Got a guy who wants a computer for his 12 year old. She'll likely have it for several years. Here are the options:
SEVERAL PCs for under $600. 2GHz or faster - certainly enough for email/IM and word processing. Monitors are effectively free these days (I can get 17" monitors for nothing or
Or he can get a G4/G5 tower for a $1300 or more.
or an ibook for > $1000.
Or the old iMac/new eMac. A console/all in one, you're stuck with it for $800.
Mr Steve, sir? Can we have a basic tower box with enough ram to not swap OSX all the time for UNDER $800? Please?
And if your folks are working on the OS, I understand that the graphics are all tricked out, but how come my 40MHz/64MB color NextStation is still pretty quick compared with my 400MHz/512MB G3 laptop running OS X? (esp when said laptop flies running BSD).
Except for the part that It was a damn test flight!. There were no passengers; there was no weight. This was the Hello World of commercial space flight.
One might also offer that certain Apollo (1) folks might have not wanted their TEST FLIGHT to go deeply wrong.
Rockets are dangerous. Space flight is dangerous. This isn't a run to the 7-11. So far, NASA and the US have been excessively successful in space flight.
You wanna go into detail as to what a "user" does to a machine versus what an IMAP connection which causes several.db files, perhaps skip 2000 message files and punch a lot of data out through the wire. Or do you just want to/. the issue and ignore it (which is fine, we're talking to windows users mainly here). (sorry, when I run IMAP, we start talking at 40,000 users; 100k is still pretty unchallenging.)
I acknowledge that an E450 in use today (per the article) is a dog compared to most intel boxes of 2 years ago. It was MARGINALLY better than the Intel boxes of 1998 (and lagged most of their Unix competitors. Now, when we get to $30,000 for the thing in the first place, bang/buck was pretty low.
By and large, any 1 or 2-way Sun (even the Ultra 3's) are dogs compared to their era equiv hardware. AT the time of E450 introduction, there wasn't a lot of good AMD/Intel 4-way hardware.
However, price similar Alphas and SGI did kick sun's butt.
Sun hasn't LED the performance pack in a long long long time. This goes back to the SPARCStation 2 era. It was an issue with science and engineering folks then. When the SPARCStation 5 & 20 came out, for around $8k for the 20 @ 60MHz, we got a gang of Alpha's at 166MHz (AFAIR) for the same price. Since Sun was telling is to move our apps from BSD/SunOS 4 to SVR4/Solaris 2.x, we decided to move to OSF/1 on a machine that was actually FASTER. At the time, AIX and HPUX were also smoking sparcs.
But that's mainly moot.
The Suns, as they come out, tend to use PCI from a couple generations back. Until VERY recently, they didn't use ECC. Remember all those failing 400MHz E4500 CPU boards? I do. They FINALLY put in cache with ECC.
So:
No, sun is rarely at the cutting or leading edge of performance with 4 or fewer processors. SPARC chips are NOT speed demons. Now, at 12 or 16 (or 32) processors, they are unChallenged by Intel/AMD boxes. But looking at an E4800 with a gang of 900MHz chips, we wanted to add 1200MHz chips. Doh! Forklift upgrade. Sorry - gotta replace them ALL. (the 4WAY SGI that's CrayLinked to another 4WAY SGI turning it into a scalable 8WAY box, doesn't have that issue. And I can get all the 4Way SGIs I want, as I want, and make it into a bigger and bigger machine.)
But mostly on-topic:
just POWERING an E450 from a car would be a challenge. Selling the sucker, buying an iPod and perhaps spending the rest on dinner and things for a cute girl wouldn't get his pics on slashdot, but it would prolly be a lot more satisfying and functional for him, all things considered.
A more interesting hack would be my Kaypro Model 2 running mp3s.
take it past ten concurrent users and I'd take the E450 every time
(Well, yeah, if the x86 were running Windows.)
On the Sun, that 66MHz PCI is just HUGE! (at least this one had 66MHz, the previous ones were 32bit/33MHz busses). (I'll expect PCI-X (133MHz) support as soon as the rest of the world is 2 generations further).
We ran tests of an E420R with hardware RAID against a (2x2GHz) DL380 testing (disk) IO and IMAP (disk, network under most stress) with THOUSANDS of concurrent connections and the 420 was only a little more useful than an expensive anchor.
Sun told us, later, that we should have tested against their then current machines. "LIke what?"
we asked. "Like the V880." said Sun.
I offered that I'd just *grant* that a $150,000 8 CPU sun was going to be faster than the $4,000 HP-TanPaqItal. (but maybe not with those built in "FC/AL disks").
