This is a bit on the nitpicking side, but as someone with very fond memories of Amiga, I can't resist a couple of corrections/comments:
VGA hardware let you have 16 colors at 640x480 and Amiga only had 4
Do you mean the Productivity mode (i.e. 640x480 without use of interlace) that was first present on ECS chipset (which was a minor disappointment as an update over OCS, and in hindsight a bit of an early omen about Commodore's inability to keep the competitive edge)? I'm wondering about this, because even the original chipset did allow use of 16 colors at that resolution (but with interlacing). For still images there was also the so-called Dynamic HiRes that was not a 'real' screen mode, but instead a software trick to use the Copper to switch the 16-color palette for each individual horizontal line with little CPU overhead.
Concerning non-bitmapped scalable fonts, AmigaOS 2.04 (introduced with A3000) did introduce the so-called outline fonts. I don't really remember whether they could also be rotated via OS itself, though.
I looked at the list of suggested additional columns and chose "Died". Now I know that Linux died as "A modem hung up the phone". Various BSDs seem to still be going strong, though.
On a more serious note, the concept is quite neat (and as noted, not entirely unlike the comparisons provided by WolframAlpha). However, the quality of the results has to improve a lot before I'll use this for anything else than amusing myself.
If you are still using windows 2000- BUY A NEW COMPUTER!
Actually, the W2k machine I have and use semi-frequently is a newer acquisition than my current primary Linux box, so in a sense it might be called the most recent machine I have, even though the hardware and OS are older:) While I wouldn't be satisfied using it as my only computer, it's really quite good enough for surprisingly many tasks.
Regarding Mozilla guys and gals possibly dropping the support for it, it's too bad, but OTOH I suppose the end of W2k security updates is either getting pretty close or has already happened at that point, making it increasingly risky to have the machine connected to Internet anyway, so I can live with that if it happens.
As I have one W2k box (mostly for playing some older games every now and then, but also for some random surfing and other lightweight use; the hardware isn't very new and shiny either; 650 MHz Slot-A Athlon etc), I can confirm still seeing a fairly steady trickle of fixes every now and then.
Regarding worms and viruses, I have yet to see any on that machine, even though the OS installation is now quite a few years old and in semi-active use.
I'd guess that a significant part of people in western Europe have heard about it, at least it seems to be sufficiently mainstream to get mentioned every now and then in (non-IT) newspapers. Elsewhere the answer is probably "not many", due to the geographical restrictions the service current has.
Personally, I think it's a quite nice music streaming service with a rather impressive set of available albums, even though running the client under Wine seems to occasionally crash my window manager (while it does restore the desktop pretty much immediately to the pre-crash state, it's still somewhat disconcerting).
The mirror might go away at some point, but I doubt the viewfinder will be completely replaced by the back-of-the-camera LCD; holding the camera against head gives it some additional stabilization compared of using just arms and hands. I liked the flexible LCD on my old Canon Powershot G3, but my Canon 20D and 40D DSLRs are certainly noticeably easier to hold steady.
However, it's quite possible that the viewfinder itself eventually becomes a miniature LCD (or whatever technology is used), allowing more flexible superimposition of additional information over the image feed from sensor and some other benefits. Currently the technology isn't quite there yet, but things might be different once something like 5-10 years have passed. (I'm aware that there are already some cameras with electronic viewfinders, but most people seem to still find them generally inferior to the traditional optical viewfinders, at least on the discussions I've followed)
Just for the curiosity; do you mean that they never came out into the mouth cavity, or that there's even nothing showing up on X-ray photos? In my case all my wisdom teeth do exist, but three of them are tightly stuck within the jaw bones. The fourth has gone a bit further, but is probably never going to get through the back of my mouth either.
