Clippy wouldn't be nearly so annoying if it didn't pop up when it wasn't wanted, and if Microsoft hadn't jettisoned creating real documentation when they implemented it. A decent manmade TOC and index is always going to be more useful than an automated wildass guess as to what you want.
Instead of using up valuable screen real estate, though, I'd make it an ever-present part of the right-click menu.
No DVD in the GameCube allows them to be $100 cheaper than both the PS2 and the Xbox.
More likely the $100 difference is from no hard drive and no Ethernet.
This isn't a bad thing: the XBox hard drive seems to me like it could be the source of all kinds of problems when it a) gets filled up b) gets fragmented c) fails or gets corrupted d) gets used to patch games that were released broken. I couild be wrong, but I'm certainly waiting to see before I buy.
Ethernet would have been cool, but OTOH, I have the Ethernet card for my Dreamcast and have never hooked it up.
It spurs people on to try harder, and keeps the beaurocrats under control. Also, because it tends to make people try different approaches to see what works. With a monolithic development path, you get wedded to the One True Path, and can't get off that track until its failure is undeniable. It takes generations to get anywhere that way, which is why we haven't seen much progress since the Apollo missions.
Also, when you have multiple teams competing, people have no ability to hide their own failures by saying "well that was clearly just not possible," because chances are, the other team is doing it and getting it to work.
This is a good first step, but more needs to be done. Many spaceflight enthusiasts believe that NASA has long been a major obstacle to achieving low cost access to orbit. This is because of beaurocracy, politics, the need to spread out programs across as many congressional districts as possible, and a nasty habit of choosing the approach that requires the most new, unproven bleeding-edge technology, instead of something workable and cheap.
The more important step is to keep NASA from screwing up the next generation of space launch vehicles. Remember, the Space Shuttle was supposed to be cheaper than conventional rockets, but thanks largely to NASA it wound up being more like an order of magnitude more expensive.
I believe it is crucial for the US to move our space launch development from a beaurocratic process to a market-based process. I feel it will lower the cost of launch, and provide impetus to try alternative approaches that have been ignored by NASA.
I'd treat space launch capability like a utility. Just as the government must buy the electricity that people generate back into the power grid, I'd mandate that the government must buy a certain number of flights from all qualified vendors within a certain time frame after they come on line.
Specifically:
Begin by specifying the criteria for several types of launches: how much payload you want to get to which orbit for how much money per pound. I wouldn't necessarily be picky about SSTO vs. a staged approach: let the market sort that out.
Pass legislation to provide "legal air cover" for private development.
Declare that, if you can demonstrate launch capability by successfully launching a dummy payload (spare parts for ISS) within one of the sets of mission criteria established in step 1, the government MUST buy 10 launches from you within the next 5 years. (Note: That's 10 launches total per company for each type of mission specified in step 1: after 10 launches, a company should have enough cash flow to attract private investment.)
There is no step 4, except to stay out of the way.
Yes, if enough companies came forward and built working launch systems it might cost more than, for instance, the two billion NASA has spent on X-33. But we'd have many times more working launch systems! As X-33 so amply proved, we cannot expect a beaurocratic approach to give us even one working next-gen system for the same amount of cash.
Indeed -- A very popular early PDA was a handheld PC XT-compatible from HP. Had DOS, Lotus 123 and Lotus Organizer in ROM, and could emulate the calculator functions. Tiny keyboard instead of pen-input, but IMO, that's actually better for 'real work' type applications.
I remember that one! I thought it was kind of cute to have a PC in the palm of your hand. People even got Windows working on later models.
Apple didn't invent the GUI, Xerox Parc didn't even invent the GUI. There were experiments being done back in the 60's.
Apple didn't perfect the GUI, either. It's still being perfected. I like multiple mouse buttons and wheels, for instance.
Apple didn't invent the PDA. There were many experimental PDAs produced at the time of the Newton and before. HP's calculators had been PDAs for uber-geeks for some time. The Newton was a worthy attempt though, if it hadn't been rushed to market before it was ready it might have been more successful. Still, it ended up being too big and too expensive to really hit the mark.
The Newton was out three years before the Palm, not five.
As for "everything I want," I want my PDA to fit in my shirt pocket.
