Saying that Slashdot is part of the web and email is ignoring the point. They're both messaging systems. Rich text is a useful messaging system feature. Exactly how you happen to implement the messaging syste isn't at all relevent.
Never mind simple things like italics and colored fonts. When you're doing any kind of serious workflow, you need to be able to do complex tables, simple diagrams, etc. I don't just want HTML support in my workflow, I want vector graphics. For online collaboration to get serious, online collaboration tools have to come out of the dark ages.
If MUTT works for you, fine. But don't assume your needs are the only ones any mail user can have.
People have a hard time understanding the ACLU, because they keep trying to put it into some kind of political pigeon hole. It just doesn't work. The ACLU isn't a political movement. It's a bunch of lawyers who litigate in defense of their interpretation of the Bill of Rights.
There was a case back in 88 that demonstrates the role of the ACLU in all its irony. If you remember that year, you probably remember Bush the First packing as many Hot Button Keywords into his presidential campaign speeches as possible. One really nasty example is that he repeatedly referred to his opponent as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU", terminology obviously meant to evoke left wing associations.
Now somewhere in the midwest (I think it was Ohio) a woman tried to put "Elect Bush" signs on her front lawn, only to be told she was violating local zoning ordinances. She placed a call to the local ACLU chapter -- and got a callback from the state chairman, who informed her that she had raised a vital free speech issue, and the state ACLU would back her and her Bush signs with everything it had!
Of course, that's not the biggest irony connected with the ACLU -- it doesn't come close to all those Nazi and White Supremicist bozos who turn to the ACLU for legal representation, which often comes in the form of Jewish or African-American lawyers! But it's all part of the same idea: that for the Constitution to work, its protections have to be extended to everybody: pedophiles, Nazis, and even people who attack the ACLU itself.
Which makes association with the ACLU pretty difficult: you have to accept that your dues are going to go to protect the legal rights of a lot of people you happen to despise.
I actually have no problem with this: I'm a Jewish American who happens to think that everybody should read The Turner Diaries. The more appalling an idea is, the more you need to bring it out in the open. Anyway, freedom of thought (including stupid thought) is the most fundamental of rights.
I do have a major issue with the ACLU. Not their rabid defense of the rights of despised minorities, but rather their assumption that litigation is the only way to do it. Lawyers do play an important role in protecting the rights of their clients. But the courts aren't always the best protector of personal liberties. As Dred Scott learned, they often give a high priority to maintaining the status quo. And even when they don't, having a social change mandated by a federal judge is no guarantee of the change actually happening. Any African American trying to find a place to live will tell you that!
OE, for all its many flaws, is the least-worst IMAP client for Windows that supports HTML in e-mail. It handles large message stores flawlessly; it does disconnected mode; it lets me do a full-text search easily, it supports authenticated SMTP, STARTTLS, and IMAP over SSL; it cleanly supports multiple accounts, and it's certainly got the least clunky UI.
Have you followed development of the email client in Mozilla/Netscape? Feature-for-feature, it's always lagged behind OE -- but the current release has all the features you mention. And it's a lot easier to use than OE.
I also believe it is the *only* client (aside from Outlook itself) that supports the IDLE extension, which lets my Cyrus IMAP server push "new mail" notifications asynchronously, instead of requiring the client to poll every N minutes.
Well, that's a cool feature. But all it does is save on network bandwidth (which is hardly in short supply these days) and get you notified of email the very moment it arrives, instead of within 60 seconds.
I tried Mulberry a while ago, but I didn't like it; I forget why, exactly, but it looks like they've recently released a new client, so maybe I should check into that again.
My problem with Mulberry is that it piles on the features (I think it must have more than any IMAP client) without trying to make them fit together, or make the whole reasonably usable. So you end up having to do a half-dozen clicks for even the simplest actions. Unless they're advertising that they've done some serious usability testing, I wouldn't bother downloading the latest release.
You mean, that's the only kind of email you get. Lots of people use rich text in their email. Why? Well, why did you use it just now in your Slashdot post?
