Sure they are. Numerous BIOS's have a "power on at time" option.
Thanks for setting me straight on that one. It still isn't quite the same as a VCR since the program can't control the wake from sleep, but it is useful.
As for the reason people want to put their computer to sleep - it varies. I agree that power consumption is small when the disks spin down and the monitor sleeps (less than 30 watts?), but for some users this is significant. I've never completely bought the argument about wear and tear if the disk drive is designed right - perhaps I don't understand the mechanics that well. Another factor is noise - most desktops make a fair amount of it (and I have a quiet one supposedly) - perhaps one has their desktop in their bedroom and wants it to start recording at 6AM but not have the computer make any noise at night.
There is probably something for the Mac, but I wouldn't know.
Both solutions require that you have an external radio tuned to the station that you want or a Radio Card you can control from your OS. Unfortunately neither Windows or Linux is capable of waking up from a deep sleep via the computer's clock (this is ridiculous, somebody should fix this and offer a smarter computer/BIOS), so it isn't exactly the same as a VCR for the radio. But if you leave your computer on all the time anyway, it doesn't matter.
I had a Vtech Helio for a while and the idea of taking voice memos when your in the car or walking on a trail or whatever while you remember something your supposed to do is pretty cool. I'd be happy if I could turn those voice memos into text memos for later editing and inserting into the right PDA applications - it wouldn't have to be realtime. If the text didn't make sense, it should be able to point to the sound file memory and I could listen to it myself.
Why don't they bottle the oxygen as well, and use that to feed the fuel cells' cathode? It would result in a significant boost in efficiency.
PEM fuel cells (the only ones I vaguely understand) work on the principle of a hydrogen atom wanting to squeeze through a membrane to get to the oxygen atom on the other side and losing its electron in the process. That electron travels the long way around through a load (motor, light, etc.). I'm not aware of any substantial efficiency improvements in PEM cells by using pure oxygen compared to normal atmospheric percentages (around 22%). What are your numbers? I'd be less surprised if the power density (W/kg of equipment) could be increased, but efficiency (J/kg of H2) increases seem less likely.
Glad you explained that - for a minute there i thought you were getting unbelievably huge files as opposed to even more unbelievably huge files!
I should have posted numbers instead, but I don't have them handy anymore. The following is apples and oranges, but... I have two files in front of me representing a single slide in a technical presentation. The ratio in size of.fm/.pdf is 1M/10k. Granted a lot of that is probably heavy compression of a picture. So that is what I meant by saying save as PDF in Framemaker makes files smaller. I don't remember how much bigger they got using Openoffice, Adobe's print driver, and ghostscript, but it was at least 5:1. I could be doing something very wrong of course.
I checked out the links tweek and Alien54 posted and they look interesting. I'll try those strategies and see if I get a better result. If so, perhaps I can recommend PDF solutions on OO mailing lists.
I've played with OO a bit over several betas and did have stability problems (on both MS and Mandrake 8.1). I'm excited to try 1.0, since I'm very bullish on the format even if the execution hasn't worked perfectly for me so far.
By far the number one feature I would like to see added is a "save as PDF" which is as efficient as Framemaker. When I try the procedure outlined for windows (download a Postscript driver from Adobe, print to file, and use Ghostscript to convert), I get unbelievably huge files, as opposed to smaller files. It would also be nice to have a PDF target with links which is impossible going through.ps formats I think.
What is everyone else's number one requested feature?
Dara (hmmm - have to learn how to start a new thread)
If I can by a Dell for well under $2000 that runs Linux reasonably well according to reports on the Linux Laptop page at 1600x1200 resolution (with the ATI card and Xfree 4.2), I'm a bit disappointed that Apple cannot offer a higher screen resolution to at least match the Intel PC laptop market.
What they really need to offer is 1920x1200 in the existing form factor (or even a bit narrower - I hate having a laptop with extra width over the keyboard - hell if they keyboard fits with extra space, they could have made an ergo one or something (remember the Samsung?).
