The companies who are really serious about servers are particularly interested in CPU power compared to heat dissipation -- thermal density. This new Intel CPU is high performance with high heat--more of a gamer chip. At least so far it is; it's a very early sample and Intel hasn't had time to tune the power management features.
Intel's latest chips are fabbed at 65nm, while AMD is still only shipping chips fabbed at 90nm. This should give Intel a serious edge in the performance/heat ratio, but AMD's chips are so much more energy efficient that they are still competitive. (The current best performance/heat is the AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ ADD chip.) When AMD finally ships 65nm Opterons, those ought to be really great for dense server installations.
It's telling that even Dell is planning to ship servers with AMD chips. They announced a 4-core server; two dual-core Opterons. It wouldn't surprise me if they will be 65nm Opterons when they finally are released.
The article says that Intel is going to transition from 65nm to 45nm sometime in 2007, and to 34nm sometime in 2009. They beat AMD to 65nm big-time. They may well be at 34nm before AMD can make it to 45nm! Just imagine some sort of server chip with 16 cores... or more likely, 8 cores and a whole bunch of cache.
But we shouldn't count those chickens before they hatch. Right now Intel is at 65nm and AMD will be there soon.
According to Nichelle Nichols in her Trek book, it was the first interracial kiss. She said that they shot the real kiss first, and then William Shatner kept accidentally-on-purpose doing things that ruined the shot every time they tried to film a fake kiss. She said she has no idea why he doesn't remember that.
Her book also had a great quote from a letter sent to the show, written by a man from the South. He said words to the effect of "I'm a Southern gentleman and I believe in the separation of the races... but if I had a woman in my arms who looked like that, I'd kiss her too."
She was ready to quit the show, because her part was relatively small and she was frustrated. (Denise Crosby, years later, did quit, for similar reasons.) Martin Luther King Jr. told her she should stay in the show, because he felt she was being a good role model; that was enough to change her mind.
Horrified, LeMessurier fled to his island hideaway on Sebago Lake to refine the findings and consider his options. Because he faced possible litigation, bankruptcy, and professional disgrace he contemplated suicide, but he was struck with the realization that he held the information to initiate extraordinary events which could save thousands of lives. The following day he started making phone calls.
As for LeMessurier, the executives at Citicorp asked no more than the $2 million his insurance policy covered, despite the fact that the repairs alone cost over $8 million. It is generally thought that his forthrightness so impressed the executives that they decided to keep their lawyers at bay. It is clear that it takes a lot of character to admit one's own mistakes, but in accepting responsibility for this flaw and then leading the repair effort, the character shown by William J. LeMessurier was nothing short of heroic.
The Damn Interesting website is a potentially huge time sink. There is so much interesting stuff to read in there. Recommended.
Abolishment of copyright would be a decisive victory both for CC and GPL.
Not quite.
The GPL uses the power of copyright to enforce certain goals. If copyright loses force, the GPL loses force.
The BSD license is basically "you can do anything you want" and if copyright runs out, that's pretty much the situation. If copyright loses force, it's like everything is now BSD-licensed.
With no copyrights, Microsoft could take FSF software, change it, and sell the result without releasing source code. RMS would not be pleased.
The only reason we need the GPL is because commercial interests use copyright to artificially restrict their customers' freedom to do as they wish with their products.
No, another reason for the GPL is to keep anyone from taking free software, changing it, and not releasing the changes to the world.
The business volume customers aren't going to roll out Vista company-wide the same day they get it. They will start installing it on their test computers, evaluating it, seeing how it runs their in-house applications, etc. Plus, they should already have a good system in place for getting patches from Microsoft; it won't bother them much if there are lots of patches for a while.
The corporate guys will serve as an extension to the beta testing. If corporate test installs find anything, Microsoft can fix it and roll the fix into Vista before the final release.
Even if Microsoft had not slipped the final date, the corporate customers would still spend several months before rolling it out. They will probably be happy to get Vista earlier rather than later, so they can start the evaluation process.
The last customers who should get the OS are the home users, who want something that will Just Work right out of the box.
Nice of the poster to inject a controvertial personal view in the end of his submission for all of us to flame about.
Hi, I'm steveha. The poster.
For the record, here is the story submission exactly as I submitted it:
The cover story for this month's Discover magazine tells of a recently discovered gigantic virus, Mimivirus, that has blurred the lines between viruses and bacteria, and spurred speculation that viruses could be the reason life evolved past single-celled organisms.
Please note that I didn't put any personal views there.
Please also note that Zonk did not put words in my mouth. He put my summary in double-quotes, and then after the double-quotes he put some additional stuff from the article. He edited my link references but did not edit my words at all.
I think there is a market for mini-tablets--if not now, then for certain in the near future.
People are really using the Internet. People buy things, check their email, look up movie times, just generally Google for things. If you are looking up movie times, you can use any public Internet access terminal... but for email and buying things, you will want a trusted computer. And a small trusted computer you carry around is a great idea.
I have a policy of not typing in any password I care about to a public Internet terminal. There could be a keystroke logger running... especially if the terminal is a PC running Windows and IE, and thus vulnerable to attack by spyware and worms.
To me, the perfect portable device would be small enough to carry conveniently, but big enough that the screen is usable. This implies both a minimum as well as a maximum size. For a PDA, the minimum size is much smaller. I use my PDA heavily, but as an Internet device my PDA sucks. This looks like the perfect size. (I want to try one out in real life, though; so far I have just seen this on the web.)
This size of screen would also be great as a photo viewer and portable movie player. Unfortunately the 770 doesn't have an SD card slot (it has a mini-MMC slot) and I'm not sure how good a 200 MHz processor would be for viewing movies.
In the not-too-distant future, people will start paying for purchases at stores using a "digital wallet". Currently, you hand a credit card to a complete stranger at a store, and hope that the stranger doesn't make a copy of the number; a digital wallet would be more secure, while being very easy to use. The store computer would send a request for payment to the wallet, and the user would accept or decline. This device would make a perfect digital wallet. A PDA would also work as a digital wallet, but I can see people buying a mini-tablet who wouldn't buy a PDA.
This is also the perfect size for a device to use during a long airplane flight. You would want an extra battery pack for long flights. (Given that the specs say it has a 1500 mAh battery, and that's good for 3 hours, a battery pack with four NiMH AA cells could probably run it for at least another 3 hours and possibly as much as 6.)
For the near term, I'm not really sure how many of these things they will actually sell. But in the middle to long term, I think mini-tablets will sell very well.
I think that the Linux distro landscape will consolidate a bit on its own in the near future. No one can sit back and plan it--if someone told you to stop using your favorite distro and use something else, why should you pay any attention?--but I think market forces will shake out most of the distros and leave a handful as the top ones.
As long as anyone, anywhere in the world, keeps working on a distro, that distro is alive. So there will always be hundreds of distros. I'm just talking about the top end.
I also think that the desktop environment will become the important developer target: developers won't be developing for SuSE or Ubuntu, they will be developing for KDE or GNOME. As long as the distro does a good job of packaging the desktop environment, the apps should drop in and run.
