> My grandfather was a victim of chemical warfare in World War I
That was probably my grandfather who threw the canister, he was said to be very fond of throwing them, something about the ft-ft-ft sound they made flying through the air. So, from grandson to grandson, sorry about that, no hard feelings.
> and almost any ISP that you signed up with would just send you a floppy disk
And a lot of ISPs used TIA (The Internet Adapter), which allowed them to offer TCP/IP connectivity through a regular old dial-up shell account which had been around for a while. My first steady ISP was cris.com and I remember getting curious about this Internet thing after reading a review of Netscape 1.0 in Byte magazine. Before that it had been just email and Gopher through my university shell account.
Well, it comes down to inertia. The thought of pouring over endless lines of someone else's code to understand its design and find the bug(s) would usually put me off doing what you suggest, but I might just do it anyway if I download Gideon and see that my pet bugs are still there. Even though that would mean interrupting a project to fix a tool, but what the heck.
...all the Macophiles here automatically assume that everyone has the same warm fuzzy feelings towards Apple as them, which is certainly not the case. Apple and Microsoft are just two sides of the same coin, platform lock-in--except that with Apple the platform is not just software but also hardware. Of course, Microsoft is working hard on Palladium to reach parity with Apple in that respect.
> I am not aware of any other IDE that let you develop in multiple languages AND multiple toolkits
On Linux maybe. You are aware that KDevelop is (more or less closely) tracking the Visual Studio IDE from Microsoft? It used to look A LOT like VC++, and with version 3 it's adopting the new VS.NET look and functionality, including the New Project dialog and the code expansion and collapsing features (the tree gadgets on the left of the code). Not that that's a bad thing, the VS.NET has some pretty neat features.
How about some more bug fixes?
on
KDevelop 3.0 beta 1
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Before adding tons of new features? I like KDevelop and use it a lot, but it's got plenty of glitches, such as buggy syntax highlighting settings and a broken help viewer (BACK button doesn't work amongst other things). How about some simple but nice additions like Go To Declaration, jump between declaration and definition, etc? Plus, it would be great to have some sort of macro capabilities inside the IDE, on a per-project basis.
> To me system does not just [...] mean operating system.
I'm sorry but that's the traditional meaning of the term. If you list "systems programming" on your resume, most people would expect you to be able to write device drivers and such.
> C# will not get me a job as a systems developer [...] > don't want to waste my time on something that isn't marketable.
Ok, so you're saying that systems development jobs are more plentiful than general desktop app development? Which universe are you living in? This is regardless as to the merits of C#.
> what would be the purpose to of a DC/DC inverter?
To convert an unstable source of DC into a stable one. If you look at your average 12V car power system, the actual voltage on the line can fluctuate incredibly and can include all sorts of spikes and noise and drop-outs, especially at start-up. Your average digital electronics would be fried within minutes, or would constantly reboot at best.
Which part?! If you're talking about the low voltage airplane connections, you might be right, I threw that in without knowing much about its actual implementation. Still, a DC-DC inverter requires less hardware and bulk than your average transformer and could easily be built into the plug itself.
Replying to all the sarcasm about power strips:
on
A Universal Power Bus?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What he's asking for is a very sensible idea. Airlines have already picked up on the notion that providing a low voltage power source for laptops would be quite handy by removing the need for the power brick, and have helpfully come up with multiple standards . If you think that the idea of a standard low-voltage power source in the modern household--and especially around the computer--is so wayward, just look at the growing number of USB peripherals that are learning to make do with 500mA at 5V in order to live entirely off the USB bus.
In fact I think USB will turn out to be the motivator of a revolution in standardized low power busses, because manufacturers will get used very quickly to the ubiquitous availability of a power source for their TLL logic and stepper motors without having to worry about power supplies. This has never really been the case in the past, serial and parallel devices (almost) always requiring separate power sources.
The standard could be a lot simpler than what some are suggesting. A system could consist of an under-the-table brick that plugs into a wall outlet and contains a switching power supply, with a low-voltage power strip going up to the desktop. The connectors could be simple USB-plug-like affairs with pins for ground plus 12V and 5V, satisfying the vast majority of consumer electronics devices. The standard would specify what the maximum current draw could be at each voltage level, and device manufacturers would simply design their devices towards this standard. Almost everything around your computer except for the CRT and laser printer can run off 12V and a few amps.
