I think e-mail would be defined as having two features, similar to the postal service. In a properly configured system, a message would never be lost. It would either be delivered or returned to the sender. It would also allow routing through multiple systems (and not necessarily TCP/IP ones) in order to arrive at its destination.
Instant messaging doesn't count as e-mail because most IM systems don't guarantee delivery, so you're lucky if your failed message doesn't get lost forever. They are also centralised, and even Jabber servers connect directly to one another so the concept of routing messages through many mailhubs doesn't generally apply (of course it's possible to do all this, but most IM services don't.)
1. I didn't say my friend demands that someone should donate their time to make a better OS screen reader. He's merely pointing out that it sucks. You can be a programmer, a Linux geek, and an OS fan and still point out flaws in the system.
That's true, but I just find it irritating when the people pointing out the flaws are the same people who are perfectly capable of fixing them. Why not just fix them to benefit yourself and others?
2. Really, all it takes to write a decent screen reader is to be a programmer and a Linux geek? So I take it the reason Gimp doesn't come close to a lot of Photoshop's features is that there are few Linux programmers who like photography? And the reason OS OCR software sucks is that people who like scanning stuff are not the ones who care for Open Source? So the people who work on Orca are either not Linux geeks or are not programmers, as according to your claim any one who is both can make a better one?
I am sure any shortcomings in Orca are primarily due to a lack of resources, since like much open source, most people would be working on it in their spare time. So any help your friend could give would help improve the software, and since he is blind, I am sure his contribution would be more beneficial than a sighted person (since he already knows exactly what the shortcomings are.)
The reason GIMP doesn't come close to Photoshop is because there are few Linux programmers with the mathematical skill and motivation to research and design the complex algorithms required to manipulate the images. The reason OCR sucks is similar - there aren't enough programmers with the skill set needed to do complex image manipulation. But the main requirement to write a screen reader is to know what its users want, and a blind person already knows that intimately. So your friend is in the perfect situation to help write the world's best screen reader, except he doesn't want to.
Which is suprising given you refer to him as a Linux geek, because one thing about Linux geeks is that they are passionate about making Linux the best OS there is. So if your friend doesn't really care about improving Linux for other blind users, despite being in the perfect position to do so, I don't think he's really a true Linux geek. Maybe just the lesser title of 'enthusiast':-)
Notwithstanding the other comments, if your co-worker really was a Linux geek, and a programmer, one of the first things you would think he'd do is write some decent screen-reading software for Linux. Given the tiny number of blind programmers compared to sighted ones, who else is going to write the software? The other comments here have already pointed out that most sighted people don't know how to design something for the blind. Maybe that's why every time he tries the software it hasn't improved...it sounds a bit mean, but you kind of only have yourself to blame if you have all the skills and ability required to solve a problem, but then choose not to.
Let's see:
-The toolbar can't be customized
-No real AdBlock
-Extensions are glorified userscripts
-Installs Google Updater
-Memory usage goes through the roof with a lot of tabs opened (higher than Firefox could ever hope it to go)
Don't worry, I'm sure Mozilla are working on getting these features into Firefox as we speak!
Can't really call it a developer laptop if said developer is unable to customise their own BIOS code. I'm still waiting to buy a machine I can use for development work that can also run Coreboot.
Of course this is likely because the phone system has very good surge protection, so a surge entered your equipment through the power lines, then found the phone line the easiest place to exit, killing the DSL connection on the way out.
That's part of what I can't understand about Mozilla's attitude. They say all these crappy features are fine, because you can just install extensions to revert to previous behaviour. But then they say you shouldn't install extensions because they're badly written and cause problems with the browser. Honestly, as soon as Chrome figure out how to scroll under Linux without using 100% CPU, I'm switching. I hate the UI, but I'm 95% of the way there already with Firefox so it won't be that much of a stretch.
No, last I checked the cards have six DisplayPort sockets on the back. But there's a big price premium for them, and it is much cheaper to buy multiple dualhead cards. It's a moot point though, according to the FAQ Linux support is only in the planning stage so it's not really an option for Linux PCs.
