I couldn't agree more. I've listened to Play and 18 back to back, and 18 is definitely the better of the two albums. Tracks like 'Extreme Ways' (one of the angriest songs ever committed to CD), 'Great Escape' (I love the lyrics) and 'Harbour' (I almost cried the first time I heard this) are infinitely better than anything on Play.
Interestingly, all of those songs use actual vocalists rather than the 'really old samples' approach. In general, 18 features less of the samples that people seem to be criticising it for than Play does.
Also, 18 doesn't mellow out after about track 13 like Play does. The final 5 songs on Play always felt like they were just running into each other, whereas every song on 18 sounds individual, and works in the context of the album.
Don't get me wrong, I love both albums, but it's pretty obvious after a few listens that Play is merely the beta version of 18.
As to Moby's comments about MP3s killing his sales, well, I'd make a comment about musical integrity, but considering the number of Ayumi Hamasaki albums in my CD collection, it's better that I don't.
Bjork and Neil Young are probably the only two artists with any sort of musical integrity now. Bjork's last album was fantastic.
I just saw Metropolis the other night. This is the new film from (partly) the creative minds behind Akira. It's based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka that was inspired by Fritz Lang's original 1930s film of the same name.
All I can say is, if you think Akira's good, you haven't seen anything yet.
(Just for reference, I have always regarded Patlabor and Patlabor 2 as my favourite anime films of that type, and My Neighbour Totoro as my favourite anime film ever).
Intriguingly, SBS here in Australia screened NGE in its entirety, twice, back in 1998. It was the dubbed version though.
Still, you'll find here in Australia that a lot more people know what NGE is than in many other parts of the world. Mind you, SBS is clearly our best TV station, showing everything from South Park to freaky cult movies presented by the legendary Des Mangan. And that's just on the one night.
Unfortunately they passed on screening Serial Experiments Lain...
I've spoken to an Apple employee about this, and apparently the problem with file extentions is due to a Mexican standoff between the NeXT developers in apple (pro file extentions) and the Mac OS developers (anti file extentions).
Unfortunately, it seems the NeXT guys are winning, while Mac OS X usability suffers as a result (file extentions are the one major thing that annoys me about Mac OS X).
Other than this stupid design flaw, Mac OS X has been great for me ever since I installed Mac OS 10.1 on my iBook (Dual USB) last year.
Seriously, that is just so totally wrong I can't believe it.
Hopefully if they show it here in Australia, they'll show it subtitled, like they have with Mononoke Hime (which has been going around various cinemas here for a year now...) and Metropolis.
/me goes off to cry at the thought of not hearing Maaya in wonderful Dolby 5.1 surround sound... *sigh*
As much as I enjoyed the Escaflowne movie, I still think the series is a lot better. The movie changed a lot of things, not always for the better. The new character designs weren't great, although I did like Hitomi more in the film, mainly because she had more of a purpose than she does in the series.
My problem really is that they neutered Merle in the movie, and almost neutered Allen. These two were my favourite characters from the series. I did like the fact they gave Merle a background though.
Of course, the movie is an excuse to listen to Maaya Sakamoto's beautiful voice for 90-odd minutes.
Then again, I can listen to it for 13 hours if i watch the series.:D
Just a quick reply to the troll comment... It was rather late at night, and I needed an excuse to rant, so biting at what I thought was a troll was my best option... I noticed after I'd posted that there had been a few other posts in the thread as well and realised that I was wrong (dammit why isn't there an edit comment feature in slashdot yet?) (it took me nearly half an hour to write that, between watching Gundam Wing, IRC and other web boards.)
Sorry if I offended you, but I did think, initially, that you were trolling. (Of course, I thought it was a pretty well written troll too:) )
As to Mac OS X being hard to use... to each his own i guess:)
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not trolling.
Mac OS X is based on UNIX, a design which, if you'd noticed a previous story today on slashdot, is now 30 years old, much older than Classic Mac OS.
Mac OS X has a carefully redesigned UI that actually works really well. Believe me, I haven't used Classic Mac OS in about 4 weeks now, and even then it was for DVD playback due to an oversight in Mac OS X. The new UI is just as carefully designed, and just as carefully planned as the old one. It has one disadvantage however:
It's new.
That means that there are going to be kinks for a while yet (ever used Mac OS 1.0? I have, and believe me, it has more UI kinks that Aqua does now).
