I believe the webcams at MIT's TNS research group may have been first. I seem to remember viewing the TNS people remotely in 94, but you may want to double check on that. The TNS Technology Demonstrations page has been up for many many years.
More flexibility in caching algorithms - for example, cache images but refresh content would speed many browsers. IE5 caches based on time periods, which are either too long or too short for many sites.
Allow users to define behavior of typing in a name into the url text box. Some browsers assume that this means that you want to search, or go to a database such as realnames. Defaulting to www..com (or.org or whatever) would simplify and speed browsing.
I used to work on a project called Remote TA. The project is run by Professor Walters of the UC Davis Computer Science Department. It includes all of the features that you are looking for. Drop Dr. Walters a line and let him know that you are interested.
The reason that Palm OS dominates the handheld market is that it uses a very simple, minimalist interface which lends itself quite well to a tiny screen. When you are using a handheld, you want your GUI to:
1) minimize screen real estate to save it for useful information
2) minimize taps/clicks required to perform a function
3) take up as little memory as possible, since handhelds generally don't have much due to power constraints.
4) take up as little CPU as possible, because of power constraints.
While KDE, or some of its components, may be a good choice for some people on a desktop system, it really is probably not a good choice for a handheld, because it wasn't designed with the constraints mentioned above in mind. As an example, look at the old Windows CE interface, which attempted to stick a Windows 95 style paradigm on a tiny screen. It was difficult to use on a handheld, and the CE devices sold poorly. As soon as MS learned to simplify its interface, CE started to jump in market share. Linux handhelds need to learn this lesson, not repeat Microsoft's mistakes.
Even if you aren't an expert on some code, you can surely find ways to improve it just by using it. So contact the maintainers of the source tree, and give them feedback and suggestions for fixes, features or other improvements. Then, as you become more familiar with the program, you can start to delve into the code itself and code your own fixes, features and improvements.:)
A rail gun is generally fixed to a massive body, such as a planet, which will not accelerate noticably when the rail gun is used. The planet/rail gun system experiences an equal but opposite force to that experienced by the projectile, but since the planet is so much more massive than the projectile, planet barely moves, while the projectile moves very rapidly. Also note that the rail gun impulse works ONCE. You can't take the rail gun with you! If the rail gun were not attached to a massive body, or were not itself very massive, it would launch itself in the opposite direction as the projectile in a noticable way.
There IS a reaction. The solar wind is made of high energy gas particles, plasma, etc. It pushes on the sail. The sail pushes back. That's how a sailboat works too...
Ok. I push on the magnet, which pushes back on me with equal and opposite force. I move one way. The magnet moves the other. Oops...magnet is now farther away. If I keep doing this, the force of the magnetic field on the magnet falls off with the square of the distance from it. So, you technically CAN keep accelerating, but eventually the effect will be essentially zero. Oops! Well, what if the magnet is fixed into some frame of reference? If the frame of reference isn't fixed relative to your spacecraft, then what I described will happen. If it is fixed relative to your ship (ie, you bolted it to the rear bumper), then you'll just cause internal stresses within the ship-magnet system. That might generate some heat, but it won't get you anywhere. Sorry...
I personally prefer PC games to console games because I get bored with games where all that you can do is kick, punch and shoot. Most PC games have much more depth than that. They require you to THINK. Console games do not.
I see a WindowMaker dock on there. You have to consider why certain things show up on TV though. Last year, there were lots of iMacs, because the colors show up rather well on TV. They're probably using Linux because they can easily customize its appearance, because it looks techy and most people won't recognize it on site, and because anyone who DOES recognize it will think that the show is more realistic because the characters are running Linux.
Ahh...another government conspiracy show. Hmm...I do something rather similar for a living. They have lots of technobabble, but nothing that they are doing on the show makes any sense from a technical standpoint.
I spent about 20 or 30 minutes playing on a PS2 last night at Fry's. The polygon counts were rather nice, but the games themselves seemed pretty unremarkable to me. Honestly, the games don't seem to be any more interesting or sophisticated than games for earlier consoles. The graphics are better, and the game pad feels nicer. But the games don't seem any different.
Soon, we will probably see an announcement of FurbyLinux, the first version of the open source OS to compile on a Furby. FurbyLinux will feature a special tactile "fur" interface. Eyelids will droop lower to indicate high load average. X will run (Xeyes will be the included demo program). FurbyLinux will allow a Furby network nicely with other Furbys, however plush toys such as Microsoft Barney will implement non-standard protocols, allowing them to only transmit the words "innovate", "upgrade" and "assimilate".
First, thanks for producing Nedit. I've been a big fan of the program for years, and it's always one of the first things that I install. I'm wondering how you go about coordinating the development and testing of code on an open source project. Do you create well defined APIs for modules to interact with, and then ask people to work on modules that use those APIs? Do you put one person in charge of each segment of the project? How do you resolve disagreements over the features and functionality of the project?
