Well, we know what happened the last time a few experts were taken at face value...No WMDs.
No, what was accepted at face value was what was said and repeated publically by Bush, and by those in charge (Cheney, Tenet, and Rice, among others, and to his regret, Powell). To the extent there were experts working for or in conjunction with any of these folks, none of use was privy to the discussions or any disagreements.
The thing is, many of the great works in this so-called geek canon aren't chiefly admired for their literary qualities at all. If there's anything that serves as the basis for self-important pretentiousness in geek reading preference, it's a bias favouring substance over form and ideas over aesthetics.
Well said. Something similar, I think, can be said for fiction writers like Grisham, King, Clancy et al whose names regularly appear on bestseller lists and, despite their obvious talent for story telling, offer up remarkably undistinguished fare not unlike the ardent scribblings of a semi-talented student in a high school English class.
That said, I do believe Douglas Adams deserves special recognition for his contributions to the narrative form. A Trilogy published in five books is undoubtedly a literary first.
Explorer does it's work, if I wanted more power on my workstations I'd be slapping Linux on them where I have amazing powers at my tooltip with some help by perl and bash.
Agreed that Perl and shell are generally preferrable when you know WTF you want/are doing, but Windows Explorer? Single threaded featureless toy with next-to-zero customisability, problematic relationship to the desktop shell and progress dialogs that range from the "very rough" to "braindead" to "absurd" are just a few characterisations off the top of my head.
On a Windows system, the only file manager worth discussing is Directory Opus, which aside from having more features and possible customisations than anyone has time for, actually works better than most Win32 apps, that despite the fact that it actually compensates for Explorer's deficiencies. And the multi-pane approach offers a preview window with a plugin architecture (text, html, images, pdfs, etc.) that substitutes nicely for anyone in the habit of using ACDSee, etc. for file management. The irony for me, at least, is that many of menu items and/or toolbar buttons run bash or Perl scripts.
My idea of a "type manager" is a full-featured file manager with a customisable display that accommodates file/directory filtering.
It must have been the woman. The article describes researchers busy showing pictures of toys and yams to monkeys and looking for some kind of response.
Ignoring how depressing a Day in the Life of a Research monkey must be, I'm wondering why they wouldn't opt for something more stimulating?
Well, if people start taking advantage of your door being unlocked and your house being open by hanging out and doing drugs and generally causing a fuss, it becomes a problem for the neighbourhood, right? It wasn't so long ago that municipalities got into the habit passing laws to address that problem. Back then it was crack, of course. Moreover, homeowner are typically liable for all sorts of other shit they may not have a direct role in.
Obviously, WiFi isn't analogous to crack but the reasoning behind the laws is similar enough that it could be successfully argued in a court of law and establish a precedent or two. Take this even further, it's entirely possible that over time software developers could become liable for security problems.
Establishing the tradeoffs between what's in the public's best interests with individual rights and accountability happens in all sorts of ways. My guess is that any law that places the burden on the individual stands a better chance of passing than any law that seeks to regulate a company's manufacture of an "insecure" product. Any corporation that sees its bottom line at risk is typically ready and eager to contribute to their local legislatures to ensure that doesn't happen.
Forbes is reporting that Amazon plans to sell books by the page, so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in.
Well, we read only a page a time, so I guess that would work.
What I found more interesting though was the mention of a program called Amazon Upgrade, which will allow you to view books you own from any web browser.
What I'd find interesting is having free access to O'Reilly's on-line versions of printed books I've already bought and paid for. Or even better, have the good folks at O'Reilly send me a bound and printed copy of whatever it is I'm paying for the privilege of reading on their pricey website, or previously bought as an electronic version. Or maybe they'll just start including an electronic version on CD gratis with every book they sell, and save me all this head scratching? Or maybe someone else will come up with a Netflix version of a Monthly Book Club and confuse the hell out of everyone.
