If it becomes a serious issue, I suspect they will demand that the IT staff be replaced and future EULAs be reviewed by the legal staff before being agreed to. That is, of course, only if it becomes a serious issue in the perception of the bank in question. That will probably not happen, because MS won't make any sudden moves, just nice easy slow gradual ones. Because they _know_ what will happen if they move too suddenly.
> A bank that takes customer privacy seriously and switches away > from using Microsoft products has a better chance of getting my > business.
I'd just like to find a bank that has business hours occasionally. All the banks around here are closed on weekends, Wednesdays after noon, most Mondays ("because of the holiday you've never heard of that we got together with Hallmark and invented"), after 4pm most other days of the week... and it's a pain trying to remember which days they open at ten and which days they don't open until noon. Bah. I'll switch to any bank in my community that promises to be open 8-6 Monday - Saturday except for holidays that a significant percentage of people actually celebrate in a meaningful fashion (beyond exchanging flowers and cards or remarking, "Hey, did you know today is Magellan Day?").
Well, any bank within reason. You know, FDIC member and that sort of thing, not Bob's Bank that he runs out of his house.
Re:Error,Cannot Close Application, Click OK to clo
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 1
This is similar to what I do. I generally write a function that I can use for debugging errors. Originally (for early development) it just prints out the string it's passed, but before letting any users get their hands on the thing I change it so that it prefixes that with an indication that something unusual has happened, probably representing a bug in the program, and that the developers would appreciate a bug report, so they can find the problem and fix it, blah, blah, and here's contact information, and please try to describe what you were doing right before it happened, blah, blah, and if possible please include the technical information (below) as exactly as possible, thanks, the developers, and then finally a big line of hyphens or something and then the string that was passed in. Hopefully with the ability to copy the whole thing to the clipboard, if it's a GUI application.
Oh, and whenever I call the thing I make sure to pass in a unique string that at minimum identifies which call to the function is responsible. I also like to throw in the values of any variables that might possibly be relevant, just because you never know what's going to help you isolate the bug.
That is, of course, only for debugging type error messages, ones that you can't predict what (if anything) will cause them. Fallthrough conditions, the inability to access some file that should be part of the application's installation, sanity check failures, memory conditions, and that sort of thing. Naturally, if I can predict the cause, then I can either prevent it or resolve it in some way, or if it's a user issue then I can at least give the user a more helpful message on how to correct (or avoid) the problem. But in any real app you're always going to have the occasional unpredictable error. Unless you don't _bother_ to do sanity checks, in which case something worse will happen than a bad error message, probably resulting in data loss.
When an unpredictable error happens, the best thing you can do IMO is tell the user that it's a bug (many will still think they must have done something wrong to cause it, but nothing you can say will allay that suspicion for some), and request a bug report. Unless you want to go the route Netscape has gone with Talkback, or even go the whole way and have crash data sent in silently without bothering the user, but your talkback mechanism can fail too, and then what do you do? Anyway, you always _hope_ these errors will never be seen, but the reason you check for them in the first place is because there's the possibility they _could_ be seen. So against that possibility, it's best to instruct the user how to contact you and report the problem. (Unless, of course, it's some kind of one- time contract job and you specifically want to avoid being contacted; in that case you point them to someone else, like whoever hired you.)
> And that is one way in which Unix is superior. In Unix you *can*, > with linking (hard or soft), put a directory inside itself if you > had some reason to.
Doing it with a hard link, however, is an incredibly bad idea, even more problematic than creating a directory name with a space in it, and something that the OS _should_ stop you from doing, because there's no reason good enough to justify it.
Even doing it with a symlink is asking for trouble.
> Your machine boots in 10 seconds?? Damn, how'd you manage to > pull that off?
Some motherboards have an option to skip the POST entirely. With an OS that boots quickly (PC-DOS, for example), you can easily boot in much less than 10 seconds. My old ITT XTRA didn't _have_ a POST, not even a memory check on startup; to get to the BIOS diagnostics, you had to hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc or call the interrupt that the old assembly-language references say is for ROM BASIC. DOS 3.3 used to boot pretty darn fast (yes, at 4.77MHz), until the hard drive died; the floppy drive was slow enough to make it take noticeably longer.
On my current system (a Pentium II, 233) DOS 6 (which I don't use regularly but still have around on a 1GB partition) boots in less than ten seconds once the POST completes; if this motherboard had the option to disable the POST I bet I could boot in that timeframe.
Of course, boot speed doesn't _matter_ as much these days, since I reboot a lot less _often_...
