Right you are. You might also look at the JabberIM client, which you can download from Jabber.com. For the moment, its source remains unreleased, but it also happens to be written in Delphi (it was written for Jabber.com by Peter Millard, WinJab's author).
Absolutely, and we have transports for MSN and IRC as well. The Jabber protocol is based on streaming XML, which makes it very flexible. Here are some good Jabber sites to check out:
Jabber also has support for communicating with users on other IM networks (currently AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN are supported, as well as IRC). Unlike EveryBuddy, which has all the IM protocols implemented in the client, Jabber uses "transports" installed on the server to communicate with the foreign IM network. That way, when AOL changes their protocol, or when some new IM system shows up, the server admin can install a new or updated transport on the server, and it is immediately usable by all the clients, with no client-side updates required.
Jabber's own protocol is based on streaming XML, meaning that the protocol can be used for more than just simple IM. Look for new and exciting developments along these lines, coming soon.
This is true, JabberIM (the client distributed by Jabber.com) does not have source available at this time. However, there is another Windows client, WinJab, which is available as Open Source and has more features besides. The "official" Linux client at the moment is Gabber, which is also Open Source. Other client projects also exist.
IMHO, Debian's installer is at least comparable to the Red Hat 5.x text-mode installer. I don't find it confusing at all. I actually prefer text-mode installers to graphical installers; the graphical installers require more out of the system during installation, which means that there's that much more that can go wrong. (Yes, 16-color VGA is hard to screw up these days, but if it's not necessary, why bother?)
When I was a Mandrake user, I tried MandrakeUpdate several times. It frequently seemed to have problems connecting to the master download site to get the list of mirrors, which made it pretty useless. I only got it to work properly a couple of times.
At least, if apt-get seems to be having problems, I can go edit/etc/apt/sources.list by hand and point to a different mirror site. I didn't see an option like that with MandrakeUpdate.
A few months ago I made the switch from Mandrake 7 to Debian-potato, and in many respects it's been worthwhile. Let me outline some of the things I like about Debian...
The update system that can upgrade every package on the system with just two commands (apt-get update; apt-get upgrade). For busy people that don't have time to pore over every single update notice that comes in the mail or gets posted on the Web, that's worth a black-market price right there.
Related to this, the packaging system in general, and tools like gnome-apt that make it easy to select and download new software.
The ease of installation. I like how, if you've got an Ethernet connection to the Net, you can use just 5 floppies (boot, root, 3 drivers) to get the installation started, and download the rest over the Net. I've set up many systems (including a couple of notebooks) that way.
The general stability of the system. About the only thing in Debian that crashes on me is Netscape (and that's not Debian's fault). For those who complain about it, you know, it's good to see some people sticking to their guns and saying, "We will ship no code before its time."
The sheer variety of software directly available for Debian. (That's one of the reasons why I don't want them removing non-free. If they want to put it on a different server and make me add another line to/etc/apt/sources.list, fine with me, but removing it just for the sake of ideology strikes me as severely short-sighted.)
Yes, the fact that the main parts of the system are all 100% free is both good and important, but I also like the fact that you can enjoy the benefits of Debian without being forced to become an ideologue. Basically, it's good for it to be Free, but I use it because it's good.
Jabber also does this, but with one big difference: Support for "foreign" IM protocols is handled through "transport" processes on the server side. Jabber clients only need to know how to speak the Jabber protocol. If AOL changes its protocol, or if a new IM protocol crops up, the server administrator can install the new and/or updated transports on the server, and the clients can use them immediately with no client-side downloads.
XML is a bad choice for protocol messages. The use of XML carries far too much baggage for a lightweight/automated implementation.
Not necessarily. XML parsers have now been implemented that are as small as 1.5K of code. And Jabber doesn't use full-blown XML with DTDs, automatic validation, and all that; it uses it for the sole purpose of creating a structured data stream.
I've been thinking for some time about how a good Internet-wide IM system could be used not just to send silly chat messages back and forth, but also to be a method for client-server interaction.
The Jabber protocol would be excellent for this purpose. We are exploring such possibilities as embedding XML-RPC or SOAP messages in Jabber to promote client-server interaction over the same stream you might use for two-way human-to-human communication. The existing Info/Query mechanism in Jabber already does this, to a certain extent.
The XML message format requires each piece of software to contain an XML parser and also (from what I've seen) limits the kinds of data you can send back and forth. Why not do what HTTP does -- not care about the content, just specify a header format and let arbitrarily formatted data be attached?
XML parsers are readily available, and, as I mentioned above, can be quite small. As for percveived "limitations" on data types, any text-format data can be expressed as XML and sent through a message extension. For binary data, we use the jabber:x:oob (out-of-band data) extension to pass HTTP URIs for data retrieval, which keeps the data from having to be sent if the receiving client does not support binary attachments.
