There's a strong parallel between film & TV and video games. Both have turned into huge, overblown "industries" dominated by scads of cash. But in both cases cash can be observed to have little to do with actually producing any substantive value. Is "Friends" getting less vapid and idiotic as the cost per episode vaults ever higher? Wasn't "Waterworld" a gripping flick? Is "Diablo" really that much different from, or better than Nethack? Take the Pangea (Brian Greenstone) example - I don't necessarily love his games (they're good but generally not hugely gripping), but the lack isn't in those areas that money can contribute to. Gameplay is either there or it's not, like real emotional, intellectual or artistic value in a film. Money won't help here, and usually it hurts by raising the stakes too high and making people and projects inflexible. Classic games succeeded because they were *just games* - they didn't have stockholders to answer to. However, the apparent dominance of big industry in movies doesn't mean there aren't lots and lots of interesting indie films being produced - there are and always have been. Moreover, the film industry pretty much recognises that it's forever creatively bankrupt and looks to indie stock for new ideas. This is even easier in games, where the cost of entry is lower. There is a baseline cost to making a film even when shot on DV, but the baseline cost of game production is just the use of computing machinery similar to that required to play the game (which shouldn't overreach anyway if you want a decent audience). It's also not true that game innovation ever went away. Lots of games in recent years have been done in Java or Flash or otherwise made available via a browser, and some are even huge hits, though you might not recognise them (ever played Popcap's"Diamond Mine"?). They just tend to get lost in all the dross, and especially to fly under your radar if yourOf course, in film the indie players are inevitably co-opted and end up just producing more pap (again, excess of money contributes to this). Not to overstretch an analogy.;)
You'd be surprised how many Unix hackers are also Mac people. You'd also be surprised how much the two have in common. Both philosophies pursue clean effective design, one starting in the kernel (which extrapolates out into the user world) and one in the user interface (whose design sends tendrils back into the OS).
The East/West thing might have some validity, but not enough to make a difference - all of them are smart people and all want to be ethically successful in business. It'd probably work out very nicely. Hell, I'd like to be part of it - too bad neither of them is likely to be hiring anyone new right now.;)
Aha - that's what I was getting at, then. It sounds like the storage for the preferred app is actually in the filesystem, rather than in an external database. That's cool. Although it's possible they've done it with BFS indices within that particular filesystem (as mentioned before) instead of something like enduring unique creator types. Still, nice touch.
I know it has preferred applications, but I believe they're stored in an external database equivalent to the Windows file type registry - there's no space in the filesystem directory entry for "creators". That means you can't have a different creator for two files of the same type. Unless you mean
By contrast, the Finder's desktop database just records where creator applications are (if they're present), and what they advertise as filetypes they can open (in their BNDL resources). But I'm not sure what you mean about getting out of sync, that's not something I've genuinely seen happen since System 7.5.x or so. In fact the creator-app tracking and alias tracking is damn near perfect for local volumes in 8-9 (network volumes are a different story, but that's not a filesystem issue).
There are quite a few hierarchical storage management systems that do exactly this. Most of the ones you'd want to rely on are commercial and typically bundled with expensive hardware, but I think you'll find a couple of more modest open source projects at freshmeat or sourceforge.
First, however, we are going to do the data integrity.
Uh, don't you have to do the data integrity first? If you didn't have a guarantee that the only things that could be wrong were unallocated blocks and inodes, working from a metadata snapshot could be painful (or just a waste of time).
Actually, permissions are necessary for insecurity - if you didn't have them, people would just be limited to working with their own files and never be aware of any others. I've used systems that worked this way (some VMS installations, the ancient THEOS). Permissions, as the name implies, allow you to relax security below that unsharing level and give other people a peek.
But your main point is entirely correct and well-made. See some earlier spiel by me for one suggested solution I've been mulling over, an extensible tagged metadata format within the filesystem (actually HFS+ could be theoretically capable of this, but no one has ever used the third file fork AFAIK).
The Desktop database really has nothing to do with HFS[+]. It's maintained and used by the Finder, which is merely an application. HFS and HFS+ just provide slots in the directory entry to store the type and creator attributes, which the Finder (and a lot of other Mac apps) then makes use of. This is why the command-option signal you mention takes effect when the Finder loads (or sees a new volume mounted), rather than at boot time.
The Mac's four-letter types and creators work very well, but they're unnecessarily cryptic by current standards of disk space, memory, and CPU register width. The BeFS uses MIME types for filetypes, but doesn't record creators in the filesystem AFAIK (it uses an external database like the Windows registry - correct me if I'm wrong!). What I'd really like to see in some upcoming filesystem is a more flexible scheme that can store an arbitrary number of tags, so you could flexibly encapsulate whatever metadata came with the file and is relevant to the OS - including all of the filesystems discussed above (none of which can completely describe a file from the others).