I really want to see "logo compliance" become widespread in the future. Remember what John Carmack said about releasing for Linux: it's such a pain because you have so many different config options needed to release your software on all the different distros. What we need is a standard, for example "LinuxGame Level 2" or whatever. So if you saw a piece of software that said "LinuxGame Level 2 Compatible!" that would mean it should run on your distro if your distro supports LinuxGame Level 2. And if it doesn't work, you would first file bugs against the distro, not against the software developer.
You clearly have insider perspective I do not (cannot) have. But I still want to argue a couple of points.
Jeff Hawkins deserves most of the credit for Palm's early success. He really did figure out exactly what customers wanted in a PDA, where no one else had successfully figured it out before. He specified that the first Palm must: fit in a pocket; syncronize seamlessly with a host PC; use Graffiti instead of whole-word writing recognition; and have at least one model that cost $300 or less.
The first Palm devices were an amazing home run. Long battery life with 2 AAA cells. Simple software that really did Just Work. Replaceable/upgradable memory cards, so you could buy a $300 Palm and later upgrade it to the same amount of memory as the $500 one. Infrared "beaming" of data, including the cool feature of "here is my business card" (just press and hold the "contacts" hard key).
So Jeff Hawkins and a few others split off to make Handspring. You dismiss the Visor as "-- a Palm Pilot knock-off." Actually it was another home run. The first Palm PDA to use USB for HotSync. Much faster processor (Palms at the time were 8 MHz, the Visor was 16 MHz, and it wasn't that long before they shipped Visors with 33 MHz). Springboard was also a really cool slot; you could take a stock Visor and slot in an MP3 player, a flash card reader, etc. Maybe it was a "fat, ugly" add-on card standard, but it had some cool features. (For example, it used the same connector as a PCMCIA card, to make it cheaper to make in small quantities; and Handspring paid for the equipment to make the plastic shells for the cards and sold the shells cheaply. Basically the cost of entry for Springboard was as low as Handspring could manage.) I was happy that I could use a Visor keyboard and a Visor Springboard modem at the same time; all Palm modems at the time used the same connector that the keyboard needed to use.
I always wished someone would make a Springboard card that would turn a Visor into an autoranging voltage tester, but that never happened, sigh.
After the Visor, though, I waited for the next cool thing from Handspring and it never came. The color Visor was thick and heavy, and I never bought one. The Visor Edge was thin, but somehow cheap-feeling and never felt right in my hand. The Treo PDA with a built-in keyboard wasn't great either; I bought one but somehow kept using my Visor.
While you were chronicling the list of management mistakes, you missed a big one at Handspring: they "pulled an Osborne". Donna Dubinsky announced that PDAs were dead, that the Treo line was the future and there would be no new development of the Visor line. The problem was that she announced this at a time where Treos weren't the bread-and-butter of Handspring yet, and the Visor was still selling. Well, not for long, not after that. All the small companies that offered Springboard accessories pulled the plug, and just like that the Visor sales plummeted.
Jeff Hawkins probably is a genius, but he hasn't done much lately. Maybe it's too late anyway--it's now pretty clear what customers want in a PDA and execution is probably more important than genius.
Still, it would be cool if Jeff Hawkins started up a new company that made a new PDA that ran Linux. He could possibly hit a home run a third time.
Ubuntu Linux has a very nice Printer configuration dialog. Pull down System/Administration/Printing to check it out.
The toughest part of CUPS is setting up a remote printer. As other posters have complained, you need to type in a special URL and get it just right; an example would really help. But Ubuntu actually makes this easy too: open the Printer configuration dialog, and from the Global Settings menu choose "Detect LAN printers". Once you have done this, it will detect all the CUPS printers being shared out on the network and automatically add them for you!
It seems that if you check the "Detect LAN printers" checkbox, Ubuntu will start sharing out any printers on your computer. (I'm using Ubuntu 5.04; I'm not sure if 4.10 works this way or not.) See the comments in/etc/cups/cupsd.conf for the (terse) explanation. I hope that future versions will have somewhat more fine-grained control than this.
Before you can change the "Detect LAN printers" checkbox you will need to have the appropriate privileges. You will already have them if you are a member of the "lpadmin" group; otherwise, you must use the "Become Administrator" menu item from the Edit menu, and type in your password (just as with other sysadmin tools). To join the lpadmin group you can go to the System/Administration/Users and Groups dialog, click on your user name, click on "Properties", choose the "User Privileges" tab and check the "Setup Printers" checkbox.
This still isn't perfect. To share just one printer you would need to shut down CUPS and edit the config files by hand. Ubuntu picks a name for each printer you create using the Printers dialog, and to change this name you will need to edit config files by hand. If you "Detect LAN printers" you detect them all (all on the same subnet with your computer), and again I'd like somewhat more fine-grained control than that.
It may not be perfect but it's a huge improvement. If ESR had been using this, he never would have written that rant.
couldn't you use a series of multiplexers/demultiplxers?
Well, in real life you would have to.
Even a modern ball grid array chip doesn't have tens of thousands of pins; a few hundred at most. Back in the 80's, with the dual inline packages for chips, a few dozen pins at most was the limit.
So if you were insane enough to use a few thousand 8-bit flip-flop chips to build a memory, you would need to cascade a series of multiplexers and demultiplexers. I'm not really a hardware guy, but here's how I think it would all work. (Corrections cheerfully accepted if I get anything wrong.)
Suppose you had a bunch of 16:1 demultiplexers and wanted to use those for address select on the chips. Then every 16 flip-flop chips would have a demultiplexer hooked up to them, and you would group the chips in "paragraphs" of 16 flip-flops. You would hook up 16 paragraphs to another 16:1 demultiplexer, and that would be a page of 256 flip-flops (16*16). You would hook up 16 pages to another 16:1 demultiplexer, and so on until you ran out of chips, space on your breadboard, wire to connect them all, etc.
You would have to organize the various levels of demultiplexers to operate on some sort of a bus. The various address lines from the CPU would have to be connected to all the appropriate demultiplexers so that they all lit up just right to select the one flip-flop chip.
If the full 64KB memory were ever built using 16:1 demultiplexers, I guess you would need about this many:
1 demultiplexer to select which 4K bank to access 16 demuxes to select one page from a 4K bank 256 demuxes to select one paragraph from a page 4096 demuxes to select one byte from a paragraph
Total: 4369 demultiplexers. Notice that we have four levels of demuxes, each one expecting 4 bits of input, and we are decoding a 16-bit address. You send the most significant 4 bits from the CPU to the 4K bank select, the next most significant 4 bits to the page select, the next 4 most significant bits to the paragraph select, and the 4 least significant bits to the byte select.
In real life you would probably need some kind of buffers to boost the signals; I rather doubt if you could just wire-wrap 4096 demuxes to the CPU's address select lines!
That's just to handle address select. I'm not going to try to figure out how you would make the 8-bit data bus!
I love this sort of thing. The basic idea is silly, but he manages to show some useful stuff and make some valid points while exploring it.
I remember in the 1980's there was a great article on how to add a GOSUB keyword to the FORTH language. The article evolved the code through four different versions, and each one showed something cool and useful about FORTH. Well, maybe not the last one:
: GOSUB ; IMMEDIATE
For those of you who don't grok FORTH, this defines a keyword called GOSUB that does nothing, and does it at compile time so it doesn't get compiled in either. (The article noted that GOSUB FOO is the same thing as just plain old FOO, since FORTH functions are always called as subroutines anyway.)