So yes, a 4-way 500MHz Ultra II box from Sun will outperform a similar era x86. Usually by a good 30%. It will cost between 2 and 3 times more than an x86.
But the E450's era was 4+ years ago. A single processor box with a 3.2GHz processor and ECC RAM (Sun never offered ECC until this last generation, it killed us) will leave the Sun wondering what happened. The Sun will NOT saturate a SCSI/160 buss (do the math). Big Suns (4500's) have multiple PCI, but the E450's stumble along). My sub-$200 motherboards come with DDRAM and PCI-X slots. Shall we talk about IO in that context?
Bet he coulda gotten $500 for a loaded E450 and maintained said investment.
That said, for
@work, I suffer with E450's because "They Are Suns". Even when I show that a 1CPU x86 @ 2GHz smokes it.
"and with one CPU, I can be assured that the machine won't lock up with multiple CPUs contending for one resource" (well, it's as reasonable as his thoughts about dedicated CPUs for decoding...)
As for power, a friend just hit a junk yard ambulance and got a 100A alternator (he runs emergency lights on his car going to fires). A 1000watt inverter and you could power the E450.
Just be careful turning with all those disks on.
I can see either a disk crash or gyroscopes causing car crashes;)
I've been using it since it was Phoenix. As Firebird and now as firefox, with a T3 I can go to the mozilla.org website and start counting as I click on the "download firefox for windows" in IE.
By the time it's installed and running, I'm still under 45 seconds.
I've done this for (to?) a number of people here. They curse popups, I walk over, get FF onto their machine, spent a second configuring cookies and tabs and popups, show them Control-T and leave.
Usually 2-3 minutes total to have them running, configured and edumucated.
It is as stable as IE or more. Unfo, our very large company isn't a fan of HTML so several of the web pages look like crap or don't work at all without ActiveX.
Me? My internal web page emits a short loop of the smurf song.wav if you're using IE. Otherwise, it's HTML 4.01 compliant.
I push that following standards in HTML is critical because it would be bad practice and damaging to shareholder value to lock ourselves into a single vendor solution. Especially when it's so unnecessary and so possible to write correct HTML that allows choice and allows the IT department to choose the BEST solution for the client rather than be forced into the ONLY solution.
Use HTML, use browsers which support HTML and work for you and don't have massive holes to be patched every week.
MS stopped developing IE in large part once Netscape shipwrecked. Mozilla was close to an Open Source shipwreck but for the commitement of several Netscape employees who knew the code well enough to start getitng something that people could contribute too. In the last 18 months or so, it's been advancing nicely. Hopefully, MS won't notice and will keep doing nothing.
Right. It does this through magic! (patented by apple. Emulating or even looking magic will get them to sue your ass).
No, it does this through a protocol. Likely rendezvous. It requires a new version of iTunes. Which likely has the other side of the rendezvous protocol.
SO, as I said: You plug it in and [have itunes 4.6 running]. "hit it with" sort of implies packets going between the two, even if it means no buttons. But "too easy" with apple often means "insanely painful to debug." [not remotely as painful or common as anything with windows, but there is no "itunes -d" command].
I'm just hoping that we can figure out what it is because I don't RUN an apple server nor do I plan to. My mp3s are happily on an open source box (no binaries I didn't compile myself) and I'd like to feed the device from that.
Where MS talked about zero-conf devices - mostly to kill Network Computers - and that's why we need so few Windows admins these days - 1 person can run 15000 windows boxes half time from bed... oh wait...
Where MS talked about zero config devices, Apple has put out Rendezvous. As an IETF standard. Which means that I have tools for it. On FreeBSD. A little work in/usr/ports (like "make install" - oh that's hard), and I can play with Rendezvous devices.
One presumes that configuring it will be more towards "$Mom can do it" than the typical Windows
"Wait until a full moon; reconfigure your interrupts so the devices are found alphabetically; swing the chicken innards over the heat sync and reboot 13 times while chanting the Rolling Stones verse: 'You make a grown man cry' 13 times backwards at the stroke of midnight."
Instead, I'll suspect you'll do something like plug it in, hit it with a web browser or even iTunes 4.6 and say "find new device" and it will autoconfigure.
*I* just want to know if I can auto conf it from FreeBSD and feed it tunes from a BSD box.
Whereas this is a fucking wall-wart. Only. Which is sweet.
And stunningly, apple didn't make it $250.
The optical jack avoids several of the ground loop
and other issues I might have.
My wallwart solution - 15 years ago doing pro-audio with lots of power strips - was to take a little 2 prong extension cord - the kind with the 3 plugs on the end; cut it down to be about 16", put a new plug on it and have a thing that held 2 wall warts, velco'd together that could sit outside the effects box - self wrapped around the handle and be out of my way and secure. Wall warts needn't be attached to the wall anymore. A $3 cord can handle 2. Work with it.
