> While Descent 2 was the pinnacle of the series Descent 3 had revolutionary AI.
Actually, the AI in Descent 2 was fairly impressive in certain ways, though you wouldn't usually notice it most of the time. The thing that caused me to first notice it was in a level that I was creating. I'd positioned three Diamond Claws (the nastiest/scarriest of the melee bots) together at one corner, which was just past a fly-through trigger that tripped a producer at the opposite end of the hall (behind you). You could lure two of the DCs out into the corridor and kill them, but the third would always hide stubbornly around the corner until you came far enough to trip the producer. Then, when there were things shooting at you from the other direction, he'd come out to play. I didn't, as a level designer, even anticipate much less plan this. It was the combination of the corner and the trigger that caused it, I think. He knew if he waited he'd have reinforcements. The only suitable way to deal with it was to come flying at top speed through the trigger and around the corner hard enough to push the Diamond Claw just far enough that you could get past the corner long enough to kill him. Pushing a Diamond Claw is *not* a normal strategy in D2, since touching you is how they kill you, but you couldn't leave your back turned to the Seekers (coming out of the producer) long enough to kill him, and you *sure* don't want to turn your back on a Diamond Claw who's that close to you. It was nasty. I had to put some extra shields at that corner to compensate the player. (The other thing I could have done is widen the corridor, but for design reasons I didn't want to.)
> The letter to licensees warns that if they do not provide "a full and > complete certification" in 30 days, SCO may examine legal remedies, > including termination of the license.
30 days to complete a vendor-specified certification, or your license from them is terminated? Is it just me, or is this rougly translated, SCO told every single on of its customers, "We don't want your business any more, unless you're willing to jump through hoops, starting right now"?
> (I know, TV is boring - actually, that helps put me to sleep!)
I don't have the necessary amount of massochism to make myself watch TV. (Really: last time I watched broadcast television was in 2000. Last time I watched cable TV was 1997. I have seen some movies more recently, such as LOTR:ROTK.)
> Luckily, watching TV in the dark (making sure the TV is far enough away > from me to not give too much light) counts as dark.
Heh. I have black plastic over the window and typically turn off my lamps *hours* before bed, so the only light is the monitor and assorted LEDs. The monitor, despite being a 19" CRT, produces less light than you would think, due to my pervasive use of a soft, tertiary color scheme (#FFE6BC foreground elements on #294D4A background elements; *everything* follows this -- my web browser (page colors are always off), panels, Emacs, GTK theme, Qt theme, everything). My family accuses me of living in a cave.
I spend about 165 hours/week indoors, so I get easily more than 10 hours/day of relative darkness. I *do* have three incandescent lamps in my bedroom, but most of the time I don't use them, and I very seldom use more than one at a time unless someone else is present who likes light more than I do.
> How about getting a bedroom light that plugs into the wall and use a > simple timer
I tried that back in high school. I found it to be ineffective. I also tried music, to no avail. These stimuli weren't strong enough to penetrate my sleep. I'm a heavy sleeper.
Actually, I'm blessed in this regard; caffein appears to have no discernible impact on my body chemistry at all. I don't crave it and can go without any for days[1] with no withdrawal symptoms at all, or on the other hand I can drink two quarts of strongly brewed black tea thirty minutes before bed and sleep the same as usual.
Yes, I realize this is somewhat abnormal. My sister's the opposite; if she has as much as one Mountain Dew after circa 3pm, she has trouble sleeping. If she has two cans, she loses all grip on reality and becomes determined to make everyone help her accomplish lots and lots of stuff really fast. (One time we made two (muppet-style) puppets in four hours. I still don't know how we finished them that quickly.) She now only permits herself the caffein-free kind, because she took too much flak for her behavior when on the real stuff.
Anyway, I go to sleep approximately the same time every night only when I use the alarm clock to get up the same time every morning. I get 8-9 hours of sleep typically. That's counting from when I turn out the light and switch off the monitor until the alarm first goes off.
If I don't set the alarm, I sleep in too late and then I'm not sleepy yet at the usual time at night.
[1] Yeah, I drink very little pop. Mostly skim milk and room temperature
tapwater, and sometimes tea, but sometimes I go weeks without tea. Then
my largest source of caffein is chocolate, but I frequently go days with
no chocolate. (Then I binge and eat a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips
in a day, but I'm pretty sure I'm not eating them for the caffein.) In
the summer I drink quite a lot of Kool-Aid.
> The reason for this is that people put their alarm clocks beside their bed.