Although I'm 30-something and have only 5 fillings in my teeth (all of which I originally got in my teens; no new cavities since that), sometimes one can just have bad luck. Here's my personal experience:
Some years ago, I had an old, somewhat loose filling replaced in one of my molars. All seemed to be well, until one day my jaw started to swell. It turned out that there had been a small chipping in that tooth (I hadn't even noticed anything). However, it was sufficiently large to allow bacteria to pass between the filling and the tooth. As the original cavity was rather deep, the nerve had eventually got exposed to the bacteria, died silently (I hadn't really had any toothache) and eventually an abscess formed in my jaw. Luckily, an endodontist was able to perform a successful root canal on it, and as the root was already dead, the biggest pain on the whole operation came from having to keep my mouth wide open for an hour or so, which isn't exactly something my muscles are used to.
Then again, bad luck doesn't of course explain having half-a-dozen root canals/missing teeth; I suppose that's caused by either bad habits or poor genes (or a combination of both).
Then again, many of us with older DSLRs that lack the dust removal functionality just clean up the sensor manually (typically by using a squeezable air pump made for that purpose, or by swiping them with something like the Copperhill kits) when we get sufficiently annoyed with dust spots on the images.
I suppose some of the more persistent dust spots that are small enough to not be an annoyance might be useful for that kind of purposes though, although it might not be very reliable anymore.
How about digital photography? It's a fairly common hobby these days and a single jpeg from pretty much any camera, whether a P&S compact or a DSLR has a size of several megabytes. It doesn't require hardcore dedication to snap thousands or even tens of thousands of photos in a few years. My collection of stills dating back from 2002 takes currently up about 50 gigabytes. While I might be more active photographer than average, filling 20 gigabytes worth of storage with photos isn't really very hard, if the user isn't actively removing not-so-important photos every now and then.
(I also have several gigabytes of completely legal music ripped from my own collection of CDs on the HD; I'm too lazy to rip everything, but it's handy to keep some of my favourites permanently available with minimal effort)
Since I bough my first digital camera in 2002, I've taken more than 40000 photos and have yet to lose any photos due to a memory card failure. Of the 5 cards I own, I still use 3 frequently (the 32 MB and 128 MB ones are a tad small these days, especially when shooting RAW). Perhaps it's been dirt/wear on the card connectors rather than actual flash failure in your case?
I used Amiga for a long time (approximately from 1987 to 1997) as my only platform and liked many things on it, but what do you mean with the bit about the 'some of the best filters ever put on a soundboard'? AFAIK, the Amiga audio hardware had only one filter, and that was the low-pass filter that had no user-controllable properties other than being switchable on and off. In this particular regard, the Paula chip was a step down from the famous SID, which had quite flexible filtering capabilities.
In order to not to be completely offtopic, I agree that having a pile of cores is good for non-trivial tasks, although I wouldn't be throwing specialized hardware out yet; after all, the GPUs these days are fairly flexible and can be adapted for many tasks outside just rendering polygons for the latest 3d-shooter.
Well, carefullness is relative:) I do occasionally manage to drop a CD to the floor and cause other kinds of minor unintended abuse to them (put them slightly out-of-alignment to the player etc). My own theory is that their survival is related to not ever playing them in a car (I don't even currently have one, so ATM that is easy), they do not get subjected to temperature extremes, significant amounts of sunlight and other environmental forces which might make them more prone to damage.
Yes vinyl wears but its really not an issue if you treat right. The same is equally true of CDs. The amount of jumping CDs I have heard is probably more than worn records.
I have bought a few hundred CDs since the early 90s and none of them are jumping/skipping as far as I can tell. (Obviously with that many CDs, there are inenvitably some that I haven't listened for a few years. Still, the only time I got skipping and jumping was when my old Philips CD player was dying; with the same discs inserted in another player or at the CD drive of my computer, everything played back nicely.) Some of them do have minor scratches, but so far I haven't managed to damage any of my discs enough to cause issues that the error correction can't deal with.
I'd say that something like ALE ("ALE is an image-processing program used for tasks such as image mosaicking, super-resolution, deblurring, noise reduction, anti-aliasing, and scene reconstruction.") is pretty creative:
Sure, there are some closed-source applications out there doing one or more of those things and ALE isn't the most user-friendly and intuitive tool out there, but I'd still say that it's not very much a clone of any existing application.