> Thankfully this will go away in the future as ps/2 goes > away in favor of USB
Don't hold your breath. USB is a nightmare, both for the hardware people and for the software developers[1]. PS/2, aside from the hot plugging issue, just works, and people are sticking with it, for the most part. ADB is going away, but that's because Apple has monolithic control of all Mac motherboards, as well as the OS, so they can ensure that USB works on the Mac, at least for hardware devices that Apple controls. The keyboard and mouse that come with the Mac are fine for this reason; the minute you go buy a digital camera or somesuch, though, you start having the same sort of nightmarish driver issues as on the PC. Out of 3 non-Apple USB devices I've tried to install on Mac systems, one of them worked without hunting down extra drivers from the manufacturer's site; one of them took me hours to hunt down the driver (which was very well hidden on Epson's site) but then worked fine, and the third never worked correctly. All 3 devices claimed to support MacOS. It seems to me that few hardware manufacturers have a decent working understanding of USB, and this seems unlikely to change very soon.
Anyway, back to the PC side... some major manufacturers started making "legacy-free" (USB, no PS/2, no serial, no parallel) PCs a while back, but they didn't sell well, and I haven't seen as many of them lately as when they first came out. (The Compaq IPaq, for example, was available legacy-free (the vendor-preferred, more advertised model) or with standard ports, the latter being slightly pricier; it has now been discontinued in favour of the Evo, which just comes with standard ports. Because legacy-free didn't sell.)
Conclusion: PS/2 is not going away. Especially not for keyboards. Serial isn't going away as such either, although before very long most home users won't have any serial devices. (It will remain, because it's VERY firmly entrenched in the industrial specialty device market.) Of the three long-standing standard port types on the PC, parallel is the most likely to go away soonest, IMO.
Then there's firewire... I'm starting to wonder if it will ever actually catch on. I've seen half a dozen systems with firewire ports (granted, five of them are Macs), but I've yet to lay eyes on a firewire device, other than in a catalog or advertisement. Maybe I don't hang out in the right circles, or something. I've seen more cat4 cable than firewire cable.
PS/2 is not _guaranteed_ to be hot pluggable. It's up to the motherboard manufacturer whether to make it hot pluggable. _Most_ motherboards don't do anything worse than fail to reinitialise the device (keyboard or mouse) so that it won't continue to work until after a power cycle, but that's not guaranteed. Some especially nice motherboards will actually manage to reinstate the device on the fly and go on as if it had not been unplugged.
But the reason it says "press [some key] to continue" is because it's possible to get the message when the keyboard _is_ actually plugged in. (I've seen this happen as a result of a stuck key.)
> On an old power mac 66Mhz computer, I once got the error message: > Insufficient memory to complete the requested operation. The > operation? shutting down the computer.
You can get that on Windows 98 when trying to close a window, but the message is more verbose: it suggests closing some applications and trying again. If you do things just wrong, you can get into a situation where you can't close any of the open windows, but only get this message, which suggests that to get around the problem you should close some windows. The only way out is ctrl-alt-delete.
No, singling out a specific entity (person or company) in legislation is a bad idea. Instead, they should just threaten to put a hefty import tax (say, 200% or so) on foreign software licenses, and use the money to fund grants to further the development of domestic and/or open-source software. They wouldn't have to actually do it; the threat, if perceived as even remotely credible, will shut Microsoft up but fast.
Problem with going to Europe is, the exchange rates will eat you alive. Go to Africa or South America, where the US dollar is actually _worth_ something, and your credit cards will last longer and be easier to pay off later. Actually, depending on where you go in South America, and how far off the beaten track it is, you may not _need_ credit cards, since you can get by on astonishingly small amounts of money (once you have paid for the plane tickets, that is) provided you don't exchange it. Of course, if you exchange your dollars for local currency, all your money are belong to the inflation rate... so just exchange what you intend to spend more-or-less immediately.
> Since both do about the same activities, I'd take that as a > sign that moderators are once again on crack.
I suspect it's because the CIA advocate was explaining, if you recall, that it looks good on a resume. The mods probably didn't realise how good being a terrorist looks on a resume, since the guy who suggested it didn't bother to mention that beneficial aspect.
> They are known as a homonyms (two words which share the > same sound, and sometimes the same spelling).
More particularly, if they are spelled the same they are homographs (from a Greek word for writing), and if they are pronounced (roughly) the same they are homophones (from a Greek word for sound). A pair of words can be either, neither, or both. If they're either or both, they qualify as homonyms.
I still don't like the double-o spelling of lose, but it is true that the language is capable of supporting that as well as the existing word loose with very little loss of clarity, since the difference can generally be glorked from context.
