and of course ESA is planning to test equipment on the moon for nationalistic reasons... becuase Europe is a nation?
Which world have you been living in for the last few years? Ever hear of the European Union? Did you know that they're working toward electing a President of the European Union? The Euro? Have you heard any of the complaints that it is eroding national sovereignty? Europe now looks a lot more like the way the former British colonies used to look like before the Constitutional Congress drafted our constitution. Hell, most European nations have finally shucked foreign sovereignty after the end of the Cold War. The US' allies (former and current) are getting some balls with dealing with our administration, and Eastern Europe is finally getting the gumption to break with their former Russian masters. Sounds like a revolution to me. If you think the USA is any more unified just because there's a federal system bestriding the states, you should do some actual research before you make yourself look like an idiot. The United States are only barely united. Look at our political division in our House of Representatives and our Senate. Yes, the Republicans "control" both, but by dangerously bare margins. There are DEEP political divisions within the US, both across parties and across state lines. Common political rhetoric within the US compares unfriendly state governments to this or that unfriendly foreign dictatorship. Hell, in certain regions, the American people have a lower opinion of Californians than Europeans, which is hard to do these days. And more than a few people who wouldn't mind if their state ceceded. The vocal militant minority are a symptom of the larger body of people who might not think it's such a bad idea, save a lot of the dire consequenses that would occur. If you think there aren't bitter fights between state governments over basic issues, you're not looking. It's certainly under the radar with the so-called War on Terrorism and Bush's war on Iraq outshining almost everything in US public life, but "states rights" as we call it here, is a real deep down issue that has NOT been resolved. It's even intruding into the War on Terrorism. Several states have recently refused to implement various new regulations handed down from the Bush administration, and have had legislation pass through at least one state legislatures (New Mexico, I believe) asking people to not cooperate with the FBI trying to use the new tools it was given in the recently passed Patriot Act, and the main argument for not having to do it is states rights. The only thing that hold the United States together at all is our constitution. Once that piece of paper gets rejected/thrown away, the gods only know what the cartographers might have to deal with.
So yeah, Europe is a nation...at least in as much as it counts for the political intent in their space exploration.
but what can we do for purely scientific reasons? In my mind a far more interesting question.
If you truly believe that the ESA's surge of space exploration has no goal other than pure scientific discovery, you're seriously beyond naive. I have lots of coffee and black tea here, you're welcome to as many cups as you like. You've been asleep too long, need to get that blood pumping.
Space exploration like this fosters unity in a people, which is something those running the ESA are very much interested in promoting. Once they do it, they're going to present it to the people of Europe and say "We did this. We should be proud of this, because we are now leaders of pushing the human race into space." As an American, I'd caution you from personal experience not to underestimate the effect that can have on people. I don't know if the people who control the ESA are an arm of the EU government, but they certainly share the same interest in fostering unity across the borders of the EU states. It keeps the ESA running (because the individual states within it certainly couldn't do this all on their own) and it gives a sense of community to the larger EU. At least that's the idea. Whether it works out in practice that way is anyone's guess, but you can bet your ass (or "arse" for the non-American English speakers among us) that's what they're trying to do.
The only pure scientific impulses are the simple questions, how, what, where, when, and why. Anything beyond that is biased. Your decision on whether the bias is good, bad, honorable, or dishonorable.
Which indie store would that be? All the indie stores around me charge more for their used discs than Best Buy does for the same thing new. They stay alive because their customers believe that buying their music there means they're morally superior/cooler than the slobs getting their stuff cheaper at Best Buy.
Me? I've bought 3 CDs in the last year, two of them on sale at a local pseudo-indy music store. I don't download ANYTHING from Kazaa. I buy digital versions of audiobooks at audible.com for my iPod. This service might actually encourage me to listen to music, as it lowers the barrier of entry to "trying out" an artist. I can easily drop a buck on this or that artist that a friend tells me is great. If I like it, I can fill out the rest of the album by just buying the rest of the songs individually, without having to go buy the whole album. Sounds like a win to me.
