They have a range from "Business rugged" all the way through to various MILSPEC certified models. All made in Japan (really!) and built unlike most products today. Made to last.
Could someone please explain to me what is the big deal with tethering in the US? I live in Europe, specifically in Slovakia, and here we have data plans as cheap as 6 EUR/month for an essentially unlimited (AFAIK technically 4GB/month FUP) amount of data. Mobile operators here couldn't care less about tethering and they certainly don't go out of their way to prevent it! I find it hard to understand why it's such a big deal in the states and why I keep seeing headlines about XYZ limited/disabled/outrageously expensive tethering.
I would be thrilled if they made a keyboard where you could pop out the keys and put them back in any order you like, Lego-like.
Also, the whole QWERTY thing can go.
I remember seeing a keyboard made by one of the larger keyboard manufacturers (Cherry maybe?) in the early 90s that had an LCD on each key. It was marketed as a multi-lingual keyboard and came with drivers that let you reprogram the keys to whatever you wanted.
Does anyone know if someone still makes a keyboard like this?
This has been done before, a long time ago. See
ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/users/friedman/scripts/ ad vsh
Re: NEXTSTEP and porting
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 3
Under NeXTSTEP, most cross-processor porting consisted of the following grueling steps:
Step 1: Open the app in Project Builder.
Step 2: Check "Intel," "NeXT," "Sparc," and "HP," then hit "Compile."
Step 3: There's no step 3.
Oh, and you forgot to mention that you end up with one binary which through clever sharing of resources (all interfaces, resources, etc are in the.app folder rather than in the executable) is actually smaller than for example, 4 binaries of the same app for different architectures under *NIX. It also means you could essentially fire up Interface Builder on the.nib and localize apps yourself/move buttons around and so on.
IMHO these are the most important points about OSX people on/. are missing, just look at the amount of posts here saying "it's too hard". In the case of OSX, it's not. Apple has quietly been keeping Darwin running on X86, and NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP (OSX's ancestor) always had support for X86. So an X86 port of OSX would be a matter of updating NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP drivers, writing some new ones for hardware that didn't exist at the time (note I'm only talking about drivers for those subsystems that Darwin does not include, i.e. Aqua) and recompiling. Presto, you have OSX/X86.
What I still don't understand is how Apple managed to turn NEXTSTEP (runs fine on my NeXTStation Turbo which is a 33Mhz 68040 with 32MB of RAM) into OSX (apparently only runs reasonably well on a XXXMhz PowerPC G4 with 128MB of RAM)? As far as I can see, they are essentially the same OS (OSX has a couple more APIs and more Eye Candy, but surely doesn't justify such a jump).
Quite frankly, I'm surprised at the amount of "geeks" slamming Netpliance in this and the previous/. story. Come on people, they've implemented a wonderful idea, out-of-the-box Internet for your non-geek Mother/Father/Brother/Sister. As far as I'm concerned they should be congratulated and not picked on for not letting "geeks" buy cheap Linux/*BSD terminals.
My suggestion to all the people on/. getting worked up about this: Go and work on how you can do what Netpliance is doing for the cheap-Linux-terminal market.
My suggestion to Netpliance: As of 1 April, get customers to sign contracts for service, like cellphones. Until then, be nice and foot any possible losses/withdrawals from service.
Well, I remember using an old Siemens box. It ran SINIX 1.0, had a 80186 processor and just under 1MB of ram. It also (wonder of wonders) had a MMU implemented as a piggy-back board on the bus with an 8086 and a software ROM. There's software MMUs for you!
It's getting to the point where Slashdotters are intent on making schools into geek Utopias instead helping kids get through the hell that, sadly, high school will always be.
Sorry, but I disagree. The school you are describing does seem to have an elitist attitude however this does not neccessarily have to be so. I went to High School in Slovakia (Eastern Europe), where a streamed school system is the norm. The difference there is that the entire system works this way, i.e. you don't have the 80%/20% split (which is IMO a recipe for trouble) you are referring to, the different streams are implemented as separate schools. See here for a lengthier discussion of my experiences (the trouble with time zones is by the time I get around to writing something, the story already has hundreds of comments).