Finally, as far as being "ahead of its time," maybe. Lots of people saw PDAs as being a big new market, but the big deal was coming up with the winning form factor. Palm was the first to do that. It's not like you could relaunch the Newton today and expect it to be a success: it's still too big and too expensive. Tablet PCs are a niche market.
The surface of the moon is an utterly desolate lifeless wasteland, punctuated by craters and boulders. An open pit mine on Earth would be an incredible improvement!
Besides which, no open pit mine of any conceivable size would be visible from earth. You can barely see the largest manmade features on the Earth from low Earth orbit, and the moon is hundreds of thousands of times farther away than that. Maybe you could see the lights when the mine was in shadow, but I'm not sure if you could see it even then with the naked eye.
Besides which, I do want to see the lights of the colony when I look up from Earth! And if I live long enough, I will!
9. Yes and of course it would be the same star we call Rigel. After all its not like this guys from another planet and speaks a completely different language... oh wait.
This didn't glare nearly so much on the second run-through, but since she was speaking English, I'd assume she was using our nomenclature. "Rigel" doesn't sound Vulcan to me.
10. There are any number of reasons why "use space-leeches" doesn't show up later. Foremost being that Dr. Phlox is not a starfleet doctor, he's essentially an outside contractor. Second being that a machine that can do the exact same thing as a leech doesn't get old and die or eat the wrong kind of kiddle and die or whatever. Just because its more advanced than what came before it does not mean it will not be superceded by something else later.
Good points.
11. Yup, not enough logic from the vulcans. Pretty underwhelmed by Jolene Blalock as an actress. Soft core decon camera work was stupid too. Liked the fact that they actually had a decon chamber though. Maybe we'll see some dialog in an actual starship bathroom too.
"To boldly go where B5 has been before..."
12. Right again. Great sets and supposedly we haven't seen all of them yet. There is evidentally a torpedo room that "works" among other things. The CGI was more artistic than functional. I guess they are going for weird and alien not "look realistic starship designs" like B5 tried to do in places. If that was the case I doubt the Enterprise would look the way it does. It should be noted that B5 had lots of silly stylistic ships too, but they get praised for the few ships flown mostly by earth that weren't utter crap.
The wierd alien ships in B5 also used alien technologies. My beef with the CGI in Enterprise is that they're supposed to be going for a "low-tech" Starfleet, but they're still using swoopy movements for everything instead of following realistic physics.
13. Dunno. It was hit or miss and there were a fair share of misses but overall there was a lot of promise. Quite frankly that is all I expect from a first episode of any series.
I didn't get my hopes up for the premiere and still I was disappointed. Frankly, there were just too many points at which the script stopped making sense.
"There wasn't any character development" : hey guys, this was a PILOT. Few pilots develop much characterwise, they have too much expositional ground to cover. Two hours is what, 80 pages of script? How much "development" can you cram into that without forcing it, AND still have time to show all the neato-whiz-bang special effects for which the series is famed?
I beg to differ. Judging from what I know of Trek writing, the pilot contained all of the character development these characters will ever get (Vulcan goes from antagonistic to sympathetic: done. Crew goes from distrusting Vulcan to accepting her as one of the crew: done.). The actors will get more comfortable with their roles, and the writers will pick up on how to write the characters more sharply, but nothing will change.
9. The Vulcan hottie mentions Rigel and none of the humans have ever heard of it. Hell, I'VE heard of Rigel! It's a well-known, neighborhood star, and anyone trained as an officer on a starship should have known roughly where it was, and where to lok up the exact coordinates.
10. If the naturalistic "let's use leeches!" form of medicine is so effective, why does it never make an appearance on Trek ever again?
11. Bad and inconsistant characterization of the Vulcans. Contempt is an emotion. Bitchiness is an emotion. Sympathy is an emotion. And at no point does any Vulcan attempt to actually explain themselves logically. (note: "Logically, you dirty apes could never understand us" doesn't count) Most of the actors also did a poor job. It makes you appreciate Tim Russ a lot more.
12. I really wish the people who designed their sets had also been in charge of the CGI. The sets were nice: they looked functional, and believable, and communicated that they were on a ship. They really sold the setting. The CGI, on the other hand, could have come from any of the later treks, and didn't seem to have any personality or connection to reality. The motion was bad, and nothing looked simple and functional. See Babylon 5 for an example of CGI done right.