Not me; I *know* better than that. My alarm clock is on the other side of the room, and I have to step over a large steel laundry basket to hit the snooze bar. (The laundry basket used to be the bottom basket in an old freezer that died. It holds more than twice what any normal laundry basket will, and it's more robust. By far the best laundry basket I've ever had.)
> You might consider having a sleep clinic check you out for sleep apnea. > Just a thought, in case you haven't considered it.
Actually, I'm quite familiar with this condition, because my dad has a pretty bad case of it. (He's on thirteen pounds of CPAP.) I don't believe this is my problem however. I only snore when I have a cold, and I don't get tired during the day unless I'm sick. It's only the first few minutes in the morning that are a problem. I just wake up slowly. FWIW, I fall asleep slowly too; I generally lay in bed and think for about an hour before falling asleep. (That's *not* characteristic of sleep apnea. Right before my dad was diagnosed, he was nodding off if he sat down for more than thirty seconds, any time of day.)
> Strongly insist that they use a modern, good quality web browser
You don't have to insist; just put it in the Internet Connection Kit that you send them and have your installer set it as the default browser and change out the IE shortcuts on the desktop for your approved browser. If the user wants specifically to use IE, they still can, but most will just click the big fat shortcut on the desktop and be happy. Make sure you configure it so that unrequested windows are not loaded by default.
While you're at it, put in a decent mailreader (Pegasus is good). Your users will be believe that your email service is better, because most users can't tell the difference between the service and the client software. Users who try a competitor's service will get frustrated with MSOE and come back to you.
> Konqueror has 'smart' popup blocking where it allows popups that result from > an action I take (click a link, keystroke...) and blocks the rest.
This is what Mozilla does as well. It is IIRC Opera (or was last I knew) that just blocks all new windows. IE, of course, does not have popup blocking built in, though I speculate a future version will. There are third-party utilities available to give it this feature, naturally.
Recent Mozilla.org browsers also have the ability to show an icon in the status bar when popups from the current page have not been retrieved, and the user can retrieve them if desired. Additionally, new windows that are opened by the site in response to a user action can be redirected to tabs if desired. I'm still waiting on the submit-form-and-load-results-in-a-new-tab feature.
Different people feel the addition to different degrees, but caffein for some people is *extremely* addictive, perhaps more addictive than nicotine even.
Fortunately, it has fewer bad effects than nicotine, though it does definitely have some (aside from the addition itself), as any drug does if you take too much.
Depending on how strongly the caffein affects you, you may be able to quit with relative ease (go cold turkey for a couple of days) or on the other end of the scale you may find that the easiest way to get off caffein is to move to the third world. (The first year, you won't drink the coffee because it has bugs in it. After a while, you know it has bugs in it and you drink it anyway. A while later you move back to the US, and you're suspicious of the coffee because it doesn't have bugs in it.)
> I swear french coffee is: > * Make 2 espressos. > * change the grounds > * dump the 2 espresso's back into the machine through the fresh grounds.
No, no. What you do is you grind up the grounds until they're *really* fine, like talcum powder. You then take a large, flat grate, line the top of it with a big sheet of coffee filter materiel, and put a nice layer of the fine grounds on that. Then you steam water up through from underneath, and what drips back down you collect and serve.
> Personally I do a fair bit of research and I find no use for tabs. I can > only read one screen at a time so I don't care for tabs.
You must have broadband. For dialup, tabs are vitally essential, because it is critically necessary to be able to queue a number of pages, do something else (e.g., read an already-loaded page) while they load, and then get to them when they have finished downloading. You can *theoretically* do this with new windows, but who wants 30+ browser windows open, when you only ever intend to look at one of the pages at a time? Plus, most window managers (including, I might note, the one in Windows) don't handle switching between windows in a fashion that preserves the order of the windows, which makes it a real pain to queue pages and read them in order (which you want to do, because the page you queued first is most likely to be finished loading). The tabs are a real life saver for this sort of thing.
Tabbed browsing also makes web-based discussion fora like slashdot and perlmonks viable. Before the advent of tabbed browsing, I found these things totally unusable (over dialup, at any rate) and stuck to usenet. Tabbed browsing has made it possible for me to mostly migrate from usenet over to web-based discussion fora.
Nope, I'm using 1.5 and/. is fine. Try creating a new profile in Mozilla, and see if that makes a difference. If that fails to matter, try doing an uninstall/reinstall of Mozilla.
> Here's the famous, early take on PowerPoint being bad.