Personally, I'm tired of voltage/device. I'm tired of different PLUG per device. I have a large 12VDC power supply powering a couple switches, a soekris and a couple other things. I now seek out 12VDC things.
Re:Digital Map Databases
on
Open Maps?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To develop Exchange, Microsoft has spent millions of dollars, countless meeting hours and hundreds of developers work on it.
To develop Word, Microsoft has... well the same (plus people to take ALL the F'ing suggestions for features and make sure everything gets added).
Sendmail took one guy, mainly, a semester or so and then a core of MAYBE 20 people to develop it.
Postfix was, in large part, a 1 person project.
Except for what Linus took from Minix (kidding!), a kernel was developed, without networking code, by one guy.
We can mutter about UIs and Gnome/KDE (hell, X11).
If anything can fall under the Million Monkey's Factor of Open Source, maps can.
I'm at an office where it takes dozens and dozens of people hours and meetings to add a line to a sendmail access file. But sometimes, I just do it in 12 seconds and get forgiveness later.
Copyrights
on
Open Maps?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Copyright law is clear.
Anything after Steamboat Willie and the creation of one "Michael Mouse" by Uncle Walt will retain perpetual copyright.
However streets are, mainly, publicly owned/maintained/created. Surveys by municipalities are in the public domain (tax payer and all that) - just like most NASA images.
Being able to USE that data, however, requires the use of some standard markup - which probably exists, but I'm no cartographer - with information about direction, intersections and angles of intersections and, perhaps speed.
This would be how your Nav System calmly says "make slight right turn onto BLAH"
Of interest to me would be a system where certain data would be modifyable. Eg. a 65MPH road might be modified to 20 MPH depending on current traffic conditions. You'd also want a class on each road so you could add a "never take" type of conditional if, say, you're biking and really don't want to be on a 12 lane interstate:) Trucks could also use routing for only roads that don't ban trucks.
Second year CS students would recognize any routing algorithms made from that data.
One might think that if data didn't exist, then state/federal/DARPA funding might be available for an open project like this. Unless they lock your ass in Guantanimo under the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act for resembling someone conspiring to think about perhaps doing something that displeases the Right Reverend John Ashcroft and the Ministry of Home Defense.
As a percentage of GPD. So your silly graph indicates that Sweden has a low GPD compared to the US.
Lies, damn lies, statistics (and all that).
It's a pretty picture with pretty colors, but thats about all.
In the US, around 50% of my income goes to taxes. Property, income, sales, etc. I don't really drink or use tobacco, so no surge there.
Then I get to try to find health insurance (over $1k/month for a family of 3), I try to save some money for when I'm old because the elderly in the US are largely in poverty conditions.
Advanced countries understand that for its citizens don't have health care coverage, that they mainly see doctors for Emergency care. A child with advanced flu symptoms visiting the ER at 8PM costs DOZENS of times more than treating that child when the symptoms are early or getting that child a flu shot if available.
High medical costs lead to poverty which leads to no health coverage which leads to high medical costs.
But as long as the rich are doing better than they were 20 years ago, it's all ok.
Um, England and Scotland are both part of the same country (I'm gonna presume you're aware of this, but it's a big difference).
Unless the folks up north have reinstituted customs at Hadrian's Wall, you're comparison is pretty damn irrelevant. (similar to: "I just carried a box 2km over to a friend's for free and it took 30 minutes.")
Unless this shipping happened in the last month, Poland was not part of the EU. DHL expedites quite a bit better (for a presume package) than the Post.
I've had international packages get bogged for a month going across borders ("No, really. It's a SPARC 10. It's worth $0 and it's a gift. I will not pay taxes on a 12 year old machine. I don't care that you found out that it once sold for US$10k; that was 12 years ago. How about I trade you a a Mac IIfx or a '486 and we'll call it even?")
So to paraphrase: 20 years ago, as FedEX was starting and had limited coverage, someone I once met has a bad experience. Therefore, FedEX sucks.
Does that about cover it?
As I sat hitting reload, in 1996, on the FedEX web site, to see where a package I'd shipped was, I saw that, suddenly it had been signed for. I called. the guy was astounded. "Wait, I can still see the truck driving away. How did you know I just got it?"
In an effort to get this thread on topic again, I'll suggest that Area 51 is a research area of the US Gov't in an effort to design air vehicles to replace the USPost Office.
Because the USPS is the only entity that's better armed than the army, and far more motivated to use said arms, the feds must keep Area 51 top secret, lest the USPS make a move and take over the gov't.