That said, I can't go back to Classic Mac OS for two reasons: Protected Memory and real Multitasking. Between the time that my Centris died, and the acquisition of my iBook Dual USB, my primary computer was an Intel system running Debian Linux. I can happily say that I was able to put up with KDE's quirks (it's nice, but it's got a long way to go before it gets close to Mac OS for usability), simply because the system NEVER BLOODY CRASHED!. Seriously. The only reboots I perform on it are for power outages and kernel upgrades.
Mac OS X is just the same. While I got a few kernel panics on the older 10.0.x series (3... all of them while in public for some reason:( ) I am yet to see one in Mac OS 10.1.
The point is, I would happily live at a commandline if it meant the OS wasn't going to freeze up at least once a day, or if I could happily run as many applications as I wanted without worrying about memory (No more memory size settings! YESSSSS!). And that's not even mentioning the fact that the system actually MULTITASKS. Whoa! Who'd have thought that a Mac would ever be able to multitask and provide memory protection? They've only had an MMU for what? 10 years now?
I love Macs, always have, always will, but the old OS was kludge upon kludge upon kludge. It's old, It's broken, it's been replaced. Stop using it, please. And Aqua takes all of 5 minutes to adjust to from Platinum. It's harder to jump to windows from Platinum than to Aqua.
I mean seriously... would you go on using Windows on an Intel system if you knew that a newer and better operating system was available that didn't have all of Windows bugs?
Considering that the Gamecube uses a PowerPC-based CPU and that (iirc) Apple hardware provides the development platform for the Gamecube, I think it's fairly logical that Apple wouldn't sue.
In fact... I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Mac/Gamecube hybrid in the near future. Both are PPC, and both, amusingly enough, use Matsushita optical drives.
It probably doesn't count as a WM, but I've been using KDE since the 1.1.2 days as my WM and I rarely ever use another WM unless I want to see what it's like.
The only exception to this is if I have to use X as root, when I will WindowMaker because its quick and I don't need all the extra features of KDE when I'm root.
The nice thing about using KDE is that it is under constant development (someone mentioned that the KDE team must have IV caffeine drips... I agree), and each new release, no matter how incremental has visible improvements to the GUI.
I'm a Mac User (posting this from an iBook), and I have KDE set up to mimic the Platinum look, which means that the Window Close box is in the right spot (top-left). My dad, who primarily uses windows, has KDE set up to mimic the windows button placements. I honestly don't find that KDE mimics windows at all, in fact, it seems to take windows' few good features and improve on them (kicker absolutely craps on the windows taskbar). Take Konqueror for example: MS decided that an integrated file browser/web browser was a good idea, but they never managed to get the integration right. Konqueror does it so much better and so much easier (You can use a terminal, manage files and browse the web in the *same* Konqueror window). And that's not even mentioning the coolest features of KDE.
One other thing to note: I can pretty much use KDE, Windows and Mac OS with equal proficiency. I do find that Windows is the most frustrating OS to use (It really has some brain-dead UI elements), but I try not to let that bother me. I do find that when it's running fine (which is 99% of the time for me) that Mac OS X's Aqua UI is actually quite nice and very usable. You'd think most of it's features would be eye candy (Genie effect, drop shadows, transparency etc) but when you use it for a while, you realise just what a huge visual impact something like a deeper drop shadow over the active window can have on the user experience. It's just a shame that classic applications don't inherit some of these features (yeah, I know it's pretty much technically impossible... that's what Carbon is for), as there really is a jarring difference between the two.
Once the Cocoa version of Nisus Writer is complete, I will have not need for Classic anyways, so I can be happy.
Oh... and you haven't seen the web until you've seen it in OmniWeb, which really does make even crap websites look cool. It chokes on just a few too many sites for me (mainly sites that abuse javascript in some weird way) but it takes full advantage of Aqua, and all buttons on web pages look like Aqua widgets etc... much nicer than IE's half-hearted attempt at browser widgets.
(Hmm... somehow a rant about KDE turned into a rant about Mac OS X... I really gotta stop posting on caffeine...)
Re:Macintosh text editors
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
I've got all 3 of these space western anime (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star) and I have to say that they are all good. I didn't initially like Trigun (Vash is somewhat annoying in the first 3 episodes), while CB just kept building for me. After about episode 5, Trigun really picks up. Outlaw Star is also damn good, though again a little slow to build up.