In addition, Jabber makes the unfortunate choice of not wanting anything to do with crypto on the protocol level; instead, it wants client folk to slap OpenPGP on top of it.
First of all, Jabber already supports SSL connections (via the OpenSSL library) for transparent transport-layer encryption. The only drawback here is that not many Jabber clients support SSL.
That being said, I would like to see Jabber support crypto at a level in between the transport layer (SSL) and the end-user level (OpenPGP). But it's not going to be supported until it can be done right, as it's my belief that poorly-done crypto support is worse than no crypto at all. And I might also point out that competing protocols either use no encryption, or use something that's a total joke in terms of real security (e.g., ICQ). Then, too, there are US export regulations to consider (and we have very few non-US developers at this point that could mount any sort of Jabber crypto effort).
My wife plans on doing some AM and shortwave DXing tonight and/or tomorrow night...any information on how this could affect the HF and lower bands?
Also, I'm hoping we'll be able to view the auroras from here...they've said they should be visible perhaps as far south as Texas and New Mexico. (Imagine...we could be seeing real auroras from Aurora, Colorado...)
Actually, I thought that the Atari Video Computer System (aka Atari 2600) and Magnavox Odyssey predated Intellivision by some time. The intellivision wasn't in wide release until 1980.
In fact, Magnavox patented the concept of the home video game system. Atari reportedly licensed this patent at a very low fee. Magnavox later realized their mistake, and demanded hefty royalties from Mattel. Mattel's legal department thought the patent would never stand up in court...but it did, leaving Mattel on the hook for a few megabucks in damages.
Incidentally, if you want to talk about limited system resources...the Intellivision used a GI CP1610 16-bit microprocessor running at about 0.9 MHz (no, that's not a typo, less than one megahertz), a display resolution of 160x96 at 16 colors, about 1K of RAM total, and a few K of ROM containing an elementary "operating system." Despite those limitations, they were able to make some very compelling games...
A good source of info about Intellivision is the Blue Sky Rangers page, created by the programmers who wrote many of the Intellivision games. Recommended.
if you take a general-purpose piece of hardware and write a program for it that simulates what another piece of hardware was specifically designed to do, it's going to end up a) Slower, and b) More expensive.
With regard to point (a), remember that a Palm device is pretty slow to begin with, 'cause it's been optimized for longer battery life, not speed. The Liberty FAQ mentions that you may need an overclocker utility to get decent performance...and the faster you push the processor, the faster you're gonna wear out your batteries. You'd probably get better battery life out of a real GameBoy.
With regard to point (b), consider that GameBoys are currently going for something like $50 apiece, whereas the least expensive Palm devices (a IIIe or the base-model Visor) are three times that (and they only have about 2Mb of RAM at that, which won't fit very many of the newer games).
So this emulator is a possibly-interesting toy at best; if you want real GameBoy action, you should probably just cough up the dough for a real one anyway. Somehow I don't think Nintendo is going to lose a lot of sleep over this.
But I might download Liberty anyway and check it out, just for grins. (Hmm, I wonder if they've implemented, or are planning to implement, 2-player GameLink emulation using the IR port? That would be interesting...)
Perhaps this is the wrong place for a historical debate, but...
Actually, the fact that Germany had lost so many planes in the Battle of Britain was only one factor in the indefinite postponement of "Operation Sea Lion," the planned invasion of Britain. The other was that Hitler had turned his attentions to an invasion of Russia, in part because he thought this would weaken Britain's position in the long run.[1] (Also, he was nuts enough to believe he could succeed at invading Russia where others had failed.)
And, while it's true that America did not intervene with direct military force until after the Pearl Harbor attack, America was supplying Britain with weapons and warships over a year earlier, through such expedients as the Lend-Lease program. Also, America was beginning to build up its military forces in the fall of 1940, and President Roosevelt had ordered investigations into the possibility of developing atomic weapons (preliminaries to the Manhattan Project) a year earlier than that.[2] It seems likely that somebody figured that the U.S. would be in the war at some point...
Eric
[1] See Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 774, 798. [2] Gerhard Weinberg, A World At Arms, pp. 157-159. --
Sometimes the problem's not so much "finding a geek wife" as it is "helping your SO find her inner geek."
Case in point: When my wife first moved in with me around four years ago (and about three and a half years before we finally tied the knot), she knew virtually nothing about computers. Before going to work one day, I sat her down in front of my PC and showed her, "this is how you switch it on, this is how you connect to the Internet, this is how you can send email to me at the office, and--oh yeah--here's where the Web browser is." It didn't take her long to get hooked.
She continued her explorations, learning about different things the computer could do. I provided her more help as she needed it, showing her how to use the word processor and other applications. Eventually, it got to the point, about a year and a half ago, where I had to buy her her own machine because she and I were starting to fight over mine. The one I bought her was more powerful than mine, and its arrival not only restored domestic tranquility, but enabled her to further expand her knowledge.