Let me just say first off that I think that is a great idea for a solution to the dillema facing free e-mail mailing lists. The main problem with it, is that a solution would need to be developed quickly (as in, now, while people are discussing it) so there is something that people can move to before the proverbial hammer came down. Also, would this new system respond via e-mail, or a corresponding upload system. My preference would be the latter. An awful lot of people use mailman and its ilk, and while I think it's a great idea, the logistical hurdles are large and varied, the potential consequences are far greater than the Linux Kernel Mailing List goes away, and they need to be addressed.
Also, this wouldn't save any resources...everyone would have to go download this e-mail from the remote server, possibly slashdotting the poor thing to death on lists with a large readership. This would merely reverse the burden proportion form what it is today...where the list holder would bear the brunt of the bandwidth charges, as opposed to being able to send one e-mail that gets forked to everyone on the list. And only have to deal with responses, not everyone who reads the list downloading every message. Perhaps some kind of free-net style distributed messaging server?
Now, an ISP can intercept ALL DATA going across port 25, and examine the envelope. If there is more than a few recipients ("few" determined by the ISP's AUP), the ISP can generate a bounce ("Too many recipients") and drop the mail, or even save the mail, and in the bounce, give a URL that points the user to a "Click Through" agreement to pay the surcharge for sending email to multiple users.
For Spammers that try to circumvent this by sending one message per recipient, the ISP, which now has the equivalent of a "taxi meter" on port 25, can detect this as well, simply by aggregating the number of emails that a single address is sending out (simple database application).
Apologies on the long snip...
This will not work. First of all, this can't stop a spammer that sets up his own "ISP" with it's own mail server that has an AUP of however many messages he wants to send. A potential spammer can always go up the chain to find access at the point where SMTP is not clamped down upon, and plug himself in there. It would be a logistical nightmare of Biblical proportions for every router on the planet to cross-check the credentials on every SMTP packed imaginable, which is what would be necessary in order for your system to truly be spammer-proof, and avoid the "cure is worse than the disease" solution of blacklisting.
Secondly, even if you do somehow clamp down on every bit of SMTP traffic on the planet, if you leave any kind of number of free e-mails possible, the spammers WILL exploit it. They'll sign up as many free e-mail accounts as possible, all hard limited to a certain number of emails/day or recipeients/e-mail, and in no time flat one of them will find a way to script the bejeezus out of them and you'll have made the problem even worse because almost every e-mail source on the planet will have to be blacklisted to avoid the new wave of spam.
it's a laudable idea to try to preserve some free e-mails for the little guy without big pockets, but if you give an inch, the spammers will turn it into a yard. If you're going to make it cost, the only way it will work is to make it cost everyone. Then there's nowhere for them to run.
You pay (if you live in the USA) 37 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country (maybe continental...I don't know anyone in Alaska or Hawaii, so I don't know offhand if it costs more). That letter takes days to get there, if it doesn't get lost. Amazingly, it rarely does, but it certainly has happened to me a few times.
If I have to spend even 5 cents on an e-mail message to my grandmother, or a friend on the West Coast, that gets there almost instantly, and with a far greater degree of certainty, that's a bargain. Hell, that 5 cents could theoretically get my e-mail to my friend in Bali at the speed of light and with delivery assurance far beyond the USPS ability. That's a bargain and a half. E-mail isn't the only method of Internet communication anymore.
Instant messaging of many and various ilks is quickly taking over, and e-mail being relegated to the spam, and various official or in absentia messaging needs (I can't talk about it now, but send me that list of stuff, etc) and even then, IM is making strides. I can talk to my girlfriend, grandmother, or other friends easily, mostly free from spam, through AIM or other IM applications as long as I'm responsible about giving out my IM nick. (Like people should be responsible about giving out their e-mail addresses).
