The problem with X isn't latency - it's bandwidth. Even with up to 500ms or 750ms of latency between the X client and server, the applications are totally usable. Waiting for less than a second for something to happen after you click really isn't too bad. But bandwidth usage for the X protocol - the name escapes me now - is just horrible. I tried just running the CDE login app over a 33.6 modem once, and the results were disastrous - it loaded for ten minutes before I finally killed the beast and gave up.
X sucks in that regard, but I can kinda empathize with the designers. X was written at MIT, where the truly colossal Athena network connects pretty much everything. With 10mbps, and now ten times that, in bandwidth, it probably becomes pretty eas to trivialize the bandwidth requirments of Xwin. And I'll give you that - on a LAN connection, X Windows is about the coolest thing ever for someone who like me had previously only used MS Windows. However, on dialup access, some major protocol revisions need to occur for X to become a viable windowing system. And considering that X Win has been around for almost 20 years now, the chances of that happening are slim to none.
And who better than ford to take an inefficient and expensive product and figure out a way to mass produce it for cheap? For has a car that exists that runs on a fuel cell. It seats a family of five and will be released in a few years.
Yes, gdk was originally built on X, but it has since been ported to Win32 and BeOS, and work is underway porting it to Microwindows/Nano-X.
That doesn't say anything about its dependence (or lack thereof) on Xlib. The fact is that Xlib, and therefore X windows, still draws every primitive you see on the screen, whether you're running KDE, Gnome, or anything else. Gdk, GTK, and Gnome add successive levels of abstraction to form higher-level primitives, but basic commands like "draw a line" or "shade this box" all go back to Xlib. Gdk strings a whole bunch of these together to make drawing buttons & such easier, and GTK itself strings a lot of Gdk commands together to make columned lists, scrolled windows, and the like. But if you can somehow pull all that off without using Xlib, drop me a line and I'll send you a cookie. Because it's not gonna happen.
Porting gdk to other operating systems is a matter of changing from the Xlib API to whatever API Windows uses to do things like "draw a line" or "shade this box". GTK+ is "not" built on X only in the sense that it runs on better platforms, and in saying this you're not conveying the whole truth - X is your only option if you're running Unix.
Actually, fonts are not art works, which can be copyrighted (e.g. logos). But why reinvent the wheel? This has all been said before, so I'll paraphrase:
Typefaces are viewed by US law as a utilitarian device, much like a pencil or hammer, and do not meet current copyright guidelines.
There you have it. I suppose back when metallic typefaces were in widespread usage they could have seemed a lot more analgous to a hammer or pencil, but it's pretty obvious that that argument is irrelevant now.
Adobe did not technically win the suits that you mention on the basis that their fonts are copyrightable - they won it because the defendant infringed on their "font software". IANAL, but I think that this was just some sort of fancy legal doublespeak or maneuvering since software obviously is copyrightable. I do remember reading that the distinction was an important one, because the judge, by using the "font software" term, set no precident for fonts themselves being copyrightable.
... and Sun too. I'll never forget PC Magazine's orgasm over StarOffice 5.0, in which the word "speed" is not mentioned even once. What a fucking joke - I'm all for StarOffice, but it does not merit the rating they gave it.
I'm surprised Hatch didn't, in the interest of full disclosure, provide a little background to his diatribe...
You see, once upon a time, Orrin Hatch recorded a CD full of music. Not just music, but folk music. Not just folk music, but Christian folk music. And it was bad - reeeaal bad. Bad enough to make William Shatner sound like Luciano Pavarotti. Really. Don't believe me?
Now, legend has it that old "Orrie" got spurned completely on his ass when he tried to sell his 74-minute croonfest to the major record labels. So it's obvious why he wants to screw them over now - as an independent artist, he has no way of circumventing the system! Digital distribution allows him to share his... erm... unique brand of music with the world. Hooray!
Currently, politicians get into office by NOT playing the middle.
