Microsoft not following standards must be subtly different from Moz not following standards. Mozilla not supporting a cross-platform framework for popup advertising must be ever so slightly different.
Yeah, I guess you could call having 90% less market share and no Sherman Act conviction under your belt "slightly different".
This Register article claims it uses 2 LCD panels rather than a single panel with a lenticular layer on top of it. That would at least take care of the horizontal resolution, though the "parallax barrier" they describe sounds the same as those lenticular trading cards.
It would be interesting to find out if this were the 80 lines of code all those analysts saw under NDA. It would say a lot not only about SCO's case but about the research abilities of technical analysts these days....
The interesting thing is that IBM already *has* distributed Linux many times; it was preloading it on PC's for a while, and I'm pretty sure it's them giving you a copy of Linux when you buy that shiny new zSeries.
Also, have a look at the IBM Linux Technology Center which appears to have lots of patches and other source tarballs available for download from various IBM servers. I think IBM is (like any large publicly owned corporation) best treated with caution, but I also think Linux users are safe from patent claims by virtue of all the stuff IBM's distributing under the GPL.
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned some of the cool stuff, especially crapware-blocking stuff, that has gone away in 1.3.
"always use these fonts/colors" top level menu items
"block all images from this site" context menu
middle-clicking in the history to open in a new window, or even right clicking and getting the standard link context menu
for that matter, being able to sort by "Last Visited" and "First Visited" in the history
the ability to make my toolbar buttons icons-only, or text-on-the-side
the ability to edit helper apps, mime types and the associated applications! why on earth would you take that out? I could see if it used your desktop's settings but it won't even bring up kmail to handle mailto links...
the "use stylesheet..." submenu. I can't believe I'm the only person in the world who used this regularly.
Assorted other little niceties that are missing, like the ^U shortcut for "view source" (and just pressing the key while hovering over the menu item doesn't seem to work anymore in Gtk2...) and showing the name of the image file in the context menu when you right click.
And in return, about the only real advance I can see is that my fonts are all antialiased now like they've been in Mozilla and Konqueror for about a year already. Maybe if I ran Gnome I'd find something to be impressed with, but I don't, and I haven't.
Overall, I don't think I've ever seen a minor version release of a program that took away so much functionality. I know it's due to the conversion to Gtk2/Gnome2 and there are still speed bumps to be worked out, but it's actually left me with a bad taste in my mouth for Gnome apps in general, which is pretty weird for me as a former avid Gnome user. If I end up switching to Firebird, as seems likely, I actually won't be running any more Gnome apps at all.
Maybe the thing to do is find out if Galeon has a bugzilla and see if all these have been filed already, but honestly, don't you think it'll be less effort to switch to Firebird? It would mean I would be running no Gnome apps at all anymore, which would be weird, but maybe the way Galeon's existence caused the Mozilla guys to build a browser like Firebird means it's fulfilled its purpose and there's no need to feel loyal to it for whatever reason.
I hit this article hoping to see a discussion of "different drummer" type games with different and more interesting playmechanics than "obtain bigger weapon, shoot monster/other player." (Seriously, I liked Doom and Duke3D a lot, but by Quake III I was wondering if there was ANYTHING else to play anymore....)
Instead I got to relive for a moment that dark period of the 80's when born again failed record execs came around to the Catholic schools passing the hat and suggesting we all burn our "satanic" records and buy some new ones that sounded superficially the same, but with awful songwriting and a message from Jesus. Records by bands like Stryper.
Yes, that's right, these videogames are the 21st century version of Stryper. Rock on, Christian soldiers....
Why? Why need support to play DivX format in a DVD player?
Why? Because I can't get six episodes of an hour long TV show on one SVCD.
Seriously, you say "billy bob" and "Wal-Mart" and then start talking about DVD quality? I bought my $68 DVD player at Wal-Mart. It was a colossal bargain though the remote sucks. I've been using VCD's to burn episodes of TV shows I want to save. I see video on CD's as an upgrade from 6-hour VHS tapes, not as some kind of new home theater gadget. I don't have a home theater system, I have a TV like about 90% of the population.
Truthfully, 80-128Kbit DivX 5 video with 96Kbit audio is certainly no worse than SP mode VHS tapes, and the media's a whole lot cheaper, smaller, and random access. If these things will read DVD-R's, I'll be getting a DVD burner so I can throw an entire season of any show I want on one disc. I'm surprised no one else has brought up this point.
I'm really enthusiastic about what Red Hat is trying to do, and I think all distros should look into a similar strategy. I've started trying to write a Tcl extension that lets you build Tcl apps that emulate the look of your currently running desktop. Making all Linux apps have the ability to look the same will go a long way towards making Linux a palatable desktop OS for a far wider audience than currently uses it.
That said, I bet you that if they had done something as simple as leave the "About KDE" menu items in there, we'd be hearing a lot less whining from the KDE camp right about now and Red Hat might still have Bero around. Maybe someone like Mandrake in the "little guy tries harder" mold will get it right, shipping a distribution with a theme that looks great on both GNOME and KDE, with menus that work the same under both (Mandrake almost does this already, but you can mark menu items as KDE or GNOME specific) and without any perceived slights against the developers or clumsy bug-inducing font manipulation (which Mandrake is guilty of to a lesser extent as well.) I'd say a distribution like Lycoris/Lindows/Xandros might be the one to tackle this but they all seem to have pretty much decided on straight-up KDE with a WindowsXP-like theme already. Maybe if Red Hat hadn't been so adamantly pro-GNOME in the past they would have done the same.
Rather than the obligatory Rand bashing I'm going to suggest as an alternative the Queen of Angels series by Greg Bear (Queen of Angels, "/" (Slant), Heads, and Moving Mars) as a somewhat believable utopic future and the believable problems it engenders. There's somewhat less of a sales pitch going on in these books, anyway.
