which I used without a mouse for some time.
In Windows I can (well, could) change my desktop resolution on the fly
OK - so windows has recently got that functionality in it, instead of it just being in a few Matrox drivers. Is that why we are getting dozens of posts by people that don't know that "CTRL ALT +" changes the resolution in X? People will be talking about the new login screen for WinXP, and say that something like that should be implemented - let's call it xlogin.
And how do you do it, when the screen is busted?
"xled" and morse code! Or a better solution would be to talk to the box over a network and set "DISPLAY" to a machine that actually has a screen. If it's a win* box there's a lot of implementations of X that will help there, like MI/X (shareware these days, small and easy to set up), XFree86 (fully functional, but big and requires cygwin) and Exceed (nice but pricey).
I'm sure X can do lots of things, but comming from just about any other GUI I can think of
X is not the GUI, the window manager or the applications are the GUI. Blaming X for this is like blaming your video drivers for the crappy way applications are listed in the start menu in WinXP. I would suggest either changing your window manager to one that works the way you like it or (if possible) configuring it to work the way you want it. It takes time, and a bit of reading, but if we all wanted it to be simple we would just start X with no window manager and run star office full screen.
I wasn't referring to any movie. Did you read the 100's of articles I referenced?
No I glanced at a few and gave up - nothing appeared to have been written by anyone that has even been to Australia. I have read a magazine called "lock stock and barrel" which expounded the exact same views, written in Australia in 1994 (before the gun laws) and talked about how we needed to arm so that we could overthrow the government at will, shoot Indonesian invaders (the Javanese are happier in Java anyway instead of annexing a lot of desert) and kill members of the "Jewish Conspiricy" (there are almost no jews at all in Australia - the writer lived in his own little world). That sort of publication would appear to have been the only Australian source of material for those articles. The murder rate here was low, so three loonies with armalite semi-automatic rifles raised the murder rate considerably - hence the ban on semi-automatics.
So gun control hasn't worked "for decades", but you let your gov't pass more worthless laws?
But it has worked - violent crime here mostly involves blunt instruments, single shot rifles, syringes, or fists. The violent crime rate in large cities in Australia is very low in comparison to the middle states of the USA, and of course even Belfast (Ireland) has a much lower violent crime rate than Liousiana, Washington DC and New York.
I can own a gun if I want to (I don't have a criminal record so I can get a licence), just not an easily concealable weapon (and I'm glad that no-one is likely to ever point a pistol at my head either) or a miltary weapon (fully or semi-automatic). My granny's shotgun is legal, the.22 rifle I first fired when I seven is legal, and the one inch bore "Brown Bess" style musket that a friend made is legal. The semi-automatic that my uncle got to deal with animals that ate his fruit trees wasn't, so he had a few months to sell it back to the government. A lot of firearms on the banned list are still out there - hence the proposal to have a second gun amnesty - it looks like the "forcible disarming" has only happened in a few minds across the Pacific. The previous posters "doubts" or fluffy feelings don't really hold up against reality.
It's a difference of culture - when the USA revolted the right to bear arms was a big issue. When Australia was made independant most people in rural areas had firearms anyway, and as colonies each area had it's own volenteer army. The miliary still reserved the right to be the only ones with artillery, and now the only ones with automatic weapons. Hence the second amendment in the USA, and other countries looking on and saying "only in America" when someone uses that amendment as a flimsy excuse to own a.45 automatic or similar military sidearm. The problem, as in the national parks, is not the bears, but the huge numbers of guns carried in fear of the bears.
There are a lot of things wrong with Australia, but the gun laws have no impact on any of them. The worst thing an Austalian leader has been hit with is a cricket ball (during a game) - and we didn't even have a federal police force until someone threw an egg at a prime minister.
At least it has kept our government from forcibly disarming
I don't recall there being any force involved - lots of grumbling but no force.
