This is good advice, but to my way of thinking, red roses are probably a bad thing to buy on Valentine's Day.
Apart from the obvious problems of supply and demand (and therefore cost), red roses are a no-brainer - it may be "traditional", but it's also predictable and boring! While geeks may lack in the "personality" department, they usually have "individuality" in spades, so go against the flow and do something original! Instead of red roses, try a bunch of mixed pastel colours (apricot, pink, cream etc.) or better still, a bunch of orchids (e.g. "Singapore orchids" - Dendrobium hybrids, I think.) These aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty safe ones.
And why stick to Valentine's Day, anyway? Again, it's a no-brainer to buy flowers because it's Valentine's Day, but there are 364 other days to choose from! Buy her flowers on a day because it isn't Valentine's Day, and you're likely to have a greater impact (and usually for all the right reasons.)
Do they make one for lefties? Or is it just like everything else in this right-hand centric world?
As a left-hander I can sympathise, but I suspect the answer is "No." That said, I still think that right-handers have it backwards with some devices - it makes more sense to me to use your dominant hand for typing, and your weaker hand for simple tasks like pushing a mouse around.
That is so true. My daughter is just over 2 years old, and has already managed to snap one CD in two.
What on earth are you feeding your kids??!
Snapping a CD/CDR takes a fair amount of force, unless it had been dropped on its edge and was cracked at the spindle hole. I've experimented with some "coasters", and the CDs will take a lot of bending before they finally snap, though they will be usuable well before that because of the cracks damaging the data layer. When they do let go, they usually shatter into several pieces, and you get bits of blue reflective stuff all over the place...
My only real complaint with the ps2 dvd playback is that it won't play my copy of evil dead 2 or X-Men.
I had no trouble playing the R4 version of X-Men on my PS2 (SCPH-30002, Australian remote, DVD Player 2.10A.)
I bought the PS2 mainly to use as a DVD player - it's price (after the recent discount) is around the same as entry-level DVD players, and it is easy to make region-free using DVD Region X. Being able to play games was a bonus.:-)
I've tried it with a sample DVD, and all of the advanced features (e.g. angles) worked fine. My only criticism is it doesn't have a single frame forward/back control - you can use the slow scan control, but it's a bit cumbersome to stop on a specific frame.
Because of its robustness, modularity and stability, Linux is highly able to replace Solaris...
Been there, tried that, still running Solaris.:-/ Admittedly this with RedHat 6.2 - it booted and ran happily on an E250, but the lack of key applications really killed it as a viable alternative to Solaris. While there are a growing number of companies producing "Linux" versions of their software, nearly all of it is x86-based Linux only.
When RedHat discontinued Sparc support, it removed the key selling point to management - running the same software on the same operating system on different platforms. I've since tried SuSE 7.1, but the 2.4 kernel
didn't work on 32-bit machines, and it has even *less* applications out of the box due to their insistence on only using free software. (I'm sure Stallman would approve, but try explaining that to the users!)
Is it my imagination... Or has almost every astrophysics-related story I've seen lately included something like "this discovery will force scientists to rethink everything they know about [insert specialty here]?"
It's not your imagination:
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." - Douglas Adams
Seriously(?), it probably simple bias - stories like "Scientists find what they set out to discover" just aren't newsworthy, unless the subject matter is newsworthy/wacky/humourous
e.g. "Why shower curtains billow inwards."
When you start Outlook Express, it often displays the password entry box before it has finished drawing the screen. Enter your password before the redraw has finished and Lookout locks up.
(Netscape 4.7x has a similar problem, too.)
* This is only a test configuration, but runs very comfortably.
I chose QVWM because it is lightweight with a Windows look and feel - it also loads *really* fast. Getting it to work properly with the SunRays was fiddly, but not that hard once I copied the relevant parts from the CDE environment. (There's one script that I've had to leave as ksh - I've tried porting it to csh/Bourne shell but it seems to be doing something really weird...)
The production rollout will be around 25 SunRays via a gigabit connection to the server (100MHz to the desktop), so I'll probably add a couple of CPUs and 2-3GB of RAM to play it safe. (There are around 10 "power" users; the rest will be shared terminals with intermittent usage.)
The server it is replacing is an old Sparc 20 with 2x150MHz Ross CPUs, 384MB of RAM and a bunch of old Labtam X-terminals (8-bit colour only); it's old, it struggles a bit under peak usage but it has worked admirably for years. The switch to 24-bit colour will be a vast improvement - the extra performance is a bonus.;-)
It mentions methods such as cranking and pumping...
