I dig the challenge of riddles. Far worse are the syntax quizzes! Knowing about semicolons after function declarations or 'else' is the compiler's job and not a strong indicator of creativity or capability in a programmer.
The riddle:
"U2" has a concert that starts in 17 minutes and they must all cross a bridge to get there. All four men begin on the same side of the bridge. You must help them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time. Any party who crosses, either 1 or 2 people, must have the flashlight with them. The flashlight must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each band member walks at a different speed. A pair must walk together at the rate of the slower man's pace:
* Bono: - 1 minute to cross
* Edge: - 2 minutes to cross
* Adam: - 5 minutes to cross
* Larry: - 10 minutes to cross
For example: if Bono and Larry walk across first, 10 minutes have elapsed when they get to the other side of the bridge. If Larry then returns with the flashlight, a total of 20 minutes have passed and you have failed the mission. --- Another:
You are given 10 baskets. 9 of the baskets each have 10 balls weighing 10kg per ball, however one basket has 10 balls weiging 9kg each. All the balls and baskets are identical in appearance. You are asked to determine which basket contains the 9kg balls. You have a suitable scale, but may only take a single measurement. No other measurements may be taken (like trying to determine by hand). You may remove balls from the baskets but may still only take one measurement. How do you do it?
On the one hand, Microsoft attacks free software (mainly because it's bad for Microsoft's business plans, so it seems.) On the other hand, while free software has a strong hold in certain sectors -and a bid for certain desktop uses- Microsoft continues to aggressively price upward their offerings to businesses.
They're driving IT departments toward free software. Self-defeating in other words, particularly considering today's economy and business climate, where IT budgets are not faring well.
In addition to the above good answer, I'd videotape each machine audit over the BSA[A] tech's shoulder, capturing what s/he types, and what's on the screen. You'd need it for the courtroom, if it came to that. Plus, it adds hassle factor.
Of course, the legality of whether you can tape varies by jurisdiction, IANAL etc, but I believe in my town you're entitled to tape your own conversations.
Running both a computer (200-300 watts) and a resistive heater or a cooler will drain the battery right quick. If you're gonna do it, this company makes many small, embeddable resistive heater components, but you'll need some way to distribute the heat, as many of these are relatively small and hot. http://www.tempco-electric.com/BODYPAGES/Tempco3.h tml
Police cars are loaded with electronic gear, and their alternators are always engaging -the alternator and its belt usually go bad before the A/C or power steering pump (I used to work in a shop that serviced cop cars.)
Heating the unit can be essentially free -while the vehical is in operation, as internal combustion engines waste most of the fuel energy as heat. Cooling costs, but with ducting at least you're taking it from a source that already exists, not having to monkey a new system together. (I couldn't find semiconductor-based refrigeration systems on the web, but I'm not sure what you call them!)
Build an air box around the Shuttle's case, and blow cold or warm air into it from the car's cabin, or from one of the A/C-heating output ducts. If you're lucky, your car has ducts and controls for the backseat passengers. You might be able to route it under the rear passenger seats, for a minimalist "case mod.";)
The accuracy with which these "images" are "drawn" seems to fall into two categories, foot-trodden, and laser-like. Many seem, to me, to be the latter.
Some of these images are very complex, and yet so accurately drawn, that the very notion they were trod out with plank and rope by a couple of old codgers (or a team of college students even) is pretty unthinkable. They would need sight lines and all sorts of technique for making sure each one of their stompings went right where it's supposed to -otherwise they'd not look so perfect as they do, no?
These highly accurate-looking images are, in my view, a combination test pattern and non-subtle message, imaged with microwave or other high-energy, non-visible laser, mounted on an orbital "Star Wars" missile defense test platform.
The message being, "notice the accuracy with which we draw on your front lawn? we can focus that beam on anybody who pisses us off!" (except Saddam or Osama, inexplicably) There was a hilarious scene along these lines at the begining of the Val Kilmer movie "Real Genius".
An article in New Scientist Magazine asked "How long before we see a manifestation of a Mandelbrot [set] in the fields?" One year to the day after the publication of that question, a mandelbrot set appeared in a field near Cambridge University -where Benoit Mandelbrot had taught.
"The problem with self-auditing voting machines is if it's broken, how can you tell that it's broken?"
But you, I, and and voters will never know that, will we? Equipment purchased for public benefit, in a state where a major voting debacle decided the last presidential election, should be open and accountable. How can there be trust without publicly verifiable accountability? How else will anyone ever know? Companies and politicians lie! As seen on the TV!