Back off topic, no, I don't use United Pulverizing Service any more. When my friend and boss ebayed a well packed guitar amp and it came dead, we opened it up. It had been dropped, buy our guitar techs guess at least 10 feet to afix the speaker magnet to the back of the amp. UPS refused to honor the insurance, claiming that the (recommended by them) double boxing and loads of packing foam consituted "bad packaging."
The 9200C we have is on a mixed network, but it uses SMTP to get the PDF to the user. My issue is taht it's using an SMTP server I've been trying to retire for a couple months. And all these scanners seem to point to it by IP addr.
Sigh.
Clearly, the OP should check out what's needed and get a sample or 3 sent to his/her laptop.
But the main point is that the tech is out there for mid-sized volumes of scanning. OCR is a different game, and at 99% reliable, that means a typo every few lines.
Not sure why this was worth/. rather than a simple comp.soemthing.scanning news question.
We have one at work. You put in a pile of papers, tell it "go" and it emails a PDF of each to you. I've been struggling without a manual to reconfigure it a bit.
Cheap? Dunno. It was just there. In any sort of volume though, the cost drops precipitously (cheaper that you doing a flatbed scanner!).
Check out something like that (or indeed that) used, use it, resell it. Or new, then use/resell. Or get the school to buy it.
If this is a continuous thing, then all the better to own.
XML, basically, allows you to define your own "language" within it. That language is what they are endeavoring to patent. Which is just annoying. And off topic.
which might be part of why there are SO FEW good managers for named (the binary via the config file) and DNS (the data within zones).
There are things that WANT to do it, but they are few and far between.
Me? I find that XML is often a hammer and oh, look at all the nails! This one is a nail.
Mostly, you're right. It's GREAT for many config files. It's easy to parse, it's non-binary, the structure is self describing and it's EASY to present forms for managing something via web or curses or GUI.
And that's a win.
I'm tired of writing tools where each tool has to be intimate with the details of a config file and application. I'd rather be familiar with the DTD and use the "meta data" available. It doesn't make apps automatic, but it sure makes it easier to manage them.
A stylesheet can easily convert managable XML data file into an inetd.conf file. (trivially easily).
And perl/php/java can easily read in and write out XML files. My program just has to deal with the data structure that's been read in.
Now, that said... XML is wordy and large.
DNS (not BIND, DNS) struggles with large anyway. It's an ugly ugly hack/misuse to shove XML into several TXT records. Anyone remember trying to get PGP keys into DNS? We should it would be a great way to distribute them at least internally (where we controlled all the DNS servers). But TXT records won't HOLD a 1200 character blob.
Doh!
Again, we're looking for an LDAP type solution or at least in need of some infrastructure tools beyond DNS's hostfile replacement capabilities.
And yet oddly, I was just watching an old charlie chan movie this past weekend. And there was Jar Jar. The faithful, yet obsequous negro servant. Oooh, watch those darkie eyes grow when there's a NOISE coming from the crypt. Lets all laugh while he does that colored run from the scene.
Those were filmed in times where racism was common, if not accepted. The stereotypes of asians, blacks, jews and other groups go back CENTURIES. And have often been used to excuse violence against those races. Hell, the penalties implemented when white kills black are statistically significantly less than when black kills white. AT least we don't lynch anymore;)
Have you ever seen a person who talks and acts like Jar-Jar?
Er, no. AT that would be where it's a STEREOTYPE. Add "based upon race" and you can move to Racist stereotype
When the alternative could be good actors... oh that's right. Even Alec Guiness, one of the finest actors of the century, came of as stilted and wooden in the Star Wars franchise.
It's got something else in common with that early Griffith film too:
Shallow characters made up of racist stereotypes.
But somehow, I don't suppose star wars fans will go on to form a new KKK type thing. Though lynching Jar Jar after the first one would have been good for us all.
And no, Lucas will not be getting a "hollywood mansion" (below). He's quite not enamoured of Hollywood. Part of why he moved to Marin, gave up his DGA card, etc. The union rules were also part of the hassle of getting other directors on some other episodes.
(he burned his card or something after "strikes back" and he was fined for not having the director's name before the narrative crawl. Neither he or the director wanted it, but rules is rules.
God it scares me that I know this. (on the plus side, I can't NAME the director without looking to imdb. And I won't).
It's rare but it happens. I've seen it with partitions just a couple times in 15 years. On Solaris, SunOS, BSD (all FFS1 without softupdates or much of the "since 2000" work.
One symptom was a box that was at 86% but couldn't write more files. It took a while to figure that out (at 11PM over the phone with a semi-frantic customer).