Gaming is one of the greatest reasons to soup-up your PC today... and strangely was one of the reasons the Amiga was never taken seriously in it's day.
I don't think that's strange at all. The Amiga was a good game machine because it came "souped up". Not by today's standards, of course, but by the standards of the time. You could take a PC, add a bunch of multimedia hardware, and end up with something that was sort of comparable with the Amiga, but cost 2 or 3 times as much. And of course you'd still be stuck with an outdated segmented memory architecture and a pseudo-OS...
The problem with the Amiga wasn't that it was good with games, or multimedia, or such. The problem was that this was its focus. Not that it didn't have decent word processing and such. But the designers of the Amiga weren't trying to compete for existing computer users (that would have been foolish), they were trying to create new ones.
Unfortunately, existing platforms were too well established. They didn't do multimedia stuff as well as the Amiga, but they did it well enough to lock the Amiga out. My brother-in-law, a musician, was shopping around for his first computer at the time. I recommended the Amiga because of the multimedia hardware. But he ended up buying a Mac. Sure he had to pay extra for a MIDI interface, but all the musicians he knew were buying Macs, and his record label used Macs. If he'd taken my advice, he wouldn't have been able to share files with them.
Hardly a troll -- you ask some important questions. Do wish you hadn't posted as an AC though.
Just after the big AT&T breakup, my company hired away a Big Name from Bell Labs. Way out of my league, but my office was next door, our jobs overlapped, and we became friends. He had a lot of AT&T manuals in five-ring binders. I asked him why AT&T didn't didn't use three-ring binders like everybody else. He pointed out that AT&T was so big (before the breakup they were the second largest private entity on the planet) that they could set their own standards.
Current parallels to that include Microsoft's ability to resist using w3C and ISO standards, and the U.S. resistence to the metric system. Though they actually did try during the 70s, when you saw road signs that gave distances in both miles and klicks. But consumer resistence rolled that effort back.
Before you sneer at the stupidity of ordinary Americans, consider the difference between Europoe and the U.S. Before the metric system, Europe had a really painful hodgpodge of measuring system. Which varied not just between countries, but between professions. Apothecary measure, troy weight (used by goldsmiths and jewelers), various kinds of freight... The metric system won out not because it was more "logical" but because it was something everybody could agree on. But when you have a couple hundred-million people all using the same traditional system, it's less of an issue.
Which is not an excuse for those NASA contractors who refuse to change over. The scientific and engineering community has been metric for decades. The fact that NASA is unable to enforce standardization on its contractors is a really painful sign of their political feebleness and bureaucratic inertia.
I have to nitpick your claim that we "can't even get the old Imperial measurements right". Here's the history: when the U.S. broke off from British rule, the measurement systems were actually identical. Unfortunately that "system" was a really nasty hodpodge of traditional measures. In 1822, Britain tried to rationalize measurement, not by going metric (evil French-Jacobin invention!) but by inventing a new set of measurements that was easy to verify and close enough to traditional measures to be accepted. Thus the Imperial Gallon was defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water at normal temperature and pressure.
The U.S. continued to use traditional English measure, but finally started to eliminate some of the marginal systems. For volume, we're currently down to two: the English Wine Gallon and Corn Gallon, though we currently call them the Liquid Gallon and Dry Gallon. I supposed it would have made a little more sense to adopt the Imperial system -- but in 1822 that would have been politically impossible, for the same reasons the UK invented the Imperial system rather than going metric.
Indeed. I just discovered that I still haven't signed my Visa bank card. I mostly use it online, but I still do B&M shopping often enough that some clerk should have caught it by now.
Social engineering is the crucial part of this kind of fraud. That's why new tech is so damned useless. A couple years ago I saw one of those hidden-camera exposes, where they showed how easy it is to open a checking account under a bogus name -- a necessary step for an identify thief. The really stupid thing was that the clerk opening the account actually tried to make them follow the rules -- until her boss came over and made her stop hassling the customer.
Another pathetic thing was the ease with which they cashed check photocopies. And yes, the copies had "DO NOT CASH" all over them, generated by invisible ink on the originals. They showed one to a treasury official, who winced and said, "Please tell me you didn't manage to cash this!"
