> But the statemenst he makes are rediculous.
> Linux is designed from the ground up to run on
> many platforms, not just the pc.
Nope. It wasn't designed to be cross-platform at the beginning. Don't you trust Linus ?
> From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
> Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
> Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
> Summary: small poll for my new operating system
> Message-ID:
> Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
> Organization: University of Helsinki
>
>
> Hello everybody out there using minix -
>
> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
> professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
> since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
> things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
> (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
> among other things).
>
> I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
> This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
> I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
> are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them:-)
>
> Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
>
> PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
> It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
> will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have:-(
The idea of patents started back in the industrial revolution. It was applied to *MECHANICAL CONTRAPTIONS* and it worked. The problem with the US PTO (Patenting The Obvious) is that they're allowing patents on software algorithms, business methods, etc. Ban patents on anything except physical stuff, and you solve the current problem.
In the old days, Edison would spend years to come up with a lightbulb whose filament would last longer than a few hours. The stuff that really has people in an anti-patent mood is where a lawyer writes several pages of mumbo-jumbo, *WITH NO PHYSICAL DEVICE MANUFACTURED*, files it, and comes back several years later to sue everybody in site. Examples...
- The "one-click" patent
- The GIF algorithm patent
- BT (British Telecomm) filed some mumbo-jumbo in the late 1970's about data referencing other data, and claimed that HTTP urls infringed on that patent, and sued Prodigy for their website.
- check out this ZD item about a 1985 patent on downloading software. Like, how many years has FTP been around fer-cryin-outloud ?
Re:Put the frickin' Home button back on the ...
on
Mozilla Bug Week
·
· Score: 1
Browser designers seem to love crapping on the screen with oodles of menubars at top, statusbars at bottom and sidebars on the side. I don't want a gazillion menus, I want to surf the web dammit. I'd like to see a fullscreen mode, please. Secondly, in order to see the current URL, I need to have 2 menus. I.e. the main and the navigation menu. I'd love to see it folded into a one-line main menu like so...
File Edit View Bookmarks Help | http://slashdot.org
All on one line. And please scrap the crap with the honking big "M" icon so the bar doesn't have to be so thick.
Under the SSSCA, it would be "unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies."
Assembling from parts is manufacturing, regardless of whether it's done in Dell's factory or in your basement.
And they fight back with...
- dissing linux
- probably lobbying in favour of SSSCA, which would outlaw linux as we know it today
Whatever else they are, they're *NOT* stupid. Do not risk losing the war for freedom of choice by underestimating MS. They do know that people would never willingly choose.NET and time-bombed OS's and office suites. They are knowlingly taking a calculated risk in trying to destroy freedom of choice. They're not changing because they want to, but because they see that they've come to the end of the line as far as selling software is concerned, so they're exploring other options.
Common sense... buy a cheap 2nd hand clunker for connecting to the net. When you've downloaded email or whatever, unplug from the net, and plug into your *MAIN* home PC. The main PC downloads from your clunker. Then wipe the download area of the clunker; disconnect it from your main computer and connect it back to the net. If you don't, well you risk what happened here including especially juicy stuff here (warning; some nudity).
I'm 100% neutral in the KDE/Gnome interface war... "The Pox On Both Your Houses". Linux's problem isn't lack of GUI's. Linux's problem is lack of applications. We need more stuff like Kmail/AbiWord/Gnumeric/Koffice/Openoffice. F*** the gui. I installed Gnome and KDE for the apps, then switched to FVWM2. My screen starts out almost totally blank. I hit {ALT-F10} and a menu pops up. I hit one letter and a program starts up. And without a touchy/feely/draggy/droppy/cutsie/wootsie GUI, Redhat 7.1 flies on a Dell Dimension XPS T450 (yes, 450 mhz) with 128 megs of RAM. Try the latest Gnome or KDE on this machine and it crawls. Or is the slowness part of the attempt to totally duplicate the Windows look-n-feel?
People don't buy computers to run GUI's, they buy computers to run apps. Remember the fate of "real operating systems" whose fans derided DOS as "merely an application loader" ? Well guess what... a secretary didn't need "a real operating system". She needed Wordstar (later Wordperfect). Accountants didn't need "a real operating system". They needed Lotus 1-2-3 (later Excel). Apps are the weapons that linux needs in the battle against Windows.