Back to topic: I suppose the arrangement he's got going is okay if all you do is browse the web and work with text (which, I admit, is an awefully large percentage of what I do), but how in the name of all that is sane would you use the Gimp? Also, I wouldn't like to be out my always-visible clock on the panel. It's a small thing, but I wouldn't want to give it up. I'd have to look clear across the room at my physical clock then, or something.
Plus, he uses the other fork of Emacs, so he must be a heretic;-)
> Maybe you mean Netscape 4? Mozilla 4 is still long in the future.
Obligatory quote from the 3.0 release notes: "It's spelled Netscape, but it's pronounced Mozilla."
Currently Mozilla is at something like version 5.0 release 1.2 alpha, with the 1.2 beta release due out shortly. (a "release" is also called a "revision", which may be abbreviated "rv".) Netscape 7.0 for example is based on Mozilla version 5.0 revision 1.0.1. Netscape 4.x (right up through 4.79 or whatever the last release was) was based on Mozilla version 4.0, which is very badly obsolete. Yes, it was called Mozilla then (not in the official product name, but in development) and even earlier. And yes, this is all somewhat confusing, but if you look at the user-agent string (which shows on the About page), all the information is there, plus some additional information (e.g., platform and language, and in version 5 the build date as well).
Giving up my change to use my 2 remaining mod points in this thread by posting...
> If it takes a 10-15% performace hit that is significant on > older hardware.
That explains why it's switched off by default, I expect. Some people in some situations will be glad to take a 15% performance hit for the benefits of journaling, _if_ the journaling is of the level of quality that is claimed (i.e., as good as in BFS). The article says (at the end) that Apple wouldn't comment, so they may still be weighing that, as well as the performance issue.
IMO, it's good for them to give people the option. If nobody turns it on, there's no real downside. If some people _do_ see fit to turn it on, presumably that's because they value it.
> If a person wants a "cool" looking web site, and uses features > that don't follow the "code"...
You clearly don't understand web technologies. The whole point of using a markup language (such as SGML or XML) with separate style information (CSS) is so that you can make the site _look_ however you want it to look, without butchering the content in the process. It's not even that hard. You just write according to the specs mostly, and then work around a small handful of browser layout bugs. (So far, I've discovered one significant layout issue in Gecko and two in IE6; that's three. If I did web design for a living I'd probably have discovered a couple more, but really the major browsers these days _mostly_ follow the specs.)
> or if they don't want ugly alt tags popping up
Alt text doesn't pop up unless you use an ancient browser from the days of yore. The relevant standards clearly indicate that it should not, and I only know about one browser released in the last two years that violates this, and it's still claiming compatibility with Mozilla 4 (which was obsolete quite long ago), so it really can't be considered a modern browser. If you happen to _want_ tooltips, there are some provisions for that, but they are totally separate from alternate text.
> why would anyone want to use a single-user OS anymore? Most people who use a multi-user OS treat it as if it were a single-user OS. Actually, most people treat it (it being, if we're talking about most people, Windows) as if it were a single-tasking OS. I don't think the single-user issue was significant to the demise of Be.
> Dead or not, BeOS was one of the best operating systems > I have ever used. I won't go that far, but certainly Be had some innovations that other OSes would do well to consider. Even today. No, I'm not talking about the filesystem.
> If only it had the software/hardware support. I don't think either was really a problem. It had the stuff that actually mattered. (Emacs, Mozilla, what else do you need?;-) It ran fine on my hardware. Now, it has problems with some newer hardware (USB, 3D acceleration,...), but that's because its development waned and stopped; it was up to approximately current at the time of the release of R5. At the time, it had better hardware support in some areas than Linux. (For example, BeOS had drivers for some software modems before Linux did.) It has rotted since things fell apart, but that's a symptom, not the problem.
BeOS needed two things. Advertising and OEMs. Oh, and there were a handful of important missing features, such as the ability to set colour prefs globally, but the Mac is _still_ missing that one, so it must not be fatal. Java support was lousy, but there have been issues with that on the Mac also, as recently as a year ago, so again, it must not be fatal.
BeOS, like I said, needed two thing: advertising and OEMs. But instead of trying to sell the system, Be kept trying to sell the technology (to Apple, to Palm, to embedded markets, to game developers, and who knows where else that they didn't make public). I don't know whether they could have successfully sold the system as a desktop system, but I wish they would have tried a little harder to do that. AFAIK there was never _one_ TV commercial for BeOS systems. I know commercials cost money, but look where not advertising ended them. You have to try something, and the things they tried didn't work.
