I hate x10.com as much as the next guy. So, I don't look at it. Here's a simple and easy way to enjoy an x10 free browsing experience, no matter where you go!
just copy this into/etc/hosts :
# resolve x10.com as the localhost
127.0.0.1 x10.com
127.0.0.1 ndsex.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ns2.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ns1.x10.com
If you want to get rid of some banner ads, too, you can add this to/etc/hosts :
# resolve all doubleclick names to the localhost
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net
Interesting analysis of my personality, although your conclusion is rather far off the mark. I am a vegetarian, but other than that, I don't bug the wait staff at restaraunts. I've been a waiter, and I've also been a cook - I know what annoying customers are like. However, in my own kitchen, I can make whatever I like. [segue to actual point]
Your technical analysis is, although interesting, also off the mark. The fact is, there was a machine that met most of the requirements I outlined - the TRS80, and we all know how old that is. If you want a refrene point, what I propose is to build a modern system along the same lines as the TRS80. A 50 Mhz CPU is more than sufficent, and a non-backlit screen will do just fine. When the wireless card and LAN card aren't in use, you can power them down. Besides, you are right. It does draw less then you're thinking.
Since I wrote this article, I have found a number of hardware combinations that would essentially give me what I (and, if my crammed inbox is any testament, an astonishing number of other people) want: A portable system to hack on, not a desktop replacement. Basically, the questions are ones of design, not plausibility.
I have a Dell Latitude that I like very much. It runs Linux splendidly, it's pretty light, and I get fairly decent battery life if I stay in framebuffer mode (6-7 hours on one battery). But it's a lot more than I really want in a portable. What I propose is, from a technical standpoint, much easier than building a Latitude, or a Vaio.
I'm sorry if my tinkering offends you. If hobbiests annoy you, you don't have to listen to their ruminations or read thier posts on public forums. I happen to enjoy building things. The fact that a reasonable solution exists in off-the-shelf systems (with notable compramises) is quite beside the point.
When I'm at a resteraunt, I order what's on the menu. When I'm at home, in my own kitchen, on my own time, I'll cook whatever I want. I know Slashdot isn't as civil as it used to be, but for crying out loud, loose the attitude. Sure, I like to play with computers because I think it's fun. What are you accusing me of? Being a geek? A nerd? A dork? If you have a problem with that, what are you doing on Slashdot?
These new processors actually do consume heat as they operate, turning it into valuable CPU cycles. These processors require the use of a whole new CPU packaging technology that pumps heat into, rather than out of, the CPU core. Initial tests in laptop configurations have proven uncomfortable to use, due to the fact that the laptop begins to condense water out of the air, and eventually frost over as it runs. AMD expects that these problems will be solved by the time these processors reach the marketplace.
They will no doubt use this new technology to bury Intel, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and the Soviet Union. Having vanquished these foes, they will split their company into a half dozzen competing CPU manufacturers that compete fairly with one another. Each of these new chip makers will pour billions of dollars into Linux development. Their executives and directors will use their extra income to feed starving children and help build a better public education system.
Oh, wait. That would break the laws of thermodynamics. Never mind.
Just curious, but why would you want to visit the Windows Update page with Mozilla under X? What are you trying to do, patch Linux with a Windows service pack?
Maybe there's a reason for a non-Windows/IE person to go to MSN, but as far as I know, all of those articles are available on MSNBC.com. Insofar as I can tell, it works fine.
So what? Microsoft has a stupid proprietary browser and a stupid proprietary site. We already knew this. That's their problem. When a site that actually does something usefull for non-Microsoft users becomes completely IE-dependant, then I'll be annoyed.
But bitching about Windows Update not working under Mozilla/X/Linux? That's daft. No one complains about the fact that their local Ford dealership doesn't carry all the parts to fix your Saturn. Sure, it's icky what they're doing to the HTML standard, but c'mon.
This is nonesense. There has been no change, shift or sea-change in
the way employers deal with and treat their employees. this is the way
it has always been, and anyone who thinks otherwise has fallen out of
the naive tree, and hit all the branches on the way down.
Capitalism his long been decried as brutal, cold and heartless. This
complaint has been raised dozens of times by workers suddenly finding
themselves without an income, since the time of Adam Smith in the
1700's. The great irony that Smith illustrated in The Wealth of
Nations is that the very workers who felt mistreated and exploited
by the system they worked in (and often were justified in these
feelings) actually stood to realize enormous benifits. Because
capitalism pushes society towards ever-increasing productivity, it is
inevitable that, on the average, the quality of life for everyone will
increase over time. The irony of this was sharper a few hundred years
ago when workers were routenely maimed and killed by in mines and
factories, or brutalized by their employers, or starved when they had
not enough money for their bread.
Today, we reap the benifits of Smith's great irony. Capitalism has
bought prosperity unprecidented in human history to those who have
stuck with it. But amidst this prosperity, we forget at whose alter we
make our sacrifices. Capitalism is not a kindly, beneficent god. It is
a lusty, greedy and fickle god, who is capable of enormous cruelty
towards those why often deserve it the least. We should not forget
that beneath it's new robes and trapings, the engine of our economy is
the same engine the drove us to the Great Crash 1929 and the Great
Depression. It is the same engine that brought us through the panful
boom and bust cycle of the late 1800's. And it is the same engine that
maimed and killed innocent little children by the tens of thousands in
the mines, factories and mills of the 18th and 19th centuries. It may
have be better behaved of late, but it is the same god, and it will
not simply become tame and docile because we want it to.
One of the most shocking and widely accepted tenets of the
new techno-workplace is that the well-run company, the one
that wants to compete in the global economy, has to be so
fluid, evolving and responsive to change that thousands of
employees can get dumped at one whack and it's not even
controversial. That's a pretty long trek from the capitalist
ethic that only a few years ago valued corporate loyalty as
much as profits, and touted the company-employee bond.
This is bunk. There has never been a company-employee bond, except
where employers wished to exploit use feelings of loyalty and
camradery to get their workers to accept lower wages. Loyalty and
commitment don't ammount to a hill of beans when the quarter is ending
and the board of directors has to submit a negative report to
shareholders. This isn't cynical, or hyperbole. This is how money is
made and buisiness is done. Just because high-tech is more cute and
cuddly than coal mining doesn't mean that tech workers are free from
the same covenant. Anyone who thought otherwise is delusional.
In the Corporate Republic, where corporations fund the
political system, control most mass media, write legislation,
and now dominate entertainment and culture (and soon, much of
technology, from bio-tech to Net access), there are few
agreed-upon rules about layoffs. Hardly any would get far in
Washington, the world headquarters of corporate
lobbying. (Congress, allegedly the public's lobbyists, are
scrambling to get campaign funds from corporate donors.)