In fact, roughly 60% of the electorate describes themselves as "centrist", and accordingly that is where both Bush and Gore have been trying to position themselves for the last four months. You may be confusing the primaries and general election. In the primaries GOP candidates especially are usually forced to play to the more conservative elements of the party because they tend to vote with far higher numbers than the general public; this is especially true when you've got scenarious like Pat Robertson telling all 2 million of the Christian Coalition which candidate to choose and watching them pretty much do it. There are a lot of huge conservative interest groups out there who can be motivated to turn out in force in the primaries, and because voter turnout in general is far lower in the primaries, they wield a lot of influence. Thus Bush was forced to into a very conservative position in the primaries - taking a hard line on abortion, coming out in favor of guns (NRA is another huge and vocal right wing interest group), and in general adopting most of the traditional GOP platform. McCain refused to do this on principle (and what a great, glorious man he is for that =] ) and lost.
This has been the dilemma of most Republican presidents - how to appear conservative enough to get the nod in the primaries and then moderate enough to win the general election. Dole was unable to do this, and lost because he was seen as too conservative. The ironic thing is that McCain would probably present a huge problem for Gore if he was the GOP candidate, because he appeals to 2 key blocks: disenfranchised voters and the center. Combined, they make a majority of the electorate, a majority which he would poll and probably win in November. However, he wasn't conservative enough to get the primary nod.
Now we see both candidates moving to court the center by moderating their stances - Bush especially. Bush established himself as a hard-line conservative not four months ago to get the primary vote, but right now he is trying to get into office by DEFINITELY playing the middle. The middle is where the votes are, which is why you will see Bush (and Gore too) tactfully moderating their platforms to make them palatable to the center:
Bush suddenly pushing hard for low-income minority housing.
Bush speaking to Hispanic and black groups e.g. CORE - two groups that have long voted liberally.
Bush promising to a gay activist group to "end the arms race of anger"
Bush announcing refundable tax credits for low income families
Bush announcing a $7 billion plan to fund healthcare for families
Bush emphasizing his wonderful environmental record in Texas (a lie, by the way)
Some of these programs are borderline social welfare, and if that's not a push towards the left, I don't know what is. This has all happened within the last three to four months, by the way - they are positions that he would have never dreamed of taking earlier in the year. So I'd say that, yes, he is courting the middle, because he knows that he, like all politicians, has to. That's how elections are won, my friend.
Al Gore has done basically the same thing - he initially took a turn hard left early on after the primaries, lost 10-15 points for it. He is waxing conservative on certain key issues now for obvious reason. I'm going to cut this long-winded post short, but suffice it to say that both the presidential candidates, and pretty much every other politician in America, will be courting the middle in the coming weeks.
As an aside, I've seen you "petrified and naked", Signal 11, and you look like a pretty young guy:) Your apathy is quite typical in people of our generation. Don't be fooled into thinking that it's endemic of everyone, though, because it's not. A lot of people, most of them older, care a lot about these issues, and if you were to walk down the street and ask, most (over 60%) would find themselves pretty well split down the middle. And they vote, and care, and that's why pols are looking for them.
With that in mind, I hope now you see the merits of this report, because it's right in a lot of areas. Contending that special interest groups control the general election is preposterous and a gross exaggeration. We had about 150 million people turn out in 1996. The idea that SIGs control all of them, or even a large number, is just dumb - obviously wrong. Please stop painting this as a case for "the man" holding us down - it's not. There are some valid concerns in the report, specifically that online voting should not get too widespread without a much better method of authentication. Think about if online voting were to proliferate, to the point where we were electing presidents with it. In an age where impovershed Russia has the ability to implant security bugs inside the wall of the top-level of the State department, how hard do you think it would be to hack into a computer and throw a couple million votes in a different direction, and then cover your tracks? Not very, especially not for a government with unlimited money and computing resources and personnel to throw at that problem. I'm just making this up, but you've got to see the danger here. I was not in favor of online voting in Arizona, and I'm not in favor of it spreading. Not only does it present an obvious security risk, but I think it's unfair and a bit undemocratic to make it so easy for a certain sect of voters (affluent, white males, who compose most of the Internet) to participate in elections, while still excluding people who have always been underrepresented. Maybe when everyone has Internet access, then we'll talk.
Spec'ing software is merely meant to coagulate your thoughts into something codeable. If you are smart enough to write software, let alone an entire operating system, without doing so, then obviously your work will be good enough to make designing it formally a moot point.
Don't think that just because you learned it in school, it's correct.