As I said, I don't necessarily advocate it, but unless you make grandma pay to send e-mail, making Joe Bulk Mailer pay for it isn't going to work, because Joe Bulk Mailer can easily make himself look like grandma.
Limiting the "sender pays" model to only bulk e-mail will not work, plain and simple. The spammers will find a way to automate a way to utilize multiple individual free e-mail accounts to get their bulk mail out past any ISP installed trigger. Also, mailing lists would be affected by this as well, as they can easily have thousands of recipients, and they'd be flagged as bulk mail. I imagine this would put the kaibosh on all free internet mailing lists, because if you make an exception for them, spammers will start "subscribing" people to their "free informational mailing list" that they'll claim they asked for, like they already do.
Unless everyone must pay for every e-mail sent, the letter of the law will be exploited to the spammers continued benefit. I don't necessarily advocate moving to a pay system, but if you're going to make anyone pay, you damned well better make everyone pay.
Why don't you have some kind of terminal server hooked up to provide the necessary out-of-band access so the lack of truster personnel on site isn't an issue? A modem? Secondary IP connectivity?
At least have a plan in place to isolate the untrusted router from the network should things go haywire.
I mean, I'm no router god, but every router god I ever dealt with beat it into my head that you always have out of band access to your remote equipment.
...give them to me, I'll put them to good use. I've got an old iMac that I run Linux on and play with, and I'm looking for more so I can play around and learn apache and other such things.
BBEdit has perl syntax as well, but unless the file browser/network integration/CVS integration is something you really could use, then it's probably not worth the full $180 for BBEdit full version, and unless you a lot of looking at text files, Text Wrangler may not be worth it for you either. Look around for the latest version of BBEdit Lite and take a look. If you like it, Text Wrangler may be something to look at then.
I don't use a quarter of all the features BBEdit has to offer, but I just think the Bare Bones guys rule, and I'd frame my BBEdit t-shirt if I got my hands on another one to wear. But I'm kinda crazy that way. Money well spent.
There is something hard to explain about BBEdit. It just seems to make text manipulation...fun. It's got that je ne sais qua. Possessing probably the best catch phrase in software, "It Doesn't Suck," it really doesn't. The tools it gives you are an HTML writer's dream. Macromedia, way back at the first release of Dreamweaver for the Mac, originally just gave you a full BBEdit license in with the deal, and BBEdit integration is still in there today. It looks nice. Everything is well laid out. Feature-for-feature, vi and emacs almost certainly would pound it to the dirt, but the GUI versions of both of those editors are ugly and act like the kludges of terminal mode applications that they are. I like vi in terminal mode, but in a window manager, resizing a terminal and getting the font to a different size just for text editing is an unecessary hassle. BBEdit fits into the MacOS GUI like it was born there, even in Aqua. It's completely scriptable with AppleScript, to the point of providing the AppleScript menu even if you don't enable it in general. I bought a full version of BBEdit 6.5 (first version with native OSX support) when I got my iBook after a long absence from the Mac, and I use it for everything possible. I don't use Office X, or AppleWorks, or Text Edit (which does RTF, not text) for my word processing. Just BBEdit. I try to find ways to use it, just because I enjoy using it. I even bought Mailsmith so I could have a BBEdit interface to my e-mail, but I had to stop using it because aside from the editing functions, it's just not there yet as far as the networking/speed is concerned (but that's another discussion). I haven't thought
As someone who started out on the Mac, BBEdit was one of the most amazing utilities I had ever seen back in '97 when I first looked at BBEdit Lite. It was fast. You didn't have to go through huge text files by hand deleting billions of windows or unix line breaks, because BBEdit could figure it out. (No scripting this operation didn't always work. I tried, oh gods, how I tried...the tools I had available didn't cut the mustard) It looked nice, as opposed to the horrendous TeachText and SimpleText. You could open almost any file and BBEdit would just open it, and you could mess around (whether you should or not). For some of us old Mac guys, I admit, we can tend to get very zealous about BBEdit, because of all that. Hell, when I dropped the Mac at home because I decided I wanted to play games, the one thing I missed more than anything else from the Mac was my BBEdit Lite.