My reading of the tutorial really does make this sound a lot like running softupdates on UFS/FFS - same concepts, same benefits and guarantees, somewhat different methodology and wholly different implementation. It looks like one should be able to do something equivalent to snapshots to reclaim lost junk while other stuff is going on, that being one of the cool things you get for free with softupdates's guarantees. One thing UFS+softupdates offers that Tux2 apparently can't is compatibility with pre-softupdates filesystem code, mostly because 4.4BSD UFS was more cleanly designed in the first place. That means a UFS filesystem flagged for softupdates will still work with any preexisting UFS implementation, while a Tux2-converted ext2fs is basically useless to an old Linux box.
At the risk of waking the Linux and BSD zealots and trolls, why do this at all? The view from above has always made ext2 look very much like a middling attempt to reproduce what UFS already did very well, while at the same creating a lot of installed ELFish Unix boxes that are annoyingly incompatible with it. I should be able to boot Linux, FreeBSD, or even Solaris from the *same* filesystem, just as I used to boot different Suns from the same disk.
Why not just finish porting a reliable UFS implementation, incorporate the (now firmly BSD-licenced) softupdates code into it, and make that the default filesystem for new Linux installations? You can still have XFS or some other journalling system where it makes sense, but let ext2 die in peace. The only dubious benefit it ever offered over UFS was the dangerous performance increase from willy-nilly asynchronous writes, and now that's not an issue (both softupdates and phase tree can be nearly as fast while also being safe).
You might be able to teach an old dog some new tricks, but it's just sick to try and do the same with a dead one.;)
Actually, UV is nonionising radiation, though it is clearly cancer-causing (compare the wavelength with gamma and X rays). Both cancer and radiation are so poorly understood that no one really knows why, but it's worth extrapolating on your point about visible light and the retina - if one type of molecule in your body responds (and can be harmed) by the visible and near-visible wavelengths, is it now possible that others respond to microwaves?
Personally I think that your point (previously raised by dublin in several posts) about bandwidth and power spread (ie. TDMA vs. CDMA) is an important one. Aside from the waveform rise/fall time and what effects it might have, CDMA should theoretically be safer, since transmission power and bandwidth will be inversely related via Shannon's theorem.
As with anything of note or value, no one is likely to ever really know for sure.:) The best advice is to use these things in moderation (a course that also has other lifestyle benefits for most people). But for CNET to turn this into a pseudo buyer's guide is just irresponsible.
Unfortunately the ones who gab on hands-free phones will be immune. But they'll still die off eventually, because a hands-free phone is almost as dangerous in terms of causing accidents. It's not about where your hands are, it's where your focus of attention is. And anything more than trivial commentary in talking and listening to someone in the cabin is just as bad.
Haven't you ever noticed that when something "interesting" happens on the road, you can't remember the last few seconds of radio play? This is a good thing, because you can only spread your focus of attention so far before it's too dilute to do any good. The radio sound is unimportant, so you can tune it completely out of your attention no matter how loud it is, but an involved conversation with a real human isn't so easy to back out of.
You can do a couple of other simple things while driving in a familiar, easy situation, but throw in a kid on a skateboard spilling in front of you and you'd better not be doing anything else that you can't completely and instantly ignore. I've felt the tearing of my attention when my passenger is trying to talk to me while I'm driving in busy traffic, and nowadays I politely tell them to wait. A cell phone conversation is no different. The only time you should be talking on one is when the car is stopped.
Ok, I have to respond to at least one of the posts in this vein, so it may as well be this one.
Finally, most people can't hear above 20kHz, especially those people who are incessantly blasting their ears out with loud music.
This is one of a set of often-quoted assumptions - that we know human beings can only hear tones between 20Hz-20kHz, that their ears respond to a dynamic range of 120dB, etc. Now I'd love to think that my social science education and psych degree gives me some deep insight into sensation and perception - indeed, I spent an entire term's class studying nothing but hearing - but how do you think those figures were arrived at? Here's how: a bunch of psychologists thought up the best experimental tests they could, and sat a bunch of young white north americans down in the 1960s. After playing some noxious noisy sine waves and having the poor stressed underpaid psych 100 students press buttons when they could/couldn't hear them, someone wrote up some conclusions. End of story (any apparent bitterness here from a former psych 100 student with ringing ears is entirely coincidental;).