The series covers about 150 years presently (they're listed above in story-chronological order rather than by date published) and deals kind of nicely with the social issues which could result from the maturing of technologies like AI, cosmetic surgery, nano and quantum physics. It's science fiction (at times "hard" science fiction) but I'd argue that all of these utopic/dystopic books are to one extent or another.
Heads is an out of print novella I had to hit half.com to get, but the rest should be available from your choice of privacy-impeding online book merchants.
So your main complaint about the Zaurus is that it's not a copy of the PalmOS interface you're comfortable with. Gotcha.
But of course, Palm devices and the Zaurus/iPaq class of devices are completely separate in terms of design intent. Palm is meant to replace paper. Zaurus/iPaq is meant to make it less necessary to carry that laptop everywhere you go, so their apps and interfaces are designed more like the desktop model.
I'd be interested in your comparison between the Zaurus datebook and Pocket Outlook, for example, and in the amount of time it takes for someone who uses desktop machines regularly to adjust to using a Palm device's byzantine Graffiti system versus a thumb keyboard or the Pocket PC's own handwriting recognition system. I know a few people who opted for a Sharp Wizard (a much cheaper device with a larger thumb board and no stylus at all) rather than a Palm-type device because they couldn't be bothered to learn a bizarre new written language. I doubt they would have gone for the Zaurus as they really were looking for a paper replacement, but Graffiti is Palm's biggest weakness where non-PDA-users are concerned.
Before you start talking about non-intuitive user interfaces maybe you ought to look at the issue through the eyes of someone who doesn't use these things at all rather than your own clearly Palm-biased experience. For what it's worth, I don't use any PDA myself as I find them all lacking. I certainly don't want to use their minimalist interfaces on the desktop, and the designs that are fawned over by usability experts (like Aqua) would seem to bear this instinct out.
The kind of programmers he's talking about didn't popularize Windows 3.1 by writing Objective C or Java apps. They popularized Windows 3.1 by putting out thousands and thousands of VB apps.
Remember Visual Basic 3.0? It was the first "good" version of VB. It was an awful memory hog, hideously slow, didn't even compile to native code, and lowered the barrier so that lots of non-programmers could release code by drawing a form, double clicking on the buttons, putting in a few almost English-like commands (even in all caps if they wanted, VB would fix it for them), and selecting "Run" from a menu. They could select "Make EXE" from another menu, and then upload their new program to AOL. They didn't even have to worry about distributing a setup program since anyone downloading apps from AOL at the time was quickly pointed to the small runtime DLL required by VB apps.
VB didn't require novice programmers to learn to think in an object orientation; they were just able to say "When I click this button, do this, this and this." At the time some of us thought VB was like a less elegant Hypercard, not a real development language. Unix C programmers and DOS Turbo Pascal programmers laughed at VB fans. Those new coders released thousands of awful applications.... and some of them actually developed into something good. VB itself turned into a huge mess of dependencies and version conflicts, but it's the closest really working thing to a non-coder's language I've ever seen, not to mention a far more efficient use of one's time for prototyping or simple applets than any C-derived language and toolkit, as long as one is stuck in Windows to begin with.
If Lycoris (or Lindows, or someone I haven't heard of yet) were to include a coding tool as simple as VB or simpler, yet also capable of doing everything VB does plus automate all the cool things modern Linux distros include (mp3, web, video, for that matter simple things like pipes etc.) I bet they would own the Linux desktop market within a year, and quickly take a chunk out of Windows' marketshare soon after. Lindows could do it now by licensing some version of Delphi for Click-n-Run, but I wonder if even Delphi is too much for the kind of people VB appealed to in those early years (new programmers hate semicolons and type declarations! and if they have to deal with them, rather than learn something more "correct" they will simply give up... and there goes your critical mass.)
GNUstep is cool, but GNUstep is nowhere near the empowering and market-generating technology that VB was when it first appeared. It is essentially a slightly modernized clone of NeXTstep, which you may have noticed did not take over the world right around the time Win3.x and VB did.
To the parent of the parent: They finally did come out with some kind of VB clone for GEOS, I think NeoBASIC or something like that, but of course it was too little too late. I think you can actually still buy PC/GEOS from the makers of NewDeal Office.... but as their marketing gimmick was that it runs on a 286, they're looking kinda dated at this point.
The Entex Adventurevision was a portable video game system that used a spinning mirror and a few LED's to simulate a 150x40 display at 15 frames per second. It was cheap, fairly effective and fun.
However, it also suffered from headache-inducing flicker and its red LED's didn't help any, so it only ever had 4 games released for it and was quickly overshadowed by the twice as expensive but much cooler Vectrex. They're now rare enough that Adventurevision units have gone for upwards of a grand on ebay in recent years. You can relive its glories (including flicker) using xmess and the appropriate roms from adventurevision.com.
Nonetheless, I could easily see how modern MEMS implementations could replace CRT's, maybe even projection screens, if not your Gameboy or cellphone. I don't think it'll take over the way Cringely seems to (mass market retinal projection will be pie in the sky for a LONG TIME for many reasons) but the technique is bound to see some use.
No one pays unemployment insurance premiums except employers, and it's illegal for them to pass those premiums on to employees. If your employer is making you pay them, please give your local unemployment office a call, they'd love to hear from you:)
Further, the premiums don't end up in the "general tax revenue", as you appear to infer. It is administered as an insurance program and is funded by the premiums, period.
There are a lot of problems with the unemployment system (like the way our national unemployment figures are derived solely from the number of people currently receiving benefits, and the absurd length of time it can take before someone without a source of income starts getting those benefits) but you should educate yourself about how it actually works before slamming it.
It may not be a great solution for laid-off IT workers, but it beats flipping burgers (and usually pays more.)
This is inaccurate; my partner works in the New York State unemployment system, and executives who made $300,000 a year routinely call up and get unemployment benefits after being laid off.