Today, she uses that box for at least several hours every day. She corresponds with family and friends via e-mail, shops online at many different sites, talks with people around the world on ICQ, and listens to music via RealAudio and MP3 (she even rips her own MP3 files, stashing them on a Samba server I have set up). I've added a CD burner to her system recently, and provided her with additional software as she needed it. After she got jealous of my Palm VII, I bought her her own Palm IIIe, and she's rapidly becoming proficient in its use. Her machine runs Windows 98, but she wishes that the people working on WinModem support under Linux would get something working so she can try it out herself. She's not a programmer yet, but she's been thinking of learning something like Visual Basic or Java; she has, however, been learning HTML. She now has no problem understanding computer talk; if we ever go shopping for a notebook for her, I think I'll just let her talk to the sales guy.
My advice for anyone else contemplating attempting to bring out your SO's inner geek:
Don't push her. Let her learn at her own pace.
Be ready with help when she needs it, but encourage her to experiment and find the answers herself.
Try not to get too upset at her hogging the computer:-).
If you have to spend money on getting her her own hardware, that's a good sign.
Try to explain why you have the opinions you have about certain subjects (AOL, Microsoft, the RIAA, what have you); not only will this help her understand why you like/hate something so much, but it may help you refine your own advocacy techniques.
Your own SO may not be as receptive as my wife was to learning all this stuff. Don't sweat it if she isn't.
Our experience has been generally positive; it has improved my wife's self-confidence as well as her marketable job skills, and it's also helped our relationship. Here's hoping you have the same good fortune.
The only way to stop people from using current technology in favor of a new one is to force them to throw out the old stuff.
Which is exactly what the FCC is doing with digital TV. If current plans hold up, after 2006, you will have to throw out your old TVs/VCRs, or buy a converter box so your old TV will still work (but it won't do half of what those brand new TVs at Circuit City will do). And I have no idea what sort of crypto/access control/whatever the MPAA is going to demand on digital broadcasts...
OK, it's a bit of a stretch from TVs to CD players, but they're already talking about digital radio standards, too (and just imagine what those'll look like after the RIAA gets through with them). So never say never...
To add some quasi-official commentary to pieces of this thread...
Jabber is decentralized in the same sense that email is. Just as every ISP or organization runs its own email server, they can run their own Jabber server. However, your roster (the Jabber term for what That Other IM System calls a "Buddy List"(R)(C)(TM)) may contain users on any Jabber server; when one of the people on your roster sends you a message, or presence information, or whatever, their server contacts your server, which passes it on to you. It's not quite as decentralized as a Gnutella/Freenet setup, but it's a lot more convenient for the end user. And there's nothing stopping you from running a personal Jabber server on your own box (or your site's NAT box, or whatever); if you've got a DNS name pointing to that box, other Jabber users on other servers will still be able to add you to their rosters, and will get your messages and presence as they would anyone else's.
Jabber IDs are expressed as "user@server," just like email addresses; this would make it easy for an ISP to give its users Jabber IDs identical to their email addresses, and with the same passwords for authentication, if desired (assuming they set up authentication correctly). In fact, Jabber IDs may include a third element, the "resource" (making the Jabber ID format "user@server/resource"), allowing a user to log into Jabber multiple times, from different locations and/or different devices.
Since everything in Jabber is done through the server, clients can be very simple. Even so, they can support connectivity to other IM networks (such as ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and IRC) via services known as "transports" that are run on the server side and translate between the Jabber protocol and "foreign" IM protocols. (Incidentally, if you use the IRC transport to access IRC from Jabber, the IP address the IRC people will see is the IP address of your Jabber server. This is both good and bad; good because they don't see your real IP and hence can't portscan you, bad because it makes it easier for server admins to block all Jabber users if they get honked off at us.) An administrator can install a transport, and the users of that server can begin using it immediately, without any changes required to client software.
Finally, in regard to the topic of this article: Jabber can collect personal information about its users, if (and only if) they choose to provide it. (It stores it on the server, and in the Jabber User Directory, in the proposed XML vCard format.) This information can (but need not) include birthdate and/or age. How this will balance with the requirements of COPPA is a subject that has been weighing on my mind for awhile now. My gut reaction is "we just write the server; it's up to whoever runs it to follow the policy," but in some senses, that's kind of a cop-out. Perhaps one of the things Jabber.com should work on is a system to catch all users who have entered birthdates that would make them less than 13 years old (i.e., before July 3, 1987, as of the day I'm writing this) and send them notices and/or automagically delete them. In essence, we would be enabling a Jabber server administrator to do exactly what ICQ is now doing. I know that some people might view this as caving in to The Man, but, as the saying goes, "Dura lex, sed lex." ("The law is hard, but it's the law.") I'm sure ICQ doesn't like the thought of having to take this kind of action any more than I do, but...