Now ignoring the usual issues of sample size and between-subject composition, all these many repeated exercises have really proved is the extent of cleverness that have so far been reached in the theory and experimentation of sensation testing. Is a JND a useful measure of anything? Is the representation of sound as additive Fourier sinusoids sufficient to model the way our hearing actually performs? No one really knows, because no one really has all that great an idea yet how the ear and the incredible cortical processing behind it even manages to work at all. When you measure anything in an experimental setting, you are measuring the experiment as much as the subject. You can't do anything about this but be humble in what you assert based on those results - and that means resisting the urge to trumpet how we know humans can't detect a 30kHz sound. In fact they can, without even going into weirder things like how that 30kHz tone might affect the cortical processing of other noises you're listening to at the same time. Pesky humans have shown again and again that the limits on sensation depend on the type of test you use, and we're nowhere near the point where we could make grand pronouncements. We haven't thought up anywhere near enough clever tests yet.
So that's experimentation, now on to theoretical bias (phew). My own feeling is that the current engineering perspectives on sound and signal theory have led us in some interesting and really useful directions, but they've also excluded other directions and other assumptions we ought to be looking at as well. We don't really know how we hear in the real world, and it's folly to think that we can then know how our own mysterious equipment interacts with the innards of a CD player. Even if Nyquist were real-world truth instead of merely a model, brick-wall filters would be fictional. As it is you've got both the theoretical bias and the real-world engineering constraints to deal with. That doesn't mean I don't like CDs, or SACDs, or DVD-audio, but I do recognise that no sound can ever be recreated through a digital representation. They're all merely worthwhile compromises so I can listen to tunes in my living room without having to actually invite Shirley Manson over. Because she always eats all the snacks.
Yup, and there are also a lot of people who fool themselves into believing things for scientific reasons.;) Confusing the model for the real world, for instance.
I'm not sure I see how releasing a binary-only closed-source version of anything would make someone more a friend of the open-source movement. They have released a good deal of OSS, and it's a little disingenuous to carp that they're not a friend of the movement because they haven't released the particular bit that *you'd* like to see. By your argument SGI isn't an open-source contributor because they've only released XFS and I'd really like to see CXFS. Get it straight - that concerns me, or you, but not the open-source movement.
Releasing a binary-only version for (presumably) x86 Linux would only help x86 Linux users, like (presumably) you. It wouldn't help Linux users on other platforms, or users of other x86 platforms, and would generally fly in the face of one of the main points of the open-source movement - platform independence. It would make you happier as a whiny seeker of free-beer software for the platform you happen to be using, but I personally couldn't care less about that, and neither would "the open-source movement" (whomever that is).
Thanks for the note - I hadn't thought of that, and though it would still be difficult because of the lack of alternate boot devices on most PC notebooks (unlike, say Powerbooks with SCSI or Firewire), I can see that it would work as long as the package database wasn't also destroyed (which isn't guaranteed in this case, the damage was pretty scattershot). Since I don't have a Redhat CD, I think I'm still going to put FreeBSD on it (which actually doesn't track the main distribution's files via the package system, but will replace everything but packages,/etc, and/usr/local via the binary upgrade procedure, from one statically-linked app (sysinstall)).
Fortunately the machine didn't have any important unbacked-up data on it - but it's supposed to be my on-loan backup while my other machine is down due to a hardware failure! I hate when lightning strikes twice.
Finally I must point out that rpm is likely underrated because it's just so incredibly obtuse; I don't know what those people were smoking when they dreamed up the command-line structure, but I want some.;)
Yup, good points. I just had a notebook running a Redhat installation with 2.2.17 go south on me because of some ext2-based freakout; the/lib and several other less important directories are completely shot. Combined with the stupid idea of making both/sbin/init and/bin/sh (pointing to bash) dynamically linked, the box was unbootable until I noticed a statically linked "ash" present - as it is it's still basically not worth trying to recover it. And this wasn't even a crash - I think the BIOS just has some issue with soft-powering off where it doesn't always allow the IDE write cache to clear (but I won't rant on the tangent of PC architecture and notebook BIOSes - then again my PPC notebook is completely dead right now:).
This *could not have happened* under FreeBSD using UFS with softupdates. Even if it could I'd still have a halfway usable system, because the structure of / and/usr makes sense (granted that's also truer of Debian than Redhat). The machine will have FreeBSD 4.1.1 on it just as soon as I hie me over to a friend's place with a cable modem; the Redhat installation sucked and needed replacing anyway, but it's still a royal pain for to happen right now, and therein lies the other point - 3 serious filesystem errors in 6 years is *completely unacceptable* (to quote another poster's stated rate). This should never happen, and for systems with real filesystem code and sane filesystem layouts it simply doesn't.
Merely finding OSTDs at a (significantly) higher rate in the Linux group would establish a correlative link, but not a causational one. Kudos for the circular logic FUD use of "high-risk group" at the end of the first paragraph, though - just like a real press release in the statistical social sciences.
I find this Insightful as well as Funny, because it's just another example of the myth that Microsoft is good at marketing. They're not - in fact they're abysmally bad at it, and the only things they've been good at are bullying and impossible chutzpah (even that could probably have been done more competently).