I can already get close to seven hours of digital quality music on a single CD with the help of MPTrip portable CD player. And that's music that I want to hear - not stuff that's broadcasted at me. And those numbers will only grow, to the point where I can get literally hundreds of hours of the music I like to hear crammed on a DVD disc in MP[34] format and never have to worry about radio again. That stuff is just around the corner, literally. Sirius Radio bears many ominous similiarities to the last satellite-based debacle we had; they both seemed like a great idea when they were concieved 5-10 years ago, but technology has simply outpaced them as time was spent turning that conception into reality.
$1600?! That's way, way to much to pay. I can get a Netgear RT311 for a few hundred dollars that's the size of an obese Pop-Tart. I think building your own PC would be sort of overkill here.
Seriously! It's the closest thing to a casino I know of - no doors or easily accessible exits, no clocks or windows to tell time, open 24 hours a day to entice you.
"If you want full Unix functionality, go use a Unix machine. A PC-based version of Unix will prolly never match Unix itself, so what's the point?" I'm glad not everyone is willing to throw in the towel as easy as you.
Right. I don't think NASA is aimless at all. In fact, I think they have their sights set much, much higher than ever before: Mars. It may seem like Nasa is suffering from a lack of direction, but I think that is because we don't have a charismatic young president adamently supporting a manned Martian mission as Kennedy did for the moon. No one is really rallying the troops, but when we finally do reach Mars, it will be just huge; as corny as this sounds it will probably be the single most unifying event for mankind in recorded history, assuming there is no political stigma surrounding it. Mars will be the first and almost certainly only planet we will send man to for the next two to three hundred years. It will be a really big, big deal when it happens. They're not aimless, just patient.
Jesus Christ, amen to that. If women aren't flocking in droves to technical fields, perhaps it is because they don't want to. I'm consistently amazed at how often this simple point it just overlooked by some self-righteous feminazi with an axe to grind. These fools acts as if thirty years of conscious gender equalization did nothing to level the playing field. Well, guess what, it did. People can carp about the "glass ceiling" all they want, but the fact of the matter is that there are basically no barriers to female employment anymore in many fields. Hell, most companies strive to have female execs, just to curry goodwill in the eye of the public. This is just so especially true in computer fields, where the emphasis has always been on what you produce and not who you are, what you look like, or whether you have a penis. So this whole argument about a "tech fraternity" or woman being somehow excluded is just total bullshit. Almost all of my highly nerdly friends are guys. Do I know why? No. But it's not like I don't know a hundred girls who had the exact same education as we did, came from the exact same socioeconomic background as us, and simply chose to do other things with their time. Because I do. They went on to become doctors, lawyers, whatever. The thing to notice here is that they were never discouraged from choosing a tech field. They. Just. Didn't. No one really stops to consider they maybe men and women are just wired differently, despite the fact that they obviously are. I'm not saying that women are any less smart than men in tech fields, I'm just saying that something inside their heads makes them less interested in it. I think it's rather pointless to try, in vain, to change this.
Napster is not publicly traded and does not have stockholders to answer to. If they did, this saga would have ended a long, long time before they had multiple, concurrent lawsuits piling up.
In Microsoft terms, RIAA is not playing "embrace and extend." Apparently you do not understand the meaning of that phrase, which refers to Microsoft's repeated obfuscation of open standards into proprietary ones which work with only Microsoft products. How you got that out of the RIAA situation is beyond me. All the pot in Mexico couldn't help me find a link between the two.
Wireless TCP/IP is an oxymoron, considering that wireless would seem to pertain to an entirely different layer of the OSI model (e.g.: one) than the TCP/IP suite. I'm still struggling to make the connection between TCP/IP radios, "pirate" radio (which, by the way, was basically legalized at the beginning of this year by that same pesky, greedy FCC that you speak so highly of), and government censorship. Again, it ain't happening.
Again with your "anti-trust" rant we see that you have little to no factual knowledge of the subject matter about which you are writing. The Big 5 record labels that are RIAA have existed for half a century without government prodding - and that harkens back to the 50s and 60s when there were literally no indie labels to speak of and they owned every avenue to distribute and publicize music available. If anything, the climate has gotten more competitive over the years, not less. All history aside, I fail to see how cooperating with Napster, RIAA, Napster and RIAA, Napster, RIAA, CuteMX, iMesh, and Scour combined would net them any sort of anti-trust violation. Perhaps you could elaborate more.