Frankly I'm tired of elected officials (and appointed! most gov't workers are appointed or hired!) telling us we should trust them. Open Source Government Now!
The only stuff that gets through has been very well filtered by all the factions.
It makes it more conservative, any radical changes dont get enough "mindshare support" to go all the way.
Excellent description of the Debian project, but United Statesians will mistakenly think "minority" means unwhite people rather than an N-party system, where N>2. The US, having a bipolar political system, tend to see issues in terms of "for" or "against" with not many gradations in between.
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."
Only one word registered with Arthur.
"Mice?" he said.
"Indeed Earthman."
"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sit coms?"
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"Earthman," he said, "it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early sixties sit coms of which you speak. These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pan- dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."
The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.
"They've been experimenting on you I'm afraid."
Arthur thought about this for a second, and then his face cleared.
"Ah no," he said, "I see the source of the misunderstanding now. No, look you see, what happened was that we used to do experiments on them. They were often used in behavioural research, Pavlov and all that sort of stuff. So what happened was that the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring bells, run around mazes and things so that the whole nature of the learning process could be examined. From our observations of their behaviour we were able to learn all sorts of things about our own..."
Arthur's voice tailed off.
"Such subtlety..." said Slartibartfast, "one has to admire it."
"What?" said Arthur.
"How better to disguise their real natures, and how better to guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way, eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis, - if it's finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous."
He paused for effect.
"You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research programme...
"Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time."
"Time," said Arthur weakly, "is not currently one of my problems."
it is common courtesy to hand over beverages that are ready to drink, i.e. not dangerous to consume. on the flipside, you don't hand people a warm bottle of beer and tell em to stick it in the freezer, do you?
i was scalded by hot apple cider at a local coffee house in the East Village. Apparently, to heat it up, they were running it through the steamer attachment of their espresso machine. probably was just under the boiling point. my lips and tongue went white (i.e. they were cooked) and shed thick globs of skin over the next days. spent a couple days at the hospital and needed much work -not as bad as the McDonalds lady, and the lady who ran the place was mortified. Her insurance company gladly covered it, plus something for my hassle.
Well, that's an interesting point... up to a point. The assumption I sense in your message -which is the message also put out by the biotech industry- is that genetic modifications to organisms is no different from wild cross pollination *or* selective crossbreeding in a hothouse or lab.
But is that true? The purpose of genetic engineering is to add new sequences which result in the expression of new features (proteins, hormones, &c) not previously found in that organism -are we agreed on this point, at least?
With crossbreeding, wild or selective, the species of the pollen/sperm/germ plasm sources need to be pretty closely related to the species which will bear the seed/fruit/offspring -otherwise it just won't take. Still with me? So, new characteristics will come about when crosses are from already related species -my understanding, anyway.
GM does an end-run around the related species "requirement" of crossbreeding, by employing techniques which splice, inject, shotgun or otherwise introduce a new sequence into the recipient species' genome. Correct? Now, from what I've read, many of the sources for the new sequences come from species that are not related to the recipient species. They sometimes don't belong to even the same phylum or order.
A quick example is the now-demised Flavr-Savr tomato -genes from the flounder fish and a bacteria species were inserted, to add shelf life and toughen the overall structure of the fruit.
Would evolution bring these specific additions about on its own, or could you obtain those sequences through crosspollinations? Doesn't seem so -it seems that if they could have, they would have. The tomato plant and the flounder would have to spend another hundred million years evolving or more before the possibility of them becoming compatible enough to exchange genetic material on their own.
So to answer your original question, it doesn't matter to me as I don't drink coffee! But the interesting thing is, whether crosspollinated or engineered, genes do escape into the wild, and the cousin species do pick up the new characteristics -even from the GM plants. That's pretty scary.
In my humble opinion a country should not need laws, but rather a principle (i.e. "Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness") for the US.
Principles are all nice and sweet in the land of faeries and elves, but here in the real fucking world, when a criminal pulls a knife to demand your money or points a gun at your family...
Yeah, you're right. No laws, just let em go... life will be so much better.
"He's gotten back to us, despite a heavy schedule"
He doesn't have time to spice up his commentary for a bunch of hackers from a site he's probably never heard of until recently. Cut him some slack- if you were getting ready to shoot yourself into space, while recently married and an adopted son, you'd probably be freakin' busy too!
Actually, Gates' company produced a couple of operating systems that were the popular platform built upon by many software and tech "innovators" ( for "leading us out of the wilderness of Big...Iron...".
