I love all the reviews mentioning it only lasted one season. Technically that's true, but it was cancelled for one reason - the price tag of 1 million per episode. Today that's a joke - each primary _character_ in Friends makes that, but back then it was an unheard of amount.
Fans clamored to get it back after it was dumped, and were given BSG 1980, based on Earth where the executives could get away with much cheaper cost/episode. Most of the original cast was gone, and the episodes reeked of being cheaply made and for the most part poorly written.
Personally, I don't mind a rethinking, since, for instance, I can't imagine the original Star Trek working with today's audiences, but I'm a little wary about new cylons, which seem more like dopplegangers than machines. I still think of BSG as a man-vs-machine conflict (even though, if I recall this correctly, the Cylons are some kind of proteus mass that lives in the robot body). Not to say that it won't work - Terminator did the doppleganger robot thing believably. T2 and T3, on the other hand, were very non-realistic with their liquid metal robots (I can see being damaged and self repairing, but being blown to bits and having all the pieces flow back together? Give me a break). I don't really consider those movies sci-fi - they're fantasy in a sci-fi setting.
I still don't picture Starbuck as a woman - it doens't seem like a female name and the character was so well defined. Boomer I can picture more (it's got that fighter-pilot aura) and the character didn't stand out as much as Starbuck or Apollo. Speaking of, if they'd made Apollo a girl, I'd have to whack them upside the head (there are much better and appropriate female goddess names, like Artemis, Athena [though that was used in the orig], and Kalypso). Thankfully, they didn't.
I was completely shocked that the poster spelled 'Cthulhu' correctly in the same breath as 'level' and 'assassin' that I almost posted without checking to see if there was any backing behind it (aside from the ancient Deities and Demigods)
Speaking of assassins - from m-w (merriam webster) Etymology: Medieval Latin assassinus, from Arabic hashshAshIn, plural of hashshAsh one who smokes or chews hashish, from hashIsh hashish
I was going to tell him he was spending too much time role-playing his character:)
Ironically, I was about to say something about back in the 80s crackers removed software protection and hackers broke into networks.
For that matter, cracked software was called cracks, not warez, and network hacking usually involved malicious intent and was done by modem. Heck, I even remember war-dialing hundreds of numbers just to find BBS connections to hack... ah, the joys of being a 14 year old hacker - er, cracker - whatever. Somewhere in the 90s, the 'white hat' hackers (coders/do-good network hackers) noticed this and the negative connotations the word 'hacker' and started to call the bad hackers crackers - right about the time cracks became warez.
Yeah - we Minnesotans like to vote for the rich, no matter what party they support.
In case you don't know, Mark Dayton is one of the heirs to the Dayton's department store fortune, which is now Marshall Fields (formerly Daytons - name changed to the better known via merger) and Target.
You can't blame me for either one - I voted for Cthulhu.
The day the government starts an e-mail tax is the day I write a new e-mail program that doesn't use smtp (or, God forbid, Exchange). That or tunnel it over ssh:)
The not-as-easy-to-use-as-hyped editor was one of the big disappointments after discovering the original campaign really wasn't very good (I'll stray a notch above sucked, because I've played worse).
The stick figure jerky animations and flat gameplay are my biggest gripes, though, closely followed by the "tiny" world feel. I'm not much of a fan of what's known in the development world as "areas" (maps that contain a segment of the world, but do not interact with other maps in the world -- e.g. monsters do not move between them) unless they're much larger than the ones in NWN or have a non-contiguous break (like a map view). If you think of the way games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, etc. do it - provide a large map and shrink to area when encounters are near, that's my preference. It gives a much bigger world feel, even though in some cases the world is smaller, and it also makes me much less bored walking across 25 map areas I've already cleared out because I forgot to do something trivial in the last town - random encounters would at least break the tedium...
I don't know about that - some books I've read I've thought would be simple to translate to a movie... then the scriptwriters change the whole thing so even if you read the book, you are surprised at the end. The Bone Collector is a prime example.
I've also thought the Red Dragon series (Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal) would translate well to film, and for the most part, that series has. Again, certain liberties were taken by scriptwriters to surprise the audience. Hannibal itself had to be toned down just to avoid an NC17 or worse rating... if you've read the book, you know why - the graphic mutilations, pigs trained to eat humans - it's pretty extreme. Not the most violent I've ever read, but pretty darn close.
