...except, of course, they don't recommend privatization of spectrum. Rather the opposite, as they recommend making additional portions of the spectrum public and unrestricted.
But, hey, a link to Wikipedia beats reading the article any day.
I'm somewhat familiar with the science-fiction corner of the book market.
Despite constant cries about the "death of the midlist", there are more SF books being published now than ever. The average per-book sales are lower than they used to be, but the overall sales are up--in other words, the pie has grown, but not as fast as the number of slices in it.
Not very similar to the PC gaming industry, where both number of titles and overall sales appear to be declining.
Personally, I think the PC gaming industry is suffering from a lack of innovation, ever-increasing hardware requirements, poor quality control, and (most importantly) competition from consoles which mitigate many of these problems.
Fanfic (which is what you mean when you say "doujinshi"--many doujinshi are entirely original, with no relation to any commercially published work) and pirate translations are completely different.
Fanfic is original work that uses existing characters and settings. Pirate scans are a simple copying and redistribution of the original artist's work. Fanfic is fundamentally creative; pirate scans are not. It's the difference between writing a new Star Trek novel and photocopying one.
(Yes, translation is a creative act. Scanning a manga and pasting a translation over the original text is not.)
Comparing pirate scans to fan activity in the Japanese community is, frankly, insulting to the Japanese fans. Go and look at some Japanese fansites. Notice the absence of artwork copied from the original source material. Japanese fansites use original drawings done by fans--specifically because they respect the copyright of the original author.
I recently bought a 20" Dell LCD. Viewing angle problem? What's that? The thing looks exactly the same no matter what angle I look at it from--even if I look at it edgewise. Ghosting? I haven't seen any on an LCD in years. Looks terrible at anything other than the native resolution? Not at all. With anti-aliasing off, I can hardly tell that I'm not at the native resolution; with anti-aliasing on, I can't tell at all.
There are lousy LCDs out there, yes. Good LCDs are expensive, yes. But I'll take a good LCD over the convergence problems of a CRT any day.
(None of this is relevant to televisions, of course, which the original article is talking about.)
Seriously. At the start of the semester, ignore the books entirely. Buy the book the day you first need it. I started doing that a couple years into college; for the rest of my time, I think I averaged one or two books a semester. Most classes didn't require the book at all. (Often you could pick between reading the book and going to class; doing both was redundant.)
For classes that did require the book, I was often able to get away with borrowing it from a friend a once or twice.
How well this approach works probably depends on the discipline you're studying; I'm certain not everyone could do this. Give it a try, however--you might be surprised.
(Ripoff #2: School meal plans. One day, I calculated the per meal cost of my eat-as-often-as-you-want plan, and realized that I could eat out at a restaurant for every meal and spend less money. After that, I stopped paying for the meal plan and started paying on a per-meal basis at the cafeteria.)
Lily is a CMC (computer mediated communications) server that supports user authentication and discussion history. Lily is mature; the oldest lily server has been in constant service (with only occasional brief downtime for upgrades) for over ten years.
The CEI appears to be a pro-business lobbying organization. Their donors list is a who's-who of US automobile and oil companies.
The article referenced can be summed up as: "There aren't very many open source games, therefore governments shouldn't open source code they pay to have written and shouldn't have procurement policies that prefer open source code." No real effort is made at connecting the thesis and conclusion. (Governments don't buy many games--America's Army aside.)
I'm not certain why a very minor article from a propaganda organization would be considered newsworthy.
It's worth pointing out that this study is examining only carpel tunnel, not RSI in general. They don't appear to be saying that using a keyboard and mouse is not a cause of wrist injury, only that it is not a significant cause of a specific kind of injury.
Your problem is obvious--the constant layoffs. Without doing something about them, nothing anybody does will help.
Layoffs are sometimes necessary, especially in poor economic times. The critical thing is to do them once and get it over with. Figure out how many people you can afford to employ for the next year, and cut down to that size. Then tell the remaining people that their job is secure for at least a year. It's painful, but people will understand the financial need--and they won't looking over their shoulders, wondering if they're next on the hit list.
nslookup does not use the system resolver library (gethostbyname and friends). As such, nslookup results won't tell you anything about how the system resolver is behaving.
Check what host "ping www" resolves for a better idea of what the system resolver is up to.
About eight years ago, I sold my laptop to a friend. I brought it over to his place so he inspected it, and we then hopped in his car to head back to campus where I could transfer a few files off it before giving it to him.
We get to our destination, and find that the laptop is not with us.
Him: "I thought you had it." Me: "I thought YOU had it." Him: "Where did you see it last?" Me: "On top of the car." Together: "Oh, SHIT."
