I'd like to see this test repeated with a Ghz (1.2? 1/5?) cordless phone in the room.
Well, most digital cordless phones seem to be either 900MHz or 2.4GHz. 802.11 runs at 2.4-2.4835MHz in the US, and bluetooth runs at 2.4GHz as well. Both the phones and, AFAIK the wireless data technologies, use frequency hopping so they should be able to coexist peacefully.
The standard seems to be 700W (at least that's what most microwave-ready foods go by when specifying heating times). There's plenty of 1kW+ Microwave ovens available.
If one's to perform such a silly test (see earlier post about FCC regs and devices that need to be able to deal with EM interference) then at least test it with something more than a cupwarmer.
Dunno about anyone else, but the single fastest way to have a functional machine go belly up, regardless of OS, is to change something willy-nilly, without knowing what it does. Allowing the vendor to have control over what gets patched and when is suicidal and not in thebest interest of users.
Fortunately, aside from the NT4 Service Pack messes, MS has been rather good about providing useful patches for security issues. And when you're dealing with users who should, but don't, and never will have any interest in what security flaws exist on their machines and what can be done to remedy those flaws, putting MS in charge *IS* in the best interest of those users, because at least *SOMEONE* is doing something to protect these people.
autoinstalling anything, without reading the release notes and taking the time to figure out if you really need the changes, is totally begging for problems. Users like my mom don't stand a chance
Again, I'd rather have my mom's machine crash because of a bad patch that got automatically DL'd in an attempt to secure the box, than have her personal and business documents/data exposed to some l33t h4x0r who thought her machine might be a fun target.
I'd rather download patches and check them md5 checksums. Call me paranoia, but it *DOES* matter.
When the patches are downloaded there does seem to be some sort of authenticity and integrity checks made against the dl'd files, so I wouldn't think that the Windows Update system would just willingly install any ol' fake patch that you might try to send it. Still...
Hell, you can't even get the damn icon off your desktop without going to rather a lot of trouble.
Exactly. The technical knowledge and skill necessary to position the mouse over the IE icon, right click, and select "Delete" is beyond the average user's ability. It needs to be made simpler. I think the desktop should have the IE icon, and the rest of the desktop should be devoted to a 600x600 button saying "Click here to remove IE icon from desktop." Would that please you and the hapless idiot users you seem to be speaking on behalf of?
Cheers!
Yes, I see the '40 atoms in width' line. The heat from each of the transistors would screw up the transistor beside it. That was the limit of the copper lines within a chip. Now they're saying they've overcome that limitation?
D'ya ever get the feeling that these researchers and scientists and engineers working on chip technologies all get together at their IEEE meetings or some such thing and conspire against the world to make themselves seem smarter than they are?
And I think they do this by agreeing to publicize some arbitrary limit, a roadblock to whatever they're doing, causing all sorts of worry among the general population about what'll happen when that roadblock is hit, and then when the roadblock is approached, "OMG OMG we figured out something new, this roadblock is no longer an issue, move on folks."
It happens so often nowadays that nobody even notices it. How famous are the quotes by well known individuals claiming things like impossibility of supersonic travel, impracticality of computers, even impossibility of flight itself? Now we hear "once we reach this point in our technological sophistication, we can go no further" every 5 minutes, only to have that claim disproven another 15 min later.
...how soon they'll be able to capitalize on the EUV technique. NVIDIA is only now moving to.15 micron production, Athlons are being manufactured at.18,.13 is what everyone's aiming for but the process still seems to need refinement.
This certainly isn't the 1st article to preach the wonders of EUV lithography, and should have dropped that "coming soon!" tone of the previous articles hyping the new tech. Fact is, chipmakers still have a lot of work ahead of them perfecting the use of current lithography processes, and squeezing all they can from what they know to work.
Yes, research into future possibilities of chip manufacture is important, and Intel has been wise in not abandoning research in that area (duh) but they're not the heroes the article makes them out to be, they're only making sure they won't get left in the dust when current techniques become outdated. And they will not allow the consumer to benefit from that new research until they've milked the consumer for as much as they can selling them products created with current tech.