> The biggest use of RAM drives on Macs were for Powerbook users. With a lightweight word processor
> (Word 5 *cough*) and a lightweight System folder, you could spin down your hard drive, dim
> the screen, and get gobs of battery time out of those old machines, and Oh! the blissful silence!
> You'd just want to save your files to the hard drive every now and then to prevent Murphy from visiting.
A couple of points...
1) Static files - Most OS's have many files that are usually static. In the case of linux, they're in/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin, and so on. Copy those over to RAM at bootup, and you'll fly, without having to worry about losing data. The only major slowdown would be at bootup as the harddrive was mirrored to RAM. But that's only a problem on OS's that have to be re-booted often <g>.
2) Non-Static files... Ever heard of RAID 1 ? A second drive backs up your primary drive. Is there any reason that you couldn't copy over changed data from the RAM drive to the harddrive as a background process? At worst, the harddrive may be running 30 seconds or a minute behind the RAM drive. However, while you're typing away, the hardrive is being refreshed between keystrokes. It'll need some form of asynchronous 2-way access to RAM. I.e. the CPU and the bus to the harddrive have to be able to see the system RAM. You'd get the RAM drive speed, with your data being continuously backed up to harddrive.
Two questions...
1) How much would it cost you to legally obtain the latest version of Windows (XP)?
2) How much would it cost you to legally obtain the latest version of Slackware ?
> Seriously though, if any person is going to devote a good chunk of his time/life to
> developing a solid architecture that millions of people are going to use to make thier
> lives easier, shouldn't they be compensated?
If someone comes up with a patented product that's sooooooo damn great that we all *WANT* it (i.e. a de-facto standard) and they go out and market it, that's free enterprise. What I object to is the tax-collecter or toll-gate approach, where someone slips a patent into a standard that I'm *REQUIRED* to use, and then they just sit back and collect the royalties. Case in point, you do want to be able to communicate with your government over the web. How would you feel if your government set up an e-gateway that *REQUIRED* Windows and Internet Explorer ?
That's exactly what happened in England. In June of 2001 (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/200 37.html) it was leaked that Microsoft had used their position as designer of the UK government e-gateway to implement a solution that worked *ONLY* with Windows 95/98 or NT. And the only browser that worked was Internet Explorer for Windows (No, the Mac version did *NOT* work). After a lot of yelling and screaming from British citizens, the government backed down and the site was re-designed to work with more OS's and browsers. This is the type of backdoor taxation that I fear. You would've had to buy^H^H^H rent Windows, and pad Bill Gates' wallet, to be able to communicate with your government.
> the client side stuff could profile the document
> object exactly as it is loaded and displayed on
> the browser, instructing the browser to describe
> the various properties of the document's objects
> (visible=false, unavailable=true, whatever)...
> that would reveal a blocked ad. then the script
> phones home with the results, detailed, or with
> a simple pass/fail.
To which, the response is to create a proxy version of your webbrowser. The proxy displays everything on the website. The proxy responds to the webpage just like a regular browser, which isn't aware that it's talking to a proxy. The end-user would link to the proxy with a "slave" browser that has annoying garbage like popups and f##kwave/slash disabled.
Given the presence of open source software, the source code for a browser is available.
> In addition, in today's age of worms upon virus
> upon other nasty things, there is a sufficiently
> significant (probably around 10%) of users that
> have turned off Active Scripting in IE or the
> equivalent in NS to avoid such problems. I very
> much believe that these users have more of a
> right to keep this off than an advertizer has to
> force you to look at an ad.
Right on. One of the vectors for the spread of NIMDA was that people with unpatched older versions of Internet Explorer got infected *MERELY BROWSING COMPROMISED WEBPAGES*. A CERT advisory issued in February of 2000 (17 months ago http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html ) recommended "Web Users Should Disable Scripting Languages in Their Browsers".
What happened to the that old maxim in the BBS days about not blindly running any program from any BBS you see ? Guess what; with Java/Javascript/ActiveX you are downloading code from a webpage, and executing it on your machine.
People shouldn't complain that they weren't warned.
> Just cause AOL owns it doesn't mean it is
> horrible - it is when AOL changes it to a
> horrible state, that it will become unbearable.
