Been there, done that, found it to expensive and not very satisfying. I live to code and build cool things so anything that interferes with that is bad.. which includes drugs, alcohol, caffine, and women. I'd like to give up working pathetic sucky jobs too but I've yet to find a way to make a living just inventing stuff. Maybe if I had a PhD or a rich uncle or something I could get paid for crazy R&D stuff.:)
Meeting people online is a lot cheaper, safer, and easier than most real life methods. I don't like clubbing (who can afford $50/night to try to pick up drunk women who won't like you when they are sober), I don't go to school or church, I usually don't meet many people in my work as a programmer (especially single women), and most the people I hang out with are all geeks which means 95% male. I don't feel I have the time or money to invest in trying to pick women up in the old fshioned ways so online methods can be a big help.
The safety factor could be a big plus for women especially. You aren't likely to be slipped a date rape drug and find yourself tied to hotel bed while being gang raped if your meeting through the Net. Sure you have some risk when you eventually do meet the people in real life but you get some chance to screen people before going out with them.
People who think pedos are going wild online are a bit mistaken. Sure there are some but there are a lot more that are out there in real life. It'd be a lot easier to grab some brat off the street or playground than to arrange to meet them off the Net. Anything online leaves a paper trail and you can't know if the person you're talking to really is Lil Tommy or Agent Nutcracker or even Lil Tommy's parents. The majority of underage folks that get 'kidnapped' by online friends are freaky folks that are out banging anything they can anyway or at least wishing they were. Mostly horny teenagers that are wanting to get picked up.
This sounds like a good idea because so many people are bad at building what they design but it is really nothing to new. I went to a local vo tech school in highschool for my first year of electrical engineering and then went to DeVry. Both were pretty hands on.
My hands are clumsy though. I don't like actually trying to build things myself because I end up with with a lot of mistakes and burnt fingers and stuff. I'm just not good at working with small parts. I'd rather design and supervise others building my design. I've actually found that women are a lot better at building circuits than most guys. I'd guess because they have smaller hands and are a little bit more graceful.
Bluetooth for keyboard/mouse would be a big plus IMO. I have suggested several times a bluetooth/wireless version of the Twiddler keyboard/mouse combo. For the $400 or so it costs I figure they could manage that.:)
I'm not overly worried about my tablets hdd space because it has WiFi and call talk to my server. The server has several hundred gigs of space that can be mounted with NFS. The server is also small enough that I can throw it in the car and move it easily should I need to take the whole show on the road. A good supply of ram in a tablet is a good idea but for me 256Mb is probably enough for a tablet. I would like one that had mpeg acceleration so it'd work better for movie playback. That way you could play DVD quality video on a much cheaper/cooler CPU.
Exactly. They sell these as lighter than a laptop but they cost more. There is really no reason for them to cost more. The hardware just doesn't qualify for their price range.
I used BeOS (as I try to use all popular OS's) enough to be pretty familiar with it and I had a roommate that was a BeOS cult member.. I still never quite saw it as anything much. Sure it didn't suck as much as Windows but that isn't really saying much and it didn't have much in the way of drivers or applications. It booted fast but with proper tweaking I can make Linux boot just as fast. I never really cared because I reboot maybe once or twice a year so what difference does it make to me? It looks pretty nice but no better than I can make Linux look. It had some interesting filesystem features. In the day it's journaling was quite the feature.. but today Linux and Windows both offer that. It still has some filesystem features that neither Linux or Windows has but I never really figured out why you'd want the filesystem to do those things anyway. I think BeOS did have a good sound service that both Linux and Windows could still learn from but other than that I can't think of anything I really liked about BeOS.
BeOS also has the oddest installation problem I ever suffered. Whenever I installed BeOS on a certain one of my systems it'd disable the soundcard in Windows which was also on that computer. After the BeOS install I'd have to reinstall the soundcard driver in Windows.:)
Really, I'd like it if they would sell a portable PC without screen, keyboard, mouse, or external drives. Sure you can build one yourself but it'd be able to buy one ready made. Without any of those features they could easily fit the whole thing into something not much bigger than a PDA and could keep the price down to less than $400. Then you could just plug into whatever monitor was handy or use something like iGlasses.