Disclaimer: I'm one of the core Jabber.org developers, and an employee of Jabber.com, Inc., but I don't necessarily set policy or speak for either organization.
Eric J. Bowersox Software Engineer, Jabber.com Inc. (subsidiary of Webb Interactive Services, Inc.), Denver, CO Developer, Jabber Project (author, ICQ transport) --
If they eighty-six non-free, then there goes the qmail-src package (and related ones like serialmail-src). That would be a damned inconvenience, IMHO.
The truth is, qmail is probably the best mail transport system available. It's easy to adapt to everything from single-user dialup systems to massive Web-based free email systems ala Hotmail (I know, I've done both!), and it works well, and it's secure. (How many security alerts have you seen for sendmail recently?) But, since its creator, Dan Bernstein, will only allow it to be freely redistributed in source form, that disqualifies it for main or contrib, and it has to go in non-free.
Still, the Debian qmail-src and serialmail-src packages are a lot more convenient than building it yourself from the tarballs. If they give non-free the boot, I lose that convenience. And right now, that upsets me, because qmail is something I need to keep my mail running properly at home. I could just start compiling it from tarballs again, but, if I have to do enough of that, I might as well switch back to Mandrake...or go buy Corel and get most of what makes Debian a great technical distro...
<RANT> They can put the non-free stuff on separate servers if they want. They can force me to manually add the necessary lines into/etc/apt/sources.list if they want. But totally dumping non-free solely for the sake of ideology would be a signal that they're more interested in having a Politically Correct Distribution(TM) than a distribution that people will actually want to use. </RANT>
I probably should have looked at the Web site first...it looks like I'll have to go to Cub Foods or maybe Safeway to find Dilberitos, not King Soopers. Just a small correction for those of you also in Colorado...
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
While I can't presume to speak for Adams, using the Dilbert "brand name" for Dilberitos would seem to fit in with his overall strategy of bringing healthy foods to more people.
Think about it. If he were to have refrained from using the name "Dilberitos" and just called them "Scott Adams' Healthy Burritos" (or something along those lines), it seems likely that his primary response would be from people who already consume health food. People who aren't inclined to eat health food probably wouldn't try them. His product would become, basically, a "me-too" product, and would probably wind up losing out in the end to other, more popular or established brands. (Competition in the food business is murder, margins are generally low, and brand recognition is extremely important.)
On the other hand, most people in the United States have undoubtedly heard of Dilbert, via the comic strip, books, TV show, Web site, T-shirts, coffee mugs, you name it. The "Dilbert" brand, in the case of Dilberitos, is being used as a "hook" (to put it in entertainment industry terms). Seeing the name "Dilbert" on a food product might make some people more inclined to buy it, regardless of the fact that it's a healthy food...and if enough people buy and consume Dilberitos who might not have bought and consumed healthy foods otherwise, then Adams has achieved his goal, and his marketing strategy is vindicated thereby.
And, if people keep buying Dilberitos, Scott Adams makes money. As others in this thread have pointed out, this is not a bad thing. (At the risk of diverging from the topic at hand, I might note that, proverbially, it is "the love of money," not "money" itself, that is considered "the root of all evil." Money itself is a morally neutral tool, which may be used for either good or evil purposes.) And, if people don't buy Dilberitos, he doesn't make money, and he runs the risk of damaging the "Dilbert brand" and causing a backlash among Dilbert's hardcore fans. The point is, Adams believes strongly enough in this idea that he is willing to back it with, not only his own money, but the strength of the "Dilbert" brand, and I for one applaud the courage of his convictions.
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
If you have a look at Chapter 11 of Adams' The Dilbert Future (pages 213-216), you can find his motivation for inventing the Dilberito. Adams starts off by lamenting how difficult it is to figure out what you should eat that's healthy for you, as opposed to, say, finding the right motor oil for your car's engine. He then goes on to say:
Someday, you will be able to buy a burrito-like meal that is engineered as scientifically as a can of motor oil. This burrito-like thing will have just the right combination of food to give you 100 percent of what your body needs.
...
If someone doesn't build this burrito thing...then I'll build it myself. Someone is going to make a trillion dollars selling low-cost, nutritious meals to Induhviduals, and it might as well be me.
So, say what you will about Adams, it seems that, by investing his own money to develop the Dilberito, he's trying to help people eat healthier without having to become "nutrition geeks." The "Dilbert" name and packaging is just a way to market it to people (like sugar-coating on pills, perhaps).