They want to design the WHOLE package, not just the software, and not just the hardware. They want everything to work seemlessly, as can be witnessed by the vast amount of first party software bundled with OSX.
Sounds like A Good Thing, I suppose. But what if I, like millions of others, don't care for clear plastic and have no intentions of wearing turtlenecks?... but they won't stand for actual use of OSX on non-apple hardware. They make no money off that hardware, and no money off that OS install...
If there can't possibly be any money to be made from selling an OS, I think you'll find the folks at Microsoft would disagree. And if the argument is that money is only made from hardware, maybe ask Dell, or any of the Japanese conglomerates how slim their margins are.
Look, everyone knows that Apple's strategy has been, and to what degree it's been successful. The may continue with it, or they may not. There is, however, no reason to believe they don't want to make more money and/or expand their market share by considering alternative approaches. To my mind, the alternatives look pretty damn interesting. If I was given the option to run OSX on non-Apple hardware (with or without caveat emptor disclaimers), I'd be the first in line to buy it. I'd also wager that the line would awfully long.
Dear Lord. If you're going to offer a response to someone that thinks the intarweb happens in their browser, maybe provide a linky that is more meaningful? Sorry, kids, Google Groups is nothing but a pretend front end to something else, and not a very good one at that. At least Microsoft hosts their microsoft.public hierarchy, though it's ludicrous the way in which they pretend it's something they invented and fill full with content.
As for indexing content on usenet, this has been done for quite some time. The more comprehensive (scariest) approach seems to be taken by the folks at Microsoft, evidence enough of why real names/email addresses should never be used. Also, there's sites like this one that people can use if they're so inclined. Whatever.
Personally, I think most web interfaces suck for searching, but only slightly less than downloading 500K headers in a binary group looking for something... interesting. What would be ideal if Easynews et al. could just offer a big text dump of any group that could be grepped locally without the clicking and advancing page by page nonsense. Either way, publicity is Not a Good Thing for usenet, which has for years been A Really Good Thing. It's easy enough for anyone to create a new group and migrate there with everyone else (ad infinitum), but that's hardly a welcome idea.
Do you know what happens when companies get together to collude towards a certain price against a competitor (not that this has been proven, but from what I've read, I don't feel it's much of a leap)? Once the competitor dies, they raise the prices.
Once upon a time in New York when the Genovese, Gambino and Columbo families were household names, the price for getting the garbage picked up was higher inside the city than elsehwere. The DoJ et al decided this wasn't A Good Thing and decided to go break up the cosy business arrangements, eventually sending scores of hard working Italian Americans to jail, and ending years of tradition. As expected, the prices soon plummeted as competition was brought back into the marketplace. The people saw that It Was Good and cheered.
That would be a happy ending, but the story doesn't end there. Waste Management, Inc. and another company decided that there was money to be made in New York and moved in to start buying up the local competition. Within two years of The Big Bust, garbage pickup was handled by two conglomerates, and the price of getting it picked up was higher than in the days when mob was in charge of things.
If there's a point to this it's that when there's money involved, rules get bent, and then some. There are no good guys or bad guys, and the side you're on is just that.
Easy, Don't run as ADMINISTRATOR. Run as a regular user!!!!!!!
And how in this case is running as a regular user with administrative privileges (a member of the "Administrators Group") different than running under the "Administrator" account? I doubt many Windows have ever logged onto the Administrator account or know what it is; IIRC a standard click-and-point install creates a user account that is a member of the Administrator Group. Seems to me that kind of account is as regular as any other account.
Perhaps you meant run under an account that is a member of the Users Group? That kind of account is also regular, but does have limited privileges. Regular use of a such an account would be advisable, if it weren't for the discussed-to-death problems of installing and running Windows programs that require administrative privileges. Among other things.
Come on, man. It's 2006 already
I'll say. This same vaguely inaccurate information keeps appearing on/. with little notice.
Re:Promising shift in user interfaces
on
Slacker or Sick
·
· Score: 1
While the interface is interesting, the fact that you still are hanging onto a mouse is a drawback.