The problem is that most people aren't really sure what to use tablets for. They are great for business use where your staff needs to be able to work with information as they walk and a PDA is to cramped or lowpowered. They are okay for lugging around the house for Net use or even for watching ripped movies. I like to plug a Happy Hacker keyboard in and use one as a laptop to code on (I find it more convient being able to remove the keyboard when not needed).
They could even be good for low power games (think GameBoy with a much bigger screen) if there were a joypad style mouse button and the buttons were positioned properly.
The other problem is that these things tend to cost as much as a laptop. If they could get them into the upper range of PDA prices while retaining their PC-like features then they'd kick ass. The ProGears were a great hacking bargain once they went out of business and were available for $400 each.:)
That was in 1992. It was all electronic. I don't have any real records of such things. It's not like I kept printouts or anything like that. It seems a lifetime ago when nobody else knew what the Internet was and you were the area alpha geek just for having a BBS.
What kind of records are needed for this kind of thing? Somewhere I might have some old checks I was sent or something like that. I might have a backup on a floppy somewhere if they haven't all gone bad.
I don't know about everyone else but I held online auctions on my BBS and MUD as early as 1992. Never even considered getting a patent on such an obvious concept. A 'buy it now' feature was kind of obvious to. I mean real life auctions let you do that sometimes so it was something we just used. The only real EBay feature I didn't use waaaaay back then was to allow bidding to begin for less than you're willing to sell for.. that always annoyed me.
There are some nasty chemicals involved in producing solar panels but nothing compared to mining or drilling for fossil fuels, building a plant, transporting those fuels, etc. I'm not quite sure what you mean by not even breaking even on the energy put into making them. Solar panels, unless abused (some people find it funny to shoot at them), can easily last 10-20 years and pay for themselves several times over before needing replaced. Obviously, if the locale the plant that produces the panels is in is also powered by renewable means then there is little pollution involved there. Of course it takes time and effort to get to that clean a level but by not utilizing renewable power you're not even moving in the right direction.
Ways of utilizing the sun without electricity is surprisingly effecient. The average home could easily get it's hot water and part of it's heat from the sun. That's pretty much anywhere and all year round. Anywhere in the continental USA or with similar weather should be eligible for such uses. For most people those two things alone would save them a lot off their utility bill.
If people don't want to move you can always give them solar/wind farms. I think people need to stop worrying so much about themselves though and think about their children and grandchildren. Do they really need their bit of dirt out in the middle of freaking no where or do they need electricity to power modern society? Electricty allows a higher quality of life. Medicine, education, technology, jobs, running water, flushing toilets, etc. Sometimes you need to take a risk and try something new. Of course picking which risks to take is important but at least take some of them. If there is anything important about your home then take it with you. I resettle ever 6 months to a year (not entirely by choice) so I can hardly feel sorry for such people.
As someone that has lived in the midwest most of his life I fully support your plan. There is nothing that is worth much of anything in the whole damn area. That is why there are no jobs here. Better to create electricity to give life to the coastal cities. It'd also give us a nice reserve of fresh water to pipe through the rest of the country to help prevent droughts. To replace the food loss of sinking the midwest we could eat more freshwater fish and plants as well as creating floating hydroponic gardens on the lake. We'd probably end up with a large gain in the amount of food produced.
Probably because us Americans are peckers. None of us want to give up anything to get something. Everything is supposed to be easy. We don't like having to change because it forces us to use what is between our ears. Making decisions is full of trade offs and can be difficult.
There is a lot of whining when it comes to any form of renewable energy. People complain that solar panels, dams, and wind turbines are ugly or noisy. They whine that they change the eco system. They whine that they cost money to build. They whine that it uses up land.
Heavy forbid we replace those beautiful, quiet, enviromentally friendly, cheap, and tiny coal burning plants or nuke plants with something so hideous. Lord knows it could cause property values to go down.