PS. What happened to the// or/* */ commenting macro in Nedit? I miss it!
There is considerable worry in the technical community about the use of monitoring devices such as Carnivore and potential mandates for government access to private communications on the Internet. using key escrow or other techniques. The argument has been made that only criminals will actually have something to hide, but most of us would still rather not have someone else reading our private e-mail, even if there is nothing of any legal consequence in it. What will you do to protect both our constitutional rights, and our social rights, such as our right to privacy, online?
Clock speed is not the only measure of CPU performance. The G4 does more per clock cycle than a Pentium at the same clock speed. The G4 also has a much better floating point unit, and has a rather nifty vector processing unit, which performs the sort of functions that you find in photoshop much more rapidly than is possible on Intel chips. The twice as fast claim refers to specific instances of Photoshop filters which have been optimized for the Altivec vector processing pipeline in the G4.
Once the code has been translated, optimized and cached, you should see the same performance improvement for every run - but that's a one time bonus. If it runs 10% faster the second time, it will run at the same 10% faster than the first run in subsequent runs.
Motorola will be shipping 1 GHz PPC G4 chips at some point in the nearish future, although it isn't known if they will show up in Macs. see this article for details.
That would be energy per unit time per unit time = energy / unit time^2 = accelerating power usage! Given sufficient time, it would take all the energy in the universe to power the chip.;)
I seem to recall something about Linux developing a kernel tuned specifically for the Crusoe processors. It runs native, if I remember correctly. But if you were running a non-native instruction set instance of the kernel, it would run faster the second time around. Frequently used instructions have their translations cached and are optimized. So it would run faster the second time around.;)
Somehow, testing this processor in a system with a tiny display doesn't seem like a very good way to compare it to a realistic real world notebook. (Sure, some people may buy this, but the display seems too small for many real world applications.)
Honestly, you need to look at a handheld device as being in a completely different kind of computing paradigm than regular machines. Think about what kinds of tasks you might want to perform on a device the size of your hand. Games, some network communication, maybe some light web browsing, and of course, personal organizer tasks all work. Maybe even book reading. But tasks which are very CPU intensive won't work, because you'll drain your batteries quickly. Most games will have the same problem. I think that you'll see wireless networking functions, telephony and organization functions all integrated into the same device in the near future. So the OS that runs the device has to be targeted for those functions. I don't think that Linux does that very well. That isn't what it was designed for.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the webcams at MIT's TNS research group may have been first. I seem to remember viewing the TNS people remotely in 94, but you may want to double check on that. The TNS Technology Demonstrations page has been up for many many years.
More flexibility in caching algorithms - for example, cache images but refresh content would speed many browsers. IE5 caches based on time periods, which are either too long or too short for many sites. Allow users to define behavior of typing in a name into the url text box. Some browsers assume that this means that you want to search, or go to a database such as realnames. Defaulting to www..com (or .org or whatever) would simplify and speed browsing.
I used to work on a project called Remote TA. The project is run by Professor Walters of the UC Davis Computer Science Department. It includes all of the features that you are looking for. Drop Dr. Walters a line and let him know that you are interested.
The reason that Palm OS dominates the handheld market is that it uses a very simple, minimalist interface which lends itself quite well to a tiny screen. When you are using a handheld, you want your GUI to: 1) minimize screen real estate to save it for useful information 2) minimize taps/clicks required to perform a function 3) take up as little memory as possible, since handhelds generally don't have much due to power constraints. 4) take up as little CPU as possible, because of power constraints. While KDE, or some of its components, may be a good choice for some people on a desktop system, it really is probably not a good choice for a handheld, because it wasn't designed with the constraints mentioned above in mind. As an example, look at the old Windows CE interface, which attempted to stick a Windows 95 style paradigm on a tiny screen. It was difficult to use on a handheld, and the CE devices sold poorly. As soon as MS learned to simplify its interface, CE started to jump in market share. Linux handhelds need to learn this lesson, not repeat Microsoft's mistakes.
Even if you aren't an expert on some code, you can surely find ways to improve it just by using it. So contact the maintainers of the source tree, and give them feedback and suggestions for fixes, features or other improvements. Then, as you become more familiar with the program, you can start to delve into the code itself and code your own fixes, features and improvements. :)
A rail gun is generally fixed to a massive body, such as a planet, which will not accelerate noticably when the rail gun is used. The planet/rail gun system experiences an equal but opposite force to that experienced by the projectile, but since the planet is so much more massive than the projectile, planet barely moves, while the projectile moves very rapidly. Also note that the rail gun impulse works ONCE. You can't take the rail gun with you! If the rail gun were not attached to a massive body, or were not itself very massive, it would launch itself in the opposite direction as the projectile in a noticable way.
There IS a reaction. The solar wind is made of high energy gas particles, plasma, etc. It pushes on the sail. The sail pushes back. That's how a sailboat works too...