There is defrag software, but I've gotten around it by rsync'ing to another partition (or was it tar....)
Back on topic, I find HFS interesting, but until it's actually running on more than an Apple machine, it's mainly irrelevant. I dunno if it's part of what Apple made Open in Darwin, but it's still a 1 OS pony.
I'd much RATHER have FFS2 (with snapshots) in OS X. Or at least an understanding that "Makefile" and "makefile" are not the same file.
But it's not a BSD kernel, so there's more work involved.
As I recall, it was an announcement but Gary Kildall with backing from WordPerfect, Lotus and other app developers to make a (beefier improved) GEM for DOS.
What! Someone else is going to make money from MY OS! spake the Bill.
And so they announce Windows! "It's almost ready in fact. It will be out in 12 months or so." It was 24 or 30 months as I recall. But that announcement stopped all competing development.
And Windows 2 was still "run time" or "developer" for a lot more money.
We ALSO had, before Windows, DesqView which allowed DOS lovers to do all sorts of things.
Microsoft would just like you to believe they were the first, best or anything but an "also ran" that had Microsofts 200lb Gorilla behind it (they've grown since).
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SEVERAL PCs for under $600. 2GHz or faster - certainly enough for email/IM and word processing. Monitors are effectively free these days (I can get 17" monitors for nothing or Or he can get a G4/G5 tower for a $1300 or more.
or an ibook for > $1000.
Or the old iMac/new eMac. A console/all in one, you're stuck with it for $800.
Mr Steve, sir? Can we have a basic tower box with enough ram to not swap OSX all the time for UNDER $800? Please?
And if your folks are working on the OS, I understand that the graphics are all tricked out, but how come my 40MHz/64MB color NextStation is still pretty quick compared with my 400MHz/512MB G3 laptop running OS X? (esp when said laptop flies running BSD).
One might also offer that certain Apollo (1) folks might have not wanted their TEST FLIGHT to go deeply wrong.
Rockets are dangerous. Space flight is dangerous. This isn't a run to the 7-11. So far, NASA and the US have been excessively successful in space flight.
I acknowledge that an E450 in use today (per the article) is a dog compared to most intel boxes of 2 years ago. It was MARGINALLY better than the Intel boxes of 1998 (and lagged most of their Unix competitors. Now, when we get to $30,000 for the thing in the first place, bang/buck was pretty low.
By and large, any 1 or 2-way Sun (even the Ultra 3's) are dogs compared to their era equiv hardware. AT the time of E450 introduction, there wasn't a lot of good AMD/Intel 4-way hardware.
However, price similar Alphas and SGI did kick sun's butt.
Sun hasn't LED the performance pack in a long long long time. This goes back to the SPARCStation 2 era. It was an issue with science and engineering folks then. When the SPARCStation 5 & 20 came out, for around $8k for the 20 @ 60MHz, we got a gang of Alpha's at 166MHz (AFAIR) for the same price. Since Sun was telling is to move our apps from BSD/SunOS 4 to SVR4/Solaris 2.x, we decided to move to OSF/1 on a machine that was actually FASTER. At the time, AIX and HPUX were also smoking sparcs.
But that's mainly moot.
The Suns, as they come out, tend to use PCI from a couple generations back. Until VERY recently, they didn't use ECC. Remember all those failing 400MHz E4500 CPU boards? I do. They FINALLY put in cache with ECC.
So:
No, sun is rarely at the cutting or leading edge of performance with 4 or fewer processors. SPARC chips are NOT speed demons. Now, at 12 or 16 (or 32) processors, they are unChallenged by Intel/AMD boxes. But looking at an E4800 with a gang of 900MHz chips, we wanted to add 1200MHz chips. Doh! Forklift upgrade. Sorry - gotta replace them ALL. (the 4WAY SGI that's CrayLinked to another 4WAY SGI turning it into a scalable 8WAY box, doesn't have that issue. And I can get all the 4Way SGIs I want, as I want, and make it into a bigger and bigger machine.)
But mostly on-topic: just POWERING an E450 from a car would be a challenge. Selling the sucker, buying an iPod and perhaps spending the rest on dinner and things for a cute girl wouldn't get his pics on slashdot, but it would prolly be a lot more satisfying and functional for him, all things considered.
A more interesting hack would be my Kaypro Model 2 running mp3s.
Over and out.
(Well, yeah, if the x86 were running Windows.)
On the Sun, that 66MHz PCI is just HUGE! (at least this one had 66MHz, the previous ones were 32bit/33MHz busses). (I'll expect PCI-X (133MHz) support as soon as the rest of the world is 2 generations further). We ran tests of an E420R with hardware RAID against a (2x2GHz) DL380 testing (disk) IO and IMAP (disk, network under most stress) with THOUSANDS of concurrent connections and the 420 was only a little more useful than an expensive anchor.
