P.S. This Contiki OS is pretty cool. I ought to dump Windows 98 off my old K6 laptop and use Coktiki instead. All I need is something to surf the web, run Utorrent, and play back videos.
Why can't Microsoft produce an OS small and efficient as this one?
Re:I can't do with these new fangled inventions
on
The Mouse Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
Personally I'm happy the mouse was invented. I remember my first word processor was RUNscript on a C=64, and although it worked just fine, it was a royal pain in the butt to constantly look-up commands. "How do I make bold? Ahhh,.bb - okay now how do I end bold? Hmmm." (pulls down the manual again).
Having the commands immediately available electronically is far superior to having to constantly look things up in a book.
The English language made a lot of sense when it was still Germanic. It had a logical flow.
Then the damn French took-over the island and English became a multilingual language with contradictory grammar rules. Around the year 1500, the damn pronunciation change. For example: "knicht" was originally pronounced the way it was spelt, and therefore easy to read, but suddenly it became pronounced as "nite". Why? Who the hell knows??? And finally, as if the language wasn't already fraked up, the linguists decided "knight" was the proper spelling because they thought the word came from Greece... even though our Anglo-Saxon ancestors came from Asia, not Greece.
And thus we have a language that is part French, part Greek, part German, follows contradictory rules, and spells words based upon verbal pronunciations ("k-night") that nobody has used for over five centuries.
Yeah.
You'd think someone would come along and say, "Enough is enough" and start spelling English the way it sounds: "Enuf is Enuf".
Re:Obligatory review comment
on
The Mouse Turns 40
·
· Score: 3, Informative
P.S. I remember when I first used a PC, I kept wondering why I needed a second button. Back then (Win 3.1) the right mouse button was rarely used. The left button would be well-worn while the right button still looked new. It took a couple years for Microsoft to invent the idea of right-button context menus. (Or maybe that should be stole? The Commodore Amiga had been using right button menus since 1986.)
>>>What it is doing is trying to make the 50 states DLs uniform.
"I have searched but I cannot lay my hand on the part of the Constitution that grants the U.S. that power." - James Madison. QED the law is unconstitutional.
Of course so is the U.S. law that mandates drinking age be 21 and forced many states to change their age of consent from 18 to 21. I still don't understand that one... even though I agree with age 21 I think the decision should be left to each government for its own specific region. If Wyoming wants the drinking age to be 18, let Wyoming do so. I don't live there, so what do I care what the Wyomingites do?
I never smile anyway, but what's with this "you can't wear glasses" rule? That seems really stupid considering I'm always wearing glasses. Will the cops now ask me to remove my glasses so they can compare my face to the drivers license?
Also:
Why is Indiana using facial recognition software? Is there now a database of faces that police are searching every time a crime is committed???
>>>we have 22 million people in a place the size of Europe or the continental USA.
I made that argument yesterday and I was told it's bogus... that sparse population is not an excuse for Australia to only have ~4 megabit/s average when places like Japan have 18 megabit/s. Well, I agree with you that comparing Australia to a tiny nation like Japan or Korea is stupid, but most slashdotters disagree. (shrug) Anyway quoting some statistics from memory, here is how Australia compares to other continent-sized federations:
(1) Russian Federation - ~7 megabit/s (2) European Union and USA - ~6 megabit/s (3) Australia and Canada - ~4 megabit/s (4) China - ~2 megabit/s
I don't think Australia is doing poorly at all. It's only 2 megabit/s behind Europe or America... and twice as fast the Chinese.
>>>collusion is trivially easy and always overlooked by the powers that be
The powers that be did not overlook the collusion that happened between the Record Companies. The States' General Attorneys sued the companies for forming an illegal cartel and fined them accordingly (with refunds to customers who purchased CDs or cassettes). If the cellphone companies were colluding to pricefix their plans, I expect the States would drag them to court too.
The truth of the matter is that erecting antennas all over the place, and keeping those antennas operational, is very expensive. That is the real reason for the high cost of data transmission. Even wireless calls are expensive - about 20 cents a minute for my plan - it's just the real cost of an expensive operation.
>>>With the new netfilters the gov't is mandating, you won't be able to access porn.
No but you'll be able to see that "Sorry Big Brother is watching. Access denied" popup in just 1/100th of a second instead of 1 second! :-) That's technological progress for you... now if we could just get some progress on the freedom front, we'd be all set. Approximately 250 years since the Americans and French wrote their respective Declarations of Human Rights, and yet we still don't have freedom of thought or speech* in the privacy of our homes.
* * (Re: the Australian decision that naked Simpsons drawings are "child porn", even though there are no victims in this so-called crime.)
Ha! Funny.:-) Unfortunately Commodore 64s don't multitask so it would not be possible to download a porno photo & post to slashdot "at the same time". The C64 does one thing at a time. Shoulda used "Amiga" for your joke.
