Apparently only on Windows; Microsoft is dropping MSIE/Mac (and I haven't heard anything about MSIE/Solaris lately but I suspect they're probably dropping that too).
Except that Microsoft put the nail in MSIE/Mac's coffin, because they're in the process of making a mad dash to tie MSIE/Win deeper into Windows before the courts can make a ruling, and they apparently decided that dropping MSIE/Mac (one of the best apps they've ever developed, critically acclaimed, etc.) was necessary to accomplish that goal.
The biggest problem *I* see with the new layout is that the three buttons are close together, and the "single window" button is retarded. I wish they'd just drop that one, because it wastes prime real estate and is worthless to anyone who's used a computer for more than a few months.
The single window feature is a good idea for newbies, as a replacement for the System 7.5 Launcher, Mac OS 8/9's View as Buttons, and the "Hide other apps when switching applications" option in the General control panel that evolved from the retarded System 7.1P on the old Performas. However, the single window button is moronic - the option should be delegated to a Preferences panel so I can set it once and never have to look at it again.
Putting a system-wide preference option in every single window is a stupid waste of space and adds to the clutter of the UI.
A file browser is OK I guess, but I'd prefer if the current browsing system was an option too.
Apparently they're working on it; this is one of the things that DP4 does that's been improved from DP3. You can set it so the Finder behaves roughly like the old Mac OS Finder we all know and love, though the default behavior will be more like Greg's Browser (an old shareware app by Greg Landweber, the guy who wrote Kaleidoscope).
The trash on the desktop, though, is a problem, IMHO. Not showing hard drives on the desktop is annoying too, although at least removable media (CD-ROMs, etc.) shows up on the desktop now (so I've heard). Hopefully we'll have some choice about this; I can see how some users would prefer the Trash in the Dock, so I guess you should be able to drag it back and forth.
I use Kaleidoscope on my Mac, and use the Win3.1 scheme more than the Win95/98 schemes.
Are you saying you use Kaleidoscope to make your Mac look like Windows 3.1? WHY?!? There are some very pretty themes out there, many of which are at least as functional and almost all of which are prettier than the Windows 3.1 GUI.
I'm impressed. I'll have to check that out again at home (I'm at work on a lame Windows box with a pretty tight firewall); I'm curious as to exactly how that works.
Yes, but that's 1024x768x1 = 786432 pixels, while 800x600x2 = 960000 pixels. Can't you just imagine displaying the left half of your browser on top of the right half, tricking your system into thinking you were running at 1600x600?
No, Apple will not open-source Mac OS X, but they've already released Darwin (the core BSD part) as open-source, and they've got a couple of other open-source things too. They're testing the waters, and you can expect to see more projects opened later once they confirm that nothing bad comes of opening what they've already opened.
As for Mac OS X on Intel, Darwin is fully x86-compatible and is distrubuted with fat binaries that run on either CPU. Most of the rest of Mac OS X is rumored to work on x86 as well, but Apple's keeping this quiet. It's good to see that they appear to be working to maintain cross-platform portability, even though they may not plan to release an Intel version.
The intelligent thing, of course, would be to release Cocoa APIs for Win32, Linux and BSD; that would make it possible to write cross-platform applications with a single API set - and the same app would be able to run on both Win32 and Linux/x86 without even the need for a recompile (same with Mac OS X and Linux/PPC), and a fat binary (containing both PowerPC and x86 code) could run on any x86 or PPC box with Cocoa libraries available.
Funny that Apple claims the iBook should last up to six hours with normal usage. I suppose you could squeeze that much out of it if you copy a stripped-down system folder, your applications and documents to a RAM disk, reboot from the RAM disk and spin down the hard drive.... but Mac OS 9 is big and complex enough that setting up a RAM boot disk is a pretty serious pain in the ass (carefully picking and choosing exactly which extensions, control panels, preferences files, shared libraries, and other files are absolutely essential for what you'll be doing and leaving everything else behind). Besides that, you'd definitely need more than the standard 32MB RAM anyway.