Take, for example, Borland, whose catalog at the time included Turbo/Borland C++, Pascal, Paradox, dBase III/IV, Quattro, (Wordperfect? still confused about that:), and a few years afterward Delphi, which was a real visual development AND programmers tool when compared next to Microsoft's Visual Basic and Basic products.
There was also Stac (had they been squashed flat by MS by that time yet?), Norton, Novell Netware (expensive, yes, but fast, widely accepted, and little alternative in the market.)
Microsoft's Word hadn't yet reached market saturation and Wordperfect was still kicking it. Windows was, what 3.1, 3.11? Just a couple years past Windows 386 and Windows 2.x, yeesh.
Gates arguably had a role in building a finally-decent platform for medium-to-large memory model apps (Windows 386/3.1x), and was finally begining to bring hardware vendors' drivers into the installer, but prior to that point you were dependent upon the manufacturer's distribution diskettes.
No, the PC industry of 1992 was the sum of its parts, not the product of one individual, or even his company.
Re:Installation vs. Usage - Mac 10 Windows 7, Linu
on
Coursey on Palladium
·
· Score: 2
This is 2002. We've had computers with GUI desktops for, what, 15+ years? Why, in order for a set of well-engineered, long-accepted graphical metaphors to work consistently, do we now require (for Linux to be the desktop o/s) that users learn and know arcane command language from a 30 year-old mainframe-oriented (originally), text-based timesharing operating system? That's regressive, man.
And especially since computers are so damn powerful now, it's almost absurd that most system management isn't handled automatically. Of course, this last applies to all three major desktops, not just Linux.
But the answer is, Linux is a server O/S, with roots steeped in, yes, mainframe timeshare systems, that has a GUI grafted on top of it. Users of spreadsheets, wordprocessors, games -most applications- should not have to be bothered with this stuff. That they are (Mac, Win or Lin) is almost shameful. Man, as a kid when I looked to the future of computers, I expected things to get drastically better. (Mac does come out on top in this regard.)
But instead, they got incrementally better. The last loudly touted new O/S, BeOS, was pushed on the basis of its multitasking fundamentals -techy/geeky features about which typical desktop users just couldn't give a flying.
From the ground up, without regard for current binary executable compatibility, an operating system designed today could be substantially better. In some ways, game consoles and PDAs (excepting wince) present an ideal exponent of latter-day interface and environment design.
Re:Installation vs. Usage - Mac 10 Windows 7, Linu
on
Coursey on Palladium
·
· Score: 2
This is not hard:
rpm -ivh package-name.rpm
No, but the consequences of running that command can be. Kernel version, dependencies, editing configuration files. All that requires command-line knowledge for which there's no GUI substitute.
As much as I dislike some of the implementation, OS X is the closest thing to a unix with really decent automatic configuration and installation tools. True, like one poster said, I'm out of date, been using Debian Potato for ages. My next two installations will be SuSE and Mandrake, and maybe DeadRat, just to check out 7.2.
Re:Installation vs. Usage - Mac 10 Windows 7, Linu
on
Coursey on Palladium
·
· Score: 2
Points taken, and I s'pose it's true that I'm out of date. I've been hearing good things about Mandrake and SuSE both, time I gave one of them a run.
Installation vs. Usage - Mac 10 Windows 7, Linux 1
on
Coursey on Palladium
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
install and usage really is simple for the avg. joe.
Installation of a Windows or Mac software package is *nothing* like on a Linux box. Flame me if you will, I just don't know what to call this expectation on the part of Linux jocks -egoism, chauvinism- but downloading and manually building a package and its dependencies, sometimes rebuilding the kernel. It's just not the same as an installshield-type GUI installer, and I won't apologize for it.
Debian comes closer on this -this is my daily system. Even though I love it, I could never, ever expect family members or non-tech friends to support their own system. If they lived under the same roof, yes, of course. But to hand somebody a CD and say, go ahead, you can replace your Windows installation, is just silly. Your typical non-tech won't make it past disk partitioning unaided.
Take, f'rinstance, video formats. Yes, there is a package now for viewing AVIs under Linux. But to get it working is another matter. And compare Mac TCP/IP versus Linux -a single, simple dialog box versus the commandline (yes, I know various distros have dialogs too, but they mostly suck, and I'm talking about Linux common denominators here.)
In order for Linux to "rule" the desktop (as many hope it will), there needs to be the same simplicity in setup, maintenance and use as its competition- MacOS and Windows. Otherwise, Linux will never get more marketshare.