And so it has been since our nation was founded. Read your
history. This is not an invention of AOL-Time-Warner, Microsoft and
Texaco. This is good, old fasioned bribery of the same stripe that
J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller used. Nothing new here.
Corporations have no particular incentive to be generous, or
even ethical, to terminated employees. Most answer to boards
of directors and demanding shareholders expecting maximum
profits. Generosity towards workers doesn't serve the bottom
line, even when it might serve the company's long-term
interests. One of the reasons Cisco treats laid-off workers
well, company officials have conceded, is to keep morale high
among remaining employees, who feel better about the company
and the work they do for it.
Well, duh.
My advice to anyone experienceing a pinch during these times (as I
myself am) is that you should go and read your history. Capitalism is
not a freindly thing, but there is much more to life than work, wages
retirement and death.
Also, it should be noted that I am not an anti-capitalist, socialist
or an anarchist. I work in the tech industry, and as long as I have a
job I get paid a wage just like everyone else. I don't see a viable
"alternative" to capitalism in systems like Marxism. However, I do
beleive that capitalism should be containied to areas where it is
appropriate. It should not be allowed to interfere with governance in
any way, for instance. Markets are decidedly un-democratic.
Additionally, I beleive that where capitalism is apropriate, it should
be practiced in a rigorous, mathmatically pure way ("atomic"
copmetition, as Smith termed it). Large corporations are
anti-capitalist, as they attempt to avoid the process of competition
in the determination of supply and demand. And finally, I beleive that
the government should create systems outside of these capitalist
structures to aid and assist workers who have been cast out or harmed
by the process, and to fill the roles in which capitalism functions
poorly (such as health care).
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
- Irving Fisher, Yale economics professor, October 17, 1929
"[1930 will be] a splendid employment year."
- U.S. Dept. of Labor, New Year's Forecast, December 1929
there are more - here's a nice page of them. I ought to compile a list of modern day ones, but I'm sure someone's allready done it. Just Google for it.
One of the more amusing things about the recent [I'm loath to call it this] dot com bull and subsequent bear market is just how wrong the analysts were. On the upswing, all the analysts and pundits threw their words and weight behind the dumbest ideas (remember "push"?). They touted the most foolish buisiness plans. They devoted all of their attention to the shinyest doodad out there, and utterly ignored the real changes that were happening in plain sight. On the downswing, despite obvious (and historically, emperically and numerically proven) indications a year ahead of time that the economy was going to slow, there was not a peep from the analyst community that things weren't going as well as they seemed. Sure, there was hype and doomsaying, but there always is. No one wanted to stick their neck out and say that the party might be slowing down, and that it might be getting time to find your date and go home. Just think - if the analyst community had been more clearheaded and more honest, we might have had a dot com slowdown, instead of a meltdown, when it did come. There are consiquences when you deny reality, and that's not a matter of opinion.
In addition, I really do wonder what people mean when they refer to Israeli "atrocities." In most cases, the incidents refered to are the shootings that have left so many young Palistinian men dead. These deaths have nearly brought me to tears, but not for their injustice - for their stupidity. Think about the circumstances under which so many of them have been killed. If you initiate or participate in a riot and assalt police officers, you will probably get shot. It doesn't matter what country you are in, or what religion you are, or what ethnic group you belong to, or how rightous your cause might be. The Police will eventually have no choice but to shoot you. It sucks, but that is how you have to maintain order. Honestly, if you throw rocks and bottles at someone with an assault rifle, you are practically begging them to shoot you. If they eventually do, that doesn't make you a martyr, no matter what you might have been screaming at the time. It makes you an idiot.
What makes me sad about these deaths is not just that Palistinian children are being killed. What makes me sad is how the Palistinian community glorifies their deaths, and exploits the sadness that anyone would feel about such an event. Parents, role models and leaders all but beg their children to go out to Israeli checkpoints and get shot. Their lives are being manipulated and expended by a self-serving and cynical leaders. This is not exactly what I would call an "Israeli attrocity."
The other complaint that one hears about the most is the demolition of Palistinian homes, and the construction of additional settlements. I've never been in support of either of these actions. I think it's wrong to take away someone's home, even if they didn't have a permit to build it. Furthermore, I think it's unwise to settle territory in the way that Israel has chosen to given present circumstances. These are both probably mistakes. But again, people seem to forget what we're talking about here. Israel is 20,330 square kilometers. The state of Vermont is 23,957 square kilometers. Areas like the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights are comparable to in size to such places as Windhan county or Bellows Falls. Not to belittle the Great State of Vermont, but why on earth would people get so worked up about such tiny, insignificant dollops of land? It would be like going to war because the state wanted to move you from Bellows Falls to Brattleboro. It's utter foolishness.
It always seems to come down the the fact that there are all sorts of "holy sites" all over the place there. In my opinion, if these holy sites are really causing that much trouble, they ought to destroy them all, for all religions, and be done with it. No pile of rubble, no matter how mystical or aincent, is worth the blood that has been spilt. I'm sure that if Muhammad, Moses and Jesus all appeared as guests on CMM'sCrossfire, they would all agree that a holy site isn't worth a single human life. So, with respect to land and settlements, I beleive that Isreal has acted beligerantly and unwisely. But the Palestinians (or at least their leadership) has acted completly insane. When the whole country is small enough to drive across in a couple of hours, what does it matter if you live here or there? We should be hearing demands from the Palestinian side that sound more like this:
Well, if you're going to expect us to agree to live there, then you're going to have to agree to build and maintain a public transit system from here to there! We denamd a high speed rail line from Golan to Jeruselem! And keep in mind that that's out in the middle of the desert, so you're going to have to help us build water and sewage facilities! And, since it's so hot, you're going to have to subsidize the electricity, so we can run our air conditioners!
Instead, they are blowing themselves up on streetcorners and taking potshots at preschools. Not all of them, of course. But the critical thing is that this behavior is all but encouraged by their leadership, and was officially encouraged not too long ago. We have such people in the United States, but we go to lengths to discorage them from actually killing people, and when they do, we lock them up.
I happen to think that a lot of the things done by Israel have been mistakes. There have been times that I've been ashamed to call myself a Jew on acount of what Israel was doing at the time. But the fact is, Israel offered a final and permanant peace to Arafat, and Arafat turned it down. Israel allowed the United States to twist its arm until it yeilded to just about every demand made by the PLO. But Arafat decided to hold out for a better deal. Parez knowlingly sacrificed his leadership of the nation in an attempt to make this peace, and Arafat must have known that this would be his last shot at such a sweet deal. Up until that point, I was on the side of the Palistinians. I felt that they had been wronged, and although they behaved very, very poorly, they ought to be copmensated. But to respond to a peace offering by starting a war, and to do so with the blood of their own children is to betray the very name of Peace.
