d) use a decent, open chat protocol like IRC, which has been around since 1990 and, if you're both on the same server, suffers none of the lag and other crap that ICQ et al seem to, since there's a few hundred people connected during the worst of times instead of a thousands upon thousands. Plus the clients have been around long enough that there's not much chance of finding nice backdoors in them. Remember when you could change ICQ users' passwords without their knowledge? You can still spoof UINs, if I'm not mistaken. The cute little personal webserver that they include with it lets you read any file on a user's hard disk too. Good stuff.
I'll stick with what works for me for real-time chat.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Your arguement would be all well and good if even a tiny percentage of our food was still produced by hunters shooting animals. Now we raise all our tasty meat on farms and special ranges, fatten them up and feed them the right stuff so they taste better once dead, and kill them in more efficient ways.
When's the last time you picked a load of buckshot out of your Big Mac?
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The RIAA sued the makers of the DAT standard? Funny. I just picked up a non-copy-protected DAT deck a couple months ago. They're easy as hell to get a hold of, and perfectly legal.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
They're taking someone else's copyrighted property and rebroadcasting it, which wouldn't be *so* bad if they weren't also *charging* for it. That's what'll kill their case even more than the simple fact that they're breaking copyright laws. If this even goes to court, I bet it'll be a very short case with a very predictable outcome.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
If Mozilla ever gets to a beta release (I'm guessing it'll be some time before my grandkids are of legal drinking age), it'll probably be useable, speed-wise. I'm not holding out hope though...
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
On that Salon page, he whines that the WTO is putting Americans out of work, when the unemployment level in the U.S. is at the lowest level ever. This guy thinks he can be President? (Then again, look at the two front-runners. They think they'd make good presidents too.)
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Most digital studios master to 16/48 or 16/44 at present. 24/96 digital mastering setups are too new and far too expensive for most studios right now. Give it a couple years, and, sure, there will probably be a significant number of major recording studios that master to the new standard, but what about the old stuff that was done to 16/48 or analog, or all the new stuff still being mastered at the old rate? It will sound no different in this new format! I really hope DVD Audio is relegated to the niche market of audio enthusiasts, because most people will not hear a difference at all between it and a normal CD on their stereos.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
He's saying that the entire interface is ill-conceived for the hardware. The windows metaphor doesn't translate properly to palm PCs and he used the right-tapping "feature" as an example.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
According to the article, Intel's planning on fixing the bug when the new 750 MHz PIIIs come out (which is supposedly January 10th of next year). This means that any CPUs produced before then will still have the bug.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
...turn the key one more time and it might. No big deal!" It doesn't really matter, though. The bug itself may just be annoying, but it serves the purpose of further eroding OEM and consumer trust in Intel.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
After all the garbage they've done, I'm savoring this year. First the lawsuits against VIA, then the alleged pressure on Asus to cancel their Athlon board... I'm downright happy that they're getting what's coming to them now: the Coppermine chipset showstopper bugs, the fact that AMD not only has the fastest x86 CPU, clock-for-clock on the market, but also the fastest, MHz-wise, and is gaining more and more mindshare and OEM support, and the general lack of faith that I see people displaying on an increasingly regular basis toward them. This latest bug is just icing on the cake, in my opinion. Go AMD, go International Semi, go Transmeta (or so the rumors say)... competition is a *good* thing, and this latest twist in the CPU wars saga has been especially satisfying.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
I mean, it's been my experience that Windows does indeed have trouble staying up for even a few days at a time. Though it may have been a bit of a joke, I'm sure it's not out of the realm of possibility that you'd need to reboot a Windows box once a day. Hell, we reboot our NT server once a week at work or it does it for us. (The first person that says, "well, you must have set it up wrong then!" gets a boot in the ass.)
Bottom line: get a sense of humor, please!
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Most sites simply don't have a wide enough pipe to shove all the http requests through. Anything faster than an early Pentium ought to be able to handle a few hits a second without breaking a sweat, which is about what you can expect while "being slashdotted" (see here for exact numbers - it's about 5 hits per second). This is certainly not enough to put any sort of strain on the machine itself. Whether or not it can actually pump the data out onto the network quick enough is another matter entirely. (Here's a hint: If you've only got a T1, you're SOL. If you've got anything less, you may as well turn the machine off.)
-A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
In a heartbeat. As long as it wasn't the same Internet Explorer monstrousity that Microsoft ported to Solaris and HP/UX. Ever see an Ultra 10 cave under the weight of a web browser? I have, while running MSIE 4.0 and 5.0 on it. My Sparc 5/170 at home can't handle it at any reasonable speed, yet it has no trouble with Netscape 4.x. I think a lot of the problem is that Microsoft basically ported Windows to the Sparc architecture along with Internet Explorer. (Why, for instance, does it come with its own TCP/IP shared libs? Aren't the Solaris standard TCP/IP C library functions simple enough to port to?) It really does feel like you're running some sort of emulator when you run IE on Solaris. Anything faster than a Sparc 10 mod 51 should have no problem running a web browser in X. Yet I've never seen even an Ultra that can handle IE.
I share your grief on the Netscape issue, though. Its error handling has got to be the worst of any program I've ever seen. I, too, am getting fed up with typing "rm ~/.netscape/lock"; I might as well set up a cron job to do it for me every 30 minutes. The problem, however, is that it's not just Linux that it sucks on. Netscape crashes reliably for me on every OS I've used it on: Irix 6.5, Linux 2.0 and 2.2, FreeBSD (both the native binary and a Linux binary running under emulation), Solaris, Windows 95, 98 and NT, and MacOS. Sometimes it'll take X with it (segmentation fault in the server on Irix), other times it'll cause the entire OS to slow to a crawl (Windows NT) and require a reboot. Other times, it'll just cause the machine to reboot (Mac OS 7). I'm convinced that nothing will save Netscape short of a complete rewrite; its code would simply be too buggy to be of any use without major walkthroughs and audits (which would probably take longer than rewriting the damned thing.)