It seems that people want to believe that Microsoft are good at *something*, because otherwise why would they have all that money and sales? The truth, that they've been blindly lucky in a chaotic market environment that they don't understand at all, is harder to stomach.
I can remember laughing at this a year or two ago; the "naked PC" page is ancient, and certainly predates the no-OEM-CD policy. That's why they don't agree - 'nuf said.
Of course, that doesn't excuse the blatant proganda, the no-CD policy, or the overall absurdity of "you have to buy this from us to buy a PC, only we're not even willing to actually sell it to you because we're afraid of what you might do with it". But what do you seriously expect from this company? The elevator doesn't go all the way to the top.
This would have been my interpretation as well, but now I wonder. Why can't you have more than one copy installed, if the only issue in installing and running a copy is that it creates some sort of derivative copy (on the hard disk or in memory respectively)? If copyright law allows me to create all the copies of the Windows CD contents I like so long as I don't distribute them, how is it any different when I install it onto multiple hard drives, or simultaneously boot several computers with it? The latter can perhaps be covered by the shaky shrinkwrap/clickwrap EULA's contractual licence, but what of the former case of mere multiple installation? I see no "distribution" there.
Not that I've ever bought a copy of Windows, of course - or ever will. That's what Unix and the Mac OS are for.
Was that the one about the painfully bright light stabbing at the front/back of your eyes? I found it particularly nasty b/c it required more retention. You had to remember exactly what the descriptions were (beyond the typical 2-3 moves) to notice the clue. Doesn't that merit a real challenge?
It wasn't the Dark puzzle in general that I objected to, but specifically a feature of the Hearing component (I think) - when you "Listen" it tells you that you can hear an exit to port. When you try and go that way you can't, and after trying all the directions (assuming you don't just give up and feed the game disk to your garbage disposal) you discover there's actually only an exit to south - as you exit it says "I lied about the exit to port". Uh-huh.
There are other examples of Adams's desire to merely frustrate, like the Babelfish dispenser running out just as you trial-and-error your way to the solution (which is the only way to reach it). That one means you must quit and restart the game, hopefully from a saved position, and that's a real no-no IMO (requiring the player to know something in advance based on a previous playthough - something the character couldn't know). That kind of Murphy's Law stuff is funny (maybe) in a novel, but not for long in an interactive game, and HHGTTG is full of it (Bureaucracy is even worse, which sealed my opinion that Adams should stay away from authoring computer games). The only time a game should be frustrating is when you can feel a solution just beyond your reach, intuitively knowing that you've been given just enough information but not quite making the leap (yet).
I didn't mind the Infidel ending too much, but then it had already been spoiled for me by a letter to The New Zork Times. Even so, it was fitting because the character was supposed to be a nasty piece of work, and he got what he deserved. My real problem with Infidel was that I played through the whole thing on one quarter, so to speak - the puzzles were so logically obvious that I never died or got even momentarily stuck (well not strictly true, I allowed myself to do the wrong thing at the point where you have to put the pole across the doorway because I wanted to see what would happen:). And I still haven't played AMFV mostly because of reviews like yours above, though I keep meaning to check it out one day anyway.
I have long felt that Spellbreaker was the best of the Infocom games, and probably the best adventure-puzzle game I've seen. But the text definitely does describe the puzzles very well - it's just quite subtle about it in parts, and requires you to put yourself in the perspective of the game situation more than most (where you can respond as a passive reader). This is really a goal of interactive fiction, so it succeeds.
But yes, there are an awful lot of other puzzle games that are hard just because they're stupid, obscure, or poorly-described. I would put HHGTTG squarely in this category - it was moderately amusing, but the puzzles were largely very poor. The one where you're stuck in the dark place and it "lies" about the direction of the exit particularly stuck in my craw. And I paid about $40 for that game, at a time when I could scarcely afford it.
As for Myst, the puzzles weren't really puzzles at all - the only one that required a logical leap was the floating chest. Everything else (and I mean everything) was simple extrapolation or lookup. Boring.
The best piece of interactive fiction I've seen since Infocom (there are puzzles, but they're not hard and they're very nicely integrated) is Photopia by Adam Cadre. He had a Java ZIP interpreter on his site so you could play it straight from a browser for a while, but I'm not sure if it's still up somewhere. You can certainly download it from the IF archive and play it in an interpreter for your platform. Be warned that it's poignant and rather sad, and relates to a personal tragedy the author experienced - but it's very, very worthwhile.