It's worth mentioning though: signatures are even easier to fake than id cards. Really, the only purpose of a signature is to acknowledge some kind of agreement. If there's a hassle later, they'll ask you, "is this your signature?" If you answer Yes, or they can prove you should have, it doesn't matter if you signed "Elvis, King of Outer Space."
Oh come on. Think of all the prognosticators that this keeps off the breadlines!
Seriously though, this is useful in terms of raising credibility for desktop Linux. I find it very significant that this comes from a German company -- the EU in general and Germany in particular seems to have special motivation to resist the Redmond hegemony.
Which opens up an interesting possibility: North American corporations stick with Windows out of sheer inertia, while their overseas counterparts all switch to Linux. One more cultural-technology gap, to go with the metric system and GSM!
But, you say, the prediction is still not useful, because it doesn't actually predict! Well, evaluating predictions in terms of their accuracy has a certain naive charm, I suppose. But not very realistic!
This is slightly more impressive than American Slashdotter will be aware. In Britain a pint is an Imperial pint, which is 25% bigger than the pint we use.
I'm somewhat bemused to discover that British pubs are still dispensing pints. We all remember (or should) that scene from Orwell's 1984. Winston Smith, trying to dig up forbidden history, goes looking for a guy old enough to remember The Revolution. Doesn't do him any good. He finds his source, but the man isn't very helpful. Does he care about the downfall of capitalism and democracy? Does it bother him that he now lives under a hyper-totalitarian state that makes Communism and Fascism look positively tolerant? No, he just cares that nobody will sell him a pint of beer. All they have is half-liters (not enough) and liters (too much for his aging bladder).
Didn't turn out that way. I guess Orwell was full of it after all!
You're taking a textbook truism about mass economic behavior and applying it to individual behavior. The assumption that people act selfishly may be useful in devising economic theories, but real life is more complciated than that.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "economy". Forget semantics: all I'm saying is that a for-profit business is, by definition, out to make a profit.
That's why we have governments and laws to regulate industry.
Uhm, excuse me? Who elects the government? Who elects the legislators that make the laws? That's the reason credit-card issuers are required to indemnify their customers against fraud: too many congresspeople were getting complaints.
You remind me of a quote that I wanted to put in my original post, but couldn't quite make fit. After the big S&L debacle, they held one of those on-air "town meetings" where they discussed the fact that this was going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. An elderly woman stood up and said, "The taxpayers shouldn't pay for this! The government should!"
So what is Paypal supposed to do? Absorb all your loses?
Yeah, I know, that's what banks do on credit card transactions. Because Federal law says they have to. But before you decide that the law should cover Paypal too, consider how much banks charge for credit card transactions. Plus they rake in huge amounts from interest and client fees. If they didn't have these huge income streams, they couldn't afford to obey the federal law -- and credit cards would be a lot harder to get.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing, come to think of it.
I find this quote from the article very telling:
"Until the day I got caught, I thought that no one had lost money," Nelson insists, explaining that he had thought that his buyers would be able to get their money back from PayPal or their credit-card companies.
That neatly expresses the it's-somebody-else's-problem attitude of modern consumers. If the cost of something isn't something that directly and conspicuously affects them, then the cost doesn't exist. Sorry, a market economy doesn't work that way.
So what you're saying is that electronic slots use some pre-determined pseudo-random sequence to prevent inconvenient runs of bad luck. That's interesting, but doesn't really change the practical unpredictability of the individual "pull". It doesn't even change the percentage that house keeps or pays out. It just avoids having the machine run out of coins, thus losing valuable sucker time.
By the way, the typical rand() function is also pseudo-random: it's a mathemtical sequence that satisifes some formal definition of randomness, but which is still completely deterministic. Why is it done this way? Because this level of randomness is adequate for most applications. (Though there have been famous examples where video game junkies have noticed repeatable behavior because of poorly-chosen pseudo-random functions.) Because it's usually not practical to embed a database of truely random numbers. And because it's often useful to be able to repeat a "random" sequence to see the effect of changing logic or assumptions of a simulation.
