is, what happens to Microsoft's Macintosh products? MS doesn't currently produce an OS that will run on the Mac, but they do produce both Internet software (IE/OE) and Offfice for the Mac, both of which make the current MS a lot of money. And that's not to mention games or other consumer products (e.g. Encarta).
Seems to me like it would make sense to split the Mac group off into its own company, which would still make beaucoup bux, rather than try to split it up along lines of functionality (Mac IE goes with the Internet group, Mac Office goes with the Apps group).
The same question could apply to apps for other platforms, although taken as a whole they're a pretty minimal piece of the company. Or <insert theme="X-Files"> at least the ones we know about . . . </insert> --
I'm proud to say I once almost got kicked out of Microsoft for sending something like this to a relatively large e-mail alias. (I know, I shoulda tried harder.) The one I sent was actually embellished slightly be a friend:
And whatever you do, don't try to remove this virus from your system. If you do, it will immediately mail the IRS and tell them you had $2,500,000 in unreported income last year. From dealing drugs. --
Yes, Canada is not subject to US law, and in general you should be quite happy about that.
Canadians are, however, subject to the whims of US corporations, either directly or through their Canadian subsidiaries. If the DMCA gets shoved down us Yankees' throats, just exactly how long do you think it will be before something similar gets railroaded through Parliament? Whatever your answer, it will be less than that.
You see, increasingly these days corporations seem to think that they are the law. How else can you explain the raid on Jon Johansen, orchestrated by the US entertainment industry, in a country which is even farther away from the US (both geographically and culturally) than Canada?
So apparently "nice" means "agree with everything I do and say." I've spent my time at Microsoft. I won't use the term "nice," since it apparently means something different to you than it does to me, but the people I worked with there were honest, hard-working, well-intentioned and good at what they did. They did not set policy. They honestly felt that what they were doing was good for Joe Computer User, good for the company, good for their families and good for themselves. None of the people I worked with had anything to do with the MS Kerberos authentication, but if they did, it probably never would have occurred to them that they were doing anything bad or even out of the ordinary. They just don't think the same way you do.
As for your not working for Microsoft because you think they're Evil, good for you. I admire people who stand up for their principles. But please don't be too surprised if there are those who don't share your principles, don't live by them, and don't understand why you do. --
When I read this I wondered if you might not build it into a network protocol, something like token ring except with tokens of constant size. Sometimes they'd have noise, sometimes they'd have data, but the tokens would show up every second (or whatever) and every single one would be 10 MB (or whatever) so no one would be able to gain any information by looking at the size or frequency.
Disclaimer: I'ts now 3 AM and I'm typing this is my sleep, so I haven't thought the idea through. So don't flame me if it's a dumb idea.:) --
Well, it clogged up the net enough that my mail ran slow for about a day and a half. Does that count?
I thought it odd that I didn't get a copy of this until I found a note on my provider's news page that they had heard about the virus early in the morning and had put on a filter to block it out. Just one more reason to use them, IMHO. --
OK, so in the scenario you propose I'm a developer who has been granted access to the API through MSDN on the condition that I only write Windows applications and never work on a project like WINE. In that case what's to stop me from writing a program called TESTAPI.EXE that would do the following pseudocode:
say hello test API function #1 using sub testAPI1 test API function #2 using sub testAPI2 test API function #3..#n (you get the idea) report whether the tests are successful or unsuccessful say goodbye
sub testAPI1 test all of the functions of the first API report back the results
sub testAPI2 through whatever... run a test on the API report back the results
(end of code)
Now then. I haven't broken either of the conditions of the licensing agreement. I've just written some code that tests whether these new APIs do exactly what Microsoft saye they will. However, I also release this program under the GPL or the Artistic License or something similar. Now a WINE developer, or anybody else for that matter, can look at my code, see what functions it's testing and has some concrete examples of how the functions are called and what they're supposed to do, and then use that to write a functional equivalent. In other words, assuming the WINE developer isn't tained by the same or a similar license, I've just implemented a clean room environment that will allow a developer to re-implement a library that exposes the API, then test it to see if it works the same way Microsoft's code does (success, failure, all we'd be interested in is the same results). Yet I haven't included a single line of MS code or done anything that would violate the license I signed.