I'm actually kind of surprised by this, since the OEM version is only supposed to lack manuals and support, but since I worked tech support once upon a time for a major PC builder (I can't say whom due to NDA), I know we were required to send actual Windows diskettes or CDs if the customer asked for them and paid a media fee (you own the software, the expense is the "replacement" diskettes or CDs themselves and a shipping fee). I believe this is required by either law or Microsoft's contract.
If I had this issue, I would call my PC manufacturer's tech support and ask them for a CD with the missing Windows pieces, or for them to identify a download site where I can get them, and if that fails, contact Microsoft and complain about not getting a full version of Windows with a new computer... and if that failed, sue Microsoft for falsely providing different versions of the software and not informing the consumer or the PC maker for not providing a full version of Windows.
I don't know the exact chemistry of this anymore (dammit - I actually was geek enough to know this, once...), but skipping the chemistry - CDs you buy in the store are built with a single material layer that is etched with the music and sandwiched into a plastic sleeve. A CD-R has two material layers (and sometimes more, but that's more common when you get into DVD-Rs) between the plastic sleeve and the first layer gets burned away in the etching process. In cheap CD-Rs, the second layer loses its cohesiveness with the first layer and separates resulting in lost data.
CD-RWs, at least in the early going when I read about them had an "organic layer" that reacted to certain laser frequencies to either expand or contract and form 1s and 0s. Personally, I gave up on CD-RWs after I had an entire 6 disc package of Memorex CD-RWs fail (3 unused) about 2 years after purchase, and they were kept in a near ideal environment temperature and humidity-wise.
Personally, I use a 120GB drive on my BSD box for archiving and every year or (None of my boxes are business machines, and I'm too lazy for doing it more often than that) so back the entire thing up on CD-Rs, writing in the inner ring, with no adhesive label.
Being ignorant of British history after the 1400s, I know next to nothing about this plot but I have made black powder (thanks to the BBS version of the Anarchist Cookbook - and that's Bulletin Board System for those of you who don't predate the Internet) and even the old stuff is pretty explosive unless it's damp, in which case it tends to fizzle rather than explode. It's possible the powder had gotten damp, in which case it wouldn't be much use in weapons, but I suspect in a barrel it would still explode, eventually, but probably not as forcefully.
I agree with the original poster, though - TNT is much more powerful than black powder, and, although I've never made TNT, I have seen cannister bombs that used gunpowder and black powder set off (not made by me, mind you - I was past that phase) and the gunpowder one was not only louder, but the cannister fragments were slag at the end, where the black powder fragments were merely red hot. I believe modern gunpowder is a closer relative to TNT than it is to Black Powder, but my chemistry on the issue isn't all that up-to-date, so I could be wrong.
Even major artists make the majority of their money touring, which is why the Rolling Stones, Kiss, Simon and Garfunkel, etc. go on tour and don't even bother to release a new album. Now go out and buy some concert tickets so us artists can afford a sweet crib:)
I don't know about you, but I found Amaya a mess from a usability perspective. It took me several hours to generate a serviceable web page, where I did a much better version in Mozilla composer in about 20 minutes. As far as I'm concerned, Amaya is only useful for testing XHTML conformance at the moment. Most web pages don't need to be XHTML compliant, so it probably isn't worth the bother at the moment.
I've never used Quanta, but it looks similar to both Mozilla and Frontpage. Style sheet editor looks nice from screenshots.
SodiPodi would be an interesting thing to add (it's a graphics editing/alignment tool), on the other hand, it's probably better as a separate tool (to avoid bloat). I still use Photoshop 4 for most of my graphics editing (Student version, graduated before 5 came out and couldn't afford the upgrade to pro... not that I need it).
At least you can read the HTML code Composer generates. Frontpage, to Microsoft's credit, generates somewhat readable/servicable HTML code, as long as you know CSS (and VB/VBS if you have the misfortune of some Microsoft junkie shoving it in... like I do sometimes).
Word, on the other hand, generates the worst HTML I have ever seen. Some of the code I've generated with it (because of a corporate mandate, mind you) had both a style sheet and font assigned to every character. My attempt to edit it to fix a typo with vi failed utterly because I couldn't find the word amidst all the garbage. This file was ~512k and basically 3 pages of text. I copied the text and recreated it in Mozilla composer - and got a whopping 25k file.