And then there was WordPerfect 5.1, oh, thank god for the F11 (reveal codes) key
The reveal codes feature is still in WP and always has been - and you're right, it's always been a godsend. I often run into situations in Word where formatting (font, bold, etc.) seems to activate itself on text I'm typing just out of the blue, simply because I used it somewhere else in the document. F11 would solve that problem in a snap. *sigh*
The bloody thing's $399! USD! That's like $700 CDN or some such thing. I find it incredible that these overpriced annoyances enjoy the kind of sales that they've been getting.
I can't imagine the justification for dropping that much money for something that a $5 appointment book will do better. Aside from the geek-chic thing, I suppose.
And people why the economy's goin' to shit -- everyone's wasting their cash on useless crap like these things (well, ok, I'll admit, they are useful in so far as any sort of personal management doohickey is useful) that cost 10 times what they should, and then when they realize that they really shouldn't have thrown their money away, they uh, lose their confidence as consumers, and stockholding idiots freak in reaction to the confidence index drop of other idiots and for some reason it affects even the sane people, and that's what really bothers me.
Yes, the Indrema console is a nice idea, and an interesting project, but surely the people behind it can't expect any sort of large-scale commercial success?
It's been said before, I know, but here goes: Marketing is where it's at. MS is going to spend upwards of a half billion dollars promoting the X-Box, and they surely won't hesitate to spend even more money to make sure that their console is successful in every way (competitively priced, available in volume, supported by many games).
PS2 is going to get gobbled up by people who want the latest and greatest, but meanwhile millions of others are already quite happy killing some time with their old PSX.
Nintendo? Right now it's a pokemon machine. We'll see how impressive the gamecube is, but between PSX saturation and MS's shoving the X down everyone's throats, even they will have a rough time.
Considering everything that Indrema has going against their commercial success -- PS is good enough, MS will kick marketing ass, Nintendo fills in the gaps, where is the market for Indrema? Short of some attention on SlashDot (and I seriously doubt that a very large percentage of even/.ers will be buying this console, considerably less than will be buying the MS console) and a few blurbs on gaming websites, nobody really knows about indrema, and I just don't see that changing without a LOT of marketing money (and smarts).
I'd like to say that at least they have technological superiority going for them, but other than the word "Linux" flying around in the specs, the system doesn't have much (if anything) more to offer than the upcoming consoles.
I can't say I recommend them much, since they no longer exist, but I was wondering if anyone here knew what exactly happened to them. They just suddenly disappeared without a trace one day...
Why not wait and see what it's like using these distributed types of applications before slamming them? It will probably take 2-3 years for the speed of the net and the quality of these types of applications to become really satisfactory, but have some patience
Oh, I think he'll have to be patient for a lot longer than 2-3 years. Look how long Windows took to evolve into something useable (and no, I don't consider 3.x useable). Look at the relatively slow pace of GUI advancement in the Linux world. Considering the relative simplicity of creating a decent _local_ app compared to making a fully functional, useful, and useable distributed app, I think it'll be far longer than 2-3 years before the types of wonders you describe will be at a point where they'll appeal to the average Joe.
nasa is currently tracking all orbiting junk above a certain size
According to Discovery channel, they track anything over 5 inches in diameter. They showed an animation of the thousands of objects out there that are being tracked, and it looked pretty frightening. Apparently it takes quite a bit of computation to send a shuttle up these days because they have to figure out exactly where they have to be at any given time to avoid all the crap floating around up there.
Several of the Panasonic cd-rw's (makers of the GD-ROM) have been known to read GD's with certain versions of their firmware.
That's just a myth. The burner in question was the Yamaha (Yamaha makes the GD-ROM, not Panasonic) CDR400, but the "hacked" firmware would just make the burner useless.
Consider: why would pirates go to all the trouble of using custom hardware to extract GD-ROM data using the dreamcast GD-ROM drive itself if they could just hunt down an old CDR400 and use that to rip? Also, if this myth were true you bet you'd be seeing CDR400's on ebay for $500+.
Since the translation by software is really pathetic (made even worse by the fact that there aren't any accents on the text from the FAQ), here's the best I could do...
