Hmmm... if the BBC and the SciFi Network are on good terms now, perhaps they can agree to release the lone 8th Doctor story (sometimes known as The Enemy Within and sometimes less fortunately as The TV Movie) on DVD in the U.S.
The BBC did a non-US release years ago, but since the SciFi Network inherited the distribution rights in the US, there's never been a US release.
I think there are also quite a few issues regarding incomplete transfers... portable devices on the move will be continuously connecting and disconnecting with other portable devices on the move. The connect / disconnect cycle will be a lot shorter for them than for traditional P2P devices.
There are definitely ways to deal with such issues; in fact there are multiple incompatible ways. I suspect that the exact way it's handled could make or break the concept.
I've personally been using the "Astronomy Events and Happenings" iCalendar feed from webcal://ical.mac.com/wesley/Astronomy.ics for the past couple of years. It works with Firefox/Thunderbird (pre 1.5 only with the calendar plug-in), Sunbird, Chandler, and of course iCal.
No big weekly download to manually contend with, and it covers enough of interest to satisfy my needs.
Um, just the company that created the single most successful model of computer ever (the C64); had a bunch of other very successful models (the C128, the VIC-20, the PET, the Amiga 2000, the Amiga 500); is generally acknowledged for inventing multimedia (with the Amiga 1000); had switchable GUIs, multiple processors, independent graphics processors, decent (stereo) sound and graphics, and scripting capabilities back before most other computer platforms even thought about such things; had reliably chainable external hardware well before USB; etc. Most of the best programmers I know today started on one of the Commodore series.
"The Commodore Navigator is a Windows CE-based portable device..."
I stopped reading here.
Agreed. There are some devices out there that do utilize Commodore technology; the Commodore One is just one example. These deserve the name far more than any WinCE device ever could.
IMHO the C128 version was better than the PC version in both the graphics and sound department. I'd say that in fact a C128 with multiple drives was probably the best platform to run Ultima V on overall.
Ultima VI in contrast was a horror show on the C128 with multiple drives. In fact, if you had more than one drive on your system, it wouldn't even boot. Although Origin promised a patch to fix that particular bug and generally enable multiple drive support for it, they never delivered. Quite a few Ultima fans (myself included) got rather pissed, and I know in my own case I've not bought another Origin or Ultima product since.
My favorite is the ugly black blobs in tooltips bug. It affects pretty much every platform, and is readily obvious to even casual non-tech users and really an embarrassment for anyone trying to encourage others to use Firefox.
There are a few contests out there dedicated to Interactive Fiction, and these contests tend to view it more as a literary form than a style of computer game.
The biggest is of course IF Comp, but there are other smaller ones dedicated to particular themes (like the annual Saugus.net Ghost Story Contest that invite both prose and interactive fiction entries).
Viewing interactive fiction as just a type of computer game is a little like viewing an audio book as just a type of CD. While it's in some sense true, a typical I-F title has just as much in common with a typical computer game as a typical audio book has with a typical pop CD...
this file extensions reference had all hair extension and eyelash extension ads and absolutely no ads related to computers
That one is kind of funny; one would think that the term "extension" wouldn't automatically invoke notions of hair and eyelashes. It may actually be an indication of a problem with the AI -- within the commercial world, it possibly is true that "extension" is most commonly used with hair and eyelashes even if that's quite false in general.
Am I the only one who isn't totally sold on Russell Davies' ability as a science fiction writer?... And when it came right down to it, the whole "Bad Wolf" plot thread was a huge letdown at the end and didn't really make any kind of sense at all.
Nope, I agree that the "Bad Wolf" plotline was a letdown as if anyone could have pulled what Rose did in the end then there would have been numerous "suicide manipulators" throughout the history of the series. Not well thought out. Some of the episodes were pretty good, though. While the average writing quality of Doctor Who seems to have hit its peak sometime in the '70s, I'd say the average writing quality for the current series has probably beaten out the average writing quality that the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth doctors had to deal with (granted, there were a couple exceptional fifth and sixth doctor stories, but we're talking about averages here).
They will refuse to support OpenDocument just as long as there is a chance they can browbeat customers lime MA into sticking with Office. Then they will refuse to support it while they make all of their plans to switch to something else. Finally at the last minute they will offer to allow them to be a 'beta' site for their upcoming OpenDocument supporting version.