Note that your crime rate climbed after the confiscation that was supposed to stop all that crime
Yes, I saw "Mad Max/road Warrior" too - but it is just a movie. Sadly for the US gun lobby the crime rate hasn't done anything noticable.
Your crooks now have free rein to rob and pillage, since they're the only ones with firearms.
Hasn't happened, and the robbery weapon of choice has been sawn off shotguns for years (illegal for decades), instead of semi-automatics which are now restricted to the military after the changes in the laws. Fully automatic weapons have always been military weapons here. Handguns have been restricted for at least fifty years and are fairly rare in this country. Rifles and shotguns can be easily obtained, just not semi or fully automatic versions. The well armed militia is the army reserve, which I suspect is what the US constitution was talking about instead of masses of gun clubs calling themselves citizens militias.
Back on topic - Woomera is named after a koori spear throwing device, the rocket range and town were built in the late 1940s to test rockets in the middle of the desert. The scramjet project has been going for a while - I saw a model which closely resembles the current version in December 1989. It's just now that they are finally getting to put the things on rockets instead of helium filled testing tunnels (simulating mach 8 and thereabouts).
How many times do you want to crash during installation today? Is it the three month old video card or the three month old motherboard the problem - there's no other hardware - wait the printer is turned on.
Hmm, five minutes after install EXPLORER.EXE has crashed, at least "cmd" can still be run.
Hmm, back to NT4 or wait for the sixth service pack, the one that brings XP up to the standard of CP/M.
It's a pity that they didn't just put a GUI on VMS and sell that.
In my third (and last) shot at live action role playing I tangled with someone that had got too far into character and had a real axe, which he pulled out and threatened me with, and wouldn't listen to me when I said "you've won the game I quit". It looked as if there was going to be blood spilled (either mine or his from a few desperate kicks and punches in an attempt to stop him using the axe), until about six people came over and managed to calm him down. People were surprised that I dropped out of that game then and there and complained about real weapons being used as props.
Foam weapons would have been good in that situation, even though the few rare combats were actually run by dice rolls and cards. I think anytime adults play at fighting and heavy objects are involved there should be either protective gear or a lot of empty space sepating the business end of the blunt object and the target (eg. virtual fighting on opposite sides of the room).
As a kid I used to thump at other kids with a six foot wooden staff (the nature of monkey was irrepressible), but that usually involved hitting at the other kids staff or lots of slow motion theatrical stuff. If a kid with a blunt object loses it people are less likely to get hurt than if an adult loses it.
With something like this setup and two people in the same room with virtual headsets I can forsee someone beating the guy in marketing to a bloody pulp with the gyroscopicly stablised VR sword during what would start as a friendly game. Keep it virtual, stay in your corner.
Ultimately it comes down to the application, the CDE support was "look and feel" and pasting etc, which they all had. I don't really get what you mean by a good CDE app, unless you mean one of its parts like "mwm" (the window manager).
The CDE desktop itself, the whole look and feel and integrated cut and paste didn't become widely adopted - which is my point. We have had numerous window managers and taskbar applications since then, and numerous themes within the window managers (or taskbar programs) since the days of windowmaker and enlightenment 0.13.
BTW.. if your XP install crashed that many times, you must have some pretty weird hardware.
An epson stylus 400 printer was the culprit (I pulled everything but the video card, one HDD, one CDROM and the printer cable for the install) and some legacy software has been crashing it regularly since (as well as occasional crashes by such things as the shell (EXPLORER.EXE) immediately after startup. Perhaps XP doesn't like my motherboard - time to go back to win2k which does run the legacy software (and the shell doesn't crash). My point was that I found XP more difficult to install than a very old linux distro which had limited hardware support, and I've always found editing the registry to be more difficult than editing files in/etc. The average user does not fool around with the registry or even install their own OS, which is one reason linux is seen to be a an order of magnitude more complicated than win2k etc.
I've done 200 installs, and not one crashed.