Around the same time, I saw an article on how to build your own 64KB memory: take a breadboard, and 65536 8-bit flip-flop chips, plus a 1:65536 multiplexer and a 65536:1 demultiplexer for address selection! The article helpfully calculated how many Watts of power it would take to drive all these chips (a LOT) but it didn't say where one might find a multiplexer or demultiplexer with over 65000 pins on it.
Also, why don't we have fast user switching? I want to have multiple desktops belonging to multiple users, and switch between them quickly.
This, we do have. It's not identical to the fast user switching that XP does, but it get the job done.
On my Ubuntu system, Applications/System Tools/New Login gets a new login screen. I think it's basically just running another gdm (the login manager GNOME uses). Once you have two logins going at once, running this again pops up a switcher dialog; you can then choose to switch to a different login, or choose to start off another login.
In Linux there is a concept of "virtual terminals". Most Linux systems have six text consoles set up as the first six virtual terminals; if you hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 you pull up the first of these, tty1. Ctrl+Alt+F2 pulls up tty2, and so on. Your X session is bound to virtual terminal 7 and Ctrl+Alt+F7 should switch back to it.
Once you have additional login sessions going, these are on their own virtual terminals. If you get a second login it should be on virtual terminal 8 and Ctrl+Alt+F8 will pull it up.
In Ubuntu you can switch between logins and it will prompt you for a password, but if you switch using Ctrl+Alt+Fx it seems to stop prompting for a password after the first switch. That's a pretty fast user switch.
The new eyecandy-rich X stuff should make user switching even faster. If all windows live in offscreen buffers anyway it should be very fast to switch from drawing one desktop to drawing another.
steveha
The relationship between unstable and testing
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
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· Score: 4, Informative
I always hear about Sarge, but what about the unstable branch of Debian ? I still don't get why Sarge would require unstable to be frozen like that - and in fact, it isn't the case for most of the other packages.
It's very simple.
Debian has three major branches: stable, testing, and unstable.
The stable branch is treated very carefully. It will get security patches, but otherwise will not be changed. It's a "frozen" release. Most Debian users will run the stable branch on their servers.
The testing and unstable branches work together and are closely related. The unstable branch is where new packages are checked in. Once the new package has been in unstable for a while and is working out well, it will be auto-migrated into the testing branch.
And this is the answer to your question: Debian cannot update the unstable branch to X.org without cutting off the testing branch from further updates, or risking that X.org packages might get migrated into sarge by the scripts that update testing. Why would the Debian guys make more work for themselves by doing this?
All three branches have "code names". The unstable branch is code-named "sid", always. The testing branch is currently code-named "sarge". When sarge is "released", what will happen? First, the current stable branch (code-named "woody") will be retired from the main servers. Second, the servers will be updated to have the sarge packages listed as the stable branch. Third, a new code name will be chosen for the next release, and the testing branch will be named with that code name. (At that exact moment, I guess the testing branch will be identical to the stable branch, but that won't be true for long.) Finally, all the checkins that were held back, waiting for the release of sarge, will start to flood into unstable; this is when you can expect to see X.org in unstable.
Actually there is a fourth branch of Debian: experimental. You will really see X.org show up in experimental before it even shows up in unstable. Once people have good success with the packages in experimental, the packages will be checked in to unstable. (Just because it is called "unstable" doesn't mean that Debian is completely careless.)
The problem is that the expected date release of Sarge was pushed back over and over.
This is just Debian for you. Debian is a loose coalition of volunteers, and their sole goal is to put out a distribution that will be rock solid. They ship "when it's done", not according to some schedule.
Note that there is any reason you cannot use sarge now. Why wait? It's already very stable. I used to use unstable on my desktops, and that was stable enough for me; testing should be even more stable.
The Debian X Strike Force was IMHO quite slow at reacting to the upcoming of XOrg.
The X Strike Force is not a large team, it has a lot of work to do, and what you think of it doesn't really change anything. If you join the X Strike Force and help them get their work done, then I will listen attentively to your opinions, and until then, I'll gently suggest you not complain of their slowness.
If you want to combine the Debian goodness with the X.org exciting new flavor, I have two suggestions for you.
First, you can read the discussion here about how to compile your own X.org from the CVS, and set that up on your Debian system. It works so well there is "no need for packages", according to that discussion.
Also, if you would like everything that is good about Debian but with faster release cycles, you ought to look into Ubuntu. Ubuntu is committed to a new version every six months, and their next release (due to release in April 2005) already has X.org checked in. I'm using that to type this message. It's definitely not as stable as the released version of Ubuntu from October 2004 but I can deal with it and I like th
The new manager decided to just use WinWord 2.0's code-base on the Mac.
Not quite correct. I worked there around that time.
The decision was to use the same source code to build both Windows and Mac versions.
With Pyramid, the goal was to make a word processor that would be carefully designed: back end universal, front end specific to each supported OS (which would be Windows, MacOS, and possibly OS/2 PM). When Pyramid didn't work out as well as they hoped, they decided to take the Windows source code and build it for MacOS.
Rather than running wild with #ifdef statements and trying to make a native Mac interface, they used a compatibility library. IIRC this was called WLM (Windows Layer for Macintosh). It was not unlike the "winelib" library.
Because both Windows Word and Mac Word were compiled from the same source code, the two products became fully compatible. This was a major leap in features for the Mac Word product. Previous versions of Mac Word had been much smaller and faster, but they were also missing features compared to Windows Word, which meant that file compatibility was not 100%. (You can't import a file, and then export that file with edits, if your word processor does not support all the features that file uses!)
Business users were much happier with Mac Word 6 because of the file compatibility. Home users, students, and magazine reporters tended to be annoyed about the slower speed of Word 6 compared to the older versions. There was a bug that made the "word count" feature particularly slow, and Microsoft caught a lot of heat from the press because magazine reporters tend to care a lot about word counts.
As for it being a top 10 flop, I disagree. I don't think you can reasonably call it a failure. From Mac Word 6 onward, every version of Word for the Mac has had good feature compatibility with Windows Word, and of course Macs got faster and got more RAM. And Microsoft wasn't making enough money on the Mac version to continue to support a complete extra development team with its own code base.
And by the way, the Mac developers I knew at Microsoft all really loved the Mac and wanted to make good software for it. You can accuse Microsoft of not caring about the Mac, or grudgingly writing code for it, but it's not true.
I'm still confused (and I did RTFA) how the bits of the bootloader were translated to sound.
His goal: extract the data from the ROM.
His problem: he didn't know very much about the hardware. Sending the data through the FireWire port was not an option, since he had no idea how to access that port.
His opportunity: someone showed him how to make the piezo make sounds.
So, he picked one sound to represent a 1 bit, and picked a different sound (more of a click) to represent a 0 bit. Then he wrote code to read data from the ROM, and bit by bit, look at each bit and play the appropriate sound. He recorded the sound. It took hours to dump the whole ROM this way.
Then it was a matter of sampling the recording with a desktop computer, and writing code to detect the two different sounds, turn them into data bits, and save the data bits on disk.
Disclaimer: I am not a self-defense expert, but I have read many books and articles, and taken classes.
you're more likely to have your gun pointed at you than you are to point it at someone else.
