A common well tested operating system that's been used by dozens of other groups will contain far less bugs than code hacked together by your own small bunch of developers.
It doesn't mean that you don't test it or that you test it less. It's simply means that other people will be testing it as well.
The solution is a market. A real one, where people actually trade with each other.
You need genuine demand for goods, regular food intake, equipment that breaks etc. You need an open market that allows people to trade between each other. You strongly favour specialists over generalists, this forces people to interact in the market. There has to be mechanisms to remove wealth from the game, this can be transaction fees, regular taxes, destruction of goods through use, consumption of goods such as food. Demand must always be higher than supply, if everyone has the best armour, best weapon and tonnes of food, the economy is broken.
The system is self balancing. Everyone needs all the goods and everyone needs to interact with the market. If weapon smithing is lucrative for some reason a genuine supply/demand market makes weapons cheap enough that it's no longer the case. There will always be short term advantages to being in different groups but they balance as the market pushes people to correct for it.
The game administrators have two ways of influencing the market. By tweaking the tax system and economy dampers they change the overall availability of goods. Adjusting the demand for a particular good or the rate that it's produced will change the number of people in a given profession. This also impacts on the overall economy.
I don't think safety rails are necessary. A game with a dozen people will make the economy start to tick over. However if safety rails are required (NPC's producing food etc) then the prices should be punative. Selling at least 5x more expensive than a human farmer would sell the product for and buying at least 5x cheaper. People should not regularly be buying or selling from the NPC based market.
The big downside to all of this and the reason the game developers don't do it is because it forces you to interact with the market. Which isn't cool if you just want to go around and punch monsters.
Say Gnote takes off and Tomboy dies, the motivation to improve Gnote is gone because the single goal of Gnote(i.e to kill Tomboy) has been achieved, and anyway, there is no more Tomboy to ripoff new ideas, code and GUI design from. Tomboy's developers are not happy with gnote now, so there's little chance they will jump ship to gnote.
I think the goal of Gnote is to have a good note application like Tomboy that doesn't require Mono. Any killing of Tomboy is just a side effect.
If Tomboy died the core developers probably wouldn't switch but many of the minor contributors will and all the future contributors will including the new eyes that see a better way to structure something or a really nice new feature. Gnote will continue to grow.
You have identified the key problem nicely in your question. How to maintain your changes when the base changes underneath you.
The first thing I recommend is to go back to your basic OOP structures. If you can, inherit and extend rather than modify their code. The interface will change far less than the internals.
If you have to modify the internals try and keep it as contained as possible. Consider creating new functions rather than modifying theirs. Try and collect as many changes together as you can, each function changed is a pile more work.
When you are updating to the newer versions try and do a three way merge, it makes it far simpler. Many of the distributed VCS like git have it built in or you can use tools like kdiff3 to do it manually.
Rowing is an interesting sport, it works a wide range of muscle groups and is non-impact. You can row in groups or by yourself and in most countries right through the year.
The biggest downside in my view is that the water is generally flattest at dawn so you have to be up early.
With sculling you should be able to move the boat by yourself, a decent quality boat is very light. Rowing in the winter is certainly possible (if the water doesn't freeze), the risk involved is drowning due to the cold water before you can get back in the boat. Practice improves the time to get back in and experienced rowers rarely fall out.
A few years ago I restructured my CV to deal specifically with this problem.
In my imagination recruitment monkeys are sitting there with the job requirements that reads "Must have experience in C, Perl and embedded devices" and a stack of CVs. (Though more likely it's a search for "C AND Perl AND embedded").
If my CV has something like, experience with low level languages such as C and assembler,... extensive scripting experience on Unix based systems etc. I'm just going to get thrown in the bin.
So half a page of my CV is a list of languages and other areas I know. It doesn't mean a great deal but if I've used a language for a while I list it there. That way the recruitment monkey can easily tick their boxes and I move on to the second round.
