This brings the issue of having an addon keyboard... all well and good but now you have something else to lug around... sure its not a major inconvinience but it still is a bother.
How about both? There were laptops that allowed the covers to be removed so that you can place them on projectors (the old-style kind).
Now what about being able to open the laptop 90-180* for use as a normal laptop, or being able to fold it closer to 350*, and have it close back on itself, somehow covering the keyboard. Now, you'd just have an LCD screen, but if that screen also contained a tablet, you could use a stylus directly on the screen.
This would allow you to have both. Keyboards in Quake, and a stylus directly on the screen for writing. Personally, I write faster than I type, mainly because I make fewer mistakes...
Incidentally, if you spend a little bit of time with a tablet, you stop paying attention to it, and just watch the pointer on the screen. Works pretty well. A little disorienting at first, but it gets second nature, and works better than a mouse after a few hours... The table understands a relationship between it's dimensions and the screen's that mouse doesn't have.
For me, I've noticed major issues with the slashdot.org address. If I manually switch the link to slashdot.com, I get an instant reponse, and about twice the speed at loading the page, before IE decides to take an hour processing the HTML for display... (still faster than Netscape, though, only reason I use it).
My connection is a T1 to UUNET, and it's normally a VERY empty T1 at that. Late at night, west coast, about 1-2 people sharing the T1 with me...
It doesn't matter, no software will be going into the public domain for the next 80 years or so (ok more like 60). Certainly no current day, well used software. By that time the interests of Big Buisness will have done away with the concepts of public domain and "fair use".
This is why I think that software should fall under patents, no copyrights. Software isn't a work of art (no offense meant to the CS people here), but a product that was designed and built, and copies made of. Because of this, copyright doesn't apply correctly (to me).
So, if software was covered under patents, then it would be protected for 17 years, but only if they disclosed the source code (analgous to design drawings). However, that is still too long for the industry. This industry advances at a much greater rate (generation-wise) than technology did when the 17 year limit was chosen.
Reverse engineering is a time honored method of having competition in a field. (Assuming you don't step on patents which is pretty hard in itself.)
This is part of why we (USA) have patents. We have (had once upon a time) patents to encourage inventors to disclose thier invention to the public domain. This is good for society. To encourage them to do this, we give them a short (at the time) monopoly over the production/use of the invention/patent.
17 years (or whatever it is) made sense 100+ years ago. Cars today have a design-cycle of 5 years (typically). So a company can patent an idea, use it in their next generation of a car, and then by the time they get around to the second/third generation, it's public domain and any other car company can use it.
In this case, 10 years would cover both the design process, and the generation of cars it was designed for... A good rule of thumb I think for determining the duration of a patent's protection.
Now, with computers and software, it should be somewhere in the realm of 2-5 years. That more accurately covers the "generations" of HW/SW
Copyrights, however, are different, as the cover "art". A similar idea is offered here as with patents. Here you give the Author the right to control who is allowed to distribute his works. That way, he can get paid (eat). Now, 75 years is a good long time, and (I think) about right for a person.
However, this is particular post was about patents, so I won't go further (here) about copyright.
Why can't I make them publically available as long as I don't sell them.
That would be like broadcasting over the radio. Radio stations pay fees to broadcast a copyrighted song to the public.
So if you would like to pay a fee to the MPAA as friends, then you, too can "broadcast" on the net. Since the copyright on the CDs you buy say it is for private use only, that excludes you the right to post it on the net.
I don't see a problem with that exclusion of rights. You still have fair use. You can still listen to the CD in any device you want, do anything you want to it. However, providing copies for other people, instead of them purchasing it isn't right.
MFC gives you a lot more options, and you have lots of control over how you want the window to come up. However the Z-order, is yes, a bitch.
My personal preference is the use of poping up a dialog, and then causing the parent of the dialog to flash it's title bar. Annoying at first, but easy to ignore when 8 people ICQ you at the same time...
I think the sudden reappearance of a window (IE, Netscape, etc.) is based in that they are assuming you aren't using another applicaition. I often start 2-3 web page downloads at the same time (my pipe is a T1), and then wait for everthing inbetween me and the servers to figure out whats going on. Meanwhile, I do something else, and get interrupted as the windows pop up, thinking that a repait is worth calling CWnd::SetFocus()...
LCD Projectors make this easy. I was looking at getting an apartment with a vaulted cieling. I could have had 1024x768 at 10' square, or TV at the same size... Apartment was too much though...