I wonder how long Linux would run on an iBook? I hope Pat Volkerding et al can find the time to do a PPC port of Slackware sometime soon....
The G3/4 processor while having horrible yields is quite good.
The G3 gets decent yields, and they're working on revising the G4. Sounds like IBM's taking over production; that will help.
Apple "develops" the hardware in the same way Compaq, Packard Bell, or Dell do, the procesors are made by mottorolla, the video cards by ATI, the hard drives are standard issue, etc.
Apple also develops their own motherboards and their own chipsets. The larger PC OEMs make their own boards, but they license the chipsets, and smaller OEMs use off-the-shelf boards. But yes, most of the other components are made by other companies.
Find a large grocery store that carries both Coke and Pepsi, I sure can't.
I've never heard of a large grocery store that doesn't carry both Coke and Pepsi. Most restaurants, however, only carry one or the other.
Instead, I think we ought to be discussing good remedies. For one thing, each company affected (netscape, corel, etc) can use the finding of fact in a civil suit.
That's a pretty good idea, but only if the DoJ fails to deal with Microsoft itself - which means the FoF was probably overturned in appeals, so the whole thing becomes moot.;-)
The government could follow Cringley's suggestion and fine MS; it has tens of billions in cash reserves sitting around.
Fining Microsoft several billion would be pretty neat, but solves nothing (even if they were pay restitution to Netscape, that would be going to AOL Time Warner, which hardly needs it).
Third, it could open the source to windows in a non-restrictive license.
Making Windows open-source would be a very Bad Thing(tm), because countless new security holes would be found, the script kiddies would get ahold of the exploits, and half the businesses in the country would grind suddenly to a halt - and rather than blame Microsoft for creating the problem, everyone would blame the government for exposing it.
Fourth, it could implement full disclosure of MS file formats and APIs, forcing MS to fully document all of these, and imposing a waiting period of not less than one year on changes to these formats.
Breaking up MS is both too extreme and won't solve anything.
It's not extreme at all; we'd be left with Windows (a pretty evil company with a huge fanatical following dumping buggy software on unsuspecting masses) and Microsoft (almost exactly as we know it now, but without Windows).
Oops, sorry, my bad. You're right, the Mac IE team has been disbanded and moved to WebTV, but some members of the team are still working on the project to ensure Carbon-compatibility. MSIE 5.0 will be maintained for at least a short while, but future releases will not be happening until after Judge Jackson orders a breakup, Microsoft appeals, Jackson sends the appeal directly to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court upholds Jackson's ruling, Microsoft begs for more time, the requested delay is granted, and they finally finish the breakup - no sooner than 2004, at earliest.
Meanwhile the Mac Office team is currently working on Office 2001, and has said that while the initial release will not be Carbon-compliant, they do intend to Carbonize it sometime within the next year or so (although a change in plans wouldn't greatly surprise me).
*sigh* You know, if Microsoft were smart, they'd realize that if the DOJ breakup goes through, their best option is to capitalize on the markets they have left after Windows is pulled away: Office and IE. Instead, they're scrambling to ensure that a breakup will hurt them as much as it possibly could, so their customers will be upset and they can simply blame the government.
My apologies if I sound ignorant; I'm not a scientist and have no more than a casual interest in biology. I certainly don't mean to imply that I have all the answers, only that some of those who profess to have the answers are sadly mistaken.
About as interesting as the fact that the first Americans came to America from Europe and yet there are still Europeans!
Those Europeans chose, for whatever reasons, to leave Europe and move to the New World. A living thing doesn't choose to mutate into a different species! The concept of evolution is generally that a new species is better suited to its environment than the original species, and the original species is eventually eliminated through natural selection (because the new species is better adapted to survival). Am I missing something?
If your religion satisfies you and you do not wish to learn the scientific theories that man has put forth, then that is your decision, but you should at least refrain from attempt to speak about those theories in an intelligent manner.