However if DP daisychaining was to work, presumably you'd need two sockets on each monitor - DP in and DP out/passthrough. I have two screens with DisplayPort inputs on them, but neither of them have an out/passthrough socket so I don't think I could daisychain them anyway.
Multicard multimonitors work fine (probably on most platforms) for simple things like advertising displays that only run one or two programs, but as soon as you try to do anything complex - full screen single-screen OpenGL, multimonitor OpenGL, changing screen resolution, etc. it quickly becomes apparent there's not a huge amount of testing going on for that kind of set up. Application support is lacking too. Only a few of the more popular apps let you select which screen to use when you want to go full screen for example - you'd think it'd stick to whichever monitor the window was on, but usually it just uses whichever screen has pixel (0,0) on it. And good luck if you want a full screen program spread across only a subset of your monitors...
XRandR, Xinerama, TwinView, you'd think between all that something would work for you.
Thanks for the reply. I'm currently using Xinerama (without TwinView, as some of my screens are in portrait mode) with the "Awesome" window manager which works fine (apart from the nVidia bugs like OpenGL freezing on one monitor until you switch virtual desktop on another monitor), but I was thinking more of the physical connection for four screens. AFAIK Intel don't make discrete graphics cards so it sounds like I'd only be able to go triple-head before I have to pick from one of the closed source camps ("closed source" referring to officially supported manufacturer's drivers.)
When I go looking for a Linux machine the very first thing I look to check-off is "Intel graphics"? Yup, then it's a buy.
I've decided to do the same with my next PC, after growing tired of the lacking multimonitor support under nVidia (sure it's usable, but still very buggy.) But what are Intel graphics like with multiple monitors? I currently have four screens connected via two nVidia discrete cards (no onboard graphics) so how could I achieve this with Intel? The fabled DisplayPort daisy-chaining hasn't seem to have materialised, and the one-to-many DP adapters are still stuck at very low resolutions.
it seems whenever a major multinational corporation or government entity is charged with piracy, they arent. theyre simply "out of compliance" or "underlicensed" or some other equally innocuous amorphity they can escape through hiring a compliance officer, cutting a comparatively insignificant check, and saying theyre sorry. when a private citizen is charged with piracy its almost always widespread, intractable, correlated to violent terrorism, and prosecuted at the fervor of a rape case. its exactly the opposite of what it should be.
Not from a copyright holder's financial standpoint. If you sue a private citizen you won't get much money out of the endeavour, so the idea is to make piracy seem so bad individuals won't do it, because it's not worth suing them all. But when you sue a company for piracy, they are very likely to send you a lot of money. So having businesses pirate software is a great way to get more out of them than you would with normal licence fees (since they are probably using more copies than they would have willingly purchased.)
FYI my Unikoo one (also RTL2832, arrived two days ago) can tune below 30MHz and just over 2GHz. The tuner chip actually goes down to 0Hz but the sensitivity seems to drop off outside the advertised range (i.e. strong signals only. I can tune into the normal AM radio band at ~1MHz but can't see any signals.)
But on that note, does anyone know where SDR newbies like myself can go to discuss these things? There are a bunch of extremely narrowband transmissions all over the place and I have no idea what they are and I'm hoping someone else might know. I'm also looking for a program like HDSDR that runs under Linux, and I have a ton of other questions that seasoned hams will probably just roll their eyes at, so it would be nice to find a forum or someplace that is beginner friendly!
FWIW I have three 8" floppy drives and am happy to help anyone try to recover their old 8" disks with a low-level read from a Kryoflux. Just ask on their forums.
It's interesting, I used to think the same thing but then we switched to Win7 at work. After a few months getting used to its quirks, I have to say it's much nicer than XP. Reading your comment reminded me of when Windows 98 came out and people were saying you'll never get them to stop using DOS.
And of course I would be weirded out entirely based on the medical evidence that a significant number of people take on personality traits of the heart donor. Granted it's a long way off scientific proof, but there's enough there that I would reserve judgement until it was investigated thoroughly. Nothing at all to do with belief in 'magic', but rather understanding the limits of my and humanity's knowledge.
...but it is trivial to generate an unsolvable free cell board. Just start by laying aces in the first row, then continue with kings, queens, jacks, tens, in descending order until you run out of cards. That is one example of many provably unsolvable free cell boards and proves the Microsoft help text to be wrong for free cell in general. You don't need Windows to play free cell.