The information presented in it is freely available all over the web...
And having things all over instead of in one place is a Good Thing?
Dunno about you, but it seems to me that reading a few hundred manpages or clicking through a few hundred links is neither practical nor comprehensive, which I believe is the purpose of this book.
I'm one of the software engineers who worked on the Open Library's Flipbook viewer.
Nice work!
I'm reminded of all the "viewers" that were being marketed during the dot-com boom when the term "ebook" was bandied with an ever increasing urgency. The most impressive of the lot (IMHO) were actually PDFs that simulated page turns and came complete with interactive menus and coloured "paper." I designed many such PDFs myself and while some folks at Adobe were duly impressed, I had this sinking feeling that no matter how realistic or interactive I or anyone else could make the experience, the approach wasn't going to go very far in becoming a standard. The rest, as they say, is history, and the term ebook is as meaningless today as it was back then.
I'm left wondering, however, whether having Life, the Universe and Everything end up in a browser window is a good thing, or just a sign of the times.
The professional line CRTs are great, and I'd stack them up against just about anybody elses. The budget line are... budget equipment, just as you'd expect.
Generally true, but I own 3 PF795s and a few models like the E90f, and all of them have trouble with geometry. When run at the highest supported resolution and refresh rate (what else would one use?), it's next to impossible to get straight lines at the edges after compensating for pincushion-type problems in the center. By contrast, I've seen run of the mill Dell monitors with less geometry issues.
Viewsonic is great, but there are several other manufactures out there who also make top notch monitors.
WHY DO END USER LICENSE AGREEMENTS LIKE CAPS SO MUCH?
Legal documents have traditionally been written (and continue to be written) in a fixed pitched (typewriter-style) font. Emphasizing portions of text is accomplished using all caps. There's certain exceptions, of course. A prospectus, for instance, is now typically published using a variable-pitch font and makes liberal use of italics, underscoring and various forms of capitalisation. By contrast, court filings are subject to rules of the court which mandate paper size, margins, etc. and a fixed-pitched font.
Note also that any and all variations on the standard font (emphasis) takes on a legal significance, as does punctuation. When drafting a contract, an attorney can labour over the placement of commas to the same degree as the actual words in a sentence.
If it helps, reading allcaps isn't any more difficult than sentence case when the text is printed using a typewriter style font. It's the proportional fonts (typical Microsoft's fonts, in particular) that exaggerate allcaps.
This is blindingly obvious to everyone except themselves; like the story submitter, they tend to make up all sorts of more palatable justifications for why they like their hobby.
Agreed, but "hobbies" are not created equal, so it's not entirely fair to over generalise. If the poster is looking for associations between creativity and programming, I'd suggest he'd be more likely to find it in the study of music and stop... playing around.
Your description of what you get to can be easily described as somewhere between rude and selfish. And despite your claim to be on the net since 1990 (whatever that means), your casually arrogant remarks indicate that it's unlikely you have participated in any meaningful discussion, or otherwise been subscribed to a mailing list (for example), where the content is more substantive than a typical IM conversation.
Top posting follows the natural flow of conversation. First, the question, then the answer. Rinse, cycle, repeat. Reading an answer without the necessary context of the preceding question is illogical at best. Top posting (and/or not trimming quoted text to the relevant bits) makes a mess of everything for everyone that is trying to follow the discussion in its entirety, or is reading it after the fact. The full text archive of the discussion (hopefully in logical form) remains for all to benefit from, irrespective of what any one individual's level of patience or interest is.
With respect to the OP's question, I believe the original quotation was excerpted from this page. The mailing list etiquette discussed on that page is hardly unique, and most certainly dates back well before 1990.
