The easy way to do that is to do what we do in Australia: compulsory voting for all elegible voters. At least that way the results are somewhat valid... though you still get the problem that we currrently have insasmuch as the party with the most votes at the last election did not win a lower house majority so we're still stuck wit that little monkey John Howard for a prime minister...
Apple had a t-shirt with 'been there' followed by a list of features that the MacOS had for years before the release of Win95 and then 'done that' at the bottom. It came out at the time win95 was released.
The friday night will also be the Geek Night Out basically a big party for all the alternative OS geeks.
On a related note, I had a chat to the Acorn/RiscStation guys at InteractIT (a melbourne pc expo) and it was really pleasing to hear that truly alternative systems such as the RiscStation are still out there, despite not getting all the press coverage of Linux or BSD or
Of couse... anyone who went to LUV on tuesday already knows about this... but that would be giving my local LUG a plug...
actually, if you ever use the mac, you'll know that it has heaps of useful error messages.
"Sorry, A system error occured." is the one that appears in a modal dialog with a bomb. No other Macintosh error messages do this. (IIRC, the bomb is actually in ROM on older systems).
The sad mac is useful: it tells of a ROM failure, and there is a technote (don't know the number) that explains exactly what all the sad mac error messages mean. Most of them are to do with hardware faliures, and are usually accompanied by the 'chimes of doom' (basically a short sample played instead of the chord, older Macs had a slice of Beethoven, my Centris plays a drum solo and G1 and G2 powermacs have the sound of a car crashing!).
The best error messages come from an old version of MPW, and includes this classic: 'call me paranoid, but seeing/* inside a comment makes me nervous.'
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, he registered it, but allows anyone to use it, within reason.
Open Source is not a trademark (refer discussion for reasons.
Sorry? What? The resource fork, if you look carefully, is actually written as a seperate file, which is how it has always worked under MacOS. Each 'file' is actually 2 seperate files, Data fork and Resource fork. When the MacOS writes to a MSDOS formatted disk, it creates a new directory as a subdirectory of where the file is being copied. This subdirectory shows up in MSDOS/Windows as a directory called 'resource.frk'. You should *never* have to remove a resource fork from a data fork, as it was never there. The Resource fork is one of the great advantages of the MacOS, as it allows things such as custom icons, stored image previews (quicktime) and most applications use it to store things like dialog box information and things. If you use a program like ResEdit, you'll discover just how completely cool the idea of the resource fork is.
(I am not trying to be a MacOS zealot, even though I do use them, I just think that the idea of seperate data and resource forks is one of the best things ever, and should be available to all operating systems)
On the subject of Windows not recognising MacOS disks, it doesn't recognise Linux (ext2fs) disks either, so don't feel too left out here. (There is a nifty freeware program called HFVExplorer which allows the reading and writing of MacOS disks under windows, but it's getting quite old now, and I don't think it supports HFS+).
Of course, make sure you watch the *real* ending. The official western release features two episodes, 'Do You Love Me?' and 'Take Care of Yourself' as episodes 25 & 26. These episodes were shown as the original ending because Japanese christian groups got rather upset about the proper ending.
Actually, 'Take Care of Yourself' is worth watching for the alternate universe sequence near the end, but neither of these episodes make much sense, and they look like they were made in a day.
The *real* ending (episodes 25 & 26) are the episodes entitled 'Air' and 'My Pure Heart for You' (which also calls itself 'Yours Sincerely') These two episodes were released as a film called 'The End Of Evangelion' and they make much more sense than the episodes they were replaced with. The fansubbed versions that I have seen rock.
Also, avoid the movie 'Evangelion:Death', also known as 'Death and Rebirth', as it is simply an hour and a half re-cut of the series in chronological order. If you've seen the series, it isn't worth the effort.
And of course, once you've seen 'My Pure Heart For You', you'll become completely addicted to the song 'Komme Susse Tod', which is played about halfway through, and is the greatest pop song ever written, so hunt down the soundtrack to end of evangelion, and while you're at it, get the other three soundtracks (Eva 1, 2, and 3). Just a word of warning though: the third eva s/t contains eleven mixes of 'Fly Me To The Moon', some of which rock, some of which don't.
Other cool anime:
Serial Experiments Lain Just finished watching this, it rocks seriously hard. Especially because there are so many Macintosh references in it. Were these guys paid by Apple or something?
The Vision Of Escaflowne Haven't finished watching this 26-part fantasy anime, but it has been excellent so far, well worth checking out.
Well, that'll do for now, and everyone else will mention everything worth seeing anyway, so I'll go now...
