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User: kalidasa

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  1. Re:Why? on Spielberg Denied Crack at Star Wars · · Score: 1

    Doesn't he remember a little franchise known as Indiana Jones? Lucas and Spielberg teamed up on that and look, nerds and non-nerds love it.

    You seem to have forgotten a little thing called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the Phantom Menace of the Indiana Jones series. Spielberg is good, don't get me wrong: Schindler's List is a Eisenstein-level masterpiece; but he does strike out now and then.

    Mind you, at least he never made Howard the Duck.

  2. Re:On the other hand... on Spielberg Denied Crack at Star Wars · · Score: 1

    I'd rather see Ridley Scott spend his time working on stuff he might be good at - like a move version of Lem's Fiasko, or Haldeman's Forever War - and let Lucas do his own movies. Like it or hate it, Star Wars is 100% pure Lucas.

  3. Re:What a rough life... on Apple Blacklists "Rumor Promoting" Publications · · Score: 1

    It would rather trade the 2 surge in sales every year for a consistent income all year round, which makes it easier to plan around.

    The only reason consistent income would matter is if they're constantly borrowing during down times and repaying when the next cycle hits; then limiting their borrowing would reduce interest expenses and improve their bottom line. Though this is a standard business practice, most companies don't have Apple's bank balance. I doubt they have to resort to much in the way of loans to keep up with their cashflow.

    I think the reason behind this is obvious: Apple is sick of leaks, and this is the best way they can think of to limit them.

  4. Re:Standards according to who? on Web Designers Ignoring Standards and Support IE Only · · Score: 1

    And the W3C was founded in part by the guy who wrote HTML, the first WWW server, and the first browser, thereby inventing the web in the first place, Tim Berners-Lee. So I think his organization has some authority as originator in determining what is standard. And MS *participates* in the standards process at W3C, so there aren't really two standards at all: there're the standards, and the places where MS (or Netscape, or Mozilla) has decided to ignore the standards they participated in developing.

  5. Re:Clients are superb (tho server needs some work) on Cygwin's XFree86 4.2.0 on Windows XP · · Score: 1

    It is truly a beautiful thing to be able to use bash _and_ windows explorer to manage files, or to Alt-TAB from emacs to CorelDraw to FrontPage when web editing.

    Two problems here:

    • You used "beautiful" and "FrontPage" in the same sentence, even though they are obviously mutually exclusive.
    • You imply that the only way to get emacs on Windows is with an Xserver. As I'm sure you know, you don't even need Cygwin for that: there's an emacs for NT; I use it all the time.
  6. Re:I have a client who is Japanese.. on Reading/Writing Chinese Using Linux? · · Score: 1

    Uh, no. Comparing OS 9 to Windows 2000 is like comparing OS 9 to Windows 2000. OS X and Windows XP is a fair comparison as well. Windows 3.1 would compare with around OS 7 or 6.

    Uh, no. OS 9 is a different codebase than OS X. Windows 2000 is the same codebase as Windows XP. So I should have said Windows ME instead of Windows 3.1, and was exaggerating on that point - mainly because I don't think much of OS 9. (Windows ME, like OS 9, was a planned-last-release for its codebase).

  7. Re:choice of benchmark text on Beyond Dvorak via Genetic Algorithm · · Score: 1

    I appreciate that he uses a lot of text for analysis. Ten years of email and C++ code are nice additions. However, the inclusion of the King James Bible and a few other works may have skewed the results somewhat, as shown by the presence of the word "thou" in the most-often used words list

    Then thou dost not use the singular number of the pronoun's second person? I am shockt with thee!

    Seriously, one could just drop the word "thou" out of the results, and any other archaic form. And "th" and "ou" are very common combinations. Remember, too, that he most likely used a modern-spelling Shakespeare, rather than e.g. a facsimile of the First Folio, els his numbres likly wou'd be skeued bye Elisabethan orthographie!