Done this at work a few times, in conference rooms. It's fun!
If there must be a few arbiters of taste, the general public may as well...
Seems to me this doesn't change anything... RIAA does a pretty good job of arbitrating taste. Not that I agree with what they consider good. Backstreet Boys? please...
My microwave zaps my 2.4Ghz Phone, only thing that does it. But because it's DSS, then it only pops in and out a little, when it's frequency hopping happens to land on the one of the noisy freqs of the mircowave.
Now, in theory, a large number of DSS devices can share the same range of freqs because they spread out and "randomly" hop from carrier to carrier, supposedly fast enough not to cause an issue. It's a bit more complex than that, as the bits are encoded, then a DSP does some mangling to broadcast some info on one carrier, and other info on another carrier...
However, if you've got an analog 2.4Ghz phone, your screwed, or even a digital, if it's narrow-band and not DSS. Narrow-band will work if it can select a "channel".
Company I work for does interesting stuff with power-line communications using both DSS, and dual-channel Narrow-band communications. Both types of communication beat the hell out of anything else I've seen for reliability, but they have different strengths.
Do you really think Be has ALL of thier APIs open? I seriously doubt it. Any good code will break down an implementation of a public API into smaller peices.
I always thought API meant "Application Programming Interface". Kind of like the public methods of a class in C++. Who knows how I implement helper functions, or what I call. Those aren't part of the "API" they are part of the implementation of the API. The API is the interface, not the internal classes that the interface uses to to get it's job done.
An application should ONLY use APIs, not calls to lower, unpublished levels, unless it wants to risk breaking at the next release of the implementation of the API... However, an agreement to not change a certain call, because it's used by a certain app in another group...
This is an important distinction that will have to be made so that MS-OS (?) and MS-Apps (?) can be properly monitored so that MS-Apps isn't using little "private but stable" lower-level calls that won't change in the next version of the OS.
The baby little processor (z80 or 8051, don't remember which) in a gameboy could not handle the decoding by itself. However, Micronas makes DSP chips that will do the decode in hardware, taking in blocks of data, and then dumping out a PCM stream that a D/A can handle. This is how the MP-Man works. I looked into making one of these for a senior design project in school. All the processor needs to do is dump the mpeg data into the buffer of the dsp. The Gameboy could be doing as little as sending control signals to an fpga that dumps the data from memory into the decoder if the processor couldn't handle it. We were looking at a 20Mhz PIC to do the data handshaking for us, along with some other things.
I had to do a research paper recently about the "underground economy". Well, from what I gathered during that paper, a lot of the economists and politicians are scared to death of the internet.
There were two issues that I found that the economists and the governments have with the internet. The first is that any transactions that take place on the web aren't taxed, and therefore the governments will get less money, and then the quality of the services the governments provide will go down. The second was that because the major divisions of the world (the boundaries between the countries) really have no bearing on the internet, the divisions will instead be based on interests, desires, needs, etc. This they fear because it erodes people's sense of community (the physical one, not the internet one).
A place like this, slashdot, is one of these "communities" that is a threat to a goverment. Because the members identify more with the other members of their internet community (sorry about the buzzwords here), and identify less with the community that they actually live in, they care less about what happens in that community.
One really good example is the number of young people in the US that vote, or have even bothered to register to vote. Many think that it doesn't affect them, or that they can't do anything about it.
I think we need to keep a very good eye on our government. It's shown its ability in the past at sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong, and it could really screw over what we now have with the internet.
Ok, this is a rather long-winded heads up for those of you who don't think that the government can do anything, look at what's going on with MS right now. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but the government could bend that into an excuse to heavily regulate the market. That could pose many obstacles to Open Source.
Here is a link to Wacom's combination Active-Matrix LCD displays and pressure-sensitive tablet. Pretty cool. Now if someone does this with the Apple Cinema Display, which looks way cool.
I think that better GUI's are out there, it's just expensive to try anything other than the mouse and tube that comes with your pc. And it's probably even less likely for a company to provide you with hardware this cool... Unless you are very, very good at what you do.
Slashdot Mirror
This brings the issue of having an addon keyboard... all well and good but now you have something else to lug around... sure its not a major inconvinience but it still is a bother.
How about both? There were laptops that allowed the covers to be removed so that you can place them on projectors (the old-style kind).