Pay attention to Q12 specifically...
Q1: What was involved in the localization?
The majority of strings which StarOffice (SO from here on) uses at runtime are stored in resource files. It is a common technique which allows programmers to separate the program from the data which it uses.
The resource files do not contain only the strings. They also contain dialog window definitions and display elements, menus, mouse pointers, bitmaps, and other important components.
Where are the resources for SO stored? If you install SO to opt/office52, as it is in SuSE Linux, you'll find them in/opt/office52/program/resource.
He who would want to translate SO to another language, e.g. Czech, would have to open the resource files and translate all the strings. He would further have to modify the code to work with all the symbols which the new language may contain.
If you look into any of the aforementioned sources, you'll find that they're not text-editable. There exist specialized resource editors, but SO works with a proprietary resource format, and is therefore not modifiable in this way.
The only person able to modify the resources is the software's author, in this case Sun Microsystems. If it is not interested in localizing for a specific language, there doesn't exist any other way of translating the software.
Incidentally, around the end of 2000, Sun decided to open the source code of SO 5.2 under the title OpenOffice (OO). Thanks to the fact that the source code is key to localization, the opening was met with great anticipation.
When the source code was opened, it was found that several key components which were a part of SO are absent in OO. Perhaps not because Sun wanted to keep them away from prying eyes, but because Sun did not develop themselves, but bought them from third parties. The license under which Sun did so did not allow it to open the code for these components.
Because of this, OO lacked a complete printing system and organizer. In addition, as a work in progress in comparison to SO, OO seemed rather disjointed.
Thus, it was not possible to localize SO because of a proprietary resource format, and it was not worthwhile to localize OO because of its incompleteness.
Q2. StarOffice, OpenOffice, I'm all confused. What did you actually translate?
It was impossible to localize SO thanks to unknown binary resource formats and it was not worthwhile to localize OO because of its incompleteness.
After further examination of both applications, we came to the conclusion that there exists a significant probability that OO uses the same, or similar, resource formats as SO.
SuSE programmers, based on the OO source code, attempted to create a tool which would allow access to strings stored in the binary resource files of SO. Their work was successful and it became possible to consider possibly localizing SO 5.2.
After considering the circumstances, SuSE decided to go ahead with the translation, expecting to finish around the end of 2000.
Q3. Why is the translation over 100MB? It looks like the entire SO and not just the translated strings.
Not really relevant...
Q4-Q7... ditto
Q8. Localization is silly, you should've rather translated OO. You'd have been helping Open Source Software!
We considered localization of OO (viz. Q1), but in the end, because of many reasons, decided to do SO. Consider that our work might have a benefit even for the OO project, and we plan to open the sources of the translation in 2001.
Q9. What'll I find in the so_czech package?
Programs from the polish version of SO, help from the english version, and new czech resource files, a czech dictionary and czech grammar rules.
Q12. Are the translated resource files under the GPL? Can I distribute the Czech SO? Can I use it in a different distribution?
Czech-ified SO 5.2 is freely useable in the SuSE Linux distribution. The Company SuSE CR, s.r.o. will not contest personal use on other distributions. It will , however, legally challenge commercial subjects, if they use the Czech translation of SO without written consent of SuSE CR, s.r.o.
All rights to the translation belong to SuSE CR, s.r.o. Resources are NOT available under GNU GPL.
The translations will be GPL'd 31/5/2001.
Q15. Did SuSE work with Sun on the translation?
Neither the Czech or German divisions of Sun showed, at any time, interest in participating in the effort of translating SO 5.2 to Czech.
To this day (a year later) i still instinctivly drop whatever I'm fucking doing and start walking someplace whenever i hear a similar bell, then it hits me....yuk.
While you're pondering the meaning of this, consider: it used to be the policy of the U.S. government to keep content producers and carriers separate.
Today, this would conflict with the policy of the US government to give some serious head to whoever can up big.
On a slightly different note, we all saw what kind of a bullshit generator CNN and Time and the other usual suspects became during, say, the Kosovo conflict. It'll be even EASIER now for the good ol' gov't to make sure more citizens are informed with the latest and greatest bit of quality, honest reporting. I wonder how long before they forget to include an off-switch to a AOL-CNN news feed monitor...