  8. Re:I have a client who is Japanese.. on Reading/Writing Chinese Using Linux? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your client should try OS X before he makes his decision. OS X's keyboard support is somewhat better. Comparing OS 9 to Windows 2000 is a little like comparing Windows 3.1 to OS 9. Not at all fair. Mind you, the one thing you can say for Windows is that it has excellent support for EA languages.

  9. So, How Long Before Footnoting is Banned? on Danish Court Rules Deep Linking Illegal · · Score: 1

    This decision is the best argument I've ever seen for continuing education requirements for the judiciary.

  10. Re:Dead Man's Switch on Zimmermann Suggests Freeing PGP Source · · Score: 1

    I think that software companies should have to submit all source to the copyright office for exactly this reason. The concept of things falling into the public domain includes them being in a useful state when they do, and software won't be.

    Of course, for this to work, you'd have to reverse the Berne convention and go back to requiring copyrights to be registered. (Which probably would be a good thing for the public interest as well, but that's another point.)

    The copyright office's Circular 61 requires that much of the source code be submitted with a copyright registration request, about 50 pages, with trade secrets blacked out. One could imagine a copyright reform requiring that registrations, to be accepted, must be accompanied by the entire uncensored source code of the work to be copyrighted, and that trade secrets which are patentable would be required to be patented before copyright is registered, obviating the need for blocking out trade secrets in the source code. Unregistered works would not get the more onerous protections of the DMCA, but just the standard Berne Convention protections. Of course, the producers would be up in arms. Can you imagine how MS would feel having to register an entire hard copy of the Windows source code to get protection under the DMCA?

    BTW, in case it ain't obvious, IANAL.

  11. Re:Do something worthy on Around the World In 14 Days · · Score: 1

    This guy and others (Bill Gates) have enough money to change the world if they wanted to. Why dont they put their money to some good use rather than stupid crap like this. They could change a small country that is dying off due to starvation or lack of water but what do they spend their money on.

    Perhaps like giving $1 billion to projects focused on the prevention and control of infectious disease. I don't have to like Bill's operating system, but I do have to admire the way he sheds his disposable cash.

  12. Re:Dead Man's Switch on Zimmermann Suggests Freeing PGP Source · · Score: 5, Insightful

    His idea for a Dead Man's Switch license would be very interesting to see implemented. It would be nice to see something like that used in a lot of commercial software.



    They used to have that. It was called copyright. One got a fixed term of copyright, could renew it for a small fee after that term to extend it to 75 years (net, not additional), and then it would go public domain after the 75 years were up. Then someone thought of the Berne Convention, and someone else thought of the Bono Bill, and someone else thought of the DMCA . . .


  13. Re:My experience on Does Drawing on Experience Infringe on Other's IP? · · Score: 1

    I don't see how this is relevant to the question. The questioner came up with the idea on his own, to solve a problem that a previous employer had. He's not borrowing anyone else's ideas, so far as he knows.

    On the other hand, if he can find the same idea in two or three other places, it becomes prior art, and he's all set.

    BTW, reverse engineering isn't relevant here, because the questioner is not a "virgin." He's not only seen the code he'd be trying to reverse, he wrote it.

  14. Re:Just for laughs on Dvorak: Discontinue the Mac · · Score: 1

    I don't really remember reading about it at the time, but it sounds vaguely familiar (I was in high school, and couldn't afford anything fancy for my TI99/4A, which is still sitting in my basement, complete with the programming manual and some carts).

  15. Fetishism on Dvorak: Discontinue the Mac · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seems to me that if Apple just called the iBook the NeXTBook, and called it a NeXT computer rather than a Macintosh, they've have answered all of Dvorak's objections in one fell swoop.

    And immediately have lost 99+% of their market.

    Apple computers are called Macintoshes for the same reason that Microsoft's XP operating system is called Windows: Windows XP has little in common with Windows 3.1, but MS wants to market to loyal Windows customers. If they had called it Whistler, would it have sold so quickly? Not likely.

    Same with the Mac: Apple is basically fooling long time Mac customers into buying a PPC-based NeXT box by falsely calling it a Macintosh and including a few pretty graphics. When you've got a fiercely loyal customer base, you do incremental changes, or disguise sea changes as incremental changes (Carbon, anyone?).