The catch is, there is a maximum benefit, something like $380 a week in NYS. And if you were fired with cause, or quit, you are probably out of luck (or would have been when it happened last summer; things may be different now because of 9/11.) Not receiving paychecks while being expected to work usually gets treated as a layoff by the unemployment people, so Aimster victims like yourself should certainly have had a shot at collecting. If you were self-employed and didn't pay unemployment insurance on yourself, you're also screwed. If you were working on a 1099, things are more murky. In all these cases, however, the matter goes to a hearing before you're determined ineligible.
Otherwise, if you find you're ineligible for unemployment, it's because your former employer committed tax fraud and you may be able to get in line behind all their other creditors and sue them. It's fairly common for employers to lie to people and tell them they're ineligible for unemployment because they're a "special case" of some kind (e.g. "your salary is too high") but that's because their experience rating (i.e. cost) goes up every time someone files for unemployment benefits.
I notice from your journal entry that we lived in the same town during much of your ordeal, so if you called unemployment while upstate, you probably got the call center my partner works in. If you called in NYC, god only knows you probably got a workfare recipient or temp or something; they seem to be notorious for messing up cases. Sadly, since it's now been 8 months since you first became eligible, it may be more difficult. "I thought I was ineligible" isn't a line they care to hear.
There are many myths about how the unemployment system works (that you have to have worked for 18 months prior, that it's only good for six months and then you can never get it again, that the benefit rate is half of your pay no matter how high it was, etc) and the various state and federal websites do little to correct them.
Aimster did pretty much suck though, as a company and as a concept. A friend of mine wanted to get me involved in a joint venture with them early last year and I simply refused. Looks like my instincts were right.
The MJ2 and its various clones are actually based on the NES (8-bit Nintendo). Still nostalgic, and I'd buy it just to play Mappy on hotel room TV's, but really aimed at the generation after those who would buy this Atari thing;)
OTOH, there is already a licensed Activision one which I see now and then at Toys-R-Us and Walmart, and that one is based on the 2600 (and includes Pitfall, among others.) In fact, it's from the same Jakks subsidiary, Toymax:
As I understand it, it's not actually a complete clone of the 2600, just enough to get those specific games working (and apparently the Atari-licensed ones in the new version as well.)
The land argument is another straw man, as land is the original scarce resource. Expertise may be a scarce resource, and many here including myself are paid well for having and using it, but the fruits of our expertise are not scarce and can be copied infinitely without cost to anyone. The work undertaken is valuable, but any one copy of the result has no intrinsic value the way that a piece of land or car or television has value. You can work with that knowledge or you can put up walls of fantasy and try to pretend you're producing something physical and scarce.
I also don't see any backup for the assertion that simply because an industry is based on a flawed or obsolete business model (in this case, a 'product' which costs an awful lot to make the first one, but virtually nothing to make the next million) it must be allowed to exist via command economy constructs -- like protectionism in the form of imaginary property laws.
Again, free software producers are working to correct this situation, which would make concepts like 'piracy' irrelevant -- as they were only a decade or two ago.
I don't see why the parent hasn't been modded as a troll, since it depends upon the classic "imaginary property is real property" troll argument.
I don't know why I'm responding either, except to say that if you steal someone's TV, they have one less TV. If you copy someone's OfficeXP or MacOSX or Mandrake 8.2, you have created a second instance of that object at little or no cost to anyone. You have borne the minimal cost of production, not Microsoft nor Apple nor MandrakeSoft. Thus, scarcity never comes into play except by writ, as described below.
Finally, you started off with "Capitalism is good until it creates Monopolies". Yet imaginary property laws themselves are monopolies by writ, a textbook example of command economy style protectionism. You're taking something which, while it may cost money to design, costs essentially nothing for anyone to mass produce, and because limiting that would benefit some people who give you money as a lawmaker, people who would no longer have that money if their business model were subjected to laissez-faire capitalism, you declare it equivalent to physical property. Declaring it as such doesn't make it so, which is why most people in the world (just ask the BSA) understand 'piracy' to be a false concept and why the aim of the FSF and others is to break that system using its own rules. Thus, Linux and other GPL'ed software isn't 'piracy', but can be seen as an attack on the artificial constructs of imaginary property itself.
Seriously, sure, the first time I see PTMF$20 or You Have One Message Waiting, junkbuster gets installed (or images.slashdot.org gets added to my hosts file as I've done with all the offensive ad servers.) But right now I'm seeing an ad for Rackspace, which is fine with me even though it's animated and I already have colo, and I really like the Thinkgeek ads for the most part. In fact, I click on them pretty regularly and sometimes even buy stuff from them. It's kind of synergistic too because Thinkgeek isn't the sort of site I'm going to regularly look at. Slashdot is pretty much their only way of reaching people like me.
I once tried to explain to a real live newspaper editor who was thinking about moving to the web that ads are part of the package if properly done, a valued part of the experience and not something to be skipped over. I *want* to see an ad for my local butcher in the local section of my paper. I *want* the Best Buy flyer in my Sunday comics. And just the same, I *want* to know when Thinkgeek has a new Photon Light or something equally shiny for me to abuse my credit card with.
I won't mind the "message unit" ads if they're of the same type as Slashdot has been running for years, and if they're still going to be GIF/JPG then no worries. I browse with Java and plugins disabled so I wouldn't see the other kind anyway. Subscribing isn't an option right now because I'm not about to give Paypal my credit card or checking account number, but if Slashdot keeps doing what they're doing, at least I won't be among the freeloaders.
There are two that I know of for Windows: Hamster (page is German), which is GPL'ed, and MyNews, by the creator of yEnc, which is shareware and includes a built-in newsreader. There are probably more but those seem like the two dominant players in this very small field:)
However, both of those are really oriented towards P2P more than what the poster was looking for. And I don't even want to think about what kind of smackdown would be waiting for a home broadband user running an open news server.