I'm certainly open to an intelligent discussion on the matter, although this is probably not the most appropriate forum (we're straying a bit off-topic....).
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Fred Phelps are not accurate resources when it comes to biology.
Jerry Falwell, PAt Robertson and Fred Phelps are not accurate resources when it comes to religion, either.;-)
You may be surprised to find out how far removed your conceptions of "puddles of goo" and "in-between species" are from reality.
Forgive my use of non-technical terms. Again, I'm not a biologist.
Perhaps you can tell me, though, what did bats evolve from? Do you have any idea? Perhaps you can consult one of those textbooks you've got lying around; I don't have any handy at the moment.
A standard Class C subnet with 256 addresses (254 actually available; the first is the network address and last is the broadcast address) uses a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. This can be expressed in binary as 11111111 11111111 11111111 00000000. If you count the ones, there are 24 of them. A network address and a subnet mask can be written as 192.168.123.0/24, thus "/24" refers to a Class C.
A/16 has 16 bits on, 11111111 11111111 00000000 00000000 or 255.255.0.0; 172.23.0.0/16 is an example of a Class B subnet. 10.0.0.0/8 is an example of a Class A subnet.
Now, to find out how many IP addresses are available in a subnet, and what they can be. If the subnet is a Class C or smaller (255.255.255.anything), subtract the last number from 256 (255.255.255.0, 256-0=256, 256 possible addresses). Then subtract two (the network and broadcast addresses), and rememer that one of your IPs has to be your router/gateway.
For 255.255.255.240 (/28), 256 - 240 = a 16-IP subnet with 14 usable IPs. For 192.168.5.128/28, the network address is (obviously) 192.168.5.128, and the broadcast address is 192.168.5.143.
For larger subnets, it gets more complicated to figure it all out and you usually have to convert everything to binary. If you want to know a little bit more detail, feel free to e-mail me.
That's right, we all just evolved out of a puddle of goo that just decided one day that it would mutate into a complex forms of life.
Oh wait, how did that collection of proteins come to life, exactly? Hmmm....
Isn't it interesting that many of the lower forms of life that we supposedly evolved from are still alive and well to this day? And a lot of the in-between species have yet to be discovered, but simply "must have existed"? Good thing they were able to mutate and evolve into a new species before natural selection killed them off.
urgggh, straying off-topic; sorry. It just bugs me when people get personally offended if you say Evolution isn't a perfect theory, yet they claim not to be religious. Tell me, what's your definition of religion? The origin of the universe falls outside the realm of empirical science, therefore the idea of the Big Bang must be held solely on faith. Am I offending anyone yet? Good! Flame away.
It would be a deathwish to release OS X without Office, since it is aimed at people that already have Macs, and want the ease of use of a major Office suite.
Au contraire! Microsoft Office will run in the Classic environment (code-named Blue Box), which is essentially an emulator running Mac OS 9 that runs transparently on Mac OS X. No nifty UNIX features, but it'll run.
Remember when Apple transitioned from m68k to PowerPC? They wrote a 68040 emulator and built it into the OS so 68k apps would still run (MUCH more slowly than PPC-native apps, and slower than on 68040 boxes), and everybody was happy - most people never knew the difference. how many people realized that a 68040 has more in common with a Pentium than a PowerPC? To the user, the PowerPC was just an upgrade. Mac OS X will be the same way, and if anybody can pull it off, Apple's the one.
Micro$oft has said, I believe, that MS Office 2001 will not be Carbon-compliant, although I can't imagine why. I suspect they'll change their mind. Porting from the traditional Mac OS Toolbox to Carbon is supposed to be easy; that's the whole point of Carbon.
The build originally known as Beta has begun seeding as Developer Preview 4.