We're not even close to matching the resolution of paper when held at a normal viewing distance with LCDs. 1920x1200's not there either, but you could use it as an HDTV monitor also and do reasonably well with 2 pages side by side. There's no point in stopping until about 10 megapixels - our eyes are much harder to feed digitally than our ears.
I've been thinking of getting the Dell for a while now. It is the only machine with a 14.1" UXGA on the market, and since I want to display digital photos and enjoy very clear text using sub-pixel rendering, this is currently the best option (I'm looking forward to even higher pixel densities in the future).
The post by Fish was interesting in that he got to try both video cards that come with the 4100. I didn't understand the pros and cons of each though.
Radeon version could do 2h11m of straight DVD playback, while my current version can watch any normal length DVD's
Does this mean that the Geoforce is more energy efficient? It costs $100 more - I thought it would actually be less efficient, but more powerful. But since all I want to do is watch DVDs and display still graphics, I thought the ATI might be good enough. However the UXGA screen may be more taxing so the Geoforce may be better. I like ATI's better relationship with Xfree86 though. Could you elaborate on the choice between these cards?
Finally, does anyone know how loud the 4100 is after the update for the clicking hard drive is installed?
I agree. I don't yet own an HDTV, but I would buy one without a tuner if there was a new DVD standard that encoded movies specifically for HDTV, and if the discs were available on a Netflix like service. Good encoding for HDTV is going to take around an order of magnitude more bits than a DVD (50 GB - maybe a little less), but it sounds like the new laser technologies can read discs at near this density now.
The other factor is convergence. I want a general purpose reasonable cost DLP projector that can be used for movies and a computer display (digital pictures, maps, etc.). Spending that much money on movie only screen is a drag.
As has been repeated many times here, what Unix really needs is:
1] A standard for office file formats
2] A capable standalone import/export program between this format and MS office formats.
The OpenOffice file format looks pretty good to me, but I understand why there could be reluctance among the many other office projects to ditch their ideas (though I think they should anyway).
Having the conversion program be standalone would allow all competing interfaces to the standard file to coexist nicely with each other. My fantasy is that in the final settlement with somebody (US states, EU,...), Microsoft would have to cooperate in the construction of this program in some way.
Wow this is the first comparison I have seen between StarOffice and FrameMaker, thanks. FrameMaker is being pushed where I work and I am still resisting. This mainly due to the need to do a lot of DSP flowcharts and FrameMaker doesn't even have connector objects (even PowerPoint has them). I end up using PowerPoint with embedded Visio objects and doing the rest in Word and
Excel. I've been playing with OpenOffice at home for a while now and what I'm really impressed with, which no one has mentioned that I've seen so far, is the drawing tools are WAY better than Office or FrameMaker. Multiple glue points per object side, zoom to 3000%, lots of control, but reasonably easy to use.
Another big plus for StarOffice if I understand correctly is that it can link objects with relative links and not just absolute links (as with Office 97 anyway). I want to have a directory with links from drawing and spreadsheet files to text files (I'm sick of embedding) and then copy it to a shared server where someone else may look at it. Office 97 forces all links to be absolute so unless you copy your files to the same directory path on a different computer, you can't do it. I read somewhere that StarOffice can do this, but I haven't tried it yet.
As far as all the smaller faster office programs people have been comparing to StarOffice (Koffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Hancom Office, etc.), I've tried a lot of them and I'd much rather wait a few more seconds on startup and actually find the tool I need than discover it hasn't been implemented yet. I also wouldn't consider investing any more time in an office programs that wasn't at least cross-platform with Windows and Linux (StarOffice, Abiword, Hancom Office yes, Koffice, Gnumeric no). Then there is the likelihood that StarOffice is more likely to be accepted at a company than any other Office alternative (save for FrameMaker which is quite expensive btw).
I agree, but I would like my PDA to use 2 AA and not AAA batteries. The extra power can drive a GPS and all my other devices (headlamps, walkman, cdplayer) use AAs. I then only have to carry one kind of spare battery with me.
AA may not be thin enough for shirt pocket uses, but I don't want to put my PDA there anyway. Too bad they don't make rechargeable Li Ion AA batteries. It would be nice if the charging electronics can be made light enough to charge regular NiCad or NiMH batteries in a PDA, because I'm sick of proprietary batteries.