That's actually one of the classic myths of activism. What you refer to as 'civil disobedience' is really only the final stage of civil disobedience. It becomes viable when the opposing cause has been weakened enough that people marching in the streets carrying posters marked "Free sconeu!" will be enough to tilt the balance of public opinion against the oppressive behavior. Even then the volunteer has to be carefully selected, to maximize popular sympathy and minimize the opponent's ability to demonize him/her. Preferably it should be the basis for a test case.
The vast majority of civil disobedience takes place quietly prior to that point, and is arguably much more important in effecting change.
To get to that final stage, a critical mass of people must partake in the illegal activity *without* being punished, so that conventional wisdom becomes that everyone does it and it's a reasonable thing to expect to be able to do. i.e., the common use of Napster hurt the credibility of copyright's proponents much more than Adobe having Skylarov arrested, despite the publicity. The cannabis decriminalization and gay equality movements have been going that way for 30 years and have not gotten to that stage yet despite their progress (do you think anyone WANTED to go to jail for smoking a joint or being in a gay bar?) There are striking parallels between those movements and the movement on the net to restore the public ownership of culture.
Finally, the one way in which the anti-imaginary-property movement differs from other social movements is that the 'oppressor' isn't so much the government, but rich corporations and their trusts -- er, industry associations. They tend to do things without mug shots and handcuffs. Until the NET Act and DMCA came along there was zero chance that the IDSA was going to send someone to jail for distributing King's Quest III, and "Free sconeu!" looks a lot better on a placard than "Pay sconeu's Legal Bills!"
No, it's not a 100% replacement for Visio, but in some ways it's more powerful. Its drawing tools are about on a par with Visio 2000, it just lacks stencils and connectors. Yes, that is Visio's hook, but in practice I'd say 75% of the Visio diagrams I've seen real office people create consist of squares with text in them, lines and arrows. And it's included in both StarOffice and OpenOffice. You can embed a StarDraw document in StarWriter probably easier than a Visio document in Word.
Now if it would just import Visio diagrams.... but it does import WMF's and EPS's, which have been good enough for me so far.
The real MSOffice killer app for my clients in the past, which is still not really available under Linux, is (sadly) Access. Yes, there's Katabase and the commercial version of StarOffice has always included Adabas, but neither of them is still quite up to snuff for creating quick ad-hoc applications without hiring someone (until you realize how unstable Access is for your now huge and mission critical app, at which point you call me!;) )
Overall, I think the move will reduce confusion and help both StarOffice and OpenOffice in the long run.
I always wondered how reporters were able to canvass for hackers in this kind of story; it's hard to imagine them hanging out on IRC channels asking for interviews without getting/kicked pretty fast.
But I got an email from the author of this Time article a few weeks back after I mentioned getting all of B5:Crusade on two CD's in a/. post. It went to one of my spam-catcher addresses so I didn't see it until much later. I was surprised, though, as the story seemed pretty balanced considering it appeared in an AOLTW property. And it probably reads better with a guy like "Necratog" editing out commercials in vdub rather than some schmuck from Albany, New York;)
From: anita_hamilton@[no, I'm not that cruel] To: webmaster@kudla.org Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 23:40:35 -0500 Subject: TIME Magazine Interview request
Hi Rob,
I noticed that you posted a message on Slashdot about how you were able to save Babylon 5 shows, convert them to digital, edit out the commericals, and burn them onto CDs. Well, it turns out that I too am writing a story about this topic and wondered if you could tell me more about how you did it and how easy it was. Would you be interested in talking on the phone for a few minutes about it? If so, I wondered if we could talk sometime Friday or Saturday. It should take less than 15 minutes total.
If you are interested, please let me know when is a god time for me to give you a call.
Thanks for considering this,
Anita Hamilton Staff Writer TIME Magazine 212/[xxx-xxxx]
I don't see how this differs practically from offering it under the LGPL while offering commercial terms as an alternative. Both provide a free version licensed under "viral terms", and both would require copyright assignation from all contributors.
The only arguably positive difference I can see would be the ability to include code covered by other "viral licenses" besides the [L]GPL, and the moment you do that, your whole codebase is QPL or SISSL or whatever and you're stuck with that license exclusively. It just postpones the decision of which "viral license" to use. Six of one....
Now, I love electronic technical documentation. I am the only geek I know who doesn't collect O'Reilly and other technical reference books except for the 5 or 6 I couldn't resist. Most of my friends have bought personal laser printers and have shelves full of 3-ring binders of printed-out man pages and other unfathomable wastes of pulp and toner. I can't stand having to get up out of my chair, walk over to the bookshelf, find the textbook I need, find the index in the back of it, then find the page with the information I need -- IF it's indexed at all. I read man pages and README's and if all else fails, Google works 9 out of 10 times.
But e-books, even technical ones, aren't generally plain text. In the best case they're HTML, like the O'Reilly Perl CD, and searching a ton of HTML files is a lot tougher than typing "/" in less. More often they're PDF's, which require me to either install Adobe's awful reader software (in which searching may or may not be useful) or forego any worthwhile search capabilities by using gv or xpdf. I end up trying pdf2txt or something similar with fugly results, or using Google's spotty PDF to HTML translation.
And that's nothing compared to fiction. I got Goblet of Fire off of some ebook newsgroup the same day it was released. It was a PDF, and I never read it even though I'm dying to after reading the first three books in hardcopy. (I'm now stubbornly waiting for the trade paperback so it'll match my other 3 HP books.) There's something about fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction, that needs soft lighting and a place to curl up and enjoy it. There's just something wrong with hitting "page down" as opposed to physically turning a page. And underneath it all, reading something onscreen just makes me feel like I'm wasting time and I'd better get back to work, even when I'm on vacation.