As an example of somewhat more commonly used OSS tools, I'd still consider PanotoolsNG as rather creative. While creating panoramas in itself isn't something really new, PanotoolsNG already includes pretty much anything needed for creation of panorama images and seem to be gaining new features at a pace that seems hard to match. I doubt that there are many closed-source panorama-making tools that are significantly more innovative. More information can be seen at:
Of course, there are a lot of more 'cloned' OSS applications out there than the truly creative ones, but then again, the same can be also said about closed source...
The brightness varies quite a bit; sometimes they are rather faint, but at best they're really rather spectacular. Probably related at least to the angle of reflection and the brightness of the background sky.
Here in southern Finland they are rather common sight near late July / early August.
This shot (and others in the same directory) which I took last year is IMO rather close to how they looked to my own eyes:
Well, even though I have 2.5 gigs of RAM, it's still not infinite and the more carelessly individual applications use it, the sooner I have to either get even more RAM or ditch some badly-behaving applications. Of course with basic usage (just a mail client, browser, some text editing etc) it may take a long time to bump into the limits, especially if one doesn't have the machine running 24/7 or shuts applications that aren't currently used. However, I'm personally an amateur photographer (image processing takes a lot of memory), generally don't close applications when I'm not going to use them for a while and use a wide variety of them as well. Thus, any memory leaks or inefficient use of memory will show up fairly soon in my case.
(Kind of ironically I tried lately switching to Opera because of a crasher bug in Seamonkey/Firefox and found myself switching back a few weeks later, because in my case Opera was very stable, but leaked a lot of memory, so I ended up in the reverse of the situation I tried to escape from; for me the memory usage of FF/Seamonkey always stays in the range of a couple of hundred MBs even if it's been running for weeks, but Opera hogged about one GB in a few days and didn't release the memory until I restarted it...)
A friend opened my eyes to Opera about a year ago and I haven't used Firefox since.
A while ago I got fed up with a nasty bug in Seamonkey/Firefox (see bug 263160 / "frames open in new windows leaving the firefox window unusable" in Mozilla Bugzilla for details) and tried Opera, having heard much good about it. Indeed, there was plenty to like (slightly but noticeably quicker UI response time, the Wand feature etc) but after a couple of weeks I returned to Seamonkey because I bumped several times into behavior that was very much not something I'd expected from Opera; the browser reached repeatedly in a couple of days about a gigabytes worth of virtual size, of which something like 700-800 MBs were actually resident. Even after I had closed all tabs but one empty placeholder one, only very little memory was regained. I have 2.5 GB of RAM on my machine, but being an amateur photographer, I have plenty of other apps that would also like to have some memory, so I decided to revert back to Seamonkey, as in my case it uses less memory and needs restarts at least somewhat less often.
I mentioned about this to a couple of my friends that are long-time Opera users and the behavior wasn't familiar to them. Likewise, in my case Seamonkey (or Firefox) doesn't really exhibit the memory leakiness that has been described in many places. On the other hand, while I suffer from the nasty bug I mentioned earlier while using Seamonkey or Firefox, almost no-one of my friends have ever bumped into it and even those who have do not experience it frequently. So I suppose the leakiness and other issues of both browsers are largely site-dependent.
While N800 (or its recent successor, N810) isn't really called a PDA, I've found it a nice generic tool for browsing, reading emails, making some notes, listening music and other moderately lightweight tasks. While there isn't a default calendar application, I think some are available separately (I have very few meetings etc. myself, so I don't really need a calendar personally). With WLAN and Bluetooth connectivity, I can access net pretty much anywhere and the 800x480 screen is pretty good for most uses.
On the downside it could use a bit longer active use-time (~4h of continuous usage in worst case), but I suppose that's the price of a large high-quality color screen.