As much as I loathe PowerPoint (Powerless and Pointless it is, IMO), I have to point out that the Gettysburg Address example is really not fair to PowerPoint. First off, Lincoln was not the main speaker, nor was his speech considered to be special at the time; the papers went on and on about how wonderful the other man's speach was -- and oh, by the way, the President also said a few words. The reason the Gettysburg Address is famous today, I am convinced, is because it is a model of brevity. It gets to the point quickly, says what needs to be said, and is done. Nobody could complain about Lincoln's verbosity on this occasion. Even if it *were* done in PowerPoint, it wouldn't justify more than three slides tops; if it were part of a longer speech, it would be summarized on only one slide or perhaps even left off the slides entirely. PowerPoint is designed for longer presentations.
That said, I'm not a fan of PowerPoint at all. Were most presentations done as slideshows before there was PowerPoint? No. Slideshows are only one form of presentation, and only a relatively small minority of presentations are well suited to that particular form. Most speeches and presentations would be much better given in an entirely different format -- an extemporaneous speech with notecards, perhaps, with one chart on a poster-sized page at the front, or whatever. Software-related presentations might be given with similar projection-screen technology but using the actual software itself. (Nothing is more cheesy than a PowerPoint slideshow with screenshots in it showing how an app works. That's like a brochure with black and white photos showing how colorful an art exhibit is.)
This statistic may be significantly off, since both of those words have alternate meanings that make more sense with the other word than the meaning you're thinking of.
> I am trying to begin rolling out Linux as an alternative desktop solution > to my enterprise. [...] This is a solution that I need to start working > on TODAY. We currently have a Windows 2000 Server.
If you're using Windows on the server, you probably don't have the Linux experience needed to manage Linux on 150 desktops. Seriously. (Unless there is something you're not telling us about your experience... have you used Linux yourself?) Do you really want to hire somebody else to do your Linux stuff? It'll be cheaper for the company and look better on your resume (i.e., everybody wins) if you do it yourself, but do you have the experience to do it all, right away? Maybe you should start out gradually and get your feet wet?
Linux on the server is just a matter of installing once, configuring once, and then glancing over the slashdot headlines once a day to make sure there isn't any big security issue and when there is installing the update. It's easy, because Linux was made to be like Unix, which was made for a server/network environment, and because there are no user training issues.
Linux on the desktop also can work, but more familiarity is needed IMO on the part of the IT staff. The internet community can help, but 150 is a lot of desktops if you don't have some real experience yourself already. Imagine if you had tried to manage 150 Win95 desktops when all you'd used yourself was DOS and Windows 3. You'd be totally clueless about how to stop some app from running all the time at startup out of the Run registry keys, for example -- a very common thing. Going from Windows to Linux will present similar challenges. A lot of them are under-the-hood things that the end user doesn't need to know about, but *somebody* needs to know about them, and that somebody is you, if you're the IT department. Quick, off the top of your head, how do you get the scrolling features of a wheelmouse to work in XFree? (This is easy, but unless there's something you're not telling us about your experience you won't know.)
I recommend starting with one or two Linux desktops in the IT department and a server. (It doesn't have to be your main server at first; get a cheap used PC off ebay for $100 and see what you can make it do.) When you are comfortable with Linux (three months to three years, depending on your personality and learning pace), then start rolling it out to more systems.
If you have in fact been using Linux for a while and just failed to mention it, then by all means, ignore the above and go forward with your project. I just didn't see anything in your post to indicate that, and when you mentioned a Win2000 server, I figured the server would've logically been the *first* thing you switched away from Windows, so that probably meant you'd not used Linux at all up till now...
> But then I guess you're not old enough to remember when computer manuals came > in three-ring binders.
Yeah, I have several of them that way, why?
> Revisions were distributed as a set of replacement pages.
Umm, okay, so I'm *not* old enough to remember when computer manuals came with revisions. (Revisions? Revisions as in, somebody continued to work on the manual after the customer had already purchased it? Whoah. Are you sure that was just a different time, and not an entire different universe?)
> From what I've seen, no other world religion is so dependent on historical > claims as Christianity.
Well, Islam makes some historical claims, but they are somewhat less grandiose than resurection from the dead. For example, they claim that Ishmael, not Isaac, was the child of promise. (That he was the firstborn is a point not in dispute, though they make much of it.) They do not, however, claim that their prophet was divine, or that he raised from the dead, or any of that sort of thing that gets the skeptics' shorts in a big knot. While some of their claims have to be rejected by Jews and Christians, few of them really raise the ire of, say, atheists. This is rather in contrast to Christianity; atheists *hate* Christianity, because the claims are so grandiose that they simply cannot be considered even for a moment (by the atheist) as possibly being even potentially least bit true, because that would imply that God is very real and very serious about interacting with the world.