You'll note that this post (like all/. posts where the responder has taken the time to quote relevant text) are never top-posted. Contrast that, if you will, with the ms.public hierarchy which is littered with near unintelligible discussions from participants using a OE as their usenet/email client. The degree to which OE is borked and is non-standard has been discussed to death over the years, but the fact that the Microsoft folks invariably top-post while the rest of the world doesn't, speaks volumes, doncha think?
Re:The show will need local humor appeal
on
Homer Becomes Omar
·
· Score: 1
I wonder what local-arab irreverant humor is like? Any local-arabs have any insight?
is seeing a network news story on teevee discussing some webpage of topical interest and the main graphic used is that of Safari displaying the webpage, while local stations invariably use a shot Internet Explorer maximized on a WinXP desktop. A few years ago, you could Netscape, as well.
I mean, who actually decides on the graphic? Someone in the Art Department? The reporter? Someone in IT? To my mind, both seem a bit odd, if not inappropriate.
Dude, there are no penguins in Scotland. And there probably even fewer in the 13th century, let alone any that wore a kilt or had the surname of Wallace.
Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything. Windows is 20 years of age, and like most 20-year olds, is annoying, unable to multi-task well, and thinks the world revolves around it.
And like all 20-year olds, trying to re-invent iteself again and again fighting off of the inevitable... becoming just like the old folks.
I keep a Compaq Deskpro EN (1 GHz PIII, 512 MB, 20 GB HD) in the front of my shop as an open, public net device (well, with a donation jar on the SFF case;) ). Two things I can tell you:... Yes, a 1GHz PIII is more than enough muscle for 5.10.
You can definitely go lower. There's a large number of Dell GX1 (450-550MHz PIII, 128MB ECC RAM, onboard NIC (PXE boot), sound and video) available on Craig's List or eBay for $50-100. You can install most any modern distro (latest Ubuntu, included) without a hitch and run Gnome or KDE just fine. Some extra RAM and a new and fast hard drive helps, of course, but in the end a perfectly good desktop machine for some wanting to run Linux, BSD, Win2K/XP or desktop, or interested in setting up a server or firewall on their network.
Slashdot Mirror
If you run Linux, you can forget this.
Wouldn't something like
export MAILPATH='/var/spool/mail/xconsole "New mail."'
be more appropriate?
Well, we know what happened the last time a few experts were taken at face value...No WMDs.
No, what was accepted at face value was what was said and repeated publically by Bush, and by those in charge (Cheney, Tenet, and Rice, among others, and to his regret, Powell). To the extent there were experts working for or in conjunction with any of these folks, none of use was privy to the discussions or any disagreements.
The thing is, many of the great works in this so-called geek canon aren't chiefly admired for their literary qualities at all. If there's anything that serves as the basis for self-important pretentiousness in geek reading preference, it's a bias favouring substance over form and ideas over aesthetics.
Well said. Something similar, I think, can be said for fiction writers like Grisham, King, Clancy et al whose names regularly appear on bestseller lists and, despite their obvious talent for story telling, offer up remarkably undistinguished fare not unlike the ardent scribblings of a semi-talented student in a high school English class.
That said, I do believe Douglas Adams deserves special recognition for his contributions to the narrative form. A Trilogy published in five books is undoubtedly a literary first.
Explorer does it's work, if I wanted more power on my workstations I'd be slapping Linux on them where I have amazing powers at my tooltip with some help by perl and bash.
Agreed that Perl and shell are generally preferrable when you know WTF you want/are doing, but Windows Explorer? Single threaded featureless toy with next-to-zero customisability, problematic relationship to the desktop shell and progress dialogs that range from the "very rough" to "braindead" to "absurd" are just a few characterisations off the top of my head.
On a Windows system, the only file manager worth discussing is Directory Opus, which aside from having more features and possible customisations than anyone has time for, actually works better than most Win32 apps, that despite the fact that it actually compensates for Explorer's deficiencies. And the multi-pane approach offers a preview window with a plugin architecture (text, html, images, pdfs, etc.) that substitutes nicely for anyone in the habit of using ACDSee, etc. for file management. The irony for me, at least, is that many of menu items and/or toolbar buttons run bash or Perl scripts.