I once had a hand powered torch (flashlight); probably late 70's or early 80's. You squeezed the handle in to spin up a flywheel attached to a dynamo to generate electricity to power the bulb; the handle sprung out again when released. Pumping the handle a few times to get the flywheel up to its top speed took a few seconds, and you got around 10-15 seconds of light out of it before it needed to be pumped again. The only catch was you could only use it for short durations before your hands became too sore to drive the torch!
A clockwork mechanism where you wind up a large spring with a handle would be much more ergonomic, and using LEDs as the light source should make it long-lasting. The "Dolphin" torches (waterproof, using a large rectangular 6 volt battery) would seem an ideal form-factor for a clockwork torch.
I usually just mash the keyboard with my fist in one shot. Sure, it takes a little longer than normal typing to get the right password, but no one's going to be guessing MY password.
I just cut and paste my password from a text file - good luck trying to glean information out of the keystroke timing, guys!
The local rally coverage mentioned the no-lag turbo systems this afternoon.
The way they described it is that when the driver takes their foot of the throttle, air/fuel is still sent to the engine but not ignited - the EMS cuts the spark, like with some rev. limiters. Instead, the fuel is ignited in the exhaust which keeps the turbine spinning up to speed. When the throttle is opened up again, there is no turbo lag. The downside is the exhaust is *much* hotter (> 1000 deg. C) which places additional strain on the engine components, and the firewall requires heavy insulation to prevent injury to the occupants, particularly the driver's feet.
This type of system wouldn't work on a road car - the unburnt fuel igniting in the exhaust would wreck the catalytic converter/mufflers in short order.
In the traditional model, yes; this is what our prototype is doing. However, given that the
that the *minimum* system readily available these days is a Duron 850MHz with 128MB stick of SDRAM, it seems rather wasteful not to put this to good use. NCD provides Netscape and ICA on some of their xterms, and we've tried this successful on the Linux-based "xterm" too. Moving the window manager to the terminal is the logical next step,
but admitted more of a giant leap...
Ignoring the technical issues of running the window manager locally, the more stuff added to the boot image, the longer the boxes take to boot. While this shouldn't be an issue, users who have been exposed to Windows will reboot the terminals with Ctrl-Alt-Del at the merest hint of a problem...
More likely, we'll harvest the spare CPU cycles after hours - imagine a Beowulf cluster of Duron-based xterms...;-)
Apparently you are not aware of shared memory.
Actually I am aware of shared memory, which is why I built everything with shared libraries to minimize the memory usage. There were some memory savings using shared libraries, but the actual memory usage of the limited trial indicated that we would have trouble with a full user load.
I thin it's also a good time for you - the reader/user to post what do you want to be changed in KDE? what do u hate about KDE? what do you like? What do you think should be improved? What do you think should be removed? most of the KDE developers read slashdot - so maybe your request will be fullfilled - you never know...
I would dearly love to roll out KDE as the Unix desktop at work - works great on Intel platforms (with > 64MB RAM to avoid "excessive" swapping to disk) but ran into some problems when trying to get it working under Solaris. I haven't tried 2.2 yet - hopefully this fixes some of these issues.
What I would like to see changed are its resource requirements. Slim it down! We're considering replacing our current X-terminals (some old Labtams, Tektronix and NCD boxes) with diskless PCs running Linux - disks are not an option. If KDE can run on a diskless machine with 128MB RAM (with an NFS-mounted/home directory) - this would be a real winner.
Increase scalability. Apart from RAM, KDE spawns a bunch of processes. On a workstation this isn't a problem, but scale it up to a several hundred users on a large box and things can get a bit ugly. (Haven't pushed it this far - extrapolating for a handful of trial users.) Do you really need so many kdeinit jobs?
I love KDE; my boss likes it. Now if I could just get it to work as well as the users expect things to work...
Probably because they're fast enough to do the task required for many embedded applications, and they require significantly less power than a Pentium class chip.
Absolutely. I own a Garmin II+ GPS receiver, which is powered by an Intel 386EX processor - an unglamourous CPU, but one that does the job very nicely. Similarly my Palm III is powered by 16MHz Dragonball processor (68000 derivative) - nothing special these days, but serious grunt 10-15 years ago.