Do people really even know what they are talking about? Usually not. Most (not all) greenies have the technical knowledge of a rabbit. These nitwits want a 100% perfect system or want all humans to just go away and leave nature to itself. They paint a dark picture of renewable power without properly comparing it to what we already have or offering viable alternatives. Instead of whining go out and find a better solution.
Of course there is also the problem of all the VIPs that have an interest in keeping those nasty old coal and nuke plants in business. Those folks that will do anything to keep cars burning oil. They have a lot of political and economic power. Hell, the President is even one of them.
Sounds sort of depressing for America's chance at a future but things are getting better. We do already have many dams and solar and wind farms and the technology is getting better and adoption is becoming more chic. More ethanol and other renewable fuels are being used. There is some promise of a cleaner future.
I agree. GUIs are bloat. That doesn't mean they can't be useful. cp and mv are still far faster and more flexible than any GUI for file management. Feedback is fine but IMO if you tell the computer to do something then you should be able to assume it's worked (or get a proper response dialog) and not have to wait for cheesy audio feedback. I can imagine instances where audio feedback would be important but not in a window manager.
Air conditioning is bloat but again it can be useful. I've had cars though where if the A/C is broken the car won't run. IMO that is the kind of bloat that is bad. It's bloat with a poor implementation that doesn't allow you to bypass it.
Games are bloat too. I seldom put them on my computer. I do have console machines for games (Playstation, Dreamcast, etc) which are lifestyle bloat but again they are okay because I can remove them if they get in the way.
Screensavers are not just loat - they are retarded. Get with the 90's and use powersaving mode. The only thing I use screen savers for is to provide an interesting background for gdm.
Bloat you can remove is fine. Bloat that is forced on you is bad. My bitch with KDE/Gnome is that they make it harder and harder to use them with the bloat disabled. I think this is a mistake but I can go to other WM's. I just feel they are hurting themselves by driving so many away.
Compilers and development tools you can't remove would be bloat too.:)
I'd ride a scooter (or a fat chick) and not really give a damn who knew. My foot on their ass will shut anyone up quickly should they decide to make snide comments.:)
You may be right that most people are to uptight to do anything as uncool as ride a scooter but then tough shit to them I guess. More toys (and fat chicks I hope) for me.
Couldn't you save yourself about $600 and just add an extra mouse to your computer (not to hard/expensive) and then write a special driver that'd use the two mice together to form the same keystrokes as this keyboard? You could even keep your mouses scrollwheel which I really like and then you'd have two so you could do both horizontal and vertical scrolling. With three mouse buttons for each hand I think you could improve on this keyboards alt, shift, control button issues. Of course you'd need a leftie mouse for your left hand but they aren't to hard to find.:)
Hrm. Couldn't you just have the observer leave the room until the victim.. err test subject.. has been hypnotised? We didn't do anything really in the way of scientific tests but the users got further through the game when hypnotised than when not.. which would lead me to believe that they were doing a better job at controlling their player. Now why they were doing a better job I dunno. Could just be that since they believed they were there for real, rather than it being just a game, that they made more of an effort. I was the victim usually so I can tell you that it really made you sweat to play that way and afterwards you tended to have nightmares from the experience.
Re:Lots of possibilities
on
Biofeedback Gaming
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
After reading Snow Crash I wanted to build a portable VR computer. For a while I worked with the Virtual Boy which was hacked to be programmable using Java on an attached PC. Then we got some small screens like used in older versions of the iGlasses which was connected to a control chip that took dual NTSC signals. They were pretty cool but the resolution wasn't good enough for anything like text and you could see the edges of them if you tried. My current design is a small cd man sized portable computer that talks to the Net via WiFi and uses iGlasses and the Twiddler keyboard/mouse combo. I'd love to use some sort of motion sensitive gloves and brain power instead but that is probably a pie in the sky version. It'd be really cool to see some sort of neurofeedback input device added to something like the iGlasses. Once these things become standardized input devices we can really start working on the software hacking portion of things. It could be a real gift to be able to mouse around the desktop using brain power and if people are able to learn enough mind macros (what I called them.. probably a better technical term) then we could have some really powerful desktops finally. You could think a macro for a given program and the program would just appear.:)
The whole concept excites me. My sister is handicapped and has a lot of trouble using computers so a lot of my work is towards inventing easier ways to do so. My mouse to brain hack was an early attempt.:)
In a related topic we also used hypnotism on players which we found could sometimes make the game very lifelike (by suggesting the player believe that it's real) and it helped a bit with the attempts at brain control. The two concepts seemed to work well together. Maybe it helps the player concentrate on their learned mental commands to be hypnotised? I dunno.. was just my guess.
