SVG is not a reverse engineered version of Flash. It is a completely separate implementation of a Scalable Vector Graphics package. See the list of authors for something more authoritative than myself.
As the above link implies, SVG is a W3C standard. It is even supported by modern versions of Flash IIRC.
I read this article much earlier today. I think this is doomed to failure from the word "go". History shows that anything involving "Unix" and words like "Common" or "Consortium" or "Group" spells disaster.
Does anyone remember the OSF or COSE or any of their products (Motif, OSF/1, CDE...) with anything but derision? Does anyone remember COSE, which was going to turn back the tide and bring Microsoft to its knees, at all?
Also, that website is a retina-searing chunk of ass. Way to convince me you can design a great desktop.
From Google newsgroups, the earliest mention of the Soundblaster card was Sep 25 1990, and in 1992 the SB was sold for $75. So in 1991, you should have been able to get a sound card for a reasonable price.
Come now, surely a true DOS gamer from back in the day would know that the SoundBlaster was not the first PC sound card!
No, the original SoundBlaster boards were cheap knock-offs of the AdLib, one of which a friend of mine had in his 286 box back around 1988. Back then, all consumer-level cards were "AdLib compatible", and the SB was one of these.
IIRC, there were also higher-end cards already on the market as well, like those from Turtle Beach and (I believe) the GUS, which was a favorite of the tracker/demo crowd.
So by 1991, you should have been able to get an older AdLib card for cheap (and, again, AdLib was the gold standard at the time and SB was cheap crap.)
"It's called "L337-speak" -- pronounced 'leet-speak,' as in 'elite.' The code was invented by Quake players to expand naming possibilities for their online personas."
There were a couple of other niggling inaccuracies before this, but I let them slide as pandering to a non-technical audience, but this is so wrong it hurts. (See http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Leet-speak.ht ml for a more historically accurate description of the phenomenon.)
I wonder: did the writer make this up off the top of his head, or did the m4d g4m3Rz he's doing his best Katz impression over tell him that?
I wish I'd thought to ask this earlier. I'd love to know why PCs still use the old, crufty, ugly, BIOS at all. Why does the Intel architecture industry not use an implementation of the powerful, flexible, architecture-independent OpenBoot (IEEE 1275) standard?
SPARC, PowerPC, and Alpha machines use it. Why is the x86 world stuck in 1980? (This, the clever reader will observe, is a rhetorical question.)
Interesting story about Cassette BASIC on the IBM XTs.
One of the reasons that no one could make clone PCs at first was that IBM wouldn't license the ROMs to anyone, and all the OSes available for the PC (DOS, CPM and something else...) refused to boot without the ROM.
Eventually, Microsoft got tired of this kink in their revenue stream and produced a version of DOS that worked without the real IBM ROMs.
Hrm. That wasn't actually about the embedded BASIC at all, was it? Okay, how about this:
The version of BASIC on those ROMS was really shitty, and to get any decent features (like saving programs) you had to pay for the advanced BASIC version, which was called BASICA.
In one of their first embrace-extend-extinguish moves, MS produced a version of BASICA called GW-BASIC (Gee-Whiz BASIC) and included it with DOS.
Damn, I'm telling MS stories again. Oh well, if any of these stories are factually inaccurate, blame John Dvorak, because I read them all in a column of his long long ago. --
So far everytime something like this has come up (with a company), the violator has begged off saying "We misunderstood the nature of the GPL" or something like that.
I for one have a hard time believing this. I first encountered the GPL when I was 17 years old, with zero experience with the legalese that licenses are written in. I had no trouble understanding the rights and restrictions carried by the GPL.
I just can't believe that any large corporation could possibly "misunderstand" the language of the GPL.
That leaves 2 possibilities: willful violation or just not bothering to read the damned thing. I can see the braindead types of technically clueless people who run corporations doing this: "Linux? Oh yeah, it's free! We can do whatever we want with it! Those moronic geeks, we'll make millions off of them!"
I love Mozilla, and I am aware of it's modular nature and all that, but I have doubts as to whether it is the right tool for a help environment.