I liked going to secondary school! I consider my time spent there (1993-1997) as the best years of my life so far. Let me explain... I come from Slovakia, which for those of you who don't know is part of former Czechoslovakia (split up in 1993). The Slovak school system works as follows:
Year 1 to 8 is primary school. This is pretty much the same for everybody, I can't comment much on this because most of the time I was in New Zealand and the rest I don't remember very well. What I do remember does have certain touches of exclusion/bullying but it obviously can't have been too bad otherwise I'd have remembered it:-). Year 8 to 12 is secondary school, which is streamed i.e. you get to choose what kind of school you want to go to, generally based on your perfomance in that schools entrance exams.
There are three broad categories of secondary schools. Two of these have a largely specialised and practical focus. They are the so-called "apprentice" schools (woodworkers, builders, cooks, etc.) and the "industrial" schools (mechanical/electronic engineering, etc.). In theory you can finish one of these and find yourself a job. People from these schools (except a minority from the second group) do not generally attend University. The third category, which I attended are the "gymnaziums" or prep-schools. These are theoretically-inclined and therefore much less specialised. They are intended for people who want to go on to university. I had the additional benefit of going to a private school with (at the time) about 200 students. I was on a first-name basis with most of the teachers and they remain my friends to this day.
The upshot of all this is that I believe that the streaming system has certain advantages, notably it separates the woodworkers, bricklayers and other similarly-inclined people from the geeks/nerds who go on to a university education. You may ask how does someone know at age twelve what they want to do? Well, in most cases their parents will decide and even their choice is constrained by that person's academic ability to pass the entrance exams. So (at least in my case) it seems to be a kind of natural separation. I ended up in a class almost full of geeks(!), with a sister class full of, well, weirdos. Part of this was due to the fact that the school was a well-regarded private school (it seems they have since been admitting more rich kids rather than weirdos, probably because the weirdo's parents can't afford the rising fees) but I think that a similar situation would exist in a public school even if to a lesser degree.
While discussing this with a friend today, he made the point that the population density of rural America/Canada/Australia for example could not support such a system. One solution is commuting - several classmates of mine were commuters, living in villages nearby. This would not work for longer distances, obviously. Therefore, in conclusion, I think that implementing such a system would certainly be plausible in areas with a high population density and I believe that this system promotes rather than suppresses non-conformity at least to a certain degree and (unfortunately) dependent on the quality of the specific school concerned.
I went to a presentation today done by the Corel folks here at Uniforum NZ and what I heard sounds very encouraging. One of the guys doing the presentation was directly from Ottawa so this should be pretty accurate.
What follows is a more or less verbatim of what I remember (it's late).
The new distro is supposed to be called Corel Desktop. They have yet to finalise whether to base it on KDE or GNOME. They are aiming for a Windows-style look and feel with a user-friendly GUI install. The distribution will come bundled with a bunch of Corel Apps (Wordperfect at least) and will be targeted at end users and OEMs for bundling with new PCs.
Corel plan to make Betas available for testing (as has been mentioned here) and they put a lot of emphasis on feedback from their users. So let these guys know what you, the users, would like to see in a user-friendly Linux.
The other major point I got confirmation on is that all the work will be contributed back to the Linux Community (i.e. it will all be Open Source).
I agree with DaBuzz that negatives are a bad idea. The default should be all comments, people are then free to choose if they want to change that.
On the subject of scoring wars, how about only allowing moderators to increase the score of a comment. That way, moderators would (hopefully) think twice before doing so (Do you really want this to be seen by thousands of people?) and there wouldn't be any scoring wars since a comment with a score of 3 could never be down-voted to 1.
I couldn't agree more. I've been programming in C since I was 10, using UNIX sice 13(!) and I'm currently working as a Systems Engineer. BUT, I'm still doing a CS degree. A lot of people might ask why, when I can get a well-paid job and so on.
The reality is, university will provide you with knowledge and insight that you can't get from just learning on your own (believe me, I've been there). There is so much more to working in IT than writing HTML and C. And there is a huge difference between 'good' and 'bad' C (The fact that it works doesn't neccessarily mean it's 'good').
Still, It's your choice. If you don't go, that'll be one less major, which means demand will go up, which means all of us who finish will get paid more:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Panasonic Toughbook.
They have a range from "Business rugged" all the way through to various MILSPEC certified models. All made in Japan (really!) and built unlike most products today. Made to last.