... the ratio of win to lose... is constant over a particular time period.
But that's true of any game of chance. If you play roulette for any length of time, the amount of money you're going to hand over to the house is extremely predictable. That doesn't mean that individual spins aren't random.
The world is full of phenomena that are unpredictable on an individual basis but highly predictable when you consider multiple events over time. This includes not only things like roulette wheels and slot machines (which are only "random" in a practical sense -- in principle you could predict individual spins with enough advance information) but quantum pheonoma, which underly everything that happens -- and which cannot be predicted even in principle. So the universe itself is fundamentally random, yet still manages to be full of predicatable events.
I'm not an expert, but I think the assumption has to do with active management of free space. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that defragmentation would be performed on the fly, just as memory managers defragment RAM. Probably that turned out not to be as easy as they originally though.
The Segway doesn't have to be Bush- *cough* fool-proof...
Actually it does. If the Segway made it too easy to fall over or run people down, it'd have no chance of selling.
Although I suppose it really has no chance anyway. Too expensive, no serious applications. (And of course there's the "save the planet from the Segway!" crowd...) The only thing it has going for it is the techno-cool factor.
One thing I found interesting about the iBot: some users report that it actually feels more stable in two-wheel mode. And indeed, ordinary wheelchairs do tip over. Possibly having a device that's actively resisting falling over is a more reliable safeguard than simple physical "stability". Hey, it works for bipeds!
The number of ignorant and stupid posts in this story is ridiculous. All the pronouncements about what the wheelchair-bound need by people who clearly don't know the first thing about physical disability.
You think people who use powered wheelchairs are lazy? John Hockenberry had to spend nine months in rehab before he learned to get by without his legs. And I understand that's pretty typical. Anybody who can deal with shit like that, with or without electrical assistance, has my respect.
And stop and consider all the practical things the wheelchair-bound can't do without assistance. Not just the obvious stuff like climbing stairs. But basic stuff like washing your car, reaching the top shelf at the store, cooking at a normal-height kitchen counter... And imagine what it's like not to be able to hold a casual conversation in the hallway without craning your neck.
And you think battery life is the biggest problem for the paraplegic? Gawd I love these Slashdot "experts".
I've never had the courage to see Schindler's list -- aside from my Spielbergphobia, I'm too close to the story.
I actually think that Jaws was a good movie. Unfortunately, it also made the studio a ton of money. Which instantly converted Spielberg into a "genius" who can get whatever budget he wants, and who is never told that his shit smells.
At the other refreshing extreme is Robert Rodriguez. I'm not a fan (pure action flicks not my thing), but I've always been bemused by his lack of self-importance. And also the strange way he became a "leading director": he decided to make cheap direct-to-video action films for the Spanish language market, which would pay the rent while he learned to make "serious" movies. This plan fell apart when his first video, El Mariachi, fell into the hands of Hollywood, which is always desperate for directors that can reliably make decent movies without spending a lot of money.
Well it may be that NTFS has a worse fragmentation problem than other journalling file systems. But it's worth mentioning that the fragmentation seems to be a problem with all JFSs, even though their inventors were sure it wouldn't be.
I've experience with two JFSs: NTFS (because I use a lot of Windows boxes, and I avoid FAT where possible) and XFS (because I used to work at SGI). Both were originally released without any defragmentation utility, because they were thought not to fragment. Both Microsoft and SGI eventually gave in and released the tool.
Well yeah, having an "obsessively constructed" background is nice. I'm just old-fashioned enough to want interesting things to happen in the foreground.
On the one hand, you jumped to assumptions. The word "free" doesn't appear anywhere in the story. And why should it? This guy is some well-paid database wonk who owns a $200 portable disk drive that he goes around connecting to a lot of (probably expensive) computers. Why should he balk at spending $40 for a product that solves his problem so neatly?
I'm probably gonna buy a copy myself. Thanks for telling me about it. Keep up the good work, and please read more carefully.