Heck, I wouldn't have to release this under an open source license if the MS license forbade it. I'd just write the app in Visual Basic. It's no secret that you can disassemble VB programs to get the original code back, right down to the variable names you used.
I'm a Perl hacker, so excuse me for saying it, but all we would need would be to get the camel's nose into the tent. --
Oh yes. For a couple of years in the seventies I subscribed to a magazine in Esperanto called El Popola Cxinio (From People's China). They tried hard to give the impression that Esperanto was a Big Thing in China. Probably whatever success it had there was due to its supposed utility in spreading the Maoist revolution. I haven't kept up with la movado for quite a few years so I don't know if the Chinese are still as big on it as they were 25 years ago.
As for serious writing, I don't remember at the moment but I think Mao's Little Red Book was translated into Esperanto, and somewhere in my collection I still have a copy of a couple of children's books in Esperanto from China. One, The Secret Bulletin (La Sekreta Informilo) was pretty much just dada about the Revolution, but the other was a charming little book called "What The Monkeys Did To Get The Moon Out Of The Water" (Klopodoj de la Simioj por Elakvigi la Lunon). -- Iun vi kunfidas, kun ni tiu sidas. --
For being a linguist, your friend has surprisingly little idea what he's talking about.
Esperanto was developed as a means of intercultural communication, not as a "language for people who didn't want to learn another language." Toward that end it was designed to be easy to learn and regular in its rules.
The only way I can parse his argument so it makes any sense at all would be something along the lines of "I learned Esperanto because I didn't want to learn English." When you phrase it that way, suddenly it doesn't sound so ridiculous for two reasons:
1. English could be extremely hard to learn, especially when you're trying to figure out verb forms and spelling. (That's not just a failing of English, of course.)
2. Flash back to the 1940s and the independence movement in India. When the various groups fighting for independence from the British got together, because they had no indigenous common language to fall back on they were forced to communicate in English -- the language of the oppressors they were trying to drive from their country!
This is a case of a phenomenon known as "cultural imperialism." It's the attitude that "everybody should learn English because if it was good enough for the people who wrote the Bible, it's good enough for you." It's the attitude that you can't be properly educated if you can't speak French (especially if you're a Francophone to being with).
Esperanto was developed in part to break down the cultural imperalism Zamenhof experienced in his native Warsaw, where anyone who wanted to be anybody or who wanted to advance in the government was expected to speak Russian instead of Polish (and God forbid you should speak Yiddish).
Granted Esperanto hasn't entirely succeeded in being a univeral medium of communication. Geez, it hasn't even come close. But it's by no means the worthless toy its detractors seem to make it out to be. -- Iun vi kunfidas, kun ni tiu sidas. --
You're right, although this is relatively recent, and I didn't mention it because quite frankly I only remember seeing it once. Usually I just go through the text install on RedHat because that's what I'm familiar with.
This does bring up the only bug worth mentioning that I've found in Mandrake so far. I tried using the drop-down menu at the login screen to switch from KDE to GNOME so I could see how it looked. When I tried to log back in to KDE it kept coming up in GNOME. I had to go in and re-edit one of my configuration files to get back to KDE. (I'm sure there are other bugs in Mandrake, but either I haven't found them yet or they aren't worth mentioning.;-) --
Mandrake is similar to RedHat in that it uses the RPM packaging scheme and has all of its/etc files in the same place RedHat does (unlike Debian and possibly others). It is NOT similar in that it has a number of tools that don't appear in RedHat (yet), and it's graphically-oriented. By default Red Hat 6.1 and below boot up in a text console; Mandrake boots up in a GUI logon screen. It still allows you to get to the consoles with Ctrl-Alt-F[1..6], it just starts you off at a GUI instead of making you run startx to get into X windows.