No, but the help text only referred to the Windows version, not Freecell in general. Their point was that the algorithm that they use to generate games only produces solvable ones.
I'm not sure if it still works in recent Windows versions, but with XP and earlier there was an easter egg where you could request game -1 or -2 and it would present a neatly ordered and unsolvable game, just as you describe. I guess this was to prove that an unsolvable Freecell is easy to create, which makes their algorithm all the more special as it only produces solvable games. I am curious how they achieve this.
I think using normal stars would be much more difficult, if you're talking about navigation beyond the solar system. Things like brightness will change considerably as you get closer, and motion will appear to increase too. I think measuring the pulse rate would provide the easiest means to identify a given star. Doing this for a bunch of them and fitting it to a known table would be relatively straightforward. I wouldn't be surprised if you could even figure out the current date and time based on the pattern being emitted by a bunch of pulsars.
Google only caches the page text, it still loads the images from the original source. If you click on the 'text-only version' link at the top right then it skips any external content and loads almost instantly.
Just for the record, I too dislike the trend of explanations being posted as videos, but the reason why I linked to a video in this case was because of the nature of the topic. Reading about software defined radio is one thing, but actually seeing the analysis take place in real time is far more interesting in video form. Watching what the radio waves do, and how they sound different as you tune in and out of different signals is something you can only get by watching a video.
Had it been just about anything else I would have gladly omitted a video link.
Damn Small Linux is pretty featureful (especially for recovery) and comes in at under 64MB, which would easily fit in a cheap onboard flash chip. So it seems the reasons why you can't have this sort of thing in ROM aren't technical or financial.
Of course the fact that you could boot it off a USB stick on your keyring means there's an easy workaround...
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If it's 802.11b/g you can also run it on channel 14, which many devices will see but can't connect to unless they've been told they're in Japan.
I think e-mail would be defined as having two features, similar to the postal service. In a properly configured system, a message would never be lost. It would either be delivered or returned to the sender. It would also allow routing through multiple systems (and not necessarily TCP/IP ones) in order to arrive at its destination.
Instant messaging doesn't count as e-mail because most IM systems don't guarantee delivery, so you're lucky if your failed message doesn't get lost forever. They are also centralised, and even Jabber servers connect directly to one another so the concept of routing messages through many mailhubs doesn't generally apply (of course it's possible to do all this, but most IM services don't.)
1. I didn't say my friend demands that someone should donate their time to make a better OS screen reader. He's merely pointing out that it sucks. You can be a programmer, a Linux geek, and an OS fan and still point out flaws in the system.
That's true, but I just find it irritating when the people pointing out the flaws are the same people who are perfectly capable of fixing them. Why not just fix them to benefit yourself and others?
2. Really, all it takes to write a decent screen reader is to be a programmer and a Linux geek? So I take it the reason Gimp doesn't come close to a lot of Photoshop's features is that there are few Linux programmers who like photography? And the reason OS OCR software sucks is that people who like scanning stuff are not the ones who care for Open Source? So the people who work on Orca are either not Linux geeks or are not programmers, as according to your claim any one who is both can make a better one?
I am sure any shortcomings in Orca are primarily due to a lack of resources, since like much open source, most people would be working on it in their spare time. So any help your friend could give would help improve the software, and since he is blind, I am sure his contribution would be more beneficial than a sighted person (since he already knows exactly what the shortcomings are.)
The reason GIMP doesn't come close to Photoshop is because there are few Linux programmers with the mathematical skill and motivation to research and design the complex algorithms required to manipulate the images. The reason OCR sucks is similar - there aren't enough programmers with the skill set needed to do complex image manipulation. But the main requirement to write a screen reader is to know what its users want, and a blind person already knows that intimately. So your friend is in the perfect situation to help write the world's best screen reader, except he doesn't want to.