My idea of a "type manager" is a full-featured file manager with a customisable display that accommodates file/directory filtering.
Don't be too quick to dismiss bad stereotypical behaviour. The Daily Show devoted an extended segment to the subject, so it must be true.
Ignoring how depressing a Day in the Life of a Research monkey must be, I'm wondering why they wouldn't opt for something more stimulating?
Leaving you front door unlocked is now illegal.
Well, if people start taking advantage of your door being unlocked and your house being open by hanging out and doing drugs and generally causing a fuss, it becomes a problem for the neighbourhood, right? It wasn't so long ago that municipalities got into the habit passing laws to address that problem. Back then it was crack, of course. Moreover, homeowner are typically liable for all sorts of other shit they may not have a direct role in.
Obviously, WiFi isn't analogous to crack but the reasoning behind the laws is similar enough that it could be successfully argued in a court of law and establish a precedent or two. Take this even further, it's entirely possible that over time software developers could become liable for security problems.
Establishing the tradeoffs between what's in the public's best interests with individual rights and accountability happens in all sorts of ways. My guess is that any law that places the burden on the individual stands a better chance of passing than any law that seeks to regulate a company's manufacture of an "insecure" product. Any corporation that sees its bottom line at risk is typically ready and eager to contribute to their local legislatures to ensure that doesn't happen.
Forbes is reporting that Amazon plans to sell books by the page, so you could purchase only the excerpt you're interested in.
Well, we read only a page a time, so I guess that would work.
What I found more interesting though was the mention of a program called Amazon Upgrade, which will allow you to view books you own from any web browser.
What I'd find interesting is having free access to O'Reilly's on-line versions of printed books I've already bought and paid for. Or even better, have the good folks at O'Reilly send me a bound and printed copy of whatever it is I'm paying for the privilege of reading on their pricey website, or previously bought as an electronic version. Or maybe they'll just start including an electronic version on CD gratis with every book they sell, and save me all this head scratching? Or maybe someone else will come up with a Netflix version of a Monthly Book Club and confuse the hell out of everyone.
So many options. so little time.
Interesting value-add proposition.
Indeed. I consider myself a cliche.
They want to design the WHOLE package, not just the software, and not just the hardware. They want everything to work seemlessly, as can be witnessed by the vast amount of first party software bundled with OSX.
... but they won't stand for actual use of OSX on non-apple hardware. They make no money off that hardware, and no money off that OS install ...
Sounds like A Good Thing, I suppose. But what if I, like millions of others, don't care for clear plastic and have no intentions of wearing turtlenecks?
If there can't possibly be any money to be made from selling an OS, I think you'll find the folks at Microsoft would disagree. And if the argument is that money is only made from hardware, maybe ask Dell, or any of the Japanese conglomerates how slim their margins are.
Look, everyone knows that Apple's strategy has been, and to what degree it's been successful. The may continue with it, or they may not. There is, however, no reason to believe they don't want to make more money and/or expand their market share by considering alternative approaches. To my mind, the alternatives look pretty damn interesting. If I was given the option to run OSX on non-Apple hardware (with or without caveat emptor disclaimers), I'd be the first in line to buy it. I'd also wager that the line would awfully long.
As for indexing content on usenet, this has been done for quite some time. The more comprehensive (scariest) approach seems to be taken by the folks at Microsoft, evidence enough of why real names/email addresses should never be used. Also, there's sites like this one that people can use if they're so inclined. Whatever.
Personally, I think most web interfaces suck for searching, but only slightly less than downloading 500K headers in a binary group looking for something ... interesting. What would be ideal if Easynews et al. could just offer a big text dump of any group that could be grepped locally without the clicking and advancing page by page nonsense. Either way, publicity is Not a Good Thing for usenet, which has for years been A Really Good Thing. It's easy enough for anyone to create a new group and migrate there with everyone else (ad infinitum), but that's hardly a welcome idea.