I couldn't agree more about the need to get GPS integrated into small form factor PDA. I'm shopping for this right now in fact, and the solutions are not that appealing (Magellan's add on for Palm V, or the Geode for handspring are both bulky and more money than I'd like to pay). I'll probably end up getting a Garmin etrex with no PDA functions which seems ridiculous as the bulk, battery power, storage, and even processing power seems like it would be sufficient to do some of the basic PDA functions.
Ditto on the color. Color maps are just way more easy to read than gray scale and when the higher resolution displays become available, photo display becomes usable ("Hey did I show you my pictures of Mt. Blanc!")
Since the Kompany is involved with Kivio, and I am currently going through a headache with several drawing packages at work (my currently limited choices are Canvas, Powerpoint, Visio, and Framemaker), I'm curious to know what your opinion is on the possibility of agreeing on common native file formats (especially for drawing, but also for other office data).
I've read a lot of OpenOffice.org documentation and it looks very promising. Do you see any limitations to the way they do it or difficulties in merging paths?
A perfect world in Office software for me would be a variety of applications, but everyone working on easily interchangeable data (forget filters altogether).
Thanks, dara
There is no daily sunset/sunrise at the North Pole
on
Total Solar Eclipse
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· Score: 1
Of course, this is also the day that if you're standing on the north pole, the sun will rise, circle around you, and set in the same place.
If you are standing on the geographic North Pole, the sun does not appear to rise and set over the course of the day. It is at approximately the same elevation all day, with the elevation varying slowly over the year. For half the year that elevation is above 0 deg and visible (it is now at the highest point), for the other half it is below the horizon all day.
I hadn't heard about the Solid Oxide Cell you mention, it sounds interesting.
What I meant by "the reformers will always be dirtier than methanol" is that "gasoline reformers will always be dirtier than methanol reformers (assuming a reformer is necessary to convert the hydrocarbon to hydrogen and CO2 and pollution)." CO2 may cause a green house effect, but it is not "dirty" by any stretch of the imagination. The process of changing methane to methanol doesn't happen on the car, and I'm sure it can be controlled to be very low pollution.
Fuel cells will definitely win out eventually, but it isn't very clear what the fuel will actually be. Many of the advantages, efficiency, quiet operation, low to zero emissions (and stable over the life of the fuel cell) are shared by all designs.
I'm hoping for methanol to win out, preferably with a direct methanol fuel cell (as opposed to a reformer producing hydrogen on the fly). Methanol looks more practical than ethanol or any other carbon based hydrogen carrier, it shouldn't require an outrageous change at the gas stations (a new nozzle standard, new tank linings, etc.). It can be made from natural gas (currently often wasted), which is bad for greenhouse effects, but you know it's going to get used up anyway. Or it can be generated from a number of feedstocks.
Gasoline will probably never allow a direct fuel cell, and the reformers will always be dirtier than methanol.
Metal sounds interesting, but will force a more expensive infrastructure.
Dara
My LED lamp is great for reading
on
LED Flashlights
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· Score: 5
A reason that LED lamps are great that is often not mentioned is that they have a very uniform illumination pattern. This is great for reading books in the tent, maps, etc. Most incandescent bulbs simply cannot focus as cleanly. Mine's quite adequate for what I use it for (see my review of the Princeton Tec Matrix on http://www.outdoorreview.com/reviews/Headlamps/pro duct_2333.asp) and it runs around 40 hours on 2 AA's. I never use my Petzl Micro or Zoom these days (anybody want them cheap?)
I've wondered about this myself. Some of my favorite music pieces are vocals and a single acoustic guitar or a single piano. I would think one could separately code the two sources more effectively than the sum. This would give the listener the added advantage of mixing the output themselves (they might me interested in learning the music part). I wonder how many separate tracks could be coded before it becomes more efficient to just code the aggregate.
For you to say though that this feature would induce people to pay for the version means there must be some sort of copy protection to prevent the user from just coping it to another file and preserving the multi-track info. Of course this is going to make it less appealing, even to people who bought the song in the first place, by making it difficult to play the same song at home, in the car, and on a portable.
