For long flights, I depend on my Visor Deluxe. Palm eBooks (such as the ones in the Baen Free Library), plus various Palm games: Rally 1000, Kyle's Quest, Taipan, etc. Kyle's Quest isn't free but there are a ton of levels for it that are free, and there are dozens of good free PalmOS games.
A PDA fits well on the tiny tray table, extra AAA cells are easy to bring, and battery life is excellent.
A Visor Deluxe is about $100 these days.
If you bring an iBook, you might want to look into a cable that will let you power it from the airplane somehow.
The first two books in the Honor Harrington series (On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen) are available in the Baen Free Library. You can download them and read them for free, or just read them from a web browser.
Reading those two books was enough to get me hooked on Honor Harrington, and I have bought all the rest. I bought them all as ebooks, from Baen. (I'm sure David Weber would be happy to hear that, since for ebook sales Baen pays authors double the paper-books royalty.)
They make a very big point about how everything is in rtf format. Pretty amazing. Sounds like they're trying to get the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, piracy thing going
WTF?!?
They don't want you to pirate their stuff. They want to be paid. What planet are you on right now?
They are being nice. They could have picked one format that is loaded down with tons of Digital Rights Management junk. Instead they skipped the DRM junk and released their books in unencrypted files. Just to make sure it is convenient for you, they release each book in five different formats: HTML, RTF, Palm Doc, Rocket eBook, and MS Reader.
The books that they put in the "Free Library" are free as in beer. You can make copies and hand them out to your friends. By the way, the first two books in the Honor Harrington series are in the Free Library. That's how I got hooked on HH.
Please don't pirate Baen ebooks. It's biting the hand that is being nice to you.
Blockbuster pays on the order of 10 times as much for a copy of a video that they can rent as compared to the copy that you can pick up at Target.
I am not an expert on this, but I think there are two reasons why this is true.
0) Blockbuster will have the video sooner than Target will sell it... and the movie companies jack up the prices on the early sales. First the movies are in the theatres long enough to make money; then the movies are rental-only long enough to make rental money; last they release the movies for sale at Target. Note that Blockbuster can afford to pay big prices for movies since they will make big money on the rentals.
1) The license for the Target movie is for home showing only. Blockbuster must be getting the movies under a different license.
Let's see: LWN has been published for 4.5 years, with insightful commentary that has won them many fans. Then they, without asking for money, announced they were going to shut down.
Yeah, that sounds like pretty standard con-men tactics to me. Set up the suckers for 4.5 years or so, and then trick them into sending donations.
If you have some spare cash, pass it on to the great guys at XFree86
There are lots of great places to donate, but I don't need you to tell me which ones are worth the money. I personally find LWN to be more worth reading than PC Week or other paper magazines; if they offered a for-pay subscription, I'd go for it.
By the sound of it this method still involves putting multiple elections on the same physical ballot.
Every election I have ever voted in, in two states total, has had all the elections on one ballot. Where are you voting? How do they do ballots there?
You need quite a bit of security to ensue that this is secure against a whole host of threats
Dude, this is an election. You always need quite a bit of security to ensure that an election is secure. You need to check for ballot-stuffing, theft or destruction of ballots, etc. etc. The other ways I have voted were not more or less secure than the current Washington state system.
Presumably the actual ballots only get looked at if the result is contested...
Don't presume that. In fact I should think it would be the opposite: the counting-machine modem results are released to the news media, but aren't actually official, and you feed all the ballots through an official counting machine for the official results. But I don't actually know.
It's not a proposal. It's in use. I have voted using this system several times now.
What's to stop an Evildoer (tm) from using his computer at home from uploading other results?
Hey, I don't work for Washington state's voting department, so I don't know. But I'd guess, probably a password or two, and probably a semi-secret protocol. And you know you expect exactly N vote-counting machines to phone in; extra phone calls are suspicious. And you have human beings guarding the actual vote-counting machines.
Subvert some humans inside the system, and you might be able to commit some fraud. But that is hardly unique to this system.
What i dont like is the verification of the vote. In my opinion it is perfectly legal to give an invalid vote without having some machine telling everybody in the room about it.