Some of the cults also make historical claims, at least in theory, but they are mostly not taken seriously even by most of their own followers. For example, I don't think most JWs really believe that there is such a language as Reformed Egyptian or even know that their church teaches such a thing. (Being a Gnostic group apparently means you don't have to tell most of your members about your actual official doctrines.) The LDS church also makes some rather bizarre historical claims, but again, these claims do not seem to be central to their faith, as many of their members seem to be quite unaware of them.
The eastern religions, because of the nature of their belief system, have no real need of historical claims. In particular, anything derived from Hinduism (including e.g. Budhism) does not hold to a Western notion of truth wherein things are either true or false (not true) and things that contradict one another cannot both be true and so on; conseqently, the truth (in the Western sense) of it of any claims that they might make historically would not be considered important; the claims might be true without being true, and it wouldn't matter if they were true anyway, if you gained enlightenment by them. (This is why Hindus and Budhists are able to embrace other quite different religious such as Christianity as another valid path to truth; they don't view truth in any absolute sense. It's Relativism taken to the extreme.)
Christianity may be unique in that its bold historical claims are crucial to such central points of doctrine that they are totally pervasive within Christianity. The resurection of Jesus from the dead, for example, is vital; it is taught to every child in every Sunday School class in every church across every major denomination (and quite a few minor ones). It is the subject of the second-best-known Christian holiday (Easter; the best-known Christian holiday of course is Christmas or Advent). It is a large part of the subject of the best-known work of serious Christian music (_Messiah_) and of countless hymns, including a number of quite popular ones. People who have never set foot inside a church building in their lives are aware that the Christian church teaches this. It is as inescapable as any Christian doctrine, save possibly really obvious things like the existence of God.
> At some point, orthodox Christian theology boils down to certain historical > claims that cannot be ignored and must be either accepted or denied.
Yes, this is absolutely true. You believe these claims or you don't, but you can't be unaware of them if you are even remotely familiar with the content of Christian teaching, and if you are aware of them they are very difficult to ignore, because of their sheer audacity if nothing else. The God who with his voice formed the universe (in six days, no less) took on human form, lived among men, die
> I just looked at the excerpt of "The Partner, Large Print Edition" but > unfortunately the font was the same as for all the other books.
So hold Ctrl (or the clover thingy if you're on a Mac) and hit + If you want all sites to have larger print all the time, go into your browser preferences, expand Appearances, click on Font, and set a minimum font size.
Your criticism isn't really all that detailed or clear, either.
That said, not having read the book myself, I tend to believe you, primarily because everything *positive* I've read about the book is on the order of "it was a good book I really liked it", and everything even remotely coherent or literate that I've read about it has been rather critical. (Of course, I've not read that many reviews of it, so my sample is probably too small to be meaningful and could potentially be quite skewed.) Still, if you're going to criticize a book, it would be nice if you went into more detail, so we understand what it is you didn't like about it.
> It's significant that the main Google Print page just has an "Intentionally > Left Blank" message.
I realize this is more-or-less beside the point, but that's a reference to Zork, probably the most quoted computer game of all time. It's an allusion that no computer geek would miss.
> But citations (which come to my mind first) don't have a standardized format
There are several competing standardized formats. MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, Terabian, et cetera. Yes, a small percentage of citations do not follow any of these formats, but it is also true that a small percentage of web hyperlinks do not follow the standard format either. (There are various odd ways to abuse ECMA Script to achieve the hyperlink effect without standard anchor horizontal reference markup.) Parsing citations is somewhat harder than parsing hyperlinks, but it is not a completely different category of problem and certainly ought to be possible, in most cases.
Slashdot Mirror
> While Descent 2 was the pinnacle of the series Descent 3 had revolutionary AI.
