I have a "hit by a bus" document on paper. All a co-worker has to do import my GPG keys, then type the encrypted version of my root password. I figure that if you don't have the patience to type for five minutes straight and evaluate possible errors, then you have no business administrating the server. If nothing else, typing junk for five minutes will prepare the future admin for the Perl scripts in my crontab;-)
The romance parts were actually good. Anakin was supposed to be inexperienced and clumsy. He did better than I did first time out. I was expecting to stammer and beat my head against the wall during the scenes, but that didn't happen.
The rest of the acting wasn't so hot, though. Obi-Wan carried the movie as far as I was concerned. I don't know what to make of Mace Windu. For Samuel L. Jackson to not have his trademark bad-ass attitude...I'm not sure if that was bad acting or the acting challenge of his career.
Heck, even something evil like guns have been used to deter crimes on a regular basis. The only thing that Flash has deterred on a regular basis is good taste. You know how some people want "medical marijuana" in the US to treat diseases? Well, there should be "medical Flash" that is legal only by prescription from a style doctor, but make Flash illegal otherwise.
That's not totally true. I remember Super Bowl ads for it and a few ads in the months following it. Of course, that was a while before Windows 95, and for the most part, you are correct. The marketing I read and saw during the Windows 95 era was almost nonexistent.
What a great article. Just today, when I pulled up to the ATM machine and saw the beloved TRAP=0002 hex dump black screen of death, and I had to let out a little sniffle for my former fave OS.
Will Linux learn the lessons of OS/2? Who knows? For my time in OS/2, the company and the users were nice, knowedgeable, and professional. There were not many exaggerations and very few of Microsoft-style false promises. The lesson I got out of it is that consumers can't handle a straightforward approach, always going for smoke and mirrors and gold glitter sparkles. It doesn't matter if something exists, only that the something is "just around the corner."
No, I was actually planning on using MathML by hand. If it can be represented as text in a Web page, I should be able to edit it with ease and convenience.
I would have been more impressed with MathML if both IE and Netscape supported it in 1998, when MathML 1.0 was released. However, four years have passed and we're *still* not there yet. That's pathetic. Microsoft finally put an NT-based product on new consumer PCs, which means that hell has frozen over. And MathML still doesn't work on more thean a program here and there.
I'm missing something here. Let's take something almost completely virtual, like the patents on MP3. When the patent holders get their money, don't they have to pay taxes on it? That seems like a job for the people who make the sales tax, not IP tax; that's a different debate altogether.
It all sounds good on paper, but if you aren't in some contract to give a service in return for someone else's service, it isn't taxable barter. And if you're giving something away, maybe tax can be milked from if your area has stingy gift tax laws. Certainly, it would be unfair to pay taxes on something that hasn't generated any revenue for you.
Just curious, where in the actual article does it mention picking up noise from a deactivated microphone, or directly off the sound card? I read at least three of the Microsoft KB articles, too, and they don't seem to mention anything that severe.
This article intrests me. I recently had to install both Agent and SAPI 4.0 on a friend's computer so he could hear his stupid purple shareware monkey (Bonzi Buddy) speak. I'm just dreading the phone call in which I'll be asked to drive 50 miles to fix a problem with the stupid monkey.
I agree about the Microsoft bashing on this article. If I choose to agree with timothy's summary, this is an OEM issue on several levels. The first issue is that the recognition was left on by default. The second issue is that most off-the-shelf computers are bundled with crappy microphones. Yeah, a mic on top of the monitor or on a stand is great companion for a webcam--it looks cool and sells computers to novices--but it stinks for voice recognition. IBM puts a headset mic and a filter adapter in their ViaVoice packages for good reason.
All that said, I get this picture of some poor guy writing E-mail to his male boss while Barry White is playing in the background, and the song adds its lyrics to the letter and sends it.
No, he got the point just fine. Here's an example in LaTeX:
$x^2 + 4x + 4 = 0$
After LaTeX, MathML looks like busy-work doled out by committee. The problem with LaTeX on the Web has never been lack of standards of portability. Rather, good, portable, free viewers are in short supply. This could have been solved a long time ago by selfless programmers. There is no need for a new standard that involves so much extra typing that even COBOL professors would cringe.
I had a friend who was burned by this problem. I think that he tried Earthlink in a very small town, and he dialed a town 50 miles away to get access. He didn't like the next month's phone bill, but he realized his mistake and didn't sue anybody.