The second page of the CV starts going into my work experience, systems I've dealt with etc. On the second page I assume a knowledgeable reader and talk about the style of work and tasks rather than worrying about the recruitment monkey or their word search.
A group at the ANU has been working in this field for at least three years now. Their submersible is called the Serafina and more details are available at http://serafina.com.au/
Ongoing research include swarm style movement and problem solving. Each of the submersibles includes a 122kHz long wave radio, there are also ongoing experiments in using LEDs for optical communication.
I'm not a fan of Sugar either, I think it's a nice Beta but I don't think that it's ready for prime time.
I do think that your complaints are off target though. For example I don't really care about the icons or names of the programs, that's easy to tweak.
The colour scheme is deliberately fairly monochrome, the laptop screen has a monochrome mode and the interface has to work in that state.
I found all the OLPC distributed activities followed the interface guidelines. The share combo is always in the same place, the close button is always in the same place. The only exception I've found is the Simcity activity which I had to install myself.
There are some serious issues though.
I've tried to reserve judgement on the journal until I tried it for a while and got used to it. I think I've waited long enough to decide that it just doesn't work in it's current state. I can't see any way to do something like take a bunch of pictures of friends a view them in a gallery.
The tool tips look like menus. I've had a number of people using the laptop trying to click on the tips and getting frustrated.
Applications take forever to load. Even something as simple as the terminal takes about seven seconds.
The XO unique features mostly aren't implemented. The resistive touch pads still don't work. The only application I could get collaboration working on was chat. This is a shame because the collaboration in particular looked like a fantastic feature.
Sadly the Sugar interface looks like it suffers from some serious feature creep. They tried to reinvent the engine, chassis and wheel all at once (compulsory car reference, tick). I don't think that XP is going to fit the XO any better though, I don't think that multiple windows is really appropriate given the screen size.
I'm remaining hopelessly optimistic about the OLPC project though. If they can outsource the GUI it might mean that they will be able to focus on better distribution and making all the other unique features of the XO as fantastic as it's battery life.
I've been in a very similar situation and actually help the police recover information from a friends computer.
I believe that the ethics of this are fairly simple, the dead man is gone. His happiness and desires are no longer important.
The family is still around, their happiness and desires are important. If you can help provide information, by whatever means, that gives them some kind of closure or helps them in any way; do so.
Standard copyright law (in Australia) doesn't allow reproductions of a work. That includes format shifting and backups.
Many DJs these days use computer based equipment which involves transferring the data onto a computer. Whilst this is technically infringement and many DJs are were aware that this was the case it wasn't being pursued.
The introduction of a new fee is a way of the record industry acknowledging the new reality and accepting it. They aren't redefining copyright law and given that an alternative was prosecuting DJs who have been offending this is not such a bad move.
Traveling forward in time doesn't seem that difficult in comparison to going back.
You don't actually have to warp time, just take a long nap. I suspect the science behind stasis will be much easier to master than time travel.
You could also accelerate to a decent percentage of the speed of light, causing outside time to pass relatively quickly.
The paradox question seems solvable as well: If you leave time A and travel to time B where B A
Stating the problem: 1. You exist in time A. 2. You depart time A and travel to time B, where B A. 3. You make a change in time B which causes your future self not to be created. (ie, killing a parent). 4. You no longer exist.
The catch is that by not existing you could not make the change to cause you not to exist.
I see two possible solutions. 1. Step 3 cannot occur, you are prevented in some way from making the change. This seems unlikely to me. 2. Step 4 is false. Altering your future self does not alter your present self in your present time. It seems counter-intuitive to me for a change in the future to reach back and alter the past. (Though this is the whole idea of time travel).
Your comments about being able to focus close up are completely off the mark for this kind of product.
By covering both eyes they can make the focal distance whatever they want it to be. So you aren't trying to focus on one or two objects an inch away you are actually trying to focus on a single image a meter or two away. This is a fairly relaxed distance for your eyes and shouldn't cause them any significant strain.
