does anyone know about the shell eco marathon contest? whoever runs the most kilometers with a single litre of gasoline wins the competition.
this year's compo was held last weekend in france, if I recall correctly. a team of colleagues of mine went over there, but I don't know the results, yet...
anyways, these are no real cars, just a motorcycle engine and a structure to hold everything together, plus the driver. but I wonder if any new concept (if any) is somehow incoroporated in a real car....
Isn't already something that does this smart-link stuff?
At the school where I teach, one of the computers had a IE-plugin that underlined some words in a diferent color of normal hyperlinks, and linked them to some search engine... I can't rememeber the name of the program. Alexa, or Copernicus, or something like that...
Not that it was intrusive, but useless to me.. As it was said already in here, I'd rather have that off by default. I hate those msn.com searches I get when I just mispell the URL in IE...
I am using mandrake 7.1 right now. I've downloaded 7.2 but couldn't get X to work with it on a fujitsu laptop with a trident 9388 graphics card. DrakX deteceted it, but when testing, the screen first appeared ok (that picture of a penguin with a rainbow gradient as the background), but when the "is this ok?" message dialog appeared, the screen got corrupted and X crashed. I mean, the entire system crashed, as it did not respond to keyboard commands (ctrl+alt+bksp, ctrl+alt+functionm key to switch to the console), and I couldn't telnet to it from another computer, which is how I assume the entire thing crashed.
Which is a shame. I am a true believer that linux could succeed in the desktop, if some things were done better. Mandrake is a step in the right direction, but is still too crammed with stuff won't be using for now, let alone a newbie with little experience, but willing to learn using linux.
Flame me if you want to, but I advocate a distro with about the same stuff that comes with Windows. Keep the installed stuff to a minimum, and when the user needs program X or service Y, he/she could install it from the distro CD, in constrast to the current situation where all (or almost) the stuff is installed by default. While this is good in the way that you have lots of programs, documentation, themes, available right after install, it intimidates users. hell! I am not an expert, but am quite familiar with Linux, and the amount of software a normal distribution installs even intimidates me!
The ideal situation would be: a distribution with the kernel, support libraries, some shell utils, X, kde/gnome/another window manager, some X utils like a calculator, mp3 player, gimp, net utils and a office application. You need the C compiler? grab the CD and install it in some easy to use package manager. You need Apache? You need MySQL? You need Z? Go to the relevant part in the installer, search for webservers, db servers, or whatever and install it. Let the system grow with the demand, don't dump it all to the users at one point in time when it will hardly be manageable (by them, of course).
I first heard of Tori Amos by once talking with a friend, and a couple of months ago I listened to Fiona Apple's "Limp" song on the radio and liked the style. What did I do? I fired up napster and searched for both these artists. I downloaded about 5-6 mp3s of each artist, and guess what? I really liked them.
Enough so that at the first opportinity to be in a cd-store I bought a CD of each one of them. I still keep those mp3 that I don't own the CDs they were ripped from. I'm still a student, I can't buy all their CDs in one afternoon at the local cd store. What am I supposed to do? Erase the mp3s from my computer and only listen to those great songs when I buy the CDs a couple of months from now (which I really intend to do, $$$ permitting), or keep the mp3s as a means to keep me interested in the CD they came from?
What are Tori Amos' and Fiona Apple's lawyers supposed to do? Sue me for not paying for what I'm listening to right now? The mp3s work for me as a way to know artists, like listening to the radio, or listening to a friend's CD, to check that I like before buying. If CDs were less expensive, I could live with buying a cd only to find out later that was no good, but at the prices they are, I need to double-check before shelling out the cash.
And yes.. I was blocked out of Napster because I had some mp3s of Metallica in my system. Thank you for being so greedy. I quite like Metallica. I can't play the guitar, but I can play the first couple of minutes of "nothing else matters". I never bought a CD, as a lot of my friends had them, even complete collections, and I could always borrow them. Now, I'll delete those mp3s from my computer, but you'll never see a penny from me. Not that it matters much to you, though...