I'm not sure I understand your objection here. If you don't fill in any bubbles, that is a valid ballot. It's only an invalid ballot if you double-vote. (It may also be an invalid ballot if you put a mark somewhere that isn't a bubble; I didn't try that out.)
You may wish to make an incorrect ballot that will not be counted, but most people would prefer to have an actual mistake caught for them so they can do the ballot over again. If you want to go through the motions of voting without actually voting, nothing will stop you.
I happen to know, from experience, that a slight smudge across a bubble is enough to make the machine count it. If you put an X through Gore and fill in the bubble for Bush, it will consider this a double vote and will kick the ballot out.
If you make any mark you don't like, your only option is to ask for another blank ballot.
I never claimed it is infallible, but it does work very well. I have not found it difficult to correctly fill in just the bubbles I wanted to fill in.
For voting, it is very important to have a way to re-count the votes. I think a literal paper trail is best.
I cannot imagine a better scheme than what Washington state is using now:
When you go to vote, you get a piece of heavy paper (or maybe it's light cardstock) pre-printed with the ballot. Next to each item you can vote for is a bubble. They loan you a fine-point permanent marker (a Sharpie) and to vote you just fill in the bubble.
When you are done, you take the ballot over to the counting machine. You feed the ballot into the slot. (If this is too technically advanced for you, the nice person watching the machine helps you.)
The counting machine makes sure you didn't make any conflicting votes: for example, voting for both Bush and Gore for President. If there are any conflicting votes, it refuses the ballot and spits it back out the slot. Then you get a fresh ballot and start over.
Assuming all is well, it counts up all the votes, and then drops the ballot into a bag. The bags are locked up and stored, so the actual paper ballots are available for a recount if necessary.
At the end of the day, the counting machine is plugged into a phone jack. It calls in to a computer and reports the votes it had counted all day. The votes can then be quickly summed and you find out how the election went quickly.
You only need one counting machine per voting location, and the voting booths are simple desks with privacy screens; the Florida voting machines cost $3500 each and you need one per voting booth.
The system now used in Washington state is easy to use, not expensive or difficult to implement, gives results quickly, and allows for recounts.
When Debian releases, they release for more platforms than anyone else: x86, Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, 68K, ia64, etc. etc.
When Debian releases "stable", they have done enough testing that you can really count on it to be stable.
The above items take some time. Stabilizing a new version of XFree86 in particular takes time, since the XFree86 guys only test on x86.
All they are doing is compiling them and packaging them, which doesn't take much time in the grand scheme of things.
Why don't you join the Debian team and show them how it's done? Since you're such an expert and all. After all, I'm sure the Debian guys are all idiots, just wasting time for no reason, and with someone like you on board they can get releases out in no time at all.
By the way, new stuff shows up in Debian's "unstable" branch very quickly, because just compiling and packaging stuff doesn't take all that long in the grand scheme of things. It's Debian's stable branch that is legendary for taking a long time to update.
If you want to see progress check out Gentoo.
I'm glad you like it. But Gentoo and Debian are not the same thing; both have pluses and minuses compared to each other.
I want to buy portable music players that can play back Vorbis-encoded music. Realistically, that won't happen until there are integer-math decoder libraries.
Is anyone working on this right now? Do we have any estimate of when it might happen?
Note to computer science students: this would make a great student project.
I have about 400 CDs at home, but six months or so ago I ripped 'em all to MP3 at 160 Kbit
You basically asked two questions: why is ogg cool, and why it is worth the effort for you to re-rip 400 CDs.
You got lots of answers for why ogg is cool. I'll go ahead and answer the second question:
If you are happy with your 160 Kbit MP3 collection, then you shouldn't go to the effort to re-rip and re-encode 400 CDs. If you were to re-compress your collection using ogg, it would sound better... but if you are already content, there isn't much need for you to change anything.
You might want to consider using ogg for future additions to your collection, though. It really is better, and it has a bright future.
Recently, US patent law was changed so that a patent expires 20 years from date of filing. A patent issued in 1986 would definitely expire 17 years after date issued.