Arafat and the Palestinians wanted a war, and Israel has merely obliged them. It is exactly the same situation as the rock-throwers and the soldiers, only with whole nations. Israel (the soldier) might not be the most enlightened in its opinion of the rock-thrower (the Palestinians), but will reluctantly shoot when forced to. It sucks, but that's how you defend a nation.
As much as I think these boxes can be nice solutions, and that your average home user ought to consider one of them before diving into the world of routing tables and IP chains, I've had pretty mixed luck. I'm using a Linksys EtherFast Cable/DSL router. It was a breeze to set up, no problem configure, and otherwise cute and cuddly. However, it is not stable. We've updated the BIOS several times, RMAed the box itself, and fiddled the settings as much as we can. The thing still crashes every few days, and it runs much, much too hot. If left alone (with light or no traffic) it will crash about once a week, and require a manual reset. Under heavy traffic (~200 KB/s or more), it will crash about every hour. If you try to VPN through it, it crashes instantly. My roommate (who uses VPN to and from work) has had some luck running VPN through a tunnel, but the router will still crash from the traffic.
Sigh. It's a nice box, and I wouldn't mind using it too much (I wish it were possible to bind multiple IP addresses and map to different subnets), but I hate resetting the damn thing all the time, or calling one of my roommates to have them reset it when I'm trying to ssh to my workstation.
My roommate, a win2k bitch (er, gugu), wants to use that as our firewall/router. I've gotten him to agree that if he can't make it work in a week, he'll let me drop a Linux box in front of our network.
Does anyone know why one must be a US citizen to see this talk? The site doesn't explain, it just points out that you need to bring credentials, such as a driver's license, passport, or green card to prove citizenship. This struck me as odd - is it a funding thing, or is there "discussion of non-exportable cryptosystems", or other such nonsense?
Oh well. Sorry to those not from the US who might want to see this talk.
Pollution is waste. Waste is inefficency. Inefficency is lost profit. Ergo, it is cheaper to be cleaner. This applies to everything from engines to PCB manufacturing.
In the late 60's and early 70's, the auto industry tried to prevent or forstall the imposition of pollution controlls by insisting that cleaner engines would be less efficent, and that it would be impossible to actually improve their engine technology. The same year that GM and Ford vehigles took a huge penalty in gas milage and performace because the companies were forced to install catalytic converters, Honda introduced a car that met the pollution restrictions without a converter and with excellent gas mileage and reasonable performace for its displacement. But despite the facts, the result of this public relations temper-tantrum is that ever since, enviornmentalism has been linked with sacrifices in prosperity. This is evident in Bush's energy plan, and the US reluctance to cut CO2 emissions.
It has everything to do with corporate (and occasionally individual) resentment at being told what to do. It has nothing to do with the realities of the industries in question. The association of concervation with decreased prosperity is classic FUD.
It's really sad that this realization is news, but I'm glad a few people are finally waking up to it.
Among other things, my mother is a video editor. She uses the Media 100 system and several Power Macs. Her workbench includes three 20" computer monitors, two 30" NTSC monitors, a couple of breakout boards, two editing decks, a Nacamichi receiver and a four NHT studio monitor speaker. This does not include the rat's nest of wires that festoons the place.
She also has a yen for antique furniture, and insisted on using a 120 year old partner's desk with its matching chair. The desk was a about eight inches too high to comfortably type, and was almost a foot think (so you couldn't solve the problem by jacking up the chair). It was aslo shaped as a square, with the origional idea being that two peopl would work from either side. My mother's solution was to place the desk in the center of the room, and walk around the thing whenever she needed to get to one of the systems on the other side. Needless to say, after every project, she had horrible back pain and aching wrists (bad enough that she couldn't hold a cup of coffee). And yet, she utterly refused to buy a real desk - "I just can't stand modern furniture!" was her reasoning.
In any event, I decided that the only way I was going to get her to use a real desk was if I built the thing myself, thus guilting her into an ergonimic solution. So, I took measurements of her height, the length of her legs to the knees and to the hip, and the length of her arms, and built a desk to her exact measurements. Fortunatly, my high school offered and woodworking evening activity. I spent about seven months building the thing (it had to hold up nearly a 1000 Kg of equipment, not to mention live up to her tasts for good furniture). In the end, it was four feet deep, fourteen feet long, with two sets of drawers and two vented computer cabinets. If anyone's ever built furniture before, you know what a pain in the ass it is to build drawers, especially big ones! Wood expands and contracts by as much as 5% with humidity and temperature, so big drawers are next to impossible to get right without doing all sorts of strange things to compensate for the changes in geometry. I also had the pleasure (?!!) to have had access to a seasoned trunk of red oak, so I milled the desk surface, leggs and other main parts myself. Since the desk had to be so large and hold up so much weight, I actually found all the available plans and project guides to be utterly useless. The main span of the desk is nine feet, and had to be able to support up to two tons (in case, for instance, someone dropped one of those 20" monitors on it from a few feet in the air, the desk wouldn't collapse and destroy the rest of her equipment).
I ended up turning to bridge design for a workable solution. It had to take into account the high loads, vibration and shock, and expansion and contraction of the material. Basically, I went with a box-girder construction, but with suspension cables inside the box. The suspension cables were nessesary becasuse the joints of the box girder could not simply be fixed to one another, or the surface of the desk would split. Each of the joints is made using lateral rails with ballbearings, like the sliders for a drawer, only much larger. Unfortunatly, this leads to a rather unpleasant amount of gear lash since the bearings require a small amount of play. The suspension cables keep the desk arched slightly upward, instead of bowed downward. This insures that the bearings are aways biased in the same direction so there is no gear lash. Also, the suspension cables are mounted to shock absorbers. Any vibration on the surface is transmitted into the shock absorbers. The result is that the desk surface is only four inches thick at the center, but is strong enough to hold up a small car (or withstand the shock of a 150 Kg object droped from two meters), sturdy enough that you can pound a nail into a block of wood and not skip a CD player a foot away, and flexible enough that it expands an contracts lengthwise by about an inch and a half.
In the end, it cost me about $300 to build the desk, if you assume my time was worthless (I was a high school student, so that was pretty much the case) and you don't count the electricity and heating oil I used up. After graduation, my mother shiped it from Vermont to California - all 400 kilograms of it. I'll leave it as an exersize to the reader to figure out how much more it cost to ship than to build.
She is now happily using a desk built to her exact ergonimic requirements, and has not suffered from back or wrist pain in the four years since she's been using it. It's not quite as pretty as the aincent antiques she's got - but hey, it was my first (and thusfar only) attempt at woodworking.
it depends on the interpretation. trading warez is a form of speech, it just runs the risk of violating someone's copyright. the copyright grants the owner the right to be paid for the work. they technically can't stop anyone from obtaining it, so long as the owner gets compensated. copyright does not grant the owner a right to censorship, but they can demand payment.
a fine line, maybe, but otherwise free speech wouldn't mean much of anything.