All 3 series are good in their own way, and work quite well together as they are all simarlarly themed (Yes, Trigun can be called a Space Western, it is revealed why later on in the series). The fact that there is going to be another Trigun series has got me salivating madly:)
One other anime series I would love to see on television (despite the fact it would be damn near impossible to dub it) is Kareshi Kanojyo No Jijyo. This series, by GAiNAX, has to be one of the most accurate depictions of teen love ever. It's also the first anime I've ever seen in which two characters actually make love. It might sound a bit weird, but people in anime don't do that! The love scene is handled very sensitively, and in a typically GAiNAX fashion too. This series is simply amazing.
Actually it's not as stupid as you might think. Preentation means a lot in Japan, so the look of something can have a huge influence on how well it does in their market. The XBox, lets face it, looks like it was designed by an American company. It's big, it's chunky, and damn if it isn't butt-ugly either. It looks exactly like a console designed by Americans. the GameCube on the other hand is very small, colourful (comes in a variety of colours, the XBox on the other hand inherits that wonderfully American feature: "Any colour you like as long as it's black"), and has a funky handle for easy carrying.
The PS2, despite looking somewhat similar to the xbox (okay, they're both black) has a nice sleek look that works in both a vertical or horizontal orientation.
Presentation is a lot more important than you would think.
You could live in Australia and be stuck with Tel$tra's pathetic excuse for broadband internet. Not only is my cablemodem capped at 64k/sec, but it also has a ridiculous 3GB/month download limit. I know people on dialup who do more in a month than I am allowed to do. And that's not mentioning Tel$tra ADSL...
Apple fixed the `ghost-disk' behaviour in Mac OS 8, which was released in 1997. This release also dropped support for any mac that required the ghost-disk behavior in the first place. This is what update() was referring to as `fixed'.
I agree that dragging a disk to the trash is somewhat non intuitive, but it takes all of five minutes to a: get used to it, and b: wonder how you managed without it. Sure, it breaks the metaphor of the trashcan, but it's such a handy shortcut that I personally couldn't care less.
Deleting a disk is a critical task that should not have such an easy shortcut assigned to it, and on the Mac OS, you choose the Erase Disk... command from the `Special' menu. This places a critical task in a safe location so that you can never `accidentally' choose it.
While I won't say the Mac OS is totally intuitive, I will say that it is far more intuitive than Windows, KDE and GNOME combined. Apple set the benchmark by which all other UIs will be judged, and to this day no one has come close to challenging that position. The new Aqua UI, while flawed in some ways, is a continuation of that tradition.
I'm not sure how you would do it, but the Cheese-worm thing on slashdot yesterday got me thinking...
What if we could have a Distributed/Peer-to-Peer virus protection system? Basically a similar concept to the Cheese-worm, but a system would have to explicitly run a small daemon to participate in it. Then whenever a virus comes through, the first system it hits gets attacked, but the daemon sees what it does and intelligently creates a definition to protect it, or adds it to an existing `behaviour definition' that covers several viruses that do the same/similar thing.
Once one machine has been hit and a definition created, the definition is spread through the peer-to-peer network as the virus hits other machines and is blocked. At most you might lose some systems to the virus initially, but the definition spreads, it would save a lot more machines than not having any at all.
I don't think what i've said above exactly explains the idea i have in my head, but i think the words peer-to-peer antivirus are closest to what i am looking for. If others could come up with a better way to implement it, i would be interested to hear them. I am not much of a programmer myself, so i don't know how this would work, but i think the idea is good.
Everyone else has already said it all for me, but Douglas Adams dying is important enough for me to post and say that i am very saddened to hear this news as well.
The scary part is, I was coming back from a meeting of the Melbourne Anime Society today, and my Dad and I were talking about Adams on the train. We had no idea that he'd died.
I know he isn't a kernel hacker, but i use KDE as my primary desktop so...
The other day, the games-sig of my local LUG (The Linux Gamers League) held a LAN here in Melbourne. One of the people that turned up, to my surprise at least, was Sirtaj Singh Khan, aka Taj, one of the KDE developers (he wrote KView, along with contributing code to various other parts of the KDE Project).