Ok. I push on the magnet, which pushes back on me with equal and opposite force. I move one way. The magnet moves the other. Oops...magnet is now farther away. If I keep doing this, the force of the magnetic field on the magnet falls off with the square of the distance from it. So, you technically CAN keep accelerating, but eventually the effect will be essentially zero. Oops! Well, what if the magnet is fixed into some frame of reference? If the frame of reference isn't fixed relative to your spacecraft, then what I described will happen. If it is fixed relative to your ship (ie, you bolted it to the rear bumper), then you'll just cause internal stresses within the ship-magnet system. That might generate some heat, but it won't get you anywhere. Sorry...
The ping is dead. Long live the ping!
I personally prefer PC games to console games because I get bored with games where all that you can do is kick, punch and shoot. Most PC games have much more depth than that. They require you to THINK. Console games do not.
I see a WindowMaker dock on there. You have to consider why certain things show up on TV though. Last year, there were lots of iMacs, because the colors show up rather well on TV. They're probably using Linux because they can easily customize its appearance, because it looks techy and most people won't recognize it on site, and because anyone who DOES recognize it will think that the show is more realistic because the characters are running Linux.
Ahh...another government conspiracy show. Hmm...I do something rather similar for a living. They have lots of technobabble, but nothing that they are doing on the show makes any sense from a technical standpoint.
I spent about 20 or 30 minutes playing on a PS2 last night at Fry's. The polygon counts were rather nice, but the games themselves seemed pretty unremarkable to me. Honestly, the games don't seem to be any more interesting or sophisticated than games for earlier consoles. The graphics are better, and the game pad feels nicer. But the games don't seem any different.
Soon, we will probably see an announcement of FurbyLinux, the first version of the open source OS to compile on a Furby. FurbyLinux will feature a special tactile "fur" interface. Eyelids will droop lower to indicate high load average. X will run (Xeyes will be the included demo program). FurbyLinux will allow a Furby network nicely with other Furbys, however plush toys such as Microsoft Barney will implement non-standard protocols, allowing them to only transmit the words "innovate", "upgrade" and "assimilate".
First, thanks for producing Nedit. I've been a big fan of the program for years, and it's always one of the first things that I install. I'm wondering how you go about coordinating the development and testing of code on an open source project. Do you create well defined APIs for modules to interact with, and then ask people to work on modules that use those APIs? Do you put one person in charge of each segment of the project? How do you resolve disagreements over the features and functionality of the project? PS. What happened to the // or /* */ commenting macro in Nedit? I miss it!
There is considerable worry in the technical community about the use of monitoring devices such as Carnivore and potential mandates for government access to private communications on the Internet. using key escrow or other techniques. The argument has been made that only criminals will actually have something to hide, but most of us would still rather not have someone else reading our private e-mail, even if there is nothing of any legal consequence in it. What will you do to protect both our constitutional rights, and our social rights, such as our right to privacy, online?
Clock speed is not the only measure of CPU performance. The G4 does more per clock cycle than a Pentium at the same clock speed. The G4 also has a much better floating point unit, and has a rather nifty vector processing unit, which performs the sort of functions that you find in photoshop much more rapidly than is possible on Intel chips. The twice as fast claim refers to specific instances of Photoshop filters which have been optimized for the Altivec vector processing pipeline in the G4.
Once the code has been translated, optimized and cached, you should see the same performance improvement for every run - but that's a one time bonus. If it runs 10% faster the second time, it will run at the same 10% faster than the first run in subsequent runs.
Motorola will be shipping 1 GHz PPC G4 chips at some point in the nearish future, although it isn't known if they will show up in Macs. see this article for details.
That would be energy per unit time per unit time = energy / unit time^2 = accelerating power usage! Given sufficient time, it would take all the energy in the universe to power the chip. ;)
I seem to recall something about Linux developing a kernel tuned specifically for the Crusoe processors. It runs native, if I remember correctly. But if you were running a non-native instruction set instance of the kernel, it would run faster the second time around. Frequently used instructions have their translations cached and are optimized. So it would run faster the second time around. ;)
Somehow, testing this processor in a system with a tiny display doesn't seem like a very good way to compare it to a realistic real world notebook. (Sure, some people may buy this, but the display seems too small for many real world applications.)
Honestly, you need to look at a handheld device as being in a completely different kind of computing paradigm than regular machines. Think about what kinds of tasks you might want to perform on a device the size of your hand. Games, some network communication, maybe some light web browsing, and of course, personal organizer tasks all work. Maybe even book reading. But tasks which are very CPU intensive won't work, because you'll drain your batteries quickly. Most games will have the same problem. I think that you'll see wireless networking functions, telephony and organization functions all integrated into the same device in the near future. So the OS that runs the device has to be targeted for those functions. I don't think that Linux does that very well. That isn't what it was designed for.
So, how does one pronounce {} anyway? :)
This page at about.com lists all sorts of comparisons between Linux, 2000 and NT.