These are just my biases, of course. In a decade they might seem as quaint as someone who misses radio drama and couldn't understand all the fuss over TV. But to get there, the ebook publishers need to get some early adopters who aren't just pirates with OCR and palmpilots. Early adopters are usually people like me, and I am not interested. I'm sure the time will come when paper will seem wasteful and outmoded, but I don't know how they'll escape that initial catch-22.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I guess you could call having 90% less market share and no Sherman Act conviction under your belt "slightly different".
This Register article claims it uses 2 LCD panels rather than a single panel with a lenticular layer on top of it. That would at least take care of the horizontal resolution, though the "parallax barrier" they describe sounds the same as those lenticular trading cards.
It would be interesting to find out if this were the 80 lines of code all those analysts saw under NDA. It would say a lot not only about SCO's case but about the research abilities of technical analysts these days....
Here's the earliest implementation people have found so far, from 1979 (before SCO was "born"):
l loc.c.html
1 BSD/sys/sys/subr_rmap.c
http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/V7/usr/sys/sys/ma
And here's where it was part of BSD 2.11 circa 1992:
http://unix-archive.pdp11.org.ru/PDP-11/Trees/2.1
Oh, how I hope the mainstream tech press "gets" this.
The interesting thing is that IBM already *has* distributed Linux many times; it was preloading it on PC's for a while, and I'm pretty sure it's them giving you a copy of Linux when you buy that shiny new zSeries.
Also, have a look at the IBM Linux Technology Center which appears to have lots of patches and other source tarballs available for download from various IBM servers. I think IBM is (like any large publicly owned corporation) best treated with caution, but I also think Linux users are safe from patent claims by virtue of all the stuff IBM's distributing under the GPL.
And in return, about the only real advance I can see is that my fonts are all antialiased now like they've been in Mozilla and Konqueror for about a year already. Maybe if I ran Gnome I'd find something to be impressed with, but I don't, and I haven't.
Overall, I don't think I've ever seen a minor version release of a program that took away so much functionality. I know it's due to the conversion to Gtk2/Gnome2 and there are still speed bumps to be worked out, but it's actually left me with a bad taste in my mouth for Gnome apps in general, which is pretty weird for me as a former avid Gnome user. If I end up switching to Firebird, as seems likely, I actually won't be running any more Gnome apps at all.
Maybe the thing to do is find out if Galeon has a bugzilla and see if all these have been filed already, but honestly, don't you think it'll be less effort to switch to Firebird? It would mean I would be running no Gnome apps at all anymore, which would be weird, but maybe the way Galeon's existence caused the Mozilla guys to build a browser like Firebird means it's fulfilled its purpose and there's no need to feel loyal to it for whatever reason.
I hit this article hoping to see a discussion of "different drummer" type games with different and more interesting playmechanics than "obtain bigger weapon, shoot monster/other player." (Seriously, I liked Doom and Duke3D a lot, but by Quake III I was wondering if there was ANYTHING else to play anymore....)
Instead I got to relive for a moment that dark period of the 80's when born again failed record execs came around to the Catholic schools passing the hat and suggesting we all burn our "satanic" records and buy some new ones that sounded superficially the same, but with awful songwriting and a message from Jesus. Records by bands like Stryper.
Yes, that's right, these videogames are the 21st century version of Stryper. Rock on, Christian soldiers....
Why? Because I can't get six episodes of an hour long TV show on one SVCD.
Seriously, you say "billy bob" and "Wal-Mart" and then start talking about DVD quality? I bought my $68 DVD player at Wal-Mart. It was a colossal bargain though the remote sucks. I've been using VCD's to burn episodes of TV shows I want to save. I see video on CD's as an upgrade from 6-hour VHS tapes, not as some kind of new home theater gadget. I don't have a home theater system, I have a TV like about 90% of the population.
Truthfully, 80-128Kbit DivX 5 video with 96Kbit audio is certainly no worse than SP mode VHS tapes, and the media's a whole lot cheaper, smaller, and random access. If these things will read DVD-R's, I'll be getting a DVD burner so I can throw an entire season of any show I want on one disc. I'm surprised no one else has brought up this point.
I'm really enthusiastic about what Red Hat is trying to do, and I think all distros should look into a similar strategy. I've started trying to write a Tcl extension that lets you build Tcl apps that emulate the look of your currently running desktop. Making all Linux apps have the ability to look the same will go a long way towards making Linux a palatable desktop OS for a far wider audience than currently uses it.
;)
That said, I bet you that if they had done something as simple as leave the "About KDE" menu items in there, we'd be hearing a lot less whining from the KDE camp right about now and Red Hat might still have Bero around. Maybe someone like Mandrake in the "little guy tries harder" mold will get it right, shipping a distribution with a theme that looks great on both GNOME and KDE, with menus that work the same under both (Mandrake almost does this already, but you can mark menu items as KDE or GNOME specific) and without any perceived slights against the developers or clumsy bug-inducing font manipulation (which Mandrake is guilty of to a lesser extent as well.) I'd say a distribution like Lycoris/Lindows/Xandros might be the one to tackle this but they all seem to have pretty much decided on straight-up KDE with a WindowsXP-like theme already. Maybe if Red Hat hadn't been so adamantly pro-GNOME in the past they would have done the same.
Anyway.... off to install Mandrake 9.0
Rather than the obligatory Rand bashing I'm going to suggest as an alternative the Queen of Angels series by Greg Bear (Queen of Angels, "/" (Slant), Heads, and Moving Mars) as a somewhat believable utopic future and the believable problems it engenders. There's somewhat less of a sales pitch going on in these books, anyway.
The series covers about 150 years presently (they're listed above in story-chronological order rather than by date published) and deals kind of nicely with the social issues which could result from the maturing of technologies like AI, cosmetic surgery, nano and quantum physics. It's science fiction (at times "hard" science fiction) but I'd argue that all of these utopic/dystopic books are to one extent or another.
Heads is an out of print novella I had to hit half.com to get, but the rest should be available from your choice of privacy-impeding online book merchants.