Yes, if you compress a track it sounds louder and more 'unified' (more of the same).
This compression is achieved at the price of the dynamic range, it's a fairly simple trade off. The result is that the music overall sounds lifeless and dull.
The fact that it sounds good when you do it and bad when someone else does it isn't really all that surprising. For an independent third party however, they would both sound like crap.
On a completely related issue, how well insulated is your receiver?
Regardless of the source of the reference frequency the DAC is driven by a crystal oscillator. Crystal oscillators have terrible issues with temperature sensitivity, a slight variation in temperature can cause an oscillator to move in all sorts of odd non-linear ways. The only good way to avoid these problems is to build an oven into the oscillator, which drastically shortens it's life and increases it's cost, so it's rarely done.
Typically there is some basic temperature compensation, but some oscillators even have a saw-tooth style response to temperature due to this compensation. So as you slide through temperature the frequency will jump up and down repeatedly.
This crystal oscillator directly drives the DAC process. Who knows what kind of errors could be introduced by someone causing a breeze by walking past, people breathing near your device or worst of all, somebody opening a door and getting a rush of cold air in.
So while I commend your efforts on ensuring that you have the best cables you really need to insulate the DAC, I'd suggest putting up one of those kids cages to stop people walking near it and wrapping the whole thing in a blanket to try and smooth out any sudden changes. I'm always amazed at home many fellow audiophiles don't pay enough attention to this aspect of their sound.
Most of the rest of the world has stronger regulations surrounding who the banks can give money too and different policies on what happens if you default on a debt.
These two things combined make it unlikely that other countries will have the same problems that the USA did. We have seen people struggle as the interest rates rise but there is more margin in what they earn to prevent them from defaulting on the loan and a stronger disincentive to defaulting.
The OLPC group has measures in place to brick the laptop if it's taken away from it's base station/village for an extended period of time.
They are also doing simple things with the colours. The colour made available to the public through the buy 2 get 1 offer will be different to the colours offered to client countries. So any laptop appearing on e-bay that's the wrong colour will have it's listing pulled.
I also suspect that there will be less children looking to give these up than you would initially think.
You might see accuracy changes with the season due to changes in the atmosphere. GPS accuracy is directly related to the signal delays and so any atmospheric changes could alter that.
The newer chipsets probably detect weaker signals, they aren't intentionally using echoed signals though. A fair bit of effort goes into the antenna design and the signal processing to get rid of bounced signals.
This update won't have any effect on your receiver. Other things they have been doing recently such as introducing new frequencies can greatly improve GPS accuracy. However most retail receivers only use the one frequency because it's much cheaper.
Not even close to true, Linux has only ever distributed the kernel... other people combined it and called the whole things like "Red Hat Linux" or "Slackware Linux", GNU should/could have done this but had not bothered to do the work to make a usable distribution (as more than a collection of tarballs) and were happily ignoring Linux and telling everyone else to ignore it and use GNU-Hurd when it would be ready "any time now". This was pretty obvious naming at the time, we didn't call Solaris "GNU/Solaris" when we installed GCC, GNU-tar etc. on it.
That isn't right. The FSF (GNU people) were involved in the founding of Debian, sponsoring it for a year when it started up. One of the consequences of this is that Debian distributes GNU/Linux.
Or it could simply be the fact that the cops seized both of the cars and then returned them.
I'm sufficiently paranoid that if that happened I would probably take off a few internal panels of my car and snoop around. (Plus the bonus chance of scoring yourself a tracking device).
If I knew that I was being investigated for a crime I'd defiantly be looking around the car.
The stuff in the article about the car running poorly was just him baiting the police. Trimble make GPS devices designed to be used indoors; it wouldn't have mattered where in the car the antenna was placed it still would have gotten enough signal for a reasonable lock.