References, please. You are probably thinking of the Kellerman study, but that has been discredited. The Lott study shows that firearms tend to prevent crime.
If someone knows you and wants to kill you (ex-lover, family member, etc), it's trivial to pick your front door lock, calmly get your gun, and kill you.
References, please: how often does this chilling scenario actually play out in real life? And how often does the attacker simply bring his own firearm? (And how often does he simply bash in your sleeping head with a crowbar?)
If, on the other hand, it is a burgler, you're far more likely to survive the incident unscathed if you just feign sleep until the person goes away.
According to what I have read, most burglars try to only enter homes that are empty. The burglars who are willing to enter occupied homes are the dangerous ones, and I don't think "feign sleep" is the best plan to handle the dangerous ones.
If you go for your gun, you are far more likely to get shot, beaten in transit, or otherwise permanently injured.
If a burglar enters your house, do not take the gun and go looking for the burglar. Retreat to a "safe room" (usually the master bedroom) and lock the door. From the safe room, call the police. If the bad guy breaks down the door to your safe room, shoot him. If he stays out of the safe room, leave him to the police.
You should of course have a flashlight, and a cellular phone, in the safe room.
If you have kids, a smart gun is the only way to have a gun in the house anyway.
If you have kids, the only way to have firearms in your house is to have a secure gun safe and to lock up the firearms in it. You might also choose to have a fast-opening mini-safe with one handgun in it next to your bed, if you think you might need a handgun quickly. (I suggest you "harden" your defenses so it will take longer for a bad guy to get into your house; if a bad guy can enter your house in seconds, that's a problem.)
"Trigger locks" are a bad idea and are not a good alternative to a safe. If you have kids, get a safe. And bolt it to your floor or your wall.
Don't tell me that you're going to unlock your gun cabinet, unlock your ammunition cabinet, and load your firearm while someone is charging at you with a crowbar.
As I said, "harden" your home so that the bad guy cannot get in too fast, and lock yourself in to your safe room. There is no reason why you cannot store a ready-to-use defensive firearm in the gun safe. You might choose a pistol with a loaded magazine but without a round chambered; it will just take racking the slide to make it ready to shoot.
If you really want to protect yourself and your property, install an alarm system and perimeter cameras.
An excellent suggestion, and one I endorse. That way if a bad guy ever breaks in to your house wanting to kill you, the loud scary noise might convince him to go away, and will wake you up so you can secure yourself in the safe room and call the cops. If the bad guy breaks down the door of your safe room, you will be awake and ready for him.
If you think that an alarm system, by itself, will in some way keep a bad guy from harming you... well, how? Maybe if you live right next door to a police station.
Actually, most burglars would simply skip your house and find another one without a burglar alarm. I'm a big fan of burglar alarms. But if some guy gets it into his head that he wants to enter your house and cause mayhem, the alarm won't stop him.
Let whoever it is take whatever it is they want, then nail them
0) If you need a gun to save your life, you need it right away, and if this thing malfunctions it could result in someone dying. (If it fails soft, and lets anyone fire it, it won't be serving its intended purpose. If it fails hard, and lets no one fire it, the firearm won't be serving its intended purpose.)
1) If it works as designed, the bad guys simply won't use such guns. Since the bad guys bring their own guns (they decide when to attack and where) this will not keep the bad guys from attacking anyone. This might save police officers from being shot with their own guns. It will also prevent one officer from being able to borrow a gun from another officer in an emergency.
2) Anyone who tells you that these new guns will completely displace the old ones is dreaming. Guns are durable, and there are literally millions of guns out there. We can't even keep drug addicts from buying drugs once a week, so we will never keep bad guys from buying a gun and carrying it around for months. Most bad guys don't even need to buy bullets, since they usually get what they want just by pointing the gun. (And how hard could it be to simply break the mechanism on a stolen gun so the gun just works all the time?)
3) This drives up the cost of a gun, which means it drives up the cost of defending your life. This matters little to those of us who live in the expensive part of town, or to people who live where average people just aren't allowed to have guns anyway (Washington, D.C.; New York; etc.) but I still don't like it.
4) I'll tell you right now what the next step will be: "Since we have these now, there is no need to let the old guns stay legal." Just wait, people will start urging that "unsafe" older guns become illegal "for the sake of the children".
I bought a Sharp Aquos LCD television last year. It's only a 20" model, not a giant one, and it's only normal TV, not HDTV.
It's way better than the CRT it replaced.
There are no issues with ghosting; it clearly refreshes fast enough for TV, DVDs, or console video gaming.
I am looking forward to the day when I get a much bigger one (the 37" and 42" both look nice). When I get the bigger one, it will be a model with a DVI input, and I'll hook up a computer to that. I want to play first-person games on a giant screen with my living room's surround sound all around me.
steveha
P.S. I figure LCD is pretty much a stable technology at this point. It's basically a large laptop screen, and those have been around for years. Plasma has burnin issues, and OLED may simply fade with time. I look forward to SED displays... but LCD is here now and getting more affordable every year.
The iAudio M3 looks sweet. (Cnet gave it a 8.7 rating.) One thing I'm wondering about: is there a "gap killer" in the iAudio players?
A gap killer is a feature that lets two songs in an album play seamlessly. It's great for (for example) a live album. Without a gap killer it sounds like this: applause... SILENCE... applause, band starts playing. The SILENCE is the gap, and I want to kill the gap.
A gap killer is essential for listening to many of my albums.
If I'm going to have something like this in my living room, I want it to be quiet. That means I want it to be cool. But this thing has a Pentium 4 motherboard.
I'd really rather have a 90nm Athlon64, with "Cool n Quiet". And whatever 3D chipset has the best performance/heat ratio. (Probably an ATI chipset... too bad the drivers suck in Linux. Are there any nVidia chipsets that can run Doom 3 but don't also heat your room?)
A PowerPC chip would also be good. Hey, Apple -- you ought to make a living-room Mac.
When you learn that the X server is indeed the server, it is easier to understand important properties of the interaction with X clients and servers, like, if you shut down the server, the clients lose their display
If you terminate a web browser, your web browsing is interrupted. From the user's point of view, a web browser works much like an X server, but the names are backwards. "Server" does not necessarily imply that it keeps state for you.
I still think the X guys could have called the window display part the "client". The internal documentation, read only by computer geeks working on X, could use the correct terminology to document the protocols, without confusing newbies.
Yes, the X server serves windows, so the name is valid. But why do we have to name it based on what the protocols are doing? If you take a step back and look at a bigger picture, you could with equal validity say that your rack-mount server box is an X application server, and that the user runs an application client. Every window opened by an X server has to have a client on the other end, and just by calling that client an "application" we can shift the terminology to make it easier to understand.
When you run the server on your thin client, and the clients all run on your rackmount server, and the newbies are all confused, and we need to write posts explaining why the seemingly backwards terminology is in fact correct... in some sense, it's sensible, but if you take a poll of a bunch of newbies, the consensus would be that it's confusing. (I'll stop now before someone beats me senseless.)
If some terminology makes arguable sense but confuses everyone but hard-core computer geeks, is it really the best terminology? I say no.
I really, really wish the X guys hadn't used this terminology. But they did, so we need to keep it straight.
Just think of it this way:
A file server provides files to its clients. A print server provides printing to its clients. An X Window server provides graphical windows to its clients.