Do you know what happens when companies get together to collude towards a certain price against a competitor (not that this has been proven, but from what I've read, I don't feel it's much of a leap)? Once the competitor dies, they raise the prices.
Once upon a time in New York when the Genovese, Gambino and Columbo families were household names, the price for getting the garbage picked up was higher inside the city than elsehwere. The DoJ et al decided this wasn't A Good Thing and decided to go break up the cosy business arrangements, eventually sending scores of hard working Italian Americans to jail, and ending years of tradition. As expected, the prices soon plummeted as competition was brought back into the marketplace. The people saw that It Was Good and cheered.
That would be a happy ending, but the story doesn't end there. Waste Management, Inc. and another company decided that there was money to be made in New York and moved in to start buying up the local competition. Within two years of The Big Bust, garbage pickup was handled by two conglomerates, and the price of getting it picked up was higher than in the days when mob was in charge of things.
If there's a point to this it's that when there's money involved, rules get bent, and then some. There are no good guys or bad guys, and the side you're on is just that.
Easy, Don't run as ADMINISTRATOR. Run as a regular user!!!!!!!
/. with little notice.
And how in this case is running as a regular user with administrative privileges (a member of the "Administrators Group") different than running under the "Administrator" account? I doubt many Windows have ever logged onto the Administrator account or know what it is; IIRC a standard click-and-point install creates a user account that is a member of the Administrator Group. Seems to me that kind of account is as regular as any other account.
Perhaps you meant run under an account that is a member of the Users Group? That kind of account is also regular, but does have limited privileges. Regular use of a such an account would be advisable, if it weren't for the discussed-to-death problems of installing and running Windows programs that require administrative privileges. Among other things.
Come on, man. It's 2006 already
I'll say. This same vaguely inaccurate information keeps appearing on
With this?
Or this?
Personally, my idea of a clickless user interface is a terminal window (vi keybindings, etc.), but the referenced link is indeed interesting.
The information presented in it is freely available all over the web ...
And having things all over instead of in one place is a Good Thing?
Dunno about you, but it seems to me that reading a few hundred manpages or clicking through a few hundred links is neither practical nor comprehensive, which I believe is the purpose of this book.
I'm one of the software engineers who worked on the Open Library's Flipbook viewer.
Nice work!
I'm reminded of all the "viewers" that were being marketed during the dot-com boom when the term "ebook" was bandied with an ever increasing urgency. The most impressive of the lot (IMHO) were actually PDFs that simulated page turns and came complete with interactive menus and coloured "paper." I designed many such PDFs myself and while some folks at Adobe were duly impressed, I had this sinking feeling that no matter how realistic or interactive I or anyone else could make the experience, the approach wasn't going to go very far in becoming a standard. The rest, as they say, is history, and the term ebook is as meaningless today as it was back then.
I'm left wondering, however, whether having Life, the Universe and Everything end up in a browser window is a good thing, or just a sign of the times.
The professional line CRTs are great, and I'd stack them up against just about anybody elses. The budget line are... budget equipment, just as you'd expect.
Generally true, but I own 3 PF795s and a few models like the E90f, and all of them have trouble with geometry. When run at the highest supported resolution and refresh rate (what else would one use?), it's next to impossible to get straight lines at the edges after compensating for pincushion-type problems in the center. By contrast, I've seen run of the mill Dell monitors with less geometry issues.
Viewsonic is great, but there are several other manufactures out there who also make top notch monitors.
WHY DO END USER LICENSE AGREEMENTS LIKE CAPS SO MUCH?
Legal documents have traditionally been written (and continue to be written) in a fixed pitched (typewriter-style) font. Emphasizing portions of text is accomplished using all caps. There's certain exceptions, of course. A prospectus, for instance, is now typically published using a variable-pitch font and makes liberal use of italics, underscoring and various forms of capitalisation. By contrast, court filings are subject to rules of the court which mandate paper size, margins, etc. and a fixed-pitched font.