13. I was BORED. I was tempted to wander off and do laundry.
I have one of those $40.00 Apollo Program pens, and it's a thing of beauty. All brass construction, no plastic, hard-chromed on the outside. As soon as you take it apart, you can tell where the money went. And, it writes really well, too.
Figure it falls into the same category as a Mount Blanc pen or some such thing. I'm happy with mine. It goes better with a suit than a Bic would when I have the need to dress up.
Oh, and in 1967, how much did a car cost? $6,000.00?
The real big deal is not the possibility of the Buran shuttle flying again, but rather its launcher, the Energia.
The biggest difference between the design of the Soviet shuttle and the American shuttle is that on the Soviet shuttle, the main engines are not located on the back of the shuttle, but rather on the bottom of the main fuel tank. Thus, the main fuel tank is actually a standalone heavy-lifter rocket that can also have a shuttle and up to 8 liquid-fueled boosters strapped to it. This heavy-lifter rocket is called Energia.
The interesting thing is, you can use Energia without the Buran shuttle. In this configuration, it can lift 100 tons into orbit in one shot, which is five times the payload of the US space shuttle. If they chose to do so, it could lift their station in one shot.
If one uses Energia without the boosters, it also qualifies as a single-stage-to-orbit rocket, though I'm not sure what its payload would be in that configuration. This is more of an interesting piece of trivia than anything important, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Whereas this was once true, it is no longer. Microsoft cannot change formats so quickly that it makes their own legacy software incompatible. If someone cannot read a DOC format in Office97, Microsoft stands to lose.
What are you talking about? Not only CAN they make their own software obsolete, doing so is a MAJOR part of their marketing strategy! Because once you're locked in, they stop selling you the old version, and force you to buy the upgrades to the new version to keep all of your users on the same page.
Word 2000 is the only version of Word I know of whose files could be read by its predecessor. Word XP, as far as I know, will not use the same file format as Word 2000/97.
Jon Acheson
"all opinions expressed are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled."
Once a good set of filters are out there, Microsoft WILL change the file formats, guaranteed. Ask the OS/2 people what maintaining compatibility with M$ was like, and how much it helped them.
We really need to be saying "Linux office suites are very powerful, and aren't horrible buggy feature landfills like M$ Awfulest. Moreover, they exchange data really well WITH EACH OTHER."
I agree that the M$ filters are necessary, but I don't think in the long run they'll be a selling point. Less bugs and fewer crashes will be the real selling points.
Perhaps it could be argued that Microsoft's macro languages are just bad implementations, but the fact is that they are a huge gigantic awful security hole.
Yes, they can be useful, but when they can also knock a company totally off-line for days, it makes them a lot less useful.
Another problem is that Microsoft's macro language keeps changing with each new release, so if you build something advanced with it, it will probably be broken by the next upgrade. Ask me how I know.
What you're missing is that the author was comparing an X-terminal based Linux network with a conventional PC network. Running an office of PCs without a network is no longer possible, you need the network for printing and e-mail.
Thus, complaining about network gear, monitors and cabling is missing the point: both networks have similar needs there, so why discuss it? Maybe the author should have covered it in a sentence somewhere, since not everyone got it.
As for scalability, the X-terminal system is actually easier to scale, since you only have to upgrade the server, instead of an office full of workstations. And UNIX servers still scale better than Microsoft servers.
I don't know if X-terms can run barcode scanners, but I suspect they can. Just another input, like the keyboard and the mouse. You can certainly run the scanner off a serial port.
As for customer/employee satisfaction, how much is having a network that WORKS worth? One where the print queue doesn't randomly crap out on you (or the email server, or the proxy server...). Every network that I have ever been on EVER that ran off of Microsoft servers has been the victim of intermittent recurring failures in its components. They aren't down for long, you just get the reboot-monkeys to cycle the power on the machines, but if each system only fails once a month, that means something is probably going to go wrong every week or so. That's too often.
If you have to give the users whiz-bang to get them on board, buy funky monitors and run a nice theme on the desktops. Hide the PCs under the desks.
Honestly, how is paying for the rights for the movies then not releasing them (i.e. taking a loss on the whole package) somehow more profitable than doing moderately-successful releases to DVD?
This is Disney being irresponsible with their shareholder's money, pure and simple.