Thus, when you run any X application, it is a client to the X Window server. It asks the server for a window to display stuff in.
So, if you buy an expensive rack-mount server machine, and you hook up a thin client that lets you use a GUI, that thin client has an X server on it, and the X server talks to X clients that run on the server.
The neat thing is that in the other universe (the one where Spock has a beard), they call "clients" "servers" and "servers" "clients", but the X guys still did it backwards there so this confusion still applies.
Slashdot Mirror
The companies who are really serious about servers are particularly interested in CPU power compared to heat dissipation -- thermal density. This new Intel CPU is high performance with high heat--more of a gamer chip. At least so far it is; it's a very early sample and Intel hasn't had time to tune the power management features.
Intel's latest chips are fabbed at 65nm, while AMD is still only shipping chips fabbed at 90nm. This should give Intel a serious edge in the performance/heat ratio, but AMD's chips are so much more energy efficient that they are still competitive. (The current best performance/heat is the AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ ADD chip.) When AMD finally ships 65nm Opterons, those ought to be really great for dense server installations.
It's telling that even Dell is planning to ship servers with AMD chips. They announced a 4-core server; two dual-core Opterons. It wouldn't surprise me if they will be 65nm Opterons when they finally are released.
The article says that Intel is going to transition from 65nm to 45nm sometime in 2007, and to 34nm sometime in 2009. They beat AMD to 65nm big-time. They may well be at 34nm before AMD can make it to 45nm! Just imagine some sort of server chip with 16 cores... or more likely, 8 cores and a whole bunch of cache.
But we shouldn't count those chickens before they hatch. Right now Intel is at 65nm and AMD will be there soon.
steveha
According to Nichelle Nichols in her Trek book, it was the first interracial kiss. She said that they shot the real kiss first, and then William Shatner kept accidentally-on-purpose doing things that ruined the shot every time they tried to film a fake kiss. She said she has no idea why he doesn't remember that.
Her book also had a great quote from a letter sent to the show, written by a man from the South. He said words to the effect of "I'm a Southern gentleman and I believe in the separation of the races... but if I had a woman in my arms who looked like that, I'd kiss her too."
She was ready to quit the show, because her part was relatively small and she was frustrated. (Denise Crosby, years later, did quit, for similar reasons.) Martin Luther King Jr. told her she should stay in the show, because he felt she was being a good role model; that was enough to change her mind.
steveha
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=500
Some quotes:
The Damn Interesting website is a potentially huge time sink. There is so much interesting stuff to read in there. Recommended.
steveha
Abolishment of copyright would be a decisive victory both for CC and GPL.
Not quite.
The GPL uses the power of copyright to enforce certain goals. If copyright loses force, the GPL loses force.
The BSD license is basically "you can do anything you want" and if copyright runs out, that's pretty much the situation. If copyright loses force, it's like everything is now BSD-licensed.
With no copyrights, Microsoft could take FSF software, change it, and sell the result without releasing source code. RMS would not be pleased.
The only reason we need the GPL is because commercial interests use copyright to artificially restrict their customers' freedom to do as they wish with their products.
No, another reason for the GPL is to keep anyone from taking free software, changing it, and not releasing the changes to the world.
steveha
The business volume customers aren't going to roll out Vista company-wide the same day they get it. They will start installing it on their test computers, evaluating it, seeing how it runs their in-house applications, etc. Plus, they should already have a good system in place for getting patches from Microsoft; it won't bother them much if there are lots of patches for a while.
The corporate guys will serve as an extension to the beta testing. If corporate test installs find anything, Microsoft can fix it and roll the fix into Vista before the final release.
Even if Microsoft had not slipped the final date, the corporate customers would still spend several months before rolling it out. They will probably be happy to get Vista earlier rather than later, so they can start the evaluation process.
The last customers who should get the OS are the home users, who want something that will Just Work right out of the box.
steveha
it's too bad the focus of the submitter was on the Intelligent Design snippet
8 22486
Hi, I'm steveha. The submitter.
Please read this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178821&cid=14
steveha
Hi, I'm steveha. The poster.
For the record, here is the story submission exactly as I submitted it:
Please note that I didn't put any personal views there.
Please also note that Zonk did not put words in my mouth. He put my summary in double-quotes, and then after the double-quotes he put some additional stuff from the article. He edited my link references but did not edit my words at all.
steveha
I think there is a market for mini-tablets--if not now, then for certain in the near future.
People are really using the Internet. People buy things, check their email, look up movie times, just generally Google for things. If you are looking up movie times, you can use any public Internet access terminal... but for email and buying things, you will want a trusted computer. And a small trusted computer you carry around is a great idea.
I have a policy of not typing in any password I care about to a public Internet terminal. There could be a keystroke logger running... especially if the terminal is a PC running Windows and IE, and thus vulnerable to attack by spyware and worms.
To me, the perfect portable device would be small enough to carry conveniently, but big enough that the screen is usable. This implies both a minimum as well as a maximum size. For a PDA, the minimum size is much smaller. I use my PDA heavily, but as an Internet device my PDA sucks. This looks like the perfect size. (I want to try one out in real life, though; so far I have just seen this on the web.)
This size of screen would also be great as a photo viewer and portable movie player. Unfortunately the 770 doesn't have an SD card slot (it has a mini-MMC slot) and I'm not sure how good a 200 MHz processor would be for viewing movies.
In the not-too-distant future, people will start paying for purchases at stores using a "digital wallet". Currently, you hand a credit card to a complete stranger at a store, and hope that the stranger doesn't make a copy of the number; a digital wallet would be more secure, while being very easy to use. The store computer would send a request for payment to the wallet, and the user would accept or decline. This device would make a perfect digital wallet. A PDA would also work as a digital wallet, but I can see people buying a mini-tablet who wouldn't buy a PDA.
This is also the perfect size for a device to use during a long airplane flight. You would want an extra battery pack for long flights. (Given that the specs say it has a 1500 mAh battery, and that's good for 3 hours, a battery pack with four NiMH AA cells could probably run it for at least another 3 hours and possibly as much as 6.)
For the near term, I'm not really sure how many of these things they will actually sell. But in the middle to long term, I think mini-tablets will sell very well.
steveha
As long as anyone, anywhere in the world, keeps working on a distro, that distro is alive. So there will always be hundreds of distros. I'm just talking about the top end.
I also think that the desktop environment will become the important developer target: developers won't be developing for SuSE or Ubuntu, they will be developing for KDE or GNOME. As long as the distro does a good job of packaging the desktop environment, the apps should drop in and run.
I really want to see "logo compliance" become widespread in the future. Remember what John Carmack said about releasing for Linux: it's such a pain because you have so many different config options needed to release your software on all the different distros. What we need is a standard, for example "LinuxGame Level 2" or whatever. So if you saw a piece of software that said "LinuxGame Level 2 Compatible!" that would mean it should run on your distro if your distro supports LinuxGame Level 2. And if it doesn't work, you would first file bugs against the distro, not against the software developer.
steveha
You clearly have insider perspective I do not (cannot) have. But I still want to argue a couple of points.
Jeff Hawkins deserves most of the credit for Palm's early success. He really did figure out exactly what customers wanted in a PDA, where no one else had successfully figured it out before. He specified that the first Palm must: fit in a pocket; syncronize seamlessly with a host PC; use Graffiti instead of whole-word writing recognition; and have at least one model that cost $300 or less.