Actually, the AI in Descent 2 was fairly impressive in certain ways, though you
wouldn't usually notice it most of the time. The thing that caused me to first
notice it was in a level that I was creating. I'd positioned three Diamond
Claws (the nastiest/scarriest of the melee bots) together at one corner, which
was just past a fly-through trigger that tripped a producer at the opposite
end of the hall (behind you). You could lure two of the DCs out into the
corridor and kill them, but the third would always hide stubbornly around the
corner until you came far enough to trip the producer. Then, when there were
things shooting at you from the other direction, he'd come out to play. I
didn't, as a level designer, even anticipate much less plan this. It was the
combination of the corner and the trigger that caused it, I think. He knew
if he waited he'd have reinforcements. The only suitable way to deal with
it was to come flying at top speed through the trigger and around the corner
hard enough to push the Diamond Claw just far enough that you could get past
the corner long enough to kill him. Pushing a Diamond Claw is *not* a normal
strategy in D2, since touching you is how they kill you, but you couldn't
leave your back turned to the Seekers (coming out of the producer) long
enough to kill him, and you *sure* don't want to turn your back on a
Diamond Claw who's that close to you. It was nasty. I had to put some extra
shields at that corner to compensate the player. (The other thing I could
have done is widen the corridor, but for design reasons I didn't want to.)
> The letter to licensees warns that if they do not provide "a full and
> complete certification" in 30 days, SCO may examine legal remedies,
> including termination of the license.
30 days to complete a vendor-specified certification, or your license from
them is terminated? Is it just me, or is this rougly translated, SCO told
every single on of its customers, "We don't want your business any more,
unless you're willing to jump through hoops, starting right now"?
I guess they only want really *loyal* customers.
> (I know, TV is boring - actually, that helps put me to sleep!)
I don't have the necessary amount of massochism to make myself watch TV.
(Really: last time I watched broadcast television was in 2000. Last time
I watched cable TV was 1997. I have seen some movies more recently, such
as LOTR:ROTK.)
> Luckily, watching TV in the dark (making sure the TV is far enough away
> from me to not give too much light) counts as dark.
Heh. I have black plastic over the window and typically turn off my lamps
*hours* before bed, so the only light is the monitor and assorted LEDs. The
monitor, despite being a 19" CRT, produces less light than you would think,
due to my pervasive use of a soft, tertiary color scheme (#FFE6BC foreground
elements on #294D4A background elements; *everything* follows this -- my web
browser (page colors are always off), panels, Emacs, GTK theme, Qt theme,
everything). My family accuses me of living in a cave.
I spend about 165 hours/week indoors, so I get easily more than 10 hours/day
of relative darkness. I *do* have three incandescent lamps in my bedroom,
but most of the time I don't use them, and I very seldom use more than one
at a time unless someone else is present who likes light more than I do.
> How about getting a bedroom light that plugs into the wall and use a
> simple timer
I tried that back in high school. I found it to be ineffective. I also tried
music, to no avail. These stimuli weren't strong enough to penetrate my sleep.
I'm a heavy sleeper.
> Don't take caffeine after ~5 pm
Actually, I'm blessed in this regard; caffein appears to have no discernible
impact on my body chemistry at all. I don't crave it and can go without any
for days[1] with no withdrawal symptoms at all, or on the other hand I can
drink two quarts of strongly brewed black tea thirty minutes before bed and
sleep the same as usual.
Yes, I realize this is somewhat abnormal. My sister's the opposite; if she
has as much as one Mountain Dew after circa 3pm, she has trouble sleeping. If
she has two cans, she loses all grip on reality and becomes determined to make
everyone help her accomplish lots and lots of stuff really fast. (One time
we made two (muppet-style) puppets in four hours. I still don't know how we
finished them that quickly.) She now only permits herself the caffein-free
kind, because she took too much flak for her behavior when on the real stuff.
Anyway, I go to sleep approximately the same time every night only when I
use the alarm clock to get up the same time every morning. I get 8-9 hours
of sleep typically. That's counting from when I turn out the light and
switch off the monitor until the alarm first goes off.
If I don't set the alarm, I sleep in too late and then I'm not sleepy yet
at the usual time at night.
[1] Yeah, I drink very little pop. Mostly skim milk and room temperature
tapwater, and sometimes tea, but sometimes I go weeks without tea. Then
my largest source of caffein is chocolate, but I frequently go days with
no chocolate. (Then I binge and eat a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips
in a day, but I'm pretty sure I'm not eating them for the caffein.) In
the summer I drink quite a lot of Kool-Aid.
> The reason for this is that people put their alarm clocks beside their bed.
Not me; I *know* better than that. My alarm clock is on the other side of
the room, and I have to step over a large steel laundry basket to hit the
snooze bar. (The laundry basket used to be the bottom basket in an old
freezer that died. It holds more than twice what any normal laundry basket
will, and it's more robust. By far the best laundry basket I've ever had.)