If a developer takes and uses APSL code in some other project, section 2.2 a, b, and c need to be followed for that section of code, but as long as those are followed I don't see why the code couldn't be distributed with BSD. I really don't see this as much of a big deal, though, unless you want a certain patch for a certain program - if it's an entire app, well, my copy of Linux came with Mozilla and Apache, both which have separate, non BSD, open source licenses (I have FreeBSD, as well, but built it from scratch, so no CD).
If you want a specific patch, ask the original developer to also submit it to BSD - as far as I can tell, any code submitted is still owned by the developer (but you give Apple a free, non-exclusive, everlasting license to use it, or something like that). I guess if the original developer works for Apple you won't get any help, but most other Open Source developers are happy to submit to other Open Source projects.
I have to agree with you - my mom installed Weatherbug, which bundled Gator, and was fooled by the marketspeak where Gator claimed to be a tool to enhance her browsing experience. I later cleaned her system of Adware and Spyware and there were several dozen pieces of spyware and adware on the machine that were not Gator (she had removed Gator on her own). This was the only program she claims to have installed from the internet, so there is no other place these programs could have come from.
Another user I deloused had three-THOUSAND files and registry entries with adware and spyware according to Ad-aware. He was an avid Kazaa and other stuff user (ok, in a nutshell, pR0n), and Gator wasn't the only culprit. After I booted in safe mode, ran a virus checker and removed several viruses his 2 year old unupdated virus checker didn't catch, I reinstalled the OS (98SE) to replace several damaged OS files and rebooted. I started MS-update and was bombarded with probably a dozen pop-ups and pop-unders. I then cleaned up the crap and spent several hours fixing registry entries. The machine actually boots in under 5 minutes again:)
Or, in cases like mine, where about 75% of First Person Shooters make me violently ill but a few don't. I don't hate the genre, I just don't trust that I can play the game without a demo. My best guess is bobbing is only part of the problem (I usually turn it off if I can), turn/look speed and too-wide camera angle are the other parts. The 3rd person game Darkened Skye makes me ill with its rapid scrolling and too-wide camera angle, for instance (it's the only 3rd person game I can't play that I know of).
for instance Halo - good. Played demo without problems. Duke Nukem 3D - really bad - yacked. Doom/Doom 2 - bad, but not quite Nukem bad Half Life - not perfect, OK if 30 minutes or less. Deus Ex - bad, got ill 10 minutes into demo. Unreal Tourney - not too bad, even at fairly low res (I had the minimum requirement machine when this came out). Unreal - didn't make it too far without feeling sick and giving up. Wolfenstein 3D/Ultima Underworld/Pathways Into Darkness - pre-true 3D - no problems Quake - Seemed OK, but didn't play anything except demo (my computer died a week before release and wasn't replaced until after Quake 2)
I don't see Linux Zealots sneaking into Microsoft based offices late at night, blowing up the Exchange server and then installing Linux and Linux apps on every PC in a company yet, which would eqates better to terrorism than some guy/gal preaching his or her beliefs loudly and/or beligerently. Heck, if the person gets too roudy, call the cops - even verbal assault (especially with abusive language) can get you arrested these days.
I love this part: "Behaving badly -- by attacking, lying or bullying -- is only bad if someone on the other side does it. "
A geek bully... LOL... what's he gonna do - point his laser pointer in your eye? If you're thinking firearms Columbine style, think again - those guys were all Doom playing Microsoft users. If you can name a Linux user who's killed for his beliefs, you're a better person than I am, and I read Slashdot daily, so I should know about it. Heck, my grandma can beat me up and she's, like, 89 years old. Geek bully...
Wow - and I thought it sucked when my little brother sleep-walked into my bedroom and pissed into my clothes drawer all over my favorite clothes. Fortunately, the computer room was downstairs at the time:)
Just in case you think he did that on purpose, you should know he had some other fun sleep-walking episodes as a kid... like when he locked himself out of the house at 3AM and woke up in his pajamas in the middle of the back yard.
This so reminds me of working a computer lab in college - this foreign student (Chinese, I think) who was pretty good with computers but not very familiar with Word had added 40 pages to a paper without saving and chose Revert rather than Save. The message was simply something like "Would you like to Revert the Document?" with no mention of changes being lost. She got confused and thought it was a save message... poof, 3 hours of typing gone in an instant. Our machine didn't save incrementally intentionally to prevent users from writing to the hard disk (which was ineffective, anyhow), so she had to re-write the entire thing. I was happy to see Versioning in Office 2000 rather than Revert...