When considering that request, the airline?s reply said, the court shouldn?t be swayed by "defendants' hyperventilated accusations about 'Big Brother' and Northwest's 'intrusion' into their private lives."
The whole story is pretty scary in its implications, but I have to agree that the subtext of that last paragraph is very frightening. Definitely need to invest in a one of those filesystems that hides data by not representing it at all (Steganography?)
A few random thoughts I had when I saw this article:
Three words: Serial Experiments Lain.
Four Words: Ghost In The Shell.
Both of the above have interesting ideas on the future of the internet. Especially Lain, where there is an entire episode that runs through a conspiracy theory that begins with Roswell and flows through Memex and Xanadu to Hypertext before diverging into Lain's somewhat bizarre storyline (does it make sense?)
Ted Nelson(?)'s idea of a global exchange of information that is accessible from anywhere is kind of like the current WWW on steroids. he first created it in the 1960's, and it has since been described by Tim Berners-Lee as the way he would have designed the web had he known about it in 1989.
Nanotechnology. This stuff is so cool that I can't even begin to imagine all the possibilities of it. (believe me, I've tried;)
There are so many things that could change the idea of networked data so radically that the internet in 10 years time may be some forgotten relic of an age gone by. At our current progress rate, by the year 2014, the human race will double its knowledge once a month, which is pretty incredible.
Okay, a pretty random post, but it's what I first thought of when I saw the question.
I can condemn the windows UI as crap *and* provide a concrete example:
In the title bar of all Windows apps, there are three boxes at the right side: minimise, maximise, and close. In most other GUI's (pre-Win95) the close box, which terminates an application, is seperated from the minimise/maximise boxes, as it performs a different function, and one that is potentially dangerous to the window.
This has been one of the big banes of Apple's Aqua UI, the fact that the close box is next to the minimise and maximise buttons. The behaviour violates Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines.
On that subject, if we're talking about good User Interface, the HIG is worth checking, as it makes some good points.
okay, making a movie of the Lord of the Rings is fine, but let's face it, wouldn't the Silmarillion kick butt as a film? It's certainly my personal favorite Tolkien story, I think it has a much stronger storyline than LotR and the characters are much better drawn Perhaps the biggest drawback in it is that it can be a little difficult to understand at first, especially with things like Ainulindale attached. (Ainulindale is Tolkien's creation myth, it's very good). Then again, considering the story runs for around 4000 years, maybe it would be a little long. But it does have it all: revenge, betrayal, magic, a beautiful love story, and a brilliant, literally earth-shattering ending. What more could you ask for?
It seems to me then, that the 68k processor works the same as it does in the Super Nintendo, as a data pump for custom graphics and sound chips. Of course, it's also 10Mhz faster than the SNES version 13Mhz vs 3Mhz, so the cartridges would load quicker when you turn the machine on. (Two minute wait for loading some SNES cartridges anyone?)
No one seems to have mentioned the massive amounts of science fiction that comes out of Japan.
Neon Genesis Evangelion: may be a bit heavy for some viewers, but this is a simply awesome TV series.
Ghost in the Shell: Shirow Masamune's wonderful vision of the future. The Neuromancer movie is going to have a lot to live up to with this.
Akira: Anyone who hasn't seen this should!
Cowboy Bebop: haven't seen this, but heard lots of good things about it
The Vision of Escaflowne: haven't seen this either but it's supposed to be better than NGE.
Warning: If you watch Evangelion, make sure you watch the original ending, not the 'westernised' ending that makes almost no sense whatsoever.
These should be a good place to get started with decent anime (Japanese Animation) and there are millions of websites dedicated to the form. Also check out the magazine 'Manga Max'.
P.S. I agree pretty much with all the books mentioned (at least the ones I've read) and when it comes to Tolkien, nothing beats The Silmarillion.
I can't really see why Sony is upset over this, for a start, they make more money off the sales of games than the sales of PSX hardware, and secondly, the PS2 comes out in Japan in March, so they have a whole new console to market. Why not just leave the old hardware alone, or better yet, release the schematics for it, have a whole bunch of PSX hardware/software clones. They'd still make a killing on the games.
This is a great article, and points out some of the major flaws in the corporate prediction of the future (vs. the individual predictions of writers like Wells, Orwell and Huxly) Call me a utopian dreamer, but surely in any controlled society there are a few that choose to buck the system, and a few of these could possibly help the technological have nots. Think about it, if I (and i mean me personally) lived in an oppressive society, and had access to the technology that made the oppressors of that society powerful, then I would do everything I could to bring this technology, and its use to those who otherwise wouldn't have it. The more people who had access to this technology, the more intelligent the people, the more likely they are to realise how their lives are being screwed by the large corporations/governments.