Mac OS Rumors is a rumor site. They don't pretend to have all the facts; quite the contrary. In this particular case, what MOSR had been calling a beta, actually turned out to be DP4. What was expected to be the 1.0 release will now be called the initial public beta (which makes me very happy, considering the current state of development, application support, etc.).
If you're counting on sites like MOSR and AppleInsider to bring you the latest accurate news reports, perhaps you should have your head examined. For those of us who like to keep up on the latest unconfirmed hearsay, MOSR has consistently been an excellent resource for several years, and I applaud their efforts.
I came up with this idea a few weeks ago, with one difference:
Send the full purchase price of the CD.
If you only send $5, it looks like you're being cheap, even if the band's cut from the sale of a CD would actually be less than that. If you're serious about this, you need to send the full retail purchase price. If you go down to Best Buy or Tower Records or wherever and see a CD you want on sale for $18.95, then get a money order for $18.95, stick it in an envelope with a note explaining yourself, stamp it and drop it in a public mailbox somewhere. If 1% of all Slashdot readers did this, it'd make a pretty huge impact.
I've been working on redoing my home page to use themes. Each section of text appears in a table, decorated with graphics to look like a window in a variety of OSes (Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X, UNIX, and I'm working on more). On the right is a navigation bar, also designed to look like a window. The various vidgets (close boxes, minimize/maximize buttons, etc.) are completely non-functional.
For any page on the site, you can click a link and change what theme you're viewing the page in. While my focus is on keeping the content the same and changing the surrounding aesthetics, while your focus is on keeping the surrounding aesthetics and changing the content, the same concepts still apply.
My site is based on a CGI script written in perl called page.pl, which takes two arguments (passed in the QUERY_STRING): the name of the page to be viewed, and the theme to view it in. Eventually the theme selection will be moved into a cookie; you might similarly want to move language selection into a cookie.
Unfortunately, my site isn't ready for prime time yet, and is currently hosted only on my 56k dialup connection (definitely unable to stand up to the Slashdot Effect). However, the previous version of my site works in a similar fashion, offering different layouts depending on what browser you're using. Much simpler, but it should give you some idea as to what I'm talking about. The main home page is done with shtml, rather than CGI, and lets you use a QUERY_STRING to override the automatic browser detection. Compare:
The three versions are designed for Netscape 4.x, Netscape 3.x and all other browsers, respectively (MSIE pretends to be Netscape). The difference between versions 3 and 4 is subtle; look for the drop-shadow - Netscape 3 doesn't support background table graphics, so I designed version 3 not to use them.
If you're seriously interested in seeing my new site with the themes feel free to e-mail me according to the instructions in my sig, and I'll give you the URL.
Wow, hey, I didn't know that! Although, it seems you have to hit Escape twice. Escape-Backspace deletes the filename you just typed, preserving the rest of the line. And tcsh is compatible with this, as well as using tab-completion like bash.
When I'm installing an app that didn't come with the distro, I prefer to compile from source. It really doesn't take that long, and I get to see all the documentation in case there's something weird. Often, the app in question isn't avaialble as an rpm or deb package anyway.
If it came with the distro, but it isn't already installed, I head over to http://www.slackware.com/ and click Packages (or hit the right arrow key, if I don't happen to be running Netscape). I can either download it from there, or find it on my CD.
If it came with the distribution, no, I don't like compiling from source (with exceptions like Apache), simply because I don't want to mess with it. If it didn't come with the distribution, why not?
Slashdot Mirror
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Maybe it's just me, but I find Freecell to be much less intuitive than the Jigsaw Puzzle.
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The single window feature is a good idea for newbies, as a replacement for the System 7.5 Launcher, Mac OS 8/9's View as Buttons, and the "Hide other apps when switching applications" option in the General control panel that evolved from the retarded System 7.1P on the old Performas. However, the single window button is moronic - the option should be delegated to a Preferences panel so I can set it once and never have to look at it again.
Putting a system-wide preference option in every single window is a stupid waste of space and adds to the clutter of the UI.