Oddly enough, this happened to me yesterday and, despite using the back button, my profound wisdom had disappeared into the void sucking any such future wisdom with it.
It's probably punishment for using IE... I'm starting up Mozilla right now. Promise:)
As I read it, this sounds exactly like what Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, and PHP are designed to do.
Cookies are required, at least for ASP and JSP, as this is used for authentication and identification. I don't know about PHP, as I've never tried to turn off cookies and use it.
The "customization options" are basically a request. In their example, if you only want to see weather, sports, and news, you would check those three boxes on an HTML form page and click submit. The returned web page only retrieves those three areas and formats the web page with this specific information. The embedded script would probably retrieve these web page fragments from a database.
The return document is HTML (as expected for PHP, ASP, or JSP).
The described preferences are essentially a client side persistent cookie, so you don't have to fill out the form again. Nothing new here, but this is a method patent, not a specific item patent (e.g. not a patent on cookies themselves, but a patent on a method that uses cookies).
Oddly enough, claim 6 appears to restrict the information to "one or more of news, sports, financial matters, entertainment, science and technology, life, and weather." Depending on interpretation, this can be read as either extremely broad or extremely specific... Are my choices on the customization screen those options, or are they anything and everything related to those options (e.g. does it just cover a weather checkbox, or is Tulsa weather also covered?). I'm sure Microsoft meant the latter, but this appears debatable to me:)
I was also going to mention Premiere and Word as being pretty poor choices for speed tests, but in reality, Word is what most people use and are familiar with, even on Mac.
Premiere I completely agree with you about - I seriously wonder about the Quicktime numbers... I would suspect they're using Apple's native Quicktime libraries and there's something wrong here - the difference between single and dual processors is pretty small, and it shouldn't be, as encoding/decoding is exactly the type of thing that I would expect to be distributed between the processors.
Quake 3 - I disagree with you here - these are mostly OpenGL rendering tests, which _is_ an important test for non-game applications, as well - for example Pixar movies. The speed hit here was fairly insignificant when compared to the fastest system with the same graphics memory, which could be from a whole host of factors - I'd have to see saturation numbers, AGP speeds, etc. to know if this is a processor, bus, cache, or other bottleneck. I suspect GPU bus saturation - compare the huge drop from 1024 to 1600 on the dual processor and then the tiny drop for the single processor. Also note that the PC tests are done with an "identically configured ATI Radeon 9800." Looking at Apple's store, the top of the line machine comes with a Radeon 9600 and the next model down a GeForce 5700 FX Ultra, so it's really not a comparable test.
Photoshop - another app I trust is optimized pretty well, because Apple actively helps Adobe with optimization of it. I suspect much of the 150MB file speed difference has to do with disk drive speed and ATA or SCSI bus speed, but there's no mention of whether the file is being paged into drive or not... did you notice the RAID drives were outperformed by the non-RAID Opteron that got the best scores? Makes me suspect that the file is entirely in memory, but that still doesn't make sense - that machine should have been smoked...
I haven't bought a mac since a G3 several years ago, but at that time, all professional macs were formatted in non-RAID, but the hardware was RAID capable. I added 2 disks and formatted the machine with RAID striping using Apple's own Partition tool, so I don't see why PC World can't do the same. The 9800 is probably available for mac 3rd party, as well, so no reason they couldn't test the same GPU, as well.
I can't say I disagree with their conclusion, the Athlon 64s are a better value hardware and cost-wise (IMO), but that's also why I own 3 Athlon based PCs (and have several part boxes that could be used to build a couple more). Compared to Intel, though, I wouldn't say that, and I certainly find OS X a much better value than Windows (both cost and feature-wise). If it weren't for games and my company's Windows-only commercial VPN software, I probably wouldn't boot my PC into Windows and leave it in Linux:)
I'm not sure how much benefit Morrowind has in of itself, but Fallout was a trove of cultural information... then again, it was an M rated game, so the kids shouldn't be playing it (tho there's nothing explicit...)
Games like Medieval Total War make excellent history lessons. I probably learned more about the 1300-1400s playing that game than I did in a history class where several weeks were devoted to that era... kinda scary (the classes were also very Euro-centric).
Slashdot Mirror
I love all the reviews mentioning it only lasted one season. Technically that's true, but it was cancelled for one reason - the price tag of 1 million per episode. Today that's a joke - each primary _character_ in Friends makes that, but back then it was an unheard of amount.