An infinite number of LED's at wavelengths between 400 and 700 nm is not required to emulate sunlight for humans. How do you think TV, film, and printing work? Humans have only 3 separate color sensors and therefore the earlier poster is correct, a sunlight color could be achieved with 3 LED's. However, this is not how most white LED's work anyway (read the recent Technology Review article for explanations), and the white LED's I've seen have more blue content than sunlight. For flashlight applications, I've found this to be acceptable and perhaps even preferable.
LED's are not going to do well in home lighting for quite some time if ever. Fluorescent lighting is more efficient, reasonably color balanced, and much much cheaper per lumen output.
If the book stresses responsiveness as the story states, perhaps I will be able to run a version of KDE in the future where the menus cascade in a reasonable time - KDE 2.0 on Madrake 7.2 on a Pentium 133 has so far been a disaster for me. I've gotten used to several KDE applications by now, but I've found it less frustrating to call them from another window manager.
I own the PrincetonTec LED headlamp, I've read the LED article in Technology Review recently, and I've followed many links on the web about white LED's, and the following seem to be the relevant facts for headlamp and homelamp applications:
The current efficiency for a white LED is limited to about 20 lumens/watt (see the Technology Review article or
www.misty.com/~don/led.html#w.
The reason that they do not put out much heat is that they do not put out much light either (though enough for some tasks).
Compact Fluorescents currently run about 50 lumens/watt (a 15 W, 750 Lumen unit costs $5-10), so it is clear that if you have access to AC power, you can forget LED's unless a drastic change in efficiency happens.
Halogen flashlight bulbs (state of the art Xenon) run about 10-20 lumens/watt (more for the higher power ~4W bulbs). Sorry, I lost the reference for this one.
The reason LED flashlights have become popular is that, for low power applications, halogen lights don't scale well and normal incandescent bulbs are not very efficient (~5 lumens/watt).
That being said, I must say I like my PrincetonTec lamp - it does go about 40 hours and is bright enough to comfortably read and walk on reasonable trails. I (along with others) reviewed this lamp on outdoorreview.com/reviews/Headlamps/product_2333.a sp.
What I'm curious about is how many Windows licenses they sell and why there can't be a free software version for this platform also. Abiword developers have stated they prefer developing for both of these OS's together, and so I have to wonder if other devolopers would release more Windows free software if QT would make a Windows free edition (granted Abisource still wouldn't have gone with QT).
But perhaps it is not just money issues and there is code in this port that can't be made public. They don't seem to explain why in any of their FAQ's. (And no, I'm not interested in running X on top of Windows)
I've used 2 and 3 button mice for most of my computing, but I think Apple got this right in the beginning - one button mice make much more sense.
My reasoning? First of all, keep it simple - I have no idea how a Mac OS works, but I would set it up so that you click the mouse button down and hold it to get a list of menu options, while clicking once will do the default option (I hate double clicking and agree with the KDE guidelines - it is too prone to error and RSI to be useful).
Another reason is having a GUI that can be consistent with a Pen based GUI - I want to be able to use more or less the same OS/GUI on a webpad as a laptop or desktop. Eventually I hope to be able to just talk and use a pen and skip the keyboard altogether on any computer I would use. Thus holding keys down while pressing various keys is not useful in my mind.
Of course Linux/*BSD will always have 3 button mice available, but I'm hoping a good desktop option will offer a coherent one button option in the future.
I know this goes counter to X11, but I'm not all that keen on multiple mouse buttons. It definitely confuses beginners (I have friends who don't know what the second mouse button on Windows 98 is for), and it means you must learn an alternate way of doing something if you use a pen based GUI (which I'm hoping will become more popular - way less potential for RSI). I never got used to Apple, but I think this is the one thing they got right.
In order to make GUI's more pen friendly, this trend to use "hover icons" needs to be rethought. I find it distracting anyway (I like minimal animation on my desktop). A simple clean interface should make it obvious what parts of the screen are clickable and what parts aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they are. Numerous BIOS's have a "power on at time" option.