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A file browser is OK I guess, but I'd prefer if the current browsing system was an option too.
Apparently they're working on it; this is one of the things that DP4 does that's been improved from DP3. You can set it so the Finder behaves roughly like the old Mac OS Finder we all know and love, though the default behavior will be more like Greg's Browser (an old shareware app by Greg Landweber, the guy who wrote Kaleidoscope).
The trash on the desktop, though, is a problem, IMHO. Not showing hard drives on the desktop is annoying too, although at least removable media (CD-ROMs, etc.) shows up on the desktop now (so I've heard). Hopefully we'll have some choice about this; I can see how some users would prefer the Trash in the Dock, so I guess you should be able to drag it back and forth.
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Are you saying you use Kaleidoscope to make your Mac look like Windows 3.1? WHY?!? There are some very pretty themes out there, many of which are at least as functional and almost all of which are prettier than the Windows 3.1 GUI.
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As for Mac OS X on Intel, Darwin is fully x86-compatible and is distrubuted with fat binaries that run on either CPU. Most of the rest of Mac OS X is rumored to work on x86 as well, but Apple's keeping this quiet. It's good to see that they appear to be working to maintain cross-platform portability, even though they may not plan to release an Intel version.
The intelligent thing, of course, would be to release Cocoa APIs for Win32, Linux and BSD; that would make it possible to write cross-platform applications with a single API set - and the same app would be able to run on both Win32 and Linux/x86 without even the need for a recompile (same with Mac OS X and Linux/PPC), and a fat binary (containing both PowerPC and x86 code) could run on any x86 or PPC box with Cocoa libraries available.
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I wonder how long Linux would run on an iBook? I hope Pat Volkerding et al can find the time to do a PPC port of Slackware sometime soon....
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The G3 gets decent yields, and they're working on revising the G4. Sounds like IBM's taking over production; that will help.
Apple "develops" the hardware in the same way Compaq, Packard Bell, or Dell do, the procesors are made by mottorolla, the video cards by ATI, the hard drives are standard issue, etc.
Apple also develops their own motherboards and their own chipsets. The larger PC OEMs make their own boards, but they license the chipsets, and smaller OEMs use off-the-shelf boards. But yes, most of the other components are made by other companies.
Find a large grocery store that carries both Coke and Pepsi, I sure can't.
I've never heard of a large grocery store that doesn't carry both Coke and Pepsi. Most restaurants, however, only carry one or the other.
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That's a pretty good idea, but only if the DoJ fails to deal with Microsoft itself - which means the FoF was probably overturned in appeals, so the whole thing becomes moot.
The government could follow Cringley's suggestion and fine MS; it has tens of billions in cash reserves sitting around.
Fining Microsoft several billion would be pretty neat, but solves nothing (even if they were pay restitution to Netscape, that would be going to AOL Time Warner, which hardly needs it).
Third, it could open the source to windows in a non-restrictive license.
Making Windows open-source would be a very Bad Thing(tm), because countless new security holes would be found, the script kiddies would get ahold of the exploits, and half the businesses in the country would grind suddenly to a halt - and rather than blame Microsoft for creating the problem, everyone would blame the government for exposing it.
Fourth, it could implement full disclosure of MS file formats and APIs, forcing MS to fully document all of these, and imposing a waiting period of not less than one year on changes to these formats.
See paragraph 4 of Microsoft' s proposed Final Judgements and 3-b of the DoJ's proposed Final Judgements.
Finally, it could impose non-discriminatory, fully disclosed prices on products to OEMs.
3-f of the DoJ's proposed Final Judgements; Microsoft doesn't sound very interested in this (gee, wonder why).
Breaking up MS is both too extreme and won't solve anything.
It's not extreme at all; we'd be left with Windows (a pretty evil company with a huge fanatical following dumping buggy software on unsuspecting masses) and Microsoft (almost exactly as we know it now, but without Windows).