Read the Eula again, pal:
* Security Updates. Content providers are using the digital rights management technology ("Microsoft DRM") contained in this Product to protect the integrity of their content ("Secure Content") so that their intellectual property, including copyright, in such content is not misappropriated.
Microsoft is forcing what is perhaps the begining of Palladium onto unsuspecting computer users. Watch out! Double meanings: Security Update means Secure Content, in this case DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
I dig the challenge of riddles. Far worse are the syntax quizzes! Knowing about semicolons after function declarations or 'else' is the compiler's job and not a strong indicator of creativity or capability in a programmer.
The riddle:
"U2" has a concert that starts in 17 minutes and they must all cross a bridge to get there. All four men begin on the same side of the bridge. You must help them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time. Any party who crosses, either 1 or 2 people, must have the flashlight with them. The flashlight must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each band member walks at a different speed. A pair must walk together at the rate of the slower man's pace:
* Bono: - 1 minute to cross
* Edge: - 2 minutes to cross
* Adam: - 5 minutes to cross
* Larry: - 10 minutes to cross
For example: if Bono and Larry walk across first, 10 minutes have elapsed when they get to the other side of the bridge. If Larry then returns with the flashlight, a total of 20 minutes have passed and you have failed the mission.
---
Another:
You are given 10 baskets. 9 of the baskets each have 10 balls weighing 10kg per ball, however one basket has 10 balls weiging 9kg each. All the balls and baskets are identical in appearance. You are asked to determine which basket contains the 9kg balls. You have a suitable scale, but may only take a single measurement. No other measurements may be taken (like trying to determine by hand). You may remove balls from the baskets but may still only take one measurement. How do you do it?
On the one hand, Microsoft attacks free software (mainly because it's bad for Microsoft's business plans, so it seems.) On the other hand, while free software has a strong hold in certain sectors -and a bid for certain desktop uses- Microsoft continues to aggressively price upward their offerings to businesses.
They're driving IT departments toward free software. Self-defeating in other words, particularly considering today's economy and business climate, where IT budgets are not faring well.
In addition to the above good answer, I'd videotape each machine audit over the BSA[A] tech's shoulder, capturing what s/he types, and what's on the screen. You'd need it for the courtroom, if it came to that. Plus, it adds hassle factor.
Of course, the legality of whether you can tape varies by jurisdiction, IANAL etc, but I believe in my town you're entitled to tape your own conversations.
Running both a computer (200-300 watts) and a resistive heater or a cooler will drain the battery right quick. If you're gonna do it, this company makes many small, embeddable resistive heater components, but you'll need some way to distribute the heat, as many of these are relatively small and hot. http://www.tempco-electric.com/BODYPAGES/Tempco3.h tml
Police cars are loaded with electronic gear, and their alternators are always engaging -the alternator and its belt usually go bad before the A/C or power steering pump (I used to work in a shop that serviced cop cars.)
Heating the unit can be essentially free -while the vehical is in operation, as internal combustion engines waste most of the fuel energy as heat. Cooling costs, but with ducting at least you're taking it from a source that already exists, not having to monkey a new system together. (I couldn't find semiconductor-based refrigeration systems on the web, but I'm not sure what you call them!)
Build an air box around the Shuttle's case, and blow cold or warm air into it from the car's cabin, or from one of the A/C-heating output ducts. If you're lucky, your car has ducts and controls for the backseat passengers. You might be able to route it under the rear passenger seats, for a minimalist "case mod." ;)
...for the big guns in the sky.
The accuracy with which these "images" are "drawn" seems to fall into two categories, foot-trodden, and laser-like. Many seem, to me, to be the latter.
Some of these images are very complex, and yet so accurately drawn, that the very notion they were trod out with plank and rope by a couple of old codgers (or a team of college students even) is pretty unthinkable. They would need sight lines and all sorts of technique for making sure each one of their stompings went right where it's supposed to -otherwise they'd not look so perfect as they do, no?
These highly accurate-looking images are, in my view, a combination test pattern and non-subtle message, imaged with microwave or other high-energy, non-visible laser, mounted on an orbital "Star Wars" missile defense test platform.
The message being, "notice the accuracy with which we draw on your front lawn? we can focus that beam on anybody who pisses us off!" (except Saddam or Osama, inexplicably) There was a hilarious scene along these lines at the begining of the Val Kilmer movie "Real Genius".