Umm, I know there's this odd phenomenon where many people tend to label any processor that's made by either Intel or AMD "non-proprietary" and any processor made by another company "proprietary", but even still this article is a little silly. SPARC processors have been in use since the late '80s, most people consider SPARC-based machines "Big Iron", and the SPARC processor architecture is fully open -- anyone who wants to can make SPARC processors. SPARCproductDIRectory lists a bunch of companies who currently do. In fact, there are probably just as many (if not more) SPARC manufacturers as there are X86 manufacturers.
While I agree that a government is not equal to a role model, saying that the OpenDocument standard is virtually ignored by the constituents of Massachusetts is ill-informed. Many of the individual communities in Massachusetts made the switch in advance of the Commonwealth itself; Saugus is probably the best example as it probably made the switch first and has a lot of info online:
There's more info buried within the various Saugus sites, too. This isn't a change decreed from on-high, it's got quite a bit of grassroots support as well.
I'm still amazed that Microsoft is acting like this is a sudden event. The tide in Massachusetts has been turning this way for a long time. Didn't they wonder about Massachusetts being the only state that didn't cave in and settle in the MS monopoly case? Didn't they wonder about the ramifications of the Massachusetts "Open Source Software Trough" when it was first instituted some years ago? Didn't they see the writing on the wall in local Massachusetts community sites like Saugus.net that have been promoting free software and open standards since the '90s? Haven't they noticed that recent Massachusetts-based projects (like the local Teaching American History Grant participation have been embracing open standards?
Wake up Microsoft. This shouldn't be a surprise. What's more, other states have been following Massachusetts' example regarding the open source trough, so I expect that they may also take a good hard look at what's happening here now.
Massachusetts has been going down this road a long time; it's not just something that appeared out of nowhere and they've already done some work weighing the various options. I don't think MS is going to be able to change things with FUD this late in the game.
Saugus has been pushing free and open software since the mid to late '90s. Massachusetts developed an "open source trough" for use by all state departments a couple of years back. Switching to open formats is just a natural step along the path that Massachusetts has been heading for quite some time now.
This event has been long in the making. Massachusetts established an "Open Source Public Trough" over a year ago, and many of its more prominent regional web sites had been using and/or advocating open source since before then (see this recommendation or Guide to Free Software for just a couple of examples from my home town) and of course Massachusetts was the only state not to cave in regarding the court case against Microsoft.
For locals, this isn't surprising. What's more surprising is that it took so long.
If you feel like Bruce Schneier, how would you fix it?
This makes the assumption that it's a solvable problem; not every problem is, especially when it comes to computer security (or security in general, for that matter).
IrDA just works on the Newton. When there were quite a few of us around using them we used to selectively exchange data all the time; it was fast and easy. I also wrote quite a few lectures on a Newton and printed them via IrDA on an HP printer with an IrDA port -- no muss, no fuss.
People trying to use IrDA for Internet access I think are missing the point. It works quite well for quick one-shot exchanges, though.
Use a CMS like Plone (built on top of Zope). Its built-in document type can automatically convert input documents in various formats (including MS-Word) into something more web-friendly.
It's pretty much a repeat of history. Back when FM radio and analog tape cassette recording was in its infancy, the music industry also cried foul about people recording music from radio shows and claimed it was cutting into their profits.
Studies of that time showed similar results to the one mentioned in the article: people who recorded music from radio also bought a heck of a lot more music than those who didn't. Ultimately radio served as an advertising medium and wasn't hurting sales at all. The music industry eventually made its peace with radio.
We can only hope that eventually the music industry will relearn this old lesson...
RSS 2.0 vs. Atom vs. RSS 1.0
on
Atom 1.0 vs RSS 2.0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
AFAIK the format war between RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 hasn't even ended yet. In spite of the version numbering, RSS 2.0 is more of a.95 than a 2.0 since it's an incremental improvement over.94. It doesn't really add any capabilities to RSS 1.0 (both can support enclosures). The only real difference is that RSS 1.0 is based on RDF while 2.0 isn't; this supposedly makes 2.0 simpler, but potentially less capable.
It's a pity that all the RSS folks couldn't simply hash together a common standard rather than wasting time on competing standards. Is 2.0 really that much simpler than 1.0? Is 1.0 really that much more capable than 2.0? Does Atom really add much to the mix? It seems that it ought to be possible to find a middle ground.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... if the BBC and the SciFi Network are on good terms now, perhaps they can agree to release the lone 8th Doctor story (sometimes known as The Enemy Within and sometimes less fortunately as The TV Movie) on DVD in the U.S.
