Canadian citizens have to pay taxes to support their socialist government Right...socialist. And of course where you live every road is a pay road, every service is a user-pay (fire call -- pay up. Need police services? Better have your chequebook!), and the government is minimalist -- anything else is socialist.
I would have thought that Canadians of all people would know this basic fact: Most (but not all) americans know nothing of socialism (or any other form of government) and just have the media-induced "not american" => "socialist" implication instead of knowledge. Sad, really.
The points in parent comment are certainly valid, but dive in a little deeper, and it looks less promising.
Try messing with socket options or fcntl stuff. getsockopt/setsockopt are reasonably in order, but insists on having its value as a *char. This means that code from *nix will not automatically compile on Windows - if you use a C++ compiler anyway (pointer types are not compatible). Variants of fcntl for Winsock exists, but do NOT work anything like fcntl (and they shouldn't - sockets on Windows are NOT files).
A SOCKET is unsigned. Much too often I've seen networking code on *nix test for errors by checking if a socket handle is below zero. Now this never happens with an unsigned value, so at best your compiler reports this as a warning about "condition always true/false" or something. If the code checks errors by checking ==SOCKET_ERROR, it will work cleanly.
Error handling is different. As you correctly write, you should use WSAGetLastError() instead. However, WSAGetLastError() is thread specific, while errno is global. So if you expect threaded code for *nix to operate identically on Windows (given that the threading ports correctly - not too difficult, actually), you could be in for a nasty surprise. The worst part is that Windows actually provides an errno (#include <errno.h>), but it is not used for sockets-related errors - just C standard library related issues (where it has to be available for compatibility).
Most of what I describe are problems you face when porting existing code from *nix to Windows. If you just write new code, most of these issues goes away, and the problem reduces mostly to what parent comment described.
Of course, given that Mr Fawkes represented the oppressed (at the time) Roman Catholic community, was he a terrorist, or a freedom fighter?
I can see how that can be difficult to answer from way back then - the world today is much easier. Whatever side gets the backing (and funding) of the US government, is by definition the freedom fighters. And they say the world was simpler way back - pfft. Too bad there were no US government back then to sort out these delicate issues...
For years, I've wanted tooltips on reality. You know, move the mouse over a button on the desktop, and a little yellow note will appear, telling you what happens when you press the button. That would be awesome as augmented reality. Fixing the engine of your car, and uncertain what that part does? Look at it for a few seconds, and an explanation will pop up. Trying to remember the name of an uncle you haven't seen in 15 years? Tooltip glasses to the rescue! What's next - scrollbars on reality? Now THAT would be useful:-)
If they make one that degrades after a certain number of playbacks instead. Or maybe one that degrades within a year or some other ridiculous timeframe. I'd be totally against it, of course, as I am with all their other DRM/IP related moves. But it's not *that* far off to imagine them seeing this as an option to prolong their current parasitic business model, instead of embracing the online world.
Actually, Northgate made a keyboard called OmniKey Ultra, which had a small red ctrl-alt-del button on the back - next to the dip switches, it would seem, and behind a small panel. I never owned one myself, but I've heard talk of it being the uber-super-goodness in keyboards.
Even assuming he's right (and I think he's being a bit too optimistic), it will still be a LOOONG time before anyone does anything commercially viable in space. Only when someone figures out what endeavors in space that makes money we'll see real innovation to get there, driving down the cost immensely. Until then, it'll just be "space geeks" doing it just to prove it's possible.
I know that space has been profitable for some (TV satellites, for instance), but MANNED spacecrafts have so far had such ridiculously high cost that any gain would be dwarfed by that cost. I know that's part of what the X-Prize is designed to remedy, but realisticly it will take "big business" to drive down the cost.
So what can we get from manned spacecrafts that couldn't just as easily be handled by automated crafts? Science perhaps? Practically any form of production would be handled better by onboard robots, IMHO.
I've had a stoker furnace in my home for 5 years now, and it has burned a variety of waste products with great success:
Hazelnut shells
Compressed sawdust
Cherry nucleus shells
Olive oil nucleus shells
Wheat - unfit for consumption for various reasons
"Oilcakes" - byproducts from animal protein feed production
Pea byproducts
So in short, YOU can do this too - but probably not in metro areas. Get a stoker furnace, a form of storage, contact some of the local farming industries around and start heating your home with other people's waste products - safely and very economically.
Lots of farming industries produce big amounts of waste, and most of that can be converted into biofuel simply by drying and sometimes crushing/shredding.
Or get a wood shredder and go shred the wood from trees that have fallen down in storms/hurricanes/whatever hits your region the most - many people will gladly let you remove their fallen trees, and you can heat your house very economically in this way.