Fans clamored to get it back after it was dumped, and were given BSG 1980, based on Earth where the executives could get away with much cheaper cost/episode. Most of the original cast was gone, and the episodes reeked of being cheaply made and for the most part poorly written.
Personally, I don't mind a rethinking, since, for instance, I can't imagine the original Star Trek working with today's audiences, but I'm a little wary about new cylons, which seem more like dopplegangers than machines. I still think of BSG as a man-vs-machine conflict (even though, if I recall this correctly, the Cylons are some kind of proteus mass that lives in the robot body). Not to say that it won't work - Terminator did the doppleganger robot thing believably. T2 and T3, on the other hand, were very non-realistic with their liquid metal robots (I can see being damaged and self repairing, but being blown to bits and having all the pieces flow back together? Give me a break). I don't really consider those movies sci-fi - they're fantasy in a sci-fi setting.
I still don't picture Starbuck as a woman - it doens't seem like a female name and the character was so well defined. Boomer I can picture more (it's got that fighter-pilot aura) and the character didn't stand out as much as Starbuck or Apollo. Speaking of, if they'd made Apollo a girl, I'd have to whack them upside the head (there are much better and appropriate female goddess names, like Artemis, Athena [though that was used in the orig], and Kalypso). Thankfully, they didn't.
They made Cthulhu... with... _levels_?!?
:)
I was completely shocked that the poster spelled 'Cthulhu' correctly in the same breath as 'level' and 'assassin' that I almost posted without checking to see if there was any backing behind it (aside from the ancient Deities and Demigods)
Speaking of assassins - from m-w (merriam webster)
Etymology: Medieval Latin assassinus, from Arabic hashshAshIn, plural of hashshAsh one who smokes or chews hashish, from hashIsh hashish
I was going to tell him he was spending too much time role-playing his character
Ironically, I was about to say something about back in the 80s crackers removed software protection and hackers broke into networks.
For that matter, cracked software was called cracks, not warez, and network hacking usually involved malicious intent and was done by modem. Heck, I even remember war-dialing hundreds of numbers just to find BBS connections to hack... ah, the joys of being a 14 year old hacker - er, cracker - whatever. Somewhere in the 90s, the 'white hat' hackers (coders/do-good network hackers) noticed this and the negative connotations the word 'hacker' and started to call the bad hackers crackers - right about the time cracks became warez.
Yeah - we Minnesotans like to vote for the rich, no matter what party they support.
:)
In case you don't know, Mark Dayton is one of the heirs to the Dayton's department store fortune, which is now Marshall Fields (formerly Daytons - name changed to the better known via merger) and Target.
You can't blame me for either one - I voted for Cthulhu.
The day the government starts an e-mail tax is the day I write a new e-mail program that doesn't use smtp (or, God forbid, Exchange). That or tunnel it over ssh
The not-as-easy-to-use-as-hyped editor was one of the big disappointments after discovering the original campaign really wasn't very good (I'll stray a notch above sucked, because I've played worse).
The stick figure jerky animations and flat gameplay are my biggest gripes, though, closely followed by the "tiny" world feel. I'm not much of a fan of what's known in the development world as "areas" (maps that contain a segment of the world, but do not interact with other maps in the world -- e.g. monsters do not move between them) unless they're much larger than the ones in NWN or have a non-contiguous break (like a map view). If you think of the way games like Fallout, Baldur's Gate, etc. do it - provide a large map and shrink to area when encounters are near, that's my preference. It gives a much bigger world feel, even though in some cases the world is smaller, and it also makes me much less bored walking across 25 map areas I've already cleared out because I forgot to do something trivial in the last town - random encounters would at least break the tedium...
I don't know about that - some books I've read I've thought would be simple to translate to a movie... then the scriptwriters change the whole thing so even if you read the book, you are surprised at the end. The Bone Collector is a prime example.
I've also thought the Red Dragon series (Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal) would translate well to film, and for the most part, that series has. Again, certain liberties were taken by scriptwriters to surprise the audience. Hannibal itself had to be toned down just to avoid an NC17 or worse rating... if you've read the book, you know why - the graphic mutilations, pigs trained to eat humans - it's pretty extreme. Not the most violent I've ever read, but pretty darn close.
I'm actually kind of surprised by this, since the OEM version is only supposed to lack manuals and support, but since I worked tech support once upon a time for a major PC builder (I can't say whom due to NDA), I know we were required to send actual Windows diskettes or CDs if the customer asked for them and paid a media fee (you own the software, the expense is the "replacement" diskettes or CDs themselves and a shipping fee). I believe this is required by either law or Microsoft's contract.