I may be showing my age here, but I first started computing at around 10 years of age on Z80 boxes (TRS-80/System-80: where 48k RAM and lowercase displays were a luxury!) I am still amazed at how good some of the software was on such limited hardware. Conversely, I see how crap some of the current software is and think "WTF"?!)
Competitions like the Perl obfuscated code contest are cool, but I'd like to see some contents based upon the best program than can be squeezed into an "antique" box like the TRS-80 Model I - that would really separate the hackers from the script kiddies...
I've tried all the distros except Mandrake and SuSE is the best as far as getting setup and running smoothly.
I recently tried SuSE 7.1 for the first time on a Sparc platform (since RedHat dropped Sparcs as of 7.0.) Try as I might, I have had no success is getting the supplied 2.4 kernel to load on a SparcStation 20 - it returns with the message "Decompression error: uncompressed image too long - wouldn't fit into destination Image not found.... try again" The supplied 2.2.18 kernel, however, works fine.
Overall, while SuSE 7.1 works fairly well, I don't feel that it has any benefit to me over RedHat 6.2, though the Sparc platform has always been a poor cousin under Linux. (Curse you, Sun!)
On the Intel platform, I've been using RedHat since 5.0 or 5.1, and have no complaints and would recommend it for new starters.
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This is good advice, but to my way of thinking, red roses are probably a bad thing to buy on Valentine's Day.
Apart from the obvious problems of supply and demand (and therefore cost), red roses are a no-brainer - it may be "traditional", but it's also predictable and boring! While geeks may lack in the "personality" department, they usually have "individuality" in spades, so go against the flow and do something original! Instead of red roses, try a bunch of mixed pastel colours (apricot, pink, cream etc.) or better still, a bunch of orchids (e.g. "Singapore orchids" - Dendrobium hybrids, I think.) These aren't the only options, of course, but they are pretty safe ones.
And why stick to Valentine's Day, anyway? Again, it's a no-brainer to buy flowers because it's Valentine's Day, but there are 364 other days to choose from! Buy her flowers on a day because it isn't Valentine's Day, and you're likely to have a greater impact (and usually for all the right reasons.)
Do they make one for lefties? Or is it just like everything else in this right-hand centric world?
As a left-hander I can sympathise, but I suspect the answer is "No." That said, I still think that right-handers have it backwards with some devices - it makes more sense to me to use your dominant hand for typing, and your weaker hand for simple tasks like pushing a mouse around.
You might be interested inThe Left Hand website - they sell products designed for lefties. The left-handed keyboard is bizarre, but the left-handed scissors would be wonderful!
That is so true. My daughter is just over 2 years old, and has already managed to snap one CD in two.
What on earth are you feeding your kids??!
Snapping a CD/CDR takes a fair amount of force, unless it had been dropped on its edge and was cracked at the spindle hole. I've experimented with some "coasters", and the CDs will take a lot of bending before they finally snap, though they will be usuable well before that because of the cracks damaging the data layer. When they do let go, they usually shatter into several pieces, and you get bits of blue reflective stuff all over the place...
My only real complaint with the ps2 dvd playback is that it won't play my copy of evil dead 2 or X-Men.
:-)
I had no trouble playing the R4 version of X-Men on my PS2 (SCPH-30002, Australian remote, DVD Player 2.10A.)
I bought the PS2 mainly to use as a DVD player - it's price (after the recent discount) is around the same as entry-level DVD players, and it is easy to make region-free using DVD Region X. Being able to play games was a bonus.
I've tried it with a sample DVD, and all of the advanced features (e.g. angles) worked fine. My only criticism is it doesn't have a single frame forward/back control - you can use the slow scan control, but it's a bit cumbersome to stop on a specific frame.
it's a diminutive form of Shoshana,
... Bob.
Huh? The diminutive form is one letter longer than the original?
Blackadder: What is your name, boy?
Boy: Kate.
Blackadder: Kate? That's an unusual name for a boy.
Boy: It's short for
Nah, call them "feature releases" - it's the same thing, but you get to charge money for them.
(Citrix *really* sucks.)
Because of its robustness, modularity and stability, Linux is highly able to replace Solaris...
:-/ Admittedly this with RedHat 6.2 - it booted and ran happily on an E250, but the lack of key applications really killed it as a viable alternative to Solaris. While there are a growing number of companies producing "Linux" versions of their software, nearly all of it is x86-based Linux only.
Been there, tried that, still running Solaris.