The BBC did a non-US release years ago, but since the SciFi Network inherited the distribution rights in the US, there's never been a US release.
I think there are also quite a few issues regarding incomplete transfers... portable devices on the move will be continuously connecting and disconnecting with other portable devices on the move. The connect / disconnect cycle will be a lot shorter for them than for traditional P2P devices.
There are definitely ways to deal with such issues; in fact there are multiple incompatible ways. I suspect that the exact way it's handled could make or break the concept.
I've personally been using the "Astronomy Events and Happenings" iCalendar feed from webcal://ical.mac.com/wesley/Astronomy.ics for the past couple of years. It works with Firefox/Thunderbird (pre 1.5 only with the calendar plug-in), Sunbird, Chandler, and of course iCal.
No big weekly download to manually contend with, and it covers enough of interest to satisfy my needs.
Um, just the company that created the single most successful model of computer ever (the C64); had a bunch of other very successful models (the C128, the VIC-20, the PET, the Amiga 2000, the Amiga 500); is generally acknowledged for inventing multimedia (with the Amiga 1000); had switchable GUIs, multiple processors, independent graphics processors, decent (stereo) sound and graphics, and scripting capabilities back before most other computer platforms even thought about such things; had reliably chainable external hardware well before USB; etc. Most of the best programmers I know today started on one of the Commodore series.
Agreed. There are some devices out there that do utilize Commodore technology; the Commodore One is just one example. These deserve the name far more than any WinCE device ever could.
IMHO the C128 version was better than the PC version in both the graphics and sound department. I'd say that in fact a C128 with multiple drives was probably the best platform to run Ultima V on overall.
Ultima VI in contrast was a horror show on the C128 with multiple drives. In fact, if you had more than one drive on your system, it wouldn't even boot. Although Origin promised a patch to fix that particular bug and generally enable multiple drive support for it, they never delivered. Quite a few Ultima fans (myself included) got rather pissed, and I know in my own case I've not bought another Origin or Ultima product since.
My favorite is the ugly black blobs in tooltips bug. It affects pretty much every platform, and is readily obvious to even casual non-tech users and really an embarrassment for anyone trying to encourage others to use Firefox.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67127
There's a fair amount written locally about it in Saugus. You can read the public announcement, see it discussed on the Saugus forums (in regards to the Teaching American History Grant Project) or even see the blog entry I posted about it on the Saugus blog. If you go digging through Saugus.net's search facility I'm sure you'll find more info about it in Saugus, too.
There are a few contests out there dedicated to Interactive Fiction, and these contests tend to view it more as a literary form than a style of computer game.
The biggest is of course IF Comp, but there are other smaller ones dedicated to particular themes (like the annual Saugus.net Ghost Story Contest that invite both prose and interactive fiction entries).
Viewing interactive fiction as just a type of computer game is a little like viewing an audio book as just a type of CD. While it's in some sense true, a typical I-F title has just as much in common with a typical computer game as a typical audio book has with a typical pop CD...
That one is kind of funny; one would think that the term "extension" wouldn't automatically invoke notions of hair and eyelashes. It may actually be an indication of a problem with the AI -- within the commercial world, it possibly is true that "extension" is most commonly used with hair and eyelashes even if that's quite false in general.
Nope, I agree that the "Bad Wolf" plotline was a letdown as if anyone could have pulled what Rose did in the end then there would have been numerous "suicide manipulators" throughout the history of the series. Not well thought out. Some of the episodes were pretty good, though. While the average writing quality of Doctor Who seems to have hit its peak sometime in the '70s, I'd say the average writing quality for the current series has probably beaten out the average writing quality that the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth doctors had to deal with (granted, there were a couple exceptional fifth and sixth doctor stories, but we're talking about averages here).
It's already too late. Parts of Massachusetts (including perhaps most notably Saugus) have already switched. See the announcement on Saugus.net and some samples of open format usage for both Saugus' involvement with the Teaching American History Grant and Saugus' official by-laws. Other communities in Massachusetts are following suit.
Remember, the deadline is that everything has to be completely changed over by 2007; that means that the change is already happening now.