I just started Mozilla and loaded this page. 'top' shows it as using 20M of memory, and it takes about 5 seconds to load on my K6-2/400.
A Help system should be instantaneous and lightweight so that it will be there as soon as you call it, so that you can keep it around all the time.
Of course, if you actually meant "a custom app based on gecko", that might fit the bill nicely. May I sugest you take a look at Mac OS's Help Center application? It's a HTML-based help system that includes AppleScripts as links in the docs to let users do things just by clicking on the appropriate link in the help pages. How cool is that?
Head over to Caldera and download DR-DO....er...OpenDOS from them. It's in there (they have a DOSEMU package buried somewhere on their FTP server too).
Hey, it's mot my fault if the promotional materials make it sound like you need to buy the SuperLeet Version to get SMP support.
The description for that version of W2K *specifically* stated that it included SMP support, while the others made no mention of it. What would you think after having read that?
I got a CDW catalog the other day with a 2-page spread about Win2K in the middle of it (Preorder your copy now!). The "Advanced Server Edition", which seemed to be the one you got if you wanted high-end stuff like SMP support or...uhh...I dunno, really, there was almost no real data on the page, was listed as ~$1700 upgrade, ~$3300 non-upgrade. I don't know how many users/whatever this was a license for, as I trashed the catalog almost immediately reading those pages.
I was going to reply with a little story about my geeky marriage, but apparently that would be self-congratulatory, offtopic grandstanding, judging by the posts in these threads.
If anyone really would liketo see it, just say so and i'll post the whole thing (although i think most of the old SlashNET crew, many of whom I recognized in the article (been a while, how ya'll are?) have already heard it.).
I have used w3m for all my serious browsing (slashdot, freshmeat, CNN, the onion, etc.) for the past several months, starting a graphical browser only when I want to see a certain page fully rendered.
I'd say that it was as full-featured as Lynx with respect to browsing, though Lynx does handle images much better at the moment.
I got an email from Ito-sensei (he's a professor in the engineering dept. of Yamagata University) yesterday saying "Happy New Year" and that a new version would be out this week with some new fixes and features, so these things are being worked on.
I used to use Lynx all the time but w3m's superior layout capabilities made me switch.
I write a lot of papers in LyX and I love the quality of output that TeX provides and the features like footnotes/margin notes that LyX gives me.
Not many people (outside the Unix community) have DVI or PostScript viewers on their machines but almost *everyone* has a copy of Acrobat, so I use texi2pdf to generate PDFs of my work.
Oh, and if you don't want to use Adobe's software (Acrobat), grab a copy of xpdf. I always make PS and/or DVI versions of my stuff available anyway.
I guess you've never used Emacs or any of the terminal control characters.
If you had, you'd realize *why* the wm lets through almost all keystrokes. Windows' habit of having ALT sequences bound to menu commands is especially annoying to emacs users because it forces them to reach for ESC rather than using the ALT key for Meta-key bindings.
While I'm at it, I'm kind of shocked at the lack of knowledge displayed in a lot of posts here. Trying to sound as un-high-and-mighty as possible, there are a ton of posts from people using GNOME who seem to have no clue at all about the separation between X and the window manager (especially which one is responsible for what). Much of the whinging about "X not letting you use the keyboard" could be solved if you'd read the manual for your *window manager*.
Man...Christians today sure are some mixed-up, crazy folks...
That site looks like it's either (A) a MANOWAR fan site (B) a Dio fansite or (C) a Robert Jordan fan site. I noticed that you can fight on either side...I wonder if there are separate endings for each of the possible outcomes (Host, Fallen, Win, Lose)? Oh, and it's strangely appropriate that the game uses a "non-Euclidean" engine, eh?
Oh well, Christianity always has been the English of religions, always blindly assimilating whatever local trends and traditions are around it at the moment. I guess this continues unabated (i.e. "Christian Rock", "Christian Rap", etc.). Perhaps we'll see some Christian Porn soon...that should be interesting.