When RedHat discontinued Sparc support, it removed the key selling point to management - running the same software on the same operating system on different platforms. I've since tried SuSE 7.1, but the 2.4 kernel didn't work on 32-bit machines, and it has even *less* applications out of the box due to their insistence on only using free software. (I'm sure Stallman would approve, but try explaining that to the users!)
Still waiting for Sun to get a Clue(tm)...
It's not your imagination:
Seriously(?), it probably simple bias - stories like "Scientists find what they set out to discover" just aren't newsworthy, unless the subject matter is newsworthy/wacky/humourous e.g. "Why shower curtains billow inwards."
Gravity sucks; black holes really suck.
When you start Outlook Express, it often displays the password entry box before it has finished drawing the screen. Enter your password before the redraw has finished and Lookout locks up. (Netscape 4.7x has a similar problem, too.)
That's a neat trick - the E450 only has 4 CPU slots, and takes a max. of 4GB of RAM...
Here's a real world case study: I have an E450 running SunRays at work:
- E450 with 2x400MHz CPU, 1GB of RAM
- 5 SunRays connected to a 100MBit port*
- Software: QVWM window manager, Netscape, Applix, Z-Mail, Acrobat Reader, GIMP etc.
* This is only a test configuration, but runs very comfortably.I chose QVWM because it is lightweight with a Windows look and feel - it also loads *really* fast. Getting it to work properly with the SunRays was fiddly, but not that hard once I copied the relevant parts from the CDE environment. (There's one script that I've had to leave as ksh - I've tried porting it to csh/Bourne shell but it seems to be doing something really weird...)
The production rollout will be around 25 SunRays via a gigabit connection to the server (100MHz to the desktop), so I'll probably add a couple of CPUs and 2-3GB of RAM to play it safe. (There are around 10 "power" users; the rest will be shared terminals with intermittent usage.)
The server it is replacing is an old Sparc 20 with 2x150MHz Ross CPUs, 384MB of RAM and a bunch of old Labtam X-terminals (8-bit colour only); it's old, it struggles a bit under peak usage but it has worked admirably for years. The switch to 24-bit colour will be a vast improvement - the extra performance is a bonus.
Yeah, their engineers got confused using Hungarian Notation...
Could be worse - if it was made in Poland, the Polish engineers puts the parts together in the "wrong" order...
The first paragraph of the article ... clearly says "methane gas-powered", not "gasoline powered".
;-)
Which also explains why the fuel cell is attached to the user's belt.
It mentions methods such as cranking and pumping...
I once had a hand powered torch (flashlight); probably late 70's or early 80's. You squeezed the handle in to spin up a flywheel attached to a dynamo to generate electricity to power the bulb; the handle sprung out again when released. Pumping the handle a few times to get the flywheel up to its top speed took a few seconds, and you got around 10-15 seconds of light out of it before it needed to be pumped again. The only catch was you could only use it for short durations before your hands became too sore to drive the torch!
A clockwork mechanism where you wind up a large spring with a handle would be much more ergonomic, and using LEDs as the light source should make it long-lasting. The "Dolphin" torches (waterproof, using a large rectangular 6 volt battery) would seem an ideal form-factor for a clockwork torch.
I usually just mash the keyboard with my fist in one shot. Sure, it takes a little longer than normal typing to get the right password, but no one's going to be guessing MY password.
I just cut and paste my password from a text file - good luck trying to glean information out of the keystroke timing, guys!
The local rally coverage mentioned the no-lag turbo systems this afternoon.
The way they described it is that when the driver takes their foot of the throttle, air/fuel is still sent to the engine but not ignited - the EMS cuts the spark, like with some rev. limiters. Instead, the fuel is ignited in the exhaust which keeps the turbine spinning up to speed. When the throttle is opened up again, there is no turbo lag. The downside is the exhaust is *much* hotter (> 1000 deg. C) which places additional strain on the engine components, and the firewall requires heavy insulation to prevent injury to the occupants, particularly the driver's feet.
This type of system wouldn't work on a road car - the unburnt fuel igniting in the exhaust would wreck the catalytic converter/mufflers in short order.
They had a URL for some page at NASA in which they have sound files up containing natural radio emissions picked up by satellites *orbiting mars*..
I couldn't find the Mars link either, but here's some natural radio sounds recorded from Earth and Jupiter. (The INSPIRE page seems to be down.)
Yeah, and I'm sure he downloaded them just to see if they used steganography...