Umm, I know there's this odd phenomenon where many people tend to label any processor that's made by either Intel or AMD "non-proprietary" and any processor made by another company "proprietary", but even still this article is a little silly. SPARC processors have been in use since the late '80s, most people consider SPARC-based machines "Big Iron", and the SPARC processor architecture is fully open -- anyone who wants to can make SPARC processors. SPARCproductDIRectory lists a bunch of companies who currently do. In fact, there are probably just as many (if not more) SPARC manufacturers as there are X86 manufacturers.
While I agree that a government is not equal to a role model, saying that the OpenDocument standard is virtually ignored by the constituents of Massachusetts is ill-informed. Many of the individual communities in Massachusetts made the switch in advance of the Commonwealth itself; Saugus is probably the best example as it probably made the switch first and has a lot of info online:
There's more info buried within the various Saugus sites, too. This isn't a change decreed from on-high, it's got quite a bit of grassroots support as well.
I'm still amazed that Microsoft is acting like this is a sudden event. The tide in Massachusetts has been turning this way for a long time. Didn't they wonder about Massachusetts being the only state that didn't cave in and settle in the MS monopoly case? Didn't they wonder about the ramifications of the Massachusetts "Open Source Software Trough" when it was first instituted some years ago? Didn't they see the writing on the wall in local Massachusetts community sites like Saugus.net that have been promoting free software and open standards since the '90s? Haven't they noticed that recent Massachusetts-based projects (like the local Teaching American History Grant participation have been embracing open standards?
Wake up Microsoft. This shouldn't be a surprise. What's more, other states have been following Massachusetts' example regarding the open source trough, so I expect that they may also take a good hard look at what's happening here now.
Massachusetts has been going down this road a long time; it's not just something that appeared out of nowhere and they've already done some work weighing the various options. I don't think MS is going to be able to change things with FUD this late in the game.
It's worth noting that parts of Massachusetts have already changed over. Saugus started going this route some years ago; you can see Saugus' official response to the state's announcement or my entry in the Saugus blog discussing the same.
Saugus has been pushing free and open software since the mid to late '90s. Massachusetts developed an "open source trough" for use by all state departments a couple of years back. Switching to open formats is just a natural step along the path that Massachusetts has been heading for quite some time now.
Quite a few local sites have already been switching over; this isn't something that just happened. See the TAHG project for just one example.
This event has been long in the making. Massachusetts established an "Open Source Public Trough" over a year ago, and many of its more prominent regional web sites had been using and/or advocating open source since before then (see this recommendation or Guide to Free Software for just a couple of examples from my home town) and of course Massachusetts was the only state not to cave in regarding the court case against Microsoft.
For locals, this isn't surprising. What's more surprising is that it took so long.
This makes the assumption that it's a solvable problem; not every problem is, especially when it comes to computer security (or security in general, for that matter).
IrDA just works on the Newton. When there were quite a few of us around using them we used to selectively exchange data all the time; it was fast and easy. I also wrote quite a few lectures on a Newton and printed them via IrDA on an HP printer with an IrDA port -- no muss, no fuss.
People trying to use IrDA for Internet access I think are missing the point. It works quite well for quick one-shot exchanges, though.
I'd say that's also true with RSS 1.0 with its RDF base.
Use a CMS like Plone (built on top of Zope). Its built-in document type can automatically convert input documents in various formats (including MS-Word) into something more web-friendly.
It's pretty much a repeat of history. Back when FM radio and analog tape cassette recording was in its infancy, the music industry also cried foul about people recording music from radio shows and claimed it was cutting into their profits.
Studies of that time showed similar results to the one mentioned in the article: people who recorded music from radio also bought a heck of a lot more music than those who didn't. Ultimately radio served as an advertising medium and wasn't hurting sales at all. The music industry eventually made its peace with radio.
We can only hope that eventually the music industry will relearn this old lesson...
AFAIK the format war between RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 hasn't even ended yet. In spite of the version numbering, RSS 2.0 is more of a .95 than a 2.0 since it's an incremental improvement over .94. It doesn't really add any capabilities to RSS 1.0 (both can support enclosures). The only real difference is that RSS 1.0 is based on RDF while 2.0 isn't; this supposedly makes 2.0 simpler, but potentially less capable.
It's a pity that all the RSS folks couldn't simply hash together a common standard rather than wasting time on competing standards. Is 2.0 really that much simpler than 1.0? Is 1.0 really that much more capable than 2.0? Does Atom really add much to the mix? It seems that it ought to be possible to find a middle ground.
Or even 30th if you decide to count 1996 as being an abbreviated season...