Re:Neurofeedback is coming too
on
Biofeedback Gaming
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We did that in highschool for a project. Using a cheap kit we found in a electronics magazine (was like $20).. I think it was some sort of eeg. (I could be wrong.. neuroscience isn't really my field). we hacked a mouse driver to work with it and a couple of us learned to move a cursor with it.. then we hooked it up to Doom and could use it to run around. It took a lot of practice but was really cool. The input from our head shrinking device sent back waveforms as it's data so we used a library for word recognition to pick out whatever wave we could force ourselves to make on demand. Probably nothing as cool as you have but for a highschool project it kicked ass. The headgear wasn't very comfortable though and sometimes you couldn't control as well as you could with a mouse.:)
I did that for a while and it's great (and I'd like to do it again) but it takes a place where you can work without other bits of life getting in the way. If you have kids, annoying roommates, annoying family, or whatever you may find it hard to concentrate. Also you don't get as much freedom as you might want because if you live out of state or out of the country it causes tax problems (and other kinds of redtape)for your employer (unless they are big enough to already have offices in that area).
I liked it rather well for system admin work but found that my day to day life was to distracting to stay in the zone for programming work. If you have a way to block those things out then you should be fine. On the other hand I found that I worked almost constantly because I enjoy my work and without having to drive to and fro and work precise hours I felt less of a sepperation between work and play.
As for advice of how to get such work.. good luck unless your current employer or someone you know is willing to hire you to telecommute. With the economy in general in a piss poor condition it's hard to be picky about what jobs you take. On the other hand that can be a good bargaining chip if you find a willing listener.. a lot of money can be saved by not needing to pay for extra office space and so on.
You might look into the Wine project. Maybe the existing interface DLL's can be made to work for you under Linux. I believe that certain Linux programs (like MPlayer) use such methods to directly access Windows DLL's. This lets you go ahead and write code to these interfaces without needing to reinvent the wheel. I'm not sure how well it'll work with your hardware - I guess it depends how it's put together and interfaces to your computer.
I haven't tried SuSE for a year or so but I've used it in a work enviroment (for which I was an admin/programmer) and while I found it good for client machines I really hated it for servers. Yast (At that time at least) was in the way far to often and things didn't work as they do under most other distros (RedHat or Debian derived distros). Installation was also sort of a pain at that time mostly due to weirdness in disc swapping that 7 or 8 cd's involved. I'd like to try the dvd version now. I think that'd be much easier to install.
I'm very anti-clutter. Clutter equals more time needed to think about what you are doing. All menus and such should have keystroke equivilants also. I like in place menus also.. so you don't have to mouse to a side of your screen in order to find a menu.
I've used a lot of distros so o my bitches are actually against KDE and Gnome themselves. You are right that part of the problem is in that I've seen no distro that has an intelligent default configuration. On most systems I've used loading either KDE or Gnome can take from 15 seconds to a couple minutes depending on the hardware's power. On the other hand HackedBox loads in about 1 second on everything I've tried. I doubt hdd speed is an issue because it's slow even when loaded from a ram disk or compact flash.
I think the embedded market is slowly growing. Up until recently the power/size of such devices was a problem for their adoption. Now a PDA sized device can do quite a lot. I won't say that the desktop will be dead anytime soon.. just that it's passed it's peak. It's not worth making a bad desktop just to steal customers from Windows and MacOS. Better to look towards long term goals.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad? Why?