It's a noble goal, whether or not its actual execution is flawed. (And I've never tasted or even seen a Dilberito, so I can't yet judge for myself, but next time I'm in the local King Soopers, I'll have a look for 'em.) So, before you condemn Adams out of hand, ask yourself how healthy you eat on a regular basis (and I know I for one am flawed in that respect). If Adams can leverage the Dilbert brand to get a few more people to eat healthy for once, isn't it worth it?
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Hey, if somebody will pay to run a T1 to my apartment, I'll host some mail servers...:-)
(I tried signing up for DSL, but US West says my lines are no good...I think I'm too far from the switch. And Optel, the cable company in our area, doesn't offer cable modems. So I'm pretty much screwed in that respect...)
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Well, I'll tell you this: if Microsoft releases their code under some license they work up for themselves (MSPL? MS-GPL?) that does not conform to the Open Source Definition and/or the Debian Free Software Guidelines, I will not download it, I will not look at it, and I will most certainly not hack on it. If Microsoft wants to try to subvert the community in the name of "openness," they're welcome to do so, but I will not aid and abet them in their efforts.
(And, for the record, I haven't downloaded, looked at, or hacked on Sun's Java source either, and I don't intend to. Just to show you that this is not just a Microsoft thing.)
I encourage everyone else to take this pledge as well. Franklin put it best: "We must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately."
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
If you look more closely at the article, you'll see that it's more than just Lego-building that's involved in the new CC "entrance exams." I quote: "Other activities include public speaking, conflict-resolution drills and personal interviews..."
Actually, some of those sound almost as interesting, if not more, than the Lego test. Public speaking, in particular, strikes me as a good test, given that, in many, many surveys, people have consistently rated "speaking before a group" as their number one fear, above even death. Conflict resolution is going to be increasingly important in society as a whole, and on college campuses in particular. And other messages in this thread have suggested that personal interviews be used in place of "the Lego test"; it would seem that they're actually being used alongside it.
Some other things to note about the article:
CC "has long been an innovator in higher education." Somebody's got to try these ideas first...
CC is not the only college using these new tests; eight other universities are doing this, too (four other private liberal-arts schools and four state universities).
Very few students are going to be admitted as a result of these tests, at least at first (it's a pilot program). CC and the other liberal-arts schools will be admitting four students each under this program; the four state schools will admit 20 students each.
Researchers will be keeping track of these students; to see how well they do in relation to students admitted under "normal" policies.
The intent of all this is to maintain racial diversity in college admissions without resorting to "affirmative action" programs (which are in the middle of a whole slew of political firestorms right now). This is important for CC, since (according to the article) "Colorado public colleges and universities are required to show continuous improvement in minority recruitment, retention and graduation."
Naturally, the "Lego test" gets the headline because it sounds outrageous. Nonetheless, the overall program sounds both interesting and worthy of investigation, and I hope that it works out. And, even if it doesn't, they'll have learned something as a result.
Eric (Denver, CO) -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
...may I present, for your enlightenment, a link to founder Jeremie Miller's year-end status report for 1999, describing the current state of Jabber development.
Disclaimer: I work for Webb Interactive (the company that now employs Jeremie), on Jabber-related software.
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Slashdot Mirror
Eric
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Jabber.org
Jabber.com
Jabber Central
Eric
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Jabber's own protocol is based on streaming XML, meaning that the protocol can be used for more than just simple IM. Look for new and exciting developments along these lines, coming soon.
Eric
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Eric
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Eric
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At least, if apt-get seems to be having problems, I can go edit /etc/apt/sources.list by hand and point to a different mirror site. I didn't see an option like that with MandrakeUpdate.
Eric
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Yes, the fact that the main parts of the system are all 100% free is both good and important, but I also like the fact that you can enjoy the benefits of Debian without being forced to become an ideologue. Basically, it's good for it to be Free, but I use it because it's good.
Eric
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Eric
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Not necessarily. XML parsers have now been implemented that are as small as 1.5K of code. And Jabber doesn't use full-blown XML with DTDs, automatic validation, and all that; it uses it for the sole purpose of creating a structured data stream.
The Jabber protocol would be excellent for this purpose. We are exploring such possibilities as embedding XML-RPC or SOAP messages in Jabber to promote client-server interaction over the same stream you might use for two-way human-to-human communication. The existing Info/Query mechanism in Jabber already does this, to a certain extent.
XML parsers are readily available, and, as I mentioned above, can be quite small. As for percveived "limitations" on data types, any text-format data can be expressed as XML and sent through a message extension. For binary data, we use the jabber:x:oob (out-of-band data) extension to pass HTTP URIs for data retrieval, which keeps the data from having to be sent if the receiving client does not support binary attachments.
First of all, Jabber already supports SSL connections (via the OpenSSL library) for transparent transport-layer encryption. The only drawback here is that not many Jabber clients support SSL.