I guess what really annoys me about this post is how it got moderated up to 4 (and probably 5) for basically taking a bunch of buzzwords - "embrace and extend", "wireless TCP/IP" - injecting a healthy dose of anti-government sentiment, capitalizing some random and stigmatized words like KILL or FORCED, mixing them up, and praying for the best in terms of currying mod points.
I think it's quite fascinating to watch big hardware and software companies moving into the consumer appliance market - Microsoft and the XBox, Dell and their MP3 stereo machine, and now the DotBox or whatever Intel's incantation is called. I'm just curious if they'll actually do it right, or if they are going to get burned.
It goes without saying that consumer electronics is a whole, entirely different enchilada than computing products. For one thing, they are really, really hard to build with quality. Anyone play with one of the original Diamond Rio PMP300's, or, more recently, the no-name MP3-ROM players out there? Cheap, flimsy - you felt like it would break if you used it the wrong way. Compare with a Discman from even ten years ago, and you'll get the idea. There are only a handful of consumer appliance makers out there (Panasonic, Sony, RCA, etc.) because the investment it takes to design these things idiot-proof and durable is just fscking huge. I heard an estimate in the tens of millions once just for R&D on a portable CD player, back in the day. Compare that oligopoly with computer makers, where literally anyone with an Ingram Micro account can suddenly be a manufacturer - it's a lot different.
Now, with that in mind, how successful will big PC companies be at moving into this market? That's a question I just don't know the answer to. Microsoft's XBox, especially, worries me because they are sticking a Nvidia graphics card in there. TNT2 and GeForces have great performance, but they aren't exactly known for their stability. How many people are going to want to buy an XBox that has heat issues or crashes after strenuous Quake sessions when they can get any one of a number of other consoles that has been well thought out by a small army of Sony or Nintendo engineers and playtested for thousands of man hours? Not many, if you ask me.
Dell also interests me - after all, the only reason they were able to carve out a (now admittedly huge) niche for themselves was because they totally revolutionized the way PCs are ordered and built (i.e. carrying no stock of supplies; ordering parts when the actual system is ordered). That is a pretty smart approach to building PCs; Michael Dell's $6 billion speaks for itself. But consumer electronics are almost by definition produced on a huge scale - not on a customer to customer basis. If Dell is trying to sell their "appliance" at such a low price ($200) I hope they either have a huge supply lined up or don't anticipate selling very many.
Caere (makers of OmniPage OCR sw) have OmniForm which was basically written for exactly what you are talking about. You are able to scan in forms with the software and then mark individual fields within the forms, thereby creating a form template. You can also idiot proof the forms by designating areas of the form that can only have certain values (e.g. drop-down boxes), etc. We have used this software in our office for months now and it's a godsend in terms of saving time. I highly reccomend. Also, the latest version has CGI support via Perl, supposedly - so you don't really need to use Windows except for the "server" computer.
True, but be honest here - probably more people are going to play Quake or its ilk than utilize the full set of OpenGL extensions available to them. For the average user, this says that BeOS has better 3D performance (way better) than two other very popular operating systems. That is big news, although I think testing X 3.3 instead of 4.0 obviously jilted the scores by a lot.
Just how helpless are you? Lean a piece of cardboard, or any other opaque material known to man, in front of the box and quit complaining. Jesus! Were you trying to curry some irate modpoints or what?
I just took out all the fans in my case/power supply and replaced them with their equivalent "queit" version from here. They have standard 80mm fans which are way quieter. They also offer a silent power supply, but it's expensive and I have a feeling it's just a normal PS with a quiet fan stuck in it. You can do that yourself - easily. Also worth mentioning is their Silent Drive enclosure - I don't have one, but it's the mechanical whine of the hard drive that really bothers most people. The white noise of the fan is actually quite relaxing. I can't sleep in a room that doesn't have a fan going... besides, the smartest and cheapest thing to do is to just spin down your hard drive at night. It's easier on the drive.
Carpet, BTW, is a no-no. To make a long story short, save yourself a lot of trouble and do not do that. Ever notice how carpet becomes electrostatically charged easily? Ever notice how dust is attracted to carpet?