I must admit, i find myself doing this now (in a limited, certain-large-computer-company is bad, other-large-computer-company is good kind of way:)
I'm sure there was a point to all this, but I seem to have forgotten it (3:21am 01/01/2000 Melbourne.au) Sorry.
Maybe you should check out the MacOS, which has had many of the features of the windows desktop for several years.
The MacOS, especially under MacOS 8+ provides a much better desktop environment than either windows, GNOME or KDE. Microsoft's big problem is (still) their complete failure to understand user interface design, something that Apple's designers have had down pat for years (close boxes on the left side of the window, anyone?)
I'm not trying to evangelise the Macintosh here, but I have used GNOME, KDE, Windows (3x and 4x) and the MacOS and the one I find the most usable has always been the MacOS.
I really couldn't care less about how stable it is, my Mac hardly ever crashes if I'm not trying to be stupid (ie running lots of extensions, old applications etc, which are the major causes of Macintosh instability.) And virtual memory can go shove itself for all I care...
For those interested, I have a Macintosh Centris 660av, and an Intel Pentium 100-based system running Red Hat 6, with KDE as my desktop (GNOME sucks ass IMHO)
I dunno whether this fits here or not, but my experience has shown that NT is stable *unless* you do something stupid, like my TAFE college has done, and install Novell Netware over it.
Don't get me wrong, Netware is a good product, but it seems silly to me to have Netware installed over the top of NT, which has most of its features anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The easy way to do that is to do what we do in Australia: compulsory voting for all elegible voters. At least that way the results are somewhat valid... though you still get the problem that we currrently have insasmuch as the party with the most votes at the last election did not win a lower house majority so we're still stuck wit that little monkey John Howard for a prime minister...
Where's my shotgun?
Apple had a t-shirt with 'been there' followed by a list of features that the MacOS had for years before the release of Win95 and then 'done that' at the bottom. It came out at the time win95 was released.
The friday night will also be the Geek Night Out basically a big party for all the alternative OS geeks.
On a related note, I had a chat to the Acorn/RiscStation guys at InteractIT (a melbourne pc expo) and it was really pleasing to hear that truly alternative systems such as the RiscStation are still out there, despite not getting all the press coverage of Linux or BSD or
Of couse... anyone who went to LUV on tuesday already knows about this... but that would be giving my local LUG a plug...
actually, if you ever use the mac, you'll know that it has heaps of useful error messages.
/* inside a comment makes me nervous.'
"Sorry, A system error occured." is the one that appears in a modal dialog with a bomb. No other Macintosh error messages do this. (IIRC, the bomb is actually in ROM on older systems).
The sad mac is useful: it tells of a ROM failure, and there is a technote (don't know the number) that explains exactly what all the sad mac error messages mean. Most of them are to do with hardware faliures, and are usually accompanied by the 'chimes of doom' (basically a short sample played instead of the chord, older Macs had a slice of Beethoven, my Centris plays a drum solo and G1 and G2 powermacs have the sound of a car crashing!).
The best error messages come from an old version of MPW, and includes this classic: 'call me paranoid, but seeing
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, he registered it, but allows anyone to use it, within reason.
Open Source is not a trademark (refer discussion for reasons.
Mr. Hicks, thank you for your testimony...
:)
Ummm.....
Sorry? What?
The resource fork, if you look carefully, is actually written as a seperate file, which is how it has always worked under MacOS. Each 'file' is actually 2 seperate files, Data fork and Resource fork. When the MacOS writes to a MSDOS formatted disk, it creates a new directory as a subdirectory of where the file is being copied. This subdirectory shows up in MSDOS/Windows as a directory called 'resource.frk'. You should *never* have to remove a resource fork from a data fork, as it was never there.
The Resource fork is one of the great advantages of the MacOS, as it allows things such as custom icons, stored image previews (quicktime) and most applications use it to store things like dialog box information and things. If you use a program like ResEdit, you'll discover just how completely cool the idea of the resource fork is.
(I am not trying to be a MacOS zealot, even though I do use them, I just think that the idea of seperate data and resource forks is one of the best things ever, and should be available to all operating systems)
On the subject of Windows not recognising MacOS disks, it doesn't recognise Linux (ext2fs) disks either, so don't feel too left out here. (There is a nifty freeware program called HFVExplorer which allows the reading and writing of MacOS disks under windows, but it's getting quite old now, and I don't think it supports HFS+).