BTW, as I understand it, the change to the rules was to prevent people/companies from filing for a patent, then messing around with the application process to stretch it out for as long as possible. Once the patent was issued, they would have 17 years, but it could be possible to stretch out the issuing process to take a long time. Under the new rules, the clock starts running once you apply for the patent.
The claims made by Ogg Vorbis (i.e. it is patent free) are extremely unlikely to be true.
Well, they have done what they can to make it more likely. Specifically, they have a staff of lawyers scrutinizing everything they do, specifically to make sure they don't run afoul of any patents. They would have been done by now if it weren't for the care they are taking about patents.
It's ironic: patents are supposed to spur innovation onward, but at the moment patents are a huge drag on the development of new software. If you want to make sure you don't get bitten by any patents, you need to go to a great deal of effort.
My only complaint about Debain is that the install can be painful, especially to those used to more graphical oriented tools.
I am happy to be able to tell you about the Progeny Graphical Installer. Graphical and friendly, and even has an ncurses mode for those times when you have an oddball graphics card and you can't get the graphical install to work. It's very nice!
As a bonus, it leverages the XFree86 project. When XFree86 adds support for a new card, PGI inherits the support. Compare with the Corel installer, which had its own graphics code... it could choke on new cards (such as a GeForce) and since it didn't even have a fallback text install, Corel Linux was uninstallable with certain graphics cards!
Anyway, the ISO file for burning a CD is about 94MB. It installs a working base system and then can use the net to install up-to-date packages.
The aptitude(1) tool does nice things with "Recommends" dependencies. Suppose package foo recommends foo-extra. When you install foo, aptitude installs foo-extra... but remembers that it was installed from a Recommends dependency. When you later remove foo, aptitude will also remove foo-extra!
aptitude is ncurses-based. It lets you interactively search and browse your packages database, looking at what you do and do not have installed. I discovered that Debian has the rogue game (the precursor to nethack) by searching for the keyword "game" in aptitude, for example. (rogue is in the package "bsdgames-nonfree", by the way.)
aptitude isn't perfect. There have been times where aptitude was convinced a package was uninstallable, but I went to a command line and did "apt-get install " and it installed just fine. And there have been a few times where I went to install a package, and aptitude was convinced it needed to remove a whole ton of packages I wanted. So I do sometimes still use apt-get... but by far I spend the most time running aptitude.
I'm looking forward to a nice GNOME tool, one that will do everything aptitude does plus show some sort of tree diagram to show package dependencies. Meanwhile, gnome-apt is a poor second place after aptitude.
In summary, if you use Debian, you need and want to use aptitude. Highly recommended.
The best 'Constructon Set' in recent memory was the level editor in Crack Dot Com's sidescroller, 'Abuse'. It used a lisp driven engine to allow you to make levels easier than anything I recall at the time.
Abuse was released as free software. You can now run it on DOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, even Irix. If you can score a copy of Abuse you can run the original levels, and if not you can run the "fRaBs" (Free levels for Abuse).
Debian users "apt-get install abuse-sdl". (Sound effects are in "abuse-sfx" which is in non-free.)
I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.
Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.
I disagree. Handspring has always had aggressive pricing: for what you get, the price has always been very good.
(And recently they have insane low prices on Visor products... probably because sales took such a big hit after Donna Dubinsky said Handspring would be exiting the organizer market. People don't want to buy an orphan product, so Handspring slashed prices to keep sales moving. Ironically, the Treo 90 makes it clear that Handspring has not, after all, decided to exit the organizer market! But Visor devices with Springboard slots are never going to see any new models.)
I used to work for a manufacturing company. They were obsessed with Cost Of Goods. If a flash chip really costs $5 extra, it would totally make sense for Handspring to want to get rid of it. $5 additional cost of goods is probably worth $15 on the retail price; they can abosorb that now but down the road that's a lot.
I paid $300 for my first Visor Deluxe. You can now get one new for $120.
And, all that said, how many Handspring customers really care? I've never bothered to install an OS update on my Visor Deluxe; I haven't had any problems with it, so who needs it? Once the OS is stable, having it in ROM won't bother very many people.