    I lusted after the first NeXT box I ever saw, but couldn't afford the $4K price tag. I snapped up the first NeXT computer I could afford. I don't care that it has an Apple on the lid, I don't care that it still has OS 9 in it (though I'll admit I like such technologies as Firewire, 802.11b, and the like, all of which seem to work better, and to arrive sooner, on the Mac than on Wintel machines), and the Aqua finder is an improvement over the old window manager. There are what, 2,000 people in the world like me? And 2M who'll buy anything with the word Mac on it.

  16. Re:Just for laughs on Dvorak: Discontinue the Mac · · Score: 1

    Of course, you both realize that he's talking about a computer you can talk to as well as one which will talk to. Of course, Apple has a solution for that, too.

    Computer: close window

    Gotta love speech preferences.

  17. And in other news . . . on Visual Studio .Net: Now with more Viruses · · Score: 2, Funny

    The latest release of Nimda has been infected with the Visual Studio.NET virus.

  18. Screenshots on Gnome 2.0 RC1 · · Score: 1

    I wish Gnome would put up some updated screenshots. I guess I'll have to install it myself and make the screenshots myself [isn't that what Open Source is all about? the good angel whispers on my right shoulder].

  19. Do not take the counter offer on Is it Wrong to Accept an Employment Counter-Offer? · · Score: 1

    Your current company cut your pay during a down time. Now they only offer to raise your pay because they're forced to do so, because it's the only way to hold onto you. In other words, they could have been paying you more, they just didn't want to. What's to stop them from cutting your pay again in six months, or laying you off when they find someone else who'll do the work for less than you were making before the counteroffer? After all, if they were into loyalty, would they have cut your pay in the first place?

  20. Re:What's good for the goose... on iPod for Windows (again) · · Score: 1

    Now let's flip the situation. Someone makes an MP-3 player, printer, external hard drive, whatever, that only runs under Windows. Now everyone cries "Why don't they port it to Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, Joe's OS 0.001?"

    Yeah, right, or suppose someone makes a PDA operating system that can only synch with Windows?

    Oh, wait a minute . . .

  21. Re:riminded me of a kvack salesmans show on How Yoda Became an Action Star · · Score: 1

    Not much left for Lucas to do but to steal from the masters.

    Considering the fact that one of those masters was Kurosawa, whom Lucas has acknowledged as a major influence (in the book of ANH, he even makes an explicit allusion to the title of the Kurosawa film that most influenced ANH, Hidden Fortress), I'm not sure it's stealing so much as homage.

    Anyway, it was odd seeing Yoda spinning like a top, but how else could you do it? As someone else pointed out, when the guy is 4 feet shorter with 1/4 the reach of his opponent, just getting inside the opponent's defenses is going to take some fancy footwork.

  22. Re:Interesting grouping of stories... on WebMail Beta II Available · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Bear in mind that Netscape 6.x was, in fact, Mozilla 1.0. [snip] I don't hold it against them for not supporting Netscape 6, since they knew it wasn't really done. -Ster

    No, Netscape 6 was Mozilla 0.6 - Mozilla has gone through 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 0.9.1-0.9.9, RC1, RC2, RC3, and 1.0 since then. Netscape 7 will be based upon Mozilla 1.0

  23. Re:is the ADTI on Responses to ADTI Paper · · Score: 1

    ADTI is a right-wing "think-tank" (and I use the term loosely). AdT himself is often a kind of patron saint for the right, in part because of his skeptical attitude toward extreme democracy.

  24. Re:Who sells their good books? on Used Books: An Actual Internet Success Story · · Score: 0

    Estates. You know, dead people.

  25. Re:I am surprised! on Used Books: An Actual Internet Success Story · · Score: 1

    Personally I find it amazing that anyone would want to buy a used book. But clearly there are people with mindsets completely differnet than mine.

    Some of us want to read books that weren't published in the past two weeks and are no longer in print.