Still, it's nice to know that Heaven is populated by white people in suits of full plate armor, eh?
Please don't accuse me of flaming Christians; I'm an equal-opportunity bastard. Everyone is free to follow whatever spiritual path they wish, but the actions of some religious people certainly do lend themselves to parody - this is definately one of them. Assuming that this is not a hoax, I would strongly urge the people who wrote this game to take a break and give their holy book a thorough reading. I don't remember "Thou Shalt Kick Ass" being on that list anywhere...
Every beginning Japanese textbook I've ever seen leads off sentences with "Watashi wa..." ("I am"). This is purely a concession to Westerners who the authors feel would have trouble with a language which is (1) highly context-sensitive, with the bare minimum needed for understanding being said (this mimimum being far less than one would assume in English) and (2) where one almost never refers to oneself (in this manner).
To lift an example from something I once read, a Japanese textbook would typically include examples like:
"Watashi wa Hayashi desu. Watashi wa gakusei desu". This is meant to be equivalent to "My name is Hayashi. I'm a student." but in fact sounds totally fake and mechanical and translates more closely as "It is I who is Hayashi. It is I who is the student". The only time you'd really say something like this is if there was some confusion about *who* was Hayashi and/or the student. In real life, you'd say something like "Hayashi desu. Gakusei desu."
Textbook Japanese is always extremely polite and grammatically correct, but you'll sound like...well, like a bad translation engine. My sensei and I spend a lot of time teaching each other correct idiom in our respective languages. I'd like to encourage everyone out there (especially my fellow Americans:) to learn a second language! It's really fun, especially if you're a programmer type (might I be so bold as to suggest an Asian language most especially? They're the LISP to European languages' C or Pascal in that they force you think differently than the way you have been trained) and they're a great way to make new friends. Japanese people are always suprised when the big Southern white guy next to them starts speaking Japanese but so far I've had nothing but pleasant, educational experiences from doing so. Sorry for the rant.
Slashdot Mirror
As the above link implies, SVG is a W3C standard. It is even supported by modern versions of Flash IIRC.
Does anyone remember the OSF or COSE or any of their products (Motif, OSF/1, CDE...) with anything but derision? Does anyone remember COSE, which was going to turn back the tide and bring Microsoft to its knees, at all?
Also, that website is a retina-searing chunk of ass. Way to convince me you can design a great desktop.
Come now, surely a true DOS gamer from back in the day would know that the SoundBlaster was not the first PC sound card!
No, the original SoundBlaster boards were cheap knock-offs of the AdLib, one of which a friend of mine had in his 286 box back around 1988. Back then, all consumer-level cards were "AdLib compatible", and the SB was one of these.
IIRC, there were also higher-end cards already on the market as well, like those from Turtle Beach and (I believe) the GUS, which was a favorite of the tracker/demo crowd.
So by 1991, you should have been able to get an older AdLib card for cheap (and, again, AdLib was the gold standard at the time and SB was cheap crap.)
There were a couple of other niggling inaccuracies before this, but I let them slide as pandering to a non-technical audience, but this is so wrong it hurts. (See http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Leet-speak.ht ml for a more historically accurate description of the phenomenon.)
I wonder: did the writer make this up off the top of his head, or did the m4d g4m3Rz he's doing his best Katz impression over tell him that?
Wasn't $exhibitor in GWAR?
I wish I'd thought to ask this earlier. I'd love to know why PCs still use the old, crufty, ugly, BIOS at all. Why does the Intel architecture industry not use an implementation of the powerful, flexible, architecture-independent OpenBoot (IEEE 1275) standard?
SPARC, PowerPC, and Alpha machines use it. Why is the x86 world stuck in 1980? (This, the clever reader will observe, is a rhetorical question.)
My suggestion to anyone wanting a *NIX on PPC is to go get mklinux.
mkLinux is dead and never ran on very many machines anyway.
My suggestion to anyone wanting a *NIX on PPC is to go get Debian or Yellow
Dog or LinuxPPC.