No no. You've got it all wrong. I can speak from experience - when you subject an Apple product to X radiation, it will turn into a giant monster and eat Tokyo.
As pointed out by prevoius posters, it is often impossible to obtain legitimate copies of many of those games. Also, there are many, many cool games that were never released in the US. I even have a few such Japan-only roms that someone with a hex editor and a death wish took the trouble to translate into English - there's no way you could get that "legitimatly".
Personally, I wouldn't have any problem paying [a reasonable price] for ROMs, but the option simply isn't available. You see, owning a copyright on a non-confidential item gives the owner the right to require that I pay for my copy of the item. It does not give the owner the right to deny me access to the item if I want it. So, if Nintendo and Sega refuse to sell their old games, then they'll have to live with the fact that trading ROMs is protected by the first amendment. If they feel like dragging people into court for copyright infringement, all the accused have to say is "I would have paid for it, but I was denyed the opportunity to do so," and malicious intent becomes impossible to prove, and the case is moot. I know it's not quite that simple, but I don't see a rational counter argument.
The funny thing about the U.S. is that we already have the world's largest (publically financed!), most advanced and most expensive public transportation system in the world. The fact that everyone has to buy their own car to use it obscures that fact a bit, and makes it just anti-democratic enough for big buisiness to play along.
If only people would wake up and smell the smog, they'd realize that cities and states already fork over hundreds of billions of dollars a year to extend and maintain this public transportation system. Here in Boston alone, the Notorious B.I.G. D.I.G. has swallowed 60 billion dollars (check your paper for the latest figures), even as the T system languishes right on top of it.
Anyway, scramjets for comercial public transportation are a long way off. But when they get here, they would be nicely complimented by a decent mag-lev rail system. I'd guess both are roughly on the same time-frame for development and deployment.
There are a few ways of getting around this problem.
Drop the scramjet vehicle from a supersonic carrier vehicle.
Build a giant rail gun, like in Gundam Wing.
Attach JATO or RATO pods to the scramjet, and jetison them once hypersoninc speeds are reached.
Use conventional means to reach a high altitude, and acheive hypersonic ingition using a balistic dive.
Use an on-board oxidizer to fuel the scramjet like a rocket until atmosphearic ignition is possible.
Build the scramjet to work first as a jet. Once at maximum jet speed, lock the jet blades and operate as a ramjet. Once at maximum ramjet speeds, jetison the jet rotors and combustion chamber to expose a scramjet surface.
There are a couple of other reasonable ways, but those are the ones that come to mind.
The idea behind these sorts of technologies (scramjets and ramjets) is to fly very efficently, especially in the higher atmosphear. The technology to beat, in this case, is non-air breathing propultion (a.k.a. rockets). Because scramjets are air breathing, it is not neccesary to bring along an oxidizer, allowing for considerable weight savings.
Because of this, scramjets are critical for efficent, practical single-stage-to-orbit vehicles. The idea is that you operate in scramjet mode until the atmosphear thins out too much to sustain combustion, and then you start adding your own oxidizer. This will effectively turn the engine into a rocket motor. With scramjets, you could build a shuttle that would actually be fairly inexpensive to operate. Also, since the most expensive part of any mission is boosting into low earth orbit, any savings in the first stages of flight would dramatically bring down to costs for any mission, but especially heavy ones (like a manned mission to Mars).
The other reason to develop scramjets is for their raw efficenty. The use fuel at a fantastic rate, but at Mach 7, the fuel per unit distance is exceedingly good. Instead of supersonic (in this case hypersonic) flight being a luxury reserved for Concorde flyers, it would become the cheap, practical way of getting around. Of course, it would only make sense for the really long flights (like Chicago to Sidny), but the implications could be trans-global flights that cost less than regional flights.
Scramjets are very, very cool, and not just because they go fast.
Yes. The speed of sound increases with the density of the medium through which it propogates. For instance, the speed of sound through the crossection of average slashdot posters is aproximatly 8450 M/s.
... but not for needless delays. The appeals process is the only real way to help prevent major miscariages of justice.
What pisses me off is that one is supposed to have a "fair and speedy" trial. There's no reason I can think of for such an important case to languish between trial and appeal for so long.
If at 85 hz you still notice flicker, then you have a really hyper nervous system.
Well, I do have a hyper nervous system. ^_^
But as you (and the post I responded to) imply, the chemical reaction in your retina is not fast enough to directly perceive the flicker of a screen running at 80 or 85 Hz. However, you can indirectly perceive the flicker when it interfeares with other things, causing a strobing effect.
Also, the squeel from the flyback transformer buggs the hell out of me. My monitor is pretty decent in that respect - the transformer must somehow be dampened. But I can't stand the sound of televisions - I can hear that obnoxious squeel from across the street sometimes. I like your suggestion about using a TV tuner card - that's what I did in high school, although that was mainly because TV's were against the rules.
You are right, most people can't see changes that cycle faster than 30 or 40 Hz. However, it is possibible to perceive flicker that is much faster than that. For instance, all CRTs will eventually give me a headache, even if I can't actually see the beam rastering across the screen. At 60 Hz, I can easily see the flickering whenever I blink, move my head, or look at or away from the screen. If you can't see the raster as easily, try waiving your hand in front of the screen. The same effect occurs in films, wich operate at 24 frames a second. 24 FPS is more than good enough for most things, but if you happen to be looking near the edge of the screen when the camera pans, zooms or joggs, you will clearly see the flicker.
I drive my monitor at 85 Hz, and I can look at it for about three hours before it starts to get uncomfortable. I know it isn't because I have a crummy monitor, it's a nice 20" flat surface Trinitron, or because of florecent lights since I use indirect hallogen lighting in my office.
In comparison, I can use my laptop, which has a much smaller LCD screen, for as long as I can pay attention. When I turn down the brightness and use my anti-eyestrain fonts and themes, I can hack for 24 hours at a stretch. The reason is because LCD screens do not flicker - LCD screens do not draw the screen by flashing one pixel at a time. If you or a friend have a laptop, try putting it next to a CRT. Set the CRT to the highest refresh rate it can handle, and set the laptop to the lowest refresh rate it can handle (although, for the laptop, it really doesn't matter, and you may only have one choice anyway). Waive your hand in front of the CRT, and then in front of the LCD. You will notice a rather remarkable difference.