I remember using a great optical mouse with my university's Silicon Graphics workstations (probably Indigos, but I'm not sure - we had several lines of SGI workstations) in the early 1990'es. They were by leaps and bounds the best mice I had ever tried, and still were until I got my Cordless Mouseman Wheel from LogiTech, with the ergonomic slanted/tilted keyboard to match (Christmas gift from my wife:-). Beautiful design, batteries last very long, fits my hand perfectly, hasn't yet accumulated crud on the ball (2+ years), runs perfectly on any smooth surface, and just plain "feels right".
The weirdest mouse I ever used for some time was a handheld trackball, which was basically an inverted mouse with the ball protruding from the surface, and buttons on the end. Superb precision, but it was really cumbersome to use that hand for anything else - you'd have to put it down first. Got replaced when heavy-duty development became a daily routine.
The most amazingly brilliant mouse I ever tried was a prototype for a professional CAD mouse I reviewed some years back for a grant application. With a freely rotating wheel on top, an optical mouse below, incredible precision and phenomenal ergonomics (for either hand!) it had it ALL. I really, really hope they got a business out of that product, but sadly I lost track of them after getting another job.
Finally, the negative impact of people downloading pr0n and mp3's is not as bad as you might think. Many slashdot readers do this, and look how we turned out.[emphasis mine]
I was with you all the way to that last paragraph, dude. Was that really necessary?:o)
if it doesn't automatically move over to the re-charging unit when it's running low on power, self-recharge, and then automatically start cleaning again when fully charged, it's worthless IMO.
Are you seriously saying that not having to actually vacuum, but merely recharge and empty the thing, is worthless? The actual vacuuming is by far the most timeconsuming part of cleaning the floors.
Have you heard of the law of diminishing returns? One interpretation says that solving most of the problem is easy (and cheap), but solving the entire problem is hard (and costly). I'm pretty sure that devices such as you've required does exist (other posters refer to such units, but I have not seen specific links yet), but it probably costs WAAAY more than the lowly Roomba. Not to mention the fact that devices with more advanced capabilities - such as those mentioned by you - are more likely to fail because of unexpected situations that the developers were not given enough time to properly deal with.
I have a friend who spent a lot of money on a gaming rig, lots of RAM, powerful video card. You know what he did? He tossed his old machine, popped in his Win 98SE CD and off he went.
That actually makes sense - Win98SE is the best choice for PURE gaming, IMHO. Better gaming performance than W2K or WXP, and you don't need much from the OS when all your programs do is render monsters in 1600x1200@70fps. In fact, the best the OS can do for most games is to get out of the way. Win98SE will do that happily, while W2K/WXP most definately will NOT.
could be AWESOME if it could also be applied to the desktop.
It can - currently, there are licensing issues regarding/preventing this, but it is my understanding (could be wrong, though) that the mix-and-match technology will find it's way into future versions of Windows. Probably in a somewhat less sofisticated manner for the consumer desktop market, but if they keep the full system sitting underneath, the tech-savvy crowd (such as/.) would probably be able to perform considerable tweaking.
Embedded XP is just a highly configurable XP Pro - it will run without a hitch on a standard desktop machine.
One of the problems with windows is the inability to strip out stuff you don't need.
I don't know what Windows version you're talking about here, but it most certainly is NOT recent Windows XP Embedded (as in Embedded XP SP1 - I assume you're sufficiently on-topic to be talking about embedded Windows stuff). You can mix and match your own XP configuration, and have it contain just the pieces you need.
Don't need no steeenkin' GUI? Unselect it.
Don't need no steeenkin' webserver? Unselect it.
Don't need no steeenkin' Ethernet support? Unselect it.
The list could go on for miles - it really works quite well. There's a target designer tool where just about anything is optional, and the database for that tool is HUGE. Module inter-dependencies are handled automatically, and the size of the target image easily available. You could argue that MS would need that tool, since no-one can figure out how their dependencies work anyway (and I'd agree with you:-), but that's besides the point. The point is that it's SOOOO easy to select/unselect options.
And no, I'm not affiliated with MS in any way - I've just actually USED Embedded XP, and that brings a somewhat different view on things.
Want to burn calories while sitting in front of your computer at work? How about shedding those extra pounds while powering your TV at the same time?
This could just as easily be accomplished with an exercise-bike running a generator, which again charges a battery powering the computer/TV. It has the added advantage of increasing muscle size at the same time. Oh, and it's available right now too.
Much less geekiness, far more realistic - even healthy. But these three factors alone make it a less attractive solution to the average/. crowd, I guess.
Most people working with fast food are, in my experience, robots already. They're just the flesh-and-blood kind, but that's hard to tell from behavior. A nice hologram of a smile (remember: must not look too real), a cap of some kind, a badge telling that they're rookies and complete obedience of the manual and you're all set!