> You might consider having a sleep clinic check you out for sleep apnea.
> Just a thought, in case you haven't considered it.
Actually, I'm quite familiar with this condition, because my dad has a pretty
bad case of it. (He's on thirteen pounds of CPAP.) I don't believe this is
my problem however. I only snore when I have a cold, and I don't get tired
during the day unless I'm sick. It's only the first few minutes in the
morning that are a problem. I just wake up slowly. FWIW, I fall asleep
slowly too; I generally lay in bed and think for about an hour before falling
asleep. (That's *not* characteristic of sleep apnea. Right before my dad
was diagnosed, he was nodding off if he sat down for more than thirty seconds,
any time of day.)
> Strongly insist that they use a modern, good quality web browser
You don't have to insist; just put it in the Internet Connection Kit that you
send them and have your installer set it as the default browser and change out
the IE shortcuts on the desktop for your approved browser. If the user wants
specifically to use IE, they still can, but most will just click the big fat
shortcut on the desktop and be happy. Make sure you configure it so that
unrequested windows are not loaded by default.
While you're at it, put in a decent mailreader (Pegasus is good). Your users
will be believe that your email service is better, because most users can't
tell the difference between the service and the client software. Users who
try a competitor's service will get frustrated with MSOE and come back to you.
> Konqueror has 'smart' popup blocking where it allows popups that result from
> an action I take (click a link, keystroke...) and blocks the rest.
This is what Mozilla does as well. It is IIRC Opera (or was last I knew) that
just blocks all new windows. IE, of course, does not have popup blocking built
in, though I speculate a future version will. There are third-party utilities
available to give it this feature, naturally.
Recent Mozilla.org browsers also have the ability to show an icon in the status
bar when popups from the current page have not been retrieved, and the user can
retrieve them if desired. Additionally, new windows that are opened by the site
in response to a user action can be redirected to tabs if desired. I'm still
waiting on the submit-form-and-load-results-in-a-new-tab feature.
Is it possible to go the other way, producing a Qt theme that draws using GTK?
Different people feel the addition to different degrees, but caffein for some
people is *extremely* addictive, perhaps more addictive than nicotine even.
Fortunately, it has fewer bad effects than nicotine, though it does definitely
have some (aside from the addition itself), as any drug does if you take too
much.
Depending on how strongly the caffein affects you, you may be able to quit with
relative ease (go cold turkey for a couple of days) or on the other end of the
scale you may find that the easiest way to get off caffein is to move to the
third world. (The first year, you won't drink the coffee because it has bugs
in it. After a while, you know it has bugs in it and you drink it anyway. A
while later you move back to the US, and you're suspicious of the coffee because
it doesn't have bugs in it.)
> I swear french coffee is:
> * Make 2 espressos.
> * change the grounds
> * dump the 2 espresso's back into the machine through the fresh grounds.
No, no. What you do is you grind up the grounds until they're *really* fine,
like talcum powder. You then take a large, flat grate, line the top of it
with a big sheet of coffee filter materiel, and put a nice layer of the fine
grounds on that. Then you steam water up through from underneath, and what
drips back down you collect and serve.
> Personally I do a fair bit of research and I find no use for tabs. I can
> only read one screen at a time so I don't care for tabs.
You must have broadband. For dialup, tabs are vitally essential, because it is
critically necessary to be able to queue a number of pages, do something else
(e.g., read an already-loaded page) while they load, and then get to them when
they have finished downloading. You can *theoretically* do this with new
windows, but who wants 30+ browser windows open, when you only ever intend to
look at one of the pages at a time? Plus, most window managers (including, I
might note, the one in Windows) don't handle switching between windows in a
fashion that preserves the order of the windows, which makes it a real pain
to queue pages and read them in order (which you want to do, because the page
you queued first is most likely to be finished loading). The tabs are a real
life saver for this sort of thing.
Tabbed browsing also makes web-based discussion fora like slashdot and
perlmonks viable. Before the advent of tabbed browsing, I found these things
totally unusable (over dialup, at any rate) and stuck to usenet. Tabbed
browsing has made it possible for me to mostly migrate from usenet over to
web-based discussion fora.
> Anyone else have the same problem?
/. is fine. Try creating a new profile in Mozilla,
Nope, I'm using 1.5 and
and see if that makes a difference. If that fails to matter, try doing an
uninstall/reinstall of Mozilla.
> Here's the famous, early take on PowerPoint being bad.