If I had this issue, I would call my PC manufacturer's tech support and ask them for a CD with the missing Windows pieces, or for them to identify a download site where I can get them, and if that fails, contact Microsoft and complain about not getting a full version of Windows with a new computer... and if that failed, sue Microsoft for falsely providing different versions of the software and not informing the consumer or the PC maker for not providing a full version of Windows.
I don't know the exact chemistry of this anymore (dammit - I actually was geek enough to know this, once...), but skipping the chemistry - CDs you buy in the store are built with a single material layer that is etched with the music and sandwiched into a plastic sleeve. A CD-R has two material layers (and sometimes more, but that's more common when you get into DVD-Rs) between the plastic sleeve and the first layer gets burned away in the etching process. In cheap CD-Rs, the second layer loses its cohesiveness with the first layer and separates resulting in lost data.
CD-RWs, at least in the early going when I read about them had an "organic layer" that reacted to certain laser frequencies to either expand or contract and form 1s and 0s. Personally, I gave up on CD-RWs after I had an entire 6 disc package of Memorex CD-RWs fail (3 unused) about 2 years after purchase, and they were kept in a near ideal environment temperature and humidity-wise.
Personally, I use a 120GB drive on my BSD box for archiving and every year or (None of my boxes are business machines, and I'm too lazy for doing it more often than that) so back the entire thing up on CD-Rs, writing in the inner ring, with no adhesive label.
Being ignorant of British history after the 1400s, I know next to nothing about this plot but I have made black powder (thanks to the BBS version of the Anarchist Cookbook - and that's Bulletin Board System for those of you who don't predate the Internet) and even the old stuff is pretty explosive unless it's damp, in which case it tends to fizzle rather than explode. It's possible the powder had gotten damp, in which case it wouldn't be much use in weapons, but I suspect in a barrel it would still explode, eventually, but probably not as forcefully.
I agree with the original poster, though - TNT is much more powerful than black powder, and, although I've never made TNT, I have seen cannister bombs that used gunpowder and black powder set off (not made by me, mind you - I was past that phase) and the gunpowder one was not only louder, but the cannister fragments were slag at the end, where the black powder fragments were merely red hot. I believe modern gunpowder is a closer relative to TNT than it is to Black Powder, but my chemistry on the issue isn't all that up-to-date, so I could be wrong.
dead on.
:)
Even major artists make the majority of their money touring, which is why the Rolling Stones, Kiss, Simon and Garfunkel, etc. go on tour and don't even bother to release a new album. Now go out and buy some concert tickets so us artists can afford a sweet crib
I don't know about you, but I found Amaya a mess from a usability perspective. It took me several hours to generate a serviceable web page, where I did a much better version in Mozilla composer in about 20 minutes. As far as I'm concerned, Amaya is only useful for testing XHTML conformance at the moment. Most web pages don't need to be XHTML compliant, so it probably isn't worth the bother at the moment.
I've never used Quanta, but it looks similar to both Mozilla and Frontpage. Style sheet editor looks nice from screenshots.
SodiPodi would be an interesting thing to add (it's a graphics editing/alignment tool), on the other hand, it's probably better as a separate tool (to avoid bloat). I still use Photoshop 4 for most of my graphics editing (Student version, graduated before 5 came out and couldn't afford the upgrade to pro... not that I need it).
At least you can read the HTML code Composer generates. Frontpage, to Microsoft's credit, generates somewhat readable/servicable HTML code, as long as you know CSS (and VB/VBS if you have the misfortune of some Microsoft junkie shoving it in... like I do sometimes).
Word, on the other hand, generates the worst HTML I have ever seen. Some of the code I've generated with it (because of a corporate mandate, mind you) had both a style sheet and font assigned to every character. My attempt to edit it to fix a typo with vi failed utterly because I couldn't find the word amidst all the garbage. This file was ~512k and basically 3 pages of text. I copied the text and recreated it in Mozilla composer - and got a whopping 25k file.
> > 2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
:)
> Then your grandma is dumb.
Ouch scathing assault on Grandma's everywhere.
I'll break it to Grandma that she's an idiot tomorrow... or whenever the snail mail letter gets there - she can't do Windows or Mac, either
Maybe, but Kame isn't, and Apple has helped fix bugs with that project. Kame is how Apple does IPv6.