Face it, the 110V power system was designed for exactly the same reasons, to provide convenient and standardized power to the devices in your household. Except that that was at a time when your average consumer electronics used tubes, ran its signals at dangerously high voltages, and also doubled as space heaters. In this growingly low-power world, 110V AC just isn't all that convenient anymore. So don't be surprised if the homes of the future will indeed sprout new wall sockets.
Here's the CanoScan LiDE 30 USB at Buy.com. These are by far the best solution for portable scanning. You get a full size bed, excellent quality, decent speed (though not blazing), very quiet operation entirely off USB without any other power source, and yet they're only about the thickness of a laptop. My wife uses hers a lot for her research, it fits very nicely in the side pocket of the laptop bag. Add a reasonably recent version of PaperPort Deluxe, which is one of the most hassle-free scanning and scan management packages around, and you've got everything to create and maintain gobs of scans.
> No more being a slave to what someone else thinks is cool
I think you'll find that the reality will be very different. Probably the first companies to offer these shirts cheaply WILL be these shirt companies that will sell you that animated shirt for $40 in exchange for wearing a hard-coded GAP ad. You just know that many companies will introduce work uniforms with rolling commercials (e.g. pest control, plumbers, electricians, phone companies etc.). Before you know it, you'll be walking down the street and seeing a sea of moving pictures on the backs of people in front of you. Shades of Diamond Age anyone?
I've convinced plenty of my friends to like TiVo, but none to buy. And these are people that spend thousands of dollars a year on other kinds of toys, but I guess the initial cost threshold plus monthly fee is too high for most. My neighbor has a $$$ HT setup with a custom room, 65" TV and very nice sound, and every time he sees my TiVo he loves it. But he still won't get one. Why? Beats me, maybe TiVo should ask him, it might help them become profitable.
> Slap on an overpriced harddrive that clips on top or something
I've always said that they could have made a KILLING with that feature alone. If you look at places like 9thtee and see the kinds of upgrades people are buying, TiVo could have been in the black already selling $50 external 1394 drives for $150.
I've always been highly disappointed that they stopped innovating after the initial product. They could have been THE media company if they had kept pushing with new features like device networking and show saving to VCD etc. Their caution with Hollywood seems to have been pointless, because it seems they're now after them anyway. They might as well have made some money.
> I don't think that TiVo is a "one trick pony" either.
Really? In the world of PVRs TiVo's Suggestions are indeed its one trick. What else sets it apart? Sure, it USED to be pretty hackable, but that's hardly a selling feature. So yes, you could say that TiVo is a one-trick-pony.
Well, at the time that wasn't the best-of-breed choice. During the 80s the PC was seriously lagging behind the Amiga in terms of OS and hardware, only its breadth of software was superior. Of course, in the long term the PC won, but in 1987 that didn't matter, because going with a PC meant a 286 with EGA and mono sound at best, and most likely MS-DOS 3.3 and maybe Windows 2.0. That's not something I'd wish on my worst enemies. The Amiga OTOH gave you most of the benefits of today's OSs, such as preemptive multitasking, a sophisticated filesystem, a powerful (though by some tastes rather ungainly) GUI, a huge API, and great multimedia.
Today the Amiga would be a curious choice at best. The point is that few if any platforms stay dominant forever, and it's silly to stay loyal out of some religious fervor. Pick whatever works best TODAY.
At this tiny size and the relative speed they're going, steering is a real issue. You have to pulse the steering button really quickly for small turns and still end up with pretty sizeable direction changes. They would be a lot more driveable if they had proportional steering, but that might be too much asked at this size and price point.
> SIM cards don't make it impossible to lock the client in one operator.
Of course not, but their original intent WAS to provide handset independence, and they're a very adequate technology for that purpose. The CDMA implementations in the US OTOH don't provide any mechanism for handset independence, not even a token one.
Regarding UMTS in Europe, yes it was completely f*cked up by the (outrageously expensive) auctions. Then again, when have you ever seen a government that shirked away from potential new very large revenue? Western Europe is particularly guilty of that, although the US certainly is no pansy either.
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> My grandfather was a victim of chemical warfare in World War I
That was probably my grandfather who threw the canister, he was said to be very fond of throwing them, something about the ft-ft-ft sound they made flying through the air. So, from grandson to grandson, sorry about that, no hard feelings.
> Of course they didn't, because you're talking out of your ass.
Well silly me, I thought real locomotives were just like itsy bitsy model ones, except bigger.