Can someone with the facts tell me, did Disney lose money on Mononoke? I really doubt it.
If Disney had been releasing the movies one or maybe two a year on DVD, they'd be millions of dollars ahead by now. They could probably recoup their production costs on a subtitled-only DVD via sales at OTAKON alone.
Jon Acheson
Also I hate to break it to some of the fanboys but anime is largely a fring/aquired taste here.
Actually a lot of anime has become so much a part of American culture that Joe Sixpack wouldn't think of it as anime. Speed Racer, Astro Boy, Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Tranzor Z, Gigantor, Battle of the Planets/G-Force, etc.
I agree though that Miyazaki should do everything in his power to avoid sending his new movie to The Black Hole of Disney.
Jon Acheson
By the time HDTV equipment gets cheap enough that I can afford it, both machines will be obselete. HDTV is a non-issue for me and most people I know.
Take another look in the video store. HDTVs are down to $1500 US for a widescreen picture tube model (a nice Panasonic Tau model). I expect sub-$1000 models by next year.
That's cheap enough that I'm beginning to plan how I'll be making the jump.
The issue for me is not so much the HDTV, but figuring out the best way to build a system around it.
And, FWIW, broadcast HDTV doesn't even enter into the equation for me. It's all about home theater, where an HDTV utterly kills anything NTSC. After watching DVDs on my 19" computer monitor at HDTV resolution, I can never go back!
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Clippy wouldn't be nearly so annoying if it didn't pop up when it wasn't wanted, and if Microsoft hadn't jettisoned creating real documentation when they implemented it. A decent manmade TOC and index is always going to be more useful than an automated wildass guess as to what you want.
Instead of using up valuable screen real estate, though, I'd make it an ever-present part of the right-click menu.
Jon Acheson
More likely the $100 difference is from no hard drive and no Ethernet.
This isn't a bad thing: the XBox hard drive seems to me like it could be the source of all kinds of problems when it a) gets filled up b) gets fragmented c) fails or gets corrupted d) gets used to patch games that were released broken. I couild be wrong, but I'm certainly waiting to see before I buy.
Ethernet would have been cool, but OTOH, I have the Ethernet card for my Dreamcast and have never hooked it up.
Jon Acheson
It spurs people on to try harder, and keeps the beaurocrats under control. Also, because it tends to make people try different approaches to see what works. With a monolithic development path, you get wedded to the One True Path, and can't get off that track until its failure is undeniable. It takes generations to get anywhere that way, which is why we haven't seen much progress since the Apollo missions.
Also, when you have multiple teams competing, people have no ability to hide their own failures by saying "well that was clearly just not possible," because chances are, the other team is doing it and getting it to work.
Jon Acheson
The more important step is to keep NASA from screwing up the next generation of space launch vehicles. Remember, the Space Shuttle was supposed to be cheaper than conventional rockets, but thanks largely to NASA it wound up being more like an order of magnitude more expensive.
I believe it is crucial for the US to move our space launch development from a beaurocratic process to a market-based process. I feel it will lower the cost of launch, and provide impetus to try alternative approaches that have been ignored by NASA.
I'd treat space launch capability like a utility. Just as the government must buy the electricity that people generate back into the power grid, I'd mandate that the government must buy a certain number of flights from all qualified vendors within a certain time frame after they come on line.
Specifically:
Yes, if enough companies came forward and built working launch systems it might cost more than, for instance, the two billion NASA has spent on X-33. But we'd have many times more working launch systems! As X-33 so amply proved, we cannot expect a beaurocratic approach to give us even one working next-gen system for the same amount of cash.
Jon Acheson
Frankly, most of her her stuff reads like a political tract to me.
I did like the Earthsea Trilogy, though.
YMMV,
Jon
I remember that one! I thought it was kind of cute to have a PC in the palm of your hand. People even got Windows working on later models.
Jon Acheson
Jon Acheson
The surface of the moon is an utterly desolate lifeless wasteland, punctuated by craters and boulders. An open pit mine on Earth would be an incredible improvement!
Besides which, no open pit mine of any conceivable size would be visible from earth. You can barely see the largest manmade features on the Earth from low Earth orbit, and the moon is hundreds of thousands of times farther away than that. Maybe you could see the lights when the mine was in shadow, but I'm not sure if you could see it even then with the naked eye.