So your main complaint about the Zaurus is that it's not a copy of the PalmOS interface you're comfortable with. Gotcha.
But of course, Palm devices and the Zaurus/iPaq class of devices are completely separate in terms of design intent. Palm is meant to replace paper. Zaurus/iPaq is meant to make it less necessary to carry that laptop everywhere you go, so their apps and interfaces are designed more like the desktop model.
I'd be interested in your comparison between the Zaurus datebook and Pocket Outlook, for example, and in the amount of time it takes for someone who uses desktop machines regularly to adjust to using a Palm device's byzantine Graffiti system versus a thumb keyboard or the Pocket PC's own handwriting recognition system. I know a few people who opted for a Sharp Wizard (a much cheaper device with a larger thumb board and no stylus at all) rather than a Palm-type device because they couldn't be bothered to learn a bizarre new written language. I doubt they would have gone for the Zaurus as they really were looking for a paper replacement, but Graffiti is Palm's biggest weakness where non-PDA-users are concerned.
Before you start talking about non-intuitive user interfaces maybe you ought to look at the issue through the eyes of someone who doesn't use these things at all rather than your own clearly Palm-biased experience. For what it's worth, I don't use any PDA myself as I find them all lacking. I certainly don't want to use their minimalist interfaces on the desktop, and the designs that are fawned over by usability experts (like Aqua) would seem to bear this instinct out.
The kind of programmers he's talking about didn't popularize Windows 3.1 by writing Objective C or Java apps. They popularized Windows 3.1 by putting out thousands and thousands of VB apps.
Remember Visual Basic 3.0? It was the first "good" version of VB. It was an awful memory hog, hideously slow, didn't even compile to native code, and lowered the barrier so that lots of non-programmers could release code by drawing a form, double clicking on the buttons, putting in a few almost English-like commands (even in all caps if they wanted, VB would fix it for them), and selecting "Run" from a menu. They could select "Make EXE" from another menu, and then upload their new program to AOL. They didn't even have to worry about distributing a setup program since anyone downloading apps from AOL at the time was quickly pointed to the small runtime DLL required by VB apps.
VB didn't require novice programmers to learn to think in an object orientation; they were just able to say "When I click this button, do this, this and this." At the time some of us thought VB was like a less elegant Hypercard, not a real development language. Unix C programmers and DOS Turbo Pascal programmers laughed at VB fans. Those new coders released thousands of awful applications.... and some of them actually developed into something good. VB itself turned into a huge mess of dependencies and version conflicts, but it's the closest really working thing to a non-coder's language I've ever seen, not to mention a far more efficient use of one's time for prototyping or simple applets than any C-derived language and toolkit, as long as one is stuck in Windows to begin with.
If Lycoris (or Lindows, or someone I haven't heard of yet) were to include a coding tool as simple as VB or simpler, yet also capable of doing everything VB does plus automate all the cool things modern Linux distros include (mp3, web, video, for that matter simple things like pipes etc.) I bet they would own the Linux desktop market within a year, and quickly take a chunk out of Windows' marketshare soon after. Lindows could do it now by licensing some version of Delphi for Click-n-Run, but I wonder if even Delphi is too much for the kind of people VB appealed to in those early years (new programmers hate semicolons and type declarations! and if they have to deal with them, rather than learn something more "correct" they will simply give up... and there goes your critical mass.)
GNUstep is cool, but GNUstep is nowhere near the empowering and market-generating technology that VB was when it first appeared. It is essentially a slightly modernized clone of NeXTstep, which you may have noticed did not take over the world right around the time Win3.x and VB did.
To the parent of the parent: They finally did come out with some kind of VB clone for GEOS, I think NeoBASIC or something like that, but of course it was too little too late. I think you can actually still buy PC/GEOS from the makers of NewDeal Office.... but as their marketing gimmick was that it runs on a 286, they're looking kinda dated at this point.
The Entex Adventurevision was a portable video game system that used a spinning mirror and a few LED's to simulate a 150x40 display at 15 frames per second. It was cheap, fairly effective and fun.
However, it also suffered from headache-inducing flicker and its red LED's didn't help any, so it only ever had 4 games released for it and was quickly overshadowed by the twice as expensive but much cooler Vectrex. They're now rare enough that Adventurevision units have gone for upwards of a grand on ebay in recent years. You can relive its glories (including flicker) using xmess and the appropriate roms from adventurevision.com.
Nonetheless, I could easily see how modern MEMS implementations could replace CRT's, maybe even projection screens, if not your Gameboy or cellphone. I don't think it'll take over the way Cringely seems to (mass market retinal projection will be pie in the sky for a LONG TIME for many reasons) but the technique is bound to see some use.
No one pays unemployment insurance premiums except employers, and it's illegal for them to pass those premiums on to employees. If your employer is making you pay them, please give your local unemployment office a call, they'd love to hear from you :)
Further, the premiums don't end up in the "general tax revenue", as you appear to infer. It is administered as an insurance program and is funded by the premiums, period.
There are a lot of problems with the unemployment system (like the way our national unemployment figures are derived solely from the number of people currently receiving benefits, and the absurd length of time it can take before someone without a source of income starts getting those benefits) but you should educate yourself about how it actually works before slamming it.
It may not be a great solution for laid-off IT workers, but it beats flipping burgers (and usually pays more.)
This is inaccurate; my partner works in the New York State unemployment system, and executives who made $300,000 a year routinely call up and get unemployment benefits after being laid off.
The catch is, there is a maximum benefit, something like $380 a week in NYS. And if you were fired with cause, or quit, you are probably out of luck (or would have been when it happened last summer; things may be different now because of 9/11.) Not receiving paychecks while being expected to work usually gets treated as a layoff by the unemployment people, so Aimster victims like yourself should certainly have had a shot at collecting. If you were self-employed and didn't pay unemployment insurance on yourself, you're also screwed. If you were working on a 1099, things are more murky. In all these cases, however, the matter goes to a hearing before you're determined ineligible.