Yes, if you live in area code 407 and have to dial a 904 number for access, you'll have to pay the same charges as if you picked the phone off the cradle and dialed the number yourself. I don't see how this is worthy of a lawsuit on behalf of AOL users. Or, to quote the AOL Terms of Service:
"Any telephone charges incurred connecting to AOL are your responsibility. Since these charges are your responsibility, you should contact your local telephone company if you have a question about whether an AOL access number is a long distance or toll call from your location. AOL also provides several surcharged 800 or 888 access phone numbers (for the current surcharge rate go to Keyword: Access). If you choose to use these surcharged numbers to access AOL, you agree to pay the currently applicable surcharge to AOL."
This reads like a part of the ToS of every ISP that I've used since 1995, so I don't see how it's specific to AOL.
An AOL user is presented with the ToS sooner or later, usually when he or she has to set up AOL on a new computer. [I think it's right before an AOL master account is initialized on one computer.] This is the part where people tell me, "But you're the tech guy, you can understand these things." And I have to reply, "You don't need tech skills, just the ability to read and the patience to not click the OK button right away. You do know how to read, don't you?"
No, StarOffice is available to Linux users because StarDivision made it available to them, long before Sun bought out StarDivision. Back in 1997, there was no office suite on Linux as complete as StarOffice. Neither WordPerfect nor Applix had enough apps to be an Office-sized office suite, and the free alternatives weren't on the map yet.
StarOffice did not bud from OpenOffice. OpenOffice is about a year and a half old, but StarOffice is much older than that, even on Linux. However, the oldest versions of StarOffice and its individual parts ran on Windows, OS/2, and Mac, albeit only in German for a lot of that period.
It's OK. I was being short. I've had my times of going from Win95 to OS/2 to Linux on one machine, and each of those times had at least two months of dual booting. It's just a painful way to migrate and try things out, even if you follow the directions and don't have any disasters. You can either have the best of both worlds at the expense of a lot of rebooting, or you can choose one OS and sacrifice.
It's clear that in a mixed network environment, you can leverage the strengths of all the systems you use. Also, you don't have to teach a new OS to the people who live with you or inconvenience them with reboot time. As far as choosing the best general-purpose OS for one PC, winner take all, that's been unclear for a long time, and the discussion of MS Office formats in this thread--a years-old discussion--is testament to that fact.
If you like an OS, then use it. I won't place any moral value on it or think any less of you. I simply feel sorry for those who have to choose one OS and sacrifice. People might act like there is no major sacrifice, but there always ends up being one, whether it's usability, flexibility, stability, security, data migration, hardware requirements, or hardware support. That's a lot to consider.
Not I. Windows sometimes has a place, and that place for me is on the Web. I left OS religious issues aside after using OS/2 for three years. I have three Linux (Slackware 8.0) boxes under my direct control, one of them being the server at work that was completely my creation and my choice. That's enough Linux for me.
I feel sorry for those of you who have one machine and have limited to choosing one OS to run at a time. Mixed environments are fun and are hard to beat for keeping skills sharp.
Hi! I'm just wondering, are webcasting fees cumulative? That is, if the industry as a whole proposes 9% of the proceeds, and the MP3 guys want 2% (3% for MP3Pro), is that a total of 11-12% to stream MP3/MP3Pro? Or are the MP3 patent guys getting a cut of this deal and waiving their separate fee? Wow, talk about being nickel-and-dimed to death...
Next thing you know, Benjamin Franklin's estate will want an extra 5% of the fees for transferring the electrons across the Internet.
I did not know that. The fact won't make my American friends regret kicking themselves for buying a BetaMax in the 1980's, but it's certainly food for thought. Thanks.
...VHS vs. Beta for the digital generation. Will this become another competition between a) a cheap standard with a large, established base of customers and b) an expensive standard with higher quality but no installed customer base?
My best friend was just telling me about how Blockbuster employees were smashing old VHS tapes with hammers instead of giving them away, just to keep the VHS/DVD market ratio more in favor of DVD. I wonder if they'll be doing the same thing for old DVD disks in favor of the new ones.
No kidding. I've had trouble with config files, but that's a matter of finding the system config file for an app, whether it's in/usr/lib/lynx/lynx.cfg or at/opt/kde/share/config/apps. The file formats of the.dotfiles themselves have been no problem. Why waste time on this?
Quite a few OSS sites ask people to write documentation for programs, and that would be infinitely more useful for Unix usablility than making a unified config file format. I understand the desire of programmers to scratch a personal technical itch instead of doing something that's boring but simple and useful, but this is gettting ridiculous. Config files??? Sheesh.
And it's a gift that keeps on giving. Every time someone unloads a computer on me, it ends up being a Packard Bell. One day, someone will unload an old Pentium-class IBM PC on me so I will know that God loves me. It's certainly too late for karma or the law of averages to work kindly in my favor...