> You're talking about steel wheels on a steel track
If they were smart, they'd put rubber bands around the driving wheels, just like model trains to get more traction. But of course they didn't ask me.
...I wonder what kind of diatribe you launch into when someone asks you to pass the salt. You must really be the life of the party.
> and almost any ISP that you signed up with would just send you a floppy disk
And a lot of ISPs used TIA (The Internet Adapter), which allowed them to offer TCP/IP connectivity through a regular old dial-up shell account which had been around for a while. My first steady ISP was cris.com and I remember getting curious about this Internet thing after reading a review of Netscape 1.0 in Byte magazine. Before that it had been just email and Gopher through my university shell account.
> How about you do some bug fixes
Well, it comes down to inertia. The thought of pouring over endless lines of someone else's code to understand its design and find the bug(s) would usually put me off doing what you suggest, but I might just do it anyway if I download Gideon and see that my pet bugs are still there. Even though that would mean interrupting a project to fix a tool, but what the heck.
...all the Macophiles here automatically assume that everyone has the same warm fuzzy feelings towards Apple as them, which is certainly not the case. Apple and Microsoft are just two sides of the same coin, platform lock-in--except that with Apple the platform is not just software but also hardware. Of course, Microsoft is working hard on Palladium to reach parity with Apple in that respect.
> I am not aware of any other IDE that let you develop in multiple languages AND multiple toolkits
On Linux maybe. You are aware that KDevelop is (more or less closely) tracking the Visual Studio IDE from Microsoft? It used to look A LOT like VC++, and with version 3 it's adopting the new VS.NET look and functionality, including the New Project dialog and the code expansion and collapsing features (the tree gadgets on the left of the code). Not that that's a bad thing, the VS.NET has some pretty neat features.
Before adding tons of new features? I like KDevelop and use it a lot, but it's got plenty of glitches, such as buggy syntax highlighting settings and a broken help viewer (BACK button doesn't work amongst other things). How about some simple but nice additions like Go To Declaration, jump between declaration and definition, etc? Plus, it would be great to have some sort of macro capabilities inside the IDE, on a per-project basis.
> To me system does not just [...] mean operating system.
I'm sorry but that's the traditional meaning of the term. If you list "systems programming" on your resume, most people would expect you to be able to write device drivers and such.
> C# will not get me a job as a systems developer [...]
> don't want to waste my time on something that isn't marketable.
Ok, so you're saying that systems development jobs are more plentiful than general desktop app development? Which universe are you living in? This is regardless as to the merits of C#.
> what would be the purpose to of a DC/DC inverter?
To convert an unstable source of DC into a stable one. If you look at your average 12V car power system, the actual voltage on the line can fluctuate incredibly and can include all sorts of spikes and noise and drop-outs, especially at start-up. Your average digital electronics would be fried within minutes, or would constantly reboot at best.
> I don't think so.
Which part?! If you're talking about the low voltage airplane connections, you might be right, I threw that in without knowing much about its actual implementation. Still, a DC-DC inverter requires less hardware and bulk than your average transformer and could easily be built into the plug itself.
What he's asking for is a very sensible idea. Airlines have already picked up on the notion that providing a low voltage power source for laptops would be quite handy by removing the need for the power brick, and have helpfully come up with multiple standards . If you think that the idea of a standard low-voltage power source in the modern household--and especially around the computer--is so wayward, just look at the growing number of USB peripherals that are learning to make do with 500mA at 5V in order to live entirely off the USB bus.
In fact I think USB will turn out to be the motivator of a revolution in standardized low power busses, because manufacturers will get used very quickly to the ubiquitous availability of a power source for their TLL logic and stepper motors without having to worry about power supplies. This has never really been the case in the past, serial and parallel devices (almost) always requiring separate power sources.
The standard could be a lot simpler than what some are suggesting. A system could consist of an under-the-table brick that plugs into a wall outlet and contains a switching power supply, with a low-voltage power strip going up to the desktop. The connectors could be simple USB-plug-like affairs with pins for ground plus 12V and 5V, satisfying the vast majority of consumer electronics devices. The standard would specify what the maximum current draw could be at each voltage level, and device manufacturers would simply design their devices towards this standard. Almost everything around your computer except for the CRT and laser printer can run off 12V and a few amps.