The biggest reason that CRTs bug people is because most places use overhead florecent lighting. In the United States, all florecent lights flicker at 60 Hz, and 50 Hz in Europe and a lot of other countries. Chances are, your CRT and the overhead lights will flicker out of phase with one another, causing a much lower frequency strobing effect. The effect may be very subtle, but it will still drive most people crazy, even if they can't see it directly.
If these new LED backlit LCDs have the same flicker that CRTs do, I'll happily stick to the older technology. For the average person who doesn't need a no-flicker screen for 30 hour hacking sessions, these new screens will be awsome.
Well, can you think of anyting new? Xerox/PARC basically invented this whole GUI thing eons ago, and there haven't been any significant changes to that paradigm. Buttons, menues windows and icons - everything else is just details.
Look at it this way - we have two kinds of interfaces; GUI and command line. What innovations have people made with command line interfaces? We have all sorts of new shells since the first VT-100 terminal rolled off the production line. With some nifty utilities, bash is more than good enough for doing just about anything with a computer (except looking at pictues and such, but there are framebuffer viewers nowadays). But shells like bash, and the utilities they use, are still regular old command line systems. They work just fine on VT-100 and 320 terminals. The paradigm hasn't changed, and it doesn't really need to.
It's possible that the same is true of GUIs. We can dress them up and build new utilities, but the underlying assumptions have remained the same for more than two decades. Given the history and continued usefullness of command line systems, I predict that GUIs as we know them will exist for a long, long time to come. When something new comes along, it will not be a GUI - it will be something else entierly. Maybe it will be a 3D enviornment, like in Snow Crash. Maybe it will be a speech based system, like in Star Trek.
But even in Snow Crash and Star Trek, GUI and command line enviornments still exist.
The GUI was invented because command line enviornments had weaknesses. GUIs never (at least not in enviornments that should be taken seriously) replaced command line systems because GUIs have their own weaknesses, and those weaknesses happen to be where the command line way of doing things is strong. When something new comes along, it will probably be to get around the weaknesses of GUIs, but if it really is different, it will have it's own weaknesses where GUIs are probably strong. Some people might bemone the new thing, as people bemoned GUIs because they waste resources and whatnot, but those people are probably users of systems that don't let you choose the style of interface for the problem at hand (*caugh* windows *caugh*).
Well, I've used several versions of RedHat (hurricane to zoot), Debian Potato and Woody, assorted Slackware distros, and tomsftbt (floppy distro). I've also got a mostly working scratchbuilt linux installation. The grand total I've spent on this software: zero.
Well, assuming you don't count the $0.50 per CD-R and the cost of downloading the ISOs.
I've spent about $500 on Microsoft software (Windows NT and Office), but I got much less use out of it than any one of those Linux distros. When I bought NT 4.0, it was very broken and had poor driver support - as a result, it wasn't really practical to use with my hardware for about a year. After a year, the driver support got better and the service packs caught up with the really bad bugs, and about a year of real usefullness followed. After about a year, NT 4.0 started to look really shabby next to Linux, so I stopped using it. After that experience, I'm never going to buy proprietary software again if I can help it. $500 for a year's usefullness is a ripoff.
Slashdot Mirror
just copy this into
# resolve x10.com as the localhost
127.0.0.1 x10.com
127.0.0.1 ndsex.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ns2.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ns1.x10.com
If you want to get rid of some banner ads, too, you can add this to
# resolve all doubleclick names to the localhost
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 gd22.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 dcnyadgds1.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 dcnyadgds2.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 annyadgds1.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 annyadgds2.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 uunyadgds1.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 uunyadgds2.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 cwvaadgds1.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 cwvaadgds2.doubleclick.net
You get the idea. Remember, dig and squid are your friends!
Your technical analysis is, although interesting, also off the mark. The fact is, there was a machine that met most of the requirements I outlined - the TRS80, and we all know how old that is. If you want a refrene point, what I propose is to build a modern system along the same lines as the TRS80. A 50 Mhz CPU is more than sufficent, and a non-backlit screen will do just fine. When the wireless card and LAN card aren't in use, you can power them down. Besides, you are right. It does draw less then you're thinking.
Since I wrote this article, I have found a number of hardware combinations that would essentially give me what I (and, if my crammed inbox is any testament, an astonishing number of other people) want: A portable system to hack on, not a desktop replacement. Basically, the questions are ones of design, not plausibility.
I have a Dell Latitude that I like very much. It runs Linux splendidly, it's pretty light, and I get fairly decent battery life if I stay in framebuffer mode (6-7 hours on one battery). But it's a lot more than I really want in a portable. What I propose is, from a technical standpoint, much easier than building a Latitude, or a Vaio.
I'm sorry if my tinkering offends you. If hobbiests annoy you, you don't have to listen to their ruminations or read thier posts on public forums. I happen to enjoy building things. The fact that a reasonable solution exists in off-the-shelf systems (with notable compramises) is quite beside the point.
When I'm at a resteraunt, I order what's on the menu. When I'm at home, in my own kitchen, on my own time, I'll cook whatever I want. I know Slashdot isn't as civil as it used to be, but for crying out loud, loose the attitude. Sure, I like to play with computers because I think it's fun. What are you accusing me of? Being a geek? A nerd? A dork? If you have a problem with that, what are you doing on Slashdot?
These new processors actually do consume heat as they operate, turning it into valuable CPU cycles. These processors require the use of a whole new CPU packaging technology that pumps heat into, rather than out of, the CPU core. Initial tests in laptop configurations have proven uncomfortable to use, due to the fact that the laptop begins to condense water out of the air, and eventually frost over as it runs. AMD expects that these problems will be solved by the time these processors reach the marketplace.
They will no doubt use this new technology to bury Intel, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and the Soviet Union. Having vanquished these foes, they will split their company into a half dozzen competing CPU manufacturers that compete fairly with one another. Each of these new chip makers will pour billions of dollars into Linux development. Their executives and directors will use their extra income to feed starving children and help build a better public education system.
Oh, wait. That would break the laws of thermodynamics. Never mind.
Maybe there's a reason for a non-Windows/IE person to go to MSN, but as far as I know, all of those articles are available on MSNBC.com. Insofar as I can tell, it works fine.
So what? Microsoft has a stupid proprietary browser and a stupid proprietary site. We already knew this. That's their problem. When a site that actually does something usefull for non-Microsoft users becomes completely IE-dependant, then I'll be annoyed.
But bitching about Windows Update not working under Mozilla/X/Linux? That's daft. No one complains about the fact that their local Ford dealership doesn't carry all the parts to fix your Saturn. Sure, it's icky what they're doing to the HTML standard, but c'mon.