I took the opportunity there and then to walk up to him, and to thank him for providing me with what (IMHO) is a better desktop system than some of the more commercial efforts out there. (and yes, i know that KDE has it's fair share of bugs, but i don't care. It works for me). He had a lot of interesting things to say about the future of KDE and where he thought that Linux should be going. I could quite happily have given up all the gaming that day, just for the 15-20 minutes that i got to speak with him.
So, yes, if you ever get the opportunity to meet an author of the open source software you use, then say thank you, especially because these guys aren't getting paid to write this stuff.
I recently saw a documentary which discussed how hydrogen wasn't the cause of the Hindenburg disaster. Instead, it turns out that a coating used on the cloth that surrounded the hydrogen ignited due to a spark. I can't remember the exact details, or provide a link, but from memory the investigation was conducted by an ex-NASA employee.
I dunno if you'd count them as classics... but I always imagined Neuromancer and Snow Crash as anime. Neuromancer because if it didn't inspire several anime (Serial Experiments Lain, Ghost In The Shell to name 2) then it bloody well should have, and Snow Crash because, well, I am reminded of it's sheer insanity everytime I watch FLCL.
It's weird though... when I read a book these days I automatically imagine it as anime... I've been doing it for about 5 years now.
Oh yeah... an Neuromancer *is* being made into a film... directed by Chris Cunningham no less...
It always amuses me the amount of non-macintosh people who seem to think that Job's decision to kill off the macintosh clone market was a poor business decision.
Unfortunately, as cool as it would be to have commodity mac hardware, the clone manufacturers weren't trying to compete against Intel architecture based manufacturers, but against apple itself. Considering that Apple makes most of it's money from hardware, this was one of the things that was killing the company.
Jobs did the right thing by cancelling the licensing scheme, as apple would have wound up going the way of IBM's PC business in the mid-1980's had they kept it going.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. I've listened to Play and 18 back to back, and 18 is definitely the better of the two albums. Tracks like 'Extreme Ways' (one of the angriest songs ever committed to CD), 'Great Escape' (I love the lyrics) and 'Harbour' (I almost cried the first time I heard this) are infinitely better than anything on Play.
Interestingly, all of those songs use actual vocalists rather than the 'really old samples' approach. In general, 18 features less of the samples that people seem to be criticising it for than Play does.
Also, 18 doesn't mellow out after about track 13 like Play does. The final 5 songs on Play always felt like they were just running into each other, whereas every song on 18 sounds individual, and works in the context of the album.
Don't get me wrong, I love both albums, but it's pretty obvious after a few listens that Play is merely the beta version of 18.
As to Moby's comments about MP3s killing his sales, well, I'd make a comment about musical integrity, but considering the number of Ayumi Hamasaki albums in my CD collection, it's better that I don't.
Bjork and Neil Young are probably the only two artists with any sort of musical integrity now. Bjork's last album was fantastic.
I just saw Metropolis the other night. This is the new film from (partly) the creative minds behind Akira. It's based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka that was inspired by Fritz Lang's original 1930s film of the same name.
All I can say is, if you think Akira's good, you haven't seen anything yet.
(Just for reference, I have always regarded Patlabor and Patlabor 2 as my favourite anime films of that type, and My Neighbour Totoro as my favourite anime film ever).
Intriguingly, SBS here in Australia screened NGE in its entirety, twice, back in 1998. It was the dubbed version though.
Still, you'll find here in Australia that a lot more people know what NGE is than in many other parts of the world. Mind you, SBS is clearly our best TV station, showing everything from South Park to freaky cult movies presented by the legendary Des Mangan. And that's just on the one night.
Unfortunately they passed on screening Serial Experiments Lain...
I've spoken to an Apple employee about this, and apparently the problem with file extentions is due to a Mexican standoff between the NeXT developers in apple (pro file extentions) and the Mac OS developers (anti file extentions).
Unfortunately, it seems the NeXT guys are winning, while Mac OS X usability suffers as a result (file extentions are the one major thing that annoys me about Mac OS X).
Other than this stupid design flaw, Mac OS X has been great for me ever since I installed Mac OS 10.1 on my iBook (Dual USB) last year.
Goodbye Chuck. My childhood would have been much less enjoyable if you hadn't made all those wonderful cartoons.
And yes, that really *is* all, folks.
*cries*
Argh! NO! WRONG! EVIL EVIL EVIL! KILL IT!