If the concept of a text editor GUI galls or amuses you, BBEdit isn't for you. Go use vi or emacs and be happy. But if you don't find the concept silly, or you've used other GUI text editors, you owe it to yourself to at least take a look at BBEdit.
Because the book was only mediocre. The second two followed Arthur C. Clarke's general method of piling pointless philosophizing on top of boring exposition, killing off everything that made the originals any good. I can't even go near 2001 after reading the idiotic tripe that was 3001. The last two Rama books (especially the last one) were truly buffalo chips.
Unless they do a completely bangup job and completely ignore the book, I will be staying FAR away from this one. Oh, and Kubrik's dead. No one else on this planet could do 2001 as well as he did. Get over it.
EA has been trying to strongarm the used market for a loooooong time. It used to be that if a store wanted to sell the "gold box" EA games (the old ones with an EA Classics or something like that logo....old games for $20 and under) then they were prohibited from taking any used EA games. Don't know if the practice persists, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I play and AWFUL lot of games. Too many games, probably, but I find myself booting into Linux just to play Frozen Bubble. Of all the small puzzle-type games I've ever played, Frozen Bubble is just the best. The only problem with it is that 50 levels just isn't enough for me. Great audio. Polished graphics better than any other free X11 game by leaps and bounds. No, it's not a gaming powerhouse, and it won't take the world by storm, but it's still damn good.
Of course it's inflammatory. How isn't an ultimatum from Opera Software inflammatory? Just sounds like Apple responding in kind to me. The Apple response wasn't in the story earlier. It's less inflammatory than, "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA," or "Opera? Opera who?" which I imagine gives the gist of the responses by the Apple reps when they heard about this.
I don't personally play it, but those of my friends who do say that a fair percentage of the servers are German, with other European scattered in there.
I use mplayer for all my computer video needs as well. Even on my Macs (save the ones it's too much of a hog for, or for regular Quicktime, which I don't have much call for) I use the version of mplayer that has been compiled and given a simple GUI for MacOS 10.2.
However, the mplayer development team are a bunch of pig-headed idiots. If there was something else that played the stuff I needed to play, I would jump right to it. Unfortunately, if you're able to figure out exactly what you need, and are actually able to get it working (try even COMPILING mplayer on a stock RedHat 7.x install without it complaining to high heaven about the gcc version...I don't know about you, but I don't trust myself to change the version of gcc on my system without screwing every possible dependency up) it's the most fully functional media file player I've found. I've never found anything that I can't play with my compiled version of mplayer. It doesn't change the fact that they INTENTIONALLY make it a pain in the ass to do almost anything. They've got a serious attitude, and while it's their right, I don't feel any sympathy for them being called to task for their blatant user-unfriendliness.
I don't care about skinning. I've never actually had enough patience to get the GUI working for it, so I don't know how crappy it is or isn't. Xine's GUI is a completely unwieldy piece of crap. I haven't bothered to look elsewhere, 'cause I finally learned how to make mplayer do what I needed it to do, but DAMN did they go out of their way to make it difficult.
I expect that this "console" is just a PC in a small box that downloads already released, prepackaged game software in some proprietary (and encrypted) format.
This is, of course, if this whole thing isn't just a giant scam.
In Massachussetts, we've had 11-digit dialing required for at least a year. I'm suprised that New York is just getting to this point. There's a whole lot more phones in NYC than here.
Slashdot Mirror
and of course ESA is planning to test equipment on the moon for nationalistic reasons...
becuase Europe is a nation?