Interesting stuff. If you're right and they don't set the EEPROM by talking to it in a separate device - meaning the AT / PS2 keyboard controller must either listen to the upstream keyboard or the computer - then it shouldn't be all that difficult to either reverse engineer or just brute force the code to set a serial number, simply because the AT keyboard interface is so limited by design. Then that could be distributed as a separate program. Now that'd annoy 'em.;)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a strong parallel between film & TV and video games. Both have turned into huge, overblown "industries" dominated by scads of cash. But in both cases cash can be observed to have little to do with actually producing any substantive value. Is "Friends" getting less vapid and idiotic as the cost per episode vaults ever higher? Wasn't "Waterworld" a gripping flick? Is "Diablo" really that much different from, or better than Nethack? ;)
Take the Pangea (Brian Greenstone) example - I don't necessarily love his games (they're good but generally not hugely gripping), but the lack isn't in those areas that money can contribute to. Gameplay is either there or it's not, like real emotional, intellectual or artistic value in a film. Money won't help here, and usually it hurts by raising the stakes too high and making people and projects inflexible. Classic games succeeded because they were *just games* - they didn't have stockholders to answer to.
However, the apparent dominance of big industry in movies doesn't mean there aren't lots and lots of interesting indie films being produced - there are and always have been. Moreover, the film industry pretty much recognises that it's forever creatively bankrupt and looks to indie stock for new ideas. This is even easier in games, where the cost of entry is lower. There is a baseline cost to making a film even when shot on DV, but the baseline cost of game production is just the use of computing machinery similar to that required to play the game (which shouldn't overreach anyway if you want a decent audience).
It's also not true that game innovation ever went away. Lots of games in recent years have been done in Java or Flash or otherwise made available via a browser, and some are even huge hits, though you might not recognise them (ever played Popcap's"Diamond Mine"?). They just tend to get lost in all the dross, and especially to fly under your radar if yourOf course, in film the indie players are inevitably co-opted and end up just producing more pap (again, excess of money contributes to this). Not to overstretch an analogy.
Ok, I thought I'd drop by, see how slashdot was doing, whether things have improved...
A story post by CT waxing about his favourite happy-time playing The Sims.
Outtahere.
You'd be surprised how many Unix hackers are also Mac people. You'd also be surprised how much the two have in common. Both philosophies pursue clean effective design, one starting in the kernel (which extrapolates out into the user world) and one in the user interface (whose design sends tendrils back into the OS).
;)
The East/West thing might have some validity, but not enough to make a difference - all of them are smart people and all want to be ethically successful in business. It'd probably work out very nicely. Hell, I'd like to be part of it - too bad neither of them is likely to be hiring anyone new right now.
Aha - that's what I was getting at, then. It sounds like the storage for the preferred app is actually in the filesystem, rather than in an external database. That's cool. Although it's possible they've done it with BFS indices within that particular filesystem (as mentioned before) instead of something like enduring unique creator types. Still, nice touch.
I know it has preferred applications, but I believe they're stored in an external database equivalent to the Windows file type registry - there's no space in the filesystem directory entry for "creators". That means you can't have a different creator for two files of the same type. Unless you mean
By contrast, the Finder's desktop database just records where creator applications are (if they're present), and what they advertise as filetypes they can open (in their BNDL resources). But I'm not sure what you mean about getting out of sync, that's not something I've genuinely seen happen since System 7.5.x or so. In fact the creator-app tracking and alias tracking is damn near perfect for local volumes in 8-9 (network volumes are a different story, but that's not a filesystem issue).
Thanks for the link.
There are quite a few hierarchical storage management systems that do exactly this. Most of the ones you'd want to rely on are commercial and typically bundled with expensive hardware, but I think you'll find a couple of more modest open source projects at freshmeat or sourceforge.
Uh, don't you have to do the data integrity first? If you didn't have a guarantee that the only things that could be wrong were unallocated blocks and inodes, working from a metadata snapshot could be painful (or just a waste of time).
Actually, permissions are necessary for insecurity - if you didn't have them, people would just be limited to working with their own files and never be aware of any others. I've used systems that worked this way (some VMS installations, the ancient THEOS). Permissions, as the name implies, allow you to relax security below that unsharing level and give other people a peek.
But your main point is entirely correct and well-made. See some earlier spiel by me for one suggested solution I've been mulling over, an extensible tagged metadata format within the filesystem (actually HFS+ could be theoretically capable of this, but no one has ever used the third file fork AFAIK).
The Desktop database really has nothing to do with HFS[+]. It's maintained and used by the Finder, which is merely an application. HFS and HFS+ just provide slots in the directory entry to store the type and creator attributes, which the Finder (and a lot of other Mac apps) then makes use of. This is why the command-option signal you mention takes effect when the Finder loads (or sees a new volume mounted), rather than at boot time.
The Mac's four-letter types and creators work very well, but they're unnecessarily cryptic by current standards of disk space, memory, and CPU register width. The BeFS uses MIME types for filetypes, but doesn't record creators in the filesystem AFAIK (it uses an external database like the Windows registry - correct me if I'm wrong!). What I'd really like to see in some upcoming filesystem is a more flexible scheme that can store an arbitrary number of tags, so you could flexibly encapsulate whatever metadata came with the file and is relevant to the OS - including all of the filesystems discussed above (none of which can completely describe a file from the others).