Sun told us, later, that we should have tested against their then current machines. "LIke what?" we asked. "Like the V880." said Sun.
I offered that I'd just *grant* that a $150,000 8 CPU sun was going to be faster than the $4,000 HP-TanPaqItal. (but maybe not with those built in "FC/AL disks").
So yes, a 4-way 500MHz Ultra II box from Sun will outperform a similar era x86. Usually by a good 30%. It will cost between 2 and 3 times more than an x86.
But the E450's era was 4+ years ago. A single processor box with a 3.2GHz processor and ECC RAM (Sun never offered ECC until this last generation, it killed us) will leave the Sun wondering what happened. The Sun will NOT saturate a SCSI/160 buss (do the math). Big Suns (4500's) have multiple PCI, but the E450's stumble along). My sub-$200 motherboards come with DDRAM and PCI-X slots. Shall we talk about IO in that context?
That said, for @work, I suffer with E450's because "They Are Suns". Even when I show that a 1CPU x86 @ 2GHz smokes it.
"and with one CPU, I can be assured that the machine won't lock up with multiple CPUs contending for one resource" (well, it's as reasonable as his thoughts about dedicated CPUs for decoding...)
As for power, a friend just hit a junk yard ambulance and got a 100A alternator (he runs emergency lights on his car going to fires). A 1000watt inverter and you could power the E450.
Just be careful turning with all those disks on. I can see either a disk crash or gyroscopes causing car crashes ;)
By the time it's installed and running, I'm still under 45 seconds.
I've done this for (to?) a number of people here. They curse popups, I walk over, get FF onto their machine, spent a second configuring cookies and tabs and popups, show them Control-T and leave.
Usually 2-3 minutes total to have them running, configured and edumucated.
It is as stable as IE or more. Unfo, our very large company isn't a fan of HTML so several of the web pages look like crap or don't work at all without ActiveX.
Me? My internal web page emits a short loop of the smurf song .wav if you're using IE. Otherwise, it's HTML 4.01 compliant.
I push that following standards in HTML is critical because it would be bad practice and damaging to shareholder value to lock ourselves into a single vendor solution. Especially when it's so unnecessary and so possible to write correct HTML that allows choice and allows the IT department to choose the BEST solution for the client rather than be forced into the ONLY solution.
Use HTML, use browsers which support HTML and work for you and don't have massive holes to be patched every week.
MS stopped developing IE in large part once Netscape shipwrecked. Mozilla was close to an Open Source shipwreck but for the commitement of several Netscape employees who knew the code well enough to start getitng something that people could contribute too. In the last 18 months or so, it's been advancing nicely. Hopefully, MS won't notice and will keep doing nothing.
No, it does this through a protocol. Likely rendezvous. It requires a new version of iTunes. Which likely has the other side of the rendezvous protocol.
SO, as I said: You plug it in and [have itunes 4.6 running]. "hit it with" sort of implies packets going between the two, even if it means no buttons. But "too easy" with apple often means "insanely painful to debug." [not remotely as painful or common as anything with windows, but there is no "itunes -d" command].
I'm just hoping that we can figure out what it is because I don't RUN an apple server nor do I plan to. My mp3s are happily on an open source box (no binaries I didn't compile myself) and I'd like to feed the device from that.
Where MS talked about zero config devices, Apple has put out Rendezvous. As an IETF standard. Which means that I have tools for it. On FreeBSD. A little work in /usr/ports (like "make install" - oh that's hard), and I can play with Rendezvous devices.
One presumes that configuring it will be more towards "$Mom can do it" than the typical Windows
"Wait until a full moon; reconfigure your interrupts so the devices are found alphabetically; swing the chicken innards over the heat sync and reboot 13 times while chanting the Rolling Stones verse: 'You make a grown man cry' 13 times backwards at the stroke of midnight."
Instead, I'll suspect you'll do something like plug it in, hit it with a web browser or even iTunes 4.6 and say "find new device" and it will autoconfigure.
*I* just want to know if I can auto conf it from FreeBSD and feed it tunes from a BSD box.
And stunningly, apple didn't make it $250.
The optical jack avoids several of the ground loop and other issues I might have.
My wallwart solution - 15 years ago doing pro-audio with lots of power strips - was to take a little 2 prong extension cord - the kind with the 3 plugs on the end; cut it down to be about 16", put a new plug on it and have a thing that held 2 wall warts, velco'd together that could sit outside the effects box - self wrapped around the handle and be out of my way and secure. Wall warts needn't be attached to the wall anymore. A $3 cord can handle 2. Work with it.