C'mon, really. All this phenomenal expense, and for what? For a system which will have a million bugs (and it would anyway, even if MS wasn't involved, so shush) and which people will be apprehensive about using and which will cause an even BIGGER mess in case of a screwup, since you can't just manually examine an electronic vote.
It's been said in almost every one of the voting stories thus far - why not go with a system like Canada's? Simple X in a box, hand counted, done in a few hours, no ambiguities, no problems. Ugh.
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Re:What Are The Chances?
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 2
name the product after a Robert Louis Stevenson character?
I believe Robinson Crusoe was written by Daniel Defoe, not RLS.
wonder MSN gets so many visits, the the default home page for IE, which most people don't even know how to change
Oh for cryin' out loud. Tools -> Internet Options. There, 1st option on the 1st damn tab, your homepage. It's the easiest setting to change in IE. If there's people who don't know how to change this then they should do the world a favor and kindly throw themselves under a train.
Who in their right mind would actually buy the V4/5's? They were ridiculously overpriced and didn't offer anything (in fact, offered less) than Nvidia's offerings. I have an old V2 8meg which I'm happy with, but I'd never have touched anything since then.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, most digital cordless phones seem to be either 900MHz or 2.4GHz. 802.11 runs at 2.4-2.4835MHz in the US, and bluetooth runs at 2.4GHz as well. Both the phones and, AFAIK the wireless data technologies, use frequency hopping so they should be able to coexist peacefully.
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If one's to perform such a silly test (see earlier post about FCC regs and devices that need to be able to deal with EM interference) then at least test it with something more than a cupwarmer.
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Fortunately, aside from the NT4 Service Pack messes, MS has been rather good about providing useful patches for security issues. And when you're dealing with users who should, but don't, and never will have any interest in what security flaws exist on their machines and what can be done to remedy those flaws, putting MS in charge *IS* in the best interest of those users, because at least *SOMEONE* is doing something to protect these people.
autoinstalling anything, without reading the release notes and taking the time to figure out if you really need the changes, is totally begging for problems. Users like my mom don't stand a chance
Again, I'd rather have my mom's machine crash because of a bad patch that got automatically DL'd in an attempt to secure the box, than have her personal and business documents/data exposed to some l33t h4x0r who thought her machine might be a fun target.
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When the patches are downloaded there does seem to be some sort of authenticity and integrity checks made against the dl'd files, so I wouldn't think that the Windows Update system would just willingly install any ol' fake patch that you might try to send it. Still...
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Exactly. The technical knowledge and skill necessary to position the mouse over the IE icon, right click, and select "Delete" is beyond the average user's ability. It needs to be made simpler. I think the desktop should have the IE icon, and the rest of the desktop should be devoted to a 600x600 button saying "Click here to remove IE icon from desktop." Would that please you and the hapless idiot users you seem to be speaking on behalf of? Cheers!
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In IE you go to Tools -> Internet Options, and uncheck "Play Animations." Bingo, no more animated gifs.
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D'ya ever get the feeling that these researchers and scientists and engineers working on chip technologies all get together at their IEEE meetings or some such thing and conspire against the world to make themselves seem smarter than they are?
And I think they do this by agreeing to publicize some arbitrary limit, a roadblock to whatever they're doing, causing all sorts of worry among the general population about what'll happen when that roadblock is hit, and then when the roadblock is approached, "OMG OMG we figured out something new, this roadblock is no longer an issue, move on folks."
It happens so often nowadays that nobody even notices it. How famous are the quotes by well known individuals claiming things like impossibility of supersonic travel, impracticality of computers, even impossibility of flight itself? Now we hear "once we reach this point in our technological sophistication, we can go no further" every 5 minutes, only to have that claim disproven another 15 min later.
Ok, i'm done.
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This certainly isn't the 1st article to preach the wonders of EUV lithography, and should have dropped that "coming soon!" tone of the previous articles hyping the new tech. Fact is, chipmakers still have a lot of work ahead of them perfecting the use of current lithography processes, and squeezing all they can from what they know to work.
