Where are these guys getting the E-mail addresses from?
If they are getting them from web pages, then maybe we could create PERL scripts to generate random E-mail addresses on strategically placed webpages. I envision a webpage with Thousands of fake e-mail addresses generated daily by a script.
what an article! I must say, that sure wrecked my paradigm of the perfect month.
On paper it sounds pretty good. In fact it might even be a good system if it was enabled, but I think it's got a snowballs chance in hell if we can't even adopt the metric system.
You make some valid points, but I have to disagree. I'm not a big fan of Reel mowers. Although great exercise (you missed that one), I happen to prefer modern non-human powered mowers.
Why you may ask?
The quality of the cut. Any human powered mower I've ever tried just doesn't work as well. Human powered mowers suck because they don't suck. A big advantage of traditional mowers is that the air currents suck the grass upward before the blade comes around.
I'm not much of a fan of Mulchers either, but I suppose that argument could be made as well.
Frankly, I'm hoping for the arrival of a simple & cheap battery powered "MoBot" that cuts the grass for me.
Finally Lawnmowers and Farmtractors that will drive themselves!
This will be sweet because you will only need a 10 inch wide lawnmower. So what if it takes 8 hours to cut the entire lawn. I'll be inside on the computer.
:-)
I have my doubts about using this technology to guide cars on the road, but with some visual recognition devices for collision avoidance, who knows?
Young minds are impressionable. I theorize that his mind is also. Despite our ability to "read between the lines", young children often don't have that ability. Try your best to keep him book smart, but also street smart. VERY few people are both, but of the people I have met who are, ALL have become extremely successful in their careers. It is important that he learn the "hardcore" theory, but if he doesn't practice it, what good will it be?
I work as a Mechanical Engineer Co-op in the Detroit area. Most of the Engineers I know specialize in the automotive industry, but guess how many I would trust to work on my own car? I'll let you know when I find one.
And for God's Sake, Don't get him near any Law books, We sure as hell don't need another Jeffery Fieger!
Back when I was doing a lot of CAD stuff, I saw a few guys running spaceballs. Basically, a spaceball is something you run in combination with your mouse. Your mouse does most of the selecting and drawing, but the spaceball does all the movement of the part selected.
Another way of moving parts on screen was to click on an icon (for translating & turning). A slight improvement involved a few hotkeys that are held while the mouse is moved, letting the mouse do the work.
I think that the spaceball I used ran on an HP (hpux) box, but I know for sure it was a UNIX flavor.
I would investigate what exactly you're trying to do. Is it really necessary to run 2 mouse pointers, or would a second input device such as a spaceball help you do what you're trying to do.
Ever notice that if you reply to spam to be removed from their mailing list, that the message bounces back to you? Spammers often just disable mail accounts after sending you a message.
What I would propose is a sort of Handshaking for spam free e-mail. Three transactions would be required.
1) Sender sends the message.
2) Receiver sends back a small packet verifing receipt.
3) Sender sends back another small packet to verify that the receipt was recieved.
The important part is the 3rd phase. If the 3rd phase doesn't happen, mail gets sorted out in the user's spam folder.
It's not a perfect solution, but surely it would make it more difficult for spammers.
Sure would be sweet if we could poison the spam databases.
I'm surprised I hear no mention of the Math Markup language. I wouldn't expect my Grandma to care, but you'd think it would be a big hit in the geek community. Sure would be nice to post math equations on the web without using that damn *.pdf format.
call my post flamebait if you will, but if there's ever been a browser on the bottom of my list, it's that damn adobe acrobat reader.
Somewhere, I've got a.jpg file of the "new micro$oft" keyboard. It's basically just like any other keyboard, except it only uses the keys that you use most. It's truely a breakthrough in one handed keyboard design. BTW, it only uses the Control/Alt/Deltete keys.
If you put a bunch of Monkeys in a room with some typewriters for an infinite amount of time, They will eventually type out the correct method to decrypt this puzzle.
Chances are, they just happened to have stumbled upon a solution that only looks correct.
Yeah Yeah, Of course it costs less than a PC, but your PC does more. My Bike costs less than more car, but that doesn't make it better.
> my Tivo fits into my entertainment center
It wouldn't need to if you have a long enough coax cable and a TV out on your video card.
> I don't have to stop using it when my daughter wants to print out her term paper. That's odd. I've never had to quit watching TV on my PC to print out anything. As a matter of fact, I often let my TV app stay under my text editor while I type and just listen. If it sounds like something cool is happening, I just change windows. What could be more cool than watching TV, surfing the net, and typing a report on the same screen?