My reading of the tutorial really does make this sound a lot like running softupdates on UFS/FFS - same concepts, same benefits and guarantees, somewhat different methodology and wholly different implementation. It looks like one should be able to do something equivalent to snapshots to reclaim lost junk while other stuff is going on, that being one of the cool things you get for free with softupdates's guarantees. One thing UFS+softupdates offers that Tux2 apparently can't is compatibility with pre-softupdates filesystem code, mostly because 4.4BSD UFS was more cleanly designed in the first place. That means a UFS filesystem flagged for softupdates will still work with any preexisting UFS implementation, while a Tux2-converted ext2fs is basically useless to an old Linux box.
;)
At the risk of waking the Linux and BSD zealots and trolls, why do this at all? The view from above has always made ext2 look very much like a middling attempt to reproduce what UFS already did very well, while at the same creating a lot of installed ELFish Unix boxes that are annoyingly incompatible with it. I should be able to boot Linux, FreeBSD, or even Solaris from the *same* filesystem, just as I used to boot different Suns from the same disk.
Why not just finish porting a reliable UFS implementation, incorporate the (now firmly BSD-licenced) softupdates code into it, and make that the default filesystem for new Linux installations? You can still have XFS or some other journalling system where it makes sense, but let ext2 die in peace. The only dubious benefit it ever offered over UFS was the dangerous performance increase from willy-nilly asynchronous writes, and now that's not an issue (both softupdates and phase tree can be nearly as fast while also being safe).
You might be able to teach an old dog some new tricks, but it's just sick to try and do the same with a dead one.
Actually, UV is nonionising radiation, though it is clearly cancer-causing (compare the wavelength with gamma and X rays). Both cancer and radiation are so poorly understood that no one really knows why, but it's worth extrapolating on your point about visible light and the retina - if one type of molecule in your body responds (and can be harmed) by the visible and near-visible wavelengths, is it now possible that others respond to microwaves?
:) The best advice is to use these things in moderation (a course that also has other lifestyle benefits for most people). But for CNET to turn this into a pseudo buyer's guide is just irresponsible.
Personally I think that your point (previously raised by dublin in several posts) about bandwidth and power spread (ie. TDMA vs. CDMA) is an important one. Aside from the waveform rise/fall time and what effects it might have, CDMA should theoretically be safer, since transmission power and bandwidth will be inversely related via Shannon's theorem.
As with anything of note or value, no one is likely to ever really know for sure.
Unfortunately the ones who gab on hands-free phones will be immune. But they'll still die off eventually, because a hands-free phone is almost as dangerous in terms of causing accidents. It's not about where your hands are, it's where your focus of attention is. And anything more than trivial commentary in talking and listening to someone in the cabin is just as bad.
Haven't you ever noticed that when something "interesting" happens on the road, you can't remember the last few seconds of radio play? This is a good thing, because you can only spread your focus of attention so far before it's too dilute to do any good. The radio sound is unimportant, so you can tune it completely out of your attention no matter how loud it is, but an involved conversation with a real human isn't so easy to back out of.
You can do a couple of other simple things while driving in a familiar, easy situation, but throw in a kid on a skateboard spilling in front of you and you'd better not be doing anything else that you can't completely and instantly ignore. I've felt the tearing of my attention when my passenger is trying to talk to me while I'm driving in busy traffic, and nowadays I politely tell them to wait. A cell phone conversation is no different. The only time you should be talking on one is when the car is stopped.
I think you've just reinvented homeopathy.
Ok, I have to respond to at least one of the posts in this vein, so it may as well be this one.
This is one of a set of often-quoted assumptions - that we know human beings can only hear tones between 20Hz-20kHz, that their ears respond to a dynamic range of 120dB, etc. Now I'd love to think that my social science education and psych degree gives me some deep insight into sensation and perception - indeed, I spent an entire term's class studying nothing but hearing - but how do you think those figures were arrived at? Here's how: a bunch of psychologists thought up the best experimental tests they could, and sat a bunch of young white north americans down in the 1960s. After playing some noxious noisy sine waves and having the poor stressed underpaid psych 100 students press buttons when they could/couldn't hear them, someone wrote up some conclusions. End of story (any apparent bitterness here from a former psych 100 student with ringing ears is entirely coincidental ;).