So when he was complaining about the "hidden bits" in the photos, he was talking about steganography? Silly me...
To be rated "Funny", the original comment should have read:
A diskless X terminal runs only the X server.
;-)
In the traditional model, yes; this is what our prototype is doing. However, given that the that the *minimum* system readily available these days is a Duron 850MHz with 128MB stick of SDRAM, it seems rather wasteful not to put this to good use. NCD provides Netscape and ICA on some of their xterms, and we've tried this successful on the Linux-based "xterm" too. Moving the window manager to the terminal is the logical next step, but admitted more of a giant leap...
Ignoring the technical issues of running the window manager locally, the more stuff added to the boot image, the longer the boxes take to boot. While this shouldn't be an issue, users who have been exposed to Windows will reboot the terminals with Ctrl-Alt-Del at the merest hint of a problem...
More likely, we'll harvest the spare CPU cycles after hours - imagine a Beowulf cluster of Duron-based xterms...
Apparently you are not aware of shared memory.
Actually I am aware of shared memory, which is why I built everything with shared libraries to minimize the memory usage. There were some memory savings using shared libraries, but the actual memory usage of the limited trial indicated that we would have trouble with a full user load.
I thin it's also a good time for you - the reader/user to post what do you want to be changed in KDE? what do u hate about KDE? what do you like? What do you think should be improved? What do you think should be removed? most of the KDE developers read slashdot - so maybe your request will be fullfilled - you never know...
/home directory) - this would be a real winner.
I would dearly love to roll out KDE as the Unix desktop at work - works great on Intel platforms (with > 64MB RAM to avoid "excessive" swapping to disk) but ran into some problems when trying to get it working under Solaris. I haven't tried 2.2 yet - hopefully this fixes some of these issues.
What I would like to see changed are its resource requirements. Slim it down! We're considering replacing our current X-terminals (some old Labtams, Tektronix and NCD boxes) with diskless PCs running Linux - disks are not an option. If KDE can run on a diskless machine with 128MB RAM (with an NFS-mounted
Increase scalability. Apart from RAM, KDE spawns a bunch of processes. On a workstation this isn't a problem, but scale it up to a several hundred users on a large box and things can get a bit ugly. (Haven't pushed it this far - extrapolating for a handful of trial users.) Do you really need so many kdeinit jobs?
I love KDE; my boss likes it. Now if I could just get it to work as well as the users expect things to work...
Probably because they're fast enough to do the task required for many embedded applications, and they require significantly less power than a Pentium class chip.
Absolutely. I own a Garmin II+ GPS receiver, which is powered by an Intel 386EX processor - an unglamourous CPU, but one that does the job very nicely. Similarly my Palm III is powered by 16MHz Dragonball processor (68000 derivative) - nothing special these days, but serious grunt 10-15 years ago.
I may be showing my age here, but I first started computing at around 10 years of age on Z80 boxes (TRS-80/System-80: where 48k RAM and lowercase displays were a luxury!) I am still amazed at how good some of the software was on such limited hardware. Conversely, I see how crap some of the current software is and think "WTF"?!)
Competitions like the Perl obfuscated code contest are cool, but I'd like to see some contents based upon the best program than can be squeezed into an "antique" box like the TRS-80 Model I - that would really separate the hackers from the script kiddies...
I've tried all the distros except Mandrake and SuSE is the best as far as getting setup and running smoothly.
I recently tried SuSE 7.1 for the first time on a Sparc platform (since RedHat dropped Sparcs as of 7.0.) Try as I might, I have had no success is getting the supplied 2.4 kernel to load on a SparcStation 20 - it returns with the message "Decompression error: uncompressed image too long - wouldn't fit into destination Image not found.... try again" The supplied 2.2.18 kernel, however, works fine.
Overall, while SuSE 7.1 works fairly well, I don't feel that it has any benefit to me over RedHat 6.2, though the Sparc platform has always been a poor cousin under Linux. (Curse you, Sun!)
On the Intel platform, I've been using RedHat since 5.0 or 5.1, and have no complaints and would recommend it for new starters.
Is it just me, or does "Rubbermaid" sound like something available for sale at an adult shop?
Okay, so it's just me...
Following this theme of "Reloaded", what will Matrix 3 called?
How can you forget a bunch of servers.
It wouldn't be the first time someone has forgotten a server. (I can't see this happening to a Windows box, though.)