This camera looks like a good deal - it's just the Canon D10 with a plastic body and some firmware downgrades. Suppose it's possible to hack the firmware back up to the D10?
Also, first post!
What the hell happened to the definition of innovation? It used to be that innovation was a positive change, a beneficial development. Now it is merely a smokescreen for nigh-criminal, underhanded manuevers like this Verisign ridiculousness and Microsoft's retarded defense.
It sounds like the popular meaning of "innovation" has metamorphasized to just "change". Specifically, it has been used to cover the tracks of profiteers trying to escape retribution for their foolish transgressions into privacy and user-end choices.
I hope that this term is returned to its former positive definition and that those who are responsible for its misuse realize the futility of their efforts.
njord
P.S. I wish I had some mod points - what's up with these comments? Take these flamers to the cleaners! Melisa? Learn to spell!
Carmack and the Origins of DirectX
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm a little over halfway through the book and I've stumbled upon an interesting passage. In it, Kushner is discussing DirectX's beginnings as a tool to bring developers and games to Windows (and keep them there).
The Microsoft agenda was to make an impressive display of the new API's strengths, and the solution was to port DOS-bound Doom to Windows. John Carmack said he'd allow it (but not do the porting).
This seems to place Carmack, long an outspoken proponent of OpenGL as the superior API (for a number of reasons), as one of the reasons for DirectX's acceptence.
Is this the real deal, I wonder, or is there a palpable spin being had here?
Of course, Carmack is right to favor the open, robust and carefully oversighted OpenGL over the proprietary and hasty DirectX, but did his actions play a part in the success of DirectX?
I hope you're joking - aside from the fact that each generation of game engine is preceeded by an id game (the guts of which certainly owe much to John), Warren Spector (one of the designers of Deus Ex) and company licensed the Unreal engine from Epic.
Spector and Carmack do different things, just like Deus Ex is a very different game from anything id has done so far. Spector designs games - and does it well - but he doesn't write the engines. Carmack writes engines - and well, I might add. These are two different people making strides in different areas of gaming.
What ever happened to Saturday morning?
You and I sat and avoided the boring,
Watching GI Joe and Cobra doin' their warring,
Garfield, too man, we thought that was divine...
I used to get up early to catch the mornin' shows,
Watching X-Men and the evil mutants come to blows.
Why Reboot was cancelled, nobody knows,
But I miss the guys and glitch all of the time...
Hot Patootie, where're my shows? Oh man oh man, how the time goes!
I'd sit there and I'd rot until my lunch time came
I didn't care that the shows were mostly all the same
Now days kids'd rather play some computer game
I'll always miss the Ghostbusters covered in slime...
In the eighties and the ninties, it's what you did
If you didn't then I'm sure you weren't a kid
In pajamas you sat two feet away from the vid
Sleeping past 9AM was a capital crime...
Hot Patootie, where're my shows? On man oh man, how the time goes!
I remember buying The Ultimate Doom a while back (getting close to 10 years now, actually) and I remember how freaky the blinking rooms in e1m2 were to a ten-year old. Also, the remarkably graphic skin-bolted-into-steel textures in episode 4 had a profound effect on me.
Thank god there were no age restrictions back then! I also remember playing the Quake demo for the first time in '96 or '97... the first time I shot a grunt down and he got back up, I had a meltdown. Also, let's not forget those zombies, groaning and chuckin' bits of skin at you while you tried to nailgun them to death, on to have the GET BACK UP!
Let's also remember how creepy all of Half-Life
was, particularly the repetitive clanging noise the tentacle made as you ran around trying to kill it.
Ever read the Authority? A couple of the superheros in there really ARE gay. It's a pretty good poke at Batman and Superman; their Authority-equivelant characters kiss (and more)!
The article starts with It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts.
doh ? I'm not a visionary, but any article starting with such predictions loses quite some credibility.
I think the various images of Blade Runner strewn across the site suggest that this may be tongue-in-cheek. I wouldn't have modded him down as flamebait, but I thought that was pretty obvious.
I don't understand why everybody is attacking Paul Graham. I respect the guy because he's one of the few Lisp evangelists out there. He defends his positions pretty well and he willing to go against the mainstream (like Java). I think he has a point about "evolutionary paths". Java is a very practical, grounded language; despite its platform independance, it was still defined with Von Neumann architecture in mind. If hardware starts pulling away from that form, Java will not follow easily.