Now what about being able to open the laptop 90-180* for use as a normal laptop, or being able to fold it closer to 350*, and have it close back on itself, somehow covering the keyboard. Now, you'd just have an LCD screen, but if that screen also contained a tablet, you could use a stylus directly on the screen.
This would allow you to have both. Keyboards in Quake, and a stylus directly on the screen for writing. Personally, I write faster than I type, mainly because I make fewer mistakes...
Incidentally, if you spend a little bit of time with a tablet, you stop paying attention to it, and just watch the pointer on the screen. Works pretty well. A little disorienting at first, but it gets second nature, and works better than a mouse after a few hours... The table understands a relationship between it's dimensions and the screen's that mouse doesn't have.
I've notice that refresh seems to work
For me, I've noticed major issues with the slashdot.org address. If I manually switch the link to slashdot.com, I get an instant reponse, and about twice the speed at loading the page, before IE decides to take an hour processing the HTML for display... (still faster than Netscape, though, only reason I use it).
My connection is a T1 to UUNET, and it's normally a VERY empty T1 at that. Late at night, west coast, about 1-2 people sharing the T1 with me...
Radio Stations are businesses which exploit the work for profit
Yes, Radio makes a profit, but not from broadcasting music. They do so by charging for advertising time. They broadcast music for free.
So, if I were to have banner ads at a web-site, and offered MP3s for downloads, it would be exactly the same as what the radio does.
It doesn't matter, no software will be going into the public domain for the next 80 years or so (ok more like 60). Certainly no current day, well used software. By that time the interests of Big Buisness will have done away with the concepts of public domain and "fair use".
This is why I think that software should fall under patents, no copyrights. Software isn't a work of art (no offense meant to the CS people here), but a product that was designed and built, and copies made of. Because of this, copyright doesn't apply correctly (to me).
So, if software was covered under patents, then it would be protected for 17 years, but only if they disclosed the source code (analgous to design drawings). However, that is still too long for the industry. This industry advances at a much greater rate (generation-wise) than technology did when the 17 year limit was chosen.
Reverse engineering is a time honored method of having competition in a field. (Assuming you don't step on patents which is pretty hard in itself.)
This is part of why we (USA) have patents. We have (had once upon a time) patents to encourage inventors to disclose thier invention to the public domain. This is good for society. To encourage them to do this, we give them a short (at the time) monopoly over the production/use of the invention/patent.
17 years (or whatever it is) made sense 100+ years ago. Cars today have a design-cycle of 5 years (typically). So a company can patent an idea, use it in their next generation of a car, and then by the time they get around to the second/third generation, it's public domain and any other car company can use it.
In this case, 10 years would cover both the design process, and the generation of cars it was designed for... A good rule of thumb I think for determining the duration of a patent's protection.
Now, with computers and software, it should be somewhere in the realm of 2-5 years. That more accurately covers the "generations" of HW/SW
Copyrights, however, are different, as the cover "art". A similar idea is offered here as with patents. Here you give the Author the right to control who is allowed to distribute his works. That way, he can get paid (eat). Now, 75 years is a good long time, and (I think) about right for a person.
However, this is particular post was about patents, so I won't go further (here) about copyright.
Why can't I make them publically available as long as I don't sell them.
That would be like broadcasting over the radio. Radio stations pay fees to broadcast a copyrighted song to the public.
So if you would like to pay a fee to the MPAA as friends, then you, too can "broadcast" on the net. Since the copyright on the CDs you buy say it is for private use only, that excludes you the right to post it on the net.
I don't see a problem with that exclusion of rights. You still have fair use. You can still listen to the CD in any device you want, do anything you want to it. However, providing copies for other people, instead of them purchasing it isn't right.
MFC gives you a lot more options, and you have lots of control over how you want the window to come up. However the Z-order, is yes, a bitch.
My personal preference is the use of poping up a dialog, and then causing the parent of the dialog to flash it's title bar. Annoying at first, but easy to ignore when 8 people ICQ you at the same time...
I think the sudden reappearance of a window (IE, Netscape, etc.) is based in that they are assuming you aren't using another applicaition. I often start 2-3 web page downloads at the same time (my pipe is a T1), and then wait for everthing inbetween me and the servers to figure out whats going on. Meanwhile, I do something else, and get interrupted as the windows pop up, thinking that a repait is worth calling CWnd::SetFocus()...
LCD Projectors make this easy. I was looking at getting an apartment with a vaulted cieling. I could have had 1024x768 at 10' square, or TV at the same size... Apartment was too much though...