I was a Compuserve user back in the old pre-AOL days. It was "kinder and gentler" version of usenet, including *TEXT-BASED* interface. I eventually dumped Compuserve. It was becoming too AOL-ized for me. If I wanted AOL, I would've joined AOL in the first place, dammit. If things haven't changed for 4 years, it looks like AOL may have learned a lesson or two.
4mn0t1337 wrote...
>>>>>>
As we are seeing the rebirth of the client-server relation (When the personal computer put more computing power in our hands at a cheaper cost, we moved away from the expensive machines (university's/companies') that we all had to time-share on. We lost track of our client-server roots.), we are seeing more and more computing power "out there" and a lot more of what happens on your machine is dependent on other's computers. Why bother spending all of that money on a lot of processing power on your desk when you use 5% of it for only a few hours of the day? Doesn't it make more sense, on a large scale, to rent processing power from someone else as you need it? You would have much more at your disposal, and you would only pay for what you use, which makes it more affordable.
>>>>>>
You should hire on with Microsoft as a copy writer. This is the most concise, cogent description of DOT.NET I've seen. One question... what reason do you have to believe that the cost of "software as a service" isn't going to blow away (many times over) the couple of hundred bucks difference between a low-end computer and a web appliance ?
>>>>>>
> None of the Internet appliance manufacturers
> have offered hard drives
Ah, but there are plenty of services out there right now that offer on-line storage. (I have about 90MB of *free* storage out there -- more than enough for most users.(mp3's and movies aside at the momment)) As the cost of storage continues to drop, the ammount available will increase. This is a chunk of data that the user has *no* responsibility for maintaining and backing up. If a HD crashes, the hosting company just yanks it out of its RAID and slips in a new one. The user never sees the difference. One less headache for the novice user.
>>>>>>
And you hope that it won't take a whole week for the company to restore service after a crash. Besides, there's stuff on my home machines I don't want on the net. For a few years I kept the membership database for a contsituency association of Canadian political party. That list was kept and maintained on a machine that was not connected to the net. I don't care how good my firewall looks today. There are risks that one simply doesn't take.
> Now screwing around with your windows registry
> in ways we won't bother to ask you about... done.
Hey, at least they're not prejudiced against
linux users <g>. Anybody out there with linux Real
installed ? Check your/etc/mailcap file. Here's
what I've had to comment out. It's one thing to
to play mime types in a browser; that's what Real
Player is for. But they also set up mailcap to
play mime email. Hey guys, one of the reasons I
went to linux was to get away from "rich format
email" that hijacks your machine and sends your
documents all over the planet. This *NOT* how
to do things in *NIX.
> I mean at some point not everyone in the
> world can be a computer expert,
A computer is a tool. You have to learn how to use it properly. Do you go around demanding that 747's be made so easy to fly that every office worker could do it ?
> so are you recommending that people that
> aren't shouldn't have a computer?
If they are not willing/able to bring themselves up to the necessary level of competence to run general-purpose computers, yes. Give me a manually operated medium-format or 35 mm SLR camera, and I'm just as helpless as a Mac or Windows user at a unix commandline. If it ain't point-and-click, I'm totally lost. That doesn't mean I'm stupid; just that I'm not competent to use a particular tool.
> There wouldn't be a computer industry if it
> weren't for the "stupid" people needing
> computers to help out thier jobs and lives.
> What we need to do is constructively help make
> the experience good and safe for everyone.
That's where WEB-TV are aiming at. They are to the general-purpose computer what the point-n-click camera is to professional equipment. The great majority of people aren't geeks. That's not disparagement; merely admitting that Joe Average is no more competent to operate a general purpose computer than I am to manually operate a medium-format camera. It's not an admission of stupidity, just an acknowledgement that different people have different competencies.
Slashdot Mirror
> But the statemenst he makes are rediculous.
:-)
:-(
> Linux is designed from the ground up to run on
> many platforms, not just the pc.
Nope. It wasn't designed to be cross-platform at the beginning. Don't you trust Linus ?
> From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
> Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
> Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
> Summary: small poll for my new operating system
> Message-ID:
> Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
> Organization: University of Helsinki
>
>
> Hello everybody out there using minix -
>
> I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
> professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
> since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
> things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
> (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
> among other things).