Now ignoring the usual issues of sample size and between-subject composition, all these many repeated exercises have really proved is the extent of cleverness that have so far been reached in the theory and experimentation of sensation testing. Is a JND a useful measure of anything? Is the representation of sound as additive Fourier sinusoids sufficient to model the way our hearing actually performs? No one really knows, because no one really has all that great an idea yet how the ear and the incredible cortical processing behind it even manages to work at all. When you measure anything in an experimental setting, you are measuring the experiment as much as the subject. You can't do anything about this but be humble in what you assert based on those results - and that means resisting the urge to trumpet how we know humans can't detect a 30kHz sound. In fact they can, without even going into weirder things like how that 30kHz tone might affect the cortical processing of other noises you're listening to at the same time. Pesky humans have shown again and again that the limits on sensation depend on the type of test you use, and we're nowhere near the point where we could make grand pronouncements. We haven't thought up anywhere near enough clever tests yet.
So that's experimentation, now on to theoretical bias (phew). My own feeling is that the current engineering perspectives on sound and signal theory have led us in some interesting and really useful directions, but they've also excluded other directions and other assumptions we ought to be looking at as well. We don't really know how we hear in the real world, and it's folly to think that we can then know how our own mysterious equipment interacts with the innards of a CD player. Even if Nyquist were real-world truth instead of merely a model, brick-wall filters would be fictional. As it is you've got both the theoretical bias and the real-world engineering constraints to deal with. That doesn't mean I don't like CDs, or SACDs, or DVD-audio, but I do recognise that no sound can ever be recreated through a digital representation. They're all merely worthwhile compromises so I can listen to tunes in my living room without having to actually invite Shirley Manson over. Because she always eats all the snacks.
Yup, and there are also a lot of people who fool themselves into believing things for scientific reasons. ;) Confusing the model for the real world, for instance.
Basically I think we're just easily fooled.
I'm not sure I see how releasing a binary-only closed-source version of anything would make someone more a friend of the open-source movement. They have released a good deal of OSS, and it's a little disingenuous to carp that they're not a friend of the movement because they haven't released the particular bit that *you'd* like to see. By your argument SGI isn't an open-source contributor because they've only released XFS and I'd really like to see CXFS. Get it straight - that concerns me, or you, but not the open-source movement.
Releasing a binary-only version for (presumably) x86 Linux would only help x86 Linux users, like (presumably) you. It wouldn't help Linux users on other platforms, or users of other x86 platforms, and would generally fly in the face of one of the main points of the open-source movement - platform independence. It would make you happier as a whiny seeker of free-beer software for the platform you happen to be using, but I personally couldn't care less about that, and neither would "the open-source movement" (whomever that is).
Thanks for the note - I hadn't thought of that, and though it would still be difficult because of the lack of alternate boot devices on most PC notebooks (unlike, say Powerbooks with SCSI or Firewire), I can see that it would work as long as the package database wasn't also destroyed (which isn't guaranteed in this case, the damage was pretty scattershot). Since I don't have a Redhat CD, I think I'm still going to put FreeBSD on it (which actually doesn't track the main distribution's files via the package system, but will replace everything but packages, /etc, and /usr/local via the binary upgrade procedure, from one statically-linked app (sysinstall)).
;)
Fortunately the machine didn't have any important unbacked-up data on it - but it's supposed to be my on-loan backup while my other machine is down due to a hardware failure! I hate when lightning strikes twice.
Finally I must point out that rpm is likely underrated because it's just so incredibly obtuse; I don't know what those people were smoking when they dreamed up the command-line structure, but I want some.
Yup, good points. I just had a notebook running a Redhat installation with 2.2.17 go south on me because of some ext2-based freakout; the /lib and several other less important directories are completely shot. Combined with the stupid idea of making both /sbin/init and /bin/sh (pointing to bash) dynamically linked, the box was unbootable until I noticed a statically linked "ash" present - as it is it's still basically not worth trying to recover it. And this wasn't even a crash - I think the BIOS just has some issue with soft-powering off where it doesn't always allow the IDE write cache to clear (but I won't rant on the tangent of PC architecture and notebook BIOSes - then again my PPC notebook is completely dead right now :).
/usr makes sense (granted that's also truer of Debian than Redhat). The machine will have FreeBSD 4.1.1 on it just as soon as I hie me over to a friend's place with a cable modem; the Redhat installation sucked and needed replacing anyway, but it's still a royal pain for to happen right now, and therein lies the other point - 3 serious filesystem errors in 6 years is *completely unacceptable* (to quote another poster's stated rate). This should never happen, and for systems with real filesystem code and sane filesystem layouts it simply doesn't.
This *could not have happened* under FreeBSD using UFS with softupdates. Even if it could I'd still have a halfway usable system, because the structure of / and
Merely finding OSTDs at a (significantly) higher rate in the Linux group would establish a correlative link, but not a causational one. Kudos for the circular logic FUD use of "high-risk group" at the end of the first paragraph, though - just like a real press release in the statistical social sciences.