You look at a webpage today just like you did in 1997, but the webpages that you look at are very different beasts. There is no way that you could have comfortable run youtube with it's flash movies on that kind of hardware. These days you expect it as a matter of course. The typical webpage back then was a bunch of HTML tags with a table or two and a few images. A slashdot article now contains five stylesheets, 5 javascript files plus a smattering of embedded javascript. The comment box that scrolls along with you would have lagged a few seconds every time you scrolled in 1997. Not to mention that 32mb of ram wouldn't have held the 25 tabs I typically have open.
You now multitask without really thinking about it. I used to always think twice about switching between major applications because of the swapping that I knew it would involve, my tolerance these days is much less. We now have nice little things like automatic spell checking in firefox and vim.
If you really believe that you could do it all in 1997 hunt around for a Pentium 200 with 32mb of ram, install Windows 95 and refresh the pain.
I remember a documentary I saw once about land mines. They showed a small mine being dismantled by some poor sap whose job it was to go out and dismantle land mines. In it was a Motorola chip. It was probably some terribly generic part like a 555 timer or 4-input NAND gate or something; it's not like Motorola was in the business of making land mines.
Now, if Motorola saw this, do they have a right to be a little miffed? "Ah," say the slashdotters, "Motorola sold their 555-timer on the open market to any buyer, they have no right to be miffed when someone uses it in a device that blows the legs off little children!" Right?
I doubt it, Motorola is probably rather happy to have it's components used the world over. Marketing is off right now contacting their land mine clients advising them of a nice generic light sensitive diode that they manufacture which can be coupled with a small explosive device prevent people opening up the land mines stealing their IP.
Slashdot Mirror
A common well tested operating system that's been used by dozens of other groups will contain far less bugs than code hacked together by your own small bunch of developers.
It doesn't mean that you don't test it or that you test it less. It's simply means that other people will be testing it as well.
The solution is a market. A real one, where people actually trade with each other.
You need genuine demand for goods, regular food intake, equipment that breaks etc.
You need an open market that allows people to trade between each other.
You strongly favour specialists over generalists, this forces people to interact in the market.
There has to be mechanisms to remove wealth from the game, this can be transaction fees, regular taxes, destruction of goods through use, consumption of goods such as food. Demand must always be higher than supply, if everyone has the best armour, best weapon and tonnes of food, the economy is broken.
The system is self balancing. Everyone needs all the goods and everyone needs to interact with the market. If weapon smithing is lucrative for some reason a genuine supply/demand market makes weapons cheap enough that it's no longer the case. There will always be short term advantages to being in different groups but they balance as the market pushes people to correct for it.
The game administrators have two ways of influencing the market.
By tweaking the tax system and economy dampers they change the overall availability of goods.
Adjusting the demand for a particular good or the rate that it's produced will change the number of people in a given profession. This also impacts on the overall economy.
I don't think safety rails are necessary. A game with a dozen people will make the economy start to tick over. However if safety rails are required (NPC's producing food etc) then the prices should be punative. Selling at least 5x more expensive than a human farmer would sell the product for and buying at least 5x cheaper. People should not regularly be buying or selling from the NPC based market.
The big downside to all of this and the reason the game developers don't do it is because it forces you to interact with the market. Which isn't cool if you just want to go around and punch monsters.
Say Gnote takes off and Tomboy dies, the motivation to improve Gnote is gone because the single goal of Gnote(i.e to kill Tomboy) has been achieved, and anyway, there is no more Tomboy to ripoff new ideas, code and GUI design from. Tomboy's developers are not happy with gnote now, so there's little chance they will jump ship to gnote.
I think the goal of Gnote is to have a good note application like Tomboy that doesn't require Mono. Any killing of Tomboy is just a side effect.
If Tomboy died the core developers probably wouldn't switch but many of the minor contributors will and all the future contributors will including the new eyes that see a better way to structure something or a really nice new feature. Gnote will continue to grow.