The first Palm devices were an amazing home run. Long battery life with 2 AAA cells. Simple software that really did Just Work. Replaceable/upgradable memory cards, so you could buy a $300 Palm and later upgrade it to the same amount of memory as the $500 one. Infrared "beaming" of data, including the cool feature of "here is my business card" (just press and hold the "contacts" hard key).
So Jeff Hawkins and a few others split off to make Handspring. You dismiss the Visor as "-- a Palm Pilot knock-off." Actually it was another home run. The first Palm PDA to use USB for HotSync. Much faster processor (Palms at the time were 8 MHz, the Visor was 16 MHz, and it wasn't that long before they shipped Visors with 33 MHz). Springboard was also a really cool slot; you could take a stock Visor and slot in an MP3 player, a flash card reader, etc. Maybe it was a "fat, ugly" add-on card standard, but it had some cool features. (For example, it used the same connector as a PCMCIA card, to make it cheaper to make in small quantities; and Handspring paid for the equipment to make the plastic shells for the cards and sold the shells cheaply. Basically the cost of entry for Springboard was as low as Handspring could manage.) I was happy that I could use a Visor keyboard and a Visor Springboard modem at the same time; all Palm modems at the time used the same connector that the keyboard needed to use.
I always wished someone would make a Springboard card that would turn a Visor into an autoranging voltage tester, but that never happened, sigh.
After the Visor, though, I waited for the next cool thing from Handspring and it never came. The color Visor was thick and heavy, and I never bought one. The Visor Edge was thin, but somehow cheap-feeling and never felt right in my hand. The Treo PDA with a built-in keyboard wasn't great either; I bought one but somehow kept using my Visor.
While you were chronicling the list of management mistakes, you missed a big one at Handspring: they "pulled an Osborne". Donna Dubinsky announced that PDAs were dead, that the Treo line was the future and there would be no new development of the Visor line. The problem was that she announced this at a time where Treos weren't the bread-and-butter of Handspring yet, and the Visor was still selling. Well, not for long, not after that. All the small companies that offered Springboard accessories pulled the plug, and just like that the Visor sales plummeted.
Jeff Hawkins probably is a genius, but he hasn't done much lately. Maybe it's too late anyway--it's now pretty clear what customers want in a PDA and execution is probably more important than genius.
Still, it would be cool if Jeff Hawkins started up a new company that made a new PDA that ran Linux. He could possibly hit a home run a third time.
steveha
Ubuntu Linux has a very nice Printer configuration dialog. Pull down System/Administration/Printing to check it out.
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf for the (terse) explanation. I hope that future versions will have somewhat more fine-grained control than this.
The toughest part of CUPS is setting up a remote printer. As other posters have complained, you need to type in a special URL and get it just right; an example would really help. But Ubuntu actually makes this easy too: open the Printer configuration dialog, and from the Global Settings menu choose "Detect LAN printers". Once you have done this, it will detect all the CUPS printers being shared out on the network and automatically add them for you!
It seems that if you check the "Detect LAN printers" checkbox, Ubuntu will start sharing out any printers on your computer. (I'm using Ubuntu 5.04; I'm not sure if 4.10 works this way or not.) See the comments in
Before you can change the "Detect LAN printers" checkbox you will need to have the appropriate privileges. You will already have them if you are a member of the "lpadmin" group; otherwise, you must use the "Become Administrator" menu item from the Edit menu, and type in your password (just as with other sysadmin tools). To join the lpadmin group you can go to the System/Administration/Users and Groups dialog, click on your user name, click on "Properties", choose the "User Privileges" tab and check the "Setup Printers" checkbox.
This still isn't perfect. To share just one printer you would need to shut down CUPS and edit the config files by hand. Ubuntu picks a name for each printer you create using the Printers dialog, and to change this name you will need to edit config files by hand. If you "Detect LAN printers" you detect them all (all on the same subnet with your computer), and again I'd like somewhat more fine-grained control than that.
It may not be perfect but it's a huge improvement. If ESR had been using this, he never would have written that rant.
steveha
couldn't you use a series of multiplexers/demultiplxers?
Well, in real life you would have to.
Even a modern ball grid array chip doesn't have tens of thousands of pins; a few hundred at most. Back in the 80's, with the dual inline packages for chips, a few dozen pins at most was the limit.
So if you were insane enough to use a few thousand 8-bit flip-flop chips to build a memory, you would need to cascade a series of multiplexers and demultiplexers. I'm not really a hardware guy, but here's how I think it would all work. (Corrections cheerfully accepted if I get anything wrong.)
Suppose you had a bunch of 16:1 demultiplexers and wanted to use those for address select on the chips. Then every 16 flip-flop chips would have a demultiplexer hooked up to them, and you would group the chips in "paragraphs" of 16 flip-flops. You would hook up 16 paragraphs to another 16:1 demultiplexer, and that would be a page of 256 flip-flops (16*16). You would hook up 16 pages to another 16:1 demultiplexer, and so on until you ran out of chips, space on your breadboard, wire to connect them all, etc.
You would have to organize the various levels of demultiplexers to operate on some sort of a bus. The various address lines from the CPU would have to be connected to all the appropriate demultiplexers so that they all lit up just right to select the one flip-flop chip.
If the full 64KB memory were ever built using 16:1 demultiplexers, I guess you would need about this many:
1 demultiplexer to select which 4K bank to access
16 demuxes to select one page from a 4K bank
256 demuxes to select one paragraph from a page
4096 demuxes to select one byte from a paragraph
Total: 4369 demultiplexers. Notice that we have four levels of demuxes, each one expecting 4 bits of input, and we are decoding a 16-bit address. You send the most significant 4 bits from the CPU to the 4K bank select, the next most significant 4 bits to the page select, the next 4 most significant bits to the paragraph select, and the 4 least significant bits to the byte select.
In real life you would probably need some kind of buffers to boost the signals; I rather doubt if you could just wire-wrap 4096 demuxes to the CPU's address select lines!
That's just to handle address select. I'm not going to try to figure out how you would make the 8-bit data bus!
steveha
I love this sort of thing. The basic idea is silly, but he manages to show some useful stuff and make some valid points while exploring it.
I remember in the 1980's there was a great article on how to add a GOSUB keyword to the FORTH language. The article evolved the code through four different versions, and each one showed something cool and useful about FORTH. Well, maybe not the last one:
: GOSUB ; IMMEDIATE
For those of you who don't grok FORTH, this defines a keyword called GOSUB that does nothing, and does it at compile time so it doesn't get compiled in either. (The article noted that GOSUB FOO is the same thing as just plain old FOO, since FORTH functions are always called as subroutines anyway.)
Around the same time, I saw an article on how to build your own 64KB memory: take a breadboard, and 65536 8-bit flip-flop chips, plus a 1:65536 multiplexer and a 65536:1 demultiplexer for address selection! The article helpfully calculated how many Watts of power it would take to drive all these chips (a LOT) but it didn't say where one might find a multiplexer or demultiplexer with over 65000 pins on it.
steveha
Also, why don't we have fast user switching? I want to have multiple desktops belonging to multiple users, and switch between them quickly.