Besides which, I do want to see the lights of the colony when I look up from Earth! And if I live long enough, I will!
Jon Acheson
This didn't glare nearly so much on the second run-through, but since she was speaking English, I'd assume she was using our nomenclature. "Rigel" doesn't sound Vulcan to me.
Good points.
"To boldly go where B5 has been before..."
The wierd alien ships in B5 also used alien technologies. My beef with the CGI in Enterprise is that they're supposed to be going for a "low-tech" Starfleet, but they're still using swoopy movements for everything instead of following realistic physics.
I didn't get my hopes up for the premiere and still I was disappointed. Frankly, there were just too many points at which the script stopped making sense.
Jon Acheson
You mean, apart from the "shadowy nemesis from the future?"
Jon Acheson
I beg to differ. Judging from what I know of Trek writing, the pilot contained all of the character development these characters will ever get (Vulcan goes from antagonistic to sympathetic: done. Crew goes from distrusting Vulcan to accepting her as one of the crew: done.). The actors will get more comfortable with their roles, and the writers will pick up on how to write the characters more sharply, but nothing will change.
I hope to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will.
Jon Acheson
9. The Vulcan hottie mentions Rigel and none of the humans have ever heard of it. Hell, I'VE heard of Rigel! It's a well-known, neighborhood star, and anyone trained as an officer on a starship should have known roughly where it was, and where to lok up the exact coordinates.
10. If the naturalistic "let's use leeches!" form of medicine is so effective, why does it never make an appearance on Trek ever again?
11. Bad and inconsistant characterization of the Vulcans. Contempt is an emotion. Bitchiness is an emotion. Sympathy is an emotion. And at no point does any Vulcan attempt to actually explain themselves logically. (note: "Logically, you dirty apes could never understand us" doesn't count) Most of the actors also did a poor job. It makes you appreciate Tim Russ a lot more.
12. I really wish the people who designed their sets had also been in charge of the CGI. The sets were nice: they looked functional, and believable, and communicated that they were on a ship. They really sold the setting. The CGI, on the other hand, could have come from any of the later treks, and didn't seem to have any personality or connection to reality. The motion was bad, and nothing looked simple and functional. See Babylon 5 for an example of CGI done right.
13. I was BORED. I was tempted to wander off and do laundry.
Jon Acheson
I have one of those $40.00 Apollo Program pens, and it's a thing of beauty. All brass construction, no plastic, hard-chromed on the outside. As soon as you take it apart, you can tell where the money went. And, it writes really well, too.
Figure it falls into the same category as a Mount Blanc pen or some such thing. I'm happy with mine. It goes better with a suit than a Bic would when I have the need to dress up.
Oh, and in 1967, how much did a car cost? $6,000.00?
Jon Acheson
The real big deal is not the possibility of the Buran shuttle flying again, but rather its launcher, the Energia.
The biggest difference between the design of the Soviet shuttle and the American shuttle is that on the Soviet shuttle, the main engines are not located on the back of the shuttle, but rather on the bottom of the main fuel tank. Thus, the main fuel tank is actually a standalone heavy-lifter rocket that can also have a shuttle and up to 8 liquid-fueled boosters strapped to it. This heavy-lifter rocket is called Energia.
The interesting thing is, you can use Energia without the Buran shuttle. In this configuration, it can lift 100 tons into orbit in one shot, which is five times the payload of the US space shuttle. If they chose to do so, it could lift their station in one shot.
If one uses Energia without the boosters, it also qualifies as a single-stage-to-orbit rocket, though I'm not sure what its payload would be in that configuration. This is more of an interesting piece of trivia than anything important, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Jon Acheson
What are you talking about? Not only CAN they make their own software obsolete, doing so is a MAJOR part of their marketing strategy! Because once you're locked in, they stop selling you the old version, and force you to buy the upgrades to the new version to keep all of your users on the same page.
Word 2000 is the only version of Word I know of whose files could be read by its predecessor. Word XP, as far as I know, will not use the same file format as Word 2000/97.
Jon Acheson
"all opinions expressed are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled."
Once a good set of filters are out there, Microsoft WILL change the file formats, guaranteed. Ask the OS/2 people what maintaining compatibility with M$ was like, and how much it helped them.