>with rebates it cost about $300 w/lifetime service, vs. $1000-$2000 for your computer Ever go to Pricewatch.com? Pick up a Linux box for $300 and add a $50.00 TV tuner card.
I don't have to write any scripts/programs IMHO, this is both a plus and a negative, but it also limits the functionality of the TiVO.
>remote controled
Okay, you got me there. (although I do have a wireless Keyboard). ;-p
Any chance these movie theaters would need a system administrator?
That could be a sweet job if ya get free drinks/popcorn.
As a side note, I think my local theatre already has something like this. They offer Pay per view events that you would normally view on your Home TV, but you get to enjoy the "crowd effect". For example, if you like WWF wrestling, you get to hang out with a theatre full of other WWF fans.
There's some great ideas on this list...
I hope my additions are worthy.
Let's keep in mind the technologies we'll have in the future. Especially bandwidth.
Maybe we'll want to have an option for webcams. Big bandwidth is more common now, and webcams are getting cheap. This weekend, Several local stores were offering them for free (after rebate). Although some people see webcam technology as bloatware, it may also be considered the "Gee-Whiz" factor that helps this software become mainstream. Personally, I'd like to see some sort of "shared whiteboard" type of plugin. It would be great if I could share a CAD drawing with a customer in another country and have the ability to move things arround on my screen in real time and let them see the changes.
If they see something they don't like, they should be able to virtually draw on my screen.
Why bother having actual meetings in person if you could do most things over the telephone or over the net?
IMHO, The big question is, Who could most easily implement this software first?
My guess would be that educational institutions could. I think it would be pretty sweet to have my instructors post my homework on this bad boy. Maybe they could even have a script that automatically 'chmod's the answers to the last exam readable. Get students using this software, and it will be sure to have a future.
One last suggestion is to have the ability to implement this functionality into devices like the Pagers, Palm 7 devices, or cell phones. I'm already seeing a lot of people with these things, and although I don't expect them to replace PCs anytime soon, They will likely become the most convienient to use.
> ability to send reminders to wherever you are logged on, e-mail, pager, cell-phone...
Perhaps a text to audio plugin for telephones.
I think it would be sweet if you could have a modem dial somebody's cell phone, and have a computer translate ASCII to something like a.wav file. Simply play the.wav file and the telephone's voice mail picks it up.
I'm sure I could find a lot of other uses for something that could convert text to audio. Like maybe a program that converts slashdot.org text to audio, and burns it out to a CDRW for me to listen to on the drive home.
I know I may get moderated down for this one, but how about a map option?
Sometimes I have meetings in other cities, and maybe it would be possible to write some PERL that would take my orgin/destination, and plug it into some online database such as MapQuest.
Probably a dumb idea, but I doubt it would be difficult to code.
I guess to be fair, we should have a "tax" put on Video Cassette Recorders, Tape Recorders, DAT tapes or other forms of storage media.
Perhaps we should also tax Hard Drives. After all, a modern 80 gig hard drive could potentially pirate as many as 123 FULL CDs. That's not even to mention how many partially full CD's could be pirated with compression.
So lets say that the perceived value of the star office is $220...
So what if you buy an $80.00 version of System Commander 2000. Included (for free) on the same CD is a full version of Star Office 5.1. Should we get taxed on only the $80.00 software, or the $300.00 perceived value?
And what happens if I only wanted the System Commander 2000 software? Do I still get taxed on the $80 value or the $300.00 value?
Sounds to me that a law like this would be difficult to fairly enforce because it has so many loopholes. Maybe Microsoft Windows should be taxed to kingdom come since it includes a bunch of stuff like Internet Explorer for "Free".
This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Maybe it can already be done, but I don't know.
I've got a keyboard with a few extra keys at the top. I'd like to assign the keys to do different tasks. I've got buttons for:
Volume Controls
a button for starting TV software
starting a web Browser
CD-Rom Controls
a button to load a calculator
a button to load a text editor
etc. etc. etc.
I'd like to be able to assign these unused buttons to different tasks. Maybe a button to load an X-Term to my desktop, a button for my screenlock, mp3 player, misc. Batch files, or maybe use the windows start button to actually start a program! < cough > VMWare < Cough >
If there isn't a linux program that would help me do this, I'd like to write it, but I'm not sure where to start.
Editing the keyboard map could be risky. Just imagine not being able to type your login password! I'm thinkin' that there should be a way to write a GUI based program that would let me click my mouse to abort changes.