> It booted faster than DOS(and I'm not kidding) Maybe not kidding, but you're exaggerating fiercely. The time DOS required to boot was dwarfed several orders of magnitude by the time the BIOS needed to do the POST; to say the same of BeOS would be a significant hyperbole. It did boot much faster than Windows or Linux, but as the other poster pointed out, boot time is really not a big deal to most users.
> It had one of the best browsers I've ever seen Err, I don't know what you saw in NetPositive. It didn't seem like a very good browser to me. This really didn't matter though. First, most users don't care beans about the quality of the browser (hence the popularity of IE4 in its day, which was nothing to write home about either), and second, you could download and install Netscape 4 (which at the time was not seeming so ancient; today of course you can get Mozilla for BeOS).
> and it was very very slim That really only mattered for dual-boot scenarios. I will say, BeOS is a multibooter's dream come true. "Plays well with others" could just about be its official motto. It also had an excellent driver model, which basically didn't require any changes when hardware was swapped out -- very user friendly, that. HardDrake is only just now beginning to approach this. It also had a couple of nice features, such as having a different res and colour depth for each workspace.
> What they needed is a linux binary emulator
Way more trouble than it would be worth. An X11/GTK+/Qt library done as a wrapper around the native GUI would have been orders of magnitude easier to do and gained source compatibility, which would be plenty good enough. And yeah, I know FreeBSD does it, but OSS does a lot of things in different ways from how companies do them.
> and a well designed wine-like windows binary emulator Even harder to do than the Linux binary emulator, because Windows is more poorly documented (in terms of its internals and ABI). It would also be more worth doing, but the amount of work involved could be prohibitive, and performance would probably not be great. Besides, OS/2 went down this path, and the only reason they didn't go bankrupt is because IBM has lots of other irons in the fire besides the OS.
> I stopped using it because it didn't support my NIC, and when i > sat down to port the driver from BSD i found myself lost in the > lack of debugging documentation and gave up.
I think Be made a mistake getting out of hardware. They got out because Apple wasn't cooperating any longer, and they ported to x86, and as far as it went that was fine, but while offering up a version that will run on various x86 hardware with an HCL is no bad thing, I think they still should have sold prebuilt beboxen, in an x86 variety. And I think they should have marketed them.
Now, I think Palm should come to terms with the realisation that they aren't going to develop BeOS (unless they _are_ doing so, in which case great), and get what PR they can out of the deal by open-sourcing whatever parts of the BeOS source code they have the rights to. (Obviously there would be some pieces of BeOS that were sublicensed and could not be released, like there were some bits of Communicator and StarOffice that couldn't be released with the rest, but that's a minor complication.)
Of course, after it's been boiling intensively for a minute, turn off your vacuum pump and let the pressure back in, and immediately take the dome off and pick up the beaker and drink some more of the water.
Draw some tap water into a large beaker with some ice cubes, take a big sip, then stick it under a glass dome and crank down the pressure until you can get it to a nice rolling boil without melting the ice. You can impress people of all ages with that one. The trouble will be in convincing them it's science, as opposed to magic.
# Schumann compared the process with distortions that appear in # videotaped images of computer screens, which may show lines that # are invisible to the naked eye. Rather than produce accidental # disturbances, he said, Cinea plans to create specific disturbances # that it can control.
Great, _deliberate_ flicker. Makes me want to go out and watch these right now, what about anyone else?
Is installation getting easier or better doc'ed?
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FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE
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I'd like to try out BSD, but last time I tried FreeBSD (4.4 IIRC) I was unable to get it to install, in large part due to the really bizarre way it handles partitions. Now, I may not be an expert, but I'm no newbie to partitioning either; I've got DOS 6, two distinct Windows versions, and two different Linux distros on my main home system now, plus a couple of hosted systems (BeOS and QNX, both within disk images on FAT partitions). My friends think I'm crazy because I run fdisk in a window while X11 or the Win32 GUI is running. But something to do with what partitions can be booted (my only free partitions are on the second drive, and well past 1024 cyllinders) or with the disklabel thingy has been preventing me from getting it to work.
Is there an installation guide that explains in detail what has to be done to get it to work in a multiboot scenerio like mine?
Slashdot Mirror
If it becomes a serious issue, I suspect they will demand that the IT
staff be replaced and future EULAs be reviewed by the legal staff
before being agreed to. That is, of course, only if it becomes a
serious issue in the perception of the bank in question. That will
probably not happen, because MS won't make any sudden moves, just
nice easy slow gradual ones. Because they _know_ what will happen
if they move too suddenly.
> A bank that takes customer privacy seriously and switches away
> from using Microsoft products has a better chance of getting my
> business.
I'd just like to find a bank that has business hours occasionally.