Capitalism his long been decried as brutal, cold and heartless. This complaint has been raised dozens of times by workers suddenly finding themselves without an income, since the time of Adam Smith in the 1700's. The great irony that Smith illustrated in The Wealth of Nations is that the very workers who felt mistreated and exploited by the system they worked in (and often were justified in these feelings) actually stood to realize enormous benifits. Because capitalism pushes society towards ever-increasing productivity, it is inevitable that, on the average, the quality of life for everyone will increase over time. The irony of this was sharper a few hundred years ago when workers were routenely maimed and killed by in mines and factories, or brutalized by their employers, or starved when they had not enough money for their bread.
Today, we reap the benifits of Smith's great irony. Capitalism has bought prosperity unprecidented in human history to those who have stuck with it. But amidst this prosperity, we forget at whose alter we make our sacrifices. Capitalism is not a kindly, beneficent god. It is a lusty, greedy and fickle god, who is capable of enormous cruelty towards those why often deserve it the least. We should not forget that beneath it's new robes and trapings, the engine of our economy is the same engine the drove us to the Great Crash 1929 and the Great Depression. It is the same engine that brought us through the panful boom and bust cycle of the late 1800's. And it is the same engine that maimed and killed innocent little children by the tens of thousands in the mines, factories and mills of the 18th and 19th centuries. It may have be better behaved of late, but it is the same god, and it will not simply become tame and docile because we want it to.
This is bunk. There has never been a company-employee bond, except where employers wished to exploit use feelings of loyalty and camradery to get their workers to accept lower wages. Loyalty and commitment don't ammount to a hill of beans when the quarter is ending and the board of directors has to submit a negative report to shareholders. This isn't cynical, or hyperbole. This is how money is made and buisiness is done. Just because high-tech is more cute and cuddly than coal mining doesn't mean that tech workers are free from the same covenant. Anyone who thought otherwise is delusional. And so it has been since our nation was founded. Read your history. This is not an invention of AOL-Time-Warner, Microsoft and Texaco. This is good, old fasioned bribery of the same stripe that J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller used. Nothing new here. Well, duh.My advice to anyone experienceing a pinch during these times (as I myself am) is that you should go and read your history. Capitalism is not a freindly thing, but there is much more to life than work, wages retirement and death.
Also, it should be noted that I am not an anti-capitalist, socialist or an anarchist. I work in the tech industry, and as long as I have a job I get paid a wage just like everyone else. I don't see a viable "alternative" to capitalism in systems like Marxism. However, I do beleive that capitalism should be containied to areas where it is appropriate. It should not be allowed to interfere with governance in any way, for instance. Markets are decidedly un-democratic. Additionally, I beleive that where capitalism is apropriate, it should be practiced in a rigorous, mathmatically pure way ("atomic" copmetition, as Smith termed it). Large corporations are anti-capitalist, as they attempt to avoid the process of competition in the determination of supply and demand. And finally, I beleive that the government should create systems outside of these capitalist structures to aid and assist workers who have been cast out or harmed by the process, and to fill the roles in which capitalism functions poorly (such as health care).
there are more - here's a nice page of them. I ought to compile a list of modern day ones, but I'm sure someone's allready done it. Just Google for it.
One of the more amusing things about the recent [I'm loath to call it this] dot com bull and subsequent bear market is just how wrong the analysts were. On the upswing, all the analysts and pundits threw their words and weight behind the dumbest ideas (remember "push"?). They touted the most foolish buisiness plans. They devoted all of their attention to the shinyest doodad out there, and utterly ignored the real changes that were happening in plain sight. On the downswing, despite obvious (and historically, emperically and numerically proven) indications a year ahead of time that the economy was going to slow, there was not a peep from the analyst community that things weren't going as well as they seemed. Sure, there was hype and doomsaying, but there always is. No one wanted to stick their neck out and say that the party might be slowing down, and that it might be getting time to find your date and go home. Just think - if the analyst community had been more clearheaded and more honest, we might have had a dot com slowdown, instead of a meltdown, when it did come. There are consiquences when you deny reality, and that's not a matter of opinion.
In addition, I really do wonder what people mean when they refer to Israeli "atrocities." In most cases, the incidents refered to are the shootings that have left so many young Palistinian men dead. These deaths have nearly brought me to tears, but not for their injustice - for their stupidity. Think about the circumstances under which so many of them have been killed. If you initiate or participate in a riot and assalt police officers, you will probably get shot. It doesn't matter what country you are in, or what religion you are, or what ethnic group you belong to, or how rightous your cause might be. The Police will eventually have no choice but to shoot you. It sucks, but that is how you have to maintain order. Honestly, if you throw rocks and bottles at someone with an assault rifle, you are practically begging them to shoot you. If they eventually do, that doesn't make you a martyr, no matter what you might have been screaming at the time. It makes you an idiot.
What makes me sad about these deaths is not just that Palistinian children are being killed. What makes me sad is how the Palistinian community glorifies their deaths, and exploits the sadness that anyone would feel about such an event. Parents, role models and leaders all but beg their children to go out to Israeli checkpoints and get shot. Their lives are being manipulated and expended by a self-serving and cynical leaders. This is not exactly what I would call an "Israeli attrocity."
The other complaint that one hears about the most is the demolition of Palistinian homes, and the construction of additional settlements. I've never been in support of either of these actions. I think it's wrong to take away someone's home, even if they didn't have a permit to build it. Furthermore, I think it's unwise to settle territory in the way that Israel has chosen to given present circumstances. These are both probably mistakes. But again, people seem to forget what we're talking about here. Israel is 20,330 square kilometers. The state of Vermont is 23,957 square kilometers. Areas like the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights are comparable to in size to such places as Windhan county or Bellows Falls. Not to belittle the Great State of Vermont, but why on earth would people get so worked up about such tiny, insignificant dollops of land? It would be like going to war because the state wanted to move you from Bellows Falls to Brattleboro. It's utter foolishness.
It always seems to come down the the fact that there are all sorts of "holy sites" all over the place there. In my opinion, if these holy sites are really causing that much trouble, they ought to destroy them all, for all religions, and be done with it. No pile of rubble, no matter how mystical or aincent, is worth the blood that has been spilt. I'm sure that if Muhammad, Moses and Jesus all appeared as guests on CMM'sCrossfire, they would all agree that a holy site isn't worth a single human life. So, with respect to land and settlements, I beleive that Isreal has acted beligerantly and unwisely. But the Palestinians (or at least their leadership) has acted completly insane. When the whole country is small enough to drive across in a couple of hours, what does it matter if you live here or there? We should be hearing demands from the Palestinian side that sound more like this:
Instead, they are blowing themselves up on streetcorners and taking potshots at preschools. Not all of them, of course. But the critical thing is that this behavior is all but encouraged by their leadership, and was officially encouraged not too long ago. We have such people in the United States, but we go to lengths to discorage them from actually killing people, and when they do, we lock them up.I happen to think that a lot of the things done by Israel have been mistakes. There have been times that I've been ashamed to call myself a Jew on acount of what Israel was doing at the time. But the fact is, Israel offered a final and permanant peace to Arafat, and Arafat turned it down. Israel allowed the United States to twist its arm until it yeilded to just about every demand made by the PLO. But Arafat decided to hold out for a better deal. Parez knowlingly sacrificed his leadership of the nation in an attempt to make this peace, and Arafat must have known that this would be his last shot at such a sweet deal. Up until that point, I was on the side of the Palistinians. I felt that they had been wronged, and although they behaved very, very poorly, they ought to be copmensated. But to respond to a peace offering by starting a war, and to do so with the blood of their own children is to betray the very name of Peace.