This, we do have. It's not identical to the fast user switching that XP does, but it get the job done.
On my Ubuntu system, Applications/System Tools/New Login gets a new login screen. I think it's basically just running another gdm (the login manager GNOME uses). Once you have two logins going at once, running this again pops up a switcher dialog; you can then choose to switch to a different login, or choose to start off another login.
In Linux there is a concept of "virtual terminals". Most Linux systems have six text consoles set up as the first six virtual terminals; if you hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 you pull up the first of these, tty1. Ctrl+Alt+F2 pulls up tty2, and so on. Your X session is bound to virtual terminal 7 and Ctrl+Alt+F7 should switch back to it.
Once you have additional login sessions going, these are on their own virtual terminals. If you get a second login it should be on virtual terminal 8 and Ctrl+Alt+F8 will pull it up.
In Ubuntu you can switch between logins and it will prompt you for a password, but if you switch using Ctrl+Alt+Fx it seems to stop prompting for a password after the first switch. That's a pretty fast user switch.
The new eyecandy-rich X stuff should make user switching even faster. If all windows live in offscreen buffers anyway it should be very fast to switch from drawing one desktop to drawing another.
steveha
I always hear about Sarge, but what about the unstable branch of Debian ? I still don't get why Sarge would require unstable to be frozen like that - and in fact, it isn't the case for most of the other packages.
It's very simple.
Debian has three major branches: stable, testing, and unstable.
The stable branch is treated very carefully. It will get security patches, but otherwise will not be changed. It's a "frozen" release. Most Debian users will run the stable branch on their servers.
The testing and unstable branches work together and are closely related. The unstable branch is where new packages are checked in. Once the new package has been in unstable for a while and is working out well, it will be auto-migrated into the testing branch.
And this is the answer to your question: Debian cannot update the unstable branch to X.org without cutting off the testing branch from further updates, or risking that X.org packages might get migrated into sarge by the scripts that update testing. Why would the Debian guys make more work for themselves by doing this?
All three branches have "code names". The unstable branch is code-named "sid", always. The testing branch is currently code-named "sarge". When sarge is "released", what will happen? First, the current stable branch (code-named "woody") will be retired from the main servers. Second, the servers will be updated to have the sarge packages listed as the stable branch. Third, a new code name will be chosen for the next release, and the testing branch will be named with that code name. (At that exact moment, I guess the testing branch will be identical to the stable branch, but that won't be true for long.) Finally, all the checkins that were held back, waiting for the release of sarge, will start to flood into unstable; this is when you can expect to see X.org in unstable.
Actually there is a fourth branch of Debian: experimental. You will really see X.org show up in experimental before it even shows up in unstable. Once people have good success with the packages in experimental, the packages will be checked in to unstable. (Just because it is called "unstable" doesn't mean that Debian is completely careless.)
The problem is that the expected date release of Sarge was pushed back over and over.
This is just Debian for you. Debian is a loose coalition of volunteers, and their sole goal is to put out a distribution that will be rock solid. They ship "when it's done", not according to some schedule.
Note that there is any reason you cannot use sarge now. Why wait? It's already very stable. I used to use unstable on my desktops, and that was stable enough for me; testing should be even more stable.
The Debian X Strike Force was IMHO quite slow at reacting to the upcoming of XOrg.
The X Strike Force is not a large team, it has a lot of work to do, and what you think of it doesn't really change anything. If you join the X Strike Force and help them get their work done, then I will listen attentively to your opinions, and until then, I'll gently suggest you not complain of their slowness.
If you want to combine the Debian goodness with the X.org exciting new flavor, I have two suggestions for you.
First, you can read the discussion here about how to compile your own X.org from the CVS, and set that up on your Debian system. It works so well there is "no need for packages", according to that discussion.
Also, if you would like everything that is good about Debian but with faster release cycles, you ought to look into Ubuntu. Ubuntu is committed to a new version every six months, and their next release (due to release in April 2005) already has X.org checked in. I'm using that to type this message. It's definitely not as stable as the released version of Ubuntu from October 2004 but I can deal with it and I like th
From the article:
The new manager decided to just use WinWord 2.0's code-base on the Mac.
Not quite correct. I worked there around that time.
The decision was to use the same source code to build both Windows and Mac versions.
With Pyramid, the goal was to make a word processor that would be carefully designed: back end universal, front end specific to each supported OS (which would be Windows, MacOS, and possibly OS/2 PM). When Pyramid didn't work out as well as they hoped, they decided to take the Windows source code and build it for MacOS.
Rather than running wild with #ifdef statements and trying to make a native Mac interface, they used a compatibility library. IIRC this was called WLM (Windows Layer for Macintosh). It was not unlike the "winelib" library.
Because both Windows Word and Mac Word were compiled from the same source code, the two products became fully compatible. This was a major leap in features for the Mac Word product. Previous versions of Mac Word had been much smaller and faster, but they were also missing features compared to Windows Word, which meant that file compatibility was not 100%. (You can't import a file, and then export that file with edits, if your word processor does not support all the features that file uses!)
Business users were much happier with Mac Word 6 because of the file compatibility. Home users, students, and magazine reporters tended to be annoyed about the slower speed of Word 6 compared to the older versions. There was a bug that made the "word count" feature particularly slow, and Microsoft caught a lot of heat from the press because magazine reporters tend to care a lot about word counts.
As for it being a top 10 flop, I disagree. I don't think you can reasonably call it a failure. From Mac Word 6 onward, every version of Word for the Mac has had good feature compatibility with Windows Word, and of course Macs got faster and got more RAM. And Microsoft wasn't making enough money on the Mac version to continue to support a complete extra development team with its own code base.
And by the way, the Mac developers I knew at Microsoft all really loved the Mac and wanted to make good software for it. You can accuse Microsoft of not caring about the Mac, or grudgingly writing code for it, but it's not true.
steveha
I'm still confused (and I did RTFA) how the bits of the bootloader were translated to sound.
His goal: extract the data from the ROM.
His problem: he didn't know very much about the hardware. Sending the data through the FireWire port was not an option, since he had no idea how to access that port.
His opportunity: someone showed him how to make the piezo make sounds.
So, he picked one sound to represent a 1 bit, and picked a different sound (more of a click) to represent a 0 bit. Then he wrote code to read data from the ROM, and bit by bit, look at each bit and play the appropriate sound. He recorded the sound. It took hours to dump the whole ROM this way.
Then it was a matter of sampling the recording with a desktop computer, and writing code to detect the two different sounds, turn them into data bits, and save the data bits on disk.
steveha
Disclaimer: I am not a self-defense expert, but I have read many books and articles, and taken classes.
you're more likely to have your gun pointed at you than you are to point it at someone else.
References, please. You are probably thinking of the Kellerman study, but that has been discredited. The Lott study shows that firearms tend to prevent crime.
If someone knows you and wants to kill you (ex-lover, family member, etc), it's trivial to pick your front door lock, calmly get your gun, and kill you.
References, please: how often does this chilling scenario actually play out in real life? And how often does the attacker simply bring his own firearm? (And how often does he simply bash in your sleeping head with a crowbar?)
If, on the other hand, it is a burgler, you're far more likely to survive the incident unscathed if you just feign sleep until the person goes away.