Lisp, on the other hand, embodies the "Science"
part of Computer Science. It's not quite as esoteric as SETL, but Lisp is mathy enough that it doesn't make any assumptions about hardware.
I'm not saying Lisp is "better" than Java, just that they are different. My question is: if Sun went under tomorrow, what would happen to Java?
I've been getting great download times from the warnerbros server (which, it now occurs to me, is probably thanks to AOL).
Even so, when I downloaded the 3rd animatrix dealie (the best by far), I was getting unheard-of speeds (for me, anyway); something like 5000 kb/sec. Of course, I'm a Colledge Student, but still, I don't get speeds like that for local files!
Seems like a misappropriation of bandwidth to me. Why can't we get these speeds for Linux ISOs?
I don't know - Maine is pretty sparsely populated. Our biggest city - Portland - has about 60,000 people at the most. Bangor (#2) has about 40,000. That's pretty much it. It's a pretty big state, so there's plenty of room for people to spread out. We've even got little towns that don't have real names, just a code. Ever met someone from TWP-24? Nice place.
Kasparov really socks it to IBM in that article. I'm surprised at this reaction, considering that they probably paid him a LOT of money to go toe-to-toe with Deep Blue.
On the other hand, it was pretty shallow of IBM to barely beat Kasparov, brag about it, and then DISMANTLE the historic machine! Considering the would-be artifact status of Deep Blue, I would have expected more from these people.
At any rate, I'm just glad to see that the brute force approach is being abandoned for better heuristics. Anyone can write minimax for chess, the only special that IBM did was dump a couple million into hardware.
Well, I think it's official now; the letter X has been overused. First, we had X11 and all the things named after that, then Window XP and OS X. Now Xserve?
I think we all know where this is headed - it's going to be like the South Park where they say 'shit' 162 times and the Knight of Standards and Practices are going to come and kick us around for overusing the letter. Again, real-like imitates South Park
A Nazgul screams across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. Down below, the hobbits work. The Shire twists and wiggles with the tiny shapes crawling across it's surface, with banners of white and red and green. Bilbo sits in the vaginal warmth of his End (his Bag End) and sucks of a dirty corn-cob pipe, listening to the the pads of leathery hobbit hooves against the earth, a whole dance number where all over the performers are drunk on some coconut-flavored drink and can't stay together. The erratic thumps of calloused soles on grassy ground plays a tune to which Bilbo in his reverie of pipe-weed and little invisible people can ponder like a hashishin marvelling at a knife while he drives it into the deep folds of date-nutured fat on a sultan's back.
Meanwhile, Frodo of the Baggins of the Shire is trying to belch the alphabet in the Green Dragon while a group of plastered but endearing hobbits watch his strained efforts at staying on his little pencil-legs like a whitecoated, bespectacled scientist watches a mantis devour its mate. A tired and grunt precede each haletosic syllable of his poorly crated abcadarium, at which he wobbles a little to the left and then to the right. The barflies keep watching.
I've read a whole bunch about how much Star Wars sucks and has always sucked in the past few weeks. Now first of all, I'm not a diehard Star Wars or Spiderman fan, but I am familar with both (I haven't seen the Spiderman movie, but I've read a few of the comic books). I think that comparison between the two is pretty ridiculous - Star Wars is definately an epic in scope and feel, while Spiderman is a much more personal tale. Anyway, the problem that I have at nailing Lucas and folk for Star Wars is the nature of the attacks. Star Wars was pretty universally popular until the Phantom Menace came out, and all of a sudden the entire series was terrible. People are acting insulted as if Lucas has forever ruined something that belonged to us: the Star Wars story. Lucas doesn't owe anything to anybody; the story was always his. If you don't like the new movies, give it up and watch the old ones. Stop telling us how much they suck because we can make up our own minds. I'm going to pay $4.50 for an AOTC matinee on Thursday next week, and I frankly think that that is a fair price to pay. I thought some parts of Episode I were pretty lame, but I know the AOTC isn't going to be any worse; from what I've heard, it will be better. So either like it or don't like it, but don't take it personally.