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Meanwhile the Mac Office team is currently working on Office 2001, and has said that while the initial release will not be Carbon-compliant, they do intend to Carbonize it sometime within the next year or so (although a change in plans wouldn't greatly surprise me).
*sigh* You know, if Microsoft were smart, they'd realize that if the DOJ breakup goes through, their best option is to capitalize on the markets they have left after Windows is pulled away: Office and IE. Instead, they're scrambling to ensure that a breakup will hurt them as much as it possibly could, so their customers will be upset and they can simply blame the government.
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About as interesting as the fact that the first Americans came to America from Europe and yet there are still Europeans!
Those Europeans chose, for whatever reasons, to leave Europe and move to the New World. A living thing doesn't choose to mutate into a different species! The concept of evolution is generally that a new species is better suited to its environment than the original species, and the original species is eventually eliminated through natural selection (because the new species is better adapted to survival). Am I missing something?
If your religion satisfies you and you do not wish to learn the scientific theories that man has put forth, then that is your decision, but you should at least refrain from attempt to speak about those theories in an intelligent manner.
I'm certainly open to an intelligent discussion on the matter, although this is probably not the most appropriate forum (we're straying a bit off-topic....).
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Fred Phelps are not accurate resources when it comes to biology.
Jerry Falwell, PAt Robertson and Fred Phelps are not accurate resources when it comes to religion, either.
You may be surprised to find out how far removed your conceptions of "puddles of goo" and "in-between species" are from reality.
Forgive my use of non-technical terms. Again, I'm not a biologist.
Perhaps you can tell me, though, what did bats evolve from? Do you have any idea? Perhaps you can consult one of those textbooks you've got lying around; I don't have any handy at the moment.
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A standard Class C subnet with 256 addresses (254 actually available; the first is the network address and last is the broadcast address) uses a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. This can be expressed in binary as 11111111 11111111 11111111 00000000. If you count the ones, there are 24 of them. A network address and a subnet mask can be written as 192.168.123.0/24, thus "/24" refers to a Class C.
A
Now, to find out how many IP addresses are available in a subnet, and what they can be. If the subnet is a Class C or smaller (255.255.255.anything), subtract the last number from 256 (255.255.255.0, 256-0=256, 256 possible addresses). Then subtract two (the network and broadcast addresses), and rememer that one of your IPs has to be your router/gateway.
For 255.255.255.240 (/28), 256 - 240 = a 16-IP subnet with 14 usable IPs. For 192.168.5.128/28, the network address is (obviously) 192.168.5.128, and the broadcast address is 192.168.5.143.
For larger subnets, it gets more complicated to figure it all out and you usually have to convert everything to binary. If you want to know a little bit more detail, feel free to e-mail me.
--
Oh wait, how did that collection of proteins come to life, exactly? Hmmm....
Isn't it interesting that many of the lower forms of life that we supposedly evolved from are still alive and well to this day? And a lot of the in-between species have yet to be discovered, but simply "must have existed"? Good thing they were able to mutate and evolve into a new species before natural selection killed them off.
urgggh, straying off-topic; sorry. It just bugs me when people get personally offended if you say Evolution isn't a perfect theory, yet they claim not to be religious. Tell me, what's your definition of religion? The origin of the universe falls outside the realm of empirical science, therefore the idea of the Big Bang must be held solely on faith. Am I offending anyone yet? Good! Flame away.
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Au contraire! Microsoft Office will run in the Classic environment (code-named Blue Box), which is essentially an emulator running Mac OS 9 that runs transparently on Mac OS X. No nifty UNIX features, but it'll run.
Remember when Apple transitioned from m68k to PowerPC? They wrote a 68040 emulator and built it into the OS so 68k apps would still run (MUCH more slowly than PPC-native apps, and slower than on 68040 boxes), and everybody was happy - most people never knew the difference. how many people realized that a 68040 has more in common with a Pentium than a PowerPC? To the user, the PowerPC was just an upgrade. Mac OS X will be the same way, and if anybody can pull it off, Apple's the one.