Sometimes pegged with the catchy moniker of "porn mode", while in privacy mode..... URLs are not recorded in the browser history, cookies are not saved and other evidence is purged from the computer at the end of the session.
This sounds like something I need. All the time. Every day. 24/7.
How come none of these chips ever come with an AM receiver? FM is just filled with a bunch of teeny-bopper music, but AM has all the cool talk shows like "Rush Windbaugh" and "The Corn Outlook".;-)
If you think it's so easy, I have a challenge for you:
I bought a digital-to-analog converter box (Zenith DTT901) to sit on top of my TV. It includes a chip to decode QAM but that function is disabled due to Congressional law. Several people have tried but not been able to make the QAM function work; can you do it?
As an alternative, I'd be happy just to get S-video out of this box. Again, so far, no one has been able to hack it for this task.
My first "real" program (after the two-line "Hello World" stuff) was a Star Trek game. Written in Commodore 128 BASIC so it ran very slow but worked quite well. Why would anyone bother with boring stuff like text editors?
Let's assume that someone, like me, gets sexual thrills from photos of naked "children" like Miley Cyrus. Or naked animals. Or gay men.
Why does it matter? Why is it necessary to censor me from seeing those images? I fail to see how it's justified. Whatever I do in the privacy of my home does not harm your body, your property, or your rights.
>>> that hardly compares with the gigabit speeds available in some countries.
You mean available to a privileged few who just happen to live inside the correct neighborhoods. Most citizens in those countries, like you, linve in areas that have not been upgraded.
And pay 60% in taxes for the privilege, and an interest rate of 0.03% on your bank account or IRA. (Ahhh the joys of a fifteen-year-long recession.) No thanks; I don't think I would enjoy living in Debt-pan.
Slashdot Mirror
Can I use this to test my blood-sugar levels?
Unfortunately I doubt it would make it any cheaper. Those greedy companies charge 50 cents for each "refill" and it's really just a piece of paper.
P.S. This Contiki OS is pretty cool. I ought to dump Windows 98 off my old K6 laptop and use Coktiki instead. All I need is something to surf the web, run Utorrent, and play back videos.
Why can't Microsoft produce an OS small and efficient as this one?
Personally I'm happy the mouse was invented. I remember my first word processor was RUNscript on a C=64, and although it worked just fine, it was a royal pain in the butt to constantly look-up commands. "How do I make bold? Ahhh, .bb - okay now how do I end bold? Hmmm." (pulls down the manual again).
Having the commands immediately available electronically is far superior to having to constantly look things up in a book.
The English language made a lot of sense when it was still Germanic. It had a logical flow.
Then the damn French took-over the island and English became a multilingual language with contradictory grammar rules. Around the year 1500, the damn pronunciation change. For example: "knicht" was originally pronounced the way it was spelt, and therefore easy to read, but suddenly it became pronounced as "nite". Why? Who the hell knows??? And finally, as if the language wasn't already fraked up, the linguists decided "knight" was the proper spelling because they thought the word came from Greece... even though our Anglo-Saxon ancestors came from Asia, not Greece.
And thus we have a language that is part French, part Greek, part German, follows contradictory rules, and spells words based upon verbal pronunciations ("k-night") that nobody has used for over five centuries.
Yeah.
You'd think someone would come along and say, "Enough is enough" and start spelling English the way it sounds: "Enuf is Enuf".
P.S. I remember when I first used a PC, I kept wondering why I needed a second button. Back then (Win 3.1) the right mouse button was rarely used. The left button would be well-worn while the right button still looked new. It took a couple years for Microsoft to invent the idea of right-button context menus. (Or maybe that should be stole? The Commodore Amiga had been using right button menus since 1986.)
I don't get it. I've used one-button with the Macintosh for years and never needed to remove my hand from the keyboard.
Doesn't that violate the "equal apportionment" clause? i.e. If one state gets funds, then they should all get funds.
>>>What it is doing is trying to make the 50 states DLs uniform.
"I have searched but I cannot lay my hand on the part of the Constitution that grants the U.S. that power." - James Madison. QED the law is unconstitutional.
Of course so is the U.S. law that mandates drinking age be 21 and forced many states to change their age of consent from 18 to 21. I still don't understand that one... even though I agree with age 21 I think the decision should be left to each government for its own specific region. If Wyoming wants the drinking age to be 18, let Wyoming do so. I don't live there, so what do I care what the Wyomingites do?
I never smile anyway, but what's with this "you can't wear glasses" rule? That seems really stupid considering I'm always wearing glasses. Will the cops now ask me to remove my glasses so they can compare my face to the drivers license?