The problem is the people have huge misconceptions about Carnivore. Being concerned about personal privacy, I chose to research Carnivore for an Ethics class at school. I found that Carnivore is pretty much just misunderstood; it is really incapable of doing any large-scale surveillance. There's an independant review that was conducted by IITRI last year that points out that Carnivore is the safest of any online monitoring tool and that it is incapable of wantonly collecting data. Incidentally, the report suggests that Carnivore be open-sourced. Fat chance.
The real issue is whether or not it's right to perform surviellance. I think that it can be necessary at times (with the required warrants) but I also think that it needs to be taken more seriously and greater restrictions need to be in place to ensure that it is only used in extreme situations. If you think that Carnivore could invade your privacy, read up on how many wiretaps are used every year. Carnivore is used much less and is safer to boot. The real problem here is whether the government should be allowed to monitor communications at all, not that Carnivore gives the government some awesome new powers of data capture.
njord
By the way, I really have no association with the government. I'm just a left-winger college student that did a little research and was surprised by what I found.
I was being reserved when I said "Wouldn't it be silly" because I know that positive film (of which there are many varieties, including E-6 7-step, E-6 4-step, Kodachrome, and ECM) was (and still is, in some places) to capture movies.
Your argument is flawed in three main ways - first of all "35mm" and "negative" are not always found togther. Most consumer cameras today are 35mm, so the slide or negative film that you buy for your 35mm camera is, not surprisingly, 35mm. However, both types of film can be found in a variety of formats; to name a few, there is 110, 126, 120, APS, 8mm, 16mm, 4x5, 2x2, and disc (ug).
Second, I'm certain that nobody (especially a Hollywood studio) shoots a movie with 35mm film. There are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that movie film has to be greased to run through a movie camera and not get mangled by the shutter. For instance, ECM film has a layer of graphite on the base to make it slick (this comes off in ECM development). I don't know all of the types used, but 8 and 16mm film are pretty common.
Third, negative film isn't suited for projection; like I said, it would look pretty strange. A movie is shot in one of the aformentioned formats with a positive emulsion (who wants to edit negatives, anyway?). After the master is developed, there's no problem using it to expose other positive film, and you'll get a good copy. Copies of slide film do lose quality, but it's not as bad as the transition from a negative to a print. Color matching is very difficult to achieve with color prints (which is almost always C-41, a negative process). Any photography-savvy person will tell you that the dynamic range on positive is much better than negative film, and that both of them are a LOT better than paper.
I don't really understand what you mean by putting prints in quotes, or that there was a higher risk of damaging older negatives. If you're talking about daguerrotype, those were positives (and there were fragile, but consider that they were prints and that the technology was very primitive). You couldn't make duplicates of those prints unless you did something akin to a copy negative - which was no fun, because the damn things were printed with iodine and mercury vapors! That's why they are so valuble now; there were'nt many made.
Well, that's certainly long and I'm sure I'll get about a billion "off topic" mods, but I just hope this is informative.
I don't know what the hell Ridley was talking about in that article - he said he was making the new edition "off the negatives". I'm no film expert, but who the hell shoots a movie on negative film? If you tried to show it, it would look pretty stupid - inverted. I'm pretty sure that all moves are (or maybe were, in this digital age) shot using ECM film (color revseral, like slide film) Is Ridley just "dumming it down" for us or what?
A lot of people are miffed that Sony's asking $200 this and so and and so forth, but I think it's an okay deal - think how much a 40 gig hd costs (~$100) and an ethernet card (~30).
Throw in a great os that has been ported for the first time to a completely foreign architecture (~ $$ who knows?), coupled with the fact that this stuff is not off-the-shelf but has to be tested and repackaged to fit the exacting specs of the PS2 and I think you've got a pretty good deal.
Add the $300 for a PS2 plus the $200 for this kit and maybe another $200 for a decent monitor (if you don't have one already), and you've got yourself an incredibly compact, inexpensive graphics workstation with the added bonus of being able to play PS/PS2 games! Everyone who reads slashdot knows that it won't be long before people start writing stuff - utlilities, games, workarounds - and you've got a new platform. So Sony says the PS2 can't read anything but PS/PS2/DVD discs. Then get a usb CD drive and go to town. I think this is a great opportunity to get another big company behind Linux and actually foster support towards the whole user-empowerment idea.