That being said, I would like to see Jabber support crypto at a level in between the transport layer (SSL) and the end-user level (OpenPGP). But it's not going to be supported until it can be done right, as it's my belief that poorly-done crypto support is worse than no crypto at all. And I might also point out that competing protocols either use no encryption, or use something that's a total joke in terms of real security (e.g., ICQ). Then, too, there are US export regulations to consider (and we have very few non-US developers at this point that could mount any sort of Jabber crypto effort).
Eric
The preceding was my opinion only, and not the official opinions of Jabber.com Inc. or The Jabber Project.
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Also, I'm hoping we'll be able to view the auroras from here...they've said they should be visible perhaps as far south as Texas and New Mexico. (Imagine...we could be seeing real auroras from Aurora, Colorado...)
Eric
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In fact, Magnavox patented the concept of the home video game system. Atari reportedly licensed this patent at a very low fee. Magnavox later realized their mistake, and demanded hefty royalties from Mattel. Mattel's legal department thought the patent would never stand up in court...but it did, leaving Mattel on the hook for a few megabucks in damages.
Incidentally, if you want to talk about limited system resources...the Intellivision used a GI CP1610 16-bit microprocessor running at about 0.9 MHz (no, that's not a typo, less than one megahertz), a display resolution of 160x96 at 16 colors, about 1K of RAM total, and a few K of ROM containing an elementary "operating system." Despite those limitations, they were able to make some very compelling games...
A good source of info about Intellivision is the Blue Sky Rangers page, created by the programmers who wrote many of the Intellivision games. Recommended.
Eric
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With regard to point (a), remember that a Palm device is pretty slow to begin with, 'cause it's been optimized for longer battery life, not speed. The Liberty FAQ mentions that you may need an overclocker utility to get decent performance...and the faster you push the processor, the faster you're gonna wear out your batteries. You'd probably get better battery life out of a real GameBoy.
With regard to point (b), consider that GameBoys are currently going for something like $50 apiece, whereas the least expensive Palm devices (a IIIe or the base-model Visor) are three times that (and they only have about 2Mb of RAM at that, which won't fit very many of the newer games).
So this emulator is a possibly-interesting toy at best; if you want real GameBoy action, you should probably just cough up the dough for a real one anyway. Somehow I don't think Nintendo is going to lose a lot of sleep over this.
But I might download Liberty anyway and check it out, just for grins. (Hmm, I wonder if they've implemented, or are planning to implement, 2-player GameLink emulation using the IR port? That would be interesting...)
Eric
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Actually, the fact that Germany had lost so many planes in the Battle of Britain was only one factor in the indefinite postponement of "Operation Sea Lion," the planned invasion of Britain. The other was that Hitler had turned his attentions to an invasion of Russia, in part because he thought this would weaken Britain's position in the long run.[1] (Also, he was nuts enough to believe he could succeed at invading Russia where others had failed.)
And, while it's true that America did not intervene with direct military force until after the Pearl Harbor attack, America was supplying Britain with weapons and warships over a year earlier, through such expedients as the Lend-Lease program. Also, America was beginning to build up its military forces in the fall of 1940, and President Roosevelt had ordered investigations into the possibility of developing atomic weapons (preliminaries to the Manhattan Project) a year earlier than that.[2] It seems likely that somebody figured that the U.S. would be in the war at some point...
Eric
[1] See Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 774, 798.
[2] Gerhard Weinberg, A World At Arms, pp. 157-159.
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Case in point: When my wife first moved in with me around four years ago (and about three and a half years before we finally tied the knot), she knew virtually nothing about computers. Before going to work one day, I sat her down in front of my PC and showed her, "this is how you switch it on, this is how you connect to the Internet, this is how you can send email to me at the office, and--oh yeah--here's where the Web browser is." It didn't take her long to get hooked.
She continued her explorations, learning about different things the computer could do. I provided her more help as she needed it, showing her how to use the word processor and other applications. Eventually, it got to the point, about a year and a half ago, where I had to buy her her own machine because she and I were starting to fight over mine. The one I bought her was more powerful than mine, and its arrival not only restored domestic tranquility, but enabled her to further expand her knowledge.
Today, she uses that box for at least several hours every day. She corresponds with family and friends via e-mail, shops online at many different sites, talks with people around the world on ICQ, and listens to music via RealAudio and MP3 (she even rips her own MP3 files, stashing them on a Samba server I have set up). I've added a CD burner to her system recently, and provided her with additional software as she needed it. After she got jealous of my Palm VII, I bought her her own Palm IIIe, and she's rapidly becoming proficient in its use. Her machine runs Windows 98, but she wishes that the people working on WinModem support under Linux would get something working so she can try it out herself. She's not a programmer yet, but she's been thinking of learning something like Visual Basic or Java; she has, however, been learning HTML. She now has no problem understanding computer talk; if we ever go shopping for a notebook for her, I think I'll just let her talk to the sales guy.