If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know!
brad3378@NO.SPAM.hotmail.com
Frankly, I don't think that the real problem is in the kernal, I think we need more emphasis on appz that make not only Linux, but computing in general more user friendly.
For Example, Take a look at most Linux Newbies (such as myself), Most of us just go out and buy a computer from a brick & Mortar store if it's our first computer. So we try Windoze for a little bit. Once we start to "master" it, we decide we want to upgrade to linux, but keep windoze. Newbies need an idiot proof way to dual boot. System commander 2000 is a good start, but it's been pretty buggy and I wouldn't expect my parents to figure out how to download & install the patches.
I'd like to see an open source program that integrates the features of Norton/Symantec-Ghost, System Commander 2000, and Partition Magic. Hopefully with support for not only EXT2, but the Reiser File system as well. Perhaps something that installs in MS-Dos.
Something else that would be cool would be a special Newbie Rescue disk. Suppose your Newbie friends buy a Linux box from Dell or Gateway. IMHO, both companies offer excellent support, but wouldn't it be great if you could just have newbies boot to a special floppy disk that dials the internet & creates a temporary helpdesk account? That way the help desks could remote login to the Newbie's machine, and fix most software problems themselves. Lets face it. Do Newbies want to learn how to recompile the kernal when somebody else could do it for them?
This just in > My sister suggested having dialup access during the linux install procedure itself. Then when I get stuck with something, some website, or person at SuSE in Germany could help me out for a small fee;-)
I believe it's in our best intrest to get as many people using linux as possible. The main reason is for Hardware & software vendors to take us more seriously, and offer us more & better drivers & software.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are these guys getting the E-mail addresses from?
If they are getting them from web pages, then maybe we could create PERL scripts to generate random E-mail addresses on strategically placed webpages. I envision a webpage with Thousands of fake e-mail addresses generated daily by a script.
Death to the spammers!!
what an article! I must say, that sure wrecked my paradigm of the perfect month.
On paper it sounds pretty good. In fact it might even be a good system if it was enabled, but I think it's got a snowballs chance in hell if we can't even adopt the metric system.
If had had that much computer time, I wouldn't spend it on finding aliens.
I'd do something useful like encoding MP3's!
To moderate or to reply.... That is the question.
. A big advantage of traditional mowers is that the air currents suck the grass upward before the blade comes around.
You make some valid points, but I have to disagree. I'm not a big fan of Reel mowers. Although great exercise (you missed that one), I happen to prefer modern non-human powered mowers.
Why you may ask?
The quality of the cut. Any human powered mower I've ever tried just doesn't work as well. Human powered mowers suck because they don't suck
I'm not much of a fan of Mulchers either, but I suppose that argument could be made as well.
Frankly, I'm hoping for the arrival of a simple & cheap battery powered "MoBot" that cuts the grass for me.
Finally Lawnmowers and Farmtractors that will drive themselves!
This will be sweet because you will only need a 10 inch wide lawnmower. So what if it takes 8 hours to cut the entire lawn. I'll be inside on the computer.
:-)
I have my doubts about using this technology to guide cars on the road, but with some visual recognition devices for collision avoidance, who knows?
Young minds are impressionable. I theorize that his mind is also. Despite our ability to "read between the lines", young children often don't have that ability. Try your best to keep him book smart, but also street smart. VERY few people are both, but of the people I have met who are, ALL have become extremely successful in their careers. It is important that he learn the "hardcore" theory, but if he doesn't practice it, what good will it be?
;-)
I work as a Mechanical Engineer Co-op in the Detroit area. Most of the Engineers I know specialize in the automotive industry, but guess how many I would trust to work on my own car? I'll let you know when I find one.
And for God's Sake, Don't get him near any Law books, We sure as hell don't need another Jeffery Fieger!
You may want to investigate the Spaceball.
Back when I was doing a lot of CAD stuff, I saw a few guys running spaceballs. Basically, a spaceball is something you run in combination with your mouse. Your mouse does most of the selecting and drawing, but the spaceball does all the movement of the part selected.
Another way of moving parts on screen was to click on an icon (for translating & turning). A slight improvement involved a few hotkeys that are held while the mouse is moved, letting the mouse do the work.
I think that the spaceball I used ran on an HP (hpux) box, but I know for sure it was a UNIX flavor.
I would investigate what exactly you're trying to do. Is it really necessary to run 2 mouse pointers, or would a second input device such as a spaceball help you do what you're trying to do.
Ever notice that if you reply to spam to be removed from their mailing list, that the message bounces back to you? Spammers often just disable mail accounts after sending you a message.