All the banks around here are closed on weekends, Wednesdays after
noon, most Mondays ("because of the holiday you've never heard of
that we got together with Hallmark and invented"), after 4pm most
other days of the week... and it's a pain trying to remember which
days they open at ten and which days they don't open until noon.
Bah. I'll switch to any bank in my community that promises to be
open 8-6 Monday - Saturday except for holidays that a significant
percentage of people actually celebrate in a meaningful fashion
(beyond exchanging flowers and cards or remarking, "Hey, did you
know today is Magellan Day?").
Well, any bank within reason. You know, FDIC member and that sort
of thing, not Bob's Bank that he runs out of his house.
> C++ is clearly a work of the devil.
Agreed.
> Java java java!!
Ick, ick, ick. Far too similar to C++. I like lisp and Perl better.
Darn straight. The correct plural is unices.
This is similar to what I do. I generally write a function that I can
use for debugging errors. Originally (for early development) it just
prints out the string it's passed, but before letting any users get
their hands on the thing I change it so that it prefixes that with an
indication that something unusual has happened, probably representing
a bug in the program, and that the developers would appreciate a bug
report, so they can find the problem and fix it, blah, blah, and
here's contact information, and please try to describe what you were
doing right before it happened, blah, blah, and if possible please
include the technical information (below) as exactly as possible,
thanks, the developers, and then finally a big line of hyphens or
something and then the string that was passed in. Hopefully with
the ability to copy the whole thing to the clipboard, if it's a
GUI application.
Oh, and whenever I call the thing I make sure to pass in a unique
string that at minimum identifies which call to the function is
responsible. I also like to throw in the values of any variables
that might possibly be relevant, just because you never know what's
going to help you isolate the bug.
That is, of course, only for debugging type error messages, ones that
you can't predict what (if anything) will cause them. Fallthrough
conditions, the inability to access some file that should be part
of the application's installation, sanity check failures, memory
conditions, and that sort of thing. Naturally, if I can predict
the cause, then I can either prevent it or resolve it in some way,
or if it's a user issue then I can at least give the user a more
helpful message on how to correct (or avoid) the problem. But in
any real app you're always going to have the occasional unpredictable
error. Unless you don't _bother_ to do sanity checks, in which case
something worse will happen than a bad error message, probably
resulting in data loss.
When an unpredictable error happens, the best thing you can do IMO
is tell the user that it's a bug (many will still think they must
have done something wrong to cause it, but nothing you can say will
allay that suspicion for some), and request a bug report. Unless
you want to go the route Netscape has gone with Talkback, or even
go the whole way and have crash data sent in silently without
bothering the user, but your talkback mechanism can fail too, and
then what do you do? Anyway, you always _hope_ these errors will
never be seen, but the reason you check for them in the first place
is because there's the possibility they _could_ be seen. So against
that possibility, it's best to instruct the user how to contact you
and report the problem. (Unless, of course, it's some kind of one-
time contract job and you specifically want to avoid being contacted;
in that case you point them to someone else, like whoever hired you.)
> And that is one way in which Unix is superior. In Unix you *can*,
> with linking (hard or soft), put a directory inside itself if you
> had some reason to.
Doing it with a hard link, however, is an incredibly bad idea, even
more problematic than creating a directory name with a space in it,
and something that the OS _should_ stop you from doing, because
there's no reason good enough to justify it.
Even doing it with a symlink is asking for trouble.
> Your machine boots in 10 seconds?? Damn, how'd you manage to
> pull that off?
Some motherboards have an option to skip the POST entirely. With
an OS that boots quickly (PC-DOS, for example), you can easily boot
in much less than 10 seconds. My old ITT XTRA didn't _have_ a POST,
not even a memory check on startup; to get to the BIOS diagnostics,
you had to hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc or call the interrupt that the old
assembly-language references say is for ROM BASIC. DOS 3.3 used to
boot pretty darn fast (yes, at 4.77MHz), until the hard drive died;
the floppy drive was slow enough to make it take noticeably longer.
On my current system (a Pentium II, 233) DOS 6 (which I don't use
regularly but still have around on a 1GB partition) boots in less
than ten seconds once the POST completes; if this motherboard had
the option to disable the POST I bet I could boot in that timeframe.
Of course, boot speed doesn't _matter_ as much these days, since
I reboot a lot less _often_...
