No, they are saying that if the software came pre-installed on your computer you are not allowed to sell it. If you go to the store and buy a boxed copy, you can see it provided you don't have copies and you include the license agreement with it.
At least if I read the article correctly that's the way it works.
This would be good, but it would require a 3d interface. I think the only way to truly do a 3d environment is for it to exist in the physical world. Any 3d interface on a 2d screen will become kludgy pretty quick. The best way to do a fully 3d interface is to put in in the real world. Imagine if your desk *WAS* the computer. The desktop *WAS* your actual desktop. You open your draw to see 'real' manilla folders with names on the tabs for your documents and thumbing through them to find the financial report you were working on, 'grabbing' it and pulling it out and it appears on your desktop for you to work with. You open up another draw and see pens, pencils, markers highlighters, etc that you then 'grab' to select what you want to start writing with. You could just slide your hand across the desktop to move documents out of the way and tab or 'grab' a document that was 'under' the one you were working on and it comes to the top and you can begin working on that one.
This would require a lot of holography and motion tracking, touch sensors, etc, but it would be the ultimate in 3d interfaces. It would avoid klunky HUDs and gloves, etc that just detract from the actual work. You could even bring up a keyboard on the desktop and use that instead of a virtual pen or pencil.
3d interfaces would be nice, but on a 2d display I think it's best to stick with a 2d interface.
A speech interface would be nice, but only if it was supplemented with a standard mouse and keyboard (and maybe a touch screen) and would accept natural language commands. As far as the user interface goes it should have a complete abstraction from applications and the file system leaving the user to only be concerned with documents.
The reason they should also have mouse and keyboards are for security so passwords etc wouldn't have to be spoken (see the recent user friendly strip series for a humerous take on that), and so things you're doing could be kept somewhat private. Imagine starting up a long build or whatever on your machine and figuring you'd take a short break while everything compiles and telling your computer 'open mozilla. go to hot asian chicks dot com. click hot and horney', you might get more than a few head turns from local cube dwellers unless you bookmarked it and renamed it to something like 'intranet' but the renaming process would also have to be vocalized.
It should also accept natural language commands for complicated to speak text. The main example for this is programming. If I wanted to do:
for (int i = 1; i = 10; i++)
cout << i << endl;
I would like to just say 'for loop. local integer i from zero to ten step one begin. print i and end line. end loop'. instead of having to articulate each puntuation symbol as 'for open parenthesis int i equals 1 semicolon i less than equal ten semicolon i plus plus close parethesis. enter. c out less than less than i less than less than end l', not to mention if I had to put spaces in there too.
The next thing we would need is an abstraction from the use of applications and the file system which would go in very well with a speech interface. The user would only be concerned with documents and data. The user would just ask the computer to start a new report on photosynthesis and the computer could ask the user what to call it and they could just respond with a natural name like 'biology 101 mid-term'. Later the user would just ask the computer to open the biology 101 mid-term without having to care if it was opened with word or starwriter or kword, etc, it would just be there and they could work on it.
The abstraction from the file system would be a natural extension of this because the user doesn't need to know where anything is because the computer takes care of it for them. The user just needs to remember documents/files as he would anything else 'I was writing that letter to Bob', 'I was working on the bio mid-term', etc. This also furthers the use of a computer as a tool, because it would actually help you get things done and be easy to use by anyone because speech is a natural interface for us, but keyboards and mice are not.
The best example I can think of having something like a touch screen is for web browsing or editing documents/preparing presentations, drawing (but maybe a graphic tablet would better for that), etc. so instead of telling the computer to open the 'Read more' link, I could point and it would open whatever I pointed to.
Microsoft is trying to do this with things like the My Documents folder and automatically naming documents with the first line of the document, but it's still somewhat cludgy because it relies on keyboard and mouse interaction. They are kind of on the right track in terms of abstraction from applications and the file system, but still needs a ways to go. This is why they have the Documents folder in the start menu and New Office Document and Open Office Document on the start menu instead of the programs menu. This is also why they have extension associations with applications so the user can just click on a document and it will spawn the right application (or maybe they just stole it from macs).
These ideas are nothing new, I've seem them all somewhere else before, but I just thought I'd post them here for discussion because I think they're good ideas. It should also be noted that this type of interface is for the 'average' user not the average slashdot reader since we all like our keyboards and CLIs.
What's so wrong about this? Sure the government has to hire some coders to write some free software for them, but they'll easily make up the returns by not having to pay licensing fees to Microsoft or Sun.
This is a very good move by their government to put up a relatively small fixed cost up front to reap potentially huge savings in the future. Who is it who said a penny saved is a penny earned?