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is a good sci-fi story about a ship with a Bussard Ramjet getting really out of hands. Basically, due to an accident the crew of a spaceship are stuck on accelerating forever, fly into intergalactic void, creep ever closer to the speed of light and experience sufficiently serious time dilation to eventually notice that there are no new stars forming anymore, galaxies are getting dimmer as the old stars start to fade away and to top it all, the universe has become old enough to start contracting towards the Big Crunch. (The story doesn't end there, but I'll leave the ending unspoiled)
You know, I don't see the big deal. I've got less than a gig of ram. I frequently open more than 40 tabs in one firefox sitting. I run firefox for a week or more at a time before I restart it. When I do it's mostly just because I want to get rid of all those tabs that accumulate. (somehow there's no "close all tabs" function.)
I'm also one us us apparently lucky that aren't seeing much of memory leaking; my sessions rarely use more than a couple of hundred megs, despite a large number of tabs. What usually forces me to restart the browser is the awful browser-eating bug 263160, which many of my friends seem to never encounter, but for me it's more or less a weekly nuisace:(
This is not an issue or a cause to be taken seriously. So it seems that the logic here is: "let us all use "dark sky friendly" lights so we cannot see the real pollution and this will all go away and seem like a bad dream. I believe that we can find better issues to deal with than "light pollution". It is similar to going to an emergency room with a gunshot wound to the chest and complaining about a hangnail. Priorities people... Priorities.
A couple of comments:
I don't quite see why trying to reduce light pollution would be mutually exclusive with working concurrently to solve other issues. After all, 'we' (in the more global sense, as I'm not probably living in the same country as you) have been working at the same time on multiple problems of different scopes pretty much as long as the humans have lived in organized societies. As a comparison, it's generally not a good idea to forget completely about some local group of criminals while you're working on the global hunger, war on terror or other grand things.
It's also not only about being able to enjoy the night sky properly. By using more efficient lighting setups that minimize the amount of light that ends up on the sky and becomes wasted, less energy is used, which in turn has an effect on the amount of other pollution being created. This really is related to the other pollution problems (and even appears to be capable of causing some actual biological harm to humans and other animals, as mentioned briefly in the article as well).
I think that Stellarium, Xephem etc. and this new GE feature are targeted pretty much for different uses anyway:
- The Sky feature in GE is nice for general visual ogling around the sky for entertainment purposes; the UI is rather slick and the search functionality seems to cover the popular things (Messier/NGC catalogs etc) quite well. This makes it very attractive for causal wandering around the night sky, especially for people who aren't interested about getting dirty with the details of astronomy (although some information appears to be available with links to Wikipedia pages and various astronomical sources, kudos for that).
- The traditional planetarium applications are generally quite a bit more useful for e.g. planning an observation session ahead with simulation features. It's far easier to look for the first day of year when moon is closer than 5 degress to Pleiades and sun is below horizon in, say, XEphem than in GE. The information databases in planetarium applications often also provide data about things like variable stars/spectral class of a star etc, which are useful for some kinds of amateur astronomy, but not really important for visual enjoyment of hopping around the sky in GE. However, the UIs in planetarium apps do not IMO really provide as slick feeling of cruising around the sky view, as they tend to be functional/informative (stellar magnitudes/spectral classes etc) rather than to provide instant visual enjoyment.
I don't think it's really possible to generally claim either kind of application to be the ultimate solution, at least for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they get closer to each other as time passes, though. Being an amateur astronomer myself, I see the sky feature in GE as something I'll probably not use as often as, say, XEphem, but it's still nice.
My main "this is fucking stupid" remark is the irritation at having menus for each of the little sub windows. I can handle saying "File->New" on the tool palette, if I absolutely must, but everything fucking else is just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Hmm, do you mean the menubar at the top of the individual image windows, or something else? In case you're talking about that particular menubar, it can be turned off from the preferences: Preferences->Image Windows->Appearance and remove the tick from the "Show Menubar" checkboxes for both normal and fullscreen mode. If you mean something different, then I have no idea though.