>
> I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
> This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
> I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
> are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them
>
> Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
>
> PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
> It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
> will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have
The idea of patents started back in the industrial revolution. It was applied to *MECHANICAL CONTRAPTIONS* and it worked. The problem with the US PTO (Patenting The Obvious) is that they're allowing patents on software algorithms, business methods, etc. Ban patents on anything except physical stuff, and you solve the current problem.
In the old days, Edison would spend years to come up with a lightbulb whose filament would last longer than a few hours. The stuff that really has people in an anti-patent mood is where a lawyer writes several pages of mumbo-jumbo, *WITH NO PHYSICAL DEVICE MANUFACTURED*, files it, and comes back several years later to sue everybody in site. Examples...
- The "one-click" patent
- The GIF algorithm patent
- BT (British Telecomm) filed some mumbo-jumbo in the late 1970's about data referencing other data, and claimed that HTTP urls infringed on that patent, and sued Prodigy for their website.
- check out this ZD item about a 1985 patent on downloading software. Like, how many years has FTP been around fer-cryin-outloud ?
Browser designers seem to love crapping on the screen with oodles of menubars at top, statusbars at bottom and sidebars on the side. I don't want a gazillion menus, I want to surf the web dammit. I'd like to see a fullscreen mode, please. Secondly, in order to see the current URL, I need to have 2 menus. I.e. the main and the navigation menu. I'd love to see it folded into a one-line main menu like so...
File Edit View Bookmarks Help | http://slashdot.org
All on one line. And please scrap the crap with the honking big "M" icon so the bar doesn't have to be so thick.
Under the SSSCA, it would be "unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies."
Assembling from parts is manufacturing, regardless of whether it's done in Dell's factory or in your basement.
And they fight back with...
.NET and time-bombed OS's and office suites. They are knowlingly taking a calculated risk in trying to destroy freedom of choice. They're not changing because they want to, but because they see that they've come to the end of the line as far as selling software is concerned, so they're exploring other options.
- dissing linux
- probably lobbying in favour of SSSCA, which would outlaw linux as we know it today
Whatever else they are, they're *NOT* stupid. Do not risk losing the war for freedom of choice by underestimating MS. They do know that people would never willingly choose
Common sense... buy a cheap 2nd hand clunker for connecting to the net. When you've downloaded email or whatever, unplug from the net, and plug into your *MAIN* home PC. The main PC downloads from your clunker. Then wipe the download area of the clunker; disconnect it from your main computer and connect it back to the net. If you don't, well you risk what happened here including especially juicy stuff here (warning; some nudity).
I'm 100% neutral in the KDE/Gnome interface war... "The Pox On Both Your Houses". Linux's problem isn't lack of GUI's. Linux's problem is lack of applications. We need more stuff like Kmail/AbiWord/Gnumeric/Koffice/Openoffice. F*** the gui. I installed Gnome and KDE for the apps, then switched to FVWM2. My screen starts out almost totally blank. I hit {ALT-F10} and a menu pops up. I hit one letter and a program starts up. And without a touchy/feely/draggy/droppy/cutsie/wootsie GUI, Redhat 7.1 flies on a Dell Dimension XPS T450 (yes, 450 mhz) with 128 megs of RAM. Try the latest Gnome or KDE on this machine and it crawls. Or is the slowness part of the attempt to totally duplicate the Windows look-n-feel?
People don't buy computers to run GUI's, they buy computers to run apps. Remember the fate of "real operating systems" whose fans derided DOS as "merely an application loader" ? Well guess what... a secretary didn't need "a real operating system". She needed Wordstar (later Wordperfect). Accountants didn't need "a real operating system". They needed Lotus 1-2-3 (later Excel). Apps are the weapons that linux needs in the battle against Windows.
> The biggest use of RAM drives on Macs were for Powerbook users. With a lightweight word processor
/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and so on. Copy those over to RAM at bootup, and you'll fly, without having to worry about losing data. The only major slowdown would be at bootup as the harddrive was mirrored to RAM. But that's only a problem on OS's that have to be re-booted often <g>.
> (Word 5 *cough*) and a lightweight System folder, you could spin down your hard drive, dim
> the screen, and get gobs of battery time out of those old machines, and Oh! the blissful silence!
> You'd just want to save your files to the hard drive every now and then to prevent Murphy from visiting.
A couple of points...
