One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com
Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
Back-up your data and, when you bike,
always wear white.
I'm glad to see knowledge of "the universal analog interface" (aka, "the human") has finally reached "needless to say, though I'm saying it" status at /.
... In principle it's impossible to prevent music from being copied anyway, because a user can always play a song through an audio output jack and use another device to record the sound; there are several other methods that work by reducing the same principle to practice....
Of course what they miss is that you can, as a rule of thumb, assume you've lost half your market for each barrier to entry. In this case, the DRM-to-mp3 loving crowd seems to once again forget that for slashdotters, such things are trivial, but for J. Q. Public, putting the CD in a drive right-side up is often an insurmountable task.
posted by ruffin
at 10/26/2006 11:47:00 AM
I'm making it official, folks. My supra-cool Libretto 50CT is the neatest laptop out there for under $100. It's literally the size of a VCR cassette and feels smaller. It runs Linux and Windows 95, the latter, at least, quite well. A PCMCIA slot means it's a great little box to take on the road or to most any WiFi enabled spot, and also allows the use of most any USB keyboard/mouse combo you might prefer. The tiny keyboard is initially annoying, but grows on you. I can take notes with it fairly well now, with only a minimum of editing necessary on a fullsize once I'm done. Runs VIm well and, get this, runs VB 6.0 just quickly enough that it's not aggravating to program. CodeWarrior 5 and Java, forget it; they're molasses, but VB6 ain't bad at all, at least for programming smallish utilities. Has a Windows key and a right-click keyboard key, two things that drive me crazy when some upstart laptop mfgr decides to amputate 'em.
Ah, it also has a standard IDE laptop hard drive port. I've got a 10 gig hard drive in there. Very nice.
One note: Make sure if you eBay that you get a "port replicator" with your Libretto. This will give you PS/2 ports for a mouse and a keyboard and VGA out, up to 1024x768 without bad flicker, a touch higher with. It also gives room for two PCMCIA ports, so wireless + USB is an option without adding much weight at all.
Only negative? Hard to find a new battery, and I keep reading that rebuilding is an explosion hazzard. Hrm. And, well, it is a 75 MHz [sic] Pentium with 16 megs of RAM. Still, a great portable that'll do the email, web browsing, and IM chores with no complaining, and even let you code. Beat that for $50.
Apropos of nothing, man, can you believe Jimmy Leland? Man, I wish he'd come back to the Pirates, but it appears he made the right decision. There's a HoFer.
posted by ruffin
at 10/14/2006 08:11:00 PM
While we lefties are bashing righties, it's not just an issue of dragging your hand through wet ink...
A left-handed nib is a nice try, but after several years of trying to use fountain pens, I've come to the conclusion that they just don't work right for lefties with our left-to-right writing system. Right-handed writers more or less pull the pen with them, with the nib pointing more to the left than the right. Left-handed writers have to push it, nib first, across the page, which always makes it feel to me like the nib is scratching across the page.
It's discrimination, I tell you! We should lobby to have Western lanuages written right to left--or just all move to Israel.
Of course Saudi Arabia or Syria would work just as well. Or perhaps the upshot is that Israel is really a Western nation, which could be a telling statement, if true.
Still, something worth remembering if you're buying a fountain pen for that special lefty. I couldn't figure out exactly what the fancy nib cut meant, and this explanation makes the most sense.
What does this have to do with computer science? Very little.
posted by ruffin
at 10/13/2006 03:48:00 AM
So how did this bizarre rumor [that Java is broken on Windows Vista] originate? Well, older versions of Java do have problems on Vista, and that's what the original report was about; someone tried running some older version of Java on Vista and noted some problems. But that's like saying that your favorite XBox game, Bloody Mess X, doesn't work on XBox360.
Um, no. No it's not. Not at all. I didn't buy a new console, I installed a new OS.
Let's take a look at this, a favorite tidbit of mine from Joel Spolsky:
Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.
Let's face it, this is yet another example of Sun losing touch with the end user. The news, and it's not rumor, is that Grandma Betty isn't going to be able to use Limewire the second she installs Vista. It'll be broken. And MS Word won't be, I'll wager. She's not going to know to look for weblogs.java.net. She barely knows where Google is.
If Sun ever wants to get serious about the desktop, they absolutely have to stop thinking like this. They just don't get it. The rumors are true, and this blog confirms it. Java doesn't work on Vista. Or, to help translate for our friend chet, Previous Java VMs/Runtimes/Whatever you're calling them today don't work for end users once they install Vista, and that means Java is broken for them. Not everyone uses Tomcat, daggummit.
Wonder if VB6 apps work on Vista? And where is the MS VM? Is it there by default, running good old Java 1.1.4? Hey, don't knock your inroads.
More from the Java blog...
The port is the key; the new system is different enough in its fundamentals that software for the older system would not just work, but had to be ported. It would be great if your game just worked. Just like it would be great if Java just happened to work on Vista with no changes. But it just didn't happen that way; the platforms are different enough that changes are necessary.
It's the same thing here; Vista is not just XP++; there are fundamentally new things about the system that makes older software break. Is all software broken? Probably not.
So much for that MS/Sun partnership. So much for Java on the desktop. So much for Netscape commoditizing the OS. ;^)
Look, most people equate platform with hardware. The hardware's the same. Other apps work. You'd better jump on MS to figure out why the old runtimes are borked, and see if you can't figure out a way to get some sort of warning to pop up when they try.
Face it, Sun. You're less important to the survival of Vista than SimCity was to Windows 95.
posted by ruffin
at 10/11/2006 04:03:00 AM
from variety.com: Unlike the recording biz, which watched its sales plummet due to downloads, the DVD business is still relatively healthy and remains a predictable source of profit for the studios.
Oh, so this is a good reason not to go with Apple and movies on the iTunes M/usic/ovie Store? Because most people don't have connections to the Net that make pirating full-quality movies a viable alternative, the movie execs decide that there's no good reason to start looking ahead to digital (ie, not using trucks) distribution?
Brilliant. As brilliant as the mythical ostrich with its head in the sand, or more realistic kitten with its head under the couch. It's not a problem, so no use fixing, I suppose? What ever happened to an ounce of prevention? Fine, don't use Apple, but get your head in the free and clear and get a new strategy.
I hate to say it, but Microsoft's DRM + monthy subscription seems a popular way to go, though I still find it humorous that once the DRM was cracked, crackers could download as much music as they wanted to crack with a single month's "rent," rather than have to still pay a buck per track. It's all about tipping points, people.
In any event, this "better to ask restitution than use foresight" approach is unforgivable. Not to mention that it's just plain bad business.
(We'll agree to ignore the use of the word "biz" in an otherwise fairly seriously written piece, I trust.)
posted by ruffin
at 10/01/2006 11:50:00 PM
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