I'm willing to accept some of your point, but I'm grumbling a bit. I just got back from looking at a friend's Celeron 1300 (128 MB RAM) Gateway, in which it took 20 seconds from the time I right-clicked the WinXP desktop to the time the right-click menu appeared. I don't want Linux to become that way, just because you expect all of us to pull $300 out of our asses on a whim, with case, power supply, fans, and possibly more yet to go.
I have a general rule of thumb about programs: If they run quickly on slow machines, then they will run like lightning on fast machines. It would be nice to not have disk-space bloat, too, at least until PC makers give up on the MHz game and bundle the latest version of Ultra/SCSI for our IO needs. What's wrong with that?
Until I get my 3D virtual-reality UI and all of the other whiz-bang features that were speculated in the previous decade, I'll grumble that the glibc2 devel package is larger than the rest of my installed Slackware packages combined. For all of the technology that is supposed to make programming easier, it just seemed to make programmers lazy. Okay, we have our C++, Java, COM, CORBA, SOAP,.NET, etc., blah blah blah, but where are the results that are so extremely different and so superior to 1995-era software that I should need a 2002-era machine to run the programs well?
Yeah, I was thinking of the Pentium III ads, in which the Internet was supposed to go much faster just because I upgraded my processor. I was thinking, "What, did they bundle DSL on-chip to replace my 56k modem?" Someone within Intel must have made the same joke and was taken seriously by management.
I was just poking fun at the situation. I didn't mean it to be dramatic.
I remember how hard it was to secure a $500 loan from a local bank, just because I moved to a new town to get a much better job and had lived there for only a year. Yet countries with no track record of financial or political stability get billions of dollars in loans and keep getting them after defaulting on payments, if they just act nice. I never understood it, but I hope the IMF and World Bank open branch offices in my area.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget...
3%: "Imagine what a Bewoulf cluster of suns would be like!"
2%: Lists predicting how people will respond to the statement.
That also describes the average American after being stuffed with post-9/11 propaganda.
I have a "hit by a bus" document on paper. All a co-worker has to do import my GPG keys, then type the encrypted version of my root password. I figure that if you don't have the patience to type for five minutes straight and evaluate possible errors, then you have no business administrating the server. If nothing else, typing junk for five minutes will prepare the future admin for the Perl scripts in my crontab ;-)
The romance parts were actually good. Anakin was supposed to be inexperienced and clumsy. He did better than I did first time out. I was expecting to stammer and beat my head against the wall during the scenes, but that didn't happen.
The rest of the acting wasn't so hot, though. Obi-Wan carried the movie as far as I was concerned. I don't know what to make of Mace Windu. For Samuel L. Jackson to not have his trademark bad-ass attitude...I'm not sure if that was bad acting or the acting challenge of his career.
Computers are, as Steve Jobs puts it, bicycles for the mind.
Yeah, it's too bad the rest of the industry wants the them to be treadmills for the mind.
Heck, even something evil like guns have been used to deter crimes on a regular basis. The only thing that Flash has deterred on a regular basis is good taste. You know how some people want "medical marijuana" in the US to treat diseases? Well, there should be "medical Flash" that is legal only by prescription from a style doctor, but make Flash illegal otherwise.
That's not totally true. I remember Super Bowl ads for it and a few ads in the months following it. Of course, that was a while before Windows 95, and for the most part, you are correct. The marketing I read and saw during the Windows 95 era was almost nonexistent.
What a great article. Just today, when I pulled up to the ATM machine and saw the beloved TRAP=0002 hex dump black screen of death, and I had to let out a little sniffle for my former fave OS.
Will Linux learn the lessons of OS/2? Who knows? For my time in OS/2, the company and the users were nice, knowedgeable, and professional. There were not many exaggerations and very few of Microsoft-style false promises. The lesson I got out of it is that consumers can't handle a straightforward approach, always going for smoke and mirrors and gold glitter sparkles. It doesn't matter if something exists, only that the something is "just around the corner."
No, I was actually planning on using MathML by hand. If it can be represented as text in a Web page, I should be able to edit it with ease and convenience.
I would have been more impressed with MathML if both IE and Netscape supported it in 1998, when MathML 1.0 was released. However, four years have passed and we're *still* not there yet. That's pathetic. Microsoft finally put an NT-based product on new consumer PCs, which means that hell has frozen over. And MathML still doesn't work on more thean a program here and there.
I'm missing something here. Let's take something almost completely virtual, like the patents on MP3. When the patent holders get their money, don't they have to pay taxes on it? That seems like a job for the people who make the sales tax, not IP tax; that's a different debate altogether.