1) Static files - Most OS's have many files that are usually static. In the case of linux, they're in
2) Non-Static files... Ever heard of RAID 1 ? A second drive backs up your primary drive. Is there any reason that you couldn't copy over changed data from the RAM drive to the harddrive as a background process? At worst, the harddrive may be running 30 seconds or a minute behind the RAM drive. However, while you're typing away, the hardrive is being refreshed between keystrokes. It'll need some form of asynchronous 2-way access to RAM. I.e. the CPU and the bus to the harddrive have to be able to see the system RAM. You'd get the RAM drive speed, with your data being continuously backed up to harddrive.
Two questions...
1) How much would it cost you to legally obtain the latest version of Windows (XP)?
2) How much would it cost you to legally obtain the latest version of Slackware ?
'nuff said
> Seriously though, if any person is going to devote a good chunk of his time/life to
0 37 .html) it was leaked that Microsoft had used their position as designer of the UK government e-gateway to implement a solution that worked *ONLY* with Windows 95/98 or NT. And the only browser that worked was Internet Explorer for Windows (No, the Mac version did *NOT* work). After a lot of yelling and screaming from British citizens, the government backed down and the site was re-designed to work with more OS's and browsers. This is the type of backdoor taxation that I fear. You would've had to buy^H^H^H rent Windows, and pad Bill Gates' wallet, to be able to communicate with your government.
> developing a solid architecture that millions of people are going to use to make thier
> lives easier, shouldn't they be compensated?
If someone comes up with a patented product that's sooooooo damn great that we all *WANT* it (i.e. a de-facto standard) and they go out and market it, that's free enterprise. What I object to is the tax-collecter or toll-gate approach, where someone slips a patent into a standard that I'm *REQUIRED* to use, and then they just sit back and collect the royalties. Case in point, you do want to be able to communicate with your government over the web. How would you feel if your government set up an e-gateway that *REQUIRED* Windows and Internet Explorer ?
That's exactly what happened in England. In June of 2001 (see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/20
> the client side stuff could profile the document
> object exactly as it is loaded and displayed on
> the browser, instructing the browser to describe
> the various properties of the document's objects
> (visible=false, unavailable=true, whatever)...
> that would reveal a blocked ad. then the script
> phones home with the results, detailed, or with
> a simple pass/fail.
To which, the response is to create a proxy version of your webbrowser. The proxy displays everything on the website. The proxy responds to the webpage just like a regular browser, which isn't aware that it's talking to a proxy. The end-user would link to the proxy with a "slave" browser that has annoying garbage like popups and f##kwave/slash disabled.
Given the presence of open source software, the source code for a browser is available.
> Why don't we just go back to the web "stone
... oh, you mean *MOSAIC 1.0* ?
> ages" and use Mozilla 1.0? So much for the
> evolving web.
Considering that Mozilla is currently at 0.9.4, that would be an advance
> In addition, in today's age of worms upon virus
> upon other nasty things, there is a sufficiently
> significant (probably around 10%) of users that
> have turned off Active Scripting in IE or the
> equivalent in NS to avoid such problems. I very
> much believe that these users have more of a
> right to keep this off than an advertizer has to
> force you to look at an ad.
Right on. One of the vectors for the spread of NIMDA was that people with unpatched older versions of Internet Explorer got infected *MERELY BROWSING COMPROMISED WEBPAGES*. A CERT advisory issued in February of 2000 (17 months ago http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html ) recommended "Web Users Should Disable Scripting Languages in Their Browsers".
What happened to the that old maxim in the BBS days about not blindly running any program from any BBS you see ? Guess what; with Java/Javascript/ActiveX you are downloading code from a webpage, and executing it on your machine.
People shouldn't complain that they weren't warned.
> Just cause AOL owns it doesn't mean it is
> horrible - it is when AOL changes it to a
> horrible state, that it will become unbearable.
I was a Compuserve user back in the old pre-AOL days. It was "kinder and gentler" version of usenet, including *TEXT-BASED* interface. I eventually dumped Compuserve. It was becoming too AOL-ized for me. If I wanted AOL, I would've joined AOL in the first place, dammit. If things haven't changed for 4 years, it looks like AOL may have learned a lesson or two.
You have just received VERSION 2 of a low tech virus via http.
Since we're not so technologically advanced in Linux this is a MANUAL virus.
Please forward this in e-mail to everyone you know
*AND THEN* delete all files on your hard disk yourself.
That's better.
4mn0t1337 wrote...