Personally, I'm tired of voltage/device. I'm tired of different PLUG per device. I have a large 12VDC power supply powering a couple switches, a soekris and a couple other things. I now seek out 12VDC things.
To develop Word, Microsoft has ... well the same (plus people to take ALL the F'ing suggestions for features and make sure everything gets added).
Sendmail took one guy, mainly, a semester or so and then a core of MAYBE 20 people to develop it.
Postfix was, in large part, a 1 person project.
Except for what Linus took from Minix (kidding!), a kernel was developed, without networking code, by one guy.
We can mutter about UIs and Gnome/KDE (hell, X11).
If anything can fall under the Million Monkey's Factor of Open Source, maps can.
I'm at an office where it takes dozens and dozens of people hours and meetings to add a line to a sendmail access file. But sometimes, I just do it in 12 seconds and get forgiveness later.
Anything after Steamboat Willie and the creation of one "Michael Mouse" by Uncle Walt will retain perpetual copyright.
However streets are, mainly, publicly owned/maintained/created. Surveys by municipalities are in the public domain (tax payer and all that) - just like most NASA images.
Being able to USE that data, however, requires the use of some standard markup - which probably exists, but I'm no cartographer - with information about direction, intersections and angles of intersections and, perhaps speed.
This would be how your Nav System calmly says "make slight right turn onto BLAH"
Of interest to me would be a system where certain data would be modifyable. Eg. a 65MPH road might be modified to 20 MPH depending on current traffic conditions. You'd also want a class on each road so you could add a "never take" type of conditional if, say, you're biking and really don't want to be on a 12 lane interstate :) Trucks could also use routing for only roads that don't ban trucks.
Second year CS students would recognize any routing algorithms made from that data.
One might think that if data didn't exist, then state/federal/DARPA funding might be available for an open project like this. Unless they lock your ass in Guantanimo under the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act for resembling someone conspiring to think about perhaps doing something that displeases the Right Reverend John Ashcroft and the Ministry of Home Defense.
Lies, damn lies, statistics (and all that).
It's a pretty picture with pretty colors, but thats about all.
In the US, around 50% of my income goes to taxes. Property, income, sales, etc. I don't really drink or use tobacco, so no surge there.
Then I get to try to find health insurance (over $1k/month for a family of 3), I try to save some money for when I'm old because the elderly in the US are largely in poverty conditions.
Advanced countries understand that for its citizens don't have health care coverage, that they mainly see doctors for Emergency care. A child with advanced flu symptoms visiting the ER at 8PM costs DOZENS of times more than treating that child when the symptoms are early or getting that child a flu shot if available.
High medical costs lead to poverty which leads to no health coverage which leads to high medical costs.
But as long as the rich are doing better than they were 20 years ago, it's all ok.
Unless the folks up north have reinstituted customs at Hadrian's Wall, you're comparison is pretty damn irrelevant. (similar to: "I just carried a box 2km over to a friend's for free and it took 30 minutes.")
Unless this shipping happened in the last month, Poland was not part of the EU. DHL expedites quite a bit better (for a presume package) than the Post.
I've had international packages get bogged for a month going across borders ("No, really. It's a SPARC 10. It's worth $0 and it's a gift. I will not pay taxes on a 12 year old machine. I don't care that you found out that it once sold for US$10k; that was 12 years ago. How about I trade you a a Mac IIfx or a '486 and we'll call it even?")
20 years ago, as FedEX was starting and had limited coverage, someone I once met has a bad experience.
Therefore, FedEX sucks.
Does that about cover it?
As I sat hitting reload, in 1996, on the FedEX web site, to see where a package I'd shipped was, I saw that, suddenly it had been signed for. I called. the guy was astounded. "Wait, I can still see the truck driving away. How did you know I just got it?"
In an effort to get this thread on topic again, I'll suggest that Area 51 is a research area of the US Gov't in an effort to design air vehicles to replace the USPost Office.
Because the USPS is the only entity that's better armed than the army, and far more motivated to use said arms, the feds must keep Area 51 top secret, lest the USPS make a move and take over the gov't.
Back off topic, no, I don't use United Pulverizing Service any more. When my friend and boss ebayed a well packed guitar amp and it came dead, we opened it up. It had been dropped, buy our guitar techs guess at least 10 feet to afix the speaker magnet to the back of the amp. UPS refused to honor the insurance, claiming that the (recommended by them) double boxing and loads of packing foam consituted "bad packaging."
Sigh.
Clearly, the OP should check out what's needed and get a sample or 3 sent to his/her laptop.