Oh yeah, there are a lot of places where you can definitely see the RedHat influence. The Postscript printer test page is one outstanding example.:)
I've been using Mandrake for about six months and I like it a lot. I would recommend Mandrake for people coming in from Windows who want a friendly environment, and people who like having a GUI available so they can do more things at one (I fall into this category). I would recommend RedHat to people with older and more confined systems, or who really enjoy tinkering with their X configuration. --
Both of the above, plus back in the 40s and 50s there was a comic strip called "Mandrake the Magician." I tend to prefer this interpretation for two reasons:
1. Mandrake-the-distro's motif is a magic wand and top hat. Well, Mandrake-the-Magician didn't have a magic wand (he "gestured hypnotically") but he did have a top hat. It wasn't blue, though.
2. Mandrake-the-Magician had an assistant named Lothar. Mandrake-the-distribution includes a program called Lothar which bills itself as "the hardware central configuration tool." Superficially it looks a lot like Windows 98's Device Mangler; I haven't tried it to see how it works. --
My point was that somebody is going to get fired, loudly and publicly, over this. Almost certainly whoever put it into the code (you're right on that score), and very possibly his program manager. They're going to want to present the public with the idea that this was something that one guy slipped in rather than something that was mandated by policy -- which in fact I believe to be the case. They are then going to say, in effect, "It's OK now, he's gone, so this is never going to happen again" -- which in fact I don't believe for a minute.
You may be right about the Hotmail thing. I don't know. But you also have to remember that Hotmail is sort of this incidental little service off in the middle of nowhere where they don't even used Windows NT, fercryinoutloud. People do occasionally get fired for lesser crimes than this. (I almost did once, but that's another story for another time.) (They also get promoted for greater crimes than this, but that's yet another story for yet another time.) --
For what it's worth, KIRO Radio (Seattle's news/talk station and CBS affiliate) reported this morning that a Microsoft spokesman -- I don't remember which one -- said that this was (paraphrasing) "a very serious breach of company policy" and "those who did it could be fired." Could be? I'll bet they're publicly hung, shot, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, and bludgeoned to death. And then the real disciplinary action is going to start. --
You can probably pick up most of the first-season episodes without prior knowledge of the series, although it helps. A background in the show helps to understand the fifth-season episodes, although I don't remember it as always being necessary -- with some exceptions, "Day Of The Dead" coming immediately to mind (otherwise the interactions between Leneer and Malden, and between Garibaldi and Dodger, don't make as much sense).
Anybody coming in in the middle of any of the other seasons is probably going to be lost until they watch for a few weeks to catch up with the action. That's something of a drawback, because not everybody is going to put in the effort to catch up. Those who do, though, will be well rewarded. --
Having hit the "submit" button on the above, I got to thinking -- presumably this storm would affect the Aurora Australis (sp?) as well. However, I have to wonder if anyone is able to observe it. Presumably it might be visible to New Zealanders, but (again, I'm not looking at a map) most of Australia might be too close to the equator for it to be visible there. Just wondering. --
Presumably what the comment means is "anywhere on EARTH where it matters," which if we're talking about the latitude of Washington, DC would most likely (I'm not looking at a map) be Finland, all of Scandinavia, Great Britain and Ireland, Iceland, anywhere in Russia Moscow and north, plus at least the northern areas of Poland, Germany, the Benelux countries, and France. Not, of course, to mention a huge chunk of North America not owned by the United States, namely, all of Canada. In other words, a huge percentage of Slashdot readers (unfortunately not those in Australia or New Zealand), assuming it was night there and the aurora was still active (it's possible both could be the case by the time night falls over Europe tonight).
In other words, the comment "Anywhere on EARTH where it still matters" is INCLUSIVE rather than EXCULSIVE. We Americans may be many things, but so far I don't hear any of us laying claims to the Aurora Borealis (heck, most of us have never seen one). We also apparently don't have a monopoly on arrogance and bigotry. --
> Solaris and IRIX are pretty attached to their windowing systems. > I wouldn't count this one as a meaningful criterion.