> Thankfully this will go away in the future as ps/2 goes
> away in favor of USB
Don't hold your breath. USB is a nightmare, both for the hardware
people and for the software developers[1]. PS/2, aside from the hot
plugging issue, just works, and people are sticking with it, for
the most part. ADB is going away, but that's because Apple has
monolithic control of all Mac motherboards, as well as the OS, so
they can ensure that USB works on the Mac, at least for hardware
devices that Apple controls. The keyboard and mouse that come with
the Mac are fine for this reason; the minute you go buy a digital
camera or somesuch, though, you start having the same sort of
nightmarish driver issues as on the PC. Out of 3 non-Apple USB
devices I've tried to install on Mac systems, one of them worked
without hunting down extra drivers from the manufacturer's site;
one of them took me hours to hunt down the driver (which was very
well hidden on Epson's site) but then worked fine, and the third
never worked correctly. All 3 devices claimed to support MacOS.
It seems to me that few hardware manufacturers have a decent
working understanding of USB, and this seems unlikely to change
very soon.
Anyway, back to the PC side... some major manufacturers started
making "legacy-free" (USB, no PS/2, no serial, no parallel) PCs a
while back, but they didn't sell well, and I haven't seen as many
of them lately as when they first came out. (The Compaq IPaq, for
example, was available legacy-free (the vendor-preferred, more
advertised model) or with standard ports, the latter being slightly
pricier; it has now been discontinued in favour of the Evo, which
just comes with standard ports. Because legacy-free didn't sell.)
Conclusion: PS/2 is not going away. Especially not for keyboards.
Serial isn't going away as such either, although before very long
most home users won't have any serial devices. (It will remain,
because it's VERY firmly entrenched in the industrial specialty
device market.) Of the three long-standing standard port types
on the PC, parallel is the most likely to go away soonest, IMO.
Then there's firewire... I'm starting to wonder if it will ever
actually catch on. I've seen half a dozen systems with firewire
ports (granted, five of them are Macs), but I've yet to lay eyes
on a firewire device, other than in a catalog or advertisement.
Maybe I don't hang out in the right circles, or something. I've
seen more cat4 cable than firewire cable.
[1] Oh, and for users too. Do they count anymore?
> ADB and PS/2 keyboards are not hot pluggable
PS/2 is not _guaranteed_ to be hot pluggable. It's up to the
motherboard manufacturer whether to make it hot pluggable. _Most_
motherboards don't do anything worse than fail to reinitialise the
device (keyboard or mouse) so that it won't continue to work until
after a power cycle, but that's not guaranteed. Some especially
nice motherboards will actually manage to reinstate the device
on the fly and go on as if it had not been unplugged.
But the reason it says "press [some key] to continue" is because
it's possible to get the message when the keyboard _is_ actually
plugged in. (I've seen this happen as a result of a stuck key.)
> On an old power mac 66Mhz computer, I once got the error message:
> Insufficient memory to complete the requested operation. The
> operation? shutting down the computer.
You can get that on Windows 98 when trying to close a window, but the
message is more verbose: it suggests closing some applications and
trying again. If you do things just wrong, you can get into a
situation where you can't close any of the open windows, but only
get this message, which suggests that to get around the problem you
should close some windows. The only way out is ctrl-alt-delete.
> To forbid the sale of anything Microsoft owns.
No, singling out a specific entity (person or company) in legislation
is a bad idea. Instead, they should just threaten to put a hefty
import tax (say, 200% or so) on foreign software licenses, and use
the money to fund grants to further the development of domestic and/or
open-source software. They wouldn't have to actually do it; the threat,
if perceived as even remotely credible, will shut Microsoft up but fast.
They are only called Bruce by eachother, and only to keep things clear. Their real names are Eric.
Problem with going to Europe is, the exchange rates will eat you
alive. Go to Africa or South America, where the US dollar is
actually _worth_ something, and your credit cards will last longer
and be easier to pay off later. Actually, depending on where you
go in South America, and how far off the beaten track it is, you
may not _need_ credit cards, since you can get by on astonishingly
small amounts of money (once you have paid for the plane tickets,
that is) provided you don't exchange it. Of course, if you exchange
your dollars for local currency, all your money are belong to the
inflation rate... so just exchange what you intend to spend
more-or-less immediately.
> Since both do about the same activities, I'd take that as a
> sign that moderators are once again on crack.
I suspect it's because the CIA advocate was explaining, if you recall,
that it looks good on a resume. The mods probably didn't realise how
good being a terrorist looks on a resume, since the guy who suggested
it didn't bother to mention that beneficial aspect.
> They are known as a homonyms (two words which share the
;-)
> same sound, and sometimes the same spelling).
More particularly, if they are spelled the same they are homographs
(from a Greek word for writing), and if they are pronounced (roughly)
the same they are homophones (from a Greek word for sound). A pair
of words can be either, neither, or both. If they're either or both,
they qualify as homonyms.
I still don't like the double-o spelling of lose, but it is true
that the language is capable of supporting that as well as the
existing word loose with very little loss of clarity, since the
difference can generally be glorked from context.