It all sounds good on paper, but if you aren't in some contract to give a service in return for someone else's service, it isn't taxable barter. And if you're giving something away, maybe tax can be milked from if your area has stingy gift tax laws. Certainly, it would be unfair to pay taxes on something that hasn't generated any revenue for you.
Thanks. I'm still trying to make sense of it all.
Just curious, where in the actual article does it mention picking up noise from a deactivated microphone, or directly off the sound card? I read at least three of the Microsoft KB articles, too, and they don't seem to mention anything that severe.
This article intrests me. I recently had to install both Agent and SAPI 4.0 on a friend's computer so he could hear his stupid purple shareware monkey (Bonzi Buddy) speak. I'm just dreading the phone call in which I'll be asked to drive 50 miles to fix a problem with the stupid monkey.
I agree about the Microsoft bashing on this article. If I choose to agree with timothy's summary, this is an OEM issue on several levels. The first issue is that the recognition was left on by default. The second issue is that most off-the-shelf computers are bundled with crappy microphones. Yeah, a mic on top of the monitor or on a stand is great companion for a webcam--it looks cool and sells computers to novices--but it stinks for voice recognition. IBM puts a headset mic and a filter adapter in their ViaVoice packages for good reason.
All that said, I get this picture of some poor guy writing E-mail to his male boss while Barry White is playing in the background, and the song adds its lyrics to the letter and sends it.
No, he got the point just fine. Here's an example in LaTeX:
$x^2 + 4x + 4 = 0$
After LaTeX, MathML looks like busy-work doled out by committee. The problem with LaTeX on the Web has never been lack of standards of portability. Rather, good, portable, free viewers are in short supply. This could have been solved a long time ago by selfless programmers. There is no need for a new standard that involves so much extra typing that even COBOL professors would cringe.
I had a friend who was burned by this problem. I think that he tried Earthlink in a very small town, and he dialed a town 50 miles away to get access. He didn't like the next month's phone bill, but he realized his mistake and didn't sue anybody.
Yes, if you live in area code 407 and have to dial a 904 number for access, you'll have to pay the same charges as if you picked the phone off the cradle and dialed the number yourself. I don't see how this is worthy of a lawsuit on behalf of AOL users. Or, to quote the AOL Terms of Service:
"Any telephone charges incurred connecting to AOL are your responsibility. Since these charges are your responsibility, you should contact your local telephone company if you have a question about whether an AOL access number is a long distance or toll call from your location. AOL also provides several surcharged 800 or 888 access phone numbers (for the current surcharge rate go to Keyword: Access). If you choose to use these surcharged numbers to access AOL, you agree to pay the currently applicable surcharge to AOL."
This reads like a part of the ToS of every ISP that I've used since 1995, so I don't see how it's specific to AOL.
An AOL user is presented with the ToS sooner or later, usually when he or she has to set up AOL on a new computer. [I think it's right before an AOL master account is initialized on one computer.] This is the part where people tell me, "But you're the tech guy, you can understand these things." And I have to reply, "You don't need tech skills, just the ability to read and the patience to not click the OK button right away. You do know how to read, don't you?"
No, StarOffice is available to Linux users because StarDivision made it available to them, long before Sun bought out StarDivision. Back in 1997, there was no office suite on Linux as complete as StarOffice. Neither WordPerfect nor Applix had enough apps to be an Office-sized office suite, and the free alternatives weren't on the map yet.
StarOffice did not bud from OpenOffice. OpenOffice is about a year and a half old, but StarOffice is much older than that, even on Linux. However, the oldest versions of StarOffice and its individual parts ran on Windows, OS/2, and Mac, albeit only in German for a lot of that period.
It's OK. I was being short. I've had my times of going from Win95 to OS/2 to Linux on one machine, and each of those times had at least two months of dual booting. It's just a painful way to migrate and try things out, even if you follow the directions and don't have any disasters. You can either have the best of both worlds at the expense of a lot of rebooting, or you can choose one OS and sacrifice.
It's clear that in a mixed network environment, you can leverage the strengths of all the systems you use. Also, you don't have to teach a new OS to the people who live with you or inconvenience them with reboot time. As far as choosing the best general-purpose OS for one PC, winner take all, that's been unclear for a long time, and the discussion of MS Office formats in this thread--a years-old discussion--is testament to that fact.
If you like an OS, then use it. I won't place any moral value on it or think any less of you. I simply feel sorry for those who have to choose one OS and sacrifice. People might act like there is no major sacrifice, but there always ends up being one, whether it's usability, flexibility, stability, security, data migration, hardware requirements, or hardware support. That's a lot to consider.