Perhaps, although I wouldn't know because I've never sat at either a Solaris or IRIX system that used a graphical terminal. You can do a great deal of useful work by in either one by attaching with telnet or ssh and never going through a graphical window. (Granted my experience with both is limited but I've always ssh'd into them rather than going through an attached console.)
In my mind this is another thing that separates Unix from NT. Granted there are ways to attach to NT remotely (e.g. Terminal Server and VNC) but they're not the same thing. --
From what I remember MS added a set of POSIX utilities to the NT resource kit so they could claim POSIX compliance for whatever government contract they were trying to land. But, they are pretty minimal. (Presumably Win2K has these as well, but I don't have a copy at hand to check.)
The Cygwin command line utilities are much better and make the Windows environment a little more comfortable, and let you do useful things like ls -1 | grep 'txt$', but it still ain't Unix. --
You give Steve far too little credit. He has sailed the stormy seas of the business world (and the even rockier shoals of the hobby game industry) for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years now. I believe Raid on Iran and One Page Bulge came out in 1990.
And you're right -- that's quite an accomplishment. --
SJ Games is doing no such thing. WhiteRabbit misinterpreted something somewhere along the way. SJG has never claimed the raid happened because of the subject matter of GURPS Cyberpunk, because the government was completely unaware of Cyberpunk until they examined the hard disks after the raid. Basically, the government knew that Mentor worked for SJG, and that SJG had a bulletin board. That's all they knew. They were on a fishing expedition. They thought they found a big one with GURPS Cyberpunk. Boy, were they wrong.
At any rate, whoever moderated this post up wasted their points. It was either a complete troll or completely uninformed, and either way it doesn't deserve a mapping into the realm of positive integers. --
WP 5.1 was about as far from WYSIWYG as you can get. (I used things like XyWrite and Wordstar and for-cryin'-out-loud Electric Pencil before that, so it's not completely as far away as you can get, but close.:) We, ah, won't discuss WP6. WP7 and WP8 will let you run Reveal Codes and see your page layout, so I don't see why you wouldn't consider this WYSIWYG just because you can see what steps the program took to give you WYG. Perhaps we're just coming at this from two different directions, and that's fine. I can certainly make my way around Word, and when I'm there I like having Show Paragraph available to show me some how I got to where I am, but I learned WordPerfect first and still know it best. (Plus, it's available for Linux, and that's where I spend most of my time these days.) --
I agree that styles are a Good Thing, but I still think Reveal Codes is the one WordPerfect feature that Word should have. I can't begin to count the number of times it's shown me where I made a mistake like, oh say, changing my text to 30-point bold when I didn't mean to.
Not only that, I've used it to do exact placement of frames and graphics on a page. Something like Pagemaker would do a better job of this, but since I had WordPerfect for my hammer, all of those documents I did looked a lot like nails.:) --
I don't follow your logic here. If I can look at the Windows source and the WINE source for, say, GDI.EXE, and they don't look a bit like each other, I think I can conclusively prove that the two works are independent. Or am I missing something?
This would be especially true if you use a "clean room" technique where the people writing the WINE code are working from documentation of GDI.EXE provided by another set of engineers who describe in detail what it does, but don't pass any source code to the people actually doing the coding. Then the coders can swear in court that they have never seen the source, therefore even if it's a workalike it isn't derived from the Windows code and is therefore legal. --
If whatever shareware he's talking about is that good, he just might, but remember this is the Government we're talking about. There are layers upon layers upon sublayers upon strata of bureaucracy to plow through before you get to the point where you hand Joe Developer a check for his shareware text editor. However, since this IS the Government, that check could end up being for 100,000 copies of JoeDevWrite. --
Slashdot Mirror
is, what happens to Microsoft's Macintosh products? MS doesn't currently produce an OS that will run on the Mac, but they do produce both Internet software (IE/OE) and Offfice for the Mac, both of which make the current MS a lot of money. And that's not to mention games or other consumer products (e.g. Encarta).