As much as I loathe PowerPoint (Powerless and Pointless it is, IMO), I have to
point out that the Gettysburg Address example is really not fair to PowerPoint.
First off, Lincoln was not the main speaker, nor was his speech considered to
be special at the time; the papers went on and on about how wonderful the other
man's speach was -- and oh, by the way, the President also said a few words.
The reason the Gettysburg Address is famous today, I am convinced, is because
it is a model of brevity. It gets to the point quickly, says what needs to be
said, and is done. Nobody could complain about Lincoln's verbosity on this
occasion. Even if it *were* done in PowerPoint, it wouldn't justify more than
three slides tops; if it were part of a longer speech, it would be summarized
on only one slide or perhaps even left off the slides entirely. PowerPoint is
designed for longer presentations.
That said, I'm not a fan of PowerPoint at all. Were most presentations done
as slideshows before there was PowerPoint? No. Slideshows are only one form
of presentation, and only a relatively small minority of presentations are
well suited to that particular form. Most speeches and presentations would
be much better given in an entirely different format -- an extemporaneous
speech with notecards, perhaps, with one chart on a poster-sized page at
the front, or whatever. Software-related presentations might be given with
similar projection-screen technology but using the actual software itself.
(Nothing is more cheesy than a PowerPoint slideshow with screenshots in it
showing how an app works. That's like a brochure with black and white
photos showing how colorful an art exhibit is.)
> Madonna and Flash yields a whopping 217,000
This statistic may be significantly off, since both of those words have
alternate meanings that make more sense with the other word than the meaning
you're thinking of.
> I am trying to begin rolling out Linux as an alternative desktop solution
> to my enterprise. [...] This is a solution that I need to start working
> on TODAY. We currently have a Windows 2000 Server.
If you're using Windows on the server, you probably don't have the Linux
experience needed to manage Linux on 150 desktops. Seriously. (Unless there
is something you're not telling us about your experience... have you used
Linux yourself?) Do you really want to hire somebody else to do your Linux
stuff? It'll be cheaper for the company and look better on your resume
(i.e., everybody wins) if you do it yourself, but do you have the experience
to do it all, right away? Maybe you should start out gradually and get
your feet wet?
Linux on the server is just a matter of installing once, configuring once,
and then glancing over the slashdot headlines once a day to make sure there
isn't any big security issue and when there is installing the update. It's
easy, because Linux was made to be like Unix, which was made for a
server/network environment, and because there are no user training issues.
Linux on the desktop also can work, but more familiarity is needed IMO on
the part of the IT staff. The internet community can help, but 150 is a
lot of desktops if you don't have some real experience yourself already.
Imagine if you had tried to manage 150 Win95 desktops when all you'd used
yourself was DOS and Windows 3. You'd be totally clueless about how to stop
some app from running all the time at startup out of the Run registry keys,
for example -- a very common thing. Going from Windows to Linux will present
similar challenges. A lot of them are under-the-hood things that the end
user doesn't need to know about, but *somebody* needs to know about them,
and that somebody is you, if you're the IT department. Quick, off the top
of your head, how do you get the scrolling features of a wheelmouse to work
in XFree? (This is easy, but unless there's something you're not telling
us about your experience you won't know.)
I recommend starting with one or two Linux desktops in the IT department
and a server. (It doesn't have to be your main server at first; get a cheap
used PC off ebay for $100 and see what you can make it do.) When you are
comfortable with Linux (three months to three years, depending on your
personality and learning pace), then start rolling it out to more systems.
If you have in fact been using Linux for a while and just failed to mention
it, then by all means, ignore the above and go forward with your project.
I just didn't see anything in your post to indicate that, and when you
mentioned a Win2000 server, I figured the server would've logically been
the *first* thing you switched away from Windows, so that probably meant
you'd not used Linux at all up till now...
> But then I guess you're not old enough to remember when computer manuals came
> in three-ring binders.
Yeah, I have several of them that way, why?
> Revisions were distributed as a set of replacement pages.
Umm, okay, so I'm *not* old enough to remember when computer manuals came
with revisions. (Revisions? Revisions as in, somebody continued to work
on the manual after the customer had already purchased it? Whoah. Are you
sure that was just a different time, and not an entire different universe?)
> From what I've seen, no other world religion is so dependent on historical
> claims as Christianity.