Back to topic: I suppose the arrangement he's got going is okay
if all you do is browse the web and work with text (which, I admit,
is an awefully large percentage of what I do), but how in the name
of all that is sane would you use the Gimp? Also, I wouldn't like
to be out my always-visible clock on the panel. It's a small thing,
but I wouldn't want to give it up. I'd have to look clear across
the room at my physical clock then, or something.
Plus, he uses the other fork of Emacs, so he must be a heretic
> Maybe you mean Netscape 4? Mozilla 4 is still long in the future.
Obligatory quote from the 3.0 release notes:
"It's spelled Netscape, but it's pronounced Mozilla."
Currently Mozilla is at something like version 5.0 release 1.2
alpha, with the 1.2 beta release due out shortly. (a "release"
is also called a "revision", which may be abbreviated "rv".)
Netscape 7.0 for example is based on Mozilla version 5.0 revision
1.0.1. Netscape 4.x (right up through 4.79 or whatever the last
release was) was based on Mozilla version 4.0, which is very
badly obsolete. Yes, it was called Mozilla then (not in the
official product name, but in development) and even earlier.
And yes, this is all somewhat confusing, but if you look at the
user-agent string (which shows on the About page), all the
information is there, plus some additional information (e.g.,
platform and language, and in version 5 the build date as well).
Giving up my change to use my 2 remaining mod points in this
thread by posting...
> If it takes a 10-15% performace hit that is significant on
> older hardware.
That explains why it's switched off by default, I expect. Some
people in some situations will be glad to take a 15% performance
hit for the benefits of journaling, _if_ the journaling is of the
level of quality that is claimed (i.e., as good as in BFS). The
article says (at the end) that Apple wouldn't comment, so they
may still be weighing that, as well as the performance issue.
IMO, it's good for them to give people the option. If nobody
turns it on, there's no real downside. If some people _do_ see
fit to turn it on, presumably that's because they value it.
> If a person wants a "cool" looking web site, and uses features ...
> that don't follow the "code"
You clearly don't understand web technologies. The whole point
of using a markup language (such as SGML or XML) with separate
style information (CSS) is so that you can make the site _look_
however you want it to look, without butchering the content in
the process. It's not even that hard. You just write according
to the specs mostly, and then work around a small handful of
browser layout bugs. (So far, I've discovered one significant
layout issue in Gecko and two in IE6; that's three. If I did
web design for a living I'd probably have discovered a couple
more, but really the major browsers these days _mostly_ follow
the specs.)
> or if they don't want ugly alt tags popping up
Alt text doesn't pop up unless you use an ancient browser from
the days of yore. The relevant standards clearly indicate that
it should not, and I only know about one browser released in
the last two years that violates this, and it's still claiming
compatibility with Mozilla 4 (which was obsolete quite long ago),
so it really can't be considered a modern browser. If you happen
to _want_ tooltips, there are some provisions for that, but they
are totally separate from alternate text.
> why would anyone want to use a single-user OS anymore?
Most people who use a multi-user OS treat it as if it were
a single-user OS. Actually, most people treat it (it being,
if we're talking about most people, Windows) as if it were
a single-tasking OS. I don't think the single-user issue
was significant to the demise of Be.
> Dead or not, BeOS was one of the best operating systems
;-) ...), but that's because its
> I have ever used.
I won't go that far, but certainly Be had some innovations that other
OSes would do well to consider. Even today. No, I'm not talking
about the filesystem.
> If only it had the software/hardware support.
I don't think either was really a problem. It had the stuff that
actually mattered. (Emacs, Mozilla, what else do you need?
It ran fine on my hardware. Now, it has problems with some newer
hardware (USB, 3D acceleration,
development waned and stopped; it was up to approximately current
at the time of the release of R5. At the time, it had better
hardware support in some areas than Linux. (For example, BeOS had
drivers for some software modems before Linux did.) It has rotted
since things fell apart, but that's a symptom, not the problem.
BeOS needed two things. Advertising and OEMs. Oh, and there were
a handful of important missing features, such as the ability to set
colour prefs globally, but the Mac is _still_ missing that one, so
it must not be fatal. Java support was lousy, but there have been
issues with that on the Mac also, as recently as a year ago, so
again, it must not be fatal.
BeOS, like I said, needed two thing: advertising and OEMs. But
instead of trying to sell the system, Be kept trying to sell the
technology (to Apple, to Palm, to embedded markets, to game
developers, and who knows where else that they didn't make public).