I, personally, would cheerfully pay $20 or more for a flash chip on my PDA. However, I'm a geek, and most people wouldn't choose to pay that much. And it would cost too much to produce two versions of each PDA (the flash version and the cheaper ROM version) and let customers choose.
I wish they could put the ROM in a socket or something so it would be easy to swap in a flash chip. Alas that isn't going to happen on a tiny PDA device, even if it didn't add to cost and make the device potentially less reliable.
I don't have a problem with what Handspring has done. But I might try to buy one of the "early" model Handsprings now that I know about this.
The music studios are not taking advantage of technology. They could set up a system for selling songs, where their cost would be very close to zero, and then charge a small amount per song and still make money.
Instead of doing that they continue to sell CDs, and they try to sabotage any new way to sell music that comes along. They are doing what they can to prop up the price of CDs, even though they are now much cheaper to produce than they were when they first came out.
It used to be that all the most popular songs were released on "singles" (small records) for a couple of bucks; these days if you want the popular song you must buy a CD with many other songs. The best way to make money is to give people what they want; this isn't giving people what they want. It is not surprising that people would rather download the one song they want than pay $18 for a CD.
If the music studios aren't careful, they will become irrelevant. It used to be that the only way to make any money in the music business was to sign up with a big studio; but now, with the Internet, it is possible to make music, advertise the music, and sell the music, all on your own and without signing your life away. Go to mp3.com and look around. There is a ton of music there you can listen to, and a ton of CDs you can buy, and all without the music studios being involved. CDs there go for around $8 or so!
The amount of action in the music world is not getting smaller; just the amount of dollars the big music studios are seeing. The Net economy is starting to route around them. They claim piracy is killing them, but it's the world changing around them and they have their heads in the sand.
This technique is a way to quickly make a hologram, on film. You can develop the film and view the hologram.
What's cool is that they have figured out how to use an LCD screen to computer-generate the 3D holograms. Until now, to make a hologram, you needed a physical object to work from.
I'd be interested to know how long it takes to make one of these holograms. If they could get their equipment fast enough to make, say, 24 holograms per second, perhaps they could leave out the film part and just generate moving holograms in realtime. I suspect it's a lot slower than that right now.
I disagree that Dr. Who is only fun for laughing at cheesy special effects. You could make Dr. Who with decent effects and it could still be good.
What it needs is a charismatic guy playing the title character. What pulled me in to Dr. Who was watching Tom Baker; he was so much fun.
I haven't seen this new guy so I don't know how he'll do as the Doctor. But I can hope.
The scripts and directing will matter, too. If the plots are too complicated and annoying, or if everything is too serious, that will suck the fun out of the show. What we need are lots of vaguely menacing creatures that never actually do anything really bad, at least onscreen, and light-hearted dialog.
One of my favorite moments from Doctor Who went something like this:
Romana: I've got an idea! How about if we [x, y, z]? Doctor: Brilliant! Oh, I'm sorry, did you just say something? I didn't hear you because I was thinking... we could [x, y, z]. Romana: [annoyed] Yeah, that would work.
It's the only place where you can get computer chips and potato chips, oscilloscopes and bottles of Coke, cheap toys and expensive Fluke meters. You can get anything CompUSA has, plus lots more.
I've heard horror stories about people trying to return things at Fry's... but when I get a chance to go I mostly wander around in a glassy-eyed daze without buying anything, so it's okay.
This sounds great, but I want it to protect me from the orbital mind-control lasers. It's such a hassle wrapping the tinfoil around my head, especially when I forget to leave my eyes uncovered.
This might also help when the Goldeneye satellite blasts EMP everywhere. At least my computer will still work so I can play Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Barbie's Fashion Designer after all the banks collapse.
Will it also work against telepathy and remote viewing? Got to call Art Bell and ask.
Slashdot Mirror
For long flights, I depend on my Visor Deluxe. Palm eBooks (such as the ones in the Baen Free Library), plus various Palm games: Rally 1000, Kyle's Quest, Taipan, etc. Kyle's Quest isn't free but there are a ton of levels for it that are free, and there are dozens of good free PalmOS games.
A PDA fits well on the tiny tray table, extra AAA cells are easy to bring, and battery life is excellent.