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The problem with X isn't latency - it's bandwidth. Even with up to 500ms or 750ms of latency between the X client and server, the applications are totally usable. Waiting for less than a second for something to happen after you click really isn't too bad. But bandwidth usage for the X protocol - the name escapes me now - is just horrible. I tried just running the CDE login app over a 33.6 modem once, and the results were disastrous - it loaded for ten minutes before I finally killed the beast and gave up.
X sucks in that regard, but I can kinda empathize with the designers. X was written at MIT, where the truly colossal Athena network connects pretty much everything. With 10mbps, and now ten times that, in bandwidth, it probably becomes pretty eas to trivialize the bandwidth requirments of Xwin. And I'll give you that - on a LAN connection, X Windows is about the coolest thing ever for someone who like me had previously only used MS Windows. However, on dialup access, some major protocol revisions need to occur for X to become a viable windowing system. And considering that X Win has been around for almost 20 years now, the chances of that happening are slim to none.
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And who better than ford to take an inefficient and expensive product and figure out a way to mass produce it for cheap? For has a car that exists that runs on a fuel cell. It seats a family of five and will be released in a few years.
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Yes, gdk was originally built on X, but it has since been ported to Win32 and BeOS, and work is underway porting it to Microwindows/Nano-X.
That doesn't say anything about its dependence (or lack thereof) on Xlib. The fact is that Xlib, and therefore X windows, still draws every primitive you see on the screen, whether you're running KDE, Gnome, or anything else. Gdk, GTK, and Gnome add successive levels of abstraction to form higher-level primitives, but basic commands like "draw a line" or "shade this box" all go back to Xlib. Gdk strings a whole bunch of these together to make drawing buttons & such easier, and GTK itself strings a lot of Gdk commands together to make columned lists, scrolled windows, and the like. But if you can somehow pull all that off without using Xlib, drop me a line and I'll send you a cookie. Because it's not gonna happen.
Porting gdk to other operating systems is a matter of changing from the Xlib API to whatever API Windows uses to do things like "draw a line" or "shade this box". GTK+ is "not" built on X only in the sense that it runs on better platforms, and in saying this you're not conveying the whole truth - X is your only option if you're running Unix.
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Actually, fonts are not art works, which can be copyrighted (e.g. logos). But why reinvent the wheel? This has all been said before, so I'll paraphrase:
Typefaces are viewed by US law as a utilitarian device, much like a pencil or hammer, and do not meet current copyright guidelines.
There you have it. I suppose back when metallic typefaces were in widespread usage they could have seemed a lot more analgous to a hammer or pencil, but it's pretty obvious that that argument is irrelevant now.
Adobe did not technically win the suits that you mention on the basis that their fonts are copyrightable - they won it because the defendant infringed on their "font software". IANAL, but I think that this was just some sort of fancy legal doublespeak or maneuvering since software obviously is copyrightable. I do remember reading that the distinction was an important one, because the judge, by using the "font software" term, set no precident for fonts themselves being copyrightable.
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The best, most foolproof way I have found to find sites that are whoring their reviews is to just look for the ones that gave Daikatana a good review.
:)
Those I don't patronize anymore
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As cool as that sounds, it really makes no sense. Think about it.
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... and Sun too. I'll never forget PC Magazine's orgasm over StarOffice 5.0, in which the word "speed" is not mentioned even once. What a fucking joke - I'm all for StarOffice, but it does not merit the rating they gave it.
:)
Aah, what the fuck. It's free
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Form your own opinion! Watch it.
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I'm surprised Hatch didn't, in the interest of full disclosure, provide a little background to his diatribe...
... erm ... unique brand of music with the world. Hooray!
You see, once upon a time, Orrin Hatch recorded a CD full of music. Not just music, but folk music. Not just folk music, but Christian folk music. And it was bad - reeeaal bad. Bad enough to make William Shatner sound like Luciano Pavarotti. Really. Don't believe me?
Now, legend has it that old "Orrie" got spurned completely on his ass when he tried to sell his 74-minute croonfest to the major record labels. So it's obvious why he wants to screw them over now - as an independent artist, he has no way of circumventing the system! Digital distribution allows him to share his
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Currently, politicians get into office by NOT playing the middle.