If it can do the waltz with any degree of precision, it's gotten to a stage that I have never been able to reach. And yes, I have been (forced into) training.
Slashdot Mirror
Not much, but based on personal experience, having sex with more than three supermodels at a time seems just plain impossible.
You're obviously not danish then...
Canadian citizens have to pay taxes to support their socialist government
Right...socialist. And of course where you live every road is a pay road, every service is a user-pay (fire call -- pay up. Need police services? Better have your chequebook!), and the government is minimalist -- anything else is socialist.
I would have thought that Canadians of all people would know this basic fact: Most (but not all) americans know nothing of socialism (or any other form of government) and just have the media-induced "not american" => "socialist" implication instead of knowledge. Sad, really.
The points in parent comment are certainly valid, but dive in a little deeper, and it looks less promising.
Most of what I describe are problems you face when porting existing code from *nix to Windows. If you just write new code, most of these issues goes away, and the problem reduces mostly to what parent comment described.
Of course, given that Mr Fawkes represented the oppressed (at the time) Roman Catholic community, was he a terrorist, or a freedom fighter?
I can see how that can be difficult to answer from way back then - the world today is much easier. Whatever side gets the backing (and funding) of the US government, is by definition the freedom fighters.
And they say the world was simpler way back - pfft. Too bad there were no US government back then to sort out these delicate issues...
For years, I've wanted tooltips on reality. You know, move the mouse over a button on the desktop, and a little yellow note will appear, telling you what happens when you press the button. That would be awesome as augmented reality. Fixing the engine of your car, and uncertain what that part does? Look at it for a few seconds, and an explanation will pop up. Trying to remember the name of an uncle you haven't seen in 15 years? Tooltip glasses to the rescue! :-)
What's next - scrollbars on reality? Now THAT would be useful
If they make one that degrades after a certain number of playbacks instead. Or maybe one that degrades within a year or some other ridiculous timeframe.
I'd be totally against it, of course, as I am with all their other DRM/IP related moves. But it's not *that* far off to imagine them seeing this as an option to prolong their current parasitic business model, instead of embracing the online world.
My guess is the museum will hold long gone stuff like "search for previous art".
Actually, Northgate made a keyboard called OmniKey Ultra, which had a small red ctrl-alt-del button on the back - next to the dip switches, it would seem, and behind a small panel. I never owned one myself, but I've heard talk of it being the uber-super-goodness in keyboards.
I've found an image of it, but the page is Japanese - about one third down the page you can see the red button.
From when Win95/98 reigned supreme - CtrlAltDel stick!
Even assuming he's right (and I think he's being a bit too optimistic), it will still be a LOOONG time before anyone does anything commercially viable in space. Only when someone figures out what endeavors in space that makes money we'll see real innovation to get there, driving down the cost immensely. Until then, it'll just be "space geeks" doing it just to prove it's possible.
I know that space has been profitable for some (TV satellites, for instance), but MANNED spacecrafts have so far had such ridiculously high cost that any gain would be dwarfed by that cost. I know that's part of what the X-Prize is designed to remedy, but realisticly it will take "big business" to drive down the cost.
So what can we get from manned spacecrafts that couldn't just as easily be handled by automated crafts? Science perhaps? Practically any form of production would be handled better by onboard robots, IMHO.
I've had a stoker furnace in my home for 5 years now, and it has burned a variety of waste products with great success:
So in short, YOU can do this too - but probably not in metro areas. Get a stoker furnace, a form of storage, contact some of the local farming industries around and start heating your home with other people's waste products - safely and very economically.
Lots of farming industries produce big amounts of waste, and most of that can be converted into biofuel simply by drying and sometimes crushing/shredding.
Or get a wood shredder and go shred the wood from trees that have fallen down in storms/hurricanes/whatever hits your region the most - many people will gladly let you remove their fallen trees, and you can heat your house very economically in this way.
Aka "from the when-hell-freezes-over dept".
I remember using a great optical mouse with my university's Silicon Graphics workstations (probably Indigos, but I'm not sure - we had several lines of SGI workstations) in the early 1990'es. They were by leaps and bounds the best mice I had ever tried, and still were until I got my Cordless Mouseman Wheel from LogiTech, with the ergonomic slanted/tilted keyboard to match (Christmas gift from my wife :-). Beautiful design, batteries last very long, fits my hand perfectly, hasn't yet accumulated crud on the ball (2+ years), runs perfectly on any smooth surface, and just plain "feels right".
The weirdest mouse I ever used for some time was a handheld trackball, which was basically an inverted mouse with the ball protruding from the surface, and buttons on the end. Superb precision, but it was really cumbersome to use that hand for anything else - you'd have to put it down first. Got replaced when heavy-duty development became a daily routine.