Which world have you been living in for the last few years? Ever hear of the European Union? Did you know that they're working toward electing a President of the European Union? The Euro? Have you heard any of the complaints that it is eroding national sovereignty? Europe now looks a lot more like the way the former British colonies used to look like before the Constitutional Congress drafted our constitution. Hell, most European nations have finally shucked foreign sovereignty after the end of the Cold War. The US' allies (former and current) are getting some balls with dealing with our administration, and Eastern Europe is finally getting the gumption to break with their former Russian masters. Sounds like a revolution to me. If you think the USA is any more unified just because there's a federal system bestriding the states, you should do some actual research before you make yourself look like an idiot. The United States are only barely united. Look at our political division in our House of Representatives and our Senate. Yes, the Republicans "control" both, but by dangerously bare margins. There are DEEP political divisions within the US, both across parties and across state lines. Common political rhetoric within the US compares unfriendly state governments to this or that unfriendly foreign dictatorship. Hell, in certain regions, the American people have a lower opinion of Californians than Europeans, which is hard to do these days. And more than a few people who wouldn't mind if their state ceceded. The vocal militant minority are a symptom of the larger body of people who might not think it's such a bad idea, save a lot of the dire consequenses that would occur. If you think there aren't bitter fights between state governments over basic issues, you're not looking. It's certainly under the radar with the so-called War on Terrorism and Bush's war on Iraq outshining almost everything in US public life, but "states rights" as we call it here, is a real deep down issue that has NOT been resolved. It's even intruding into the War on Terrorism. Several states have recently refused to implement various new regulations handed down from the Bush administration, and have had legislation pass through at least one state legislatures (New Mexico, I believe) asking people to not cooperate with the FBI trying to use the new tools it was given in the recently passed Patriot Act, and the main argument for not having to do it is states rights. The only thing that hold the United States together at all is our constitution. Once that piece of paper gets rejected/thrown away, the gods only know what the cartographers might have to deal with.
So yeah, Europe is a nation...at least in as much as it counts for the political intent in their space exploration.
but what can we do for purely scientific reasons?
In my mind a far more interesting question.
If you truly believe that the ESA's surge of space exploration has no goal other than pure scientific discovery, you're seriously beyond naive. I have lots of coffee and black tea here, you're welcome to as many cups as you like. You've been asleep too long, need to get that blood pumping.
Space exploration like this fosters unity in a people, which is something those running the ESA are very much interested in promoting. Once they do it, they're going to present it to the people of Europe and say "We did this. We should be proud of this, because we are now leaders of pushing the human race into space." As an American, I'd caution you from personal experience not to underestimate the effect that can have on people. I don't know if the people who control the ESA are an arm of the EU government, but they certainly share the same interest in fostering unity across the borders of the EU states. It keeps the ESA running (because the individual states within it certainly couldn't do this all on their own) and it gives a sense of community to the larger EU. At least that's the idea. Whether it works out in practice that way is anyone's guess, but you can bet your ass (or "arse" for the non-American English speakers among us) that's what they're trying to do.
The only pure scientific impulses are the simple questions, how, what, where, when, and why. Anything beyond that is biased. Your decision on whether the bias is good, bad, honorable, or dishonorable.
Which indie store would that be? All the indie stores around me charge more for their used discs than Best Buy does for the same thing new. They stay alive because their customers believe that buying their music there means they're morally superior/cooler than the slobs getting their stuff cheaper at Best Buy.
Me? I've bought 3 CDs in the last year, two of them on sale at a local pseudo-indy music store. I don't download ANYTHING from Kazaa. I buy digital versions of audiobooks at audible.com for my iPod. This service might actually encourage me to listen to music, as it lowers the barrier of entry to "trying out" an artist. I can easily drop a buck on this or that artist that a friend tells me is great. If I like it, I can fill out the rest of the album by just buying the rest of the songs individually, without having to go buy the whole album. Sounds like a win to me.
Let me just say first off that I think that is a great idea for a solution to the dillema facing free e-mail mailing lists. The main problem with it, is that a solution would need to be developed quickly (as in, now, while people are discussing it) so there is something that people can move to before the proverbial hammer came down. Also, would this new system respond via e-mail, or a corresponding upload system. My preference would be the latter. An awful lot of people use mailman and its ilk, and while I think it's a great idea, the logistical hurdles are large and varied, the potential consequences are far greater than the Linux Kernel Mailing List goes away, and they need to be addressed.