I find this Insightful as well as Funny, because it's just another example of the myth that Microsoft is good at marketing. They're not - in fact they're abysmally bad at it, and the only things they've been good at are bullying and impossible chutzpah (even that could probably have been done more competently).
It seems that people want to believe that Microsoft are good at *something*, because otherwise why would they have all that money and sales? The truth, that they've been blindly lucky in a chaotic market environment that they don't understand at all, is harder to stomach.
I can remember laughing at this a year or two ago; the "naked PC" page is ancient, and certainly predates the no-OEM-CD policy. That's why they don't agree - 'nuf said.
Of course, that doesn't excuse the blatant proganda, the no-CD policy, or the overall absurdity of "you have to buy this from us to buy a PC, only we're not even willing to actually sell it to you because we're afraid of what you might do with it". But what do you seriously expect from this company? The elevator doesn't go all the way to the top.
This would have been my interpretation as well, but now I wonder. Why can't you have more than one copy installed, if the only issue in installing and running a copy is that it creates some sort of derivative copy (on the hard disk or in memory respectively)? If copyright law allows me to create all the copies of the Windows CD contents I like so long as I don't distribute them, how is it any different when I install it onto multiple hard drives, or simultaneously boot several computers with it? The latter can perhaps be covered by the shaky shrinkwrap/clickwrap EULA's contractual licence, but what of the former case of mere multiple installation? I see no "distribution" there.
Not that I've ever bought a copy of Windows, of course - or ever will. That's what Unix and the Mac OS are for.
It wasn't the Dark puzzle in general that I objected to, but specifically a feature of the Hearing component (I think) - when you "Listen" it tells you that you can hear an exit to port. When you try and go that way you can't, and after trying all the directions (assuming you don't just give up and feed the game disk to your garbage disposal) you discover there's actually only an exit to south - as you exit it says "I lied about the exit to port". Uh-huh.
There are other examples of Adams's desire to merely frustrate, like the Babelfish dispenser running out just as you trial-and-error your way to the solution (which is the only way to reach it). That one means you must quit and restart the game, hopefully from a saved position, and that's a real no-no IMO (requiring the player to know something in advance based on a previous playthough - something the character couldn't know). That kind of Murphy's Law stuff is funny (maybe) in a novel, but not for long in an interactive game, and HHGTTG is full of it (Bureaucracy is even worse, which sealed my opinion that Adams should stay away from authoring computer games). The only time a game should be frustrating is when you can feel a solution just beyond your reach, intuitively knowing that you've been given just enough information but not quite making the leap (yet).
I didn't mind the Infidel ending too much, but then it had already been spoiled for me by a letter to The New Zork Times. Even so, it was fitting because the character was supposed to be a nasty piece of work, and he got what he deserved. My real problem with Infidel was that I played through the whole thing on one quarter, so to speak - the puzzles were so logically obvious that I never died or got even momentarily stuck (well not strictly true, I allowed myself to do the wrong thing at the point where you have to put the pole across the doorway because I wanted to see what would happen :). And I still haven't played AMFV mostly because of reviews like yours above, though I keep meaning to check it out one day anyway.
I have long felt that Spellbreaker was the best of the Infocom games, and probably the best adventure-puzzle game I've seen. But the text definitely does describe the puzzles very well - it's just quite subtle about it in parts, and requires you to put yourself in the perspective of the game situation more than most (where you can respond as a passive reader). This is really a goal of interactive fiction, so it succeeds.
But yes, there are an awful lot of other puzzle games that are hard just because they're stupid, obscure, or poorly-described. I would put HHGTTG squarely in this category - it was moderately amusing, but the puzzles were largely very poor. The one where you're stuck in the dark place and it "lies" about the direction of the exit particularly stuck in my craw. And I paid about $40 for that game, at a time when I could scarcely afford it.
As for Myst, the puzzles weren't really puzzles at all - the only one that required a logical leap was the floating chest. Everything else (and I mean everything) was simple extrapolation or lookup. Boring.
The best piece of interactive fiction I've seen since Infocom (there are puzzles, but they're not hard and they're very nicely integrated) is Photopia by Adam Cadre. He had a Java ZIP interpreter on his site so you could play it straight from a browser for a while, but I'm not sure if it's still up somewhere. You can certainly download it from the IF archive and play it in an interpreter for your platform. Be warned that it's poignant and rather sad, and relates to a personal tragedy the author experienced - but it's very, very worthwhile.
Interesting stuff. If you're right and they don't set the EEPROM by talking to it in a separate device - meaning the AT / PS2 keyboard controller must either listen to the upstream keyboard or the computer - then it shouldn't be all that difficult to either reverse engineer or just brute force the code to set a serial number, simply because the AT keyboard interface is so limited by design. Then that could be distributed as a separate program. Now that'd annoy 'em. ;)