Of course they don't want to release the source code, but we'll stick RMS on 'em. Heh.
Njord
Slashdot Mirror
... is that 2 of those exabytes was just data created by the researchers to discern the amount of data made in 2001.
This camera looks like a good deal - it's just the Canon D10 with a plastic body and some firmware downgrades. Suppose it's possible to hack the firmware back up to the D10? Also, first post!
What the hell happened to the definition of innovation? It used to be that innovation was a positive change, a beneficial development. Now it is merely a smokescreen for nigh-criminal, underhanded manuevers like this Verisign ridiculousness and Microsoft's retarded defense.
It sounds like the popular meaning of "innovation" has metamorphasized to just "change". Specifically, it has been used to cover the tracks of profiteers trying to escape retribution for their foolish transgressions into privacy and user-end choices.
I hope that this term is returned to its former positive definition and that those who are responsible for its misuse realize the futility of their efforts.
njord
P.S. I wish I had some mod points - what's up with these comments? Take these flamers to the cleaners! Melisa? Learn to spell!
I'm a little over halfway through the book and I've stumbled upon an interesting passage. In it, Kushner is discussing DirectX's beginnings as a tool to bring developers and games to Windows (and keep them there).
The Microsoft agenda was to make an impressive display of the new API's strengths, and the solution was to port DOS-bound Doom to Windows. John Carmack said he'd allow it (but not do the porting).
This seems to place Carmack, long an outspoken proponent of OpenGL as the superior API (for a number of reasons), as one of the reasons for DirectX's acceptence.
Is this the real deal, I wonder, or is there a palpable spin being had here?
Of course, Carmack is right to favor the open, robust and carefully oversighted OpenGL over the proprietary and hasty DirectX, but did his actions play a part in the success of DirectX?
njord
I hope you're joking - aside from the fact that each generation of game engine is preceeded by an id game (the guts of which certainly owe much to John), Warren Spector (one of the designers of Deus Ex) and company licensed the Unreal engine from Epic.
Spector and Carmack do different things, just like Deus Ex is a very different game from anything id has done so far. Spector designs games - and does it well - but he doesn't write the engines. Carmack writes engines - and well, I might add. These are two different people making strides in different areas of gaming.
njordDon't tell Meatloaf or Richard O'Brian
njordI remember buying The Ultimate Doom a while back (getting close to 10 years now, actually) and I remember how freaky the blinking rooms in e1m2 were to a ten-year old. Also, the remarkably graphic skin-bolted-into-steel textures in episode 4 had a profound effect on me.
Thank god there were no age restrictions back then! I also remember playing the Quake demo for the first time in '96 or '97... the first time I shot a grunt down and he got back up, I had a meltdown. Also, let's not forget those zombies, groaning and chuckin' bits of skin at you while you tried to nailgun them to death, on to have the GET BACK UP!
Let's also remember how creepy all of Half-Life was, particularly the repetitive clanging noise the tentacle made as you ran around trying to kill it.
Here's to the memories
njord
Ever read the Authority? A couple of the superheros in there really ARE gay. It's a pretty good poke at Batman and Superman; their Authority-equivelant characters kiss (and more)!
njordI think the various images of Blade Runner strewn across the site suggest that this may be tongue-in-cheek. I wouldn't have modded him down as flamebait, but I thought that was pretty obvious.
I don't understand why everybody is attacking Paul Graham. I respect the guy because he's one of the few Lisp evangelists out there. He defends his positions pretty well and he willing to go against the mainstream (like Java). I think he has a point about "evolutionary paths". Java is a very practical, grounded language; despite its platform independance, it was still defined with Von Neumann architecture in mind. If hardware starts pulling away from that form, Java will not follow easily.
Lisp, on the other hand, embodies the "Science" part of Computer Science. It's not quite as esoteric as SETL, but Lisp is mathy enough that it doesn't make any assumptions about hardware.
I'm not saying Lisp is "better" than Java, just that they are different. My question is: if Sun went under tomorrow, what would happen to Java?
njordI've been getting great download times from the warnerbros server (which, it now occurs to me, is probably thanks to AOL).