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This is a bit on the nitpicking side, but as someone with very fond memories of Amiga, I can't resist a couple of corrections/comments:
VGA hardware let you have 16 colors at 640x480 and Amiga only had 4
Do you mean the Productivity mode (i.e. 640x480 without use of interlace) that was first present on ECS chipset (which was a minor disappointment as an update over OCS, and in hindsight a bit of an early omen about Commodore's inability to keep the competitive edge)? I'm wondering about this, because even the original chipset did allow use of 16 colors at that resolution (but with interlacing). For still images there was also the so-called Dynamic HiRes that was not a 'real' screen mode, but instead a software trick to use the Copper to switch the 16-color palette for each individual horizontal line with little CPU overhead.
Concerning non-bitmapped scalable fonts, AmigaOS 2.04 (introduced with A3000) did introduce the so-called outline fonts. I don't really remember whether they could also be rotated via OS itself, though.
Where did you get the idea that it doesn't have a terminal application? A bit of googling proves this to be not quite true:
http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/software-freedom-lovers-here-comes-maemo-5/
I looked at the list of suggested additional columns and chose "Died". Now I know that Linux died as "A modem hung up the phone". Various BSDs seem to still be going strong, though.
On a more serious note, the concept is quite neat (and as noted, not entirely unlike the comparisons provided by WolframAlpha). However, the quality of the results has to improve a lot before I'll use this for anything else than amusing myself.
If you are still using windows 2000- BUY A NEW COMPUTER!
Actually, the W2k machine I have and use semi-frequently is a newer acquisition than my current primary Linux box, so in a sense it might be called the most recent machine I have, even though the hardware and OS are older :) While I wouldn't be satisfied using it as my only computer, it's really quite good enough for surprisingly many tasks.
Regarding Mozilla guys and gals possibly dropping the support for it, it's too bad, but OTOH I suppose the end of W2k security updates is either getting pretty close or has already happened at that point, making it increasingly risky to have the machine connected to Internet anyway, so I can live with that if it happens.
Actually, W2k is getting security fixes until 13.7.2010, as the extended support phase covers them:
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3071
As I have one W2k box (mostly for playing some older games every now and then, but also for some random surfing and other lightweight use; the hardware isn't very new and shiny either; 650 MHz Slot-A Athlon etc), I can confirm still seeing a fairly steady trickle of fixes every now and then.
Regarding worms and viruses, I have yet to see any on that machine, even though the OS installation is now quite a few years old and in semi-active use.
I'd guess that a significant part of people in western Europe have heard about it, at least it seems to be sufficiently mainstream to get mentioned every now and then in (non-IT) newspapers. Elsewhere the answer is probably "not many", due to the geographical restrictions the service current has.
Personally, I think it's a quite nice music streaming service with a rather impressive set of available albums, even though running the client under Wine seems to occasionally crash my window manager (while it does restore the desktop pretty much immediately to the pre-crash state, it's still somewhat disconcerting).
The mirror might go away at some point, but I doubt the viewfinder will be completely replaced by the back-of-the-camera LCD; holding the camera against head gives it some additional stabilization compared of using just arms and hands. I liked the flexible LCD on my old Canon Powershot G3, but my Canon 20D and 40D DSLRs are certainly noticeably easier to hold steady.
However, it's quite possible that the viewfinder itself eventually becomes a miniature LCD (or whatever technology is used), allowing more flexible superimposition of additional information over the image feed from sensor and some other benefits. Currently the technology isn't quite there yet, but things might be different once something like 5-10 years have passed. (I'm aware that there are already some cameras with electronic viewfinders, but most people seem to still find them generally inferior to the traditional optical viewfinders, at least on the discussions I've followed)
Just for the curiosity; do you mean that they never came out into the mouth cavity, or that there's even nothing showing up on X-ray photos? In my case all my wisdom teeth do exist, but three of them are tightly stuck within the jaw bones. The fourth has gone a bit further, but is probably never going to get through the back of my mouth either.