Not really -
Here's the APSL
If a developer takes and uses APSL code in some other project, section 2.2 a, b, and c need to be followed for that section of code, but as long as those are followed I don't see why the code couldn't be distributed with BSD. I really don't see this as much of a big deal, though, unless you want a certain patch for a certain program - if it's an entire app, well, my copy of Linux came with Mozilla and Apache, both which have separate, non BSD, open source licenses (I have FreeBSD, as well, but built it from scratch, so no CD).
If you want a specific patch, ask the original developer to also submit it to BSD - as far as I can tell, any code submitted is still owned by the developer (but you give Apple a free, non-exclusive, everlasting license to use it, or something like that). I guess if the original developer works for Apple you won't get any help, but most other Open Source developers are happy to submit to other Open Source projects.
I have to agree with you - my mom installed Weatherbug, which bundled Gator, and was fooled by the marketspeak where Gator claimed to be a tool to enhance her browsing experience. I later cleaned her system of Adware and Spyware and there were several dozen pieces of spyware and adware on the machine that were not Gator (she had removed Gator on her own). This was the only program she claims to have installed from the internet, so there is no other place these programs could have come from.
:)
Another user I deloused had three-THOUSAND files and registry entries with adware and spyware according to Ad-aware. He was an avid Kazaa and other stuff user (ok, in a nutshell, pR0n), and Gator wasn't the only culprit. After I booted in safe mode, ran a virus checker and removed several viruses his 2 year old unupdated virus checker didn't catch, I reinstalled the OS (98SE) to replace several damaged OS files and rebooted. I started MS-update and was bombarded with probably a dozen pop-ups and pop-unders. I then cleaned up the crap and spent several hours fixing registry entries. The machine actually boots in under 5 minutes again
Or, in cases like mine, where about 75% of First Person Shooters make me violently ill but a few don't. I don't hate the genre, I just don't trust that I can play the game without a demo. My best guess is bobbing is only part of the problem (I usually turn it off if I can), turn/look speed and too-wide camera angle are the other parts. The 3rd person game Darkened Skye makes me ill with its rapid scrolling and too-wide camera angle, for instance (it's the only 3rd person game I can't play that I know of).
for instance
Halo - good. Played demo without problems.
Duke Nukem 3D - really bad - yacked.
Doom/Doom 2 - bad, but not quite Nukem bad
Half Life - not perfect, OK if 30 minutes or less.
Deus Ex - bad, got ill 10 minutes into demo.
Unreal Tourney - not too bad, even at fairly low res (I had the minimum requirement machine when this came out).
Unreal - didn't make it too far without feeling sick and giving up.
Wolfenstein 3D/Ultima Underworld/Pathways Into Darkness - pre-true 3D - no problems
Quake - Seemed OK, but didn't play anything except demo (my computer died a week before release and wasn't replaced until after Quake 2)
I don't see Linux Zealots sneaking into Microsoft based offices late at night, blowing up the Exchange server and then installing Linux and Linux apps on every PC in a company yet, which would eqates better to terrorism than some guy/gal preaching his or her beliefs loudly and/or beligerently. Heck, if the person gets too roudy, call the cops - even verbal assault (especially with abusive language) can get you arrested these days.
I love this part:
"Behaving badly -- by attacking, lying or bullying -- is only bad if someone on the other side does it. "
A geek bully... LOL... what's he gonna do - point his laser pointer in your eye? If you're thinking firearms Columbine style, think again - those guys were all Doom playing Microsoft users. If you can name a Linux user who's killed for his beliefs, you're a better person than I am, and I read Slashdot daily, so I should know about it. Heck, my grandma can beat me up and she's, like, 89 years old. Geek bully...
Wow - and I thought it sucked when my little brother sleep-walked into my bedroom and pissed into my clothes drawer all over my favorite clothes. Fortunately, the computer room was downstairs at the time :)
Just in case you think he did that on purpose, you should know he had some other fun sleep-walking episodes as a kid... like when he locked himself out of the house at 3AM and woke up in his pajamas in the middle of the back yard.
This so reminds me of working a computer lab in college - this foreign student (Chinese, I think) who was pretty good with computers but not very familiar with Word had added 40 pages to a paper without saving and chose Revert rather than Save. The message was simply something like "Would you like to Revert the Document?" with no mention of changes being lost. She got confused and thought it was a save message... poof, 3 hours of typing gone in an instant. Our machine didn't save incrementally intentionally to prevent users from writing to the hard disk (which was ineffective, anyhow), so she had to re-write the entire thing. I was happy to see Versioning in Office 2000 rather than Revert...