You have identified the key problem nicely in your question. How to maintain your changes when the base changes underneath you.
The first thing I recommend is to go back to your basic OOP structures. If you can, inherit and extend rather than modify their code. The interface will change far less than the internals.
If you have to modify the internals try and keep it as contained as possible. Consider creating new functions rather than modifying theirs. Try and collect as many changes together as you can, each function changed is a pile more work.
When you are updating to the newer versions try and do a three way merge, it makes it far simpler. Many of the distributed VCS like git have it built in or you can use tools like kdiff3 to do it manually.
Rowing is an interesting sport, it works a wide range of muscle groups and is non-impact. You can row in groups or by yourself and in most countries right through the year.
The biggest downside in my view is that the water is generally flattest at dawn so you have to be up early.
With sculling you should be able to move the boat by yourself, a decent quality boat is very light. Rowing in the winter is certainly possible (if the water doesn't freeze), the risk involved is drowning due to the cold water before you can get back in the boat. Practice improves the time to get back in and experienced rowers rarely fall out.
A few years ago I restructured my CV to deal specifically with this problem.
... extensive scripting experience on Unix based systems etc. I'm just going to get thrown in the bin.
In my imagination recruitment monkeys are sitting there with the job requirements that reads "Must have experience in C, Perl and embedded devices" and a stack of CVs. (Though more likely it's a search for "C AND Perl AND embedded").
If my CV has something like, experience with low level languages such as C and assembler,
So half a page of my CV is a list of languages and other areas I know. It doesn't mean a great deal but if I've used a language for a while I list it there. That way the recruitment monkey can easily tick their boxes and I move on to the second round.
The second page of the CV starts going into my work experience, systems I've dealt with etc. On the second page I assume a knowledgeable reader and talk about the style of work and tasks rather than worrying about the recruitment monkey or their word search.
A group at the ANU has been working in this field for at least three years now. Their submersible is called the Serafina and more details are available at http://serafina.com.au/
Ongoing research include swarm style movement and problem solving. Each of the submersibles includes a 122kHz long wave radio, there are also ongoing experiments in using LEDs for optical communication.
I'm not a fan of Sugar either, I think it's a nice Beta but I don't think that it's ready for prime time.
I do think that your complaints are off target though. For example I don't really care about the icons or names of the programs, that's easy to tweak.
The colour scheme is deliberately fairly monochrome, the laptop screen has a monochrome mode and the interface has to work in that state.
I found all the OLPC distributed activities followed the interface guidelines. The share combo is always in the same place, the close button is always in the same place. The only exception I've found is the Simcity activity which I had to install myself.
There are some serious issues though.
I've tried to reserve judgement on the journal until I tried it for a while and got used to it. I think I've waited long enough to decide that it just doesn't work in it's current state. I can't see any way to do something like take a bunch of pictures of friends a view them in a gallery.
The tool tips look like menus. I've had a number of people using the laptop trying to click on the tips and getting frustrated.
Applications take forever to load. Even something as simple as the terminal takes about seven seconds.
The XO unique features mostly aren't implemented. The resistive touch pads still don't work. The only application I could get collaboration working on was chat. This is a shame because the collaboration in particular looked like a fantastic feature.
Sadly the Sugar interface looks like it suffers from some serious feature creep. They tried to reinvent the engine, chassis and wheel all at once (compulsory car reference, tick). I don't think that XP is going to fit the XO any better though, I don't think that multiple windows is really appropriate given the screen size.
I'm remaining hopelessly optimistic about the OLPC project though. If they can outsource the GUI it might mean that they will be able to focus on better distribution and making all the other unique features of the XO as fantastic as it's battery life.
I've been in a very similar situation and actually help the police recover information from a friends computer.
I believe that the ethics of this are fairly simple, the dead man is gone. His happiness and desires are no longer important.
The family is still around, their happiness and desires are important. If you can help provide information, by whatever means, that gives them some kind of closure or helps them in any way; do so.