My advice for anyone else contemplating attempting to bring out your SO's inner geek:
Our experience has been generally positive; it has improved my wife's self-confidence as well as her marketable job skills, and it's also helped our relationship. Here's hoping you have the same good fortune.
Eric
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Which is exactly what the FCC is doing with digital TV. If current plans hold up, after 2006, you will have to throw out your old TVs/VCRs, or buy a converter box so your old TV will still work (but it won't do half of what those brand new TVs at Circuit City will do). And I have no idea what sort of crypto/access control/whatever the MPAA is going to demand on digital broadcasts...
OK, it's a bit of a stretch from TVs to CD players, but they're already talking about digital radio standards, too (and just imagine what those'll look like after the RIAA gets through with them). So never say never...
Eric
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Jabber is decentralized in the same sense that email is. Just as every ISP or organization runs its own email server, they can run their own Jabber server. However, your roster (the Jabber term for what That Other IM System calls a "Buddy List"(R)(C)(TM)) may contain users on any Jabber server; when one of the people on your roster sends you a message, or presence information, or whatever, their server contacts your server, which passes it on to you. It's not quite as decentralized as a Gnutella/Freenet setup, but it's a lot more convenient for the end user. And there's nothing stopping you from running a personal Jabber server on your own box (or your site's NAT box, or whatever); if you've got a DNS name pointing to that box, other Jabber users on other servers will still be able to add you to their rosters, and will get your messages and presence as they would anyone else's.
Jabber IDs are expressed as "user@server," just like email addresses; this would make it easy for an ISP to give its users Jabber IDs identical to their email addresses, and with the same passwords for authentication, if desired (assuming they set up authentication correctly). In fact, Jabber IDs may include a third element, the "resource" (making the Jabber ID format "user@server/resource"), allowing a user to log into Jabber multiple times, from different locations and/or different devices.
Since everything in Jabber is done through the server, clients can be very simple. Even so, they can support connectivity to other IM networks (such as ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and IRC) via services known as "transports" that are run on the server side and translate between the Jabber protocol and "foreign" IM protocols. (Incidentally, if you use the IRC transport to access IRC from Jabber, the IP address the IRC people will see is the IP address of your Jabber server. This is both good and bad; good because they don't see your real IP and hence can't portscan you, bad because it makes it easier for server admins to block all Jabber users if they get honked off at us.) An administrator can install a transport, and the users of that server can begin using it immediately, without any changes required to client software.
Finally, in regard to the topic of this article: Jabber can collect personal information about its users, if (and only if) they choose to provide it. (It stores it on the server, and in the Jabber User Directory, in the proposed XML vCard format.) This information can (but need not) include birthdate and/or age. How this will balance with the requirements of COPPA is a subject that has been weighing on my mind for awhile now. My gut reaction is "we just write the server; it's up to whoever runs it to follow the policy," but in some senses, that's kind of a cop-out. Perhaps one of the things Jabber.com should work on is a system to catch all users who have entered birthdates that would make them less than 13 years old (i.e., before July 3, 1987, as of the day I'm writing this) and send them notices and/or automagically delete them. In essence, we would be enabling a Jabber server administrator to do exactly what ICQ is now doing. I know that some people might view this as caving in to The Man, but, as the saying goes, "Dura lex, sed lex." ("The law is hard, but it's the law.") I'm sure ICQ doesn't like the thought of having to take this kind of action any more than I do, but...
For more information about Jabber, visit one of our Web sites, the JabberCentral site, the open-source development site, or the company I work for.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the core Jabber.org developers, and an employee of Jabber.com, Inc., but I don't necessarily set policy or speak for either organization.
Eric J. Bowersox
Software Engineer, Jabber.com Inc. (subsidiary of Webb Interactive Services, Inc.), Denver, CO
Developer, Jabber Project (author, ICQ transport)
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The truth is, qmail is probably the best mail transport system available. It's easy to adapt to everything from single-user dialup systems to massive Web-based free email systems ala Hotmail (I know, I've done both!), and it works well, and it's secure. (How many security alerts have you seen for sendmail recently?) But, since its creator, Dan Bernstein, will only allow it to be freely redistributed in source form, that disqualifies it for main or contrib, and it has to go in non-free.
Still, the Debian qmail-src and serialmail-src packages are a lot more convenient than building it yourself from the tarballs. If they give non-free the boot, I lose that convenience. And right now, that upsets me, because qmail is something I need to keep my mail running properly at home. I could just start compiling it from tarballs again, but, if I have to do enough of that, I might as well switch back to Mandrake...or go buy Corel and get most of what makes Debian a great technical distro...