Been there, done that, found it to expensive and not very satisfying. I live to code and build cool things so anything that interferes with that is bad.. which includes drugs, alcohol, caffine, and women. I'd like to give up working pathetic sucky jobs too but I've yet to find a way to make a living just inventing stuff. Maybe if I had a PhD or a rich uncle or something I could get paid for crazy R&D stuff. :)
Meeting people online is a lot cheaper, safer, and easier than most real life methods. I don't like clubbing (who can afford $50/night to try to pick up drunk women who won't like you when they are sober), I don't go to school or church, I usually don't meet many people in my work as a programmer (especially single women), and most the people I hang out with are all geeks which means 95% male. I don't feel I have the time or money to invest in trying to pick women up in the old fshioned ways so online methods can be a big help.
The safety factor could be a big plus for women especially. You aren't likely to be slipped a date rape drug and find yourself tied to hotel bed while being gang raped if your meeting through the Net. Sure you have some risk when you eventually do meet the people in real life but you get some chance to screen people before going out with them.
People who think pedos are going wild online are a bit mistaken. Sure there are some but there are a lot more that are out there in real life. It'd be a lot easier to grab some brat off the street or playground than to arrange to meet them off the Net. Anything online leaves a paper trail and you can't know if the person you're talking to really is Lil Tommy or Agent Nutcracker or even Lil Tommy's parents. The majority of underage folks that get 'kidnapped' by online friends are freaky folks that are out banging anything they can anyway or at least wishing they were. Mostly horny teenagers that are wanting to get picked up.
This sounds like a good idea because so many people are bad at building what they design but it is really nothing to new. I went to a local vo tech school in highschool for my first year of electrical engineering and then went to DeVry. Both were pretty hands on.
My hands are clumsy though. I don't like actually trying to build things myself because I end up with with a lot of mistakes and burnt fingers and stuff. I'm just not good at working with small parts. I'd rather design and supervise others building my design. I've actually found that women are a lot better at building circuits than most guys. I'd guess because they have smaller hands and are a little bit more graceful.
True, but they don't cost THAT much more than a normal screen.
Bluetooth for keyboard/mouse would be a big plus IMO. I have suggested several times a bluetooth/wireless version of the Twiddler keyboard/mouse combo. For the $400 or so it costs I figure they could manage that. :)
I'm not overly worried about my tablets hdd space because it has WiFi and call talk to my server. The server has several hundred gigs of space that can be mounted with NFS. The server is also small enough that I can throw it in the car and move it easily should I need to take the whole show on the road. A good supply of ram in a tablet is a good idea but for me 256Mb is probably enough for a tablet. I would like one that had mpeg acceleration so it'd work better for movie playback. That way you could play DVD quality video on a much cheaper/cooler CPU.
Exactly. They sell these as lighter than a laptop but they cost more. There is really no reason for them to cost more. The hardware just doesn't qualify for their price range.
I used BeOS (as I try to use all popular OS's) enough to be pretty familiar with it and I had a roommate that was a BeOS cult member.. I still never quite saw it as anything much. Sure it didn't suck as much as Windows but that isn't really saying much and it didn't have much in the way of drivers or applications. It booted fast but with proper tweaking I can make Linux boot just as fast. I never really cared because I reboot maybe once or twice a year so what difference does it make to me? It looks pretty nice but no better than I can make Linux look. It had some interesting filesystem features. In the day it's journaling was quite the feature.. but today Linux and Windows both offer that. It still has some filesystem features that neither Linux or Windows has but I never really figured out why you'd want the filesystem to do those things anyway. I think BeOS did have a good sound service that both Linux and Windows could still learn from but other than that I can't think of anything I really liked about BeOS.
:)
BeOS also has the oddest installation problem I ever suffered. Whenever I installed BeOS on a certain one of my systems it'd disable the soundcard in Windows which was also on that computer. After the BeOS install I'd have to reinstall the soundcard driver in Windows.