Not I. Windows sometimes has a place, and that place for me is on the Web. I left OS religious issues aside after using OS/2 for three years. I have three Linux (Slackware 8.0) boxes under my direct control, one of them being the server at work that was completely my creation and my choice. That's enough Linux for me.
I feel sorry for those of you who have one machine and have limited to choosing one OS to run at a time. Mixed environments are fun and are hard to beat for keeping skills sharp.
Hi! I'm just wondering, are webcasting fees cumulative? That is, if the industry as a whole proposes 9% of the proceeds, and the MP3 guys want 2% (3% for MP3Pro), is that a total of 11-12% to stream MP3/MP3Pro? Or are the MP3 patent guys getting a cut of this deal and waiving their separate fee? Wow, talk about being nickel-and-dimed to death...
Next thing you know, Benjamin Franklin's estate will want an extra 5% of the fees for transferring the electrons across the Internet.
I did not know that. The fact won't make my American friends regret kicking themselves for buying a BetaMax in the 1980's, but it's certainly food for thought. Thanks.
...VHS vs. Beta for the digital generation. Will this become another competition between a) a cheap standard with a large, established base of customers and b) an expensive standard with higher quality but no installed customer base?
My best friend was just telling me about how Blockbuster employees were smashing old VHS tapes with hammers instead of giving them away, just to keep the VHS/DVD market ratio more in favor of DVD. I wonder if they'll be doing the same thing for old DVD disks in favor of the new ones.
No kidding. I've had trouble with config files, but that's a matter of finding the system config file for an app, whether it's in /usr/lib/lynx/lynx.cfg or at /opt/kde/share/config/apps. The file formats of the .dotfiles themselves have been no problem. Why waste time on this?
Quite a few OSS sites ask people to write documentation for programs, and that would be infinitely more useful for Unix usablility than making a unified config file format. I understand the desire of programmers to scratch a personal technical itch instead of doing something that's boring but simple and useful, but this is gettting ridiculous. Config files??? Sheesh.
And it's a gift that keeps on giving. Every time someone unloads a computer on me, it ends up being a Packard Bell. One day, someone will unload an old Pentium-class IBM PC on me so I will know that God loves me. It's certainly too late for karma or the law of averages to work kindly in my favor...
I'm willing to accept some of your point, but I'm grumbling a bit. I just got back from looking at a friend's Celeron 1300 (128 MB RAM) Gateway, in which it took 20 seconds from the time I right-clicked the WinXP desktop to the time the right-click menu appeared. I don't want Linux to become that way, just because you expect all of us to pull $300 out of our asses on a whim, with case, power supply, fans, and possibly more yet to go.
.NET, etc., blah blah blah, but where are the results that are so extremely different and so superior to 1995-era software that I should need a 2002-era machine to run the programs well?
I have a general rule of thumb about programs: If they run quickly on slow machines, then they will run like lightning on fast machines. It would be nice to not have disk-space bloat, too, at least until PC makers give up on the MHz game and bundle the latest version of Ultra/SCSI for our IO needs. What's wrong with that?
Until I get my 3D virtual-reality UI and all of the other whiz-bang features that were speculated in the previous decade, I'll grumble that the glibc2 devel package is larger than the rest of my installed Slackware packages combined. For all of the technology that is supposed to make programming easier, it just seemed to make programmers lazy. Okay, we have our C++, Java, COM, CORBA, SOAP,
Yeah, I was thinking of the Pentium III ads, in which the Internet was supposed to go much faster just because I upgraded my processor. I was thinking, "What, did they bundle DSL on-chip to replace my 56k modem?" Someone within Intel must have made the same joke and was taken seriously by management.
I was just poking fun at the situation. I didn't mean it to be dramatic.
I remember how hard it was to secure a $500 loan from a local bank, just because I moved to a new town to get a much better job and had lived there for only a year. Yet countries with no track record of financial or political stability get billions of dollars in loans and keep getting them after defaulting on payments, if they just act nice. I never understood it, but I hope the IMF and World Bank open branch offices in my area.
I always wondered how third-world nations would repay their loans. Now, I know the answer. The military is our future...
GWB: Mr. President, have our money yet?
President of Argentina: I swear, it's in the mail.
GWB: I don't believe you. Mugsy, can you see that our friend's kneecaps are OK?
Donald Rumsfeld: OK, Boss! [pulls out baseball bat] *thwack!* *thwack-thump-thwack!* *thwack!* Yah, boss, de're fine! Good kneecaps!