Yeah, Windows sucks. I think I may have heard this mentioned once or twice before. What I don't get is how that's relevent to the discussion. We're trying to solve a technical problem here, not fantasize about some perfect world where the problem doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind simple things like italics and colored fonts. When you're doing any kind of serious workflow, you need to be able to do complex tables, simple diagrams, etc. I don't just want HTML support in my workflow, I want vector graphics. For online collaboration to get serious, online collaboration tools have to come out of the dark ages.
If MUTT works for you, fine. But don't assume your needs are the only ones any mail user can have.
There was a case back in 88 that demonstrates the role of the ACLU in all its irony. If you remember that year, you probably remember Bush the First packing as many Hot Button Keywords into his presidential campaign speeches as possible. One really nasty example is that he repeatedly referred to his opponent as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU", terminology obviously meant to evoke left wing associations.
Now somewhere in the midwest (I think it was Ohio) a woman tried to put "Elect Bush" signs on her front lawn, only to be told she was violating local zoning ordinances. She placed a call to the local ACLU chapter -- and got a callback from the state chairman, who informed her that she had raised a vital free speech issue, and the state ACLU would back her and her Bush signs with everything it had!
Of course, that's not the biggest irony connected with the ACLU -- it doesn't come close to all those Nazi and White Supremicist bozos who turn to the ACLU for legal representation, which often comes in the form of Jewish or African-American lawyers! But it's all part of the same idea: that for the Constitution to work, its protections have to be extended to everybody: pedophiles, Nazis, and even people who attack the ACLU itself.
Which makes association with the ACLU pretty difficult: you have to accept that your dues are going to go to protect the legal rights of a lot of people you happen to despise.
I actually have no problem with this: I'm a Jewish American who happens to think that everybody should read The Turner Diaries. The more appalling an idea is, the more you need to bring it out in the open. Anyway, freedom of thought (including stupid thought) is the most fundamental of rights.
I do have a major issue with the ACLU. Not their rabid defense of the rights of despised minorities, but rather their assumption that litigation is the only way to do it. Lawyers do play an important role in protecting the rights of their clients. But the courts aren't always the best protector of personal liberties. As Dred Scott learned, they often give a high priority to maintaining the status quo. And even when they don't, having a social change mandated by a federal judge is no guarantee of the change actually happening. Any African American trying to find a place to live will tell you that!
You mean, that's the only kind of email you get. Lots of people use rich text in their email. Why? Well, why did you use it just now in your Slashdot post?
The problem with the Amiga wasn't that it was good with games, or multimedia, or such. The problem was that this was its focus. Not that it didn't have decent word processing and such. But the designers of the Amiga weren't trying to compete for existing computer users (that would have been foolish), they were trying to create new ones.
Unfortunately, existing platforms were too well established. They didn't do multimedia stuff as well as the Amiga, but they did it well enough to lock the Amiga out. My brother-in-law, a musician, was shopping around for his first computer at the time. I recommended the Amiga because of the multimedia hardware. But he ended up buying a Mac. Sure he had to pay extra for a MIDI interface, but all the musicians he knew were buying Macs, and his record label used Macs. If he'd taken my advice, he wouldn't have been able to share files with them.
Just after the big AT&T breakup, my company hired away a Big Name from Bell Labs. Way out of my league, but my office was next door, our jobs overlapped, and we became friends. He had a lot of AT&T manuals in five-ring binders. I asked him why AT&T didn't didn't use three-ring binders like everybody else. He pointed out that AT&T was so big (before the breakup they were the second largest private entity on the planet) that they could set their own standards.
Current parallels to that include Microsoft's ability to resist using w3C and ISO standards, and the U.S. resistence to the metric system. Though they actually did try during the 70s, when you saw road signs that gave distances in both miles and klicks. But consumer resistence rolled that effort back.
Before you sneer at the stupidity of ordinary Americans, consider the difference between Europoe and the U.S. Before the metric system, Europe had a really painful hodgpodge of measuring system. Which varied not just between countries, but between professions. Apothecary measure, troy weight (used by goldsmiths and jewelers), various kinds of freight ... The metric system won out not because it was more "logical" but because it was something everybody could agree on. But when you have a couple hundred-million people all using the same traditional system, it's less of an issue.