An article in New Scientist Magazine asked "How long before we see a manifestation of a Mandelbrot [set] in the fields?" One year to the day after the publication of that question, a mandelbrot set appeared in a field near Cambridge University -where Benoit Mandelbrot had taught.
Frankly I'm tired of elected officials (and appointed! most gov't workers are appointed or hired!) telling us we should trust them. Open Source Government Now!
try altqd. i've only used it on openbsd, but with it you can selectively throttle bandwidth.
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."
..."
..." said Slartibartfast, "one has to admire it."
...
Only one word registered with Arthur.
"Mice?" he said.
"Indeed Earthman."
"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sit coms?"
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"Earthman," he said, "it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early sixties sit coms of which you speak. These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pan- dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."
The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.
"They've been experimenting on you I'm afraid."
Arthur thought about this for a second, and then his face cleared.
"Ah no," he said, "I see the source of the misunderstanding now. No, look you see, what happened was that we used to do experiments on them. They were often used in behavioural research, Pavlov and all that sort of stuff. So what happened was that the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring bells, run around mazes and things so that the whole nature of the learning process could be examined. From our observations of their behaviour we were able to learn all sorts of things about our own
Arthur's voice tailed off.
"Such subtlety
"What?" said Arthur.
"How better to disguise their real natures, and how better to guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way, eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis, - if it's finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous."
He paused for effect.
"You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research programme
"Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time."
"Time," said Arthur weakly, "is not currently one of my problems."
fuckin-ay!
it is common courtesy to hand over beverages that are ready to drink, i.e. not dangerous to consume. on the flipside, you don't hand people a warm bottle of beer and tell em to stick it in the freezer, do you?
i was scalded by hot apple cider at a local coffee house in the East Village. Apparently, to heat it up, they were running it through the steamer attachment of their espresso machine. probably was just under the boiling point. my lips and tongue went white (i.e. they were cooked) and shed thick globs of skin over the next days. spent a couple days at the hospital and needed much work -not as bad as the McDonalds lady, and the lady who ran the place was mortified. Her insurance company gladly covered it, plus something for my hassle.
Well, that's an interesting point... up to a point. The assumption I sense in your message -which is the message also put out by the biotech industry- is that genetic modifications to organisms is no different from wild cross pollination *or* selective crossbreeding in a hothouse or lab.
But is that true? The purpose of genetic engineering is to add new sequences which result in the expression of new features (proteins, hormones, &c) not previously found in that organism -are we agreed on this point, at least?
With crossbreeding, wild or selective, the species of the pollen/sperm/germ plasm sources need to be pretty closely related to the species which will bear the seed/fruit/offspring -otherwise it just won't take. Still with me? So, new characteristics will come about when crosses are from already related species -my understanding, anyway.
GM does an end-run around the related species "requirement" of crossbreeding, by employing techniques which splice, inject, shotgun or otherwise introduce a new sequence into the recipient species' genome. Correct? Now, from what I've read, many of the sources for the new sequences come from species that are not related to the recipient species. They sometimes don't belong to even the same phylum or order.
A quick example is the now-demised Flavr-Savr tomato -genes from the flounder fish and a bacteria species were inserted, to add shelf life and toughen the overall structure of the fruit.
Would evolution bring these specific additions about on its own, or could you obtain those sequences through crosspollinations? Doesn't seem so -it seems that if they could have, they would have. The tomato plant and the flounder would have to spend another hundred million years evolving or more before the possibility of them becoming compatible enough to exchange genetic material on their own.
So to answer your original question, it doesn't matter to me as I don't drink coffee! But the interesting thing is, whether crosspollinated or engineered, genes do escape into the wild, and the cousin species do pick up the new characteristics -even from the GM plants. That's pretty scary.
it could wipe out caffeinated coffee.
Before you flame or down-mod me as being anti-GM or anti-futurist, review the facts and double-check the counter claims and rebuttals.
12 inches == 30.48 cm.
1 inch == 2.54 cm !~= 3.0 cm...
Yeah, you're right. No laws, just let em go... life will be so much better.
A call to this number rang about twenty times, then was picked up by a voicebot: "Your party is not picking up. Your call will now be disconnected."
Earth's due to expire June 6, 2003--
[God@universe ~]$ whois earth.com
Registrant:
earth.com (EARTH-DOM)
10900 Research Blvd #160C-12
Austin, TX 78759
Domain Name: EARTH.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Registrations, Earth W (TS121) hostmaster@EARTH.COM
EARTH.COM
10900 Research Blvd
Suite 160C-12
Austin, TX 78759
(512) 838-5652 (FAX) (512) 838-6098
Record expires on 06-Jun-2003.