Could someone please explain to me what is the big deal with tethering in the US? I live in Europe, specifically in Slovakia, and here we have data plans as cheap as 6 EUR/month for an essentially unlimited (AFAIK technically 4GB/month FUP) amount of data. Mobile operators here couldn't care less about tethering and they certainly don't go out of their way to prevent it! I find it hard to understand why it's such a big deal in the states and why I keep seeing headlines about XYZ limited/disabled/outrageously expensive tethering.
Aj tak ste vsetci kokoti, vobec necitate odbornu literaturu a tliachate tu blbosti jak v krcme pri pive! Pozrite si radsej toto:
1 02 860378601578&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=cryptography&m=
(Translation: You're all idiots talking bs in the local pub! Go read some constructive discussion on this subject, like the above thread.)
I would be thrilled if they made a keyboard where you could pop out the keys and put them back in any order you like, Lego-like.
Also, the whole QWERTY thing can go.
I remember seeing a keyboard made by one of the larger keyboard manufacturers (Cherry maybe?) in the early 90s that had an LCD on each key. It was marketed as a multi-lingual keyboard and came with drivers that let you reprogram the keys to whatever you wanted.
Does anyone know if someone still makes a keyboard like this?
This has been done before, a long time ago. See/ ad vsh
ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/users/friedman/scripts
Under NeXTSTEP, most cross-processor porting consisted of the following grueling steps:
Oh, and you forgot to mention that you end up with one binary which through clever sharing of resources (all interfaces, resources, etc are in the .app folder rather than in the executable) is actually smaller than for example, 4 binaries of the same app for different architectures under *NIX. It also means you could essentially fire up Interface Builder on the .nib and localize apps yourself/move buttons around and so on.
IMHO these are the most important points about OSX people on /. are missing, just look at the amount of posts here saying "it's too hard". In the case of OSX, it's not. Apple has quietly been keeping Darwin running on X86, and NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP (OSX's ancestor) always had support for X86. So an X86 port of OSX would be a matter of updating NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP drivers, writing some new ones for hardware that didn't exist at the time (note I'm only talking about drivers for those subsystems that Darwin does not include, i.e. Aqua) and recompiling. Presto, you have OSX/X86.
What I still don't understand is how Apple managed to turn NEXTSTEP (runs fine on my NeXTStation Turbo which is a 33Mhz 68040 with 32MB of RAM) into OSX (apparently only runs reasonably well on a XXXMhz PowerPC G4 with 128MB of RAM)? As far as I can see, they are essentially the same OS (OSX has a couple more APIs and more Eye Candy, but surely doesn't justify such a jump).
Interestingly enough, the New Zealand segment of the Southern Cross Cable goes via Whenuapai, which is also an airforce base. Can you say Echelon?
If you have so much FAITH why do you sound so SCARED?
Quite frankly, I'm surprised at the amount of "geeks" slamming Netpliance in this and the previous /. story. Come on people, they've implemented a wonderful idea, out-of-the-box Internet for your non-geek Mother/Father/Brother/Sister. As far as I'm concerned they should be congratulated and not picked on for not letting "geeks" buy cheap Linux/*BSD terminals.
My suggestion to all the people on /. getting worked up about this: Go and work on how you can do what Netpliance is doing for the cheap-Linux-terminal market.
My suggestion to Netpliance: As of 1 April, get customers to sign contracts for service, like cellphones. Until then, be nice and foot any possible losses/withdrawals from service.
foo
Will Konqueror be able to run standalone on non-KDE desktops? How embeddable will it be? How does this apply to other KDE Apps?
Well, I remember using an old Siemens box. It ran SINIX 1.0, had a 80186 processor and just under 1MB of ram. It also (wonder of wonders) had a MMU implemented as a piggy-back board on the bus with an 8086 and a software ROM. There's software MMUs for you!
It's getting to the point where Slashdotters are intent on making schools into geek Utopias instead helping kids get through the hell that, sadly, high school will always be.
Sorry, but I disagree. The school you are describing does seem to have an elitist attitude however this does not neccessarily have to be so. I went to High School in Slovakia (Eastern Europe), where a streamed school system is the norm. The difference there is that the entire system works this way, i.e. you don't have the 80%/20% split (which is IMO a recipe for trouble) you are referring to, the different streams are implemented as separate schools. See here for a lengthier discussion of my experiences (the trouble with time zones is by the time I get around to writing something, the story already has hundreds of comments).