Really, I'd like it if they would sell a portable PC without screen, keyboard, mouse, or external drives. Sure you can build one yourself but it'd be able to buy one ready made. Without any of those features they could easily fit the whole thing into something not much bigger than a PDA and could keep the price down to less than $400. Then you could just plug into whatever monitor was handy or use something like iGlasses.
The problem is that most people aren't really sure what to use tablets for. They are great for business use where your staff needs to be able to work with information as they walk and a PDA is to cramped or lowpowered. They are okay for lugging around the house for Net use or even for watching ripped movies. I like to plug a Happy Hacker keyboard in and use one as a laptop to code on (I find it more convient being able to remove the keyboard when not needed).
:)
They could even be good for low power games (think GameBoy with a much bigger screen) if there were a joypad style mouse button and the buttons were positioned properly.
The other problem is that these things tend to cost as much as a laptop. If they could get them into the upper range of PDA prices while retaining their PC-like features then they'd kick ass. The ProGears were a great hacking bargain once they went out of business and were available for $400 each.
That was in 1992. It was all electronic. I don't have any real records of such things. It's not like I kept printouts or anything like that. It seems a lifetime ago when nobody else knew what the Internet was and you were the area alpha geek just for having a BBS.
What kind of records are needed for this kind of thing? Somewhere I might have some old checks I was sent or something like that. I might have a backup on a floppy somewhere if they haven't all gone bad.
I don't know about everyone else but I held online auctions on my BBS and MUD as early as 1992. Never even considered getting a patent on such an obvious concept. A 'buy it now' feature was kind of obvious to. I mean real life auctions let you do that sometimes so it was something we just used. The only real EBay feature I didn't use waaaaay back then was to allow bidding to begin for less than you're willing to sell for.. that always annoyed me.
There are some nasty chemicals involved in producing solar panels but nothing compared to mining or drilling for fossil fuels, building a plant, transporting those fuels, etc. I'm not quite sure what you mean by not even breaking even on the energy put into making them. Solar panels, unless abused (some people find it funny to shoot at them), can easily last 10-20 years and pay for themselves several times over before needing replaced. Obviously, if the locale the plant that produces the panels is in is also powered by renewable means then there is little pollution involved there. Of course it takes time and effort to get to that clean a level but by not utilizing renewable power you're not even moving in the right direction.
Ways of utilizing the sun without electricity is surprisingly effecient. The average home could easily get it's hot water and part of it's heat from the sun. That's pretty much anywhere and all year round. Anywhere in the continental USA or with similar weather should be eligible for such uses. For most people those two things alone would save them a lot off their utility bill.
If people don't want to move you can always give them solar/wind farms. I think people need to stop worrying so much about themselves though and think about their children and grandchildren. Do they really need their bit of dirt out in the middle of freaking no where or do they need electricity to power modern society? Electricty allows a higher quality of life. Medicine, education, technology, jobs, running water, flushing toilets, etc. Sometimes you need to take a risk and try something new. Of course picking which risks to take is important but at least take some of them. If there is anything important about your home then take it with you. I resettle ever 6 months to a year (not entirely by choice) so I can hardly feel sorry for such people.
As someone that has lived in the midwest most of his life I fully support your plan. There is nothing that is worth much of anything in the whole damn area. That is why there are no jobs here. Better to create electricity to give life to the coastal cities. It'd also give us a nice reserve of fresh water to pipe through the rest of the country to help prevent droughts. To replace the food loss of sinking the midwest we could eat more freshwater fish and plants as well as creating floating hydroponic gardens on the lake. We'd probably end up with a large gain in the amount of food produced.
Probably because us Americans are peckers. None of us want to give up anything to get something. Everything is supposed to be easy. We don't like having to change because it forces us to use what is between our ears. Making decisions is full of trade offs and can be difficult.
There is a lot of whining when it comes to any form of renewable energy. People complain that solar panels, dams, and wind turbines are ugly or noisy. They whine that they change the eco system. They whine that they cost money to build. They whine that it uses up land.