Which is not an excuse for those NASA contractors who refuse to change over. The scientific and engineering community has been metric for decades. The fact that NASA is unable to enforce standardization on its contractors is a really painful sign of their political feebleness and bureaucratic inertia.
I have to nitpick your claim that we "can't even get the old Imperial measurements right". Here's the history: when the U.S. broke off from British rule, the measurement systems were actually identical. Unfortunately that "system" was a really nasty hodpodge of traditional measures. In 1822, Britain tried to rationalize measurement, not by going metric (evil French-Jacobin invention!) but by inventing a new set of measurements that was easy to verify and close enough to traditional measures to be accepted. Thus the Imperial Gallon was defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water at normal temperature and pressure.
The U.S. continued to use traditional English measure, but finally started to eliminate some of the marginal systems. For volume, we're currently down to two: the English Wine Gallon and Corn Gallon, though we currently call them the Liquid Gallon and Dry Gallon. I supposed it would have made a little more sense to adopt the Imperial system -- but in 1822 that would have been politically impossible, for the same reasons the UK invented the Imperial system rather than going metric.
Social engineering is the crucial part of this kind of fraud. That's why new tech is so damned useless. A couple years ago I saw one of those hidden-camera exposes, where they showed how easy it is to open a checking account under a bogus name -- a necessary step for an identify thief. The really stupid thing was that the clerk opening the account actually tried to make them follow the rules -- until her boss came over and made her stop hassling the customer.
Another pathetic thing was the ease with which they cashed check photocopies. And yes, the copies had "DO NOT CASH" all over them, generated by invisible ink on the originals. They showed one to a treasury official, who winced and said, "Please tell me you didn't manage to cash this!"
It's worth mentioning though: signatures are even easier to fake than id cards. Really, the only purpose of a signature is to acknowledge some kind of agreement. If there's a hassle later, they'll ask you, "is this your signature?" If you answer Yes, or they can prove you should have, it doesn't matter if you signed "Elvis, King of Outer Space."
Seriously though, this is useful in terms of raising credibility for desktop Linux. I find it very significant that this comes from a German company -- the EU in general and Germany in particular seems to have special motivation to resist the Redmond hegemony.
Which opens up an interesting possibility: North American corporations stick with Windows out of sheer inertia, while their overseas counterparts all switch to Linux. One more cultural-technology gap, to go with the metric system and GSM!
But, you say, the prediction is still not useful, because it doesn't actually predict! Well, evaluating predictions in terms of their accuracy has a certain naive charm, I suppose. But not very realistic!
I don't follow you. Are you saying Paypal is too strict, or not strict enough?
I'm somewhat bemused to discover that British pubs are still dispensing pints. We all remember (or should) that scene from Orwell's 1984. Winston Smith, trying to dig up forbidden history, goes looking for a guy old enough to remember The Revolution. Doesn't do him any good. He finds his source, but the man isn't very helpful. Does he care about the downfall of capitalism and democracy? Does it bother him that he now lives under a hyper-totalitarian state that makes Communism and Fascism look positively tolerant? No, he just cares that nobody will sell him a pint of beer. All they have is half-liters (not enough) and liters (too much for his aging bladder).
Didn't turn out that way. I guess Orwell was full of it after all!
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "economy". Forget semantics: all I'm saying is that a for-profit business is, by definition, out to make a profit.
Uhm, excuse me? Who elects the government? Who elects the legislators that make the laws? That's the reason credit-card issuers are required to indemnify their customers against fraud: too many congresspeople were getting complaints.You remind me of a quote that I wanted to put in my original post, but couldn't quite make fit. After the big S&L debacle, they held one of those on-air "town meetings" where they discussed the fact that this was going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. An elderly woman stood up and said, "The taxpayers shouldn't pay for this! The government should!"