In fact, roughly 60% of the electorate describes themselves as "centrist", and accordingly that is where both Bush and Gore have been trying to position themselves for the last four months. You may be confusing the primaries and general election. In the primaries GOP candidates especially are usually forced to play to the more conservative elements of the party because they tend to vote with far higher numbers than the general public; this is especially true when you've got scenarious like Pat Robertson telling all 2 million of the Christian Coalition which candidate to choose and watching them pretty much do it. There are a lot of huge conservative interest groups out there who can be motivated to turn out in force in the primaries, and because voter turnout in general is far lower in the primaries, they wield a lot of influence. Thus Bush was forced to into a very conservative position in the primaries - taking a hard line on abortion, coming out in favor of guns (NRA is another huge and vocal right wing interest group), and in general adopting most of the traditional GOP platform. McCain refused to do this on principle (and what a great, glorious man he is for that =] ) and lost.
This has been the dilemma of most Republican presidents - how to appear conservative enough to get the nod in the primaries and then moderate enough to win the general election. Dole was unable to do this, and lost because he was seen as too conservative. The ironic thing is that McCain would probably present a huge problem for Gore if he was the GOP candidate, because he appeals to 2 key blocks: disenfranchised voters and the center. Combined, they make a majority of the electorate, a majority which he would poll and probably win in November. However, he wasn't conservative enough to get the primary nod.
Now we see both candidates moving to court the center by moderating their stances - Bush especially. Bush established himself as a hard-line conservative not four months ago to get the primary vote, but right now he is trying to get into office by DEFINITELY playing the middle. The middle is where the votes are, which is why you will see Bush (and Gore too) tactfully moderating their platforms to make them palatable to the center:
Some of these programs are borderline social welfare, and if that's not a push towards the left, I don't know what is. This has all happened within the last three to four months, by the way - they are positions that he would have never dreamed of taking earlier in the year. So I'd say that, yes, he is courting the middle, because he knows that he, like all politicians, has to. That's how elections are won, my friend.
Al Gore has done basically the same thing - he initially took a turn hard left early on after the primaries, lost 10-15 points for it. He is waxing conservative on certain key issues now for obvious reason. I'm going to cut this long-winded post short, but suffice it to say that both the presidential candidates, and pretty much every other politician in America, will be courting the middle in the coming weeks.
As an aside, I've seen you "petrified and naked", Signal 11, and you look like a pretty young guy
With that in mind, I hope now you see the merits of this report, because it's right in a lot of areas. Contending that special interest groups control the general election is preposterous and a gross exaggeration. We had about 150 million people turn out in 1996. The idea that SIGs control all of them, or even a large number, is just dumb - obviously wrong. Please stop painting this as a case for "the man" holding us down - it's not. There are some valid concerns in the report, specifically that online voting should not get too widespread without a much better method of authentication. Think about if online voting were to proliferate, to the point where we were electing presidents with it. In an age where impovershed Russia has the ability to implant security bugs inside the wall of the top-level of the State department, how hard do you think it would be to hack into a computer and throw a couple million votes in a different direction, and then cover your tracks? Not very, especially not for a government with unlimited money and computing resources and personnel to throw at that problem. I'm just making this up, but you've got to see the danger here. I was not in favor of online voting in Arizona, and I'm not in favor of it spreading. Not only does it present an obvious security risk, but I think it's unfair and a bit undemocratic to make it so easy for a certain sect of voters (affluent, white males, who compose most of the Internet) to participate in elections, while still excluding people who have always been underrepresented. Maybe when everyone has Internet access, then we'll talk.
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Spec'ing software is merely meant to coagulate your thoughts into something codeable. If you are smart enough to write software, let alone an entire operating system, without doing so, then obviously your work will be good enough to make designing it formally a moot point.
Don't think that just because you learned it in school, it's correct.
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I can already get close to seven hours of digital quality music on a single CD with the help of MPTrip portable CD player. And that's music that I want to hear - not stuff that's broadcasted at me. And those numbers will only grow, to the point where I can get literally hundreds of hours of the music I like to hear crammed on a DVD disc in MP[34] format and never have to worry about radio again. That stuff is just around the corner, literally. Sirius Radio bears many ominous similiarities to the last satellite-based debacle we had; they both seemed like a great idea when they were concieved 5-10 years ago, but technology has simply outpaced them as time was spent turning that conception into reality.