Heavy forbid we replace those beautiful, quiet, enviromentally friendly, cheap, and tiny coal burning plants or nuke plants with something so hideous. Lord knows it could cause property values to go down.
Do people really even know what they are talking about? Usually not. Most (not all) greenies have the technical knowledge of a rabbit. These nitwits want a 100% perfect system or want all humans to just go away and leave nature to itself. They paint a dark picture of renewable power without properly comparing it to what we already have or offering viable alternatives. Instead of whining go out and find a better solution.
Of course there is also the problem of all the VIPs that have an interest in keeping those nasty old coal and nuke plants in business. Those folks that will do anything to keep cars burning oil. They have a lot of political and economic power. Hell, the President is even one of them.
Sounds sort of depressing for America's chance at a future but things are getting better. We do already have many dams and solar and wind farms and the technology is getting better and adoption is becoming more chic. More ethanol and other renewable fuels are being used. There is some promise of a cleaner future.
I agree. GUIs are bloat. That doesn't mean they can't be useful. cp and mv are still far faster and more flexible than any GUI for file management. Feedback is fine but IMO if you tell the computer to do something then you should be able to assume it's worked (or get a proper response dialog) and not have to wait for cheesy audio feedback. I can imagine instances where audio feedback would be important but not in a window manager.
:)
Air conditioning is bloat but again it can be useful. I've had cars though where if the A/C is broken the car won't run. IMO that is the kind of bloat that is bad. It's bloat with a poor implementation that doesn't allow you to bypass it.
Games are bloat too. I seldom put them on my computer. I do have console machines for games (Playstation, Dreamcast, etc) which are lifestyle bloat but again they are okay because I can remove them if they get in the way.
Screensavers are not just loat - they are retarded. Get with the 90's and use powersaving mode. The only thing I use screen savers for is to provide an interesting background for gdm.
Bloat you can remove is fine. Bloat that is forced on you is bad. My bitch with KDE/Gnome is that they make it harder and harder to use them with the bloat disabled. I think this is a mistake but I can go to other WM's. I just feel they are hurting themselves by driving so many away.
Compilers and development tools you can't remove would be bloat too.
I'd ride a scooter (or a fat chick) and not really give a damn who knew. My foot on their ass will shut anyone up quickly should they decide to make snide comments. :)
You may be right that most people are to uptight to do anything as uncool as ride a scooter but then tough shit to them I guess. More toys (and fat chicks I hope) for me.
Couldn't you save yourself about $600 and just add an extra mouse to your computer (not to hard/expensive) and then write a special driver that'd use the two mice together to form the same keystrokes as this keyboard? You could even keep your mouses scrollwheel which I really like and then you'd have two so you could do both horizontal and vertical scrolling. With three mouse buttons for each hand I think you could improve on this keyboards alt, shift, control button issues. Of course you'd need a leftie mouse for your left hand but they aren't to hard to find. :)
Hrm. Couldn't you just have the observer leave the room until the victim.. err test subject.. has been hypnotised? We didn't do anything really in the way of scientific tests but the users got further through the game when hypnotised than when not.. which would lead me to believe that they were doing a better job at controlling their player. Now why they were doing a better job I dunno. Could just be that since they believed they were there for real, rather than it being just a game, that they made more of an effort. I was the victim usually so I can tell you that it really made you sweat to play that way and afterwards you tended to have nightmares from the experience.
After reading Snow Crash I wanted to build a portable VR computer. For a while I worked with the Virtual Boy which was hacked to be programmable using Java on an attached PC. Then we got some small screens like used in older versions of the iGlasses which was connected to a control chip that took dual NTSC signals. They were pretty cool but the resolution wasn't good enough for anything like text and you could see the edges of them if you tried. My current design is a small cd man sized portable computer that talks to the Net via WiFi and uses iGlasses and the Twiddler keyboard/mouse combo. I'd love to use some sort of motion sensitive gloves and brain power instead but that is probably a pie in the sky version. It'd be really cool to see some sort of neurofeedback input device added to something like the iGlasses. Once these things become standardized input devices we can really start working on the software hacking portion of things. It could be a real gift to be able to mouse around the desktop using brain power and if people are able to learn enough mind macros (what I called them.. probably a better technical term) then we could have some really powerful desktops finally. You could think a macro for a given program and the program would just appear. :)
:)
The whole concept excites me. My sister is handicapped and has a lot of trouble using computers so a lot of my work is towards inventing easier ways to do so. My mouse to brain hack was an early attempt.