Yes, but I'm sure you did a few things that the a new user would not have thought of. I am not a new user, but I still didn't think of turning the printer off on the first install attempt.
Back to the original point - XP is allowing more themeability, ways to diverge from a standard desktop. Last year I worked in a place with a couple of hundred NT4 desktops, and the ways people had set up their menus, icons and even where off screen they had hidden the start menu diverged wildly. It took a bit of mucking around to even list files on these different machines due to different setups, and in a lot of cases I just used "cmd" to get a terminal window. The standard desktop is only standard where IT policy has made it manditory, and locked users out of adjusting their settings. Why should *nix have a standard desktop to copy windows, when windows doesn't?
There is one - it's called CDE, the common desktop environment. It probably predates Windows 95. a lot of people didn't like it for various reasons, hence the assortment of different window managers and ways to bring up frequently used programs (eg. goodstuff, kde and gnome in the range of GPLed programs alone.)
Until we have focused, unified efforts towards bringing out a rock solid desktop, it won't happen.
For one thing, we are talking about a wide variety of processors and display hardware. Some people aren't even happy about X and want run other display systems. Linux at this point offers a wide variety of choice, whether you want to install from a single floppy or three CDs - and I believe that is one of its strengths. It's weakness is that it doesn't come pre-installed except in rare cases, which is really why it is seen to be difficult to use. Windows is not magicly easier to install, but few people do it as their first exposure to Windows. It was certainly a much simpler and faster process to install Slackware Linux from floppy disks in 1996 (with very little proir *nix experience) than it was for me to install Windows XP last week (how many times do you want to crash during the install process today?) - and distros have certainly got a lot easier since then.
It's not the lawyers behind this, it's some childish person in management with a rape and pillage mentality. Remember folks, to some people business isn't about getting money for doing things, it's about taking money from those that are weaker without getting beaten up by those that are stronger.
Perhaps there should be a mangagement licence scheme - where only those with a mental age of 18 or above can drive a company. Perhaps that will stop all of this "the dog ate my financial records" behavior.
Wasn't that what he was complaining about? A crappy front end? The program itself has always been frustrating, but a nice, stable, secure, and easy to use front end for sharing printers and the like...well, that's what Linux Printing has needed forever.
Like CUPS for example. Control printing from a web browser.
This may not seem a big deal. You can run a finite element package like ABAQUS on an NT box. If you want to do anything that requires a bit more precision you can leave the NT box going for a month or two, but it's a cheaper to run the software on a big IRIX box somewhere (if you have access to such a thing). If you want to see what you are doing X certainly helps.
Even if you have the fastest machine imaginable that can run a microsoft OS sitting in the building, if it isn't on your desk you won't be able to control the software in real time using a GUI. Even the third party software to display remote desktops won't help, so you'll be running the stuff by text - effectively the same as doing FEA via a VT100 terminal like those who did it decades ago. It's doable, and sometimes more efficent since sometimes the GUIs make assumptions that really slow stuff down - but in most cases having the real time 3D display cuts down the time you spend at the keyboard immensely.
Fairly trivial modelling problems can take enormous amounts of processing power, and currently nothing that runs a microsoft OS gives you enormous amounts of processing power.
Brad Pitt's performance left me wanting to beat him to a pulp.
And this is a bad thing?
I think he was pretty well cast for the obnoxious character he was playing. It was probably very similar to the way he played characters in a lot of other movies, but it worked. I'm certainly not a Brad Pit fan - Seven Years in Tibet (my god - Tibetans look exactly like Mexicans!) would probably have been better with someone else in it, but the writing was also crap. The action and exciting bits were removed for the Hollywood version of a true story, instead of the usual practice of adding more in.
If Bruce Willis is part of the problem in the future... then how the hell did he get there in the first place.
By not dying as a kid. The loop gets closed, there's no strange alternate timelines. The whole point of a time travel story is to have those from one time affect another. Having a time travel story where no-one can effect anything (the unknowns, not the known facts that couldn't be changed in the movie) would be expressing that free will does not exist - which leads to the idea that we are not responsible for our own actions. Such a thing would most likely be as boring as the worst fantasy novels that have seen print (which express that premise).