We sped back to his place and searched the route we had taken for about a quarter mile, to no avail. The laptop had vanished without a trace. Despondent, I gave up hope of seeing the $600 I had expected for it.
A week later, I get a call from my friend. He had called the local police, and they said that someone had turned in a laptop found by the roadside. The thing had travelled about half a mile on the roof of the car, around several corners, through a stop light, and finally slid off on a highway on-ramp. It made it without a scratch, and in perfect working order.
I got my $600, and my friend got a laptop that worked perfectly well for many years.
I only wish I could remember the manufacturer of the case I had it in.
Reading this, I don't see any disagreement between Stallman and Tyberghein. Both people have been polite and courteous, and both seem to agree on almost all substantive issues.
The only point of difference is that Stallman wouldn't sign an NDA for API documentation himself, and would generally prefer that other people refrain from doing so. He seems to agree that a system using a wrapper around the PS2 API is no different morally than a system which uses the Win32 APIs.
I don't understand the point this article is trying to make. Internet usage IS metered, right now. If you buy an OC-48 connection, you will almost certainly be charged based on what percentage of it you use.
It is true that home lines -- modems, DSL, and the like -- are generally not charged on a per-usage basis. The amount of bandwidth consumed by the average home line is too small to make it worth the expense of metering.
I switched to using a Kinesis a couple years ago, and I could never go back. It isn't for everyone, but definitely give it a try.
One suggestion for anyone considering buying one: The Kinesis Classic is the cheapest model, but there isn't really any point to buying one of the higher-end ones. (Unless you need Macintosh support, or Dvorak keycaps.) The higher end models have more memory for programming key macros, but you can do this easily enough through your operating system. All models are switchable between the qwerty and Dvorak layouts; the Dvorak models just have different keycaps.
English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri (official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India) note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible
Think about that. Twenty-four mutually-unintelligible languages in common use. English has become the standard language for all but local purposes in India, because there are far too many local tounges to try to translate between them.
Professor Hariharan's article states that only 10% of Indians speak English. According to the factbook, only 52% of Indians are literate, in any language. Assuming that the English speakers are a subset of the literate people, that means that roughly 20% of the literate population can understand English. That's the same as the percentage of Indians who speak the most common non-English language, Hindi.
It seems to me that what India needs is more literacy, and more English speakers. English has, for better or worse, become the most common language in international trade. (And, in India's case, intranational trade.)
I would certainly applaud the efforts of any people who choose to localize Linux, or any other software, to Indian languages. I do not think, however, that placing Indian computer users into a localized ghetto, separate from the rest of India and the rest of the world, will prove to be the means that the "digital revolution" will be brought to that country.
This is especially the case if, as Professor Hariharan implies, an Indian-localized system would remove such commonly-used concepts as "files" and "folders". Does he envision a system based on "mud huts" and "clay slabs"? (And would any intelligent Indian react with anything other than offense to such a translation which assumes he is not intelligent enough to understand the original system?) Or does he rather imagine replacing the entire concept of a hierarchical directory structure with something else? If the latter, what possible purpose is served by making the systems used by Indians radically different than those used by the remainder of the world?
While this article makes a valid point in that more localized versions of Linux (or any software!) is a good thing, I feel that it far overstates its case and misses the point.
[1] Memory protection for the pilot in the OS - paperclips suck, resetting sucks.
The Pilot already has memory protection. Memory is read-only until you explicitly unlock it -- this is why a crash virtually never results in corrupt data.
Memory protection doesn't make programs stop crashing. The Pilot's OS is designed for speed, not multiuser security; as a result, it is possible for a program to crash the OS, requiring a paperclip to make things sane again. Personally, I've only seen this happen with extreme alpha software and with my own, undebugged, programs.
[2] Better security for the databases - one application can rewrite *all* data right now 0- that sucks.
A Pilot is a single-user system. What do you want, to forbid each program to access the data of other programs? That's like saying that Emacs shouldn't be able to edit a file that was created in vi! No, thank you.
As I mentioned, there is already memory protection which prevents a program from accidentally writing to the wrong section of memory. Anything else falls under the category of hostile action, which simply cannot be defended against without severe speed and usability hits.
[3] Easier API's, more access to documentation and better testing
Personally, I find the existing APIs quite easy to work with, and very well documented. I've never had a problem due to OS bugs. Is this a real complaint, or merely FUD?
[4] A full web browser
Never happen. You can't fit one on a screen of that resolution.
[5] Faster CPU, better battery, slightly larger screen (and less reflective), less scratchy screen, more rugged construction.