Although I'm 30-something and have only 5 fillings in my teeth (all of which I originally got in my teens; no new cavities since that), sometimes one can just have bad luck. Here's my personal experience:
Some years ago, I had an old, somewhat loose filling replaced in one of my molars. All seemed to be well, until one day my jaw started to swell. It turned out that there had been a small chipping in that tooth (I hadn't even noticed anything). However, it was sufficiently large to allow bacteria to pass between the filling and the tooth. As the original cavity was rather deep, the nerve had eventually got exposed to the bacteria, died silently (I hadn't really had any toothache) and eventually an abscess formed in my jaw. Luckily, an endodontist was able to perform a successful root canal on it, and as the root was already dead, the biggest pain on the whole operation came from having to keep my mouth wide open for an hour or so, which isn't exactly something my muscles are used to.
Then again, bad luck doesn't of course explain having half-a-dozen root canals/missing teeth; I suppose that's caused by either bad habits or poor genes (or a combination of both).
Then again, many of us with older DSLRs that lack the dust removal functionality just clean up the sensor manually (typically by using a squeezable air pump made for that purpose, or by swiping them with something like the Copperhill kits) when we get sufficiently annoyed with dust spots on the images.
I suppose some of the more persistent dust spots that are small enough to not be an annoyance might be useful for that kind of purposes though, although it might not be very reliable anymore.
How about digital photography? It's a fairly common hobby these days and a single jpeg from pretty much any camera, whether a P&S compact or a DSLR has a size of several megabytes. It doesn't require hardcore dedication to snap thousands or even tens of thousands of photos in a few years. My collection of stills dating back from 2002 takes currently up about 50 gigabytes. While I might be more active photographer than average, filling 20 gigabytes worth of storage with photos isn't really very hard, if the user isn't actively removing not-so-important photos every now and then.
(I also have several gigabytes of completely legal music ripped from my own collection of CDs on the HD; I'm too lazy to rip everything, but it's handy to keep some of my favourites permanently available with minimal effort)
Since I bough my first digital camera in 2002, I've taken more than 40000 photos and have yet to lose any photos due to a memory card failure. Of the 5 cards I own, I still use 3 frequently (the 32 MB and 128 MB ones are a tad small these days, especially when shooting RAW). Perhaps it's been dirt/wear on the card connectors rather than actual flash failure in your case?
This is a bit offtopic, but anyway:
I used Amiga for a long time (approximately from 1987 to 1997) as my only platform and liked many things on it, but what do you mean with the bit about the 'some of the best filters ever put on a soundboard'? AFAIK, the Amiga audio hardware had only one filter, and that was the low-pass filter that had no user-controllable properties other than being switchable on and off. In this particular regard, the Paula chip was a step down from the famous SID, which had quite flexible filtering capabilities.
In order to not to be completely offtopic, I agree that having a pile of cores is good for non-trivial tasks, although I wouldn't be throwing specialized hardware out yet; after all, the GPUs these days are fairly flexible and can be adapted for many tasks outside just rendering polygons for the latest 3d-shooter.
Well, carefullness is relative :) I do occasionally manage to drop a CD to the floor and cause other kinds of minor unintended abuse to them (put them slightly out-of-alignment to the player etc). My own theory is that their survival is related to not ever playing them in a car (I don't even currently have one, so ATM that is easy), they do not get subjected to temperature extremes, significant amounts of sunlight and other environmental forces which might make them more prone to damage.
Yes vinyl wears but its really not an issue if you treat right. The same is equally true of CDs. The amount of jumping CDs I have heard is probably more than worn records.
I have bought a few hundred CDs since the early 90s and none of them are jumping/skipping as far as I can tell. (Obviously with that many CDs, there are inenvitably some that I haven't listened for a few years. Still, the only time I got skipping and jumping was when my old Philips CD player was dying; with the same discs inserted in another player or at the CD drive of my computer, everything played back nicely.) Some of them do have minor scratches, but so far I haven't managed to damage any of my discs enough to cause issues that the error correction can't deal with.
I'd say that something like ALE ("ALE is an image-processing program used for tasks such as image mosaicking, super-resolution, deblurring, noise reduction, anti-aliasing, and scene reconstruction.") is pretty creative:
http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/
Sure, there are some closed-source applications out there doing one or more of those things and ALE isn't the most user-friendly and intuitive tool out there, but I'd still say that it's not very much a clone of any existing application.