Even so, when I downloaded the 3rd animatrix dealie (the best by far), I was getting unheard-of speeds (for me, anyway); something like 5000 kb/sec. Of course, I'm a Colledge Student, but still, I don't get speeds like that for local files!
Seems like a misappropriation of bandwidth to me. Why can't we get these speeds for Linux ISOs?
njord
I don't know - Maine is pretty sparsely populated. Our biggest city - Portland - has about 60,000 people at the most. Bangor (#2) has about 40,000. That's pretty much it. It's a pretty big state, so there's plenty of room for people to spread out. We've even got little towns that don't have real names, just a code. Ever met someone from TWP-24? Nice place.
njord
Kasparov really socks it to IBM in that article. I'm surprised at this reaction, considering that they probably paid him a LOT of money to go toe-to-toe with Deep Blue.
On the other hand, it was pretty shallow of IBM to barely beat Kasparov, brag about it, and then DISMANTLE the historic machine! Considering the would-be artifact status of Deep Blue, I would have expected more from these people.
At any rate, I'm just glad to see that the brute force approach is being abandoned for better heuristics. Anyone can write minimax for chess, the only special that IBM did was dump a couple million into hardware.
njord
Well, I think it's official now; the letter X has been overused. First, we had X11 and all the things named after that, then Window XP and OS X. Now Xserve?
I think we all know where this is headed - it's going to be like the South Park where they say 'shit' 162 times and the Knight of Standards and Practices are going to come and kick us around for overusing the letter. Again, real-like imitates South Park
Njord
The letter X was made to vex - Edward Gorey
What the hell kind of onomatopoeia is that? I've always heard "mmmmm, donut"...
A Nazgul screams across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. Down below, the hobbits work. The Shire twists and wiggles with the tiny shapes crawling across it's surface, with banners of white and red and green. Bilbo sits in the vaginal warmth of his End (his Bag End) and sucks of a dirty corn-cob pipe, listening to the the pads of leathery hobbit hooves against the earth, a whole dance number where all over the performers are drunk on some coconut-flavored drink and can't stay together. The erratic thumps of calloused soles on grassy ground plays a tune to which Bilbo in his reverie of pipe-weed and little invisible people can ponder like a hashishin marvelling at a knife while he drives it into the deep folds of date-nutured fat on a sultan's back.
Meanwhile, Frodo of the Baggins of the Shire is trying to belch the alphabet in the Green Dragon while a group of plastered but endearing hobbits watch his strained efforts at staying on his little pencil-legs like a whitecoated, bespectacled scientist watches a mantis devour its mate. A tired and grunt precede each haletosic syllable of his poorly crated abcadarium, at which he wobbles a little to the left and then to the right. The barflies keep watching.
Thomas Pynchon's The Lord of the Rings
I've read a whole bunch about how much Star Wars sucks and has always sucked in the past few weeks. Now first of all, I'm not a diehard Star Wars or Spiderman fan, but I am familar with both (I haven't seen the Spiderman movie, but I've read a few of the comic books). I think that comparison between the two is pretty ridiculous - Star Wars is definately an epic in scope and feel, while Spiderman is a much more personal tale. Anyway, the problem that I have at nailing Lucas and folk for Star Wars is the nature of the attacks. Star Wars was pretty universally popular until the Phantom Menace came out, and all of a sudden the entire series was terrible. People are acting insulted as if Lucas has forever ruined something that belonged to us: the Star Wars story. Lucas doesn't owe anything to anybody; the story was always his. If you don't like the new movies, give it up and watch the old ones. Stop telling us how much they suck because we can make up our own minds. I'm going to pay $4.50 for an AOTC matinee on Thursday next week, and I frankly think that that is a fair price to pay. I thought some parts of Episode I were pretty lame, but I know the AOTC isn't going to be any worse; from what I've heard, it will be better. So either like it or don't like it, but don't take it personally.
njord
The problem is the people have huge misconceptions about Carnivore. Being concerned about personal privacy, I chose to research Carnivore for an Ethics class at school. I found that Carnivore is pretty much just misunderstood; it is really incapable of doing any large-scale surveillance. There's an independant review that was conducted by IITRI last year that points out that Carnivore is the safest of any online monitoring tool and that it is incapable of wantonly collecting data. Incidentally, the report suggests that Carnivore be open-sourced. Fat chance.