Terry is also a writer (Starship Titanic novelisation), but Python, Brazil etc have shown what he can do. Twelve Monkeys remains the only time travel film since the original "Time Machine" that even attempts to be self-consistant, and does it well. I hope this goes ahead this time, and some film actually gets shot. Terry Gilliam can certainly do this type of story well.
Baron Munchausen could have been better (it ran out of money during filming and the finished result is somewhat less than planned) but I really liked it - and it turned out much better than some stuff that did get finished like "Waterworld".
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To those who are ignorant - who do you think worked in those tobacco planations before the American colonies got slaves? Why do you think Australia was set up as a penal colony in the first place - it was because convicts could no longer be shipped to America. Hence the chip.
The proportion of the population descended from convicts in both places is trivial.
In the case of metal machining a lot of feedback is in the form of sound and vision, which we certainly can do now - or tactile feedback in the form of resistance to motion (which is a bit harder to implement without mice squashing fingers). However, I find it hard to type without audible and tactile feedback (that interface in the final fantasy movie would be a pain to use without putting your hand all of the way through the controls).
I can just see the next version of a GUI - instead of annoying greyed out menu items you have a window in the way which you can't move no matter how hard you push!
As for the keyboard manager - I still think the best bet would be a script to translate the bindings you use in a tty to your window manager of choice. You really want something that can put the text in the correct window, and if you write a keyboard manager to do that (keeping track of mouse focus as well as keyboard events) then you have written a window manager.
What I mean is just a simple script that tells everything that gets keyboard and mouse events to behave the same way - just something that translates configuration files. You only run it when you add in a new window manager or change what keys you've mapped. Not a lot really - but you could just easily use bash, csh, awk, sed, java or whatever you normally use - you are just handling text, and only need to do it when you make changes. X is actually less than you thought it was at the start of the discussion - the window manager handles most of the stuff you are talking about (and gnome and KDE have there own clipboards, since gnome people wanted to copy MS OLE and KDE people wanted to copy CDE and "mwm"). There are better implementations of X than XFree86 (even on linux), but only on the right hardware. The good thing is that X is getting extended all of the time, but stuff like X in a web browser window isn't going to be seen in many places for a while. I like X because it can be networked, and I have more control over it than with win* (so I can actually use all the display modes that the monitor and video card can do) other people like or hate it for various reasons ; eg. XFree86 is a pain to configure by editing the file, and some configuration programs only let you have a single resolution. Lately I've been getting the rpms of XFree - and the configuration file spat out by the configuration program still needs editing by hand. Adding in stuff like mouse wheel scrolling in apps still needs to be configured by hand. Yes, the unix way of lots of little programs that are all very good at what they do - and everything is a file. X is a different (and very large) beast - and certainly was running on VMS (among others) a long time ago. It does, however, load stuff in modules that can be enabled or disabled - keeping things small if necessary. I used to run X displayed on a very low end intel machine with all of the apps running on a very high end SGI machine, and for six months I ran X on an NT4 box with the enlightement window manager running remotely from a linux box (I didn't want to go back to "twm"). For most people the networking aspect doesn't matter - hence the "berlin" project.The keyboard manager idea that you are talking about is the window manager. Maybe universal keybindings across window managers are a quick perl script away (although remapping to similar, but different behaviour (eg. iconify instead of rolling up windows into their titlebars) may be a pain, since many window managers have very different features).
Player: What is it?
DM: It is a scroll of thesis.
Player: I read it.
DM: You can't, your scroll of thesis is blank!
Think of the text display as "safe mode", and use it to start monitors that cannot handle the resolutions you want. It's a pity there's no "-screen CrapMonitor" setting in XF86Config, you'll have to add your own - but the comments in the file should make it trivially easy. You could just start X at a lower resolution, but it is a good idea to edit the configuration file so that X doesn't even attempt to push the other monitor past its rated specs (see the comments in the file for the HSync and VSync for a very low end monitor).