No, everyone I know who's seen it is addicted. We believe that there are support groups around, just haven't found any yet...
Of course, make sure you watch the *real* ending. The official western release features two episodes, 'Do You Love Me?' and 'Take Care of Yourself' as episodes 25 & 26. These episodes were shown as the original ending because Japanese christian groups got rather upset about the proper ending.
Actually, 'Take Care of Yourself' is worth watching for the alternate universe sequence near the end, but neither of these episodes make much sense, and they look like they were made in a day.
The *real* ending (episodes 25 & 26) are the episodes entitled 'Air' and 'My Pure Heart for You' (which also calls itself 'Yours Sincerely') These two episodes were released as a film called 'The End Of Evangelion' and they make much more sense than the episodes they were replaced with. The fansubbed versions that I have seen rock.
Also, avoid the movie 'Evangelion:Death', also known as 'Death and Rebirth', as it is simply an hour and a half re-cut of the series in chronological order. If you've seen the series, it isn't worth the effort.
And of course, once you've seen 'My Pure Heart For You', you'll become completely addicted to the song 'Komme Susse Tod', which is played about halfway through, and is the greatest pop song ever written, so hunt down the soundtrack to end of evangelion, and while you're at it, get the other three soundtracks (Eva 1, 2, and 3). Just a word of warning though: the third eva s/t contains eleven mixes of 'Fly Me To The Moon', some of which rock, some of which don't.
Other cool anime:
Serial Experiments Lain Just finished watching this, it rocks seriously hard. Especially because there are so many Macintosh references in it. Were these guys paid by Apple or something?
The Vision Of Escaflowne Haven't finished watching this 26-part fantasy anime, but it has been excellent so far, well worth checking out.
Well, that'll do for now, and everyone else will mention everything worth seeing anyway, so I'll go now...
When considering that request, the airline?s reply said, the court shouldn?t be swayed by "defendants' hyperventilated accusations about 'Big Brother' and Northwest's 'intrusion' into their private lives."
The whole story is pretty scary in its implications, but I have to agree that the subtext of that last paragraph is very frightening. Definitely need to invest in a one of those filesystems that hides data by not representing it at all (Steganography?)
A few random thoughts I had when I saw this article:
Three words: Serial Experiments Lain.
Four Words: Ghost In The Shell.
Both of the above have interesting ideas on the future of the internet. Especially Lain, where there is an entire episode that runs through a conspiracy theory that begins with Roswell and flows through Memex and Xanadu to Hypertext before diverging into Lain's somewhat bizarre storyline (does it make sense?)
Xanadu
Ted Nelson(?)'s idea of a global exchange of information that is accessible from anywhere is kind of like the current WWW on steroids. he first created it in the 1960's, and it has since been described by Tim Berners-Lee as the way he would have designed the web had he known about it in 1989.
Nanotechnology. This stuff is so cool that I can't even begin to imagine all the possibilities of it. (believe me, I've tried;)
There are so many things that could change the idea of networked data so radically that the internet in 10 years time may be some forgotten relic of an age gone by. At our current progress rate, by the year 2014, the human race will double its knowledge once a month, which is pretty incredible.
Okay, a pretty random post, but it's what I first thought of when I saw the question.
They've been working on this exact concept for text since 1960, it's called Xanadu.
www.xanadu.com
If you have a look at all it's features, you'll notice that it is pretty much what the WWW should have been. (Tim Berners-Lee has said as much).
I can condemn the windows UI as crap *and* provide a concrete example:
In the title bar of all Windows apps, there are three boxes at the right side: minimise, maximise, and close. In most other GUI's (pre-Win95) the close box, which terminates an application, is seperated from the minimise/maximise boxes, as it performs a different function, and one that is potentially dangerous to the window.
This has been one of the big banes of Apple's Aqua UI, the fact that the close box is next to the minimise and maximise buttons. The behaviour violates Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines.
On that subject, if we're talking about good User Interface, the HIG is worth checking, as it makes some good points.
agreed, but the story of Feanor's five sons, andtheir oath of vengeance, which is the crux of the Silmarillion, shouldn't be too hard...
okay, making a movie of the Lord of the Rings is fine, but let's face it, wouldn't the Silmarillion kick butt as a film?
It's certainly my personal favorite Tolkien story, I think it has a much stronger storyline than LotR and the characters are much better drawn
Perhaps the biggest drawback in it is that it can be a little difficult to understand at first, especially with things like Ainulindale attached. (Ainulindale is Tolkien's creation myth, it's very good).