Micro$oft has said, I believe, that MS Office 2001 will not be Carbon-compliant, although I can't imagine why. I suspect they'll change their mind. Porting from the traditional Mac OS Toolbox to Carbon is supposed to be easy; that's the whole point of Carbon.
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Mac OS Rumors is a rumor site. They don't pretend to have all the facts; quite the contrary. In this particular case, what MOSR had been calling a beta, actually turned out to be DP4. What was expected to be the 1.0 release will now be called the initial public beta (which makes me very happy, considering the current state of development, application support, etc.).
If you're counting on sites like MOSR and AppleInsider to bring you the latest accurate news reports, perhaps you should have your head examined. For those of us who like to keep up on the latest unconfirmed hearsay, MOSR has consistently been an excellent resource for several years, and I applaud their efforts.
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Send the full purchase price of the CD.
If you only send $5, it looks like you're being cheap, even if the band's cut from the sale of a CD would actually be less than that. If you're serious about this, you need to send the full retail purchase price. If you go down to Best Buy or Tower Records or wherever and see a CD you want on sale for $18.95, then get a money order for $18.95, stick it in an envelope with a note explaining yourself, stamp it and drop it in a public mailbox somewhere. If 1% of all Slashdot readers did this, it'd make a pretty huge impact.
--
I've been working on redoing my home page to use themes. Each section of text appears in a table, decorated with graphics to look like a window in a variety of OSes (Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X, UNIX, and I'm working on more). On the right is a navigation bar, also designed to look like a window. The various vidgets (close boxes, minimize/maximize buttons, etc.) are completely non-functional.
For any page on the site, you can click a link and change what theme you're viewing the page in. While my focus is on keeping the content the same and changing the surrounding aesthetics, while your focus is on keeping the surrounding aesthetics and changing the content, the same concepts still apply.
My site is based on a CGI script written in perl called page.pl, which takes two arguments (passed in the QUERY_STRING): the name of the page to be viewed, and the theme to view it in. Eventually the theme selection will be moved into a cookie; you might similarly want to move language selection into a cookie.
Unfortunately, my site isn't ready for prime time yet, and is currently hosted only on my 56k dialup connection (definitely unable to stand up to the Slashdot Effect). However, the previous version of my site works in a similar fashion, offering different layouts depending on what browser you're using. Much simpler, but it should give you some idea as to what I'm talking about. The main home page is done with shtml, rather than CGI, and lets you use a QUERY_STRING to override the automatic browser detection. Compare:
http://www.inficad.com/~phroggy/?4
http://www.inficad.com/~phroggy/?3
http://www.inficad.com/~phroggy/?2
The three versions are designed for Netscape 4.x, Netscape 3.x and all other browsers, respectively (MSIE pretends to be Netscape). The difference between versions 3 and 4 is subtle; look for the drop-shadow - Netscape 3 doesn't support background table graphics, so I designed version 3 not to use them.
If you're seriously interested in seeing my new site with the themes feel free to e-mail me according to the instructions in my sig, and I'll give you the URL.
#include <stdio.h>
Whoops, I think I just broke the law.
Wow, hey, I didn't know that! Although, it seems you have to hit Escape twice. Escape-Backspace deletes the filename you just typed, preserving the rest of the line. And tcsh is compatible with this, as well as using tab-completion like bash.
When I'm installing an app that didn't come with the distro, I prefer to compile from source. It really doesn't take that long, and I get to see all the documentation in case there's something weird. Often, the app in question isn't avaialble as an rpm or deb package anyway.
If it came with the distro, but it isn't already installed, I head over to http://www.slackware.com/ and click Packages (or hit the right arrow key, if I don't happen to be running Netscape). I can either download it from there, or find it on my CD.
If it came with the distribution, no, I don't like compiling from source (with exceptions like Apache), simply because I don't want to mess with it. If it didn't come with the distribution, why not?