<RANT> /etc/apt/sources.list if they want. But totally dumping non-free solely for the sake of ideology would be a signal that they're more interested in having a Politically Correct Distribution(TM) than a distribution that people will actually want to use.
They can put the non-free stuff on separate servers if they want. They can force me to manually add the necessary lines into
</RANT>
Eric
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Eric
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Think about it. If he were to have refrained from using the name "Dilberitos" and just called them "Scott Adams' Healthy Burritos" (or something along those lines), it seems likely that his primary response would be from people who already consume health food. People who aren't inclined to eat health food probably wouldn't try them. His product would become, basically, a "me-too" product, and would probably wind up losing out in the end to other, more popular or established brands. (Competition in the food business is murder, margins are generally low, and brand recognition is extremely important.)
On the other hand, most people in the United States have undoubtedly heard of Dilbert, via the comic strip, books, TV show, Web site, T-shirts, coffee mugs, you name it. The "Dilbert" brand, in the case of Dilberitos, is being used as a "hook" (to put it in entertainment industry terms). Seeing the name "Dilbert" on a food product might make some people more inclined to buy it, regardless of the fact that it's a healthy food...and if enough people buy and consume Dilberitos who might not have bought and consumed healthy foods otherwise, then Adams has achieved his goal, and his marketing strategy is vindicated thereby.
And, if people keep buying Dilberitos, Scott Adams makes money. As others in this thread have pointed out, this is not a bad thing. (At the risk of diverging from the topic at hand, I might note that, proverbially, it is "the love of money," not "money" itself, that is considered "the root of all evil." Money itself is a morally neutral tool, which may be used for either good or evil purposes.) And, if people don't buy Dilberitos, he doesn't make money, and he runs the risk of damaging the "Dilbert brand" and causing a backlash among Dilbert's hardcore fans. The point is, Adams believes strongly enough in this idea that he is willing to back it with, not only his own money, but the strength of the "Dilbert" brand, and I for one applaud the courage of his convictions.
Eric
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
So, say what you will about Adams, it seems that, by investing his own money to develop the Dilberito, he's trying to help people eat healthier without having to become "nutrition geeks." The "Dilbert" name and packaging is just a way to market it to people (like sugar-coating on pills, perhaps).
It's a noble goal, whether or not its actual execution is flawed. (And I've never tasted or even seen a Dilberito, so I can't yet judge for myself, but next time I'm in the local King Soopers, I'll have a look for 'em.) So, before you condemn Adams out of hand, ask yourself how healthy you eat on a regular basis (and I know I for one am flawed in that respect). If Adams can leverage the Dilbert brand to get a few more people to eat healthy for once, isn't it worth it?
Eric
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
(I tried signing up for DSL, but US West says my lines are no good...I think I'm too far from the switch. And Optel, the cable company in our area, doesn't offer cable modems. So I'm pretty much screwed in that respect...)
Eric
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
(And, for the record, I haven't downloaded, looked at, or hacked on Sun's Java source either, and I don't intend to. Just to show you that this is not just a Microsoft thing.)
I encourage everyone else to take this pledge as well. Franklin put it best: "We must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately."
Eric
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
King Kamehameha was a well-known Hawaiian monarch. Don't ask me what he's got to do with Kyle's mom.
Eric
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Actually, some of those sound almost as interesting, if not more, than the Lego test. Public speaking, in particular, strikes me as a good test, given that, in many, many surveys, people have consistently rated "speaking before a group" as their number one fear, above even death. Conflict resolution is going to be increasingly important in society as a whole, and on college campuses in particular. And other messages in this thread have suggested that personal interviews be used in place of "the Lego test"; it would seem that they're actually being used alongside it.
Some other things to note about the article:
- CC "has long been an innovator in higher education." Somebody's got to try these ideas first...
- CC is not the only college using these new tests; eight other universities are doing this, too (four other private liberal-arts schools and four state universities).
- Very few students are going to be admitted as a result of these tests, at least at first (it's a pilot program). CC and the other liberal-arts schools will be admitting four students each under this program; the four state schools will admit 20 students each.
- Researchers will be keeping track of these students; to see how well they do in relation to students admitted under "normal" policies.
- The intent of all this is to maintain racial diversity in college admissions without resorting to "affirmative action" programs (which are in the middle of a whole slew of political firestorms right now). This is important for CC, since (according to the article) "Colorado public colleges and universities are required to show continuous improvement in minority recruitment, retention and graduation."
Naturally, the "Lego test" gets the headline because it sounds outrageous. Nonetheless, the overall program sounds both interesting and worthy of investigation, and I hope that it works out. And, even if it doesn't, they'll have learned something as a result.Eric (Denver, CO)
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Disclaimer: I work for Webb Interactive (the company that now employs Jeremie), on Jabber-related software.
Eric
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"Free your code...and the rest will follow."