As an example of somewhat more commonly used OSS tools, I'd still consider PanotoolsNG as rather creative. While creating panoramas in itself isn't something really new, PanotoolsNG already includes pretty much anything needed for creation of panorama images and seem to be gaining new features at a pace that seems hard to match. I doubt that there are many closed-source panorama-making tools that are significantly more innovative. More information can be seen at:
http://wiki.panotools.org/
Of course, there are a lot of more 'cloned' OSS applications out there than the truly creative ones, but then again, the same can be also said about closed source...
The brightness varies quite a bit; sometimes they are rather faint, but at best they're really rather spectacular. Probably related at least to the angle of reflection and the brightness of the background sky.
Here in southern Finland they are rather common sight near late July / early August.
This shot (and others in the same directory) which I took last year is IMO rather close to how they looked to my own eyes:
http://kapsi.fi/~myrjola/photos/digital/tmp/20060713-yopilvet/img_3244-tmp.jpg
The sky is not dark because at that time of year, twilight is as dark as it ever gets.
Well, even though I have 2.5 gigs of RAM, it's still not infinite and the more carelessly individual applications use it, the sooner I have to either get even more RAM or ditch some badly-behaving applications. Of course with basic usage (just a mail client, browser, some text editing etc) it may take a long time to bump into the limits, especially if one doesn't have the machine running 24/7 or shuts applications that aren't currently used. However, I'm personally an amateur photographer (image processing takes a lot of memory), generally don't close applications when I'm not going to use them for a while and use a wide variety of them as well. Thus, any memory leaks or inefficient use of memory will show up fairly soon in my case.
(Kind of ironically I tried lately switching to Opera because of a crasher bug in Seamonkey/Firefox and found myself switching back a few weeks later, because in my case Opera was very stable, but leaked a lot of memory, so I ended up in the reverse of the situation I tried to escape from; for me the memory usage of FF/Seamonkey always stays in the range of a couple of hundred MBs even if it's been running for weeks, but Opera hogged about one GB in a few days and didn't release the memory until I restarted it...)
A friend opened my eyes to Opera about a year ago and I haven't used Firefox since.
A while ago I got fed up with a nasty bug in Seamonkey/Firefox (see bug 263160 / "frames open in new windows leaving the firefox window unusable" in Mozilla Bugzilla for details) and tried Opera, having heard much good about it. Indeed, there was plenty to like (slightly but noticeably quicker UI response time, the Wand feature etc) but after a couple of weeks I returned to Seamonkey because I bumped several times into behavior that was very much not something I'd expected from Opera; the browser reached repeatedly in a couple of days about a gigabytes worth of virtual size, of which something like 700-800 MBs were actually resident. Even after I had closed all tabs but one empty placeholder one, only very little memory was regained. I have 2.5 GB of RAM on my machine, but being an amateur photographer, I have plenty of other apps that would also like to have some memory, so I decided to revert back to Seamonkey, as in my case it uses less memory and needs restarts at least somewhat less often.
I mentioned about this to a couple of my friends that are long-time Opera users and the behavior wasn't familiar to them. Likewise, in my case Seamonkey (or Firefox) doesn't really exhibit the memory leakiness that has been described in many places. On the other hand, while I suffer from the nasty bug I mentioned earlier while using Seamonkey or Firefox, almost no-one of my friends have ever bumped into it and even those who have do not experience it frequently. So I suppose the leakiness and other issues of both browsers are largely site-dependent.
While N800 (or its recent successor, N810) isn't really called a PDA, I've found it a nice generic tool for browsing, reading emails, making some notes, listening music and other moderately lightweight tasks. While there isn't a default calendar application, I think some are available separately (I have very few meetings etc. myself, so I don't really need a calendar personally). With WLAN and Bluetooth connectivity, I can access net pretty much anywhere and the 800x480 screen is pretty good for most uses.
On the downside it could use a bit longer active use-time (~4h of continuous usage in worst case), but I suppose that's the price of a large high-quality color screen.