A Visor Deluxe is about $100 these days.
If you bring an iBook, you might want to look into a cable that will let you power it from the airplane somehow.
steveha
The first two books in the Honor Harrington series (On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen) are available in the Baen Free Library. You can download them and read them for free, or just read them from a web browser.
Reading those two books was enough to get me hooked on Honor Harrington, and I have bought all the rest. I bought them all as ebooks, from Baen. (I'm sure David Weber would be happy to hear that, since for ebook sales Baen pays authors double the paper-books royalty.)
http://www.baen.com/library/
steveha
They make a very big point about how everything is in rtf format. Pretty amazing. Sounds like they're trying to get the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, piracy thing going
WTF?!?
They don't want you to pirate their stuff. They want to be paid. What planet are you on right now?
They are being nice. They could have picked one format that is loaded down with tons of Digital Rights Management junk. Instead they skipped the DRM junk and released their books in unencrypted files. Just to make sure it is convenient for you, they release each book in five different formats: HTML, RTF, Palm Doc, Rocket eBook, and MS Reader.
The books that they put in the "Free Library" are free as in beer. You can make copies and hand them out to your friends. By the way, the first two books in the Honor Harrington series are in the Free Library. That's how I got hooked on HH.
Please don't pirate Baen ebooks. It's biting the hand that is being nice to you.
steveha
Blockbuster pays on the order of 10 times as much for a copy of a video that they can rent as compared to the copy that you can pick up at Target.
I am not an expert on this, but I think there are two reasons why this is true.
0) Blockbuster will have the video sooner than Target will sell it... and the movie companies jack up the prices on the early sales. First the movies are in the theatres long enough to make money; then the movies are rental-only long enough to make rental money; last they release the movies for sale at Target. Note that Blockbuster can afford to pay big prices for movies since they will make big money on the rentals.
1) The license for the Target movie is for home showing only. Blockbuster must be getting the movies under a different license.
steveha
These people are conmen, nothing more.
Let's see: LWN has been published for 4.5 years, with insightful commentary that has won them many fans. Then they, without asking for money, announced they were going to shut down.
Yeah, that sounds like pretty standard con-men tactics to me. Set up the suckers for 4.5 years or so, and then trick them into sending donations.
If you have some spare cash, pass it on to the great guys at XFree86
There are lots of great places to donate, but I don't need you to tell me which ones are worth the money. I personally find LWN to be more worth reading than PC Week or other paper magazines; if they offered a for-pay subscription, I'd go for it.
steveha
By the sound of it this method still involves putting multiple elections on the same physical ballot.
Every election I have ever voted in, in two states total, has had all the elections on one ballot. Where are you voting? How do they do ballots there?
You need quite a bit of security to ensue that this is secure against a whole host of threats
Dude, this is an election. You always need quite a bit of security to ensure that an election is secure. You need to check for ballot-stuffing, theft or destruction of ballots, etc. etc. The other ways I have voted were not more or less secure than the current Washington state system.
Presumably the actual ballots only get looked at if the result is contested...
Don't presume that. In fact I should think it would be the opposite: the counting-machine modem results are released to the news media, but aren't actually official, and you feed all the ballots through an official counting machine for the official results. But I don't actually know.
steveha
A very interesting proposal.
It's not a proposal. It's in use. I have voted using this system several times now.
What's to stop an Evildoer (tm) from using his computer at home from uploading other results?
Hey, I don't work for Washington state's voting department, so I don't know. But I'd guess, probably a password or two, and probably a semi-secret protocol. And you know you expect exactly N vote-counting machines to phone in; extra phone calls are suspicious. And you have human beings guarding the actual vote-counting machines.
Subvert some humans inside the system, and you might be able to commit some fraud. But that is hardly unique to this system.
steveha
What i dont like is the verification of the vote. In my opinion it is perfectly legal to give an invalid vote without having some machine telling everybody in the room about it.
I'm not sure I understand your objection here. If you don't fill in any bubbles, that is a valid ballot. It's only an invalid ballot if you double-vote. (It may also be an invalid ballot if you put a mark somewhere that isn't a bubble; I didn't try that out.)