Yes, research into future possibilities of chip manufacture is important, and Intel has been wise in not abandoning research in that area (duh) but they're not the heroes the article makes them out to be, they're only making sure they won't get left in the dust when current techniques become outdated. And they will not allow the consumer to benefit from that new research until they've milked the consumer for as much as they can selling them products created with current tech.
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The reveal codes feature is still in WP and always has been - and you're right, it's always been a godsend. I often run into situations in Word where formatting (font, bold, etc.) seems to activate itself on text I'm typing just out of the blue, simply because I used it somewhere else in the document. F11 would solve that problem in a snap. *sigh*
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I can't imagine the justification for dropping that much money for something that a $5 appointment book will do better. Aside from the geek-chic thing, I suppose.
And people why the economy's goin' to shit -- everyone's wasting their cash on useless crap like these things (well, ok, I'll admit, they are useful in so far as any sort of personal management doohickey is useful) that cost 10 times what they should, and then when they realize that they really shouldn't have thrown their money away, they uh, lose their confidence as consumers, and stockholding idiots freak in reaction to the confidence index drop of other idiots and for some reason it affects even the sane people, and that's what really bothers me.
I'll shut up now.
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It's been said before, I know, but here goes: Marketing is where it's at. MS is going to spend upwards of a half billion dollars promoting the X-Box, and they surely won't hesitate to spend even more money to make sure that their console is successful in every way (competitively priced, available in volume, supported by many games).
PS2 is going to get gobbled up by people who want the latest and greatest, but meanwhile millions of others are already quite happy killing some time with their old PSX.
Nintendo? Right now it's a pokemon machine. We'll see how impressive the gamecube is, but between PSX saturation and MS's shoving the X down everyone's throats, even they will have a rough time.
Considering everything that Indrema has going against their commercial success -- PS is good enough, MS will kick marketing ass, Nintendo fills in the gaps, where is the market for Indrema? Short of some attention on SlashDot (and I seriously doubt that a very large percentage of even /.ers will be buying this console, considerably less than will be buying the MS console) and a few blurbs on gaming websites, nobody really knows about indrema, and I just don't see that changing without a LOT of marketing money (and smarts).
I'd like to say that at least they have technological superiority going for them, but other than the word "Linux" flying around in the specs, the system doesn't have much (if anything) more to offer than the upcoming consoles.
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Oh, I think he'll have to be patient for a lot longer than 2-3 years. Look how long Windows took to evolve into something useable (and no, I don't consider 3.x useable). Look at the relatively slow pace of GUI advancement in the Linux world. Considering the relative simplicity of creating a decent _local_ app compared to making a fully functional, useful, and useable distributed app, I think it'll be far longer than 2-3 years before the types of wonders you describe will be at a point where they'll appeal to the average Joe.
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According to Discovery channel, they track anything over 5 inches in diameter. They showed an animation of the thousands of objects out there that are being tracked, and it looked pretty frightening. Apparently it takes quite a bit of computation to send a shuttle up these days because they have to figure out exactly where they have to be at any given time to avoid all the crap floating around up there.
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That's just a myth. The burner in question was the Yamaha (Yamaha makes the GD-ROM, not Panasonic) CDR400, but the "hacked" firmware would just make the burner useless.
Consider: why would pirates go to all the trouble of using custom hardware to extract GD-ROM data using the dreamcast GD-ROM drive itself if they could just hunt down an old CDR400 and use that to rip? Also, if this myth were true you bet you'd be seeing CDR400's on ebay for $500+.
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Pay attention to Q12 specifically...
Q1: What was involved in the localization?
The majority of strings which StarOffice (SO from here on) uses at runtime are stored in resource files. It is a common technique which allows programmers to separate the program from the data which it uses.
The resource files do not contain only the strings. They also contain dialog window definitions and display elements, menus, mouse pointers, bitmaps, and other important components.
Where are the resources for SO stored? If you install SO to opt/office52, as it is in SuSE Linux, you'll find them in
He who would want to translate SO to another language, e.g. Czech, would have to open the resource files and translate all the strings. He would further have to modify the code to work with all the symbols which the new language may contain.