97.3% chance--and how did we arrive at that magical figure
Some people just can't appreciate a little humor. Or maybe I've just been watching too much of the Star Trek: TNG marathon on TNN.
I have a deja vu feeling that 97.3% of/. readers don't
Maybe I have a 97.3% better memory than/. readers. And yes, I did read the link and visit the website, and since the primary news source I visit is/., I can think of no other website that would have linked me to FIC's website since I don't really visit fic.com.tw very often. But I could have got linked there from newsforge, I go there about as much as slashdot.
I'm having the strangest sense of Deja Vu on this article. I'm 97.3% sure I've seen this on/. before, but I can't find the link. And since my web browser remembered that I've been to the FIC webpage and all the links to their aquapad were already visitied, I know this has been here before.
So what's the big news? Did the price drop? I seemed to remember them being around $1000, I suppose $600 is more reasonable, but built in 802.11b would make it a lot more appealing.
Is this kind of similar to how cell phones work? There's a big antenna that all the little antennas can transmit to. It just seemed like the little antennas would have a finite range that they could transmit before the signal degraded too far to be usable.
I want to setup a wireless network similar to this, but I wouldn't get my bandwidth for free so I'd have to charge a small fee to cover the cost of the T-1 or T-3 line. The main problem I saw was distance, sure I could put up a powerful antenna on my home, but what about everyones wireless cards? I figured I could transmit to them, but I figured their little antennas wouldn't be able to transmit to me unless I also put up a powerful antenna on each home.
Does anyone have some ideas about how I could do this? The chaining of access points sounds like a good idea, but there is the routing issue if one goes down, not to mention to cost factor of having one in every home, maybe one every couple of homes to keep a fairly tight network. Could someone point me to a good resource that describes how I could setup a network like this and make it work well? What about FCC regulations on doing this type of thing? Ideally, in the future, I'd like to provide a wireless type service to my whole town, are there any regulations for using a standard wireless network for profit like that?
I have so many questions about this type of network setup so if you want to e-mail me the answers and maybe we could talk off-slashdot, that'd be great too. My e-mail is pretty easy to figure out since there is no JeffSketch.com domain.
Actually that code does serve a purpose when programming on Windows/MFC/C++ systems. In MFC, TRUE is defined as the integer constant '1' and FALSE is defined as the integer constant '0'. Whereas the return from the boolean expression will either be the C++ boolean value 'true' or the C++ boolean value 'false'. And depending on the warning level of the compiler, it will complain/mention that you're converting a boolean to an integer, so adding the ? TRUE : FALSE will eliminate the warning.
Actually I think it would be just as good MS Office would read/write StarOffice formats (or abiword, kword, etc). I know it'll never happen, but I also know they'll never open up their file formats either. But if they aren't going to open their formats, they could at least support our file formats, since they support Lotus and WordPerfect, and a few others. It also wouldn't be too bad to just let us know how to write a.cnv file and we could do our own conversion filters.
Wow, I didn't even know google had adds, they were so unobtrusive. But I just went back and sure enough, an add appeared on my search results. I'm trying to figure out if that's good or bad, since if I don't see the add, I won't click on it.
I do like the no additional load times. It definatly helps those of us on dialups. I hate having my limited bandwidth used for adds. At work I don't mind too much because I'm on T-1. Sigh, need high speed internet:(.
Not to be nitpicky, but Apache runs on windows too. But you're right that IIS definately has more exploits which would make it a better target despite it's smaller market share.
I don't care what anyone says, but it's NOT Mario Kart. It might be a racing game with cartoon characters, but I know I won't be buying it. I personally (and all my friends) don't like the Simpsons so we would have no enjoyment playing this game. We would prefer just a sequel to Mario Kart 64 complete with battle mode, etc.
Does anyone know if there are any plans to produce a REAL Mario Kart for the Game Cube?
Normally I would agree since I love the Myst series. While it does require significant problem solving skills, it also requires a long attention span, and there are lots of people who don't find it engaging enough to be enjoyable.
I wouldn't recommend getting too many copies, but one or two for the few people who might enjoy those types of games would be good.
I agree, I liked the raquetball one the best too. I'll have an entirely new perspective while I'm playing raquetball now:).
I wonder if the people who design raquetballs and tennisballs know that they're going to be deformed that much and design them accordingly, I would hope so, but ya never know.
I wonder if an IDS or firewall can be configured to protect against such leeching
IANAFE (I am not a firewall expert), but the only way I could think of would be to always ignore the checksum so they always get a connection and thus it would screw up their results. Otherwise it's indistinguishable from normal traffic, it's just bad traffic. Maybe the firewall could start dropping packets after X number of bad checksum packets?
breaking something down into server, games, and applications is open for a lot of abuse and confusion.
Maybe for us geeks it could be confusing, but for the other 90% of the population, it would make sense. Whereas the Float, MIPS, Integer categories would make sense to us, it wouldn't make much sense to everyone else. If they were shopping for a computer to be mainly used for gaming, they would want to pick out one with a processor that was high in the 'games' category. Whereas if the computer was mainly going to be used for word processing then they'd only be interested in the 'application' rating, etc.
I really like this idea, but the main problem that I see with it is that the only real choices among processors are AMD and Intel so basically the AMD processors will probably be consistantly higher in one category and Intels will be consistantly higher in another category. If there were 10 different processors to choose from and there was more variety then the rating system would probably make more sense.
Linux was chosen as the platform for this work because its growing success and open development environment provided an opportunity to demonstrate that this functionality can be successful in a mainstream operating system
Is Linux really a mainstream OS yet? I know it is for servers, but definately not for desktops. I couldn't quite tell where they were going with it, if it was geared more towards servers or desktops, since both need decent security. Could someone shed some light on this?
The best thing about GNU/Linux is the people who use it.
- Kenneth W. Melvin
This is the only quote I don't agree with. I think the users are probably the worst thing about Linux. I'm not saying that all users are bad, but what annoys me is the people whose only response to a question is RTFM. The people who get on their high horse about how superior Linux is and how everything else sucks also annoy me, but not as much since I know they're right, these are also the people who respond to any Windows problem by telling them to reformat and install Linux.
I think the Linux user community has a ways to go and should learn to be more inclusive of non-Linux users and Linux users who are new to Linux. Once the Linux users become more helpful, then I'll agree that the Linux users are the best thing about Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they are saying that if the software came pre-installed on your computer you are not allowed to sell it. If you go to the store and buy a boxed copy, you can see it provided you don't have copies and you include the license agreement with it.
At least if I read the article correctly that's the way it works.
This would be good, but it would require a 3d interface. I think the only way to truly do a 3d environment is for it to exist in the physical world. Any 3d interface on a 2d screen will become kludgy pretty quick. The best way to do a fully 3d interface is to put in in the real world. Imagine if your desk *WAS* the computer. The desktop *WAS* your actual desktop. You open your draw to see 'real' manilla folders with names on the tabs for your documents and thumbing through them to find the financial report you were working on, 'grabbing' it and pulling it out and it appears on your desktop for you to work with. You open up another draw and see pens, pencils, markers highlighters, etc that you then 'grab' to select what you want to start writing with. You could just slide your hand across the desktop to move documents out of the way and tab or 'grab' a document that was 'under' the one you were working on and it comes to the top and you can begin working on that one.
This would require a lot of holography and motion tracking, touch sensors, etc, but it would be the ultimate in 3d interfaces. It would avoid klunky HUDs and gloves, etc that just detract from the actual work. You could even bring up a keyboard on the desktop and use that instead of a virtual pen or pencil.
3d interfaces would be nice, but on a 2d display I think it's best to stick with a 2d interface.
A speech interface would be nice, but only if it was supplemented with a standard mouse and keyboard (and maybe a touch screen) and would accept natural language commands. As far as the user interface goes it should have a complete abstraction from applications and the file system leaving the user to only be concerned with documents.
The reason they should also have mouse and keyboards are for security so passwords etc wouldn't have to be spoken (see the recent user friendly strip series for a humerous take on that), and so things you're doing could be kept somewhat private. Imagine starting up a long build or whatever on your machine and figuring you'd take a short break while everything compiles and telling your computer 'open mozilla. go to hot asian chicks dot com. click hot and horney', you might get more than a few head turns from local cube dwellers unless you bookmarked it and renamed it to something like 'intranet' but the renaming process would also have to be vocalized.
It should also accept natural language commands for complicated to speak text. The main example for this is programming. If I wanted to do:
for (int i = 1; i = 10; i++)
cout << i << endl;
I would like to just say 'for loop. local integer i from zero to ten step one begin. print i and end line. end loop'. instead of having to articulate each puntuation symbol as 'for open parenthesis int i equals 1 semicolon i less than equal ten semicolon i plus plus close parethesis. enter. c out less than less than i less than less than end l', not to mention if I had to put spaces in there too.
The next thing we would need is an abstraction from the use of applications and the file system which would go in very well with a speech interface. The user would only be concerned with documents and data. The user would just ask the computer to start a new report on photosynthesis and the computer could ask the user what to call it and they could just respond with a natural name like 'biology 101 mid-term'. Later the user would just ask the computer to open the biology 101 mid-term without having to care if it was opened with word or starwriter or kword, etc, it would just be there and they could work on it.
The abstraction from the file system would be a natural extension of this because the user doesn't need to know where anything is because the computer takes care of it for them. The user just needs to remember documents/files as he would anything else 'I was writing that letter to Bob', 'I was working on the bio mid-term', etc. This also furthers the use of a computer as a tool, because it would actually help you get things done and be easy to use by anyone because speech is a natural interface for us, but keyboards and mice are not.
The best example I can think of having something like a touch screen is for web browsing or editing documents/preparing presentations, drawing (but maybe a graphic tablet would better for that), etc. so instead of telling the computer to open the 'Read more' link, I could point and it would open whatever I pointed to.
Microsoft is trying to do this with things like the My Documents folder and automatically naming documents with the first line of the document, but it's still somewhat cludgy because it relies on keyboard and mouse interaction. They are kind of on the right track in terms of abstraction from applications and the file system, but still needs a ways to go. This is why they have the Documents folder in the start menu and New Office Document and Open Office Document on the start menu instead of the programs menu. This is also why they have extension associations with applications so the user can just click on a document and it will spawn the right application (or maybe they just stole it from macs).
These ideas are nothing new, I've seem them all somewhere else before, but I just thought I'd post them here for discussion because I think they're good ideas. It should also be noted that this type of interface is for the 'average' user not the average slashdot reader since we all like our keyboards and CLIs.
What's so wrong about this? Sure the government has to hire some coders to write some free software for them, but they'll easily make up the returns by not having to pay licensing fees to Microsoft or Sun.
This is a very good move by their government to put up a relatively small fixed cost up front to reap potentially huge savings in the future. Who is it who said a penny saved is a penny earned?
97.3% chance--and how did we arrive at that magical figure
/. readers don't
/. readers. And yes, I did read the link and visit the website, and since the primary news source I visit is /., I can think of no other website that would have linked me to FIC's website since I don't really visit fic.com.tw very often. But I could have got linked there from newsforge, I go there about as much as slashdot.
Some people just can't appreciate a little humor. Or maybe I've just been watching too much of the Star Trek: TNG marathon on TNN.
I have a deja vu feeling that 97.3% of
Maybe I have a 97.3% better memory than
I know it's available, but I'd just rather have it built in.
I'm having the strangest sense of Deja Vu on this article. I'm 97.3% sure I've seen this on /. before, but I can't find the link. And since my web browser remembered that I've been to the FIC webpage and all the links to their aquapad were already visitied, I know this has been here before.
So what's the big news? Did the price drop? I seemed to remember them being around $1000, I suppose $600 is more reasonable, but built in 802.11b would make it a lot more appealing.
Is this kind of similar to how cell phones work? There's a big antenna that all the little antennas can transmit to. It just seemed like the little antennas would have a finite range that they could transmit before the signal degraded too far to be usable.
I want to setup a wireless network similar to this, but I wouldn't get my bandwidth for free so I'd have to charge a small fee to cover the cost of the T-1 or T-3 line. The main problem I saw was distance, sure I could put up a powerful antenna on my home, but what about everyones wireless cards? I figured I could transmit to them, but I figured their little antennas wouldn't be able to transmit to me unless I also put up a powerful antenna on each home.
Does anyone have some ideas about how I could do this? The chaining of access points sounds like a good idea, but there is the routing issue if one goes down, not to mention to cost factor of having one in every home, maybe one every couple of homes to keep a fairly tight network. Could someone point me to a good resource that describes how I could setup a network like this and make it work well? What about FCC regulations on doing this type of thing? Ideally, in the future, I'd like to provide a wireless type service to my whole town, are there any regulations for using a standard wireless network for profit like that?
I have so many questions about this type of network setup so if you want to e-mail me the answers and maybe we could talk off-slashdot, that'd be great too. My e-mail is pretty easy to figure out since there is no JeffSketch.com domain.
Thanks in advance.
Actually that code does serve a purpose when programming on Windows/MFC/C++ systems. In MFC, TRUE is defined as the integer constant '1' and FALSE is defined as the integer constant '0'. Whereas the return from the boolean expression will either be the C++ boolean value 'true' or the C++ boolean value 'false'. And depending on the warning level of the compiler, it will complain/mention that you're converting a boolean to an integer, so adding the ? TRUE : FALSE will eliminate the warning.
Actually I think it would be just as good MS Office would read/write StarOffice formats (or abiword, kword, etc). I know it'll never happen, but I also know they'll never open up their file formats either. But if they aren't going to open their formats, they could at least support our file formats, since they support Lotus and WordPerfect, and a few others. It also wouldn't be too bad to just let us know how to write a .cnv file and we could do our own conversion filters.
Wow, I didn't even know google had adds, they were so unobtrusive. But I just went back and sure enough, an add appeared on my search results. I'm trying to figure out if that's good or bad, since if I don't see the add, I won't click on it.
:(.
I do like the no additional load times. It definatly helps those of us on dialups. I hate having my limited bandwidth used for adds. At work I don't mind too much because I'm on T-1. Sigh, need high speed internet
can I get it on thinkgeek? But seriously it looks pretty cool. I'd like to try one out and see how easy it is to use.
Not to be nitpicky, but Apache runs on windows too. But you're right that IIS definately has more exploits which would make it a better target despite it's smaller market share.
I'm downloading it from ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/wolf/linux/.
:).
Happy downloading. I can't post a mirror right now, but I'm sure someone will soon
I don't care what anyone says, but it's NOT Mario Kart. It might be a racing game with cartoon characters, but I know I won't be buying it. I personally (and all my friends) don't like the Simpsons so we would have no enjoyment playing this game. We would prefer just a sequel to Mario Kart 64 complete with battle mode, etc.
Does anyone know if there are any plans to produce a REAL Mario Kart for the Game Cube?
Normally I would agree since I love the Myst series. While it does require significant problem solving skills, it also requires a long attention span, and there are lots of people who don't find it engaging enough to be enjoyable.
I wouldn't recommend getting too many copies, but one or two for the few people who might enjoy those types of games would be good.
I agree, I liked the raquetball one the best too. I'll have an entirely new perspective while I'm playing raquetball now :).
I wonder if the people who design raquetballs and tennisballs know that they're going to be deformed that much and design them accordingly, I would hope so, but ya never know.
I wonder if an IDS or firewall can be configured to protect against such leeching
IANAFE (I am not a firewall expert), but the only way I could think of would be to always ignore the checksum so they always get a connection and thus it would screw up their results. Otherwise it's indistinguishable from normal traffic, it's just bad traffic. Maybe the firewall could start dropping packets after X number of bad checksum packets?
breaking something down into server, games, and applications is open for a lot of abuse and confusion.
Maybe for us geeks it could be confusing, but for the other 90% of the population, it would make sense. Whereas the Float, MIPS, Integer categories would make sense to us, it wouldn't make much sense to everyone else. If they were shopping for a computer to be mainly used for gaming, they would want to pick out one with a processor that was high in the 'games' category. Whereas if the computer was mainly going to be used for word processing then they'd only be interested in the 'application' rating, etc.
I really like this idea, but the main problem that I see with it is that the only real choices among processors are AMD and Intel so basically the AMD processors will probably be consistantly higher in one category and Intels will be consistantly higher in another category. If there were 10 different processors to choose from and there was more variety then the rating system would probably make more sense.
Linux was chosen as the platform for this work because its growing success and open development environment provided an opportunity to demonstrate that this functionality can be successful in a mainstream operating system
Is Linux really a mainstream OS yet? I know it is for servers, but definately not for desktops. I couldn't quite tell where they were going with it, if it was geared more towards servers or desktops, since both need decent security. Could someone shed some light on this?
of course, that would explain why humans are so insecure and unstable....
And it would explain why we seem to want to seg fault and dump core all the time.
(Sorry, bad reference to the bastardization of The Matrix. I probably deserve to be modded down for it.)
Linux Today has a poll where you can vote for the best operating system.
Note: This is an unbiased and unscientific poll, for entertainment purposes only.
Opps, looks like I forgot my closing . Eventually I'll need to learn to use the preview button more. Oh well.
The best thing about GNU/Linux is the people who use it.
- Kenneth W. Melvin
This is the only quote I don't agree with. I think the users are probably the worst thing about Linux. I'm not saying that all users are bad, but what annoys me is the people whose only response to a question is RTFM. The people who get on their high horse about how superior Linux is and how everything else sucks also annoy me, but not as much since I know they're right, these are also the people who respond to any Windows problem by telling them to reformat and install Linux.
I think the Linux user community has a ways to go and should learn to be more inclusive of non-Linux users and Linux users who are new to Linux. Once the Linux users become more helpful, then I'll agree that the Linux users are the best thing about Linux.