Thanks for setting me straight on that one. It still isn't quite the same as a VCR since the program can't control the wake from sleep, but it is useful.
As for the reason people want to put their computer to sleep - it varies. I agree that power consumption is small when the disks spin down and the monitor sleeps (less than 30 watts?), but for some users this is significant. I've never completely bought the argument about wear and tear if the disk drive is designed right - perhaps I don't understand the mechanics that well. Another factor is noise - most desktops make a fair amount of it (and I have a quiet one supposedly) - perhaps one has their desktop in their bedroom and wants it to start recording at 6AM but not have the computer make any noise at night.
Dara Parsavand
If you use Linux or Windows, you have a TiVo for the radio now. See Linux Radio Timeshift HOWTO.
If you use Windows, try: Nowhere Man - Messer's Home Page.
There is probably something for the Mac, but I wouldn't know.
Both solutions require that you have an external radio tuned to the station that you want or a Radio Card you can control from your OS. Unfortunately neither Windows or Linux is capable of waking up from a deep sleep via the computer's clock (this is ridiculous, somebody should fix this and offer a smarter computer/BIOS), so it isn't exactly the same as a VCR for the radio. But if you leave your computer on all the time anyway, it doesn't matter.
Dara Parsavand
I had a Vtech Helio for a while and the idea of taking voice memos when your in the car or walking on a trail or whatever while you remember something your supposed to do is pretty cool. I'd be happy if I could turn those voice memos into text memos for later editing and inserting into the right PDA applications - it wouldn't have to be realtime. If the text didn't make sense, it should be able to point to the sound file memory and I could listen to it myself.
Why don't they bottle the oxygen as well, and use that to feed the fuel cells' cathode? It would result in a significant boost in efficiency.
PEM fuel cells (the only ones I vaguely understand) work on the principle of a hydrogen atom wanting to squeeze through a membrane to get to the oxygen atom on the other side and losing its electron in the process. That electron travels the long way around through a load (motor, light, etc.). I'm not aware of any substantial efficiency improvements in PEM cells by using pure oxygen compared to normal atmospheric percentages (around 22%). What are your numbers? I'd be less surprised if the power density (W/kg of equipment) could be increased, but efficiency (J/kg of H2) increases seem less likely.
Dara Parsavand
Glad you explained that - for a minute there i thought you were getting unbelievably huge files as opposed to even more unbelievably huge files!
I should have posted numbers instead, but I don't have them handy anymore. The following is apples and oranges, but ... I have two files in front of me representing a single slide in a technical presentation. The ratio in size of .fm/.pdf is 1M/10k. Granted a lot of that is probably heavy compression of a picture. So that is what I meant by saying save as PDF in Framemaker makes files smaller. I don't remember how much bigger they got using Openoffice, Adobe's print driver, and ghostscript, but it was at least 5:1. I could be doing something very wrong of course.
I checked out the links tweek and Alien54 posted and they look interesting. I'll try those strategies and see if I get a better result. If so, perhaps I can recommend PDF solutions on OO mailing lists.
Thanks, Dara
I've played with OO a bit over several betas and did have stability problems (on both MS and Mandrake 8.1). I'm excited to try 1.0, since I'm very bullish on the format even if the execution hasn't worked perfectly for me so far.
.ps formats I think.
By far the number one feature I would like to see added is a "save as PDF" which is as efficient as Framemaker. When I try the procedure outlined for windows (download a Postscript driver from Adobe, print to file, and use Ghostscript to convert), I get unbelievably huge files, as opposed to smaller files. It would also be nice to have a PDF target with links which is impossible going through
What is everyone else's number one requested feature?
Dara (hmmm - have to learn how to start a new thread)
If I can by a Dell for well under $2000 that runs Linux reasonably well according to reports on the Linux Laptop page at 1600x1200 resolution (with the ATI card and Xfree 4.2), I'm a bit disappointed that Apple cannot offer a higher screen resolution to at least match the Intel PC laptop market.
What they really need to offer is 1920x1200 in the existing form factor (or even a bit narrower - I hate having a laptop with extra width over the keyboard - hell if they keyboard fits with extra space, they could have made an ergo one or something (remember the Samsung?).