Seriously, that is just so totally wrong I can't believe it.
Hopefully if they show it here in Australia, they'll show it subtitled, like they have with Mononoke Hime (which has been going around various cinemas here for a year now...) and Metropolis.
/me goes off to cry at the thought of not hearing Maaya in wonderful Dolby 5.1 surround sound... *sigh*
As much as I enjoyed the Escaflowne movie, I still think the series is a lot better. The movie changed a lot of things, not always for the better. The new character designs weren't great, although I did like Hitomi more in the film, mainly because she had more of a purpose than she does in the series.
:D
My problem really is that they neutered Merle in the movie, and almost neutered Allen. These two were my favourite characters from the series. I did like the fact they gave Merle a background though.
Of course, the movie is an excuse to listen to Maaya Sakamoto's beautiful voice for 90-odd minutes.
Then again, I can listen to it for 13 hours if i watch the series.
Just a quick reply to the troll comment... It was rather late at night, and I needed an excuse to rant, so biting at what I thought was a troll was my best option... I noticed after I'd posted that there had been a few other posts in the thread as well and realised that I was wrong (dammit why isn't there an edit comment feature in slashdot yet?) (it took me nearly half an hour to write that, between watching Gundam Wing, IRC and other web boards.)
:) )
:)
Sorry if I offended you, but I did think, initially, that you were trolling. (Of course, I thought it was a pretty well written troll too
As to Mac OS X being hard to use... to each his own i guess
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not trolling.
:( ) I am yet to see one in Mac OS 10.1.
Mac OS X is based on UNIX, a design which, if you'd noticed a previous story today on slashdot, is now 30 years old, much older than Classic Mac OS.
Mac OS X has a carefully redesigned UI that actually works really well. Believe me, I haven't used Classic Mac OS in about 4 weeks now, and even then it was for DVD playback due to an oversight in Mac OS X. The new UI is just as carefully designed, and just as carefully planned as the old one. It has one disadvantage however:
It's new.
That means that there are going to be kinks for a while yet (ever used Mac OS 1.0? I have, and believe me, it has more UI kinks that Aqua does now).
That said, I can't go back to Classic Mac OS for two reasons: Protected Memory and real Multitasking. Between the time that my Centris died, and the acquisition of my iBook Dual USB, my primary computer was an Intel system running Debian Linux. I can happily say that I was able to put up with KDE's quirks (it's nice, but it's got a long way to go before it gets close to Mac OS for usability), simply because the system NEVER BLOODY CRASHED!. Seriously. The only reboots I perform on it are for power outages and kernel upgrades.
Mac OS X is just the same. While I got a few kernel panics on the older 10.0.x series (3... all of them while in public for some reason
The point is, I would happily live at a commandline if it meant the OS wasn't going to freeze up at least once a day, or if I could happily run as many applications as I wanted without worrying about memory (No more memory size settings! YESSSSS!). And that's not even mentioning the fact that the system actually MULTITASKS. Whoa! Who'd have thought that a Mac would ever be able to multitask and provide memory protection? They've only had an MMU for what? 10 years now?
I love Macs, always have, always will, but the old OS was kludge upon kludge upon kludge. It's old, It's broken, it's been replaced. Stop using it, please. And Aqua takes all of 5 minutes to adjust to from Platinum. It's harder to jump to windows from Platinum than to Aqua.
I mean seriously... would you go on using Windows on an Intel system if you knew that a newer and better operating system was available that didn't have all of Windows bugs?
Considering that the Gamecube uses a PowerPC-based CPU and that (iirc) Apple hardware provides the development platform for the Gamecube, I think it's fairly logical that Apple wouldn't sue.
In fact... I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Mac/Gamecube hybrid in the near future. Both are PPC, and both, amusingly enough, use Matsushita optical drives.
Just a thought.
It probably doesn't count as a WM, but I've been using KDE since the 1.1.2 days as my WM and I rarely ever use another WM unless I want to see what it's like.
The only exception to this is if I have to use X as root, when I will WindowMaker because its quick and I don't need all the extra features of KDE when I'm root.
The nice thing about using KDE is that it is under constant development (someone mentioned that the KDE team must have IV caffeine drips... I agree), and each new release, no matter how incremental has visible improvements to the GUI.