I liked going to secondary school! I consider my time spent there (1993-1997) as the best years of my life so far. Let me explain... I come from Slovakia, which for those of you who don't know is part of former Czechoslovakia (split up
in 1993). The Slovak school system works as follows:
Year 1 to 8 is primary school. This is pretty much the same for everybody, I can't comment much on this because most of the time I was in New Zealand and the rest I don't remember very well. What I do remember does have certain touches of exclusion/bullying but it obviously can't have been too bad otherwise I'd have remembered it :-).
Year 8 to 12 is secondary school, which is streamed i.e. you get to choose what kind of school you want to go to, generally based on your perfomance in that schools entrance exams.
There are three broad categories of secondary schools. Two of these have a largely specialised and practical focus. They are the so-called "apprentice" schools (woodworkers, builders, cooks, etc.) and the "industrial" schools (mechanical/electronic engineering, etc.). In theory
you can finish one of these and find yourself a job. People from these schools (except a minority from the second group) do not generally attend University. The third category, which I attended are the "gymnaziums" or prep-schools. These are theoretically-inclined and therefore much less specialised. They are intended
for people who want to go on to university. I had the additional benefit of going to a private school with (at the time) about 200 students. I was on a first-name basis with most of the teachers and they remain my friends to this day.
The upshot of all this is that I believe that the streaming system has certain advantages, notably it separates the woodworkers, bricklayers and other similarly-inclined people from the geeks/nerds who go on to a university education.
You may ask how does someone know at age twelve what they want to do? Well, in most cases their parents will decide and even their choice is constrained by that person's academic ability to pass the entrance exams. So (at least in my case)
it seems to be a kind of natural separation. I ended up in a class almost full of geeks(!), with a sister class full of, well, weirdos. Part of this was due to
the fact that the school was a well-regarded private school (it seems they have
since been admitting more rich kids rather than weirdos, probably because the weirdo's parents can't afford the rising fees) but I think that a similar situation would exist in a public school even if to a lesser degree.
While discussing this with a friend today, he made the point that the population density
of rural America/Canada/Australia for example could not support such a system. One solution is commuting - several classmates of mine were commuters, living in
villages nearby. This would not work for longer distances, obviously. Therefore, in conclusion, I think that implementing such a system would certainly be plausible in areas with a high population density and I believe that this system promotes rather than suppresses non-conformity at least to a certain degree and (unfortunately) dependent on the quality of the specific school concerned.
Thoughts? Comments?
Martin Lucina
mato@kotelna.sk
I went to a presentation today done by the Corel folks here at Uniforum NZ and what I heard sounds very encouraging. One of the guys doing the presentation was directly from Ottawa so this should be pretty accurate.
What follows is a more or less verbatim of what I remember (it's late).
The new distro is supposed to be called Corel Desktop. They have yet to finalise whether to base it on KDE or GNOME. They are aiming for a Windows-style look and feel with a user-friendly GUI install. The distribution will come bundled with a bunch of Corel Apps (Wordperfect at least) and will be targeted at end users and OEMs for bundling with new PCs.
Corel plan to make Betas available for testing (as has been mentioned here) and they put a lot of emphasis on feedback from their users. So let these guys know what you, the users, would like to see in a user-friendly Linux.
The other major point I got confirmation on is that all the work will be contributed back to the Linux Community (i.e. it will all be Open Source).
I agree with DaBuzz that negatives are a bad idea. The default should be all comments, people are then free to choose if they want to change that.
On the subject of scoring wars, how about only allowing moderators to increase the score of a comment. That way, moderators would (hopefully) think twice before doing so (Do you really want this to be seen by thousands of people?) and there wouldn't be any scoring wars since a comment with a score of 3 could never be down-voted to 1.
What do you think?
I couldn't agree more. I've been programming in C since I was 10, using UNIX sice 13(!) and I'm currently working as a Systems Engineer. BUT, I'm still doing a CS degree. A lot of people might ask why, when I can get a well-paid job and so on.
The reality is, university will provide you with knowledge and insight that you can't get from just learning on your own (believe me, I've been there). There is so much more to working in IT than writing HTML and C. And there is a huge difference between 'good' and 'bad' C (The fact that it works doesn't neccessarily mean it's 'good').
Still, It's your choice. If you don't go, that'll be one less major, which means demand will go up, which means all of us who finish will get paid more :-).