Seems to me like it would make sense to split the Mac group off into its own company, which would still make beaucoup bux, rather than try to split it up along lines of functionality (Mac IE goes with the Internet group, Mac Office goes with the Apps group).
The same question could apply to apps for other platforms, although taken as a whole they're a pretty minimal piece of the company. Or <insert theme="X-Files"> at least the ones we know about . . . </insert>
--
I'm proud to say I once almost got kicked out of Microsoft for sending something like this to a relatively large e-mail alias. (I know, I shoulda tried harder.) The one I sent was actually embellished slightly be a friend:
And whatever you do, don't try to remove this virus from your system. If you do, it will immediately mail the IRS and tell them you had $2,500,000 in unreported income last year. From dealing drugs.
--
Yes, Canada is not subject to US law, and in general you should be quite happy about that.
Canadians are, however, subject to the whims of US corporations, either directly or through their Canadian subsidiaries. If the DMCA gets shoved down us Yankees' throats, just exactly how long do you think it will be before something similar gets railroaded through Parliament? Whatever your answer, it will be less than that.
You see, increasingly these days corporations seem to think that they are the law. How else can you explain the raid on Jon Johansen, orchestrated by the US entertainment industry, in a country which is even farther away from the US (both geographically and culturally) than Canada?
I wouldn't get too complacent.
--
So apparently "nice" means "agree with everything I do and say." I've spent my time at Microsoft. I won't use the term "nice," since it apparently means something different to you than it does to me, but the people I worked with there were honest, hard-working, well-intentioned and good at what they did. They did not set policy. They honestly felt that what they were doing was good for Joe Computer User, good for the company, good for their families and good for themselves. None of the people I worked with had anything to do with the MS Kerberos authentication, but if they did, it probably never would have occurred to them that they were doing anything bad or even out of the ordinary. They just don't think the same way you do.
As for your not working for Microsoft because you think they're Evil, good for you. I admire people who stand up for their principles. But please don't be too surprised if there are those who don't share your principles, don't live by them, and don't understand why you do.
--
When I read this I wondered if you might not build it into a network protocol, something like token ring except with tokens of constant size. Sometimes they'd have noise, sometimes they'd have data, but the tokens would show up every second (or whatever) and every single one would be 10 MB (or whatever) so no one would be able to gain any information by looking at the size or frequency.
:)
Disclaimer: I'ts now 3 AM and I'm typing this is my sleep, so I haven't thought the idea through. So don't flame me if it's a dumb idea.
--
Well, it clogged up the net enough that my mail ran slow for about a day and a half. Does that count?
I thought it odd that I didn't get a copy of this until I found a note on my provider's news page that they had heard about the virus early in the morning and had put on a filter to block it out. Just one more reason to use them, IMHO.
--
OK, so in the scenario you propose I'm a developer who has been granted access to the API through MSDN on the condition that I only write Windows applications and never work on a project like WINE. In that case what's to stop me from writing a program called TESTAPI.EXE that would do the following pseudocode:
say hello
test API function #1 using sub testAPI1
test API function #2 using sub testAPI2
test API function #3..#n (you get the idea)
report whether the tests are successful or unsuccessful
say goodbye
sub testAPI1
test all of the functions of the first API
report back the results
sub testAPI2 through whatever...
run a test on the API
report back the results
(end of code)
Now then. I haven't broken either of the conditions of the licensing agreement. I've just written some code that tests whether these new APIs do exactly what Microsoft saye they will. However, I also release this program under the GPL or the Artistic License or something similar. Now a WINE developer, or anybody else for that matter, can look at my code, see what functions it's testing and has some concrete examples of how the functions are called and what they're supposed to do, and then use that to write a functional equivalent. In other words, assuming the WINE developer isn't tained by the same or a similar license, I've just implemented a clean room environment that will allow a developer to re-implement a library that exposes the API, then test it to see if it works the same way Microsoft's code does (success, failure, all we'd be interested in is the same results). Yet I haven't included a single line of MS code or done anything that would violate the license I signed.