Otherwise, if you find you're ineligible for unemployment, it's because your former employer committed tax fraud and you may be able to get in line behind all their other creditors and sue them. It's fairly common for employers to lie to people and tell them they're ineligible for unemployment because they're a "special case" of some kind (e.g. "your salary is too high") but that's because their experience rating (i.e. cost) goes up every time someone files for unemployment benefits.
I notice from your journal entry that we lived in the same town during much of your ordeal, so if you called unemployment while upstate, you probably got the call center my partner works in. If you called in NYC, god only knows you probably got a workfare recipient or temp or something; they seem to be notorious for messing up cases. Sadly, since it's now been 8 months since you first became eligible, it may be more difficult. "I thought I was ineligible" isn't a line they care to hear.
There are many myths about how the unemployment system works (that you have to have worked for 18 months prior, that it's only good for six months and then you can never get it again, that the benefit rate is half of your pay no matter how high it was, etc) and the various state and federal websites do little to correct them.
Aimster did pretty much suck though, as a company and as a concept. A friend of mine wanted to get me involved in a joint venture with them early last year and I simply refused. Looks like my instincts were right.
The MJ2 and its various clones are actually based on the NES (8-bit Nintendo). Still nostalgic, and I'd buy it just to play Mappy on hotel room TV's, but really aimed at the generation after those who would buy this Atari thing ;)
OTOH, there is already a licensed Activision one which I see now and then at Toys-R-Us and Walmart, and that one is based on the 2600 (and includes Pitfall, among others.) In fact, it's from the same Jakks subsidiary, Toymax:
http://www.toymax.com/ToyCentral/EL/10in1.htm
As I understand it, it's not actually a complete clone of the 2600, just enough to get those specific games working (and apparently the Atari-licensed ones in the new version as well.)
The land argument is another straw man, as land is the original scarce resource. Expertise may be a scarce resource, and many here including myself are paid well for having and using it, but the fruits of our expertise are not scarce and can be copied infinitely without cost to anyone. The work undertaken is valuable, but any one copy of the result has no intrinsic value the way that a piece of land or car or television has value. You can work with that knowledge or you can put up walls of fantasy and try to pretend you're producing something physical and scarce.
I also don't see any backup for the assertion that simply because an industry is based on a flawed or obsolete business model (in this case, a 'product' which costs an awful lot to make the first one, but virtually nothing to make the next million) it must be allowed to exist via command economy constructs -- like protectionism in the form of imaginary property laws.
Again, free software producers are working to correct this situation, which would make concepts like 'piracy' irrelevant -- as they were only a decade or two ago.
I don't see why the parent hasn't been modded as a troll, since it depends upon the classic "imaginary property is real property" troll argument.
I don't know why I'm responding either, except to say that if you steal someone's TV, they have one less TV. If you copy someone's OfficeXP or MacOSX or Mandrake 8.2, you have created a second instance of that object at little or no cost to anyone. You have borne the minimal cost of production, not Microsoft nor Apple nor MandrakeSoft. Thus, scarcity never comes into play except by writ, as described below.
Finally, you started off with "Capitalism is good until it creates Monopolies". Yet imaginary property laws themselves are monopolies by writ, a textbook example of command economy style protectionism. You're taking something which, while it may cost money to design, costs essentially nothing for anyone to mass produce, and because limiting that would benefit some people who give you money as a lawmaker, people who would no longer have that money if their business model were subjected to laissez-faire capitalism, you declare it equivalent to physical property. Declaring it as such doesn't make it so, which is why most people in the world (just ask the BSA) understand 'piracy' to be a false concept and why the aim of the FSF and others is to break that system using its own rules. Thus, Linux and other GPL'ed software isn't 'piracy', but can be seen as an attack on the artificial constructs of imaginary property itself.
There really ought to be a FAQ.
....who *likes* the ads that appear on Slashdot?
Seriously, sure, the first time I see PTMF$20 or You Have One Message Waiting, junkbuster gets installed (or images.slashdot.org gets added to my hosts file as I've done with all the offensive ad servers.) But right now I'm seeing an ad for Rackspace, which is fine with me even though it's animated and I already have colo, and I really like the Thinkgeek ads for the most part. In fact, I click on them pretty regularly and sometimes even buy stuff from them. It's kind of synergistic too because Thinkgeek isn't the sort of site I'm going to regularly look at. Slashdot is pretty much their only way of reaching people like me.
I once tried to explain to a real live newspaper editor who was thinking about moving to the web that ads are part of the package if properly done, a valued part of the experience and not something to be skipped over. I *want* to see an ad for my local butcher in the local section of my paper. I *want* the Best Buy flyer in my Sunday comics. And just the same, I *want* to know when Thinkgeek has a new Photon Light or something equally shiny for me to abuse my credit card with.
I won't mind the "message unit" ads if they're of the same type as Slashdot has been running for years, and if they're still going to be GIF/JPG then no worries. I browse with Java and plugins disabled so I wouldn't see the other kind anyway. Subscribing isn't an option right now because I'm not about to give Paypal my credit card or checking account number, but if Slashdot keeps doing what they're doing, at least I won't be among the freeloaders.
There are two that I know of for Windows: Hamster (page is German), which is GPL'ed, and MyNews, by the creator of yEnc, which is shareware and includes a built-in newsreader. There are probably more but those seem like the two dominant players in this very small field :)
However, both of those are really oriented towards P2P more than what the poster was looking for. And I don't even want to think about what kind of smackdown would be waiting for a home broadband user running an open news server.
That's actually one of the classic myths of activism. What you refer to as 'civil disobedience' is really only the final stage of civil disobedience. It becomes viable when the opposing cause has been weakened enough that people marching in the streets carrying posters marked "Free sconeu!" will be enough to tilt the balance of public opinion against the oppressive behavior. Even then the volunteer has to be carefully selected, to maximize popular sympathy and minimize the opponent's ability to demonize him/her. Preferably it should be the basis for a test case.