Record created on 05-Jun-1994.
Database last updated on 7-Jul-2002 21:43:14 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.EARTH.COM 199.239.20.70
NS2.EARTH.COM 199.239.20.71
Actually, Gates' company produced a couple of operating systems
:), and
that were the popular platform built upon by many software and tech "innovators" ( for "leading us out of the wilderness of Big...Iron...".
Take, for example, Borland, whose catalog at the time included Turbo/Borland C++, Pascal, Paradox, dBase III/IV, Quattro, (Wordperfect? still confused about that
a few years afterward Delphi, which was a real visual development AND programmers tool when compared next to Microsoft's Visual Basic and Basic products.
There was also Stac (had they been squashed flat by MS by that time yet?), Norton, Novell Netware (expensive, yes, but fast, widely accepted, and little alternative in the market.)
Microsoft's Word hadn't yet reached market saturation and Wordperfect was still kicking it. Windows was, what
3.1, 3.11? Just a couple years past Windows 386 and Windows 2.x, yeesh.
Gates arguably had a role in building a finally-decent platform for medium-to-large memory model apps (Windows 386/3.1x), and was finally begining to
bring hardware vendors' drivers into the installer, but prior to that point you were
dependent upon the manufacturer's distribution diskettes.
No, the PC industry of 1992 was the sum of its parts, not the product of one individual, or even his company.
Design patterns for human-computer interaction are nascent but document well the common metaphors used in nearly all GUI computer applications today:
. html
http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/interaction_patterns
This is 2002. We've had computers with GUI desktops for, what, 15+ years? Why, in order for a set of well-engineered, long-accepted graphical metaphors to work consistently, do we now require (for Linux to be the desktop o/s) that users learn and know arcane command language from a 30 year-old mainframe-oriented (originally), text-based timesharing operating system? That's regressive, man.
And especially since computers are so damn powerful now, it's almost absurd that most system management isn't handled automatically. Of course, this last applies to all three major desktops, not just Linux.
But the answer is, Linux is a server O/S, with roots steeped in, yes, mainframe timeshare systems, that has a GUI grafted on top of it. Users of spreadsheets, wordprocessors, games -most applications- should not have to be bothered with this stuff. That they are (Mac, Win or Lin) is almost shameful. Man, as a kid when I looked to the future of computers, I expected things to get drastically better. (Mac does come out on top in this regard.)
But instead, they got incrementally better. The last loudly touted new O/S, BeOS, was pushed on the basis of its multitasking fundamentals -techy/geeky features about which typical desktop users just couldn't give a flying.
From the ground up, without regard for current binary executable compatibility, an operating system designed today could be substantially better. In some ways, game consoles and PDAs (excepting wince) present an ideal exponent of latter-day interface and environment design.
As much as I dislike some of the implementation, OS X is the closest thing to a unix with really decent automatic configuration and installation tools. True, like one poster said, I'm out of date, been using Debian Potato for ages. My next two installations will be SuSE and Mandrake, and maybe DeadRat, just to check out 7.2.
Points taken, and I s'pose it's true that I'm out of date. I've been hearing good things about Mandrake and SuSE both, time I gave one of them a run.
install and usage really is simple for the avg. joe.
Installation of a Windows or Mac software package is *nothing* like on a Linux box. Flame me if you will, I just don't know what to call this expectation on the part of Linux jocks -egoism, chauvinism- but downloading and manually building a package and its dependencies, sometimes rebuilding the kernel. It's just not the same as an installshield-type GUI installer, and I won't apologize for it.
Debian comes closer on this -this is my daily system. Even though I love it, I could never, ever expect family members or non-tech friends to support their own system. If they lived under the same roof, yes, of course. But to hand somebody a CD and say, go ahead, you can replace your Windows installation, is just silly. Your typical non-tech won't make it past disk partitioning unaided.
Take, f'rinstance, video formats. Yes, there is a package now for viewing AVIs under Linux. But to get it working is another matter. And compare Mac TCP/IP versus Linux -a single, simple dialog box versus the commandline (yes, I know various distros have dialogs too, but they mostly suck, and I'm talking about Linux common denominators here.)
In order for Linux to "rule" the desktop (as many hope it will), there needs to be the same simplicity in setup, maintenance and use as its competition- MacOS and Windows. Otherwise, Linux will never get more marketshare.