Heck, I wouldn't have to release this under an open source license if the MS license forbade it. I'd just write the app in Visual Basic. It's no secret that you can disassemble VB programs to get the original code back, right down to the variable names you used.
I'm a Perl hacker, so excuse me for saying it, but all we would need would be to get the camel's nose into the tent.
--
Oh yes. For a couple of years in the seventies I subscribed to a magazine in Esperanto called El Popola Cxinio (From People's China). They tried hard to give the impression that Esperanto was a Big Thing in China. Probably whatever success it had there was due to its supposed utility in spreading the Maoist revolution. I haven't kept up with la movado for quite a few years so I don't know if the Chinese are still as big on it as they were 25 years ago.
As for serious writing, I don't remember at the moment but I think Mao's Little Red Book was translated into Esperanto, and somewhere in my collection I still have a copy of a couple of children's books in Esperanto from China. One, The Secret Bulletin (La Sekreta Informilo) was pretty much just dada about the Revolution, but the other was a charming little book called "What The Monkeys Did To Get The Moon Out Of The Water" (Klopodoj de la Simioj por Elakvigi la Lunon).
--
Iun vi kunfidas, kun ni tiu sidas.
--
For being a linguist, your friend has surprisingly little idea what he's talking about.
Esperanto was developed as a means of intercultural communication, not as a "language for people who didn't want to learn another language." Toward that end it was designed to be easy to learn and regular in its rules.
The only way I can parse his argument so it makes any sense at all would be something along the lines of "I learned Esperanto because I didn't want to learn English." When you phrase it that way, suddenly it doesn't sound so ridiculous for two reasons:
1. English could be extremely hard to learn, especially when you're trying to figure out verb forms and spelling. (That's not just a failing of English, of course.)
2. Flash back to the 1940s and the independence movement in India. When the various groups fighting for independence from the British got together, because they had no indigenous common language to fall back on they were forced to communicate in English -- the language of the oppressors they were trying to drive from their country!
This is a case of a phenomenon known as "cultural imperialism." It's the attitude that "everybody should learn English because if it was good enough for the people who wrote the Bible, it's good enough for you." It's the attitude that you can't be properly educated if you can't speak French (especially if you're a Francophone to being with).
Esperanto was developed in part to break down the cultural imperalism Zamenhof experienced in his native Warsaw, where anyone who wanted to be anybody or who wanted to advance in the government was expected to speak Russian instead of Polish (and God forbid you should speak Yiddish).
Granted Esperanto hasn't entirely succeeded in being a univeral medium of communication. Geez, it hasn't even come close. But it's by no means the worthless toy its detractors seem to make it out to be.
--
Iun vi kunfidas, kun ni tiu sidas.
--
You're right, although this is relatively recent, and I didn't mention it because quite frankly I only remember seeing it once. Usually I just go through the text install on RedHat because that's what I'm familiar with.
;-)
This does bring up the only bug worth mentioning that I've found in Mandrake so far. I tried using the drop-down menu at the login screen to switch from KDE to GNOME so I could see how it looked. When I tried to log back in to KDE it kept coming up in GNOME. I had to go in and re-edit one of my configuration files to get back to KDE. (I'm sure there are other bugs in Mandrake, but either I haven't found them yet or they aren't worth mentioning.
--
Mandrake is similar to RedHat in that it uses the RPM packaging scheme and has all of its /etc files in the same place RedHat does (unlike Debian and possibly others). It is NOT similar in that it has a number of tools that don't appear in RedHat (yet), and it's graphically-oriented. By default Red Hat 6.1 and below boot up in a text console; Mandrake boots up in a GUI logon screen. It still allows you to get to the consoles with Ctrl-Alt-F[1..6], it just starts you off at a GUI instead of making you run startx to get into X windows.
