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" Now, copying a variable number of pages, then erasing them immediately is extra wear and tear on the HD."

Sure that makes sense, but why the long-term storage? Why does it store the copies from 6 months ago? Shouldn't it go through every week wipe anything over a week old?

Of course that's not perfect, there's still going to be that final week on there, but at least no one will be "downloading tens of thousands of documents" from a photocopy machine like they did.

Also shouldn't the manufacture's be responsible for this somewhat? It's obvious when you save a document to a computer that the drive needs to be wiped, not so obvious when it's a copy machine. Shouldn't there be big warning labels and a "wipe all" button on the back somewhere? Sharp apparently offers a product to wipe copy machine hard drives.... for $500:
"One product from Sharp automatically erases an image from the hard drive. It costs $500. "

WTF Sharp? You couldn't just put a button on the back that does a DoD wipe?

I personally believe that individuals will make the difference.
But people are now starting to feel enough pain - be it software costs, inefficient use of hardware, viruses and other malware, etc. - that Linux and open-source software, generally, are getting plenty of attention. The cure, in other words, now outweighs the effort of applying it. Yes, Microsoft will do its part to thwart this progress,but even so I've seen broad and ever-increasing government adoption of open source

He believes that individuals will make the difference - but the progress he sees is in government adoption of open source.

The top-down solution.

The mandate from on high.

Nothing much seems to be happening at ground level.

In the Net Applications stats, Linux struggles to hold on to a 1% share of the global desktop. Top Operating System Share Trend [March 2 Preview]

In the W3Schools OS Platform Stats W2K held a 42% share in March 03, Linux 2%.

W2K was never a mass market OS.

This February, Win 7 had 13%, Linux 5% and W2K 0%. You could legitimately argue from these stats that Linux hasn't gained much of a grip - on the desktop - even when you look at usage by the pros.

As for the general gaming market, yes, gaming is a weakness on Linux, but addressing that is not a priority for Canonical.

The PC game is the quintessential client app.

The machine that can play games is a powerhouse for all forms of media, interaction and communication. It sets the standard. Games and gaming tech can change the way you think about the PC or the console. How you use it.

It astonishes me that basic audio play and mixing could still be problematical for the Linux user in in 2010.

All About . . . Sound Cards for Windows [July 1997]

Open Source is inherently cross-platform. The Windows port is inevitable - and it has visibility. Download.com is one click away. The quality and ease of use of the Linux repository is unknown until you install the OS.

The sample apps on the typical Linux Live CD clearly aren't setting the world on fire.

Just because it is common, and just because you are used to it, that does not mean that it is in any way good. You know: Correlation is not causation.

I agree that Gimp has a horrible interface. But I think that nearly every single graphical user interface out there is a unacceptable piece of horrible shit.
First of all, because it’s all extremely monolithic. You can’t pipe anything to anything. A bit of drag-and-drop does not solve that. You can’t use your gimp brush in your OpenOffice document. You can’t use TeX inside every program with graphical frames, etc, etc, etc. They are basically appliance-simulating programs. Like your hi-fi system or TV. They lack any freedom to combine trough generic interfaces.
Then everything nowadays tends to be strongly focused on the retardedly inefficient one-pointer point-and-click system. Despite you having five very flexible fingers on two hands. Despite keyboard combos almost always being quicker. (Acknowledging valid exceptions like drawing like with a pen, here.) (Also, with a good interface, the argument of having to memorize the combos, is invalid. See my Slashdot editor for an example. [Select something, and then hold Ctrl in it.])
Which results in the stupid menus and icon bars/blocks like you see them nowadays.
And finally, most developers still seem to live in the not-invented-here world, with respect to property sidebars/boxes. (Like the famous Lotus InfoBox, which unfortunately still was point-and-click.)

http://www.smartcomputing.com/techsupport/detail.aspx?guid=&ErrorID=29874

Will help.
The problem is that TB3 has Master Password clicked on by default. The bug is that if you didn't have a master password set (just keeps your pop passwords), then your stuffed.
Back up your emails, uninstall TB3, reinstall TB2, assign a master password, reinstall TB3.

The concept of a tab based OS has been done before with Windows 3.1 & 95 when Xerox introduced their TabWorks GUI.

I'm looking at an upgrade - installing a heat pump system this summer, assuming I can get good price information and ordering ability on line. Last time they were 'out of stock'. That might be your best option, as well. 3X the heating ability per kwh, even over tankless.

Unfortunately I don't have such a choice now, I rent an apartment.

if you put a carbon tax in coal gets slaughtered. Even clean coal

If carbon emissions were taxed alternative energy wouldn't look as expensive. And there are no clean coal plants in commercial production, what plants there are are for research. Even then though I doubt nuclear power would be profitable without subsidies.

Hmm, also disagrees with the cost for clean coal

I agree too, coal can not be clean. Sure emissions can be cleaned up but mining is far from being clean. A lot of coal is mined by mountain top removal. Google as some good photos of what it looks like.

So the tech isn't ready. To reduce the waste that's already there I may agree to reprocess it so it can be used in power plants that have already been built but I don't think I could agree to building more nuclear power plants.

Engineering always needs to be done. Basically, we're putting solar, wind, and other experimental electricity generation systems up left and right.