What I would propose is a sort of Handshaking for spam free e-mail. Three transactions would be required.
1) Sender sends the message.
2) Receiver sends back a small packet verifing receipt.
3) Sender sends back another small packet to verify that the receipt was recieved.
The important part is the 3rd phase. If the 3rd phase doesn't happen, mail gets sorted out in the user's spam folder.
It's not a perfect solution, but surely it would make it more difficult for spammers.
Sure would be sweet if we could poison the spam databases.
I'm surprised I hear no mention of the Math Markup language. I wouldn't expect my Grandma to care, but you'd think it would be a big hit in the geek community. Sure would be nice to post math equations on the web without using that damn *.pdf format.
call my post flamebait if you will, but if there's ever been a browser on the bottom of my list, it's that damn adobe acrobat reader.
Reminded me of the last Bruce Willis hit, "6th sense".
Both great movies with lousy endings.
Doh! I wish I had all my disks with me!
.jpg file of the "new micro$oft" keyboard. It's basically just like any other keyboard, except it only uses the keys that you use most. It's truely a breakthrough in one handed keyboard design. BTW, it only uses the Control/Alt/Deltete keys.
Somewhere, I've got a
>I wrote a video game in it, only to have Sun cease-and-desist me for calling it "Java Invaders".
Maybe you should have called it Taco Invaders
Then again, maybe not... That sounds an aweful lot like the title of a Pr0n movie.
as the saying goes...
;-p
If you put a bunch of Monkeys in a room with some typewriters for an infinite amount of time, They will eventually type out the correct method to decrypt this puzzle.
Chances are, they just happened to have stumbled upon a solution that only looks correct.
Yeah Yeah, Of course it costs less than a PC, but your PC does more. My Bike costs less than more car, but that doesn't make it better.
;-p
> my Tivo fits into my entertainment center
It wouldn't need to if you have a long enough coax cable and a TV out on your video card.
> I don't have to stop using it when my daughter wants to print out her term paper.
That's odd. I've never had to quit watching TV on my PC to print out anything. As a matter of fact, I often let my TV app stay under my text editor while I type and just listen. If it sounds like something cool is happening, I just change windows. What could be more cool than watching TV, surfing the net, and typing a report on the same screen?
>with rebates it cost about $300 w/lifetime service, vs. $1000-$2000 for your computer
Ever go to Pricewatch.com? Pick up a Linux box for $300 and add a $50.00 TV tuner card.
I don't have to write any scripts/programs
IMHO, this is both a plus and a negative, but it also limits the functionality of the TiVO.
>remote controled
Okay, you got me there. (although I do have a wireless Keyboard).
> blah blah blah
Exactly my point!
Any chance these movie theaters would need a system administrator?
That could be a sweet job if ya get free drinks/popcorn.
As a side note, I think my local theatre already has something like this. They offer Pay per view events that you would normally view on your Home TV, but you get to enjoy the "crowd effect". For example, if you like WWF wrestling, you get to hang out with a theatre full of other WWF fans.
There's some great ideas on this list...
I hope my additions are worthy.
Let's keep in mind the technologies we'll have in the future. Especially bandwidth.
Maybe we'll want to have an option for webcams. Big bandwidth is more common now, and webcams are getting cheap. This weekend, Several local stores were offering them for free (after rebate). Although some people see webcam technology as bloatware, it may also be considered the "Gee-Whiz" factor that helps this software become mainstream. Personally, I'd like to see some sort of "shared whiteboard" type of plugin. It would be great if I could share a CAD drawing with a customer in another country and have the ability to move things arround on my screen in real time and let them see the changes. If they see something they don't like, they should be able to virtually draw on my screen.
Why bother having actual meetings in person if you could do most things over the telephone or over the net?
IMHO, The big question is, Who could most easily implement this software first?
My guess would be that educational institutions could. I think it would be pretty sweet to have my instructors post my homework on this bad boy. Maybe they could even have a script that automatically 'chmod's the answers to the last exam readable. Get students using this software, and it will be sure to have a future.
One last suggestion is to have the ability to implement this functionality into devices like the Pagers, Palm 7 devices, or cell phones. I'm already seeing a lot of people with these things, and although I don't expect them to replace PCs anytime soon, They will likely become the most convienient to use.
> ability to send reminders to wherever you are logged on, e-mail, pager, cell-phone...
.wav file. Simply play the .wav file and the telephone's voice mail picks it up.