--
One of the reasons that no one could make clone PCs at first was that IBM wouldn't license the ROMs to anyone, and all the OSes available for the PC (DOS, CPM and something else...) refused to boot without the ROM.
Eventually, Microsoft got tired of this kink in their revenue stream and produced a version of DOS that worked without the real IBM ROMs.
Hrm. That wasn't actually about the embedded BASIC at all, was it? Okay, how about this:
The version of BASIC on those ROMS was really shitty, and to get any decent features (like saving programs) you had to pay for the advanced BASIC version, which was called BASICA.
In one of their first embrace-extend-extinguish moves, MS produced a version of BASICA called GW-BASIC (Gee-Whiz BASIC) and included it with DOS.
Damn, I'm telling MS stories again. Oh well, if any of these stories are factually inaccurate, blame John Dvorak, because I read them all in a column of his long long ago.
--
Heh! Opera for Mac was *originally* scheduled to be released sometime in 1997 IIRC. It is years and years behind its initial release date.
I haven't wanted anything to do with Opera since their first Mac fiasco (and there have been several).
--
So far everytime something like this has come up (with a company), the violator has begged off saying "We misunderstood the nature of the GPL" or something like that.
I for one have a hard time believing this. I first encountered the GPL when I was 17 years old, with zero experience with the legalese that licenses are written in. I had no trouble understanding the rights and restrictions carried by the GPL.
I just can't believe that any large corporation could possibly "misunderstand" the language of the GPL.
That leaves 2 possibilities: willful violation or just not bothering to read the damned thing. I can see the braindead types of technically clueless people who run corporations doing this: "Linux? Oh yeah, it's free! We can do whatever we want with it! Those moronic geeks, we'll make millions off of them!"
Maybe I'm just bitter...
--
I love Mozilla, and I am aware of it's modular nature and all that, but I have doubts as to whether it is the right tool for a help environment.
I just started Mozilla and loaded this page. 'top' shows it as using 20M of memory, and it takes about 5 seconds to load on my K6-2/400.
A Help system should be instantaneous and lightweight so that it will be there as soon as you call it, so that you can keep it around all the time.
Of course, if you actually meant "a custom app based on gecko", that might fit the bill nicely. May I sugest you take a look at Mac OS's Help Center application? It's a HTML-based help system that includes AppleScripts as links in the docs to let users do things just by clicking on the appropriate link in the help pages. How cool is that?
Okay, I read the whole bug. Exactly what is being decided there?
You know, Lynx lets you *set* the amount of data recieved between rendering passes. Surely that wouldn't be too difficult to implement.
You want to play NetWar?
Head over to Caldera and download DR-DO....er...OpenDOS from them. It's in
there (they have a DOSEMU package buried somewhere on their FTP server too).
I used to run it on my 486/25 linux laptop.
My web/mail server is a LX with maxed out RAM (96M).
I ain't changing anytime soon. That little lunchbox is built like a ROCK.
Older SPARCs make great personal domain servers (cheap too!)
Hey, it's mot my fault if the promotional materials make it sound like you need to buy the SuperLeet Version to get SMP support.
The description for that version of W2K *specifically* stated that it included SMP support, while the others made no mention of it. What would you think after having read that?
The second option in the View menu is "Sidebar".
Uncheck it and the sidebar magically disappears.
This same technique works for the three toolbars, which are found under the *first* option in View, "Toolbars".
I got a CDW catalog the other day with a 2-page spread about Win2K in the middle of it (Preorder your copy now!). The "Advanced Server Edition", which seemed to be the one you got if you wanted high-end stuff like SMP support or...uhh...I dunno, really, there was almost no real data on the page, was listed as ~$1700 upgrade, ~$3300 non-upgrade.
I don't know how many users/whatever this was a license for, as I trashed the catalog almost immediately reading those pages.
I was going to reply with a little story about my geeky marriage, but apparently that would be self-congratulatory, offtopic grandstanding, judging by the posts in these threads.
If anyone really would liketo see it, just say so and i'll post the whole thing (although i think most of the old SlashNET crew, many of whom I recognized in the article (been a while, how ya'll are?) have already heard it.).