Also, this wouldn't save any resources...everyone would have to go download this e-mail from the remote server, possibly slashdotting the poor thing to death on lists with a large readership. This would merely reverse the burden proportion form what it is today...where the list holder would bear the brunt of the bandwidth charges, as opposed to being able to send one e-mail that gets forked to everyone on the list. And only have to deal with responses, not everyone who reads the list downloading every message. Perhaps some kind of free-net style distributed messaging server?
Now, an ISP can intercept ALL DATA going across port 25, and examine the envelope. If there is more than a few recipients ("few" determined by the ISP's AUP), the ISP can generate a bounce ("Too many recipients") and drop the mail, or even save the mail, and in the bounce, give a URL that points the user to a "Click Through" agreement to pay the surcharge for sending email to multiple users.
For Spammers that try to circumvent this by sending one message per recipient, the ISP, which now has the equivalent of a "taxi meter" on port 25, can detect this as well, simply by aggregating the number of emails that a single address is sending out (simple database application).
Apologies on the long snip...
This will not work. First of all, this can't stop a spammer that sets up his own "ISP" with it's own mail server that has an AUP of however many messages he wants to send. A potential spammer can always go up the chain to find access at the point where SMTP is not clamped down upon, and plug himself in there. It would be a logistical nightmare of Biblical proportions for every router on the planet to cross-check the credentials on every SMTP packed imaginable, which is what would be necessary in order for your system to truly be spammer-proof, and avoid the "cure is worse than the disease" solution of blacklisting.
Secondly, even if you do somehow clamp down on every bit of SMTP traffic on the planet, if you leave any kind of number of free e-mails possible, the spammers WILL exploit it. They'll sign up as many free e-mail accounts as possible, all hard limited to a certain number of emails/day or recipeients/e-mail, and in no time flat one of them will find a way to script the bejeezus out of them and you'll have made the problem even worse because almost every e-mail source on the planet will have to be blacklisted to avoid the new wave of spam.
it's a laudable idea to try to preserve some free e-mails for the little guy without big pockets, but if you give an inch, the spammers will turn it into a yard. If you're going to make it cost, the only way it will work is to make it cost everyone. Then there's nowhere for them to run.
You pay (if you live in the USA) 37 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country (maybe continental...I don't know anyone in Alaska or Hawaii, so I don't know offhand if it costs more). That letter takes days to get there, if it doesn't get lost. Amazingly, it rarely does, but it certainly has happened to me a few times.
If I have to spend even 5 cents on an e-mail message to my grandmother, or a friend on the West Coast, that gets there almost instantly, and with a far greater degree of certainty, that's a bargain. Hell, that 5 cents could theoretically get my e-mail to my friend in Bali at the speed of light and with delivery assurance far beyond the USPS ability. That's a bargain and a half. E-mail isn't the only method of Internet communication anymore.
Instant messaging of many and various ilks is quickly taking over, and e-mail being relegated to the spam, and various official or in absentia messaging needs (I can't talk about it now, but send me that list of stuff, etc) and even then, IM is making strides. I can talk to my girlfriend, grandmother, or other friends easily, mostly free from spam, through AIM or other IM applications as long as I'm responsible about giving out my IM nick. (Like people should be responsible about giving out their e-mail addresses).
As I said, I don't necessarily advocate it, but unless you make grandma pay to send e-mail, making Joe Bulk Mailer pay for it isn't going to work, because Joe Bulk Mailer can easily make himself look like grandma.
Limiting the "sender pays" model to only bulk e-mail will not work, plain and simple. The spammers will find a way to automate a way to utilize multiple individual free e-mail accounts to get their bulk mail out past any ISP installed trigger. Also, mailing lists would be affected by this as well, as they can easily have thousands of recipients, and they'd be flagged as bulk mail. I imagine this would put the kaibosh on all free internet mailing lists, because if you make an exception for them, spammers will start "subscribing" people to their "free informational mailing list" that they'll claim they asked for, like they already do.