Pilot CPUs have been steadily getting faster. This is tied mainly to what Motorola releases, since Palm isn't about to break backwards compatability by switching CPU families at this time. (I do wish they had gone with a StrongARM CPU at the beginning, though.)
The screen currently occupies most of the physical area of the device. I'm not certain how you expect it to get bigger. Or do you want a higher resolution? Don't expect it any time soon -- backwards compatability again.
The construction has also been getting steadily better. Compare the Palm V with the Pilot 5000.
I see no evidence that any of these are being ignored in order to bring color to the Pilot.
Adding color is just a waste of resources - improvements need to be made elsewhere.
Improvements have been and still are being made elsewhere. Color is going to be one of them.
Six years ago, people were saying that laptops were never going to need color. Nowadays, it's standard. I expect the same to happen with the Pilot. Why would I want to slow down advances? Certainly, I wouldn't want to sacrifice important things like battery life for color, but all past evidence shows that I can have my cake and eat it too -- good battery life, more memory, faster CPUs, and color too.
Currently, it seems that SSL and RSA are tied together--you can't talk SSL unless you talk RSA. I would take SSL, gut out the algorithms (gut out RSA, and see if the symmetric algorithm is copyrighted), and replace the algorithms.
This is actually not the case. SSL supports Diffie-Hellman key exchange as an alternative to RSA. Unfortunately, none of the major browsers implement DH, making this not very useful for web servers. OpenSSL does, however, support DH out of the box.
My personal favorite of the uber-remotes is the Marantz RC-2000MkII Mine currently controls a receiver, TV, DVD player, LD player, DSS decoder, and VCR, and has plenty of room left over. Since buying it, I haven't touched any of the other remotes except to program functions into it. It lists for $250.
I have heard good things about the Phillips Pronto/Marantz RC-5000. This remote uses a touchscreen instead of physical buttons, and offers a very high degree of customizability. (Regrettably, only through Windows, as far as I know.) I have never used one myself, and suspect I would not like it; I prefer to have physical buttons.
You can get remote control software for the Pilot. (An impressive achievement, since speaking remote protocols through a UART is decidedly non-trivial; I'd love to know how they did it.) The Pilot's IR range is very low, however, and I find the interface to be very clunky. I don't belive you'll ever be able to match the convenience of a single-purpose remote with a Pilot.
Whatever you go with, definitely try before you buy. Tastes vary wildly when it comes to remotes.
Slashdot Mirror
...except, of course, they don't recommend privatization of spectrum. Rather the opposite, as they recommend making additional portions of the spectrum public and unrestricted.
But, hey, a link to Wikipedia beats reading the article any day.
I'm somewhat familiar with the science-fiction corner of the book market.
Despite constant cries about the "death of the midlist", there are more SF books being published now than ever. The average per-book sales are lower than they used to be, but the overall sales are up--in other words, the pie has grown, but not as fast as the number of slices in it.
Not very similar to the PC gaming industry, where both number of titles and overall sales appear to be declining.
Personally, I think the PC gaming industry is suffering from a lack of innovation, ever-increasing hardware requirements, poor quality control, and (most importantly) competition from consoles which mitigate many of these problems.
For OS X, I recommend NetNewsWire Lite, which is free-as-in-beer and very functional.
Fanfic (which is what you mean when you say "doujinshi"--many doujinshi are entirely original, with no relation to any commercially published work) and pirate translations are completely different.
Fanfic is original work that uses existing characters and settings. Pirate scans are a simple copying and redistribution of the original artist's work. Fanfic is fundamentally creative; pirate scans are not. It's the difference between writing a new Star Trek novel and photocopying one.
(Yes, translation is a creative act. Scanning a manga and pasting a translation over the original text is not.)
Comparing pirate scans to fan activity in the Japanese community is, frankly, insulting to the Japanese fans. Go and look at some Japanese fansites. Notice the absence of artwork copied from the original source material. Japanese fansites use original drawings done by fans--specifically because they respect the copyright of the original author.
I recently bought a 20" Dell LCD. Viewing angle problem? What's that? The thing looks exactly the same no matter what angle I look at it from--even if I look at it edgewise. Ghosting? I haven't seen any on an LCD in years. Looks terrible at anything other than the native resolution? Not at all. With anti-aliasing off, I can hardly tell that I'm not at the native resolution; with anti-aliasing on, I can't tell at all.
There are lousy LCDs out there, yes. Good LCDs are expensive, yes. But I'll take a good LCD over the convergence problems of a CRT any day.
(None of this is relevant to televisions, of course, which the original article is talking about.)
Don't buy the book.