Then again, considering the story runs for around 4000 years, maybe it would be a little long. But it does have it all: revenge, betrayal, magic, a beautiful love story, and a brilliant, literally earth-shattering ending. What more could you ask for?
It seems to me then, that the 68k processor works the same as it does in the Super Nintendo, as a data pump for custom graphics and sound chips. Of course, it's also 10Mhz faster than the SNES version 13Mhz vs 3Mhz, so the cartridges would load quicker when you turn the machine on. (Two minute wait for loading some SNES cartridges anyone?)
I know I'm posting this a bit late, but...
No one seems to have mentioned the massive amounts of science fiction that comes out of Japan.
Neon Genesis Evangelion: may be a bit heavy for some viewers, but this is a simply awesome TV series.
Ghost in the Shell: Shirow Masamune's wonderful vision of the future. The Neuromancer movie is going to have a lot to live up to with this.
Akira: Anyone who hasn't seen this should!
Cowboy Bebop: haven't seen this, but heard lots of good things about it
The Vision of Escaflowne: haven't seen this either but it's supposed to be better than NGE.
Warning: If you watch Evangelion, make sure you watch the original ending, not the 'westernised' ending that makes almost no sense whatsoever.
These should be a good place to get started with decent anime (Japanese Animation) and there are millions of websites dedicated to the form. Also check out the magazine 'Manga Max'.
P.S. I agree pretty much with all the books mentioned (at least the ones I've read) and when it comes to Tolkien, nothing beats The Silmarillion.
I can't really see why Sony is upset over this, for a start, they make more money off the sales of games than the sales of PSX hardware, and secondly, the PS2 comes out in Japan in March, so they have a whole new console to market.
Why not just leave the old hardware alone, or better yet, release the schematics for it, have a whole bunch of PSX hardware/software clones. They'd still make a killing on the games.
Umm...
To anyone writing this off as an AC, check out VA Linux's homepage. It actually appears to be true. Scary...
This is a great article, and points out some of the major flaws in the corporate prediction of the future (vs. the individual predictions of writers like Wells, Orwell and Huxly)
Call me a utopian dreamer, but surely in any controlled society there are a few that choose to buck the system, and a few of these could possibly help the technological have nots. Think about it, if I (and i mean me personally) lived in an oppressive society, and had access to the technology that made the oppressors of that society powerful, then I would do everything I could to bring this technology, and its use to those who otherwise wouldn't have it.
The more people who had access to this technology, the more intelligent the people, the more likely they are to realise how their lives are being screwed by the large corporations/governments.
I must admit, i find myself doing this now (in a limited, certain-large-computer-company is bad, other-large-computer-company is good kind of way:)
I'm sure there was a point to all this, but I seem to have forgotten it (3:21am 01/01/2000 Melbourne.au) Sorry.
Or something...
and I was in Bourke Street Mall (ie the centre of the city) watching a big LED screen count down to the year 2000.
We didn't have a Y2K problem, but when the countdown rolled over, the following message appeared: Happy New Millenium
That is exactly what the screen read... no typos here... just a small Y2K problem!
Windows is the best desktop?
Maybe you should check out the MacOS, which has had many of the features of the windows desktop for several years.
The MacOS, especially under MacOS 8+ provides a much better desktop environment than either windows, GNOME or KDE. Microsoft's big problem is (still) their complete failure to understand user interface design, something that Apple's designers have had down pat for years (close boxes on the left side of the window, anyone?)
I'm not trying to evangelise the Macintosh here, but I have used GNOME, KDE, Windows (3x and 4x) and the MacOS and the one I find the most usable has always been the MacOS.
I really couldn't care less about how stable it is, my Mac hardly ever crashes if I'm not trying to be stupid (ie running lots of extensions, old applications etc, which are the major causes of Macintosh instability.) And virtual memory can go shove itself for all I care...
For those interested, I have a Macintosh Centris 660av, and an Intel Pentium 100-based system running Red Hat 6, with KDE as my desktop (GNOME sucks ass IMHO)
'Bring out the GIMP'
hmmm...
P2/400/128MB/G400MAX
Q3A: 1024x768x32
The result? 50+fps on average. 128MB of DRAM probably helps.
This is under Win98 too...
Statement. Basic Input Output STATEMENT. Any old (pre-1990) book on the IBM-PC will tell you that.
I dunno whether this fits here or not, but my experience has shown that NT is stable *unless* you do something stupid, like my TAFE college has done, and install Novell Netware over it.
Don't get me wrong, Netware is a good product, but it seems silly to me to have Netware installed over the top of NT, which has most of its features anyway.