Unless everyone must pay for every e-mail sent, the letter of the law will be exploited to the spammers continued benefit. I don't necessarily advocate moving to a pay system, but if you're going to make anyone pay, you damned well better make everyone pay.
Why don't you have some kind of terminal server hooked up to provide the necessary out-of-band access so the lack of truster personnel on site isn't an issue? A modem? Secondary IP connectivity?
At least have a plan in place to isolate the untrusted router from the network should things go haywire.
I mean, I'm no router god, but every router god I ever dealt with beat it into my head that you always have out of band access to your remote equipment.
...give them to me, I'll put them to good use. I've got an old iMac that I run Linux on and play with, and I'm looking for more so I can play around and learn apache and other such things.
BBEdit has perl syntax as well, but unless the file browser/network integration/CVS integration is something you really could use, then it's probably not worth the full $180 for BBEdit full version, and unless you a lot of looking at text files, Text Wrangler may not be worth it for you either. Look around for the latest version of BBEdit Lite and take a look. If you like it, Text Wrangler may be something to look at then.
I don't use a quarter of all the features BBEdit has to offer, but I just think the Bare Bones guys rule, and I'd frame my BBEdit t-shirt if I got my hands on another one to wear. But I'm kinda crazy that way. Money well spent.
There is something hard to explain about BBEdit. It just seems to make text manipulation...fun. It's got that je ne sais qua. Possessing probably the best catch phrase in software, "It Doesn't Suck," it really doesn't. The tools it gives you are an HTML writer's dream. Macromedia, way back at the first release of Dreamweaver for the Mac, originally just gave you a full BBEdit license in with the deal, and BBEdit integration is still in there today. It looks nice. Everything is well laid out. Feature-for-feature, vi and emacs almost certainly would pound it to the dirt, but the GUI versions of both of those editors are ugly and act like the kludges of terminal mode applications that they are. I like vi in terminal mode, but in a window manager, resizing a terminal and getting the font to a different size just for text editing is an unecessary hassle. BBEdit fits into the MacOS GUI like it was born there, even in Aqua. It's completely scriptable with AppleScript, to the point of providing the AppleScript menu even if you don't enable it in general. I bought a full version of BBEdit 6.5 (first version with native OSX support) when I got my iBook after a long absence from the Mac, and I use it for everything possible. I don't use Office X, or AppleWorks, or Text Edit (which does RTF, not text) for my word processing. Just BBEdit. I try to find ways to use it, just because I enjoy using it. I even bought Mailsmith so I could have a BBEdit interface to my e-mail, but I had to stop using it because aside from the editing functions, it's just not there yet as far as the networking/speed is concerned (but that's another discussion). I haven't thought
As someone who started out on the Mac, BBEdit was one of the most amazing utilities I had ever seen back in '97 when I first looked at BBEdit Lite. It was fast. You didn't have to go through huge text files by hand deleting billions of windows or unix line breaks, because BBEdit could figure it out. (No scripting this operation didn't always work. I tried, oh gods, how I tried...the tools I had available didn't cut the mustard) It looked nice, as opposed to the horrendous TeachText and SimpleText. You could open almost any file and BBEdit would just open it, and you could mess around (whether you should or not). For some of us old Mac guys, I admit, we can tend to get very zealous about BBEdit, because of all that. Hell, when I dropped the Mac at home because I decided I wanted to play games, the one thing I missed more than anything else from the Mac was my BBEdit Lite.
If the concept of a text editor GUI galls or amuses you, BBEdit isn't for you. Go use vi or emacs and be happy. But if you don't find the concept silly, or you've used other GUI text editors, you owe it to yourself to at least take a look at BBEdit.
You. Either you're exploring some vague irony, or you couldn't get a joke if it slapped you in the face.