You may wish to make an incorrect ballot that will not be counted, but most people would prefer to have an actual mistake caught for them so they can do the ballot over again. If you want to go through the motions of voting without actually voting, nothing will stop you.
steveha
I happen to know, from experience, that a slight smudge across a bubble is enough to make the machine count it. If you put an X through Gore and fill in the bubble for Bush, it will consider this a double vote and will kick the ballot out.
If you make any mark you don't like, your only option is to ask for another blank ballot.
I never claimed it is infallible, but it does work very well. I have not found it difficult to correctly fill in just the bubbles I wanted to fill in.
steveha
For voting, it is very important to have a way to re-count the votes. I think a literal paper trail is best.
I cannot imagine a better scheme than what Washington state is using now:
When you go to vote, you get a piece of heavy paper (or maybe it's light cardstock) pre-printed with the ballot. Next to each item you can vote for is a bubble. They loan you a fine-point permanent marker (a Sharpie) and to vote you just fill in the bubble.
When you are done, you take the ballot over to the counting machine. You feed the ballot into the slot. (If this is too technically advanced for you, the nice person watching the machine helps you.)
The counting machine makes sure you didn't make any conflicting votes: for example, voting for both Bush and Gore for President. If there are any conflicting votes, it refuses the ballot and spits it back out the slot. Then you get a fresh ballot and start over.
Assuming all is well, it counts up all the votes, and then drops the ballot into a bag. The bags are locked up and stored, so the actual paper ballots are available for a recount if necessary.
At the end of the day, the counting machine is plugged into a phone jack. It calls in to a computer and reports the votes it had counted all day. The votes can then be quickly summed and you find out how the election went quickly.
You only need one counting machine per voting location, and the voting booths are simple desks with privacy screens; the Florida voting machines cost $3500 each and you need one per voting booth.
The system now used in Washington state is easy to use, not expensive or difficult to implement, gives results quickly, and allows for recounts.
steveha
I simply don't buy it.
I frankly don't care what you "buy" or not.
When Debian releases, they release for more platforms than anyone else: x86, Alpha, PowerPC, Sparc, 68K, ia64, etc. etc.
When Debian releases "stable", they have done enough testing that you can really count on it to be stable.
The above items take some time. Stabilizing a new version of XFree86 in particular takes time, since the XFree86 guys only test on x86.
All they are doing is compiling them and packaging them, which doesn't take much time in the grand scheme of things.
Why don't you join the Debian team and show them how it's done? Since you're such an expert and all. After all, I'm sure the Debian guys are all idiots, just wasting time for no reason, and with someone like you on board they can get releases out in no time at all.
By the way, new stuff shows up in Debian's "unstable" branch very quickly, because just compiling and packaging stuff doesn't take all that long in the grand scheme of things. It's Debian's stable branch that is legendary for taking a long time to update.
If you want to see progress check out Gentoo.
I'm glad you like it. But Gentoo and Debian are not the same thing; both have pluses and minuses compared to each other.
steveha
I want to buy portable music players that can play back Vorbis-encoded music. Realistically, that won't happen until there are integer-math decoder libraries.
Is anyone working on this right now? Do we have any estimate of when it might happen?
Note to computer science students: this would make a great student project.
steveha
I know you asked for Win32, but please forgive me: I want to put in a plug for Grip, the GTK-based ripping program.
Grip includes cdparanoia, tools for reliable extraction of audio data. Another fine xiph.org product!
I like Grip enough that I do all my CD ripping from Linux now.
steveha
I have about 400 CDs at home, but six months or so ago I ripped 'em all to MP3 at 160 Kbit
You basically asked two questions: why is ogg cool, and why it is worth the effort for you to re-rip 400 CDs.
You got lots of answers for why ogg is cool. I'll go ahead and answer the second question:
If you are happy with your 160 Kbit MP3 collection, then you shouldn't go to the effort to re-rip and re-encode 400 CDs. If you were to re-compress your collection using ogg, it would sound better... but if you are already content, there isn't much need for you to change anything.
You might want to consider using ogg for future additions to your collection, though. It really is better, and it has a bright future.
steveha
Recently, US patent law was changed so that a patent expires 20 years from date of filing. A patent issued in 1986 would definitely expire 17 years after date issued.