In a related topic we also used hypnotism on players which we found could sometimes make the game very lifelike (by suggesting the player believe that it's real) and it helped a bit with the attempts at brain control. The two concepts seemed to work well together. Maybe it helps the player concentrate on their learned mental commands to be hypnotised? I dunno.. was just my guess.
We did that in highschool for a project. Using a cheap kit we found in a electronics magazine (was like $20).. I think it was some sort of eeg. (I could be wrong.. neuroscience isn't really my field). we hacked a mouse driver to work with it and a couple of us learned to move a cursor with it.. then we hooked it up to Doom and could use it to run around. It took a lot of practice but was really cool. The input from our head shrinking device sent back waveforms as it's data so we used a library for word recognition to pick out whatever wave we could force ourselves to make on demand. Probably nothing as cool as you have but for a highschool project it kicked ass. The headgear wasn't very comfortable though and sometimes you couldn't control as well as you could with a mouse. :)
I did that for a while and it's great (and I'd like to do it again) but it takes a place where you can work without other bits of life getting in the way. If you have kids, annoying roommates, annoying family, or whatever you may find it hard to concentrate. Also you don't get as much freedom as you might want because if you live out of state or out of the country it causes tax problems (and other kinds of redtape)for your employer (unless they are big enough to already have offices in that area).
I liked it rather well for system admin work but found that my day to day life was to distracting to stay in the zone for programming work. If you have a way to block those things out then you should be fine. On the other hand I found that I worked almost constantly because I enjoy my work and without having to drive to and fro and work precise hours I felt less of a sepperation between work and play.
As for advice of how to get such work.. good luck unless your current employer or someone you know is willing to hire you to telecommute. With the economy in general in a piss poor condition it's hard to be picky about what jobs you take. On the other hand that can be a good bargaining chip if you find a willing listener.. a lot of money can be saved by not needing to pay for extra office space and so on.
You might look into the Wine project. Maybe the existing interface DLL's can be made to work for you under Linux. I believe that certain Linux programs (like MPlayer) use such methods to directly access Windows DLL's. This lets you go ahead and write code to these interfaces without needing to reinvent the wheel. I'm not sure how well it'll work with your hardware - I guess it depends how it's put together and interfaces to your computer.
I haven't tried SuSE for a year or so but I've used it in a work enviroment (for which I was an admin/programmer) and while I found it good for client machines I really hated it for servers. Yast (At that time at least) was in the way far to often and things didn't work as they do under most other distros (RedHat or Debian derived distros). Installation was also sort of a pain at that time mostly due to weirdness in disc swapping that 7 or 8 cd's involved. I'd like to try the dvd version now. I think that'd be much easier to install.
I'm very anti-clutter. Clutter equals more time needed to think about what you are doing. All menus and such should have keystroke equivilants also. I like in place menus also.. so you don't have to mouse to a side of your screen in order to find a menu.
I've used a lot of distros so o my bitches are actually against KDE and Gnome themselves. You are right that part of the problem is in that I've seen no distro that has an intelligent default configuration. On most systems I've used loading either KDE or Gnome can take from 15 seconds to a couple minutes depending on the hardware's power.
On the other hand HackedBox loads in about 1 second on everything I've tried. I doubt hdd speed is an issue because it's slow even when loaded from a ram disk or compact flash.
I think the embedded market is slowly growing. Up until recently the power/size of such devices was a problem for their adoption. Now a PDA sized device can do quite a lot. I won't say that the desktop will be dead anytime soon.. just that it's passed it's peak. It's not worth making a bad desktop just to steal customers from Windows and MacOS. Better to look towards long term goals.