We're not even close to matching the resolution of paper when held at a normal viewing distance with LCDs. 1920x1200's not there either, but you could use it as an HDTV monitor also and do reasonably well with 2 pages side by side. There's no point in stopping until about 10 megapixels - our eyes are much harder to feed digitally than our ears.
Dara
I've been thinking of getting the Dell for a while now. It is the only machine with a 14.1" UXGA on the market, and since I want to display digital photos and enjoy very clear text using sub-pixel rendering, this is currently the best option (I'm looking forward to even higher pixel densities in the future).
The post by Fish was interesting in that he got to try both video cards that come with the 4100. I didn't understand the pros and cons of each though.
Radeon version could do 2h11m of straight DVD playback, while my current version can watch any normal length DVD's
Does this mean that the Geoforce is more energy efficient? It costs $100 more - I thought it would actually be less efficient, but more powerful. But since all I want to do is watch DVDs and display still graphics, I thought the ATI might be good enough. However the UXGA screen may be more taxing so the Geoforce may be better. I like ATI's better relationship with Xfree86 though. Could you elaborate on the choice between these cards?
Finally, does anyone know how loud the 4100 is after the update for the clicking hard drive is installed?
Thanks, Dara
I agree. I don't yet own an HDTV, but I would buy one without a tuner if there was a new DVD standard that encoded movies specifically for HDTV, and if the discs were available on a Netflix like service. Good encoding for HDTV is going to take around an order of magnitude more bits than a DVD (50 GB - maybe a little less), but it sounds like the new laser technologies can read discs at near this density now.
The other factor is convergence. I want a general purpose reasonable cost DLP projector that can be used for movies and a computer display (digital pictures, maps, etc.). Spending that much money on movie only screen is a drag.
Dara
As has been repeated many times here, what Unix really needs is:
...), Microsoft would have to cooperate in the construction of this program in some way.
1] A standard for office file formats
2] A capable standalone import/export program between this format and MS office formats.
The OpenOffice file format looks pretty good to me, but I understand why there could be reluctance among the many other office projects to ditch their ideas (though I think they should anyway).
Having the conversion program be standalone would allow all competing interfaces to the standard file to coexist nicely with each other. My fantasy is that in the final settlement with somebody (US states, EU,
Dara
Wow this is the first comparison I have seen between StarOffice and FrameMaker, thanks. FrameMaker is being pushed where I work and I am still resisting. This mainly due to the need to do a lot of DSP flowcharts and FrameMaker doesn't even have connector objects (even PowerPoint has them). I end up using PowerPoint with embedded Visio objects and doing the rest in Word and
Excel. I've been playing with OpenOffice at home for a while now and what I'm really impressed with, which no one has mentioned that I've seen so far, is the drawing tools are WAY better than Office or FrameMaker. Multiple glue points per object side, zoom to 3000%, lots of control, but reasonably easy to use.
Another big plus for StarOffice if I understand correctly is that it can link objects with relative links and not just absolute links (as with Office 97 anyway). I want to have a directory with links from drawing and spreadsheet files to text files (I'm sick of embedding) and then copy it to a shared server where someone else may look at it. Office 97 forces all links to be absolute so unless you copy your files to the same directory path on a different computer, you can't do it. I read somewhere that StarOffice can do this, but I haven't tried it yet.
As far as all the smaller faster office programs people have been comparing to StarOffice (Koffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Hancom Office, etc.), I've tried a lot of them and I'd much rather wait a few more seconds on startup and actually find the tool I need than discover it hasn't been implemented yet. I also wouldn't consider investing any more time in an office programs that wasn't at least cross-platform with Windows and Linux (StarOffice, Abiword, Hancom Office yes, Koffice, Gnumeric no). Then there is the likelihood that StarOffice is more likely to be accepted at a company than any other Office alternative (save for FrameMaker which is quite expensive btw).
Submit those bug reports!
I agree, but I would like my PDA to use 2 AA and not AAA batteries. The extra power can drive a GPS and all my other devices (headlamps, walkman, cdplayer) use AAs. I then only have to carry one kind of spare battery with me.