Which is suprising given you refer to him as a Linux geek, because one thing about Linux geeks is that they are passionate about making Linux the best OS there is. So if your friend doesn't really care about improving Linux for other blind users, despite being in the perfect position to do so, I don't think he's really a true Linux geek. Maybe just the lesser title of 'enthusiast' :-)
Notwithstanding the other comments, if your co-worker really was a Linux geek, and a programmer, one of the first things you would think he'd do is write some decent screen-reading software for Linux. Given the tiny number of blind programmers compared to sighted ones, who else is going to write the software? The other comments here have already pointed out that most sighted people don't know how to design something for the blind. Maybe that's why every time he tries the software it hasn't improved...it sounds a bit mean, but you kind of only have yourself to blame if you have all the skills and ability required to solve a problem, but then choose not to.
Let's see:
-The toolbar can't be customized
-No real AdBlock
-Extensions are glorified userscripts
-Installs Google Updater
-Memory usage goes through the roof with a lot of tabs opened (higher than Firefox could ever hope it to go)
Don't worry, I'm sure Mozilla are working on getting these features into Firefox as we speak!
To be fair, at least some of the compromised systems in Iran weren't connected to the Internet.
Can't really call it a developer laptop if said developer is unable to customise their own BIOS code. I'm still waiting to buy a machine I can use for development work that can also run Coreboot.
Of course this is likely because the phone system has very good surge protection, so a surge entered your equipment through the power lines, then found the phone line the easiest place to exit, killing the DSL connection on the way out.
That's part of what I can't understand about Mozilla's attitude. They say all these crappy features are fine, because you can just install extensions to revert to previous behaviour. But then they say you shouldn't install extensions because they're badly written and cause problems with the browser. Honestly, as soon as Chrome figure out how to scroll under Linux without using 100% CPU, I'm switching. I hate the UI, but I'm 95% of the way there already with Firefox so it won't be that much of a stretch.
AMD Eyefinity does this, right?
No, last I checked the cards have six DisplayPort sockets on the back. But there's a big price premium for them, and it is much cheaper to buy multiple dualhead cards. It's a moot point though, according to the FAQ Linux support is only in the planning stage so it's not really an option for Linux PCs.
However if DP daisychaining was to work, presumably you'd need two sockets on each monitor - DP in and DP out/passthrough. I have two screens with DisplayPort inputs on them, but neither of them have an out/passthrough socket so I don't think I could daisychain them anyway.
Multicard multimonitors work fine (probably on most platforms) for simple things like advertising displays that only run one or two programs, but as soon as you try to do anything complex - full screen single-screen OpenGL, multimonitor OpenGL, changing screen resolution, etc. it quickly becomes apparent there's not a huge amount of testing going on for that kind of set up. Application support is lacking too. Only a few of the more popular apps let you select which screen to use when you want to go full screen for example - you'd think it'd stick to whichever monitor the window was on, but usually it just uses whichever screen has pixel (0,0) on it. And good luck if you want a full screen program spread across only a subset of your monitors...
XRandR, Xinerama, TwinView, you'd think between all that something would work for you.
Thanks for the reply. I'm currently using Xinerama (without TwinView, as some of my screens are in portrait mode) with the "Awesome" window manager which works fine (apart from the nVidia bugs like OpenGL freezing on one monitor until you switch virtual desktop on another monitor), but I was thinking more of the physical connection for four screens. AFAIK Intel don't make discrete graphics cards so it sounds like I'd only be able to go triple-head before I have to pick from one of the closed source camps ("closed source" referring to officially supported manufacturer's drivers.)
When I go looking for a Linux machine the very first thing I look to check-off is "Intel graphics"? Yup, then it's a buy.
I've decided to do the same with my next PC, after growing tired of the lacking multimonitor support under nVidia (sure it's usable, but still very buggy.) But what are Intel graphics like with multiple monitors? I currently have four screens connected via two nVidia discrete cards (no onboard graphics) so how could I achieve this with Intel? The fabled DisplayPort daisy-chaining hasn't seem to have materialised, and the one-to-many DP adapters are still stuck at very low resolutions.
it seems whenever a major multinational corporation or government entity is charged with piracy, they arent. theyre simply "out of compliance" or "underlicensed" or some other equally innocuous amorphity they can escape through hiring a compliance officer, cutting a comparatively insignificant check, and saying theyre sorry. when a private citizen is charged with piracy its almost always widespread, intractable, correlated to violent terrorism, and prosecuted at the fervor of a rape case. its exactly the opposite of what it should be.