Yes, engineering always needs to be done but they are not being subsidized at the same amount as coal or nuclear. They may have but I doubt either First Solar or Nanosolar received subsidies directly. You could say Germany's Nanosolar order is one, and it might be, but I don't think of it so much as a subsidy anymore than first adopters subsidize research and development.

Falcon

"nobody now remembers who introduced the small waved underlines .. tutorialized tasks .. the ribbon"

WordPerfect highlights poor grammar or incorrect word usage with a wavy blue underline

Apple Guide Isn't Help

tabbed toolbars or the Component palette as it was called in Delphi

Hm, this sounds familiar. While I agree with you, you can't blame this particular one just on open source.

Nutria already gave some examples, but I've got more for you.

Tandy 1000, HP's 95LX (and 200LX) palmtop PC with DOS (the 200 had MS-DOS 5.0), the HP 1000CX DOS palmtop, some of the early IBM Aptivas, the HP model 110 line of desktops, the rather famous GRiDLite (my GRiD laptops all loaded DOS from hardrive -- always wanted a GRiDLite too though), the IBM EduQuest Model 30 and Model 40 (I have a few model 40s, but only one still boots -- into OS/2 Warp because I'm not using the on-chip DOS), the Sharp PC-5000 portable, the IBM PCJr, certain IBM PS/1 machines, the Tandy 2500 XL, and some others.

Also, Franklin, Commodore, TI, and Atari had systems with some form of OS in the ROM. Some Franklin systems had something called F-DOS in ROM which I think was mostly a ripoff of AppleDOS.

Notice that these examples are not modern hacks to try it out at home, but all commercially shipped systems from the late 1970s to early 1990s.

AMD and Intel still have documentation on DOS in ROM for embedded systems on their websites, and AMD even recommends Datalight's solution.

Yet another huge point here is that when C++ was designed and written it really had one goal in mind, which was to bring the wonders of object orientedness to the unwashed masses of computer programming.

Stroustrup: My main aim with C++ was to be able to express ideas directly in code and have that code execute with close-to-optimal performance. In other words, to write programs that were both elegant and efficient.

Wrong.

I assume you're referring to Excel-97, which is used in various flavors from Excel 97 up to Excel 2002. This is a stretch to call a single format, since using some features in newer versions will create problems or at least inconsistencies when they are opened in other versions. Create a PivotTable in 2002 and then open it in 97, for example. This is the reason for the whole "compatibility check" that happens whenever you try to save a document in an older format than the latest one. Even 2000 and 2002 have things that will get lost in translation.

If I want to use Excel 97, I run the risk of "mangling" documents that I work on which come from people using newer versions ("what did you do with my PivotTables?!"); with each new version of Excel, features are included that break complete interoperability with past versions, even though they claim to use the same "format." The format might be good for data interchange in the roughest sense, but it doesn't preserve a complete workflow. Thus, any application claiming "Excel compatibility" must constantly update itself with the latest reverse-engineered updates, if it wants to be a viable alternative.

References:
Excel File Compatibility
How to recognize the difference among Excel 97 files, Excel 2000 files, and Excel 2002 files

I think I saw something like you mean once, but the only thing I can find on google is that canon did something like this in 1996 (bigger picture)

I think I saw something like you mean once, but the only thing I can find on google is that canon did something like this in 1996 (bigger picture)

It was a traffic monitoring equipment company called Traf-O-Data.

--
Bush lied. 100,000 died. Violence & lying show a lack of social sophistication.

Google earth is essentially a 3d Game enginge. If you remember, google bought Keyhole....

Link
Keyhole is a spin-off of game-developing company Intrinsic Graphics. In 1999, the company used the same space definition platform used for creating video game graphics for mapping technologies using real places, relying on the same principles and flow of navigation that gamers enjoy in virtual worlds.

Throw Them In The Microwave!

I completely agree...They take up way too much space, and I have no idea why people use them.

And how do they know what 'natural' for me is? Do they know my hand size, my arm length, the distance between my shoulders?

Apple had an ergonmic keyboard that wasn't fixed, so that you could spread it more or less as you needed.

All that today's split keyboards are doing is forcing me to use something that was optimally designed for someone else. We live in a day when we can get kitchen counter tops at differing heights, and we can size our chairs, but we can't size our keyboards -- a 6'5" husband is probably using the same keyboard as his 5'2" wife.

> Would it be possible to have multiple lasers all burning at once to increase speed?

You may remember Zen Research who created the TrueX technology found in the old Kenwood 72x drives. I believe these used 7 heads for reading data. However, the technology seems to have died, along with the company. I remember reading reports of the drives not being 100% compatible, having speed issues, and having high failure rates.

Serial can be made faster because the logic (De-muxing) that has to occur in parallel transfer systems slow down the clock rate. Thus, by simplifying the de-muxing process via serial transfers you can crank the transfer rates up to more than compensate. We are seeing good examples of other moves in this direction like Intel's 3GIO and AMD's HyperTransport

The simplified interfaces allow more flexibility (why SATA is hot-swappable) and are cheaper to produce.

I was doing some research this morning and came across this article in Smart Computing from November of 1994, seven years ago.The article? "Is DOS Dead?" It almost sounds just like the eulogy for DOS that this /. post is about.

I'll be damned if I can find anything at ATTO's website, but they used to make the SiliconDisk II, essentially a SCSI hard drive made completely of DRAM (yes, it has power outage protection).