Well, Islam makes some historical claims, but they are somewhat less grandiose
than resurection from the dead. For example, they claim that Ishmael, not
Isaac, was the child of promise. (That he was the firstborn is a point not
in dispute, though they make much of it.) They do not, however, claim that
their prophet was divine, or that he raised from the dead, or any of that
sort of thing that gets the skeptics' shorts in a big knot. While some of
their claims have to be rejected by Jews and Christians, few of them really
raise the ire of, say, atheists. This is rather in contrast to Christianity;
atheists *hate* Christianity, because the claims are so grandiose that they
simply cannot be considered even for a moment (by the atheist) as possibly
being even potentially least bit true, because that would imply that God is
very real and very serious about interacting with the world.
Some of the cults also make historical claims, at least in theory, but they
are mostly not taken seriously even by most of their own followers. For
example, I don't think most JWs really believe that there is such a language
as Reformed Egyptian or even know that their church teaches such a thing.
(Being a Gnostic group apparently means you don't have to tell most of your
members about your actual official doctrines.) The LDS church also makes
some rather bizarre historical claims, but again, these claims do not seem
to be central to their faith, as many of their members seem to be quite
unaware of them.
The eastern religions, because of the nature of their belief system, have no
real need of historical claims. In particular, anything derived from Hinduism
(including e.g. Budhism) does not hold to a Western notion of truth wherein
things are either true or false (not true) and things that contradict one
another cannot both be true and so on; conseqently, the truth (in the Western
sense) of it of any claims that they might make historically would not be
considered important; the claims might be true without being true, and it
wouldn't matter if they were true anyway, if you gained enlightenment by them.
(This is why Hindus and Budhists are able to embrace other quite different
religious such as Christianity as another valid path to truth; they don't
view truth in any absolute sense. It's Relativism taken to the extreme.)
Christianity may be unique in that its bold historical claims are crucial to
such central points of doctrine that they are totally pervasive within
Christianity. The resurection of Jesus from the dead, for example, is vital;
it is taught to every child in every Sunday School class in every church
across every major denomination (and quite a few minor ones). It is the
subject of the second-best-known Christian holiday (Easter; the best-known
Christian holiday of course is Christmas or Advent). It is a large part of
the subject of the best-known work of serious Christian music (_Messiah_) and
of countless hymns, including a number of quite popular ones. People who
have never set foot inside a church building in their lives are aware that
the Christian church teaches this. It is as inescapable as any Christian
doctrine, save possibly really obvious things like the existence of God.
> At some point, orthodox Christian theology boils down to certain historical
> claims that cannot be ignored and must be either accepted or denied.
Yes, this is absolutely true. You believe these claims or you don't, but
you can't be unaware of them if you are even remotely familiar with the
content of Christian teaching, and if you are aware of them they are very
difficult to ignore, because of their sheer audacity if nothing else. The
God who with his voice formed the universe (in six days, no less) took on
human form, lived among men, die
> I just looked at the excerpt of "The Partner, Large Print Edition" but
> unfortunately the font was the same as for all the other books.
So hold Ctrl (or the clover thingy if you're on a Mac) and hit +
If you want all sites to have larger print all the time, go into your browser
preferences, expand Appearances, click on Font, and set a minimum font size.
You *are* using a mozilla.org browser, right?
> give us more!
Umm, go look at www.biblegateway.com
> The DaVinci Code is not really all that good.
Your criticism isn't really all that detailed or clear, either.
That said, not having read the book myself, I tend to believe you, primarily
because everything *positive* I've read about the book is on the order of "it
was a good book I really liked it", and everything even remotely coherent or
literate that I've read about it has been rather critical. (Of course, I've
not read that many reviews of it, so my sample is probably too small to be
meaningful and could potentially be quite skewed.) Still, if you're going to
criticize a book, it would be nice if you went into more detail, so we
understand what it is you didn't like about it.
> It's significant that the main Google Print page just has an "Intentionally
> Left Blank" message.
I realize this is more-or-less beside the point, but that's a reference to Zork,
probably the most quoted computer game of all time. It's an allusion that no
computer geek would miss.
> But citations (which come to my mind first) don't have a standardized format
There are several competing standardized formats. MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of
Style, Terabian, et cetera. Yes, a small percentage of citations do not follow
any of these formats, but it is also true that a small percentage of web
hyperlinks do not follow the standard format either. (There are various odd
ways to abuse ECMA Script to achieve the hyperlink effect without standard
anchor horizontal reference markup.) Parsing citations is somewhat harder
than parsing hyperlinks, but it is not a completely different category of
problem and certainly ought to be possible, in most cases.