>>>>>>
As we are seeing the rebirth of the client-server relation (When the personal computer put more computing power in our hands at a cheaper cost, we moved away from the expensive machines (university's/companies') that we all had to time-share on. We lost track of our client-server roots.), we are seeing more and more computing power "out there" and a lot more of what happens on your machine is dependent on other's computers. Why bother spending all of that money on a lot of processing power on your desk when you use 5% of it for only a few hours of the day? Doesn't it make more sense, on a large scale, to rent processing power from someone else as you need it? You would have much more at your disposal, and you would only pay for what you use, which makes it more affordable.
>>>>>>
You should hire on with Microsoft as a copy writer. This is the most concise, cogent description of DOT.NET I've seen. One question... what reason do you have to believe that the cost of "software as a service" isn't going to blow away (many times over) the couple of hundred bucks difference between a low-end computer and a web appliance ?
>>>>>>
> None of the Internet appliance manufacturers
> have offered hard drives
Ah, but there are plenty of services out there right now that offer on-line storage. (I have about 90MB of *free* storage out there -- more than enough for most users.(mp3's and movies aside at the momment)) As the cost of storage continues to drop, the ammount available will increase. This is a chunk of data that the user has *no* responsibility for maintaining and backing up. If a HD crashes, the hosting company just yanks it out of its RAID and slips in a new one. The user never sees the difference. One less headache for the novice user.
>>>>>>
And you hope that it won't take a whole week for the company to restore service after a crash. Besides, there's stuff on my home machines I don't want on the net. For a few years I kept the membership database for a contsituency association of Canadian political party. That list was kept and maintained on a machine that was not connected to the net. I don't care how good my firewall looks today. There are risks that one simply doesn't take.
> Now screwing around with your windows registry
/etc/mailcap file. Here's
y "%u"
l ay "%u"
y "%u"
l ay "%u"
l ay "%u"
e alPlayer8/realplay "%u"
/ realplay "%u"
y "%u"
l ay "%u"
> in ways we won't bother to ask you about... done.
Hey, at least they're not prejudiced against
linux users <g>. Anybody out there with linux Real
installed ? Check your
what I've had to comment out. It's one thing to
to play mime types in a browser; that's what Real
Player is for. But they also set up mailcap to
play mime email. Hey guys, one of the reasons I
went to linux was to get away from "rich format
email" that hijacks your machine and sends your
documents all over the planet. This *NOT* how
to do things in *NIX.
# audio/x-pn-realaudio;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realpla
# audio/vnd.rn-realaudio;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realp
# application/smil;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# text/vnd.rn-realtext;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realpla
# video/vnd.rn-realvideo;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realp
# image/vnd.rn-realflash;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realp
# application/x-shockwave-flash2-preview;/usr/lib/R
# application/sdp;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# application/x-sdp;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# application/vnd.rn-realmedia;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8
# image/vnd.rn-realpix;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realpla
# audio/wav;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# audio/x-wav;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# audio/x-pn-wav;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# audio/x-pn-windows-acm;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realp
# audio/basic;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# audio/x-pn-au;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# audio/aiff;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# audio/x-aiff;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
# audio/x-pn-aiff;/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/realplay "%u"
> I mean at some point not everyone in the
> world can be a computer expert,
A computer is a tool. You have to learn how to use it properly. Do you go around demanding that 747's be made so easy to fly that every office worker could do it ?
> so are you recommending that people that
> aren't shouldn't have a computer?
If they are not willing/able to bring themselves up to the necessary level of competence to run general-purpose computers, yes. Give me a manually operated medium-format or 35 mm SLR camera, and I'm just as helpless as a Mac or Windows user at a unix commandline. If it ain't point-and-click, I'm totally lost. That doesn't mean I'm stupid; just that I'm not competent to use a particular tool.
> There wouldn't be a computer industry if it
> weren't for the "stupid" people needing
> computers to help out thier jobs and lives.
> What we need to do is constructively help make
> the experience good and safe for everyone.
That's where WEB-TV are aiming at. They are to the general-purpose computer what the point-n-click camera is to professional equipment. The great majority of people aren't geeks. That's not disparagement; merely admitting that Joe Average is no more competent to operate a general purpose computer than I am to manually operate a medium-format camera. It's not an admission of stupidity, just an acknowledgement that different people have different competencies.