According to what I have read, most burglars try to only enter homes that are empty. The burglars who are willing to enter occupied homes are the dangerous ones, and I don't think "feign sleep" is the best plan to handle the dangerous ones.
If you go for your gun, you are far more likely to get shot, beaten in transit, or otherwise permanently injured.
If a burglar enters your house, do not take the gun and go looking for the burglar. Retreat to a "safe room" (usually the master bedroom) and lock the door. From the safe room, call the police. If the bad guy breaks down the door to your safe room, shoot him. If he stays out of the safe room, leave him to the police.
You should of course have a flashlight, and a cellular phone, in the safe room.
If you have kids, a smart gun is the only way to have a gun in the house anyway.
If you have kids, the only way to have firearms in your house is to have a secure gun safe and to lock up the firearms in it. You might also choose to have a fast-opening mini-safe with one handgun in it next to your bed, if you think you might need a handgun quickly. (I suggest you "harden" your defenses so it will take longer for a bad guy to get into your house; if a bad guy can enter your house in seconds, that's a problem.)
"Trigger locks" are a bad idea and are not a good alternative to a safe. If you have kids, get a safe. And bolt it to your floor or your wall.
Don't tell me that you're going to unlock your gun cabinet, unlock your ammunition cabinet, and load your firearm while someone is charging at you with a crowbar.
As I said, "harden" your home so that the bad guy cannot get in too fast, and lock yourself in to your safe room. There is no reason why you cannot store a ready-to-use defensive firearm in the gun safe. You might choose a pistol with a loaded magazine but without a round chambered; it will just take racking the slide to make it ready to shoot.
If you really want to protect yourself and your property, install an alarm system and perimeter cameras.
An excellent suggestion, and one I endorse. That way if a bad guy ever breaks in to your house wanting to kill you, the loud scary noise might convince him to go away, and will wake you up so you can secure yourself in the safe room and call the cops. If the bad guy breaks down the door of your safe room, you will be awake and ready for him.
If you think that an alarm system, by itself, will in some way keep a bad guy from harming you... well, how? Maybe if you live right next door to a police station.
Actually, most burglars would simply skip your house and find another one without a burglar alarm. I'm a big fan of burglar alarms. But if some guy gets it into his head that he wants to enter your house and cause mayhem, the alarm won't stop him.
Let whoever it is take whatever it is they want, then nail them
0) If you need a gun to save your life, you need it right away, and if this thing malfunctions it could result in someone dying. (If it fails soft, and lets anyone fire it, it won't be serving its intended purpose. If it fails hard, and lets no one fire it, the firearm won't be serving its intended purpose.)
1) If it works as designed, the bad guys simply won't use such guns. Since the bad guys bring their own guns (they decide when to attack and where) this will not keep the bad guys from attacking anyone. This might save police officers from being shot with their own guns. It will also prevent one officer from being able to borrow a gun from another officer in an emergency.
2) Anyone who tells you that these new guns will completely displace the old ones is dreaming. Guns are durable, and there are literally millions of guns out there. We can't even keep drug addicts from buying drugs once a week, so we will never keep bad guys from buying a gun and carrying it around for months. Most bad guys don't even need to buy bullets, since they usually get what they want just by pointing the gun. (And how hard could it be to simply break the mechanism on a stolen gun so the gun just works all the time?)
3) This drives up the cost of a gun, which means it drives up the cost of defending your life. This matters little to those of us who live in the expensive part of town, or to people who live where average people just aren't allowed to have guns anyway (Washington, D.C.; New York; etc.) but I still don't like it.
4) I'll tell you right now what the next step will be: "Since we have these now, there is no need to let the old guns stay legal." Just wait, people will start urging that "unsafe" older guns become illegal "for the sake of the children".
steveha
I bought a Sharp Aquos LCD television last year. It's only a 20" model, not a giant one, and it's only normal TV, not HDTV.
It's way better than the CRT it replaced.
There are no issues with ghosting; it clearly refreshes fast enough for TV, DVDs, or console video gaming.
I am looking forward to the day when I get a much bigger one (the 37" and 42" both look nice). When I get the bigger one, it will be a model with a DVI input, and I'll hook up a computer to that. I want to play first-person games on a giant screen with my living room's surround sound all around me.
steveha
P.S. I figure LCD is pretty much a stable technology at this point. It's basically a large laptop screen, and those have been around for years. Plasma has burnin issues, and OLED may simply fade with time. I look forward to SED displays... but LCD is here now and getting more affordable every year.
The iAudio M3 looks sweet. (Cnet gave it a 8.7 rating.) One thing I'm wondering about: is there a "gap killer" in the iAudio players?
A gap killer is a feature that lets two songs in an album play seamlessly. It's great for (for example) a live album. Without a gap killer it sounds like this: applause... SILENCE... applause, band starts playing. The SILENCE is the gap, and I want to kill the gap.
A gap killer is essential for listening to many of my albums.
steveha
If I'm going to have something like this in my living room, I want it to be quiet. That means I want it to be cool. But this thing has a Pentium 4 motherboard.
I'd really rather have a 90nm Athlon64, with "Cool n Quiet". And whatever 3D chipset has the best performance/heat ratio. (Probably an ATI chipset... too bad the drivers suck in Linux. Are there any nVidia chipsets that can run Doom 3 but don't also heat your room?)
A PowerPC chip would also be good. Hey, Apple -- you ought to make a living-room Mac.
steveha
When you learn that the X server is indeed the server, it is easier to understand important properties of the interaction with X clients and servers, like, if you shut down the server, the clients lose their display
If you terminate a web browser, your web browsing is interrupted. From the user's point of view, a web browser works much like an X server, but the names are backwards. "Server" does not necessarily imply that it keeps state for you.
I still think the X guys could have called the window display part the "client". The internal documentation, read only by computer geeks working on X, could use the correct terminology to document the protocols, without confusing newbies.
Yes, the X server serves windows, so the name is valid. But why do we have to name it based on what the protocols are doing? If you take a step back and look at a bigger picture, you could with equal validity say that your rack-mount server box is an X application server, and that the user runs an application client. Every window opened by an X server has to have a client on the other end, and just by calling that client an "application" we can shift the terminology to make it easier to understand.
steveha
The terminology makes sense, but is it sensible?
When you run the server on your thin client, and the clients all run on your rackmount server, and the newbies are all confused, and we need to write posts explaining why the seemingly backwards terminology is in fact correct... in some sense, it's sensible, but if you take a poll of a bunch of newbies, the consensus would be that it's confusing. (I'll stop now before someone beats me senseless.)
If some terminology makes arguable sense but confuses everyone but hard-core computer geeks, is it really the best terminology? I say no.
steveha
I really, really wish the X guys hadn't used this terminology. But they did, so we need to keep it straight.
Just think of it this way:
A file server provides files to its clients. A print server provides printing to its clients. An X Window server provides graphical windows to its clients.
Thus, when you run any X application, it is a client to the X Window server. It asks the server for a window to display stuff in.
So, if you buy an expensive rack-mount server machine, and you hook up a thin client that lets you use a GUI, that thin client has an X server on it, and the X server talks to X clients that run on the server.
The neat thing is that in the other universe (the one where Spock has a beard), they call "clients" "servers" and "servers" "clients", but the X guys still did it backwards there so this confusion still applies.
Hope this helps.
steveha