Linux is a unix clone, not a mac or MS windows clone, hence the emphasis on configuration files and command line options. In a lot of cases it's a pain to implement all the possible command line options in a GUI (see dvdrip vs transcode or any GUI CD writing program vs the command line tools they call), hence most things fall back to the command line when you try to do something a little different. I think it's worth it, for all those times I've found the menu option in an MS program for something I want to do, and it has been "greyed out", and there's no docs that will help me enable that again. The "go do it, and dont hassle me" option, instead of clicking in many menus and waiting at different stages, is ultimately why I don't exclusively use a GUI. In linux, if you want to set up and administer a box and add a variety of things you usually can't avoid the command line or configuration files even if you want to - that's what a mac is for. Similarly, if you don't want to stuff around with editing the registry on MS windows you either get soemone else to do it, or re-format and reinstall. All of those MSCE's are around for that reason - MS windows isnt simple either.
However, someone may see your post (or similar) and consider it while they are writing their GUI configuration files. Until then, you actually have to know what hardware you are using, and tell the computer - it can't always tell on its own (eg. consider what a mess "plug and play" was).
Being able to tell the machine what strange things you expect it to diplay on before turning that display on is a huge bonus. Who knows what the standard for the next generation of cheap flat screens is going to be? Or even the next digital TV standard?
I can own a gun if I want to (I don't have a criminal record so I can get a licence), just not an easily concealable weapon (and I'm glad that no-one is likely to ever point a pistol at my head either) or a miltary weapon (fully or semi-automatic). My granny's shotgun is legal, the .22 rifle I first fired when I seven is legal, and the one inch bore "Brown Bess" style musket that a friend made is legal. The semi-automatic that my uncle got to deal with animals that ate his fruit trees wasn't, so he had a few months to sell it back to the government. A lot of firearms on the banned list are still out there - hence the proposal to have a second gun amnesty - it looks like the "forcible disarming" has only happened in a few minds across the Pacific. The previous posters "doubts" or fluffy feelings don't really hold up against reality.
It's a difference of culture - when the USA revolted the right to bear arms was a big issue. When Australia was made independant most people in rural areas had firearms anyway, and as colonies each area had it's own volenteer army. The miliary still reserved the right to be the only ones with artillery, and now the only ones with automatic weapons. Hence the second amendment in the USA, and other countries looking on and saying "only in America" when someone uses that amendment as a flimsy excuse to own a .45 automatic or similar military sidearm. The problem, as in the national parks, is not the bears, but the huge numbers of guns carried in fear of the bears.
There are a lot of things wrong with Australia, but the gun laws have no impact on any of them. The worst thing an Austalian leader has been hit with is a cricket ball (during a game) - and we didn't even have a federal police force until someone threw an egg at a prime minister.
Back on topic - Woomera is named after a koori spear throwing device, the rocket range and town were built in the late 1940s to test rockets in the middle of the desert. The scramjet project has been going for a while - I saw a model which closely resembles the current version in December 1989. It's just now that they are finally getting to put the things on rockets instead of helium filled testing tunnels (simulating mach 8 and thereabouts).
Hmm, five minutes after install EXPLORER.EXE has crashed, at least "cmd" can still be run.
Hmm, back to NT4 or wait for the sixth service pack, the one that brings XP up to the standard of CP/M.
It's a pity that they didn't just put a GUI on VMS and sell that.
Foam weapons would have been good in that situation, even though the few rare combats were actually run by dice rolls and cards. I think anytime adults play at fighting and heavy objects are involved there should be either protective gear or a lot of empty space sepating the business end of the blunt object and the target (eg. virtual fighting on opposite sides of the room).