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$1600?! That's way, way to much to pay. I can get a Netgear RT311 for a few hundred dollars that's the size of an obese Pop-Tart. I think building your own PC would be sort of overkill here.
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Seriously! It's the closest thing to a casino I know of - no doors or easily accessible exits, no clocks or windows to tell time, open 24 hours a day to entice you.
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"If you want full Unix functionality, go use a Unix machine. A PC-based version of Unix will prolly never match Unix itself, so what's the point?" I'm glad not everyone is willing to throw in the towel as easy as you.
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Right. I don't think NASA is aimless at all. In fact, I think they have their sights set much, much higher than ever before: Mars. It may seem like Nasa is suffering from a lack of direction, but I think that is because we don't have a charismatic young president adamently supporting a manned Martian mission as Kennedy did for the moon. No one is really rallying the troops, but when we finally do reach Mars, it will be just huge; as corny as this sounds it will probably be the single most unifying event for mankind in recorded history, assuming there is no political stigma surrounding it. Mars will be the first and almost certainly only planet we will send man to for the next two to three hundred years. It will be a really big, big deal when it happens. They're not aimless, just patient.
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Jesus Christ, amen to that. If women aren't flocking in droves to technical fields, perhaps it is because they don't want to. I'm consistently amazed at how often this simple point it just overlooked by some self-righteous feminazi with an axe to grind. These fools acts as if thirty years of conscious gender equalization did nothing to level the playing field. Well, guess what, it did. People can carp about the "glass ceiling" all they want, but the fact of the matter is that there are basically no barriers to female employment anymore in many fields. Hell, most companies strive to have female execs, just to curry goodwill in the eye of the public. This is just so especially true in computer fields, where the emphasis has always been on what you produce and not who you are, what you look like, or whether you have a penis. So this whole argument about a "tech fraternity" or woman being somehow excluded is just total bullshit. Almost all of my highly nerdly friends are guys. Do I know why? No. But it's not like I don't know a hundred girls who had the exact same education as we did, came from the exact same socioeconomic background as us, and simply chose to do other things with their time. Because I do. They went on to become doctors, lawyers, whatever. The thing to notice here is that they were never discouraged from choosing a tech field. They. Just. Didn't. No one really stops to consider they maybe men and women are just wired differently, despite the fact that they obviously are. I'm not saying that women are any less smart than men in tech fields, I'm just saying that something inside their heads makes them less interested in it. I think it's rather pointless to try, in vain, to change this.
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The exposure is a little off, but I like the quality of the pictures in general. Anyone know what kind of (digital, I'm assuming) camera they used?
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Time to check some facts.
Napster is not publicly traded and does not have stockholders to answer to. If they did, this saga would have ended a long, long time before they had multiple, concurrent lawsuits piling up.
In Microsoft terms, RIAA is not playing "embrace and extend." Apparently you do not understand the meaning of that phrase, which refers to Microsoft's repeated obfuscation of open standards into proprietary ones which work with only Microsoft products. How you got that out of the RIAA situation is beyond me. All the pot in Mexico couldn't help me find a link between the two.
Wireless TCP/IP is an oxymoron, considering that wireless would seem to pertain to an entirely different layer of the OSI model (e.g.: one) than the TCP/IP suite. I'm still struggling to make the connection between TCP/IP radios, "pirate" radio (which, by the way, was basically legalized at the beginning of this year by that same pesky, greedy FCC that you speak so highly of), and government censorship. Again, it ain't happening.
Again with your "anti-trust" rant we see that you have little to no factual knowledge of the subject matter about which you are writing. The Big 5 record labels that are RIAA have existed for half a century without government prodding - and that harkens back to the 50s and 60s when there were literally no indie labels to speak of and they owned every avenue to distribute and publicize music available. If anything, the climate has gotten more competitive over the years, not less. All history aside, I fail to see how cooperating with Napster, RIAA, Napster and RIAA, Napster, RIAA, CuteMX, iMesh, and Scour combined would net them any sort of anti-trust violation. Perhaps you could elaborate more.