The most amazingly brilliant mouse I ever tried was a prototype for a professional CAD mouse I reviewed some years back for a grant application. With a freely rotating wheel on top, an optical mouse below, incredible precision and phenomenal ergonomics (for either hand!) it had it ALL. I really, really hope they got a business out of that product, but sadly I lost track of them after getting another job.
Nanotech?
[snip]
Finally, the negative impact of people downloading pr0n and mp3's is not as bad as you might think. Many slashdot readers do this, and look how we turned out. [emphasis mine]
I was with you all the way to that last paragraph, dude. Was that really necessary? :o)
if it doesn't automatically move over to the re-charging unit when it's running low on power, self-recharge, and then automatically start cleaning again when fully charged, it's worthless IMO.
Are you seriously saying that not having to actually vacuum, but merely recharge and empty the thing, is worthless? The actual vacuuming is by far the most timeconsuming part of cleaning the floors.
Have you heard of the law of diminishing returns? One interpretation says that solving most of the problem is easy (and cheap), but solving the entire problem is hard (and costly). I'm pretty sure that devices such as you've required does exist (other posters refer to such units, but I have not seen specific links yet), but it probably costs WAAAY more than the lowly Roomba. Not to mention the fact that devices with more advanced capabilities - such as those mentioned by you - are more likely to fail because of unexpected situations that the developers were not given enough time to properly deal with.
What happens when the user is a sick, twisted and sadistic person. Will the computer adapt to that kind of user?
If it does, my guess would be that it'd use 'vi' as the default editor for anything.
I have a friend who spent a lot of money on a gaming rig, lots of RAM, powerful video card. You know what he did? He tossed his old machine, popped in his Win 98SE CD and off he went.
That actually makes sense - Win98SE is the best choice for PURE gaming, IMHO. Better gaming performance than W2K or WXP, and you don't need much from the OS when all your programs do is render monsters in 1600x1200@70fps. In fact, the best the OS can do for most games is to get out of the way. Win98SE will do that happily, while W2K/WXP most definately will NOT.
BIG DEAL. Maybe someone should map out the complex dependancies of the system's modules, then might see the true benifits!
Hey, you know what - that's EXACTLY what they did!
It's all marketing hype, look at the underlying technology, CE is a pile of junk.
I hear you - CE is crap. But XP Embedded is cool.
could be AWESOME if it could also be applied to the desktop.
It can - currently, there are licensing issues regarding/preventing this, but it is my understanding (could be wrong, though) that the mix-and-match technology will find it's way into future versions of Windows. Probably in a somewhat less sofisticated manner for the consumer desktop market, but if they keep the full system sitting underneath, the tech-savvy crowd (such as /.) would probably be able to perform considerable tweaking.
Embedded XP is just a highly configurable XP Pro - it will run without a hitch on a standard desktop machine.
One of the problems with windows is the inability to strip out stuff you don't need.
I don't know what Windows version you're talking about here, but it most certainly is NOT recent Windows XP Embedded (as in Embedded XP SP1 - I assume you're sufficiently on-topic to be talking about embedded Windows stuff). You can mix and match your own XP configuration, and have it contain just the pieces you need.
:-), but that's besides the point. The point is that it's SOOOO easy to select/unselect options.
Don't need no steeenkin' GUI? Unselect it.
Don't need no steeenkin' webserver? Unselect it.
Don't need no steeenkin' Ethernet support? Unselect it.
The list could go on for miles - it really works quite well. There's a target designer tool where just about anything is optional, and the database for that tool is HUGE. Module inter-dependencies are handled automatically, and the size of the target image easily available. You could argue that MS would need that tool, since no-one can figure out how their dependencies work anyway (and I'd agree with you
And no, I'm not affiliated with MS in any way - I've just actually USED Embedded XP, and that brings a somewhat different view on things.
Want to burn calories while sitting in front of your computer at work? How about shedding those extra pounds while powering your TV at the same time?
This could just as easily be accomplished with an exercise-bike running a generator, which again charges a battery powering the computer/TV. It has the added advantage of increasing muscle size at the same time. Oh, and it's available right now too.
Much less geekiness, far more realistic - even healthy. But these three factors alone make it a less attractive solution to the average /. crowd, I guess.
Yoda, is that you?
Most people working with fast food are, in my experience, robots already. They're just the flesh-and-blood kind, but that's hard to tell from behavior. A nice hologram of a smile (remember: must not look too real), a cap of some kind, a badge telling that they're rookies and complete obedience of the manual and you're all set!
If it can do the waltz with any degree of precision, it's gotten to a stage that I have never been able to reach. And yes, I have been (forced into) training.