I have used w3m for all my serious browsing (slashdot, freshmeat, CNN, the onion, etc.) for the past several months, starting a graphical browser only when I want to see a certain page fully rendered.
I'd say that it was as full-featured as Lynx with respect to browsing, though Lynx does handle images much better at the moment.
I got an email from Ito-sensei (he's a professor in the engineering dept. of Yamagata University) yesterday saying "Happy New Year" and that a new version would be out this week with some new fixes and features, so these things are being worked on.
I used to use Lynx all the time but w3m's superior layout capabilities made me switch.
Just my ni en
--
Not many people (outside the Unix community) have DVI or PostScript viewers on their machines but almost *everyone* has a copy of Acrobat, so I use texi2pdf to generate PDFs of my work.
Oh, and if you don't want to use Adobe's software (Acrobat), grab a copy of xpdf. I always make PS and/or DVI versions of my stuff available anyway.
--
If you had, you'd realize *why* the wm lets through almost all keystrokes. Windows' habit of having ALT sequences bound to menu commands is especially annoying to emacs users because it forces them to reach for ESC rather than using the ALT key for Meta-key bindings.
While I'm at it, I'm kind of shocked at the lack of knowledge displayed in a lot of posts here. Trying to sound as un-high-and-mighty as possible, there are a ton of posts from people using GNOME who seem to have no clue at all about the separation between X and the window manager (especially which one is responsible for what). Much of the whinging about "X not letting you use the keyboard" could be solved if you'd read the manual for your *window manager*.
--
That site looks like it's either (A) a MANOWAR fan site (B) a Dio fansite or (C) a Robert Jordan fan site. I noticed that you can fight on either side...I wonder if there are separate endings for each of the possible outcomes (Host, Fallen, Win, Lose)? Oh, and it's strangely appropriate that the game uses a "non-Euclidean" engine, eh?
Oh well, Christianity always has been the English of religions, always blindly assimilating whatever local trends and traditions are around it at the moment. I guess this continues unabated (i.e. "Christian Rock", "Christian Rap", etc.). Perhaps we'll see some Christian Porn soon...that should be interesting.
Still, it's nice to know that Heaven is populated by white people in suits of full plate armor, eh?
Please don't accuse me of flaming Christians; I'm an equal-opportunity bastard. Everyone is free to follow whatever spiritual path they wish, but the actions of some religious people certainly do lend themselves to parody - this is definately one of them. Assuming that this is not a hoax, I would strongly urge the people who wrote this game to take a break and give their holy book a thorough reading. I don't remember "Thou Shalt Kick Ass" being on that list anywhere...
--
Every beginning Japanese textbook I've ever seen leads off sentences with "Watashi wa..." ("I am"). This is purely a concession to Westerners who the authors feel would have trouble with a language which is (1) highly context-sensitive, with the bare minimum needed for understanding being said (this mimimum being far less than one would assume in English) and (2) where one almost never refers to oneself (in this manner).
To lift an example from something I once read, a Japanese textbook would typically include examples like:
"Watashi wa Hayashi desu. Watashi wa gakusei desu". This is meant to be equivalent to "My name is Hayashi. I'm a student." but in fact sounds totally fake and mechanical and translates more closely as "It is I who is Hayashi. It is I who is the student". The only time you'd really say something like this is if there was some confusion about *who* was Hayashi and/or the student. In real life, you'd say something like "Hayashi desu. Gakusei desu."
Textbook Japanese is always extremely polite and grammatically correct, but you'll sound like...well, like a bad translation engine. My sensei and I spend a lot of time teaching each other correct idiom in our respective languages. I'd like to encourage everyone out there (especially my fellow Americans
--
Problem there: "Rosetta" is the name of the Handwriting Recognition engine in the latter versions of Apple's Newton OS.
Knowing Apple, they almost certainly still have trademark on it and wouldn't take kindly to someone else using it.
--
This has been hashed out several times already since i've started reading
--