AA may not be thin enough for shirt pocket uses, but I don't want to put my PDA there anyway. Too bad they don't make rechargeable Li Ion AA batteries. It would be nice if the charging electronics can be made light enough to charge regular NiCad or NiMH batteries in a PDA, because I'm sick of proprietary batteries.
I couldn't agree more about the need to get GPS integrated into small form factor PDA. I'm shopping for this right now in fact, and the solutions are not that appealing (Magellan's add on for Palm V, or the Geode for handspring are both bulky and more money than I'd like to pay). I'll probably end up getting a Garmin etrex with no PDA functions which seems ridiculous as the bulk, battery power, storage, and even processing power seems like it would be sufficient to do some of the basic PDA functions.
Ditto on the color. Color maps are just way more easy to read than gray scale and when the higher resolution displays become available, photo display becomes usable ("Hey did I show you my pictures of Mt. Blanc!")
Since the Kompany is involved with Kivio, and I am currently going through a headache with several drawing packages at work (my currently limited choices are Canvas, Powerpoint, Visio, and Framemaker), I'm curious to know what your opinion is on the possibility of agreeing on common native file formats (especially for drawing, but also for other office data).
I've read a lot of OpenOffice.org documentation and it looks very promising. Do you see any limitations to the way they do it or difficulties in merging paths?
A perfect world in Office software for me would be a variety of applications, but everyone working on easily interchangeable data (forget filters altogether).
Thanks, dara
Of course, this is also the day that if you're standing on the north pole, the sun will rise, circle around you, and set in the same place.
If you are standing on the geographic North Pole, the sun does not appear to rise and set over the course of the day. It is at approximately the same elevation all day, with the elevation varying slowly over the year. For half the year that elevation is above 0 deg and visible (it is now at the highest point), for the other half it is below the horizon all day.
Dara
I hadn't heard about the Solid Oxide Cell you mention, it sounds interesting. What I meant by "the reformers will always be dirtier than methanol" is that "gasoline reformers will always be dirtier than methanol reformers (assuming a reformer is necessary to convert the hydrocarbon to hydrogen and CO2 and pollution)." CO2 may cause a green house effect, but it is not "dirty" by any stretch of the imagination. The process of changing methane to methanol doesn't happen on the car, and I'm sure it can be controlled to be very low pollution.
Fuel cells will definitely win out eventually, but it isn't very clear what the fuel will actually be. Many of the advantages, efficiency, quiet operation, low to zero emissions (and stable over the life of the fuel cell) are shared by all designs.
I'm hoping for methanol to win out, preferably with a direct methanol fuel cell (as opposed to a reformer producing hydrogen on the fly). Methanol looks more practical than ethanol or any other carbon based hydrogen carrier, it shouldn't require an outrageous change at the gas stations (a new nozzle standard, new tank linings, etc.). It can be made from natural gas (currently often wasted), which is bad for greenhouse effects, but you know it's going to get used up anyway. Or it can be generated from a number of feedstocks.
Gasoline will probably never allow a direct fuel cell, and the reformers will always be dirtier than methanol.
Metal sounds interesting, but will force a more expensive infrastructure.
Dara
A reason that LED lamps are great that is often not mentioned is that they have a very uniform illumination pattern. This is great for reading books in the tent, maps, etc. Most incandescent bulbs simply cannot focus as cleanly. Mine's quite adequate for what I use it for (see my review of the Princeton Tec Matrix on http://www.outdoorreview.com/reviews/Headlamps/pro duct_2333.asp) and it runs around 40 hours on 2 AA's. I never use my Petzl Micro or Zoom these days (anybody want them cheap?)
Dara
I've wondered about this myself. Some of my favorite music pieces are vocals and a single acoustic guitar or a single piano. I would think one could separately code the two sources more effectively than the sum. This would give the listener the added advantage of mixing the output themselves (they might me interested in learning the music part). I wonder how many separate tracks could be coded before it becomes more efficient to just code the aggregate.