I'm a Mac User (posting this from an iBook), and I have KDE set up to mimic the Platinum look, which means that the Window Close box is in the right spot (top-left). My dad, who primarily uses windows, has KDE set up to mimic the windows button placements. I honestly don't find that KDE mimics windows at all, in fact, it seems to take windows' few good features and improve on them (kicker absolutely craps on the windows taskbar). Take Konqueror for example: MS decided that an integrated file browser/web browser was a good idea, but they never managed to get the integration right. Konqueror does it so much better and so much easier (You can use a terminal, manage files and browse the web in the *same* Konqueror window). And that's not even mentioning the coolest features of KDE.
One other thing to note: I can pretty much use KDE, Windows and Mac OS with equal proficiency. I do find that Windows is the most frustrating OS to use (It really has some brain-dead UI elements), but I try not to let that bother me. I do find that when it's running fine (which is 99% of the time for me) that Mac OS X's Aqua UI is actually quite nice and very usable. You'd think most of it's features would be eye candy (Genie effect, drop shadows, transparency etc) but when you use it for a while, you realise just what a huge visual impact something like a deeper drop shadow over the active window can have on the user experience. It's just a shame that classic applications don't inherit some of these features (yeah, I know it's pretty much technically impossible... that's what Carbon is for), as there really is a jarring difference between the two.
Once the Cocoa version of Nisus Writer is complete, I will have not need for Classic anyways, so I can be happy.
Oh... and you haven't seen the web until you've seen it in OmniWeb, which really does make even crap websites look cool. It chokes on just a few too many sites for me (mainly sites that abuse javascript in some weird way) but it takes full advantage of Aqua, and all buttons on web pages look like Aqua widgets etc... much nicer than IE's half-hearted attempt at browser widgets.
(Hmm... somehow a rant about KDE turned into a rant about Mac OS X... I really gotta stop posting on caffeine...)
Give Me Nisus Writer Or Give Me Death.
I've got all 3 of these space western anime (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star) and I have to say that they are all good. I didn't initially like Trigun (Vash is somewhat annoying in the first 3 episodes), while CB just kept building for me. After about episode 5, Trigun really picks up. Outlaw Star is also damn good, though again a little slow to build up.
:)
All 3 series are good in their own way, and work quite well together as they are all simarlarly themed (Yes, Trigun can be called a Space Western, it is revealed why later on in the series). The fact that there is going to be another Trigun series has got me salivating madly
One other anime series I would love to see on television (despite the fact it would be damn near impossible to dub it) is Kareshi Kanojyo No Jijyo. This series, by GAiNAX, has to be one of the most accurate depictions of teen love ever. It's also the first anime I've ever seen in which two characters actually make love. It might sound a bit weird, but people in anime don't do that! The love scene is handled very sensitively, and in a typically GAiNAX fashion too. This series is simply amazing.
Oh... and say it with me:
LOVE AND PEACE! LOVE AND PEACE! LOVE AND PEACE!
Actually it's not as stupid as you might think. Preentation means a lot in Japan, so the look of something can have a huge influence on how well it does in their market. The XBox, lets face it, looks like it was designed by an American company. It's big, it's chunky, and damn if it isn't butt-ugly either. It looks exactly like a console designed by Americans. the GameCube on the other hand is very small, colourful (comes in a variety of colours, the XBox on the other hand inherits that wonderfully American feature: "Any colour you like as long as it's black"), and has a funky handle for easy carrying.
The PS2, despite looking somewhat similar to the xbox (okay, they're both black) has a nice sleek look that works in both a vertical or horizontal orientation.
Presentation is a lot more important than you would think.
You could live in Australia and be stuck with Tel$tra's pathetic excuse for broadband internet. Not only is my cablemodem capped at 64k/sec, but it also has a ridiculous 3GB/month download limit. I know people on dialup who do more in a month than I am allowed to do. And that's not mentioning Tel$tra ADSL...
it's a small island off the west coast of Australia, it's administered by the Australian government iirc.
Apple fixed the `ghost-disk' behaviour in Mac OS 8, which was released in 1997. This release also dropped support for any mac that required the ghost-disk behavior in the first place. This is what update() was referring to as `fixed'.
I agree that dragging a disk to the trash is somewhat non intuitive, but it takes all of five minutes to a: get used to it, and b: wonder how you managed without it. Sure, it breaks the metaphor of the trashcan, but it's such a handy shortcut that I personally couldn't care less.