BTW, as I understand it, the change to the rules was to prevent people/companies from filing for a patent, then messing around with the application process to stretch it out for as long as possible. Once the patent was issued, they would have 17 years, but it could be possible to stretch out the issuing process to take a long time. Under the new rules, the clock starts running once you apply for the patent.
steveha
The claims made by Ogg Vorbis (i.e. it is patent free) are extremely unlikely to be true.
Well, they have done what they can to make it more likely. Specifically, they have a staff of lawyers scrutinizing everything they do, specifically to make sure they don't run afoul of any patents. They would have been done by now if it weren't for the care they are taking about patents.
It's ironic: patents are supposed to spur innovation onward, but at the moment patents are a huge drag on the development of new software. If you want to make sure you don't get bitten by any patents, you need to go to a great deal of effort.
steveha
My only complaint about Debain is that the install can be painful, especially to those used to more graphical oriented tools.
I am happy to be able to tell you about the Progeny Graphical Installer. Graphical and friendly, and even has an ncurses mode for those times when you have an oddball graphics card and you can't get the graphical install to work. It's very nice!
As a bonus, it leverages the XFree86 project. When XFree86 adds support for a new card, PGI inherits the support. Compare with the Corel installer, which had its own graphics code... it could choke on new cards (such as a GeForce) and since it didn't even have a fallback text install, Corel Linux was uninstallable with certain graphics cards!
Anyway, the ISO file for burning a CD is about 94MB. It installs a working base system and then can use the net to install up-to-date packages.
http://hackers.progeny.com/pgi/
steveha
The aptitude(1) tool does nice things with "Recommends" dependencies. Suppose package foo recommends foo-extra. When you install foo, aptitude installs foo-extra... but remembers that it was installed from a Recommends dependency. When you later remove foo, aptitude will also remove foo-extra!
aptitude is ncurses-based. It lets you interactively search and browse your packages database, looking at what you do and do not have installed. I discovered that Debian has the rogue game (the precursor to nethack) by searching for the keyword "game" in aptitude, for example. (rogue is in the package "bsdgames-nonfree", by the way.)
aptitude isn't perfect. There have been times where aptitude was convinced a package was uninstallable, but I went to a command line and did "apt-get install " and it installed just fine. And there have been a few times where I went to install a package, and aptitude was convinced it needed to remove a whole ton of packages I wanted. So I do sometimes still use apt-get... but by far I spend the most time running aptitude.
I'm looking forward to a nice GNOME tool, one that will do everything aptitude does plus show some sort of tree diagram to show package dependencies. Meanwhile, gnome-apt is a poor second place after aptitude.
In summary, if you use Debian, you need and want to use aptitude. Highly recommended.
steveha
The best 'Constructon Set' in recent memory was the level editor in Crack Dot Com's sidescroller, 'Abuse'. It used a lisp driven engine to allow you to make levels easier than anything I recall at the time.
Abuse was released as free software. You can now run it on DOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, even Irix. If you can score a copy of Abuse you can run the original levels, and if not you can run the "fRaBs" (Free levels for Abuse).
Debian users "apt-get install abuse-sdl". (Sound effects are in "abuse-sfx" which is in non-free.)
Everyone else http://www.abuse2.com/downloads.php3
steveha
I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.
Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.
I disagree. Handspring has always had aggressive pricing: for what you get, the price has always been very good.
(And recently they have insane low prices on Visor products... probably because sales took such a big hit after Donna Dubinsky said Handspring would be exiting the organizer market. People don't want to buy an orphan product, so Handspring slashed prices to keep sales moving. Ironically, the Treo 90 makes it clear that Handspring has not, after all, decided to exit the organizer market! But Visor devices with Springboard slots are never going to see any new models.)
I used to work for a manufacturing company. They were obsessed with Cost Of Goods. If a flash chip really costs $5 extra, it would totally make sense for Handspring to want to get rid of it. $5 additional cost of goods is probably worth $15 on the retail price; they can abosorb that now but down the road that's a lot.
I paid $300 for my first Visor Deluxe. You can now get one new for $120.