Australia doesn't have "free speech", never has.
Besides, the censoring is a voluntary act by Rockstar to get the rating that they desire. They could have simply proceeded with the higher rating.
In my state it's enforced by the liquor licencing body which is a government entity. I assume other states are similar.
Standard copyright law (in Australia) doesn't allow reproductions of a work. That includes format shifting and backups.
Many DJs these days use computer based equipment which involves transferring the data onto a computer. Whilst this is technically infringement and many DJs are were aware that this was the case it wasn't being pursued.
The introduction of a new fee is a way of the record industry acknowledging the new reality and accepting it. They aren't redefining copyright law and given that an alternative was prosecuting DJs who have been offending this is not such a bad move.
Traveling forward in time doesn't seem that difficult in comparison to going back.
You don't actually have to warp time, just take a long nap. I suspect the science behind stasis will be much easier to master than time travel.
You could also accelerate to a decent percentage of the speed of light, causing outside time to pass relatively quickly.
The paradox question seems solvable as well:
If you leave time A and travel to time B where B A
Stating the problem:
1. You exist in time A.
2. You depart time A and travel to time B, where B A.
3. You make a change in time B which causes your future self not to be created. (ie, killing a parent).
4. You no longer exist.
The catch is that by not existing you could not make the change to cause you not to exist.
I see two possible solutions.
1. Step 3 cannot occur, you are prevented in some way from making the change. This seems unlikely to me.
2. Step 4 is false. Altering your future self does not alter your present self in your present time. It seems counter-intuitive to me for a change in the future to reach back and alter the past. (Though this is the whole idea of time travel).
Your comments about being able to focus close up are completely off the mark for this kind of product.
By covering both eyes they can make the focal distance whatever they want it to be. So you aren't trying to focus on one or two objects an inch away you are actually trying to focus on a single image a meter or two away. This is a fairly relaxed distance for your eyes and shouldn't cause them any significant strain.
Yes, if you compress a track it sounds louder and more 'unified' (more of the same).
This compression is achieved at the price of the dynamic range, it's a fairly simple trade off. The result is that the music overall sounds lifeless and dull.
The fact that it sounds good when you do it and bad when someone else does it isn't really all that surprising.
For an independent third party however, they would both sound like crap.
On a completely related issue, how well insulated is your receiver?
Regardless of the source of the reference frequency the DAC is driven by a crystal oscillator. Crystal oscillators have terrible issues with temperature sensitivity, a slight variation in temperature can cause an oscillator to move in all sorts of odd non-linear ways. The only good way to avoid these problems is to build an oven into the oscillator, which drastically shortens it's life and increases it's cost, so it's rarely done.
Typically there is some basic temperature compensation, but some oscillators even have a saw-tooth style response to temperature due to this compensation. So as you slide through temperature the frequency will jump up and down repeatedly.
This crystal oscillator directly drives the DAC process. Who knows what kind of errors could be introduced by someone causing a breeze by walking past, people breathing near your device or worst of all, somebody opening a door and getting a rush of cold air in.
So while I commend your efforts on ensuring that you have the best cables you really need to insulate the DAC, I'd suggest putting up one of those kids cages to stop people walking near it and wrapping the whole thing in a blanket to try and smooth out any sudden changes. I'm always amazed at home many fellow audiophiles don't pay enough attention to this aspect of their sound.
Most of the rest of the world has stronger regulations surrounding who the banks can give money too and different policies on what happens if you default on a debt.
These two things combined make it unlikely that other countries will have the same problems that the USA did. We have seen people struggle as the interest rates rise but there is more margin in what they earn to prevent them from defaulting on the loan and a stronger disincentive to defaulting.
The OLPC group has measures in place to brick the laptop if it's taken away from it's base station/village for an extended period of time.