If you look into any of the aforementioned sources, you'll find that they're not text-editable. There exist specialized resource editors, but SO works with a proprietary resource format, and is therefore not modifiable in this way.
The only person able to modify the resources is the software's author, in this case Sun Microsystems. If it is not interested in localizing for a specific language, there doesn't exist any other way of translating the software.
Incidentally, around the end of 2000, Sun decided to open the source code of SO 5.2 under the title OpenOffice (OO). Thanks to the fact that the source code is key to localization, the opening was met with great anticipation.
When the source code was opened, it was found that several key components which were a part of SO are absent in OO. Perhaps not because Sun wanted to keep them away from prying eyes, but because Sun did not develop themselves, but bought them from third parties. The license under which Sun did so did not allow it to open the code for these components.
Because of this, OO lacked a complete printing system and organizer. In addition, as a work in progress in comparison to SO, OO seemed rather disjointed.
Thus, it was not possible to localize SO because of a proprietary resource format, and it was not worthwhile to localize OO because of its incompleteness.
Q2. StarOffice, OpenOffice, I'm all confused. What did you actually translate?
It was impossible to localize SO thanks to unknown binary resource formats and it was not worthwhile to localize OO because of its incompleteness.
After further examination of both applications, we came to the conclusion that there exists a significant probability that OO uses the same, or similar, resource formats as SO.
SuSE programmers, based on the OO source code, attempted to create a tool which would allow access to strings stored in the binary resource files of SO. Their work was successful and it became possible to consider possibly localizing SO 5.2.
After considering the circumstances, SuSE decided to go ahead with the translation, expecting to finish around the end of 2000.
Q3. Why is the translation over 100MB? It looks like the entire SO and not just the translated strings.
Not really relevant...
Q4-Q7... ditto
Q8. Localization is silly, you should've rather translated OO. You'd have been helping Open Source Software!
We considered localization of OO (viz. Q1), but in the end, because of many reasons, decided to do SO. Consider that our work might have a benefit even for the OO project, and we plan to open the sources of the translation in 2001.
Q9. What'll I find in the so_czech package?
Programs from the polish version of SO, help from the english version, and new czech resource files, a czech dictionary and czech grammar rules.
Q12. Are the translated resource files under the GPL? Can I distribute the Czech SO? Can I use it in a different distribution?
Czech-ified SO 5.2 is freely useable in the SuSE Linux distribution. The Company SuSE CR, s.r.o. will not contest personal use on other distributions. It will , however, legally challenge commercial subjects, if they use the Czech translation of SO without written consent of SuSE CR, s.r.o.
All rights to the translation belong to SuSE CR, s.r.o. Resources are NOT available under GNU GPL.
The translations will be GPL'd 31/5/2001.
Q15. Did SuSE work with Sun on the translation?
Neither the Czech or German divisions of Sun showed, at any time, interest in participating in the effort of translating SO 5.2 to Czech.
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Pavlov would be proud...
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Today, this would conflict with the policy of the US government to give some serious head to whoever can up big.
On a slightly different note, we all saw what kind of a bullshit generator CNN and Time and the other usual suspects became during, say, the Kosovo conflict. It'll be even EASIER now for the good ol' gov't to make sure more citizens are informed with the latest and greatest bit of quality, honest reporting. I wonder how long before they forget to include an off-switch to a AOL-CNN news feed monitor...
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It's been said in almost every one of the voting stories thus far - why not go with a system like Canada's? Simple X in a box, hand counted, done in a few hours, no ambiguities, no problems. Ugh.
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I believe Robinson Crusoe was written by Daniel Defoe, not RLS.
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Don't forget Wing Rhames(sp?) in Mission Impossible. He was their l33t hax0r.
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Forgive my ignorance, but what is PKD?
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Oh for cryin' out loud. Tools -> Internet Options. There, 1st option on the 1st damn tab, your homepage. It's the easiest setting to change in IE. If there's people who don't know how to change this then they should do the world a favor and kindly throw themselves under a train.
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