Yeah, I know, that's what banks do on credit card transactions. Because Federal law says they have to. But before you decide that the law should cover Paypal too, consider how much banks charge for credit card transactions. Plus they rake in huge amounts from interest and client fees. If they didn't have these huge income streams, they couldn't afford to obey the federal law -- and credit cards would be a lot harder to get.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing, come to think of it.
I find this quote from the article very telling:
That neatly expresses the it's-somebody-else's-problem attitude of modern consumers. If the cost of something isn't something that directly and conspicuously affects them, then the cost doesn't exist. Sorry, a market economy doesn't work that way.By the way, the typical rand() function is also pseudo-random: it's a mathemtical sequence that satisifes some formal definition of randomness, but which is still completely deterministic. Why is it done this way? Because this level of randomness is adequate for most applications. (Though there have been famous examples where video game junkies have noticed repeatable behavior because of poorly-chosen pseudo-random functions.) Because it's usually not practical to embed a database of truely random numbers. And because it's often useful to be able to repeat a "random" sequence to see the effect of changing logic or assumptions of a simulation.
The world is full of phenomena that are unpredictable on an individual basis but highly predictable when you consider multiple events over time. This includes not only things like roulette wheels and slot machines (which are only "random" in a practical sense -- in principle you could predict individual spins with enough advance information) but quantum pheonoma, which underly everything that happens -- and which cannot be predicted even in principle. So the universe itself is fundamentally random, yet still manages to be full of predicatable events.
I'm not an expert, but I think the assumption has to do with active management of free space. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that defragmentation would be performed on the fly, just as memory managers defragment RAM. Probably that turned out not to be as easy as they originally though.
And fraud is not a sign of poor execution?
Although I suppose it really has no chance anyway. Too expensive, no serious applications. (And of course there's the "save the planet from the Segway!" crowd...) The only thing it has going for it is the techno-cool factor.
One thing I found interesting about the iBot: some users report that it actually feels more stable in two-wheel mode. And indeed, ordinary wheelchairs do tip over. Possibly having a device that's actively resisting falling over is a more reliable safeguard than simple physical "stability". Hey, it works for bipeds!
You think people who use powered wheelchairs are lazy? John Hockenberry had to spend nine months in rehab before he learned to get by without his legs. And I understand that's pretty typical. Anybody who can deal with shit like that, with or without electrical assistance, has my respect.
And stop and consider all the practical things the wheelchair-bound can't do without assistance. Not just the obvious stuff like climbing stairs. But basic stuff like washing your car, reaching the top shelf at the store, cooking at a normal-height kitchen counter ... And imagine what it's like not to be able to hold a casual conversation in the hallway without craning your neck.
And you think battery life is the biggest problem for the paraplegic? Gawd I love these Slashdot "experts".
Not as funny as quadraplegia though. And don't even get me started on land mines....
I actually think that Jaws was a good movie. Unfortunately, it also made the studio a ton of money. Which instantly converted Spielberg into a "genius" who can get whatever budget he wants, and who is never told that his shit smells.
At the other refreshing extreme is Robert Rodriguez. I'm not a fan (pure action flicks not my thing), but I've always been bemused by his lack of self-importance. And also the strange way he became a "leading director": he decided to make cheap direct-to-video action films for the Spanish language market, which would pay the rent while he learned to make "serious" movies. This plan fell apart when his first video, El Mariachi, fell into the hands of Hollywood, which is always desperate for directors that can reliably make decent movies without spending a lot of money.
I've experience with two JFSs: NTFS (because I use a lot of Windows boxes, and I avoid FAT where possible) and XFS (because I used to work at SGI). Both were originally released without any defragmentation utility, because they were thought not to fragment. Both Microsoft and SGI eventually gave in and released the tool.
Well yeah, having an "obsessively constructed" background is nice. I'm just old-fashioned enough to want interesting things to happen in the foreground.
I'm probably gonna buy a copy myself. Thanks for telling me about it. Keep up the good work, and please read more carefully.
Yeah, Windows sucks. I think I may have heard this mentioned once or twice before. What I don't get is how that's relevent to the discussion. We're trying to solve a technical problem here, not fantasize about some perfect world where the problem doesn't exist.