Also:
Why is Indiana using facial recognition software? Is there now a database of faces that police are searching every time a crime is committed???
And here's an image of Contiki multitasking on a C=64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Contiki-C64.png
Amazing. I thought the old Commie was too slow and too small to run multiple programs at the same time.
>>>we have 22 million people in a place the size of Europe or the continental USA.
I made that argument yesterday and I was told it's bogus... that sparse population is not an excuse for Australia to only have ~4 megabit/s average when places like Japan have 18 megabit/s. Well, I agree with you that comparing Australia to a tiny nation like Japan or Korea is stupid, but most slashdotters disagree. (shrug) Anyway quoting some statistics from memory, here is how Australia compares to other continent-sized federations:
(1) Russian Federation - ~7 megabit/s
(2) European Union and USA - ~6 megabit/s
(3) Australia and Canada - ~4 megabit/s
(4) China - ~2 megabit/s
I don't think Australia is doing poorly at all. It's only 2 megabit/s behind Europe or America... and twice as fast the Chinese.
>>>collusion is trivially easy and always overlooked by the powers that be
The powers that be did not overlook the collusion that happened between the Record Companies. The States' General Attorneys sued the companies for forming an illegal cartel and fined them accordingly (with refunds to customers who purchased CDs or cassettes). If the cellphone companies were colluding to pricefix their plans, I expect the States would drag them to court too.
The truth of the matter is that erecting antennas all over the place, and keeping those antennas operational, is very expensive. That is the real reason for the high cost of data transmission. Even wireless calls are expensive - about 20 cents a minute for my plan - it's just the real cost of an expensive operation.
>>>With the new netfilters the gov't is mandating, you won't be able to access porn.
No but you'll be able to see that "Sorry Big Brother is watching. Access denied" popup in just 1/100th of a second instead of 1 second! :-) That's technological progress for you... now if we could just get some progress on the freedom front, we'd be all set. Approximately 250 years since the Americans and French wrote their respective Declarations of Human Rights, and yet we still don't have freedom of thought or speech* in the privacy of our homes.
*
* (Re: the Australian decision that naked Simpsons drawings are "child porn", even though there are no victims in this so-called crime.)
Ha! Funny. :-) Unfortunately Commodore 64s don't multitask so it would not be possible to download a porno photo & post to slashdot "at the same time". The C64 does one thing at a time. Shoulda used "Amiga" for your joke.
What is private browsing?
Sometimes pegged with the catchy moniker of "porn mode", while in privacy mode..... URLs are not recorded in the browser history, cookies are not saved and other evidence is purged from the computer at the end of the session.
This sounds like something I need.
All the time.
Every day.
24/7.
How come none of these chips ever come with an AM receiver? FM is just filled with a bunch of teeny-bopper music, but AM has all the cool talk shows like "Rush Windbaugh" and "The Corn Outlook". ;-)
If you think it's so easy, I have a challenge for you:
I bought a digital-to-analog converter box (Zenith DTT901) to sit on top of my TV. It includes a chip to decode QAM but that function is disabled due to Congressional law. Several people have tried but not been able to make the QAM function work; can you do it?
As an alternative, I'd be happy just to get S-video out of this box. Again, so far, no one has been able to hack it for this task.
I must be weird.
My first "real" program (after the two-line "Hello World" stuff) was a Star Trek game. Written in Commodore 128 BASIC so it ran very slow but worked quite well. Why would anyone bother with boring stuff like text editors?
>>> there's a widespread belief that child-porn is a gateway to molestation
Next you'll be telling me that marijuana is a "gateway" to harder drugs. That has been proven false by many, many studies.
Let's assume that someone, like me, gets sexual thrills from photos of naked "children" like Miley Cyrus. Or naked animals. Or gay men.
Why does it matter? Why is it necessary to censor me from seeing those images? I fail to see how it's justified. Whatever I do in the privacy of my home does not harm your body, your property, or your rights.
>>> that hardly compares with the gigabit speeds available in some countries.
You mean available to a privileged few who just happen to live inside the correct neighborhoods. Most citizens in those countries, like you, linve in areas that have not been upgraded.
>>>the best you can say is that we're keeping up with a bunch of mediocre countries.
I'm sure our Russian and European Union friends just love being called "mediocre". ;-)
And pay 60% in taxes for the privilege, and an interest rate of 0.03% on your bank account or IRA. (Ahhh the joys of a fifteen-year-long recession.) No thanks; I don't think I would enjoy living in Debt-pan.
>>> What are these megabits used in the comparison? Out here in the middle of nowhere (Nebraska), Cox provides 12 mbit/s cable...
Is this some kinda joke? I don't get it.
12 Mbit/s == 12 megabits/second
Um.
Hello? A government monopoly is still a monopoly (including all the evils that implies).