I've got a question... Are you merely failing to be funny, or are you staggeringly humor impaired?
Because the book was only mediocre. The second two followed Arthur C. Clarke's general method of piling pointless philosophizing on top of boring exposition, killing off everything that made the originals any good. I can't even go near 2001 after reading the idiotic tripe that was 3001. The last two Rama books (especially the last one) were truly buffalo chips.
Unless they do a completely bangup job and completely ignore the book, I will be staying FAR away from this one. Oh, and Kubrik's dead. No one else on this planet could do 2001 as well as he did. Get over it.
...but I have a sneaking suspicion that eventually I'll have to pay to avoid it.
EA has been trying to strongarm the used market for a loooooong time. It used to be that if a store wanted to sell the "gold box" EA games (the old ones with an EA Classics or something like that logo....old games for $20 and under) then they were prohibited from taking any used EA games. Don't know if the practice persists, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Tough shit.
I play and AWFUL lot of games. Too many games, probably, but I find myself booting into Linux just to play Frozen Bubble. Of all the small puzzle-type games I've ever played, Frozen Bubble is just the best. The only problem with it is that 50 levels just isn't enough for me. Great audio. Polished graphics better than any other free X11 game by leaps and bounds. No, it's not a gaming powerhouse, and it won't take the world by storm, but it's still damn good.
Of course it's inflammatory. How isn't an ultimatum from Opera Software inflammatory? Just sounds like Apple responding in kind to me. The Apple response wasn't in the story earlier. It's less inflammatory than, "BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA," or "Opera? Opera who?" which I imagine gives the gist of the responses by the Apple reps when they heard about this.
How many actual nobles really were?
Oh, right. It's still vaporware, not hardware.
Wake me when there's something that people other than those nVIDIA wants to butter up can use.
Although eBay has successfully fended off similar suits, an erosion of the feedback system's credibility could be devastating, said Rashtchy.
Excuse me? This is eBay we're talking about here, right? You mean the feedback system actually has credibility? Did I wake up on an alternate Earth?
It's also a PR tool for the American military.
I don't personally play it, but those of my friends who do say that a fair percentage of the servers are German, with other European scattered in there.
I use mplayer for all my computer video needs as well. Even on my Macs (save the ones it's too much of a hog for, or for regular Quicktime, which I don't have much call for) I use the version of mplayer that has been compiled and given a simple GUI for MacOS 10.2.
However, the mplayer development team are a bunch of pig-headed idiots. If there was something else that played the stuff I needed to play, I would jump right to it. Unfortunately, if you're able to figure out exactly what you need, and are actually able to get it working (try even COMPILING mplayer on a stock RedHat 7.x install without it complaining to high heaven about the gcc version...I don't know about you, but I don't trust myself to change the version of gcc on my system without screwing every possible dependency up) it's the most fully functional media file player I've found. I've never found anything that I can't play with my compiled version of mplayer. It doesn't change the fact that they INTENTIONALLY make it a pain in the ass to do almost anything. They've got a serious attitude, and while it's their right, I don't feel any sympathy for them being called to task for their blatant user-unfriendliness.
I don't care about skinning. I've never actually had enough patience to get the GUI working for it, so I don't know how crappy it is or isn't. Xine's GUI is a completely unwieldy piece of crap. I haven't bothered to look elsewhere, 'cause I finally learned how to make mplayer do what I needed it to do, but DAMN did they go out of their way to make it difficult.
I'd say it's a hell of a lot closer to "completely safe" than a 2000 pound bomb or a cruise missile or, the gods help us all, cluster munitions.
I expect that this "console" is just a PC in a small box that downloads already released, prepackaged game software in some proprietary (and encrypted) format.
This is, of course, if this whole thing isn't just a giant scam.
In Massachussetts, we've had 11-digit dialing required for at least a year. I'm suprised that New York is just getting to this point. There's a whole lot more phones in NYC than here.