They are also doing simple things with the colours. The colour made available to the public through the buy 2 get 1 offer will be different to the colours offered to client countries. So any laptop appearing on e-bay that's the wrong colour will have it's listing pulled.
I also suspect that there will be less children looking to give these up than you would initially think.
You might see accuracy changes with the season due to changes in the atmosphere. GPS accuracy is directly related to the signal delays and so any atmospheric changes could alter that.
The newer chipsets probably detect weaker signals, they aren't intentionally using echoed signals though. A fair bit of effort goes into the antenna design and the signal processing to get rid of bounced signals.
This update won't have any effect on your receiver. Other things they have been doing recently such as introducing new frequencies can greatly improve GPS accuracy. However most retail receivers only use the one frequency because it's much cheaper.
Not even close to true, Linux has only ever distributed the kernel ... other people combined it and called the whole things like "Red Hat Linux" or "Slackware Linux", GNU should/could have done this but had not bothered to do the work to make a usable distribution (as more than a collection of tarballs) and were happily ignoring Linux and telling everyone else to ignore it and use GNU-Hurd when it would be ready "any time now". This was pretty obvious naming at the time, we didn't call Solaris "GNU/Solaris" when we installed GCC, GNU-tar etc. on it.
That isn't right. The FSF (GNU people) were involved in the founding of Debian, sponsoring it for a year when it started up. One of the consequences of this is that Debian distributes GNU/Linux.
The Chaser played some really nice footage that they shot of the whole exercise. You can see the relevant segment from their website.
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/video/default.htm?program=chaser&pres=20070912_2100
They also provide the entire episode, an mp4 format file is also available.
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/vodcast/chaser_2007_ep15.wmv
Or it could simply be the fact that the cops seized both of the cars and then returned them.
I'm sufficiently paranoid that if that happened I would probably take off a few internal panels of my car and snoop around. (Plus the bonus chance of scoring yourself a tracking device).
If I knew that I was being investigated for a crime I'd defiantly be looking around the car.
The stuff in the article about the car running poorly was just him baiting the police. Trimble make GPS devices designed to be used indoors; it wouldn't have mattered where in the car the antenna was placed it still would have gotten enough signal for a reasonable lock.
No tasks today that you couldn't do in 1997?
You look at a webpage today just like you did in 1997, but the webpages that you look at are very different beasts. There is no way that you could have comfortable run youtube with it's flash movies on that kind of hardware. These days you expect it as a matter of course. The typical webpage back then was a bunch of HTML tags with a table or two and a few images. A slashdot article now contains five stylesheets, 5 javascript files plus a smattering of embedded javascript. The comment box that scrolls along with you would have lagged a few seconds every time you scrolled in 1997. Not to mention that 32mb of ram wouldn't have held the 25 tabs I typically have open.
You now multitask without really thinking about it. I used to always think twice about switching between major applications because of the swapping that I knew it would involve, my tolerance these days is much less. We now have nice little things like automatic spell checking in firefox and vim.
If you really believe that you could do it all in 1997 hunt around for a Pentium 200 with 32mb of ram, install Windows 95 and refresh the pain.
How is this news?
The Ars article was written seven days ago and the WGA failure started several days before that.
I remember a documentary I saw once about land mines. They showed a small mine being dismantled by some poor sap whose job it was to go out and dismantle land mines. In it was a Motorola chip. It was probably some terribly generic part like a 555 timer or 4-input NAND gate or something; it's not like Motorola was in the business of making land mines.
Now, if Motorola saw this, do they have a right to be a little miffed? "Ah," say the slashdotters, "Motorola sold their 555-timer on the open market to any buyer, they have no right to be miffed when someone uses it in a device that blows the legs off little children!" Right?
I doubt it, Motorola is probably rather happy to have it's components used the world over. Marketing is off right now contacting their land mine clients advising them of a nice generic light sensitive diode that they manufacture which can be coupled with a small explosive device prevent people opening up the land mines stealing their IP.