Arafat and the Palestinians wanted a war, and Israel has merely obliged them. It is exactly the same situation as the rock-throwers and the soldiers, only with whole nations. Israel (the soldier) might not be the most enlightened in its opinion of the rock-thrower (the Palestinians), but will reluctantly shoot when forced to. It sucks, but that's how you defend a nation.
Sigh. It's a nice box, and I wouldn't mind using it too much (I wish it were possible to bind multiple IP addresses and map to different subnets), but I hate resetting the damn thing all the time, or calling one of my roommates to have them reset it when I'm trying to ssh to my workstation.
My roommate, a win2k bitch (er, gugu), wants to use that as our firewall/router. I've gotten him to agree that if he can't make it work in a week, he'll let me drop a Linux box in front of our network.
Oh well. Sorry to those not from the US who might want to see this talk.
In the late 60's and early 70's, the auto industry tried to prevent or forstall the imposition of pollution controlls by insisting that cleaner engines would be less efficent, and that it would be impossible to actually improve their engine technology. The same year that GM and Ford vehigles took a huge penalty in gas milage and performace because the companies were forced to install catalytic converters, Honda introduced a car that met the pollution restrictions without a converter and with excellent gas mileage and reasonable performace for its displacement. But despite the facts, the result of this public relations temper-tantrum is that ever since, enviornmentalism has been linked with sacrifices in prosperity. This is evident in Bush's energy plan, and the US reluctance to cut CO2 emissions.
It has everything to do with corporate (and occasionally individual) resentment at being told what to do. It has nothing to do with the realities of the industries in question. The association of concervation with decreased prosperity is classic FUD.
It's really sad that this realization is news, but I'm glad a few people are finally waking up to it.
She also has a yen for antique furniture, and insisted on using a 120 year old partner's desk with its matching chair. The desk was a about eight inches too high to comfortably type, and was almost a foot think (so you couldn't solve the problem by jacking up the chair). It was aslo shaped as a square, with the origional idea being that two peopl would work from either side. My mother's solution was to place the desk in the center of the room, and walk around the thing whenever she needed to get to one of the systems on the other side. Needless to say, after every project, she had horrible back pain and aching wrists (bad enough that she couldn't hold a cup of coffee). And yet, she utterly refused to buy a real desk - "I just can't stand modern furniture!" was her reasoning.
In any event, I decided that the only way I was going to get her to use a real desk was if I built the thing myself, thus guilting her into an ergonimic solution. So, I took measurements of her height, the length of her legs to the knees and to the hip, and the length of her arms, and built a desk to her exact measurements. Fortunatly, my high school offered and woodworking evening activity. I spent about seven months building the thing (it had to hold up nearly a 1000 Kg of equipment, not to mention live up to her tasts for good furniture). In the end, it was four feet deep, fourteen feet long, with two sets of drawers and two vented computer cabinets. If anyone's ever built furniture before, you know what a pain in the ass it is to build drawers, especially big ones! Wood expands and contracts by as much as 5% with humidity and temperature, so big drawers are next to impossible to get right without doing all sorts of strange things to compensate for the changes in geometry. I also had the pleasure (?!!) to have had access to a seasoned trunk of red oak, so I milled the desk surface, leggs and other main parts myself. Since the desk had to be so large and hold up so much weight, I actually found all the available plans and project guides to be utterly useless. The main span of the desk is nine feet, and had to be able to support up to two tons (in case, for instance, someone dropped one of those 20" monitors on it from a few feet in the air, the desk wouldn't collapse and destroy the rest of her equipment).
I ended up turning to bridge design for a workable solution. It had to take into account the high loads, vibration and shock, and expansion and contraction of the material. Basically, I went with a box-girder construction, but with suspension cables inside the box. The suspension cables were nessesary becasuse the joints of the box girder could not simply be fixed to one another, or the surface of the desk would split. Each of the joints is made using lateral rails with ballbearings, like the sliders for a drawer, only much larger. Unfortunatly, this leads to a rather unpleasant amount of gear lash since the bearings require a small amount of play. The suspension cables keep the desk arched slightly upward, instead of bowed downward. This insures that the bearings are aways biased in the same direction so there is no gear lash. Also, the suspension cables are mounted to shock absorbers. Any vibration on the surface is transmitted into the shock absorbers. The result is that the desk surface is only four inches thick at the center, but is strong enough to hold up a small car (or withstand the shock of a 150 Kg object droped from two meters), sturdy enough that you can pound a nail into a block of wood and not skip a CD player a foot away, and flexible enough that it expands an contracts lengthwise by about an inch and a half.
In the end, it cost me about $300 to build the desk, if you assume my time was worthless (I was a high school student, so that was pretty much the case) and you don't count the electricity and heating oil I used up. After graduation, my mother shiped it from Vermont to California - all 400 kilograms of it. I'll leave it as an exersize to the reader to figure out how much more it cost to ship than to build.
She is now happily using a desk built to her exact ergonimic requirements, and has not suffered from back or wrist pain in the four years since she's been using it. It's not quite as pretty as the aincent antiques she's got - but hey, it was my first (and thusfar only) attempt at woodworking.
a fine line, maybe, but otherwise free speech wouldn't mean much of anything.
No really. It will - don't try it.
Personally, I wouldn't have any problem paying [a reasonable price] for ROMs, but the option simply isn't available. You see, owning a copyright on a non-confidential item gives the owner the right to require that I pay for my copy of the item. It does not give the owner the right to deny me access to the item if I want it. So, if Nintendo and Sega refuse to sell their old games, then they'll have to live with the fact that trading ROMs is protected by the first amendment. If they feel like dragging people into court for copyright infringement, all the accused have to say is "I would have paid for it, but I was denyed the opportunity to do so," and malicious intent becomes impossible to prove, and the case is moot. I know it's not quite that simple, but I don't see a rational counter argument.
...were greatly exaggerated, it seems. What a releif!