Seriously. At the start of the semester, ignore the books entirely. Buy the book the day you first need it. I started doing that a couple years into college; for the rest of my time, I think I averaged one or two books a semester. Most classes didn't require the book at all. (Often you could pick between reading the book and going to class; doing both was redundant.)
For classes that did require the book, I was often able to get away with borrowing it from a friend a once or twice.
How well this approach works probably depends on the discipline you're studying; I'm certain not everyone could do this. Give it a try, however--you might be surprised.
(Ripoff #2: School meal plans. One day, I calculated the per meal cost of my eat-as-often-as-you-want plan, and realized that I could eat out at a restaurant for every meal and spend less money. After that, I stopped paying for the meal plan and started paying on a per-meal basis at the cafeteria.)
Lily is a CMC (computer mediated communications) server that supports user authentication and discussion history. Lily is mature; the oldest lily server has been in constant service (with only occasional brief downtime for upgrades) for over ten years.
Preview, I meant to hit preview...
http://www.capitalresearch.org/search/orgdisplay.
http://www.capitalresearch.org/search/orgdisplay.a sp?Org=CEI200
The CEI appears to be a pro-business lobbying organization. Their donors list is a who's-who of US automobile and oil companies.
The article referenced can be summed up as: "There aren't very many open source games, therefore governments shouldn't open source code they pay to have written and shouldn't have procurement policies that prefer open source code." No real effort is made at connecting the thesis and conclusion. (Governments don't buy many games--America's Army aside.)
I'm not certain why a very minor article from a propaganda organization would be considered newsworthy.
The word is "madogiwazoku". (ç"ésæ--)
It's worth pointing out that this study is examining only carpel tunnel, not RSI in general. They don't appear to be saying that using a keyboard and mouse is not a cause of wrist injury, only that it is not a significant cause of a specific kind of injury.
Your problem is obvious--the constant layoffs. Without doing something about them, nothing anybody does will help.
Layoffs are sometimes necessary, especially in poor economic times. The critical thing is to do them once and get it over with. Figure out how many people you can afford to employ for the next year, and cut down to that size. Then tell the remaining people that their job is secure for at least a year. It's painful, but people will understand the financial need--and they won't looking over their shoulders, wondering if they're next on the hit list.
nslookup does not use the system resolver library (gethostbyname and friends). As such, nslookup results won't tell you anything about how the system resolver is behaving.
Check what host "ping www" resolves for a better idea of what the system resolver is up to.
- Damien
About eight years ago, I sold my laptop to a friend. I brought it over to his place so he inspected it, and we then hopped in his car to head back to campus where I could transfer a few files off it before giving it to him.
We get to our destination, and find that the laptop is not with us.
Him: "I thought you had it."
Me: "I thought YOU had it."
Him: "Where did you see it last?"
Me: "On top of the car."
Together: "Oh, SHIT."
We sped back to his place and searched the route we had taken for about a quarter mile, to no avail. The laptop had vanished without a trace. Despondent, I gave up hope of seeing the $600 I had expected for it.
A week later, I get a call from my friend. He had called the local police, and they said that someone had turned in a laptop found by the roadside. The thing had travelled about half a mile on the roof of the car, around several corners, through a stop light, and finally slid off on a highway on-ramp. It made it without a scratch, and in perfect working order.
I got my $600, and my friend got a laptop that worked perfectly well for many years.
I only wish I could remember the manufacturer of the case I had it in.
Reading this, I don't see any disagreement between Stallman and Tyberghein. Both people have been polite and courteous, and both seem to agree on almost all substantive issues.
The only point of difference is that Stallman wouldn't sign an NDA for API documentation himself, and would generally prefer that other people refrain from doing so. He seems to agree that a system using a wrapper around the PS2 API is no different morally than a system which uses the Win32 APIs.
Where's the argument?
-Damien
I don't understand the point this article is trying to make. Internet usage IS metered, right now. If you buy an OC-48 connection, you will almost certainly be charged based on what percentage of it you use.
It is true that home lines -- modems, DSL, and the like -- are generally not charged on a per-usage basis. The amount of bandwidth consumed by the average home line is too small to make it worth the expense of metering.
- Damien
One suggestion for anyone considering buying one: The Kinesis Classic is the cheapest model, but there isn't really any point to buying one of the higher-end ones. (Unless you need Macintosh support, or Dvorak keycaps.) The higher end models have more memory for programming key macros, but you can do this easily enough through your operating system. All models are switchable between the qwerty and Dvorak layouts; the Dvorak models just have different keycaps.