Not from a copyright holder's financial standpoint. If you sue a private citizen you won't get much money out of the endeavour, so the idea is to make piracy seem so bad individuals won't do it, because it's not worth suing them all. But when you sue a company for piracy, they are very likely to send you a lot of money. So having businesses pirate software is a great way to get more out of them than you would with normal licence fees (since they are probably using more copies than they would have willingly purchased.)
FYI my Unikoo one (also RTL2832, arrived two days ago) can tune below 30MHz and just over 2GHz. The tuner chip actually goes down to 0Hz but the sensitivity seems to drop off outside the advertised range (i.e. strong signals only. I can tune into the normal AM radio band at ~1MHz but can't see any signals.)
But on that note, does anyone know where SDR newbies like myself can go to discuss these things? There are a bunch of extremely narrowband transmissions all over the place and I have no idea what they are and I'm hoping someone else might know. I'm also looking for a program like HDSDR that runs under Linux, and I have a ton of other questions that seasoned hams will probably just roll their eyes at, so it would be nice to find a forum or someplace that is beginner friendly!
FWIW I have three 8" floppy drives and am happy to help anyone try to recover their old 8" disks with a low-level read from a Kryoflux. Just ask on their forums.
It's interesting, I used to think the same thing but then we switched to Win7 at work. After a few months getting used to its quirks, I have to say it's much nicer than XP. Reading your comment reminded me of when Windows 98 came out and people were saying you'll never get them to stop using DOS.
And of course I would be weirded out entirely based on the medical evidence that a significant number of people take on personality traits of the heart donor. Granted it's a long way off scientific proof, but there's enough there that I would reserve judgement until it was investigated thoroughly. Nothing at all to do with belief in 'magic', but rather understanding the limits of my and humanity's knowledge.
...but it is trivial to generate an unsolvable free cell board. Just start by laying aces in the first row, then continue with kings, queens, jacks, tens, in descending order until you run out of cards. That is one example of many provably unsolvable free cell boards and proves the Microsoft help text to be wrong for free cell in general. You don't need Windows to play free cell.
No, but the help text only referred to the Windows version, not Freecell in general. Their point was that the algorithm that they use to generate games only produces solvable ones.
I'm not sure if it still works in recent Windows versions, but with XP and earlier there was an easter egg where you could request game -1 or -2 and it would present a neatly ordered and unsolvable game, just as you describe. I guess this was to prove that an unsolvable Freecell is easy to create, which makes their algorithm all the more special as it only produces solvable games. I am curious how they achieve this.
Isn't this akin to looking for your lost keys under the street light because its brighter there?
If you've got no idea at all where your keys are then why not? Might as well look in all the easy places first.
I think using normal stars would be much more difficult, if you're talking about navigation beyond the solar system. Things like brightness will change considerably as you get closer, and motion will appear to increase too. I think measuring the pulse rate would provide the easiest means to identify a given star. Doing this for a bunch of them and fitting it to a known table would be relatively straightforward. I wouldn't be surprised if you could even figure out the current date and time based on the pattern being emitted by a bunch of pulsars.
Google only caches the page text, it still loads the images from the original source. If you click on the 'text-only version' link at the top right then it skips any external content and loads almost instantly.
Just for the record, I too dislike the trend of explanations being posted as videos, but the reason why I linked to a video in this case was because of the nature of the topic. Reading about software defined radio is one thing, but actually seeing the analysis take place in real time is far more interesting in video form. Watching what the radio waves do, and how they sound different as you tune in and out of different signals is something you can only get by watching a video.
Had it been just about anything else I would have gladly omitted a video link.
Damn Small Linux is pretty featureful (especially for recovery) and comes in at under 64MB, which would easily fit in a cheap onboard flash chip. So it seems the reasons why you can't have this sort of thing in ROM aren't technical or financial.
Of course the fact that you could boot it off a USB stick on your keyring means there's an easy workaround...
Graeme: "Are all your hens battery hens?"
Uncle Tom: "No. Some of them run off the mains."
-- The Goodies