But the main point is that the tech is out there for mid-sized volumes of scanning. OCR is a different game, and at 99% reliable, that means a typo every few lines.
Not sure why this was worth /. rather than a simple comp.soemthing.scanning news question.
Cheap? Dunno. It was just there. In any sort of volume though, the cost drops precipitously (cheaper that you doing a flatbed scanner!).
Check out something like that (or indeed that) used, use it, resell it. Or new, then use/resell. Or get the school to buy it.
If this is a continuous thing, then all the better to own.
To steal from a news.com.com.com.com.com site The proposed patents apparently seek to protect methods other applications could use to interpret the XML dialect, or schema, Office uses to describe and organize information in documents. Microsoft recently agreed to publish those schemas and is looking at opening other chunks of Office code.
XML, basically, allows you to define your own "language" within it. That language is what they are endeavoring to patent. Which is just annoying. And off topic.
which might be part of why there are SO FEW good managers for named (the binary via the config file) and DNS (the data within zones). There are things that WANT to do it, but they are few and far between.
Me? I find that XML is often a hammer and oh, look at all the nails! This one is a nail.
Mostly, you're right. It's GREAT for many config files. It's easy to parse, it's non-binary, the structure is self describing and it's EASY to present forms for managing something via web or curses or GUI.
And that's a win.
I'm tired of writing tools where each tool has to be intimate with the details of a config file and application. I'd rather be familiar with the DTD and use the "meta data" available. It doesn't make apps automatic, but it sure makes it easier to manage them.
A stylesheet can easily convert managable XML data file into an inetd.conf file. (trivially easily).
And perl/php/java can easily read in and write out XML files. My program just has to deal with the data structure that's been read in.
Now, that said... XML is wordy and large.
DNS (not BIND, DNS) struggles with large anyway. It's an ugly ugly hack/misuse to shove XML into several TXT records. Anyone remember trying to get PGP keys into DNS? We should it would be a great way to distribute them at least internally (where we controlled all the DNS servers). But TXT records won't HOLD a 1200 character blob.
Doh!
Again, we're looking for an LDAP type solution or at least in need of some infrastructure tools beyond DNS's hostfile replacement capabilities.
Try reading
Those were filmed in times where racism was common, if not accepted. The stereotypes of asians, blacks, jews and other groups go back CENTURIES. And have often been used to excuse violence against those races. Hell, the penalties implemented when white kills black are statistically significantly less than when black kills white. AT least we don't lynch anymore ;)
Have you ever seen a person who talks and acts like Jar-Jar?
Er, no. AT that would be where it's a STEREOTYPE. Add "based upon race" and you can move to Racist stereotype
When the alternative could be good actors... oh that's right. Even Alec Guiness, one of the finest actors of the century, came of as stilted and wooden in the Star Wars franchise.
you can also use UFS
Um, except that it's the UFS in FreeBSD 3.x. Which is about 3 years behind during some very ACTIVE programming years.
So apple is missing:
Shallow characters made up of racist stereotypes.
But somehow, I don't suppose star wars fans will go on to form a new KKK type thing. Though lynching Jar Jar after the first one would have been good for us all.
And no, Lucas will not be getting a "hollywood mansion" (below). He's quite not enamoured of Hollywood. Part of why he moved to Marin, gave up his DGA card, etc. The union rules were also part of the hassle of getting other directors on some other episodes.
(he burned his card or something after "strikes back" and he was fined for not having the director's name before the narrative crawl. Neither he or the director wanted it, but rules is rules.
God it scares me that I know this. (on the plus side, I can't NAME the director without looking to imdb. And I won't).
One symptom was a box that was at 86% but couldn't write more files. It took a while to figure that out (at 11PM over the phone with a semi-frantic customer).
There is defrag software, but I've gotten around it by rsync'ing to another partition (or was it tar....)
Back on topic, I find HFS interesting, but until it's actually running on more than an Apple machine, it's mainly irrelevant. I dunno if it's part of what Apple made Open in Darwin, but it's still a 1 OS pony.
I'd much RATHER have FFS2 (with snapshots) in OS X. Or at least an understanding that "Makefile" and "makefile" are not the same file.
But it's not a BSD kernel, so there's more work involved.
What! Someone else is going to make money from MY OS! spake the Bill.
And so they announce Windows! "It's almost ready in fact. It will be out in 12 months or so." It was 24 or 30 months as I recall. But that announcement stopped all competing development.
And Windows 2 was still "run time" or "developer" for a lot more money.
We ALSO had, before Windows, DesqView which allowed DOS lovers to do all sorts of things.
Microsoft would just like you to believe they were the first, best or anything but an "also ran" that had Microsofts 200lb Gorilla behind it (they've grown since).