-Damien
English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri (official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible
Think about that. Twenty-four mutually-unintelligible languages in common use. English has become the standard language for all but local purposes in India, because there are far too many local tounges to try to translate between them.
Professor Hariharan's article states that only 10% of Indians speak English. According to the factbook, only 52% of Indians are literate, in any language. Assuming that the English speakers are a subset of the literate people, that means that roughly 20% of the literate population can understand English. That's the same as the percentage of Indians who speak the most common non-English language, Hindi.
It seems to me that what India needs is more literacy, and more English speakers. English has, for better or worse, become the most common language in international trade. (And, in India's case, intranational trade.)
I would certainly applaud the efforts of any people who choose to localize Linux, or any other software, to Indian languages. I do not think, however, that placing Indian computer users into a localized ghetto, separate from the rest of India and the rest of the world, will prove to be the means that the "digital revolution" will be brought to that country.
This is especially the case if, as Professor Hariharan implies, an Indian-localized system would remove such commonly-used concepts as "files" and "folders". Does he envision a system based on "mud huts" and "clay slabs"? (And would any intelligent Indian react with anything other than offense to such a translation which assumes he is not intelligent enough to understand the original system?) Or does he rather imagine replacing the entire concept of a hierarchical directory structure with something else? If the latter, what possible purpose is served by making the systems used by Indians radically different than those used by the remainder of the world?
While this article makes a valid point in that more localized versions of Linux (or any software!) is a good thing, I feel that it far overstates its case and misses the point.
-Damien
The Pilot already has memory protection. Memory is read-only until you explicitly unlock it -- this is why a crash virtually never results in corrupt data.
Memory protection doesn't make programs stop crashing. The Pilot's OS is designed for speed, not multiuser security; as a result, it is possible for a program to crash the OS, requiring a paperclip to make things sane again. Personally, I've only seen this happen with extreme alpha software and with my own, undebugged, programs.
[2] Better security for the databases - one application can rewrite *all* data right now 0- that sucks.
A Pilot is a single-user system. What do you want, to forbid each program to access the data of other programs? That's like saying that Emacs shouldn't be able to edit a file that was created in vi! No, thank you.
As I mentioned, there is already memory protection which prevents a program from accidentally writing to the wrong section of memory. Anything else falls under the category of hostile action, which simply cannot be defended against without severe speed and usability hits.
[3] Easier API's, more access to documentation and better testing
Personally, I find the existing APIs quite easy to work with, and very well documented. I've never had a problem due to OS bugs. Is this a real complaint, or merely FUD?
[4] A full web browser
Never happen. You can't fit one on a screen of that resolution.
[5] Faster CPU, better battery, slightly larger screen (and less reflective), less scratchy screen, more rugged construction.
Pilot CPUs have been steadily getting faster. This is tied mainly to what Motorola releases, since Palm isn't about to break backwards compatability by switching CPU families at this time. (I do wish they had gone with a StrongARM CPU at the beginning, though.)
The screen currently occupies most of the physical area of the device. I'm not certain how you expect it to get bigger. Or do you want a higher resolution? Don't expect it any time soon -- backwards compatability again.
The construction has also been getting steadily better. Compare the Palm V with the Pilot 5000.
I see no evidence that any of these are being ignored in order to bring color to the Pilot.
Adding color is just a waste of resources - improvements need to be made elsewhere.
Improvements have been and still are being made elsewhere. Color is going to be one of them.
Six years ago, people were saying that laptops were never going to need color. Nowadays, it's standard. I expect the same to happen with the Pilot. Why would I want to slow down advances? Certainly, I wouldn't want to sacrifice important things like battery life for color, but all past evidence shows that I can have my cake and eat it too -- good battery life, more memory, faster CPUs, and color too.
- Damien
This is actually not the case. SSL supports Diffie-Hellman key exchange as an alternative to RSA. Unfortunately, none of the major browsers implement DH, making this not very useful for web servers. OpenSSL does, however, support DH out of the box.
I have heard good things about the Phillips Pronto/Marantz RC-5000. This remote uses a touchscreen instead of physical buttons, and offers a very high degree of customizability. (Regrettably, only through Windows, as far as I know.) I have never used one myself, and suspect I would not like it; I prefer to have physical buttons.
You can get remote control software for the Pilot. (An impressive achievement, since speaking remote protocols through a UART is decidedly non-trivial; I'd love to know how they did it.) The Pilot's IR range is very low, however, and I find the interface to be very clunky. I don't belive you'll ever be able to match the convenience of a single-purpose remote with a Pilot.
Whatever you go with, definitely try before you buy. Tastes vary wildly when it comes to remotes.