If only people would wake up and smell the smog, they'd realize that cities and states already fork over hundreds of billions of dollars a year to extend and maintain this public transportation system. Here in Boston alone, the Notorious B.I.G. D.I.G. has swallowed 60 billion dollars (check your paper for the latest figures), even as the T system languishes right on top of it.
Anyway, scramjets for comercial public transportation are a long way off. But when they get here, they would be nicely complimented by a decent mag-lev rail system. I'd guess both are roughly on the same time-frame for development and deployment.
- Drop the scramjet vehicle from a supersonic carrier vehicle.
- Build a giant rail gun, like in Gundam Wing.
- Attach JATO or RATO pods to the scramjet, and jetison them once hypersoninc speeds are reached.
- Use conventional means to reach a high altitude, and acheive hypersonic ingition using a balistic dive.
- Use an on-board oxidizer to fuel the scramjet like a rocket until atmosphearic ignition is possible.
- Build the scramjet to work first as a jet. Once at maximum jet speed, lock the jet blades and operate as a ramjet. Once at maximum ramjet speeds, jetison the jet rotors and combustion chamber to expose a scramjet surface.
There are a couple of other reasonable ways, but those are the ones that come to mind.Because of this, scramjets are critical for efficent, practical single-stage-to-orbit vehicles. The idea is that you operate in scramjet mode until the atmosphear thins out too much to sustain combustion, and then you start adding your own oxidizer. This will effectively turn the engine into a rocket motor. With scramjets, you could build a shuttle that would actually be fairly inexpensive to operate. Also, since the most expensive part of any mission is boosting into low earth orbit, any savings in the first stages of flight would dramatically bring down to costs for any mission, but especially heavy ones (like a manned mission to Mars).
The other reason to develop scramjets is for their raw efficenty. The use fuel at a fantastic rate, but at Mach 7, the fuel per unit distance is exceedingly good. Instead of supersonic (in this case hypersonic) flight being a luxury reserved for Concorde flyers, it would become the cheap, practical way of getting around. Of course, it would only make sense for the really long flights (like Chicago to Sidny), but the implications could be trans-global flights that cost less than regional flights.
Scramjets are very, very cool, and not just because they go fast.
Yes. The speed of sound increases with the density of the medium through which it propogates. For instance, the speed of sound through the crossection of average slashdot posters is aproximatly 8450 M/s.
What pisses me off is that one is supposed to have a "fair and speedy" trial. There's no reason I can think of for such an important case to languish between trial and appeal for so long.
Well, I do have a hyper nervous system. ^_^
But as you (and the post I responded to) imply, the chemical reaction in your retina is not fast enough to directly perceive the flicker of a screen running at 80 or 85 Hz. However, you can indirectly perceive the flicker when it interfeares with other things, causing a strobing effect.
Also, the squeel from the flyback transformer buggs the hell out of me. My monitor is pretty decent in that respect - the transformer must somehow be dampened. But I can't stand the sound of televisions - I can hear that obnoxious squeel from across the street sometimes. I like your suggestion about using a TV tuner card - that's what I did in high school, although that was mainly because TV's were against the rules.
I drive my monitor at 85 Hz, and I can look at it for about three hours before it starts to get uncomfortable. I know it isn't because I have a crummy monitor, it's a nice 20" flat surface Trinitron, or because of florecent lights since I use indirect hallogen lighting in my office.
In comparison, I can use my laptop, which has a much smaller LCD screen, for as long as I can pay attention. When I turn down the brightness and use my anti-eyestrain fonts and themes, I can hack for 24 hours at a stretch. The reason is because LCD screens do not flicker - LCD screens do not draw the screen by flashing one pixel at a time. If you or a friend have a laptop, try putting it next to a CRT. Set the CRT to the highest refresh rate it can handle, and set the laptop to the lowest refresh rate it can handle (although, for the laptop, it really doesn't matter, and you may only have one choice anyway). Waive your hand in front of the CRT, and then in front of the LCD. You will notice a rather remarkable difference.
The biggest reason that CRTs bug people is because most places use overhead florecent lighting. In the United States, all florecent lights flicker at 60 Hz, and 50 Hz in Europe and a lot of other countries. Chances are, your CRT and the overhead lights will flicker out of phase with one another, causing a much lower frequency strobing effect. The effect may be very subtle, but it will still drive most people crazy, even if they can't see it directly.
If these new LED backlit LCDs have the same flicker that CRTs do, I'll happily stick to the older technology. For the average person who doesn't need a no-flicker screen for 30 hour hacking sessions, these new screens will be awsome.
Well, can you think of anyting new? Xerox/PARC basically invented this whole GUI thing eons ago, and there haven't been any significant changes to that paradigm. Buttons, menues windows and icons - everything else is just details.
Look at it this way - we have two kinds of interfaces; GUI and command line. What innovations have people made with command line interfaces? We have all sorts of new shells since the first VT-100 terminal rolled off the production line. With some nifty utilities, bash is more than good enough for doing just about anything with a computer (except looking at pictues and such, but there are framebuffer viewers nowadays). But shells like bash, and the utilities they use, are still regular old command line systems. They work just fine on VT-100 and 320 terminals. The paradigm hasn't changed, and it doesn't really need to.
It's possible that the same is true of GUIs. We can dress them up and build new utilities, but the underlying assumptions have remained the same for more than two decades. Given the history and continued usefullness of command line systems, I predict that GUIs as we know them will exist for a long, long time to come. When something new comes along, it will not be a GUI - it will be something else entierly. Maybe it will be a 3D enviornment, like in Snow Crash. Maybe it will be a speech based system, like in Star Trek.
But even in Snow Crash and Star Trek, GUI and command line enviornments still exist.
The GUI was invented because command line enviornments had weaknesses. GUIs never (at least not in enviornments that should be taken seriously) replaced command line systems because GUIs have their own weaknesses, and those weaknesses happen to be where the command line way of doing things is strong. When something new comes along, it will probably be to get around the weaknesses of GUIs, but if it really is different, it will have it's own weaknesses where GUIs are probably strong. Some people might bemone the new thing, as people bemoned GUIs because they waste resources and whatnot, but those people are probably users of systems that don't let you choose the style of interface for the problem at hand (*caugh* windows *caugh*).
Well, assuming you don't count the $0.50 per CD-R and the cost of downloading the ISOs.
I've spent about $500 on Microsoft software (Windows NT and Office), but I got much less use out of it than any one of those Linux distros. When I bought NT 4.0, it was very broken and had poor driver support - as a result, it wasn't really practical to use with my hardware for about a year. After a year, the driver support got better and the service packs caught up with the really bad bugs, and about a year of real usefullness followed. After about a year, NT 4.0 started to look really shabby next to Linux, so I stopped using it. After that experience, I'm never going to buy proprietary software again if I can help it. $500 for a year's usefullness is a ripoff.
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