:)
Oh yeah, there are a lot of places where you can definitely see the RedHat influence. The Postscript printer test page is one outstanding example.
I've been using Mandrake for about six months and I like it a lot. I would recommend Mandrake for people coming in from Windows who want a friendly environment, and people who like having a GUI available so they can do more things at one (I fall into this category). I would recommend RedHat to people with older and more confined systems, or who really enjoy tinkering with their X configuration.
--
Both of the above, plus back in the 40s and 50s there was a comic strip called "Mandrake the Magician." I tend to prefer this interpretation for two reasons:
1. Mandrake-the-distro's motif is a magic wand and top hat. Well, Mandrake-the-Magician didn't have a magic wand (he "gestured hypnotically") but he did have a top hat. It wasn't blue, though.
2. Mandrake-the-Magician had an assistant named Lothar. Mandrake-the-distribution includes a program called Lothar which bills itself as "the hardware central configuration tool." Superficially it looks a lot like Windows 98's Device Mangler; I haven't tried it to see how it works.
--
My point was that somebody is going to get fired, loudly and publicly, over this. Almost certainly whoever put it into the code (you're right on that score), and very possibly his program manager. They're going to want to present the public with the idea that this was something that one guy slipped in rather than something that was mandated by policy -- which in fact I believe to be the case. They are then going to say, in effect, "It's OK now, he's gone, so this is never going to happen again" -- which in fact I don't believe for a minute.
You may be right about the Hotmail thing. I don't know. But you also have to remember that Hotmail is sort of this incidental little service off in the middle of nowhere where they don't even used Windows NT, fercryinoutloud. People do occasionally get fired for lesser crimes than this. (I almost did once, but that's another story for another time.) (They also get promoted for greater crimes than this, but that's yet another story for yet another time.)
--
For what it's worth, KIRO Radio (Seattle's news/talk station and CBS affiliate) reported this morning that a Microsoft spokesman -- I don't remember which one -- said that this was (paraphrasing) "a very serious breach of company policy" and "those who did it could be fired." Could be? I'll bet they're publicly hung, shot, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, and bludgeoned to death. And then the real disciplinary action is going to start.
--
You can probably pick up most of the first-season episodes without prior knowledge of the series, although it helps. A background in the show helps to understand the fifth-season episodes, although I don't remember it as always being necessary -- with some exceptions, "Day Of The Dead" coming immediately to mind (otherwise the interactions between Leneer and Malden, and between Garibaldi and Dodger, don't make as much sense).
Anybody coming in in the middle of any of the other seasons is probably going to be lost until they watch for a few weeks to catch up with the action. That's something of a drawback, because not everybody is going to put in the effort to catch up. Those who do, though, will be well rewarded.
--
Having hit the "submit" button on the above, I got to thinking -- presumably this storm would affect the Aurora Australis (sp?) as well. However, I have to wonder if anyone is able to observe it. Presumably it might be visible to New Zealanders, but (again, I'm not looking at a map) most of Australia might be too close to the equator for it to be visible there. Just wondering.
--
Presumably what the comment means is "anywhere on EARTH where it matters," which if we're talking about the latitude of Washington, DC would most likely (I'm not looking at a map) be Finland, all of Scandinavia, Great Britain and Ireland, Iceland, anywhere in Russia Moscow and north, plus at least the northern areas of Poland, Germany, the Benelux countries, and France. Not, of course, to mention a huge chunk of North America not owned by the United States, namely, all of Canada. In other words, a huge percentage of Slashdot readers (unfortunately not those in Australia or New Zealand), assuming it was night there and the aurora was still active (it's possible both could be the case by the time night falls over Europe tonight).