The real issue is whether or not it's right to perform surviellance. I think that it can be necessary at times (with the required warrants) but I also think that it needs to be taken more seriously and greater restrictions need to be in place to ensure that it is only used in extreme situations. If you think that Carnivore could invade your privacy, read up on how many wiretaps are used every year. Carnivore is used much less and is safer to boot. The real problem here is whether the government should be allowed to monitor communications at all, not that Carnivore gives the government some awesome new powers of data capture.
njord
By the way, I really have no association with the government. I'm just a left-winger college student that did a little research and was surprised by what I found.
To quote you, "Nope"
I was being reserved when I said "Wouldn't it be silly" because I know that positive film (of which there are many varieties, including E-6 7-step, E-6 4-step, Kodachrome, and ECM) was (and still is, in some places) to capture movies.
Your argument is flawed in three main ways - first of all "35mm" and "negative" are not always found togther. Most consumer cameras today are 35mm, so the slide or negative film that you buy for your 35mm camera is, not surprisingly, 35mm. However, both types of film can be found in a variety of formats; to name a few, there is 110, 126, 120, APS, 8mm, 16mm, 4x5, 2x2, and disc (ug).
Second, I'm certain that nobody (especially a Hollywood studio) shoots a movie with 35mm film. There are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that movie film has to be greased to run through a movie camera and not get mangled by the shutter. For instance, ECM film has a layer of graphite on the base to make it slick (this comes off in ECM development). I don't know all of the types used, but 8 and 16mm film are pretty common.
Third, negative film isn't suited for projection; like I said, it would look pretty strange. A movie is shot in one of the aformentioned formats with a positive emulsion (who wants to edit negatives, anyway?). After the master is developed, there's no problem using it to expose other positive film, and you'll get a good copy. Copies of slide film do lose quality, but it's not as bad as the transition from a negative to a print. Color matching is very difficult to achieve with color prints (which is almost always C-41, a negative process). Any photography-savvy person will tell you that the dynamic range on positive is much better than negative film, and that both of them are a LOT better than paper.
I don't really understand what you mean by putting prints in quotes, or that there was a higher risk of damaging older negatives. If you're talking about daguerrotype, those were positives (and there were fragile, but consider that they were prints and that the technology was very primitive). You couldn't make duplicates of those prints unless you did something akin to a copy negative - which was no fun, because the damn things were printed with iodine and mercury vapors! That's why they are so valuble now; there were'nt many made.
Well, that's certainly long and I'm sure I'll get about a billion "off topic" mods, but I just hope this is informative.
Njord
I don't know what the hell Ridley was talking about in that article - he said he was making the new edition "off the negatives". I'm no film expert, but who the hell shoots a movie on negative film? If you tried to show it, it would look pretty stupid - inverted. I'm pretty sure that all moves are (or maybe were, in this digital age) shot using ECM film (color revseral, like slide film) Is Ridley just "dumming it down" for us or what?
Congratulations, Taco - it takes a lot of guts to preempt April Fool's day by two months.
Njord's girlfriend, to Njord: "[censored]" [Slap!]
Njord to girlfriend: "Ouch! What? It's who's day?"
True story.
A lot of people are miffed that Sony's asking $200 this and so and and so forth, but I think it's an okay deal - think how much a 40 gig hd costs (~$100) and an ethernet card (~30). Throw in a great os that has been ported for the first time to a completely foreign architecture (~ $$ who knows?), coupled with the fact that this stuff is not off-the-shelf but has to be tested and repackaged to fit the exacting specs of the PS2 and I think you've got a pretty good deal. Add the $300 for a PS2 plus the $200 for this kit and maybe another $200 for a decent monitor (if you don't have one already), and you've got yourself an incredibly compact, inexpensive graphics workstation with the added bonus of being able to play PS/PS2 games! Everyone who reads slashdot knows that it won't be long before people start writing stuff - utlilities, games, workarounds - and you've got a new platform. So Sony says the PS2 can't read anything but PS/PS2/DVD discs. Then get a usb CD drive and go to town. I think this is a great opportunity to get another big company behind Linux and actually foster support towards the whole user-empowerment idea. Of course they don't want to release the source code, but we'll stick RMS on 'em. Heh. Njord