Note also that any and all variations on the standard font (emphasis) takes on a legal significance, as does punctuation. When drafting a contract, an attorney can labour over the placement of commas to the same degree as the actual words in a sentence.
If it helps, reading allcaps isn't any more difficult than sentence case when the text is printed using a typewriter style font. It's the proportional fonts (typical Microsoft's fonts, in particular) that exaggerate allcaps.
This is blindingly obvious to everyone except themselves; like the story submitter, they tend to make up all sorts of more palatable justifications for why they like their hobby.
... playing around.
Agreed, but "hobbies" are not created equal, so it's not entirely fair to over generalise. If the poster is looking for associations between creativity and programming, I'd suggest he'd be more likely to find it in the study of music and stop
Your description of what you get to can be easily described as somewhere between rude and selfish. And despite your claim to be on the net since 1990 (whatever that means), your casually arrogant remarks indicate that it's unlikely you have participated in any meaningful discussion, or otherwise been subscribed to a mailing list (for example), where the content is more substantive than a typical IM conversation.
Top posting follows the natural flow of conversation. First, the question, then the answer. Rinse, cycle, repeat. Reading an answer without the necessary context of the preceding question is illogical at best. Top posting (and/or not trimming quoted text to the relevant bits) makes a mess of everything for everyone that is trying to follow the discussion in its entirety, or is reading it after the fact. The full text archive of the discussion (hopefully in logical form) remains for all to benefit from, irrespective of what any one individual's level of patience or interest is.
With respect to the OP's question, I believe the original quotation was excerpted from this page. The mailing list etiquette discussed on that page is hardly unique, and most certainly dates back well before 1990.
You'll note that this post (like all /. posts where the responder has taken the time to quote relevant text) are never top-posted. Contrast that, if you will, with the ms.public hierarchy which is littered with near unintelligible discussions from participants using a OE as their usenet/email client. The degree to which OE is borked and is non-standard has been discussed to death over the years, but the fact that the Microsoft folks invariably top-post while the rest of the world doesn't, speaks volumes, doncha think?
Maybe this?
http://waxy.org/random/video/Ali_G_-_Throw_the_Jew _Down_the_Well.wmv
is seeing a network news story on teevee discussing some webpage of topical interest and the main graphic used is that of Safari displaying the webpage, while local stations invariably use a shot Internet Explorer maximized on a WinXP desktop. A few years ago, you could Netscape, as well.
I mean, who actually decides on the graphic? Someone in the Art Department? The reporter? Someone in IT? To my mind, both seem a bit odd, if not inappropriate.
Dude, there are no penguins in Scotland. And there probably even fewer in the 13th century, let alone any that wore a kilt or had the surname of Wallace.
Windows is not old. UNIX is old, and behaves as many older people do, working calmly and quietly in the background, running everything. Windows is 20 years of age, and like most 20-year olds, is annoying, unable to multi-task well, and thinks the world revolves around it.
... becoming just like the old folks.
And like all 20-year olds, trying to re-invent iteself again and again fighting off of the inevitable
I keep a Compaq Deskpro EN (1 GHz PIII, 512 MB, 20 GB HD) in the front of my shop as an open, public net device (well, with a donation jar on the SFF case ;) ). Two things I can tell you: ... Yes, a 1GHz PIII is more than enough muscle for 5.10.
You can definitely go lower. There's a large number of Dell GX1 (450-550MHz PIII, 128MB ECC RAM, onboard NIC (PXE boot), sound and video) available on Craig's List or eBay for $50-100. You can install most any modern distro (latest Ubuntu, included) without a hitch and run Gnome or KDE just fine. Some extra RAM and a new and fast hard drive helps, of course, but in the end a perfectly good desktop machine for some wanting to run Linux, BSD, Win2K/XP or desktop, or interested in setting up a server or firewall on their network.