As a kid I used to thump at other kids with a six foot wooden staff (the nature of monkey was irrepressible), but that usually involved hitting at the other kids staff or lots of slow motion theatrical stuff. If a kid with a blunt object loses it people are less likely to get hurt than if an adult loses it.
With something like this setup and two people in the same room with virtual headsets I can forsee someone beating the guy in marketing to a bloody pulp with the gyroscopicly stablised VR sword during what would start as a friendly game. Keep it virtual, stay in your corner.
For more information on how bearings work, and wear in general, do a search on the field of "tribology". It's all there.
The CDE desktop itself, the whole look and feel and integrated cut and paste didn't become widely adopted - which is my point. We have had numerous window managers and taskbar applications since then, and numerous themes within the window managers (or taskbar programs) since the days of windowmaker and enlightenment 0.13.
An epson stylus 400 printer was the culprit (I pulled everything but the video card, one HDD, one CDROM and the printer cable for the install) and some legacy software has been crashing it regularly since (as well as occasional crashes by such things as the shell (EXPLORER.EXE) immediately after startup. Perhaps XP doesn't like my motherboard - time to go back to win2k which does run the legacy software (and the shell doesn't crash). My point was that I found XP more difficult to install than a very old linux distro which had limited hardware support, and I've always found editing the registry to be more difficult than editing files inBack to the original point - XP is allowing more themeability, ways to diverge from a standard desktop. Last year I worked in a place with a couple of hundred NT4 desktops, and the ways people had set up their menus, icons and even where off screen they had hidden the start menu diverged wildly. It took a bit of mucking around to even list files on these different machines due to different setups, and in a lot of cases I just used "cmd" to get a terminal window. The standard desktop is only standard where IT policy has made it manditory, and locked users out of adjusting their settings. Why should *nix have a standard desktop to copy windows, when windows doesn't?
Perhaps there should be a mangagement licence scheme - where only those with a mental age of 18 or above can drive a company. Perhaps that will stop all of this "the dog ate my financial records" behavior.
This may not seem a big deal. You can run a finite element package like ABAQUS on an NT box. If you want to do anything that requires a bit more precision you can leave the NT box going for a month or two, but it's a cheaper to run the software on a big IRIX box somewhere (if you have access to such a thing). If you want to see what you are doing X certainly helps.
Even if you have the fastest machine imaginable that can run a microsoft OS sitting in the building, if it isn't on your desk you won't be able to control the software in real time using a GUI. Even the third party software to display remote desktops won't help, so you'll be running the stuff by text - effectively the same as doing FEA via a VT100 terminal like those who did it decades ago. It's doable, and sometimes more efficent since sometimes the GUIs make assumptions that really slow stuff down - but in most cases having the real time 3D display cuts down the time you spend at the keyboard immensely.
Fairly trivial modelling problems can take enormous amounts of processing power, and currently nothing that runs a microsoft OS gives you enormous amounts of processing power.
Right you are - wrong Python. I have no excuse, the book is sitting on a shelf behind me!
I think he was pretty well cast for the obnoxious character he was playing. It was probably very similar to the way he played characters in a lot of other movies, but it worked. I'm certainly not a Brad Pit fan - Seven Years in Tibet (my god - Tibetans look exactly like Mexicans!) would probably have been better with someone else in it, but the writing was also crap. The action and exciting bits were removed for the Hollywood version of a true story, instead of the usual practice of adding more in.
By not dying as a kid. The loop gets closed, there's no strange alternate timelines. The whole point of a time travel story is to have those from one time affect another. Having a time travel story where no-one can effect anything (the unknowns, not the known facts that couldn't be changed in the movie) would be expressing that free will does not exist - which leads to the idea that we are not responsible for our own actions. Such a thing would most likely be as boring as the worst fantasy novels that have seen print (which express that premise).Baron Munchausen could have been better (it ran out of money during filming and the finished result is somewhat less than planned) but I really liked it - and it turned out much better than some stuff that did get finished like "Waterworld".