Face it, the 110V power system was designed for exactly the same reasons, to provide convenient and standardized power to the devices in your household. Except that that was at a time when your average consumer electronics used tubes, ran its signals at dangerously high voltages, and also doubled as space heaters. In this growingly low-power world, 110V AC just isn't all that convenient anymore. So don't be surprised if the homes of the future will indeed sprout new wall sockets.
Here's the CanoScan LiDE 30 USB at Buy.com.
These are by far the best solution for portable scanning. You get a full size bed, excellent quality, decent speed (though not blazing), very quiet operation entirely off USB without any other power source, and yet they're only about the thickness of a laptop. My wife uses hers a lot for her research, it fits very nicely in the side pocket of the laptop bag. Add a reasonably recent version of PaperPort Deluxe, which is one of the most hassle-free scanning and scan management packages around, and you've got everything to create and maintain gobs of scans.
> Imagine trying to explain away that one!
Especially if the image is on your back and you have no idea it's been changed.
> No more being a slave to what someone else thinks is cool
I think you'll find that the reality will be very different. Probably the first companies to offer these shirts cheaply WILL be these shirt companies that will sell you that animated shirt for $40 in exchange for wearing a hard-coded GAP ad. You just know that many companies will introduce work uniforms with rolling commercials (e.g. pest control, plumbers, electricians, phone companies etc.). Before you know it, you'll be walking down the street and seeing a sea of moving pictures on the backs of people in front of you. Shades of Diamond Age anyone?
> and the habits of 3 other people I convinced.
I've convinced plenty of my friends to like TiVo, but none to buy. And these are people that spend thousands of dollars a year on other kinds of toys, but I guess the initial cost threshold plus monthly fee is too high for most. My neighbor has a $$$ HT setup with a custom room, 65" TV and very nice sound, and every time he sees my TiVo he loves it. But he still won't get one. Why? Beats me, maybe TiVo should ask him, it might help them become profitable.
> Slap on an overpriced harddrive that clips on top or something
I've always said that they could have made a KILLING with that feature alone. If you look at places like 9thtee and see the kinds of upgrades people are buying, TiVo could have been in the black already selling $50 external 1394 drives for $150.
I've always been highly disappointed that they stopped innovating after the initial product. They could have been THE media company if they had kept pushing with new features like device networking and show saving to VCD etc. Their caution with Hollywood seems to have been pointless, because it seems they're now after them anyway. They might as well have made some money.
> I don't think that TiVo is a "one trick pony" either.
Really? In the world of PVRs TiVo's Suggestions are indeed its one trick. What else sets it apart? Sure, it USED to be pretty hackable, but that's hardly a selling feature. So yes, you could say that TiVo is a one-trick-pony.
> But opted for a PC [...] instead.
Well, at the time that wasn't the best-of-breed choice. During the 80s the PC was seriously lagging behind the Amiga in terms of OS and hardware, only its breadth of software was superior. Of course, in the long term the PC won, but in 1987 that didn't matter, because going with a PC meant a 286 with EGA and mono sound at best, and most likely MS-DOS 3.3 and maybe Windows 2.0. That's not something I'd wish on my worst enemies. The Amiga OTOH gave you most of the benefits of today's OSs, such as preemptive multitasking, a sophisticated filesystem, a powerful (though by some tastes rather ungainly) GUI, a huge API, and great multimedia.
Today the Amiga would be a curious choice at best. The point is that few if any platforms stay dominant forever, and it's silly to stay loyal out of some religious fervor. Pick whatever works best TODAY.
http://optics.org/articles/news/8/7/1/1
Why does the world need this again?
At this tiny size and the relative speed they're going, steering is a real issue. You have to pulse the steering button really quickly for small turns and still end up with pretty sizeable direction changes. They would be a lot more driveable if they had proportional steering, but that might be too much asked at this size and price point.
> not to mention Dmitry
Well, he got nabbed when he set foot on US soil. That's different from US law reaching overseas. I don't know if Russia would have extradited him.
> SIM cards don't make it impossible to lock the client in one operator.
Of course not, but their original intent WAS to provide handset independence, and they're a very adequate technology for that purpose. The CDMA implementations in the US OTOH don't provide any mechanism for handset independence, not even a token one.
Regarding UMTS in Europe, yes it was completely f*cked up by the (outrageously expensive) auctions. Then again, when have you ever seen a government that shirked away from potential new very large revenue? Western Europe is particularly guilty of that, although the US certainly is no pansy either.