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is a good sci-fi story about a ship with a Bussard Ramjet getting really out of hands. Basically, due to an accident the crew of a spaceship are stuck on accelerating forever, fly into intergalactic void, creep ever closer to the speed of light and experience sufficiently serious time dilation to eventually notice that there are no new stars forming anymore, galaxies are getting dimmer as the old stars start to fade away and to top it all, the universe has become old enough to start contracting towards the Big Crunch. (The story doesn't end there, but I'll leave the ending unspoiled)
You know, I don't see the big deal. I've got less than a gig of ram. I frequently open more than 40 tabs in one firefox sitting. I run firefox for a week or more at a time before I restart it. When I do it's mostly just because I want to get rid of all those tabs that accumulate. (somehow there's no "close all tabs" function.)
I'm also one us us apparently lucky that aren't seeing much of memory leaking; my sessions rarely use more than a couple of hundred megs, despite a large number of tabs. What usually forces me to restart the browser is the awful browser-eating bug 263160, which many of my friends seem to never encounter, but for me it's more or less a weekly nuisace :(
This is not an issue or a cause to be taken seriously. So it seems that the logic here is: "let us all use "dark sky friendly" lights so we cannot see the real pollution and this will all go away and seem like a bad dream. I believe that we can find better issues to deal with than "light pollution". It is similar to going to an emergency room with a gunshot wound to the chest and complaining about a hangnail. Priorities people... Priorities.
A couple of comments:
I don't quite see why trying to reduce light pollution would be mutually exclusive with working concurrently to solve other issues. After all, 'we' (in the more global sense, as I'm not probably living in the same country as you) have been working at the same time on multiple problems of different scopes pretty much as long as the humans have lived in organized societies. As a comparison, it's generally not a good idea to forget completely about some local group of criminals while you're working on the global hunger, war on terror or other grand things.
It's also not only about being able to enjoy the night sky properly. By using more efficient lighting setups that minimize the amount of light that ends up on the sky and becomes wasted, less energy is used, which in turn has an effect on the amount of other pollution being created. This really is related to the other pollution problems (and even appears to be capable of causing some actual biological harm to humans and other animals, as mentioned briefly in the article as well).
I think that Stellarium, Xephem etc. and this new GE feature are targeted pretty much for different uses anyway:
- The Sky feature in GE is nice for general visual ogling around the sky for entertainment purposes; the UI is rather slick and the search functionality seems to cover the popular things (Messier/NGC catalogs etc) quite well. This makes it very attractive for causal wandering around the night sky, especially for people who aren't interested about getting dirty with the details of astronomy (although some information appears to be available with links to Wikipedia pages and various astronomical sources, kudos for that).
- The traditional planetarium applications are generally quite a bit more useful for e.g. planning an observation session ahead with simulation features. It's far easier to look for the first day of year when moon is closer than 5 degress to Pleiades and sun is below horizon in, say, XEphem than in GE. The information databases in planetarium applications often also provide data about things like variable stars/spectral class of a star etc, which are useful for some kinds of amateur astronomy, but not really important for visual enjoyment of hopping around the sky in GE. However, the UIs in planetarium apps do not IMO really provide as slick feeling of cruising around the sky view, as they tend to be functional/informative (stellar magnitudes/spectral classes etc) rather than to provide instant visual enjoyment.
I don't think it's really possible to generally claim either kind of application to be the ultimate solution, at least for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they get closer to each other as time passes, though. Being an amateur astronomer myself, I see the sky feature in GE as something I'll probably not use as often as, say, XEphem, but it's still nice.
My main "this is fucking stupid" remark is the irritation at having menus for each of the little sub windows. I can handle saying "File->New" on the tool palette, if I absolutely must, but everything fucking else is just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Hmm, do you mean the menubar at the top of the individual image windows, or something else? In case you're talking about that particular menubar, it can be turned off from the preferences: Preferences->Image Windows->Appearance and remove the tick from the "Show Menubar" checkboxes for both normal and fullscreen mode. If you mean something different, then I have no idea though.