And, all that said, how many Handspring customers really care? I've never bothered to install an OS update on my Visor Deluxe; I haven't had any problems with it, so who needs it? Once the OS is stable, having it in ROM won't bother very many people.
I, personally, would cheerfully pay $20 or more for a flash chip on my PDA. However, I'm a geek, and most people wouldn't choose to pay that much. And it would cost too much to produce two versions of each PDA (the flash version and the cheaper ROM version) and let customers choose.
I wish they could put the ROM in a socket or something so it would be easy to swap in a flash chip. Alas that isn't going to happen on a tiny PDA device, even if it didn't add to cost and make the device potentially less reliable.
I don't have a problem with what Handspring has done. But I might try to buy one of the "early" model Handsprings now that I know about this.
steveha
The music studios are not taking advantage of technology. They could set up a system for selling songs, where their cost would be very close to zero, and then charge a small amount per song and still make money.
Instead of doing that they continue to sell CDs, and they try to sabotage any new way to sell music that comes along. They are doing what they can to prop up the price of CDs, even though they are now much cheaper to produce than they were when they first came out.
It used to be that all the most popular songs were released on "singles" (small records) for a couple of bucks; these days if you want the popular song you must buy a CD with many other songs. The best way to make money is to give people what they want; this isn't giving people what they want. It is not surprising that people would rather download the one song they want than pay $18 for a CD.
If the music studios aren't careful, they will become irrelevant. It used to be that the only way to make any money in the music business was to sign up with a big studio; but now, with the Internet, it is possible to make music, advertise the music, and sell the music, all on your own and without signing your life away. Go to mp3.com and look around. There is a ton of music there you can listen to, and a ton of CDs you can buy, and all without the music studios being involved. CDs there go for around $8 or so!
The amount of action in the music world is not getting smaller; just the amount of dollars the big music studios are seeing. The Net economy is starting to route around them. They claim piracy is killing them, but it's the world changing around them and they have their heads in the sand.
steveha
This technique is a way to quickly make a hologram, on film. You can develop the film and view the hologram.
What's cool is that they have figured out how to use an LCD screen to computer-generate the 3D holograms. Until now, to make a hologram, you needed a physical object to work from.
I'd be interested to know how long it takes to make one of these holograms. If they could get their equipment fast enough to make, say, 24 holograms per second, perhaps they could leave out the film part and just generate moving holograms in realtime. I suspect it's a lot slower than that right now.
steveha
I disagree that Dr. Who is only fun for laughing at cheesy special effects. You could make Dr. Who with decent effects and it could still be good.
What it needs is a charismatic guy playing the title character. What pulled me in to Dr. Who was watching Tom Baker; he was so much fun.
I haven't seen this new guy so I don't know how he'll do as the Doctor. But I can hope.
The scripts and directing will matter, too. If the plots are too complicated and annoying, or if everything is too serious, that will suck the fun out of the show. What we need are lots of vaguely menacing creatures that never actually do anything really bad, at least onscreen, and light-hearted dialog.
One of my favorite moments from Doctor Who went something like this:
Romana: I've got an idea! How about if we [x, y, z]?
Doctor: Brilliant! Oh, I'm sorry, did you just say something? I didn't hear you because I was thinking... we could [x, y, z].
Romana: [annoyed] Yeah, that would work.
steveha
Fry's isn't perfect, but I want one near my home.
It's the only place where you can get computer chips and potato chips, oscilloscopes and bottles of Coke, cheap toys and expensive Fluke meters. You can get anything CompUSA has, plus lots more.
I've heard horror stories about people trying to return things at Fry's... but when I get a chance to go I mostly wander around in a glassy-eyed daze without buying anything, so it's okay.
steveha
This sounds great, but I want it to protect me from the orbital mind-control lasers. It's such a hassle wrapping the tinfoil around my head, especially when I forget to leave my eyes uncovered.
This might also help when the Goldeneye satellite blasts EMP everywhere. At least my computer will still work so I can play Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Barbie's Fashion Designer after all the banks collapse.
Will it also work against telepathy and remote viewing? Got to call Art Bell and ask.