I guess what really annoys me about this post is how it got moderated up to 4 (and probably 5) for basically taking a bunch of buzzwords - "embrace and extend", "wireless TCP/IP" - injecting a healthy dose of anti-government sentiment, capitalizing some random and stigmatized words like KILL or FORCED, mixing them up, and praying for the best in terms of currying mod points.
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I think it's quite fascinating to watch big hardware and software companies moving into the consumer appliance market - Microsoft and the XBox, Dell and their MP3 stereo machine, and now the DotBox or whatever Intel's incantation is called. I'm just curious if they'll actually do it right, or if they are going to get burned.
It goes without saying that consumer electronics is a whole, entirely different enchilada than computing products. For one thing, they are really, really hard to build with quality. Anyone play with one of the original Diamond Rio PMP300's, or, more recently, the no-name MP3-ROM players out there? Cheap, flimsy - you felt like it would break if you used it the wrong way. Compare with a Discman from even ten years ago, and you'll get the idea. There are only a handful of consumer appliance makers out there (Panasonic, Sony, RCA, etc.) because the investment it takes to design these things idiot-proof and durable is just fscking huge. I heard an estimate in the tens of millions once just for R&D on a portable CD player, back in the day. Compare that oligopoly with computer makers, where literally anyone with an Ingram Micro account can suddenly be a manufacturer - it's a lot different.
Now, with that in mind, how successful will big PC companies be at moving into this market? That's a question I just don't know the answer to. Microsoft's XBox, especially, worries me because they are sticking a Nvidia graphics card in there. TNT2 and GeForces have great performance, but they aren't exactly known for their stability. How many people are going to want to buy an XBox that has heat issues or crashes after strenuous Quake sessions when they can get any one of a number of other consoles that has been well thought out by a small army of Sony or Nintendo engineers and playtested for thousands of man hours? Not many, if you ask me.
Dell also interests me - after all, the only reason they were able to carve out a (now admittedly huge) niche for themselves was because they totally revolutionized the way PCs are ordered and built (i.e. carrying no stock of supplies; ordering parts when the actual system is ordered). That is a pretty smart approach to building PCs; Michael Dell's $6 billion speaks for itself. But consumer electronics are almost by definition produced on a huge scale - not on a customer to customer basis. If Dell is trying to sell their "appliance" at such a low price ($200) I hope they either have a huge supply lined up or don't anticipate selling very many.
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Caere (makers of OmniPage OCR sw) have OmniForm which was basically written for exactly what you are talking about. You are able to scan in forms with the software and then mark individual fields within the forms, thereby creating a form template. You can also idiot proof the forms by designating areas of the form that can only have certain values (e.g. drop-down boxes), etc. We have used this software in our office for months now and it's a godsend in terms of saving time. I highly reccomend. Also, the latest version has CGI support via Perl, supposedly - so you don't really need to use Windows except for the "server" computer.
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True, but be honest here - probably more people are going to play Quake or its ilk than utilize the full set of OpenGL extensions available to them. For the average user, this says that BeOS has better 3D performance (way better) than two other very popular operating systems. That is big news, although I think testing X 3.3 instead of 4.0 obviously jilted the scores by a lot.
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Just how helpless are you? Lean a piece of cardboard, or any other opaque material known to man, in front of the box and quit complaining. Jesus! Were you trying to curry some irate modpoints or what?
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I just took out all the fans in my case/power supply and replaced them with their equivalent "queit" version from here. They have standard 80mm fans which are way quieter. They also offer a silent power supply, but it's expensive and I have a feeling it's just a normal PS with a quiet fan stuck in it. You can do that yourself - easily. Also worth mentioning is their Silent Drive enclosure - I don't have one, but it's the mechanical whine of the hard drive that really bothers most people. The white noise of the fan is actually quite relaxing. I can't sleep in a room that doesn't have a fan going... besides, the smartest and cheapest thing to do is to just spin down your hard drive at night. It's easier on the drive.
:)
Carpet, BTW, is a no-no. To make a long story short, save yourself a lot of trouble and do not do that. Ever notice how carpet becomes electrostatically charged easily? Ever notice how dust is attracted to carpet?
Riiight... now you get it
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3. The Word 2000 additions have never been documented in public.
That's because there aren't any "additions." Word 2000 is 100% backward-compatible with the Word 97 format.
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