The vast majority of civil disobedience takes place quietly prior to that point, and is arguably much more important in effecting change.
To get to that final stage, a critical mass of people must partake in the illegal activity *without* being punished, so that conventional wisdom becomes that everyone does it and it's a reasonable thing to expect to be able to do. i.e., the common use of Napster hurt the credibility of copyright's proponents much more than Adobe having Skylarov arrested, despite the publicity. The cannabis decriminalization and gay equality movements have been going that way for 30 years and have not gotten to that stage yet despite their progress (do you think anyone WANTED to go to jail for smoking a joint or being in a gay bar?) There are striking parallels between those movements and the movement on the net to restore the public ownership of culture.
Finally, the one way in which the anti-imaginary-property movement differs from other social movements is that the 'oppressor' isn't so much the government, but rich corporations and their trusts -- er, industry associations. They tend to do things without mug shots and handcuffs. Until the NET Act and DMCA came along there was zero chance that the IDSA was going to send someone to jail for distributing King's Quest III, and "Free sconeu!" looks a lot better on a placard than "Pay sconeu's Legal Bills!"
No, it's not a 100% replacement for Visio, but in some ways it's more powerful. Its drawing tools are about on a par with Visio 2000, it just lacks stencils and connectors. Yes, that is Visio's hook, but in practice I'd say 75% of the Visio diagrams I've seen real office people create consist of squares with text in them, lines and arrows. And it's included in both StarOffice and OpenOffice. You can embed a StarDraw document in StarWriter probably easier than a Visio document in Word.
;) )
Now if it would just import Visio diagrams.... but it does import WMF's and EPS's, which have been good enough for me so far.
The real MSOffice killer app for my clients in the past, which is still not really available under Linux, is (sadly) Access. Yes, there's Katabase and the commercial version of StarOffice has always included Adabas, but neither of them is still quite up to snuff for creating quick ad-hoc applications without hiring someone (until you realize how unstable Access is for your now huge and mission critical app, at which point you call me!
Overall, I think the move will reduce confusion and help both StarOffice and OpenOffice in the long run.
I always wondered how reporters were able to canvass for hackers in this kind of story; it's hard to imagine them hanging out on IRC channels asking for interviews without getting /kicked pretty fast.
/. post. It went to one of my spam-catcher addresses so I didn't see it until much later. I was surprised, though, as the story seemed pretty balanced considering it appeared in an AOLTW property. And it probably reads better with a guy like "Necratog" editing out commercials in vdub rather than some schmuck from Albany, New York ;)
But I got an email from the author of this Time article a few weeks back after I mentioned getting all of B5:Crusade on two CD's in a
From: anita_hamilton@[no, I'm not that cruel]
To: webmaster@kudla.org
Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 23:40:35 -0500
Subject: TIME Magazine Interview request
Hi Rob,
I noticed that you posted a message on Slashdot about how you were able
to save Babylon 5 shows, convert them to digital, edit out the
commericals, and burn them onto CDs. Well, it turns out that I too am
writing a story about this topic and wondered if you could tell me more
about how you did it and how easy it was.
Would you be interested in talking on the phone for a few minutes about
it? If so, I wondered if we could talk sometime Friday or Saturday. It
should take less than 15 minutes total.
If you are interested, please let me know when is a god time for me to
give you a call.
Thanks for considering this,
Anita Hamilton
Staff Writer
TIME Magazine
212/[xxx-xxxx]
I don't see how this differs practically from offering it under the LGPL while offering commercial terms as an alternative. Both provide a free version licensed under "viral terms", and both would require copyright assignation from all contributors.
The only arguably positive difference I can see would be the ability to include code covered by other "viral licenses" besides the [L]GPL, and the moment you do that, your whole codebase is QPL or SISSL or whatever and you're stuck with that license exclusively. It just postpones the decision of which "viral license" to use. Six of one....
...they kind of combine the worst of both worlds.
Now, I love electronic technical documentation. I am the only geek I know who doesn't collect O'Reilly and other technical reference books except for the 5 or 6 I couldn't resist. Most of my friends have bought personal laser printers and have shelves full of 3-ring binders of printed-out man pages and other unfathomable wastes of pulp and toner. I can't stand having to get up out of my chair, walk over to the bookshelf, find the textbook I need, find the index in the back of it, then find the page with the information I need -- IF it's indexed at all. I read man pages and README's and if all else fails, Google works 9 out of 10 times.
But e-books, even technical ones, aren't generally plain text. In the best case they're HTML, like the O'Reilly Perl CD, and searching a ton of HTML files is a lot tougher than typing "/" in less. More often they're PDF's, which require me to either install Adobe's awful reader software (in which searching may or may not be useful) or forego any worthwhile search capabilities by using gv or xpdf. I end up trying pdf2txt or something similar with fugly results, or using Google's spotty PDF to HTML translation.
And that's nothing compared to fiction. I got Goblet of Fire off of some ebook newsgroup the same day it was released. It was a PDF, and I never read it even though I'm dying to after reading the first three books in hardcopy. (I'm now stubbornly waiting for the trade paperback so it'll match my other 3 HP books.) There's something about fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction, that needs soft lighting and a place to curl up and enjoy it. There's just something wrong with hitting "page down" as opposed to physically turning a page. And underneath it all, reading something onscreen just makes me feel like I'm wasting time and I'd better get back to work, even when I'm on vacation.
These are just my biases, of course. In a decade they might seem as quaint as someone who misses radio drama and couldn't understand all the fuss over TV. But to get there, the ebook publishers need to get some early adopters who aren't just pirates with OCR and palmpilots. Early adopters are usually people like me, and I am not interested. I'm sure the time will come when paper will seem wasteful and outmoded, but I don't know how they'll escape that initial catch-22.