Deleting a disk is a critical task that should not have such an easy shortcut assigned to it, and on the Mac OS, you choose the Erase Disk... command from the `Special' menu. This places a critical task in a safe location so that you can never `accidentally' choose it.
While I won't say the Mac OS is totally intuitive, I will say that it is far more intuitive than Windows, KDE and GNOME combined. Apple set the benchmark by which all other UIs will be judged, and to this day no one has come close to challenging that position. The new Aqua UI, while flawed in some ways, is a continuation of that tradition.
I'm not sure how you would do it, but the Cheese-worm thing on slashdot yesterday got me thinking...
What if we could have a Distributed/Peer-to-Peer virus protection system? Basically a similar concept to the Cheese-worm, but a system would have to explicitly run a small daemon to participate in it. Then whenever a virus comes through, the first system it hits gets attacked, but the daemon sees what it does and intelligently creates a definition to protect it, or adds it to an existing `behaviour definition' that covers several viruses that do the same/similar thing.
Once one machine has been hit and a definition created, the definition is spread through the peer-to-peer network as the virus hits other machines and is blocked. At most you might lose some systems to the virus initially, but the definition spreads, it would save a lot more machines than not having any at all.
I don't think what i've said above exactly explains the idea i have in my head, but i think the words peer-to-peer antivirus are closest to what i am looking for. If others could come up with a better way to implement it, i would be interested to hear them. I am not much of a programmer myself, so i don't know how this would work, but i think the idea is good.
Everyone else has already said it all for me, but Douglas Adams dying is important enough for me to post and say that i am very saddened to hear this news as well.
The scary part is, I was coming back from a meeting of the Melbourne Anime Society today, and my Dad and I were talking about Adams on the train. We had no idea that he'd died.
*sigh*
Mac OS had one since the introduction of Mac OS 7 in 1991.
I know he isn't a kernel hacker, but i use KDE as my primary desktop so...
The other day, the games-sig of my local LUG (The Linux Gamers League) held a LAN here in Melbourne. One of the people that turned up, to my surprise at least, was Sirtaj Singh Khan, aka Taj, one of the KDE developers (he wrote KView, along with contributing code to various other parts of the KDE Project).
I took the opportunity there and then to walk up to him, and to thank him for providing me with what (IMHO) is a better desktop system than some of the more commercial efforts out there. (and yes, i know that KDE has it's fair share of bugs, but i don't care. It works for me). He had a lot of interesting things to say about the future of KDE and where he thought that Linux should be going. I could quite happily have given up all the gaming that day, just for the 15-20 minutes that i got to speak with him.
So, yes, if you ever get the opportunity to meet an author of the open source software you use, then say thank you, especially because these guys aren't getting paid to write this stuff.
I recently saw a documentary which discussed how hydrogen wasn't the cause of the Hindenburg disaster. Instead, it turns out that a coating used on the cloth that surrounded the hydrogen ignited due to a spark. I can't remember the exact details, or provide a link, but from memory the investigation was conducted by an ex-NASA employee.
this is kinda offtopic and pedantic but...
:)
IBM haven't ported Lunix (A UNIX implementation for the Commodore 64/128) to the 64-bit PPC platform. They ported Linux. Get It Right.
Sorry... someone had to do it though
I dunno if you'd count them as classics... but I always imagined Neuromancer and Snow Crash as anime. Neuromancer because if it didn't inspire several anime (Serial Experiments Lain, Ghost In The Shell to name 2) then it bloody well should have, and Snow Crash because, well, I am reminded of it's sheer insanity everytime I watch FLCL.
It's weird though... when I read a book these days I automatically imagine it as anime... I've been doing it for about 5 years now.
Oh yeah... an Neuromancer *is* being made into a film... directed by Chris Cunningham no less...
It always amuses me the amount of non-macintosh people who seem to think that Job's decision to kill off the macintosh clone market was a poor business decision.
Unfortunately, as cool as it would be to have commodity mac hardware, the clone manufacturers weren't trying to compete against Intel architecture based manufacturers, but against apple itself. Considering that Apple makes most of it's money from hardware, this was one of the things that was killing the company.
Jobs did the right thing by cancelling the licensing scheme, as apple would have wound up going the way of IBM's PC business in the mid-1980's had they kept it going.