Done this at work a few times, in conference rooms. It's fun!
If there must be a few arbiters of taste, the general public may as well...
Seems to me this doesn't change anything... RIAA does a pretty good job of arbitrating taste. Not that I agree with what they consider good. Backstreet Boys? please...
My microwave zaps my 2.4Ghz Phone, only thing that does it. But because it's DSS, then it only pops in and out a little, when it's frequency hopping happens to land on the one of the noisy freqs of the mircowave.
Now, in theory, a large number of DSS devices can share the same range of freqs because they spread out and "randomly" hop from carrier to carrier, supposedly fast enough not to cause an issue. It's a bit more complex than that, as the bits are encoded, then a DSP does some mangling to broadcast some info on one carrier, and other info on another carrier...
However, if you've got an analog 2.4Ghz phone, your screwed, or even a digital, if it's narrow-band and not DSS. Narrow-band will work if it can select a "channel".
Company I work for does interesting stuff with power-line communications using both DSS, and dual-channel Narrow-band communications. Both types of communication beat the hell out of anything else I've seen for reliability, but they have different strengths.
If you're interested: http://www. echelon.com/products/Transceivers/powerlinePresent ations.htm contains presentations about this kind of stuff. The technology update presentation contains information about the different strengths of DSS and narrow-band info. It covers power-line communications, but the same applies to air-waves, just that there is much, much less distortion... Which is why DSS works so well over the air.
-WoodyDo you really think Be has ALL of thier APIs open? I seriously doubt it. Any good code will break down an implementation of a public API into smaller peices.
I always thought API meant "Application Programming Interface". Kind of like the public methods of a class in C++. Who knows how I implement helper functions, or what I call. Those aren't part of the "API" they are part of the implementation of the API. The API is the interface, not the internal classes that the interface uses to to get it's job done.
An application should ONLY use APIs, not calls to lower, unpublished levels, unless it wants to risk breaking at the next release of the implementation of the API... However, an agreement to not change a certain call, because it's used by a certain app in another group...
This is an important distinction that will have to be made so that MS-OS (?) and MS-Apps (?) can be properly monitored so that MS-Apps isn't using little "private but stable" lower-level calls that won't change in the next version of the OS.
Processor is a Z-80... Scrolled down further and found it...
The baby little processor (z80 or 8051, don't remember which) in a gameboy could not handle the decoding by itself. However, Micronas makes DSP chips that will do the decode in hardware, taking in blocks of data, and then dumping out a PCM stream that a D/A can handle. This is how the MP-Man works. I looked into making one of these for a senior design project in school. All the processor needs to do is dump the mpeg data into the buffer of the dsp. The Gameboy could be doing as little as sending control signals to an fpga that dumps the data from memory into the decoder if the processor couldn't handle it. We were looking at a 20Mhz PIC to do the data handshaking for us, along with some other things.
Those power supplies are designed to tough that even if they launch goes bad, very bad, they won't leak much radiation...
Very nice UPS...
MS's site is still up, and goes directly to thier Y2k page... Guess they think people will need to hit their site a lot for Y2K advice (or updates...)
Paper clip hole... Of course!
There were two issues that I found that the economists and the governments have with the internet. The first is that any transactions that take place on the web aren't taxed, and therefore the governments will get less money, and then the quality of the services the governments provide will go down. The second was that because the major divisions of the world (the boundaries between the countries) really have no bearing on the internet, the divisions will instead be based on interests, desires, needs, etc. This they fear because it erodes people's sense of community (the physical one, not the internet one).
A place like this, slashdot, is one of these "communities" that is a threat to a goverment. Because the members identify more with the other members of their internet community (sorry about the buzzwords here), and identify less with the community that they actually live in, they care less about what happens in that community.
One really good example is the number of young people in the US that vote, or have even bothered to register to vote. Many think that it doesn't affect them, or that they can't do anything about it.
I think we need to keep a very good eye on our government. It's shown its ability in the past at sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong, and it could really screw over what we now have with the internet.
Ok, this is a rather long-winded heads up for those of you who don't think that the government can do anything, look at what's going on with MS right now. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but the government could bend that into an excuse to heavily regulate the market. That could pose many obstacles to Open Source.
I think that better GUI's are out there, it's just expensive to try anything other than the mouse and tube that comes with your pc. And it's probably even less likely for a company to provide you with hardware this cool... Unless you are very, very good at what you do.