For you to say though that this feature would induce people to pay for the version means there must be some sort of copy protection to prevent the user from just coping it to another file and preserving the multi-track info. Of course this is going to make it less appealing, even to people who bought the song in the first place, by making it difficult to play the same song at home, in the car, and on a portable.
An infinite number of LED's at wavelengths between 400 and 700 nm is not required to emulate sunlight for humans. How do you think TV, film, and printing work? Humans have only 3 separate color sensors and therefore the earlier poster is correct, a sunlight color could be achieved with 3 LED's. However, this is not how most white LED's work anyway (read the recent Technology Review article for explanations), and the white LED's I've seen have more blue content than sunlight. For flashlight applications, I've found this to be acceptable and perhaps even preferable.
LED's are not going to do well in home lighting for quite some time if ever. Fluorescent lighting is more efficient, reasonably color balanced, and much much cheaper per lumen output.
If the book stresses responsiveness as the story states, perhaps I will be able to run a version of KDE in the future where the menus cascade in a reasonable time - KDE 2.0 on Madrake 7.2 on a Pentium 133 has so far been a disaster for me. I've gotten used to several KDE applications by now, but I've found it less frustrating to call them from another window manager.
I own the PrincetonTec LED headlamp, I've read the LED article in Technology Review recently, and I've followed many links on the web about white LED's, and the following seem to be the relevant facts for headlamp and homelamp applications:
The current efficiency for a white LED is limited to about 20 lumens/watt (see the Technology Review article or www.misty.com/~don/led.html#w.
The reason that they do not put out much heat is that they do not put out much light either (though enough for some tasks).
Compact Fluorescents currently run about 50 lumens/watt (a 15 W, 750 Lumen unit costs $5-10), so it is clear that if you have access to AC power, you can forget LED's unless a drastic change in efficiency happens.
Halogen flashlight bulbs (state of the art Xenon) run about 10-20 lumens/watt (more for the higher power ~4W bulbs). Sorry, I lost the reference for this one.
The reason LED flashlights have become popular is that, for low power applications, halogen lights don't scale well and normal incandescent bulbs are not very efficient (~5 lumens/watt).
That being said, I must say I like my PrincetonTec lamp - it does go about 40 hours and is bright enough to comfortably read and walk on reasonable trails. I (along with others) reviewed this lamp on outdoorreview.com/reviews/Headlamps/product_2333.a sp.
What I'm curious about is how many Windows licenses they sell and why there can't be a free software version for this platform also. Abiword developers have stated they prefer developing for both of these OS's together, and so I have to wonder if other devolopers would release more Windows free software if QT would make a Windows free edition (granted Abisource still wouldn't have gone with QT).
But perhaps it is not just money issues and there is code in this port that can't be made public. They don't seem to explain why in any of their FAQ's. (And no, I'm not interested in running X on top of Windows)
I've used 2 and 3 button mice for most of my computing, but I think Apple got this right in the beginning - one button mice make much more sense.
My reasoning? First of all, keep it simple - I have no idea how a Mac OS works, but I would set it up so that you click the mouse button down and hold it to get a list of menu options, while clicking once will do the default option (I hate double clicking and agree with the KDE guidelines - it is too prone to error and RSI to be useful).
Another reason is having a GUI that can be consistent with a Pen based GUI - I want to be able to use more or less the same OS/GUI on a webpad as a laptop or desktop. Eventually I hope to be able to just talk and use a pen and skip the keyboard altogether on any computer I would use. Thus holding keys down while pressing various keys is not useful in my mind.
Of course Linux/*BSD will always have 3 button mice available, but I'm hoping a good desktop option will offer a coherent one button option in the future.
I know this goes counter to X11, but I'm not all that keen on multiple mouse buttons. It definitely confuses beginners (I have friends who don't know what the second mouse button on Windows 98 is for), and it means you must learn an alternate way of doing something if you use a pen based GUI (which I'm hoping will become more popular - way less potential for RSI). I never got used to Apple, but I think this is the one thing they got right.
In order to make GUI's more pen friendly, this trend to use "hover icons" needs to be rethought. I find it distracting anyway (I like minimal animation on my desktop). A simple clean interface should make it obvious what parts of the screen are clickable and what parts aren't.