In other words, the comment "Anywhere on EARTH where it still matters" is INCLUSIVE rather than EXCULSIVE. We Americans may be many things, but so far I don't hear any of us laying claims to the Aurora Borealis (heck, most of us have never seen one). We also apparently don't have a monopoly on arrogance and bigotry.
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> Solaris and IRIX are pretty attached to their windowing systems.
> I wouldn't count this one as a meaningful criterion.
Perhaps, although I wouldn't know because I've never sat at either a Solaris or IRIX system that used a graphical terminal. You can do a great deal of useful work by in either one by attaching with telnet or ssh and never going through a graphical window. (Granted my experience with both is limited but I've always ssh'd into them rather than going through an attached console.)
In my mind this is another thing that separates Unix from NT. Granted there are ways to attach to NT remotely (e.g. Terminal Server and VNC) but they're not the same thing.
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From what I remember MS added a set of POSIX utilities to the NT resource kit so they could claim POSIX compliance for whatever government contract they were trying to land. But, they are pretty minimal. (Presumably Win2K has these as well, but I don't have a copy at hand to check.)
The Cygwin command line utilities are much better and make the Windows environment a little more comfortable, and let you do useful things like ls -1 | grep 'txt$', but it still ain't Unix.
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You give Steve far too little credit. He has sailed the stormy seas of the business world (and the even rockier shoals of the hobby game industry) for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years now. I believe Raid on Iran and One Page Bulge came out in 1990.
And you're right -- that's quite an accomplishment.
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SJ Games is doing no such thing. WhiteRabbit misinterpreted something somewhere along the way. SJG has never claimed the raid happened because of the subject matter of GURPS Cyberpunk, because the government was completely unaware of Cyberpunk until they examined the hard disks after the raid. Basically, the government knew that Mentor worked for SJG, and that SJG had a bulletin board. That's all they knew. They were on a fishing expedition. They thought they found a big one with GURPS Cyberpunk. Boy, were they wrong.
At any rate, whoever moderated this post up wasted their points. It was either a complete troll or completely uninformed, and either way it doesn't deserve a mapping into the realm of positive integers.
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WP 5.1 was about as far from WYSIWYG as you can get. (I used things like XyWrite and Wordstar and for-cryin'-out-loud Electric Pencil before that, so it's not completely as far away as you can get, but close.:) We, ah, won't discuss WP6. WP7 and WP8 will let you run Reveal Codes and see your page layout, so I don't see why you wouldn't consider this WYSIWYG just because you can see what steps the program took to give you WYG. Perhaps we're just coming at this from two different directions, and that's fine. I can certainly make my way around Word, and when I'm there I like having Show Paragraph available to show me some how I got to where I am, but I learned WordPerfect first and still know it best. (Plus, it's available for Linux, and that's where I spend most of my time these days.)
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I agree that styles are a Good Thing, but I still think Reveal Codes is the one WordPerfect feature that Word should have. I can't begin to count the number of times it's shown me where I made a mistake like, oh say, changing my text to 30-point bold when I didn't mean to.
:)
Not only that, I've used it to do exact placement of frames and graphics on a page. Something like Pagemaker would do a better job of this, but since I had WordPerfect for my hammer, all of those documents I did looked a lot like nails.
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I don't follow your logic here. If I can look at the Windows source and the WINE source for, say, GDI.EXE, and they don't look a bit like each other, I think I can conclusively prove that the two works are independent. Or am I missing something?
This would be especially true if you use a "clean room" technique where the people writing the WINE code are working from documentation of GDI.EXE provided by another set of engineers who describe in detail what it does, but don't pass any source code to the people actually doing the coding. Then the coders can swear in court that they have never seen the source, therefore even if it's a workalike it isn't derived from the Windows code and is therefore legal.
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If whatever shareware he's talking about is that good, he just might, but remember this is the Government we're talking about. There are layers upon layers upon sublayers upon strata of bureaucracy to plow through before you get to the point where you hand Joe Developer a check for his shareware text editor. However, since this IS the Government, that check could end up being for 100,000 copies of JoeDevWrite.
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