I don't know whether they could have successfully sold the system
as a desktop system, but I wish they would have tried a little
harder to do that. AFAIK there was never _one_ TV commercial for
BeOS systems. I know commercials cost money, but look where not
advertising ended them. You have to try something, and the things
they tried didn't work.
> It booted faster than DOS(and I'm not kidding)
Maybe not kidding, but you're exaggerating fiercely. The time DOS
required to boot was dwarfed several orders of magnitude by the
time the BIOS needed to do the POST; to say the same of BeOS would
be a significant hyperbole. It did boot much faster than Windows
or Linux, but as the other poster pointed out, boot time is really
not a big deal to most users.
> It had one of the best browsers I've ever seen
Err, I don't know what you saw in NetPositive. It didn't seem like
a very good browser to me. This really didn't matter though. First,
most users don't care beans about the quality of the browser (hence
the popularity of IE4 in its day, which was nothing to write home
about either), and second, you could download and install Netscape 4
(which at the time was not seeming so ancient; today of course you
can get Mozilla for BeOS).
> and it was very very slim
That really only mattered for dual-boot scenarios. I will say, BeOS
is a multibooter's dream come true. "Plays well with others" could
just about be its official motto. It also had an excellent driver
model, which basically didn't require any changes when hardware was
swapped out -- very user friendly, that. HardDrake is only just now
beginning to approach this. It also had a couple of nice features,
such as having a different res and colour depth for each workspace.
> What they needed is a linux binary emulator
Way more trouble than it would be worth. An X11/GTK+/Qt library
done as a wrapper around the native GUI would have been orders of
magnitude easier to do and gained source compatibility, which would
be plenty good enough. And yeah, I know FreeBSD does it, but OSS
does a lot of things in different ways from how companies do them.
> and a well designed wine-like windows binary emulator
Even harder to do than the Linux binary emulator, because Windows
is more poorly documented (in terms of its internals and ABI).
It would also be more worth doing, but the amount of work involved
could be prohibitive, and performance would probably not be great.
Besides, OS/2 went down this path, and the only reason they didn't
go bankrupt is because IBM has lots of other irons in the fire
besides the OS.
> I stopped using it because it didn't support my NIC, and when i
> sat down to port the driver from BSD i found myself lost in the
> lack of debugging documentation and gave up.
I think Be made a mistake getting out of hardware. They got out
because Apple wasn't cooperating any longer, and they ported to
x86, and as far as it went that was fine, but while offering up
a version that will run on various x86 hardware with an HCL is no
bad thing, I think they still should have sold prebuilt beboxen,
in an x86 variety. And I think they should have marketed them.
Now, I think Palm should come to terms with the realisation that
they aren't going to develop BeOS (unless they _are_ doing so, in
which case great), and get what PR they can out of the deal by
open-sourcing whatever parts of the BeOS source code they have the
rights to. (Obviously there would be some pieces of BeOS that were
sublicensed and could not be released, like there were some bits
of Communicator and StarOffice that couldn't be released with the
rest, but that's a minor complication.)
> Would this be possible with a damp finger and standard french
> fry grease heated to 350 F?
Don't do this. Your finger might be fine, but you could get some
nasty burns in random other locations as the grease splatters.
Of course, after it's been boiling intensively for a minute,
turn off your vacuum pump and let the pressure back in, and
immediately take the dome off and pick up the beaker and
drink some more of the water.
Draw some tap water into a large beaker with some ice cubes, take a
big sip, then stick it under a glass dome and crank down the pressure
until you can get it to a nice rolling boil without melting the ice.
You can impress people of all ages with that one. The trouble will
be in convincing them it's science, as opposed to magic.
# Schumann compared the process with distortions that appear in
# videotaped images of computer screens, which may show lines that
# are invisible to the naked eye. Rather than produce accidental
# disturbances, he said, Cinea plans to create specific disturbances
# that it can control.
Great, _deliberate_ flicker. Makes me want to go out and watch
these right now, what about anyone else?
I'd like to try out BSD, but last time I tried FreeBSD (4.4 IIRC)
I was unable to get it to install, in large part due to the really
bizarre way it handles partitions. Now, I may not be an expert,
but I'm no newbie to partitioning either; I've got DOS 6, two
distinct Windows versions, and two different Linux distros on my
main home system now, plus a couple of hosted systems (BeOS and
QNX, both within disk images on FAT partitions). My friends think
I'm crazy because I run fdisk in a window while X11 or the Win32
GUI is running. But something to do with what partitions can be
booted (my only free partitions are on the second drive, and well
past 1024 cyllinders) or with the disklabel thingy has been
preventing me from getting it to work.
Is there an installation guide that explains in detail what has to
be done to get it to work in a multiboot scenerio like mine?