Oddly enough, this happened to me yesterday and, despite using the back button, my profound wisdom had disappeared into the void sucking any such future wisdom with it.
:)
It's probably punishment for using IE... I'm starting up Mozilla right now. Promise
As I read it, this sounds exactly like what Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, and PHP are designed to do.
:)
Cookies are required, at least for ASP and JSP, as this is used for authentication and identification. I don't know about PHP, as I've never tried to turn off cookies and use it.
The "customization options" are basically a request. In their example, if you only want to see weather, sports, and news, you would check those three boxes on an HTML form page and click submit. The returned web page only retrieves those three areas and formats the web page with this specific information. The embedded script would probably retrieve these web page fragments from a database.
The return document is HTML (as expected for PHP, ASP, or JSP).
The described preferences are essentially a client side persistent cookie, so you don't have to fill out the form again. Nothing new here, but this is a method patent, not a specific item patent (e.g. not a patent on cookies themselves, but a patent on a method that uses cookies).
Oddly enough, claim 6 appears to restrict the information to "one or more of news, sports, financial matters, entertainment, science and technology, life, and weather." Depending on interpretation, this can be read as either extremely broad or extremely specific... Are my choices on the customization screen those options, or are they anything and everything related to those options (e.g. does it just cover a weather checkbox, or is Tulsa weather also covered?). I'm sure Microsoft meant the latter, but this appears debatable to me
I was also going to mention Premiere and Word as being pretty poor choices for speed tests, but in reality, Word is what most people use and are familiar with, even on Mac.
:)
Premiere I completely agree with you about - I seriously wonder about the Quicktime numbers... I would suspect they're using Apple's native Quicktime libraries and there's something wrong here - the difference between single and dual processors is pretty small, and it shouldn't be, as encoding/decoding is exactly the type of thing that I would expect to be distributed between the processors.
Quake 3 - I disagree with you here - these are mostly OpenGL rendering tests, which _is_ an important test for non-game applications, as well - for example Pixar movies. The speed hit here was fairly insignificant when compared to the fastest system with the same graphics memory, which could be from a whole host of factors - I'd have to see saturation numbers, AGP speeds, etc. to know if this is a processor, bus, cache, or other bottleneck. I suspect GPU bus saturation - compare the huge drop from 1024 to 1600 on the dual processor and then the tiny drop for the single processor. Also note that the PC tests are done with an "identically configured ATI Radeon 9800." Looking at Apple's store, the top of the line machine comes with a Radeon 9600 and the next model down a GeForce 5700 FX Ultra, so it's really not a comparable test.
Photoshop - another app I trust is optimized pretty well, because Apple actively helps Adobe with optimization of it. I suspect much of the 150MB file speed difference has to do with disk drive speed and ATA or SCSI bus speed, but there's no mention of whether the file is being paged into drive or not... did you notice the RAID drives were outperformed by the non-RAID Opteron that got the best scores? Makes me suspect that the file is entirely in memory, but that still doesn't make sense - that machine should have been smoked...
I haven't bought a mac since a G3 several years ago, but at that time, all professional macs were formatted in non-RAID, but the hardware was RAID capable. I added 2 disks and formatted the machine with RAID striping using Apple's own Partition tool, so I don't see why PC World can't do the same. The 9800 is probably available for mac 3rd party, as well, so no reason they couldn't test the same GPU, as well.
I can't say I disagree with their conclusion, the Athlon 64s are a better value hardware and cost-wise (IMO), but that's also why I own 3 Athlon based PCs (and have several part boxes that could be used to build a couple more). Compared to Intel, though, I wouldn't say that, and I certainly find OS X a much better value than Windows (both cost and feature-wise). If it weren't for games and my company's Windows-only commercial VPN software, I probably wouldn't boot my PC into Windows and leave it in Linux
I'm not sure how much benefit Morrowind has in of itself, but Fallout was a trove of cultural information... then again, it was an M rated game, so the kids shouldn't be playing it (tho there's nothing explicit...)
Games like Medieval Total War make excellent history lessons. I probably learned more about the 1300-1400s playing that game than I did in a history class where several weeks were devoted to that era... kinda scary (the classes were also very Euro-centric).
Ok, I have to say it...
My airport has always been a Chaotic Evil Thief.
my apologies to D&D