Perhaps a text to audio plugin for telephones. I think it would be sweet if you could have a modem dial somebody's cell phone, and have a computer translate ASCII to something like a
I'm sure I could find a lot of other uses for something that could convert text to audio. Like maybe a program that converts slashdot.org text to audio, and burns it out to a CDRW for me to listen to on the drive home.
I know I may get moderated down for this one, but how about a map option?
Sometimes I have meetings in other cities, and maybe it would be possible to write some PERL that would take my orgin/destination, and plug it into some online database such as MapQuest.
Probably a dumb idea, but I doubt it would be difficult to code.
I guess to be fair, we should have a "tax" put on Video Cassette Recorders, Tape Recorders, DAT tapes or other forms of storage media.
Perhaps we should also tax Hard Drives. After all, a modern 80 gig hard drive could potentially pirate as many as 123 FULL CDs. That's not even to mention how many partially full CD's could be pirated with compression.
Give me a break!
> Amazingly enough, alcohol, under some circumstances, will also improve memory
;-)
Unfortunately, Late night drinking sessions help you remember your Ex's phone number at times when you probably had better not be calling her!
So lets say that the perceived value of the star office is $220...
So what if you buy an $80.00 version of System Commander 2000. Included (for free) on the same CD is a full version of Star Office 5.1. Should we get taxed on only the $80.00 software, or the $300.00 perceived value?
And what happens if I only wanted the System Commander 2000 software? Do I still get taxed on the $80 value or the $300.00 value?
Sounds to me that a law like this would be difficult to fairly enforce because it has so many loopholes. Maybe Microsoft Windows should be taxed to kingdom come since it includes a bunch of stuff like Internet Explorer for "Free".
I've got a keyboard with a few extra keys at the top. I'd like to assign the keys to do different tasks. I've got buttons for:
Volume Controls
a button for starting TV software
starting a web Browser
CD-Rom Controls
a button to load a calculator
a button to load a text editor
etc. etc. etc.
I'd like to be able to assign these unused buttons to different tasks. Maybe a button to load an X-Term to my desktop, a button for my screenlock, mp3 player, misc. Batch files, or maybe use the windows start button to actually start a program!
< cough > VMWare < Cough >
If there isn't a linux program that would help me do this, I'd like to write it, but I'm not sure where to start.
Editing the keyboard map could be risky. Just imagine not being able to type your login password! I'm thinkin' that there should be a way to write a GUI based program that would let me click my mouse to abort changes.
If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know!
brad3378@NO.SPAM.hotmail.com
Frankly, I don't think that the real problem is in the kernal, I think we need more emphasis on appz that make not only Linux, but computing in general more user friendly.
;-)
For Example, Take a look at most Linux Newbies (such as myself), Most of us just go out and buy a computer from a brick & Mortar store if it's our first computer. So we try Windoze for a little bit. Once we start to "master" it, we decide we want to upgrade to linux, but keep windoze. Newbies need an idiot proof way to dual boot. System commander 2000 is a good start, but it's been pretty buggy and I wouldn't expect my parents to figure out how to download & install the patches.
I'd like to see an open source program that integrates the features of Norton/Symantec-Ghost, System Commander 2000, and Partition Magic. Hopefully with support for not only EXT2, but the Reiser File system as well.
Perhaps something that installs in MS-Dos.
Something else that would be cool would be a special Newbie Rescue disk. Suppose your Newbie friends buy a Linux box from Dell or Gateway. IMHO, both companies offer excellent support, but wouldn't it be great if you could just have newbies boot to a special floppy disk that dials the internet & creates a temporary helpdesk account? That way the help desks could remote login to the Newbie's machine, and fix most software problems themselves. Lets face it. Do Newbies want to learn how to recompile the kernal when somebody else could do it for them?
This just in > My sister suggested having dialup access during the linux install procedure itself. Then when I get stuck with something, some website, or person at SuSE in Germany could help me out for a small fee
I believe it's in our best intrest to get as many people using linux as possible. The main reason is for Hardware & software vendors to take us more seriously, and offer us more & better drivers & software.
If that's the case, my girlfriend would probably force me to get it done to my car so I can't pick up chicks!
;-)
I think I'll keep quiet about this one!
Okay, I know this is slightly off topic, but hear me out...
Yeah, it's cool that you can get paid for the use of your computer, but how about Getting Paid to drive your car!
www.autowraps.com and www.freecar.com are both websites that pay you up to $400.00 a month to drive arround with an advertisement on your car.
Sounds kinda silly to me, but I'd actually consider it.
I wouldn't expect this drive to become your only CD/DVD drive.
The link above states that the read speed is only 4x. WTF?!
And what's up with the IDE interface? Geez!!!