Slashdot Mirror
does anyone know about the shell eco marathon contest? whoever runs the most kilometers with a single litre of gasoline wins the competition.
this year's compo was held last weekend in france, if I recall correctly. a team of colleagues of mine went over there, but I don't know the results, yet...
anyways, these are no real cars, just a motorcycle engine and a structure to hold everything together, plus the driver. but I wonder if any new concept (if any) is somehow incoroporated in a real car....
nipjc at ua dot pt
Isn't already something that does this smart-link stuff?
At the school where I teach, one of the computers had a IE-plugin that underlined some words in a diferent color of normal hyperlinks, and linked them to some search engine... I can't rememeber the name of the program. Alexa, or Copernicus, or something like that...
Not that it was intrusive, but useless to me.. As it was said already in here, I'd rather have that off by default. I hate those msn.com searches I get when I just mispell the URL in IE...
just my Euro 0.02
I am using mandrake 7.1 right now. I've downloaded 7.2 but couldn't get X to work with it on a fujitsu laptop with a trident 9388 graphics card. DrakX deteceted it, but when testing, the screen first appeared ok (that picture of a penguin with a rainbow gradient as the background), but when the "is this ok?" message dialog appeared, the screen got corrupted and X crashed. I mean, the entire system crashed, as it did not respond to keyboard commands (ctrl+alt+bksp, ctrl+alt+functionm key to switch to the console), and I couldn't telnet to it from another computer, which is how I assume the entire thing crashed.
Which is a shame. I am a true believer that linux could succeed in the desktop, if some things were done better. Mandrake is a step in the right direction, but is still too crammed with stuff won't be using for now, let alone a newbie with little experience, but willing to learn using linux.
Flame me if you want to, but I advocate a distro with about the same stuff that comes with Windows. Keep the installed stuff to a minimum, and when the user needs program X or service Y, he/she could install it from the distro CD, in constrast to the current situation where all (or almost) the stuff is installed by default. While this is good in the way that you have lots of programs, documentation, themes, available right after install, it intimidates users. hell! I am not an expert, but am quite familiar with Linux, and the amount of software a normal distribution installs even intimidates me!
The ideal situation would be: a distribution with the kernel, support libraries, some shell utils, X, kde/gnome/another window manager, some X utils like a calculator, mp3 player, gimp, net utils and a office application. You need the C compiler? grab the CD and install it in some easy to use package manager. You need Apache? You need MySQL? You need Z? Go to the relevant part in the installer, search for webservers, db servers, or whatever and install it. Let the system grow with the demand, don't dump it all to the users at one point in time when it will hardly be manageable (by them, of course).
Anyway, just my 0.02 Euro (4$ PTE).
pedro cardoso
I first heard of Tori Amos by once talking with a friend, and a couple of months ago I listened to Fiona Apple's "Limp" song on the radio and liked the style. What did I do? I fired up napster and searched for both these artists. I downloaded about 5-6 mp3s of each artist, and guess what? I really liked them.
Enough so that at the first opportinity to be in a cd-store I bought a CD of each one of them. I still keep those mp3 that I don't own the CDs they were ripped from. I'm still a student, I can't buy all their CDs in one afternoon at the local cd store. What am I supposed to do? Erase the mp3s from my computer and only listen to those great songs when I buy the CDs a couple of months from now (which I really intend to do, $$$ permitting), or keep the mp3s as a means to keep me interested in the CD they came from?
What are Tori Amos' and Fiona Apple's lawyers supposed to do? Sue me for not paying for what I'm listening to right now? The mp3s work for me as a way to know artists, like listening to the radio, or listening to a friend's CD, to check that I like before buying. If CDs were less expensive, I could live with buying a cd only to find out later that was no good, but at the prices they are, I need to double-check before shelling out the cash.
And yes.. I was blocked out of Napster because I had some mp3s of Metallica in my system. Thank you for being so greedy. I quite like Metallica. I can't play the guitar, but I can play the first couple of minutes of "nothing else matters". I never bought a CD, as a lot of my friends had them, even complete collections, and I could always borrow them. Now, I'll delete those mp3s from my computer, but you'll never see a penny from me. Not that it matters much to you, though...
Greed.... And "nothing else matters".