I would love it if Microsoft ported IE properly to Linux. If it proved to be better than Netscape -- which it would not have a hard time doing, I daresay -- I'd use it.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Apparently, according to the site (crowdedtheater.com), some of the mirror sites that sprung up had "hard drive bombs" on them. Now, I have no idea what on earth a hard drive bomb is, but, since I was one of the mirror sites -- and probably the most-accessed one (I've got 22000 hits on that file and still counting) -- I figured I should make it clear to people that, as far as I know, it's nigh on impossible to embed a virus in a Realplayer file. Believe me, my site wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes if someone downloaded the file, found out it was a virus, and then started attacking my poor little linux box.
Oh, well. Hopefully nobody found my site too slow this weekend. It felt neat to see "http://moxy.wtower.com/mirrors/timesq.ram" mentioned all over the net, though.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
You think they care that the story's inaccurate? Muckraking and hearsay is well worth it when you consider that they're probably getting a few thousand impressions out of this story. That means money, plain and simple, journalistic integrity be damned. Expect a follow-up retraction well after the fact while the hits keep rolling in.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Under part 15 of the FCC's rules, unlicensed broadcast on the FM bands is permitted for very low-power devices. These devices are limited to a range of 35 to 100 feet - perfect for a small office or your house. For more info, go here.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
All he seems to do, from the stuff I've read on slashdot, is spin general vagaries out about what might take place in the future and hope, somehow, one will be declared "correct" in 20 years from now and people will hail him as a genius. He seems like a modern-day Nostradamus, and, for my money, his ideas of the future are about as worthless.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
I don't work 80 hours a week (I work 40), I'm paid fairly well, I anticipate being able to afford my own house with its very own driveway once I'm out of college, and my life generally tends to suck a whole lot less than it sounds like yours does. Why on earth do people torture themselves by getting jobs in Silicon Valley, where the poverty line is $65K a year, the traffic is horrible, and property values per square foot of land are the highest on the planet? It sure as hell can't be for the job benefits -- working 80 hours a week, even for dubiously valuable stock options, doesn't sound like my idea of fun. Is crack cocaine cheap there or something? Because I'd need some sort of psychotropic substance to alter my reality enough that I'd consider living and working in Sunnyvale worthwhile.
Sorry, but I fully anticipate having my own, nice car(s) in a couple of years and not having to worry about making the month's rent.
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Rumor has it that Amiga Inc. will be releasing a new machine, consisting solely of styrofoam and felt bunting with a grey plastic screen. It will make a nice conversation piece: "Why does your computer not turn on? And why does it feel like velvet?"
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Could we move all "bogus patent" announcements/"news" to its own section so people can check an "exclude" box and not have to hear about them? It seems that, almost once a week now, there's a story about some horrible patent or another that's bound to make our lives more difficult. As far as I know, though, the "making lives more difficult" part has never occurred or I haven't read about it occurring. All these articles seem to do is inspire a string of silly "I patented walking!" posts on slashdot and take up space on the main page. A section of their own would be a welcome thing.
Just my opinion, of course...
- A.P. --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Okay, so all your friends have modded PSX consoles. I'm sure this is an accurate cross-section of the home gaming market. It is especially ludicrous to claim that even a substantial number of people mod their PSXs in light of the simple fact that companies are still making plenty of money off the sales of legit copies of games. Please don't use the fact that all your friends have PSX mods as proof that everyone does and that software sales really are suffering because of this.
- A.P. (How did abortion get dragged into this?) --
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Slashdot Mirror
I'll stick with what works for me for real-time chat.
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
When's the last time you picked a load of buckshot out of your Big Mac?
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
On that Salon page, he whines that the WTO is putting Americans out of work, when the unemployment level in the U.S. is at the lowest level ever. This guy thinks he can be President? (Then again, look at the two front-runners. They think they'd make good presidents too.)
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Bottom line: get a sense of humor, please!
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
-A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
I share your grief on the Netscape issue, though. Its error handling has got to be the worst of any program I've ever seen. I, too, am getting fed up with typing "rm ~/.netscape/lock"; I might as well set up a cron job to do it for me every 30 minutes. The problem, however, is that it's not just Linux that it sucks on. Netscape crashes reliably for me on every OS I've used it on: Irix 6.5, Linux 2.0 and 2.2, FreeBSD (both the native binary and a Linux binary running under emulation), Solaris, Windows 95, 98 and NT, and MacOS. Sometimes it'll take X with it (segmentation fault in the server on Irix), other times it'll cause the entire OS to slow to a crawl (Windows NT) and require a reboot. Other times, it'll just cause the machine to reboot (Mac OS 7). I'm convinced that nothing will save Netscape short of a complete rewrite; its code would simply be too buggy to be of any use without major walkthroughs and audits (which would probably take longer than rewriting the damned thing.)
I would love it if Microsoft ported IE properly to Linux. If it proved to be better than Netscape -- which it would not have a hard time doing, I daresay -- I'd use it.
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Oh, well. Hopefully nobody found my site too slow this weekend. It felt neat to see "http://moxy.wtower.com/mirrors/timesq.ram" mentioned all over the net, though.
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Sorry, but I fully anticipate having my own, nice car(s) in a couple of years and not having to worry about making the month's rent.
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Just my opinion, of course...
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
- A.P. (How did abortion get dragged into this?)
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad