Why does every single computer need to be geek friendly? Is it seriously necessary for this whining to continue every time Apple releases a product?
Here's how it goes: the iDevices are computing as an appliance. They are not meant for you. Why do you feel the need to bitch and moan about every little thing like you are somehow entitled to everything being your way?
Because Apple built itself, originally, with a contrarian approach that specifically included openness and revolt against locked-down boxes.
If IBM (well, OK, Lenovo) created a locked-down tablet, no one would blink. It would be expected.
Apple defined itself by being entirely against that sort of corporate behavior, and is now taking flack for having slowly inched directly into the same position. They deserve all of the criticism, every single bit.
I know I don't an exact answer to the OPs question.
I am using xmonad, and I have to say being able to swap a virtual desktop between monitors is a great feature.
I often just want to swap all windows from my left monitor to the right. At first this sounds confusing, but if you get used to it you can exploit this behaviour. Imagine you have 2 monitors and 3 desktops with useful items. Instead of using two virtual desktops that span over both monitors and have your windows prearranged per desktop. You can just see either (1,3) or (2,3) or maybe (2,1) and then switch to (3,1).
The same scenario in a 2 virtual desktops with 2 monitors ends up in being awkward. If you've got (1,2) and want to see (2,3), you swap windows between 1 and 3 and that will go well. But if you want so see (3,2) then you are forced to swap all windows from one monitor to the other and move windows from one virtual desktop to the other.
Actually I am not quite happy with the way xmonad actually handles fullscreen, but it handles windows and virtual desktops by far better than anything else. I indeed crave for an answer to the posters question, as I might switch then.
Memory is dirt cheap. Why are you only using a small number of workspaces? All of the shuffling you're describing, while it sounds like fun, can be done better and faster with having many more workspaces and just switching between them. With modern hardware, there's almost no reason to have a small number of workspaces. Seriously, a decent setup has 4 to 8GB of memory these days, and X with twelve workspaces (each with a 2-monitor desktop) and lots of active windows takes under 500MB.
"Attach a debugger to processes on two different servers and begin debugging, verifying database activity"
When I need to do this, I put all of the windows on one workspace, sometimes taking advantage of Alt-TAB to rotate between them (I set Alt-TAB to rotate only within the current workspace). Or, when I need to really have one window present always, it gets shared to all workspaces. I think in some window managers, it's possible to put a given window on some subset of workspaces as well, although I've never explored that feature.
The sound effects were to underscore that there is a single keystroke for switching between desktops for every single desktop (instead of a precision mouse gesture to click the icon for a given workspace; if you want to work efficiently, find ways of avoiding the mouse) and provide a little levity. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I'm glad to see it worked.
If it wasn't clear from the post, each Fn key is bound to switch to the equivalent workspace: pressing F1 switches to workspace 1, F2 to workspace 2, etc., up to F12. Different window managers have different methods for binding keys to switch desktops, so you'll have to look it up for your particular window manager. Same goes for creating 12 full workspaces, rather than the standard 4.
On one workspace (6, for me), I have two Firefox windows, maximized, one on the left screen, one on the right. They never get closed. To set them up, I switch to Desktop 6 (F6), start Firefox, maximize the resulting window, type Ctrl-N for a second window, drag that second window to the second monitor, and maximize it there. After setting it up, all I have to do is hit F6 from anywhere and I'm immediately taken to Desktop 6 with the two Firefox windows fully maximized.
For nearly all of the reasonably sized monitors (say, anything up to 22 or 24 inches), if you aren't using maximized windows, I would argue that you're wasting real estate on a dual-monitor setup. (Hell, I'd probably argue that on a one-monitor setup, too, but less vigorously, as I do find there are times on my laptop that I need more than one window visible at a time.) Not only that, but you're distracting yourself from the task at hand with bits and pieces of other windows poking out in the background.
Another key element that might have been too implicit in my earlier posting is that once a window is established on one virtual desktop, it rarely, if ever, gets moved from that position. That way I'm (almost) never searching for which desktop has which window. If I want, for example, my web browser, it's always on Deskop 6. My media player, Desktop 12, and so forth. The pattern of which application gets put on which desktop has evolved slowly, and was biased by the symbols on various keyboards I've used over the last decade-plus. It works well for me. Yours would undoubtedly be different.
I have had a computer running Linux (Fedora of one flavor or another) with two displays for getting on to be most of a decade. Wouldn't work seriously any other way. I have 12 desktops (one for each Fn key on standard keyboards), which are linked so that both monitors switch at the same time.
If you haven't TRIED this sort of setup yet (and it sounds very much like you have not), then I would encourage you to try it first. What problem are you trying to solve with being able to switch monitors individually? WIndows can be trivially moved between virtual desktops under Linux, and with single keystroke desktop switching (remember those Fn keys?) I find that I rarely, if ever, need to move applications from one desktop to another. To promote efficiency, I have adopted, over the years, a standard pattern of where given windows are. The details are good for me, but not necessarily anyone else, so I won't go through the particulars, but, just as one example, when I want to use a browser, I hit F6, and BOOM, there are two browser windows at full screen. When I need an editor, another single keystroke (F3, if you care), and BOOM, emacs on the left, and, usually, an xterm on the right. Fully maximized. Moving windows around and resizing them is a waste of time and screen area. Twelve desktops maps nicely to the Fn keys -- which, again, is why I have 12, and, again is why switching between applications is 1-keystroke-instantaneous -- and I cannot recall running out of room, ever.
If the reason you want to switch workspaces individually is that you don't have enough flexibility in your workspaces (like you only have four per monitor), then you're solving the wrong problem. Increase the number of workspaces you have. Also, stop putting the task bar on the long dimension of the monitor -- that's the one where you have the least distance to play with. And if you're doing any document-based work, then it's a MUST to use portrait orientation.
Or were you just going to dick around, switching the left workspace, then the right one, then the left, then the right?
When people join my lab, they universally comment on how efficient my work setup is... and usually leave using a very similar setup themselves.
Getting critical mass in the first place is hard. I wonder if there's any stories out there about how Facebook/Myspace/Twitter first got started.
My brother (who lurks here with a two-digit Slashdot ID) started a commercial social networking web site that is a direct, albeit smaller, competitor to those three. I was part of the closed beta testing team who were invited to join in from friends and family of the original crew. It took a very, very long time before there were more than just a handful of people on the site, and most of them joined as a result of direct, repeated, personal solicitation by my brother and his team. They worked pretty hard at it, and now have many millions of users, but it took a long time to build up a head of steam.
I'm no expert on this, but it seems to me that radio waves may likely be obsolete to advanced civilizations. They are quite possibly using something like lasers, x-rays, gravity waves, etc. True, if they are in the same stage we are, they may be using lots of the radio spectrum, but that greatly limits the kind and number of civilizations we may detect. Looking for something like a Dyson Sphere (star-orbiting solar arrays) may be a more productive approach, or at least a good supplement.
I'm not an expert at long-range radio transmission, but I have worked in signal detection. One of the basic tenets of SETI is the observation that the Earth has been a huge transmitting station for some decades now, thanks to Radio and Television, and that goldarnit, if we're inadvertently transmitting to outer space, then we ought to be able to listen to some other planet doing the same thing.
Except that if you can't focus an antenna to one very very small part of the earth, radio and television stations have a nasty tendency to interfere with each other since television stations in New York will be operating on the same frequencies as ones in Los Angeles, and although the combination of widely skewed proximity patterns and terrestrial curvature blocking line-of-sight interference allows through-the-air reception just fine on the surface of our planet, a receiver situated outside of the Solar system will get transmitters on one entire side of the Earth at a time. Those signals will tend to interfere, with the result being nothing more than a little extra noise over background, at distance. Structure in the signal is not going to be discernible.
The only way (and, to be fair, you do hear some SETI folk talking about this) we're going to be able to listen to an alien race is if they're beaming something straight at us. That presumes they have some suspicion we're here. And that means they're definitely more advanced than us, 'cause we can't even detect the presence of small, rocky planets around other star systems, yet, forget eavesdropping through the blinding radio background of their star.
I don't believe any spam filter that advertises 100% accuracy, especially one claiming to do it by figuring out the spam email 'templates'
Yeah, and calling this a discovery stretches credulity. Who here thinks that Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, and your favorite big mail service provider, don't already do some version of this?
Seriously, this is a hack and a half. That's one of the worst soldering and assembly jobs I've ever seen (cat5 for hookup wire?) I don't even see enough parts to make it work at all. You'd need one relay to provide ignition power, then a second to hit the starter. Plus there are no other features here like a neutral/park detect (so the vehicle doesn't start moving), an auto shutdown so the vehicle won't run for days if you accidentally start it and forget, etc.
A cheap remote start kit like the Bulldog Security Deluxe 500 is $105 anyway.
Wow, were we looking at the same page? It seemed pretty cleanly done to me: he used a perf board to hold the wire, did a reasonable job with soldering, nice neat assembly. Were you expecting a professionally designed PCB? CAT5 is perfectly good hookup wire, as long as you need solid core. Really, when you're using short lengths of solid core hookup wire, pretty much all 24 gauge is the same, as long as you don't need super high speed signalling (not here), high temp (nope), extremely low crosstalk (no), high voltage (definitely not). And CAT5 is cheap. Using it from the box to the cell phone is probably not going to work very well long-term, since the wire will fatigue from vibrations, but this fellow is open about learning from his mistakes. Furthermore, he used a terminal connector for the wires to the relay with heavier, stranded wire (a must for unsupported wire in an automotive environment), and he used crimp connectors and shrink tubing. Bonus for both.
Seriously, speaking as an EE and automotive enthusiast, it's a pretty good job. Granted, the Bulldog device sounds much better on paper (wow, their website is not only broken with missing images and pages, but also a PIA to navigate), but there's no fun in having designed it yourself. This sort of hacking SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED. Or did you forget that that's where Linux comes from?
The study was published in J. Neural Engineering which, regrettably, my institution does not have a subscription to, so can't be as well-informed as I'd like, unfortunately. Nevertheless, the research was headed by Dr. Apostolos Gerogropoulos, whom I know professionally and by his research publications. Now, Dr. Georgopoulos is no fool. His research team certainly must have thought about these potential issues. There's a hint at why the study might be considered valid despite what at first blush seems like a lack of proper controls in the press release: "the researchers also are able to judge the severity of how much [subjects with PTSD] are suffering," Proper controls (ie, soldiers without PTSD) are necessary, but if there's a good correlation between the observed MEG phenomena and the strength of clinical findings, then maybe the study really has discovered something interesting.
If the money isn't coming out of my wallet, then for all I care, it is free.
Ah, grasshopper, where do you think the money comes from then?
Producing and delivering advertising is not free for manufacturers; they must pay for it. Those costs must be recovered somehow, and their primary income stream is selling goods. Thus the cost of advertising is built in to the price of the products -- every single product -- that we buy. If you think otherwise, then, grasshopper, you have not yet found enlightenment.
You may call them "whiners", but they have a point. Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else? Why would I pick the NYTimes over any of the free sources of similar information? You are forgetting who the customer is in regards to news. The customer is the advertiser. How much are you paying for your network news exactly (not that I personally watch the news, but still)?
And you're forgetting that the NYT typically has better reporting, based on many criteria, than any other news outlet in the US, which is why it might be reasonable for the reader to pay for it, and why there really isn't another free source to replace it. Furthermore, while advertising provides substantial revenue for the NYT, if advertising were sufficient to cover all production costs, the NYT wouldn't be seeking revenue from their readers.
Personally, I'd be much happier paying full price for my news and not having any advertisements at all.
Human languages have lots and lots of redundancy, such that you can often either screw up letter order, word order, or even drop entire words, and often the full meaning is clear. Visual cues in the form of paragraphs and chapters are added to help guide the reader, but removing them would not render the text entirely incomprehensible.
Computer languages are not as forgiving, and, also, lacking redundancy, far denser. Reading speed is irrelevant because of the bottleneck formed by reading comprehension. Code is rarely read in novel-like linear fashion, but, much more often, flitting from one part of the text to another, navigating through visual cues. Visual cues in the form of often richly structured layout that includes idioms not required by syntax make navigating and comprehending code possible, and removing them although would, in most languages, not change the meaning of the code, would erect a formidable barrier to comprehension. Not using these cues to the fullest to help write clear, expressive and maintainable code is being self-indulgent and shortsighted. Requiring that a particular, and perhaps unspecified font be used for best display, rather than the ubiquitous assumption of monospaced font, is mere vanity.
Remember, when code is written, it is meant not only to be converted into executable machine language, but also to be comprehensible and comprehended by other programmers, or future selves. Clarity of expression is vital.
HAL: "Sorry about this, I know it's a bit silly...just a moment...just a moment... I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure within 72 hours."
Dave:"It's still within operational limits right now?"
HAL:"Yes. And it will stay that way till it fails."
I don't have my copy of the book handy to check the original dialogue.
guaranteed to be thicker than LED or LCD, and with phosphor delay; I want LED so that I can have [effectively] instant transitions. we can get back the delay effect with processing, but you can't eliminate phosphor delays when you've got phosphors.
There is essentially zero phosphor delay (I defy you to measure it... I am a visual neuroscientist and have, so yes, it is possible, and no, it is not easy) on the scale of perceptual latencies. I believe the latency from excitation to phosphor emission is on the nanosecond scale. The typical perceptual delays in the early visual system (retina and the first few stages of processing in the brain) are on order of 30 milliseconds, going from the time photons enter the eye to the first wave of activity in primary visual cortex. Different orders of magnitude. Like 6. Phosphor delay is irrelevant.
What you are perhaps thinking of is the phosphor DECAY which is another thing entirely. When phosphors are excited (such as by an impinging electron or photon beam) the emitted brightness steps up almost instantaneously and then decays down through an exponential relaxation curve. That decay time can tend to blur images when too long, or induce eye bleed (to use the vernacular) when the update rate is too low. The thing is that phosphor decays can be adjusted by reformulating the compounds, and are determined ultimately at time of manufacturing. Very fast phosphors are available to support KHz updates, but also very slow ones (some older oscilloscopes have phosphor decay constants measured in seconds).
Contemporary LCD monitors have typically 2 or 3 frames of latency because of the push to get faster transition times. Those 5 ms response time LCDs get fast specs by overdriving the pixels in a highly controlled fashion, but one that requires knowing what is on the next handful of frames. Since we live in a causal world, that means introducing a 2-3 frame latency for processing within the display. Since the update rates on LCDs are typically 60 Hz, that's on order of 45 ms latency, a non-trivial fraction of the loop from visual perception to motor action (known in the gaming vernacular as twitch response). If you're watching a movie, that latency is irrelevant and wholly, entirely unperceived. If you're playing a game, then it is very important.
It's likely because there are greater risks involved in general anesthetic. Where possible, it's seen as safer for the patient to use only locals.
And the patient is far from normally conscious under procedures like this. They are sedated, whereby it's generally meant the patient is socked to the gills with drugs like benzodiazepines.
As a gross generalization, I find that the medical profession (and I'm on the fringes of it) tends to overmedicate when it comes to sedation. As one example, my father was going to have a small bone spur removed from a toe. Yes, that can be painful, but a good circumdigit block with lidocaine will fix that. But he was supposed to be sedated for the procedure sufficiently that he would not be able to drive himself home. He called me to arrange for a ride before the fact, more than a little annoyed that a 10 minute procedure would entail such an ordeal, and I replied, "well, just refuse the sedative." He did, and was fine.
Now fixing a toe is very different from open heart surgery. The so-called awake patient during open heart surgery likely will be only slightly topside of conscious. However, there's a big difference between that and the deep general anesthesia that would be required without local anesthetics to block the pain. One of the big reasons for using less anesthesia is basic danger, as other posters have commented. But as we learn more about general anesthesia, and specifically in relation to open heart surgery, there's a significant toll it seems to take on the mind. It's considered a dirty little secret that patients are waking up after major surgery a little dumber than they were before. And, by "dirty little secret," I mean, it's an area ripe for significant research into the improvement of health care. In any case, combining a good epidural block with sedation to achieve the same surgical plane (that's the term used to describe depth of anesthesia) as previously achieved with general anesthesia is going to be a good step forward.
Seriously. They own an airstrip. They own what amounts to a public transit system. They own scads of land. They have what amounts to a treasury. Now they want to become an electrical power utility. What's missing?
Re:Lots of evidence for higher frame rates
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Right --- LEDs are controlled by current, not voltage (unless you really are a glutton for punishment and want to design the hard way). I haven't looked at backlight driver circuits that are available, and while PWM is an easy way out, there's no inherent reason designs must be that way, or at least couldn't include some filtering. And, as you point out, there's really no reason at all to not be driving the PWM at 4x the frame rate for a 60 Hz update (or 8x for that matter). There is good reason, however, to synchronize the frame updates and the backlighting, if the backlighting must be a strobe design.
Same goes for the idiot designers who make LED brake light systems for modern cars refresh at 60 Hz (or lower!). No reason that can't be cycling at 1000 Hz to avoid flashing trails.
Lots of evidence for higher frame rates
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I am a visual neuroscientist (IAAVNS). The standard idea of refresh rate comes from CRT based monitors where the image is drawn by a scanning electron beam. If you use an instrument to measure the instantaneous brightness at a given point on the screen it will rapidly peak as the beam swings by, and then decay as the phosphor continues to release absorbed energy in the form of photons. Different monitors have different decay rates, and, typically, CRTs that were designed for television use have pretty slow decay rates. CRTs that were designed for computer monitors typically have faster decay rates. If the decay rate were very very fast, then the hypothetical point on the screen would be dark most of the time and only occasionally very bright as the beam sweeps by on each frame.
As you can imagine this highly impulsive temporal profile is hard to smooth out into something closer to the constant brightness of the world around us. The human retina has an inherent dynamic response rate to it, but it's actually quite fast, and there have been studies showing clear responses in higher order visual areas of the brain up to 135 Hz. But standard phosphors used in CRTs have a little smoother response, and so at more-or-less 80 Hz, the brain stops seeing the flicker (at 60 Hz most people see flicker on a computer monitor). The exact refresh rate where perceptual blurring happens (so the flickering goes away) varies widely between individual, and with the exact details of the environment and what is being shown on the screen. More-or-less at 100 Hz refresh, no one sees the flicker anymore (although the brain can be shown to be still responding).
Contemporary screens, however, are LCD based (I'm going to ignore plasma screens since the field is still working out how they interact with the visual system). Making the same experiment as above, the temporal profile of brightness at a given spot on the screen will look more like a staircase, holding a value until the next frame gets drawn. This is a far, far smoother stimulus for the visual system, so a 60 Hz frame rate produces a perceptually far more flicker-free experience. That's why most CRTs at 60 Hz make your eyes bleed, while LCDs at 60 Hz are just fine.
Except that newer LCDs have LED backlighting which is no longer constant, but flashed (WHY? WHY? WHY? Just to save some power? Please, computer manufacturers, let *me* make that decision!), so the experience is somewhat more like a CRT.
So that's one part of the equation: flicker.
The other part of the equation is update rate, which still applies even there might be no flicker at all. Here, we have the evidence that the brain is responding at up to 135 Hz. In measurements made in my lab, I've found some responses up to 160 Hz. But the brain is super good at interpolating static images and deducing the motion. This is called "apparent motion" and is why strings of lights illuminated in sequence seem to move around a theater marquis. The brain is really good at that. Which is why even a 24 Hz movie (with 48 Hz frame doubling) in a movie theater is perceptually acceptable, but a 200 Hz movie would look much more like a window into reality. On TV you can see the difference between shows that have been shot on film (at 24 Hz) versus on video (at 30 or 60 Hz). Video seems clearer, less movie like.
For games, 60 Hz means 16 ms between frame updates -- and that can be a significant delay for twitch response. Further, modern LCD monitors have an inherent two or three frame processing delay, adding to the latency. As we know, long latency leads to poor gameplay. Faster updates means, potentially shorter latency, since it is a frame-by-frame issue.
So, just as with audio equipment where inexpensive low-fidelity equipment can produce an acceptable experience, while a more expensive setup can create the illusion of being at a concert, so too inexpensive video equipment (from camera to video board to monitor) can produce an acceptable experience, while a more expensive setup can create the illusion of visual reality.
These rovers are a very mature design that has worked flawlessly. Build and send a dozen of them.
Indeed! Or make just minor modifications to the design: it has been a proven reliable platform.
Modifications (off the top of my head) that would prove useful:
1. more memory to avoid the pesky problems with the NVRAM 2. higher energy density batteries (thanks to improved chemistries now available) 3. ultrasonic vibrator to shake dust off the solar panels (work GREAT in my digital SLR camera) 4. redesign the wheels a tad... perhaps add a means of mechanical decoupling if they completely lock up 5. just a tad more insulation to guard against the winter chills
I can't count the number of times I've written a very carefully researched small handful of lines of code that are either not intuitively obvious, or would leave more questions than they answered when read. When I've spent days demonstrating through thorough measurement that, for example, a certain constant requires a specific value, that fact gets documented with potentially many paragraphs of comments. Not doing so would be irresponsible, and a waste of my time when I tried to understand, months or years hence, why I had written that small handful of lines.
To quote one of the Ramones who was criticized in an interview for writing songs with only three chords, "yeah, but they're the RIGHT three chords." With music you can feel if the chords are right. With code, sometimes you have to document.
Discomfort often comes from the neck size of the shirt being too small.
And the neck sizes are always too small because shirts are made for the fattest possible person who still somehow has a neck of a particular size. At 6 feet and 160 pounds I'm thin but nowhere near emaciated, yet every shirt long enough for my arms, whether from Target or Nordstrom, could literally hold two of me in the torso yet barely buttons in the neck.
Yes, I know I'm way off topic, but good god it pisses me off. Why should it be impossible to find a shirt that fits for less than $150?
I also often have a hard time finding shirts that fit well. My brother recently turned me on to custom-tailored shirts. While not inexpensive, they aren't that bad, being typically just under $100 each. If you ever travel to Hong Kong, I understand that you can be measured and have clothing made on very short notice, with quite reasonable pricing.
Remember, uniforms exist because they work. It's social engineering.
Sure, they get the wearer used to conformity and mindless obedience.
Normally, I don't respond to AC comments, but this one misses the mark entirely. Actually, completely missed the point of my earlier reply.
Uniforms provide power. That power can either be used to control employees, to provide a ready means of recognition between employees, or to convey authority to employees. Examples of each are, in turn, fast-food staff, soldiers, and police officers.
My suggestion was that the original posting seemed to be in the first category, while I observed that it could be turned into the third with a little initiative.
Remember, dress for the job you want, not the one you have.
This is absolute BULLSHIT! What we have now is a whole lot of people fucking around trying to impress everyone else with their fashion sense rather than actually accomplishing anything noteworthy. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who bases their decisions on the fashion sense of those around them is a sheep and deserves to be treated like one (i.e. most people).
Reality would strongly suggest that you are wrong. Inter-personal relationships are, like it or not, based in great part on our appearances. That's why uniforms work. If you chose to be a slob, then you have to be far more talented to get the job that the fellow next in line who is better dressed.
Try wearing a suit some time when you don't have to. Just try it. Not a crappy fitting suit that looks like it's 20 years old, but one that fits well, and looks good. Just try it. My experience doing that suggests that you will get more respect, be taken more seriously, and your professional life will be a lot easier.
Me, I work for a fellow who is in charge of a department of 30 people with a budget of 300 million dollars. It would have to be an emergency for me to not wear a least a button down shirt, slacks, and a tie if not a suit when going to his office. Do you really think you would be taken seriously if you showed up in a similar office wearing a t-shirt and jeans?
Remember, uniforms exist because they work. It's social engineering.
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I have a stupid question.
Why does every single computer need to be geek friendly? Is it seriously necessary for this whining to continue every time Apple releases a product?
Here's how it goes: the iDevices are computing as an appliance. They are not meant for you. Why do you feel the need to bitch and moan about every little thing like you are somehow entitled to everything being your way?
Because Apple built itself, originally, with a contrarian approach that specifically included openness and revolt against locked-down boxes.
If IBM (well, OK, Lenovo) created a locked-down tablet, no one would blink. It would be expected.
Apple defined itself by being entirely against that sort of corporate behavior, and is now taking flack for having slowly inched directly into the same position. They deserve all of the criticism, every single bit.
I know I don't an exact answer to the OPs question.
I am using xmonad, and I have to say being able to swap a virtual desktop between monitors is a great feature.
I often just want to swap all windows from my left monitor to the right. At first this sounds confusing, but if you get used to it you can exploit this behaviour. Imagine you have 2 monitors and 3 desktops with useful items. Instead of using two virtual desktops that span over both monitors and have your windows prearranged per desktop. You can just see either (1,3) or (2,3) or maybe (2,1) and then switch to (3,1).
The same scenario in a 2 virtual desktops with 2 monitors ends up in being awkward.
If you've got (1,2) and want to see (2,3), you swap windows between 1 and 3 and that will go well. But if you want so see (3,2) then you are forced to swap all windows from one monitor to the other and move windows from one virtual desktop to the other.
Actually I am not quite happy with the way xmonad actually handles fullscreen, but it handles windows and virtual desktops by far better than anything else. I indeed crave for an answer to the posters question, as I might switch then.
Memory is dirt cheap. Why are you only using a small number of workspaces? All of the shuffling you're describing, while it sounds like fun, can be done better and faster with having many more workspaces and just switching between them. With modern hardware, there's almost no reason to have a small number of workspaces. Seriously, a decent setup has 4 to 8GB of memory these days, and X with twelve workspaces (each with a 2-monitor desktop) and lots of active windows takes under 500MB.
"Attach a debugger to processes on two different servers and begin debugging, verifying database activity"
When I need to do this, I put all of the windows on one workspace, sometimes taking advantage of Alt-TAB to rotate between them (I set Alt-TAB to rotate only within the current workspace). Or, when I need to really have one window present always, it gets shared to all workspaces. I think in some window managers, it's possible to put a given window on some subset of workspaces as well, although I've never explored that feature.
The sound effects were to underscore that there is a single keystroke for switching between desktops for every single desktop (instead of a precision mouse gesture to click the icon for a given workspace; if you want to work efficiently, find ways of avoiding the mouse) and provide a little levity. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I'm glad to see it worked.
If it wasn't clear from the post, each Fn key is bound to switch to the equivalent workspace: pressing F1 switches to workspace 1, F2 to workspace 2, etc., up to F12. Different window managers have different methods for binding keys to switch desktops, so you'll have to look it up for your particular window manager. Same goes for creating 12 full workspaces, rather than the standard 4.
On one workspace (6, for me), I have two Firefox windows, maximized, one on the left screen, one on the right. They never get closed. To set them up, I switch to Desktop 6 (F6), start Firefox, maximize the resulting window, type Ctrl-N for a second window, drag that second window to the second monitor, and maximize it there. After setting it up, all I have to do is hit F6 from anywhere and I'm immediately taken to Desktop 6 with the two Firefox windows fully maximized.
For nearly all of the reasonably sized monitors (say, anything up to 22 or 24 inches), if you aren't using maximized windows, I would argue that you're wasting real estate on a dual-monitor setup. (Hell, I'd probably argue that on a one-monitor setup, too, but less vigorously, as I do find there are times on my laptop that I need more than one window visible at a time.) Not only that, but you're distracting yourself from the task at hand with bits and pieces of other windows poking out in the background.
Another key element that might have been too implicit in my earlier posting is that once a window is established on one virtual desktop, it rarely, if ever, gets moved from that position. That way I'm (almost) never searching for which desktop has which window. If I want, for example, my web browser, it's always on Deskop 6. My media player, Desktop 12, and so forth. The pattern of which application gets put on which desktop has evolved slowly, and was biased by the symbols on various keyboards I've used over the last decade-plus. It works well for me. Yours would undoubtedly be different.
I have had a computer running Linux (Fedora of one flavor or another) with two displays for getting on to be most of a decade. Wouldn't work seriously any other way. I have 12 desktops (one for each Fn key on standard keyboards), which are linked so that both monitors switch at the same time.
If you haven't TRIED this sort of setup yet (and it sounds very much like you have not), then I would encourage you to try it first. What problem are you trying to solve with being able to switch monitors individually? WIndows can be trivially moved between virtual desktops under Linux, and with single keystroke desktop switching (remember those Fn keys?) I find that I rarely, if ever, need to move applications from one desktop to another. To promote efficiency, I have adopted, over the years, a standard pattern of where given windows are. The details are good for me, but not necessarily anyone else, so I won't go through the particulars, but, just as one example, when I want to use a browser, I hit F6, and BOOM, there are two browser windows at full screen. When I need an editor, another single keystroke (F3, if you care), and BOOM, emacs on the left, and, usually, an xterm on the right. Fully maximized. Moving windows around and resizing them is a waste of time and screen area. Twelve desktops maps nicely to the Fn keys -- which, again, is why I have 12, and, again is why switching between applications is 1-keystroke-instantaneous -- and I cannot recall running out of room, ever.
If the reason you want to switch workspaces individually is that you don't have enough flexibility in your workspaces (like you only have four per monitor), then you're solving the wrong problem. Increase the number of workspaces you have. Also, stop putting the task bar on the long dimension of the monitor -- that's the one where you have the least distance to play with. And if you're doing any document-based work, then it's a MUST to use portrait orientation.
Or were you just going to dick around, switching the left workspace, then the right one, then the left, then the right?
When people join my lab, they universally comment on how efficient my work setup is ... and usually leave using a very similar setup themselves.
Getting critical mass in the first place is hard. I wonder if there's any stories out there about how Facebook/Myspace/Twitter first got started.
My brother (who lurks here with a two-digit Slashdot ID) started a commercial social networking web site that is a direct, albeit smaller, competitor to those three. I was part of the closed beta testing team who were invited to join in from friends and family of the original crew. It took a very, very long time before there were more than just a handful of people on the site, and most of them joined as a result of direct, repeated, personal solicitation by my brother and his team. They worked pretty hard at it, and now have many millions of users, but it took a long time to build up a head of steam.
I'm no expert on this, but it seems to me that radio waves may likely be obsolete to advanced civilizations. They are quite possibly using something like lasers, x-rays, gravity waves, etc. True, if they are in the same stage we are, they may be using lots of the radio spectrum, but that greatly limits the kind and number of civilizations we may detect. Looking for something like a Dyson Sphere (star-orbiting solar arrays) may be a more productive approach, or at least a good supplement.
I'm not an expert at long-range radio transmission, but I have worked in signal detection. One of the basic tenets of SETI is the observation that the Earth has been a huge transmitting station for some decades now, thanks to Radio and Television, and that goldarnit, if we're inadvertently transmitting to outer space, then we ought to be able to listen to some other planet doing the same thing.
Except that if you can't focus an antenna to one very very small part of the earth, radio and television stations have a nasty tendency to interfere with each other since television stations in New York will be operating on the same frequencies as ones in Los Angeles, and although the combination of widely skewed proximity patterns and terrestrial curvature blocking line-of-sight interference allows through-the-air reception just fine on the surface of our planet, a receiver situated outside of the Solar system will get transmitters on one entire side of the Earth at a time. Those signals will tend to interfere, with the result being nothing more than a little extra noise over background, at distance. Structure in the signal is not going to be discernible.
The only way (and, to be fair, you do hear some SETI folk talking about this) we're going to be able to listen to an alien race is if they're beaming something straight at us. That presumes they have some suspicion we're here. And that means they're definitely more advanced than us, 'cause we can't even detect the presence of small, rocky planets around other star systems, yet, forget eavesdropping through the blinding radio background of their star.
I don't believe any spam filter that advertises 100% accuracy, especially one claiming to do it by figuring out the spam email 'templates'
Yeah, and calling this a discovery stretches credulity. Who here thinks that Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, and your favorite big mail service provider, don't already do some version of this?
Seriously, this is a hack and a half. That's one of the worst soldering and assembly jobs I've ever seen (cat5 for hookup wire?) I don't even see enough parts to make it work at all. You'd need one relay to provide ignition power, then a second to hit the starter. Plus there are no other features here like a neutral/park detect (so the vehicle doesn't start moving), an auto shutdown so the vehicle won't run for days if you accidentally start it and forget, etc.
A cheap remote start kit like the Bulldog Security Deluxe 500 is $105 anyway.
Wow, were we looking at the same page? It seemed pretty cleanly done to me: he used a perf board to hold the wire, did a reasonable job with soldering, nice neat assembly. Were you expecting a professionally designed PCB? CAT5 is perfectly good hookup wire, as long as you need solid core. Really, when you're using short lengths of solid core hookup wire, pretty much all 24 gauge is the same, as long as you don't need super high speed signalling (not here), high temp (nope), extremely low crosstalk (no), high voltage (definitely not). And CAT5 is cheap. Using it from the box to the cell phone is probably not going to work very well long-term, since the wire will fatigue from vibrations, but this fellow is open about learning from his mistakes. Furthermore, he used a terminal connector for the wires to the relay with heavier, stranded wire (a must for unsupported wire in an automotive environment), and he used crimp connectors and shrink tubing. Bonus for both.
Seriously, speaking as an EE and automotive enthusiast, it's a pretty good job. Granted, the Bulldog device sounds much better on paper (wow, their website is not only broken with missing images and pages, but also a PIA to navigate), but there's no fun in having designed it yourself. This sort of hacking SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED. Or did you forget that that's where Linux comes from?
These are valid concerns.
The study was published in J. Neural Engineering which, regrettably, my institution does not have a subscription to, so can't be as well-informed as I'd like, unfortunately. Nevertheless, the research was headed by Dr. Apostolos Gerogropoulos, whom I know professionally and by his research publications. Now, Dr. Georgopoulos is no fool. His research team certainly must have thought about these potential issues. There's a hint at why the study might be considered valid despite what at first blush seems like a lack of proper controls in the press release: "the researchers also are able to judge the severity of how much [subjects with PTSD] are suffering," Proper controls (ie, soldiers without PTSD) are necessary, but if there's a good correlation between the observed MEG phenomena and the strength of clinical findings, then maybe the study really has discovered something interesting.
If the money isn't coming out of my wallet, then for all I care, it is free.
Ah, grasshopper, where do you think the money comes from then?
Producing and delivering advertising is not free for manufacturers; they must pay for it. Those costs must be recovered somehow, and their primary income stream is selling goods. Thus the cost of advertising is built in to the price of the products -- every single product -- that we buy. If you think otherwise, then, grasshopper, you have not yet found enlightenment.
You may call them "whiners", but they have a point. Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else? Why would I pick the NYTimes over any of the free sources of similar information? You are forgetting who the customer is in regards to news. The customer is the advertiser. How much are you paying for your network news exactly (not that I personally watch the news, but still)?
And you're forgetting that the NYT typically has better reporting, based on many criteria, than any other news outlet in the US, which is why it might be reasonable for the reader to pay for it, and why there really isn't another free source to replace it. Furthermore, while advertising provides substantial revenue for the NYT, if advertising were sufficient to cover all production costs, the NYT wouldn't be seeking revenue from their readers.
Personally, I'd be much happier paying full price for my news and not having any advertisements at all.
Human languages have lots and lots of redundancy, such that you can often either screw up letter order, word order, or even drop entire words, and often the full meaning is clear. Visual cues in the form of paragraphs and chapters are added to help guide the reader, but removing them would not render the text entirely incomprehensible.
Computer languages are not as forgiving, and, also, lacking redundancy, far denser. Reading speed is irrelevant because of the bottleneck formed by reading comprehension. Code is rarely read in novel-like linear fashion, but, much more often, flitting from one part of the text to another, navigating through visual cues. Visual cues in the form of often richly structured layout that includes idioms not required by syntax make navigating and comprehending code possible, and removing them although would, in most languages, not change the meaning of the code, would erect a formidable barrier to comprehension. Not using these cues to the fullest to help write clear, expressive and maintainable code is being self-indulgent and shortsighted. Requiring that a particular, and perhaps unspecified font be used for best display, rather than the ubiquitous assumption of monospaced font, is mere vanity.
Remember, when code is written, it is meant not only to be converted into executable machine language, but also to be comprehensible and comprehended by other programmers, or future selves. Clarity of expression is vital.
Based on the movie 2001:
HAL: "Sorry about this, I know it's a bit silly...just a moment...just a moment... I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure within 72 hours."
Dave:"It's still within operational limits right now?"
HAL:"Yes. And it will stay that way till it fails."
I don't have my copy of the book handy to check the original dialogue.
guaranteed to be thicker than LED or LCD, and with phosphor delay; I want LED so that I can have [effectively] instant transitions. we can get back the delay effect with processing, but you can't eliminate phosphor delays when you've got phosphors.
There is essentially zero phosphor delay (I defy you to measure it ... I am a visual neuroscientist and have, so yes, it is possible, and no, it is not easy) on the scale of perceptual latencies. I believe the latency from excitation to phosphor emission is on the nanosecond scale. The typical perceptual delays in the early visual system (retina and the first few stages of processing in the brain) are on order of 30 milliseconds, going from the time photons enter the eye to the first wave of activity in primary visual cortex. Different orders of magnitude. Like 6. Phosphor delay is irrelevant.
What you are perhaps thinking of is the phosphor DECAY which is another thing entirely. When phosphors are excited (such as by an impinging electron or photon beam) the emitted brightness steps up almost instantaneously and then decays down through an exponential relaxation curve. That decay time can tend to blur images when too long, or induce eye bleed (to use the vernacular) when the update rate is too low. The thing is that phosphor decays can be adjusted by reformulating the compounds, and are determined ultimately at time of manufacturing. Very fast phosphors are available to support KHz updates, but also very slow ones (some older oscilloscopes have phosphor decay constants measured in seconds).
Contemporary LCD monitors have typically 2 or 3 frames of latency because of the push to get faster transition times. Those 5 ms response time LCDs get fast specs by overdriving the pixels in a highly controlled fashion, but one that requires knowing what is on the next handful of frames. Since we live in a causal world, that means introducing a 2-3 frame latency for processing within the display. Since the update rates on LCDs are typically 60 Hz, that's on order of 45 ms latency, a non-trivial fraction of the loop from visual perception to motor action (known in the gaming vernacular as twitch response). If you're watching a movie, that latency is irrelevant and wholly, entirely unperceived. If you're playing a game, then it is very important.
It's likely because there are greater risks involved in general anesthetic. Where possible, it's seen as safer for the patient to use only locals.
And the patient is far from normally conscious under procedures like this. They are sedated, whereby it's generally meant the patient is socked to the gills with drugs like benzodiazepines.
As a gross generalization, I find that the medical profession (and I'm on the fringes of it) tends to overmedicate when it comes to sedation. As one example, my father was going to have a small bone spur removed from a toe. Yes, that can be painful, but a good circumdigit block with lidocaine will fix that. But he was supposed to be sedated for the procedure sufficiently that he would not be able to drive himself home. He called me to arrange for a ride before the fact, more than a little annoyed that a 10 minute procedure would entail such an ordeal, and I replied, "well, just refuse the sedative." He did, and was fine.
Now fixing a toe is very different from open heart surgery. The so-called awake patient during open heart surgery likely will be only slightly topside of conscious. However, there's a big difference between that and the deep general anesthesia that would be required without local anesthetics to block the pain. One of the big reasons for using less anesthesia is basic danger, as other posters have commented. But as we learn more about general anesthesia, and specifically in relation to open heart surgery, there's a significant toll it seems to take on the mind. It's considered a dirty little secret that patients are waking up after major surgery a little dumber than they were before. And, by "dirty little secret," I mean, it's an area ripe for significant research into the improvement of health care. In any case, combining a good epidural block with sedation to achieve the same surgical plane (that's the term used to describe depth of anesthesia) as previously achieved with general anesthesia is going to be a good step forward.
How long before Google declares sovereignty?
Seriously. They own an airstrip. They own what amounts to a public transit system. They own scads of land. They have what amounts to a treasury. Now they want to become an electrical power utility. What's missing?
Right --- LEDs are controlled by current, not voltage (unless you really are a glutton for punishment and want to design the hard way). I haven't looked at backlight driver circuits that are available, and while PWM is an easy way out, there's no inherent reason designs must be that way, or at least couldn't include some filtering. And, as you point out, there's really no reason at all to not be driving the PWM at 4x the frame rate for a 60 Hz update (or 8x for that matter). There is good reason, however, to synchronize the frame updates and the backlighting, if the backlighting must be a strobe design.
Same goes for the idiot designers who make LED brake light systems for modern cars refresh at 60 Hz (or lower!). No reason that can't be cycling at 1000 Hz to avoid flashing trails.
I am a visual neuroscientist (IAAVNS). The standard idea of refresh rate comes from CRT based monitors where the image is drawn by a scanning electron beam. If you use an instrument to measure the instantaneous brightness at a given point on the screen it will rapidly peak as the beam swings by, and then decay as the phosphor continues to release absorbed energy in the form of photons. Different monitors have different decay rates, and, typically, CRTs that were designed for television use have pretty slow decay rates. CRTs that were designed for computer monitors typically have faster decay rates. If the decay rate were very very fast, then the hypothetical point on the screen would be dark most of the time and only occasionally very bright as the beam sweeps by on each frame.
As you can imagine this highly impulsive temporal profile is hard to smooth out into something closer to the constant brightness of the world around us. The human retina has an inherent dynamic response rate to it, but it's actually quite fast, and there have been studies showing clear responses in higher order visual areas of the brain up to 135 Hz. But standard phosphors used in CRTs have a little smoother response, and so at more-or-less 80 Hz, the brain stops seeing the flicker (at 60 Hz most people see flicker on a computer monitor). The exact refresh rate where perceptual blurring happens (so the flickering goes away) varies widely between individual, and with the exact details of the environment and what is being shown on the screen. More-or-less at 100 Hz refresh, no one sees the flicker anymore (although the brain can be shown to be still responding).
Contemporary screens, however, are LCD based (I'm going to ignore plasma screens since the field is still working out how they interact with the visual system). Making the same experiment as above, the temporal profile of brightness at a given spot on the screen will look more like a staircase, holding a value until the next frame gets drawn. This is a far, far smoother stimulus for the visual system, so a 60 Hz frame rate produces a perceptually far more flicker-free experience. That's why most CRTs at 60 Hz make your eyes bleed, while LCDs at 60 Hz are just fine.
Except that newer LCDs have LED backlighting which is no longer constant, but flashed (WHY? WHY? WHY? Just to save some power? Please, computer manufacturers, let *me* make that decision!), so the experience is somewhat more like a CRT.
So that's one part of the equation: flicker.
The other part of the equation is update rate, which still applies even there might be no flicker at all. Here, we have the evidence that the brain is responding at up to 135 Hz. In measurements made in my lab, I've found some responses up to 160 Hz. But the brain is super good at interpolating static images and deducing the motion. This is called "apparent motion" and is why strings of lights illuminated in sequence seem to move around a theater marquis. The brain is really good at that. Which is why even a 24 Hz movie (with 48 Hz frame doubling) in a movie theater is perceptually acceptable, but a 200 Hz movie would look much more like a window into reality. On TV you can see the difference between shows that have been shot on film (at 24 Hz) versus on video (at 30 or 60 Hz). Video seems clearer, less movie like.
For games, 60 Hz means 16 ms between frame updates -- and that can be a significant delay for twitch response. Further, modern LCD monitors have an inherent two or three frame processing delay, adding to the latency. As we know, long latency leads to poor gameplay. Faster updates means, potentially shorter latency, since it is a frame-by-frame issue.
So, just as with audio equipment where inexpensive low-fidelity equipment can produce an acceptable experience, while a more expensive setup can create the illusion of being at a concert, so too inexpensive video equipment (from camera to video board to monitor) can produce an acceptable experience, while a more expensive setup can create the illusion of visual reality.
Yes, a standard truck frame rover would be a great idea.
But 10 more rovers exactly, or nearly exactly, like Spirit and Opportunity would be fantastic. We know almost nothing about Mars right now.
These rovers are a very mature design that has worked flawlessly. Build and send a dozen of them.
Indeed! Or make just minor modifications to the design: it has been a proven reliable platform.
Modifications (off the top of my head) that would prove useful:
1. more memory to avoid the pesky problems with the NVRAM ... perhaps add a means of mechanical decoupling if they completely lock up
2. higher energy density batteries (thanks to improved chemistries now available)
3. ultrasonic vibrator to shake dust off the solar panels (work GREAT in my digital SLR camera)
4. redesign the wheels a tad
5. just a tad more insulation to guard against the winter chills
I can't count the number of times I've written a very carefully researched small handful of lines of code that are either not intuitively obvious, or would leave more questions than they answered when read. When I've spent days demonstrating through thorough measurement that, for example, a certain constant requires a specific value, that fact gets documented with potentially many paragraphs of comments. Not doing so would be irresponsible, and a waste of my time when I tried to understand, months or years hence, why I had written that small handful of lines.
To quote one of the Ramones who was criticized in an interview for writing songs with only three chords, "yeah, but they're the RIGHT three chords." With music you can feel if the chords are right. With code, sometimes you have to document.
Discomfort often comes from the neck size of the shirt being too small.
And the neck sizes are always too small because shirts are made for the fattest possible person who still somehow has a neck of a particular size. At 6 feet and 160 pounds I'm thin but nowhere near emaciated, yet every shirt long enough for my arms, whether from Target or Nordstrom, could literally hold two of me in the torso yet barely buttons in the neck.
Yes, I know I'm way off topic, but good god it pisses me off. Why should it be impossible to find a shirt that fits for less than $150?
I also often have a hard time finding shirts that fit well. My brother recently turned me on to custom-tailored shirts. While not inexpensive, they aren't that bad, being typically just under $100 each. If you ever travel to Hong Kong, I understand that you can be measured and have clothing made on very short notice, with quite reasonable pricing.
Remember, uniforms exist because they work. It's social engineering.
Sure, they get the wearer used to conformity and mindless obedience.
Normally, I don't respond to AC comments, but this one misses the mark entirely. Actually, completely missed the point of my earlier reply.
Uniforms provide power. That power can either be used to control employees, to provide a ready means of recognition between employees, or to convey authority to employees. Examples of each are, in turn, fast-food staff, soldiers, and police officers.
My suggestion was that the original posting seemed to be in the first category, while I observed that it could be turned into the third with a little initiative.
Remember, dress for the job you want, not the one you have.
This is absolute BULLSHIT! What we have now is a whole lot of people fucking around trying to impress everyone else with their fashion sense rather than actually accomplishing anything noteworthy. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who bases their decisions on the fashion sense of those around them is a sheep and deserves to be treated like one (i.e. most people).
Reality would strongly suggest that you are wrong. Inter-personal relationships are, like it or not, based in great part on our appearances. That's why uniforms work. If you chose to be a slob, then you have to be far more talented to get the job that the fellow next in line who is better dressed.
Try wearing a suit some time when you don't have to. Just try it. Not a crappy fitting suit that looks like it's 20 years old, but one that fits well, and looks good. Just try it. My experience doing that suggests that you will get more respect, be taken more seriously, and your professional life will be a lot easier.
Me, I work for a fellow who is in charge of a department of 30 people with a budget of 300 million dollars. It would have to be an emergency for me to not wear a least a button down shirt, slacks, and a tie if not a suit when going to his office. Do you really think you would be taken seriously if you showed up in a similar office wearing a t-shirt and jeans?
Remember, uniforms exist because they work. It's social engineering.