We really need to be saying "Linux office suites are very powerful, and aren't horrible buggy feature landfills like M$ Awfulest. Moreover, they exchange data really well WITH EACH OTHER."
I agree that the M$ filters are necessary, but I don't think in the long run they'll be a selling point. Less bugs and fewer crashes will be the real selling points.
Jon Acheson
And while it's nice, the lack of a keyboard is more of a drawback than you'd expect. A downright pain, in fact.
I mainly bought it to use as a drawing tablet, and for that it seems to suffice.
Wireless internet connectivity would be neat, but it's a battery killer (unless I got a cable that would run to a cellphone, hmm...).
Look at http://www.linux-hacker.net for more details.
Jon Acheson
Perhaps it could be argued that Microsoft's macro languages are just bad implementations, but the fact is that they are a huge gigantic awful security hole.
Yes, they can be useful, but when they can also knock a company totally off-line for days, it makes them a lot less useful.
Another problem is that Microsoft's macro language keeps changing with each new release, so if you build something advanced with it, it will probably be broken by the next upgrade. Ask me how I know.
Jon Acheson
What you're missing is that the author was comparing an X-terminal based Linux network with a conventional PC network. Running an office of PCs without a network is no longer possible, you need the network for printing and e-mail.
Thus, complaining about network gear, monitors and cabling is missing the point: both networks have similar needs there, so why discuss it? Maybe the author should have covered it in a sentence somewhere, since not everyone got it.
As for scalability, the X-terminal system is actually easier to scale, since you only have to upgrade the server, instead of an office full of workstations. And UNIX servers still scale better than Microsoft servers.
I don't know if X-terms can run barcode scanners, but I suspect they can. Just another input, like the keyboard and the mouse. You can certainly run the scanner off a serial port.
As for customer/employee satisfaction, how much is having a network that WORKS worth? One where the print queue doesn't randomly crap out on you (or the email server, or the proxy server...). Every network that I have ever been on EVER that ran off of Microsoft servers has been the victim of intermittent recurring failures in its components. They aren't down for long, you just get the reboot-monkeys to cycle the power on the machines, but if each system only fails once a month, that means something is probably going to go wrong every week or so. That's too often.
If you have to give the users whiz-bang to get them on board, buy funky monitors and run a nice theme on the desktops. Hide the PCs under the desks.
Jon Acheson
The only problems I have with it are related to printing out web pages.
It's certainly much better than the old Navigator. Can't wait for 1.0!
Jon Acheson
Honestly, how is paying for the rights for the movies then not releasing them (i.e. taking a loss on the whole package) somehow more profitable than doing moderately-successful releases to DVD?
This is Disney being irresponsible with their shareholder's money, pure and simple.
Can someone with the facts tell me, did Disney lose money on Mononoke? I really doubt it.
If Disney had been releasing the movies one or maybe two a year on DVD, they'd be millions of dollars ahead by now. They could probably recoup their production costs on a subtitled-only DVD via sales at OTAKON alone.
Jon Acheson
Actually a lot of anime has become so much a part of American culture that Joe Sixpack wouldn't think of it as anime. Speed Racer, Astro Boy, Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Tranzor Z, Gigantor, Battle of the Planets/G-Force, etc.
I agree though that Miyazaki should do everything in his power to avoid sending his new movie to The Black Hole of Disney.
Jon Acheson
That's because it was heavily influenced by the Gainax anime series Nadia: Secret of the Blue Water.
Some fans insist that it was stolen broadcloth a la The Lion King, but not having seen Atlantis, I can't comment.
Jon Acheson
Take another look in the video store. HDTVs are down to $1500 US for a widescreen picture tube model (a nice Panasonic Tau model). I expect sub-$1000 models by next year.
That's cheap enough that I'm beginning to plan how I'll be making the jump.
The issue for me is not so much the HDTV, but figuring out the best way to build a system around it.
And, FWIW, broadcast HDTV doesn't even enter into the equation for me. It's all about home theater, where an HDTV utterly kills anything NTSC. After watching DVDs on my 19" computer monitor at HDTV resolution, I can never go back!
Jon Acheson
Apache is a good example of an Open Source product that has totally eclipsed the original. Who uses NCSA's webserver any more?
The PHP scripting language is another good example.
I woudn't be at all surprised if XFree86 begins to put the commercial X distros out of business, either.
Jon Acheson