I can't tell you how many times I've grabbed my PowerBook thinking it wasn't plugged in...
Same here. I hope when the cord is yanked, the adapter is smart enough to cut the power. From the pictures, it looked like you could touch the power leads with your bare finger or any conductive surface. I'm a little concerned that the cord might get yanked when I'm not around (i.e.: dog) and the end lands on something metallic, shorting, and starting a fire.
Now that I think about it, the existing 'prong' adapter plug looks like you could bridge the contacts pretty easily.
Corporations should be required to contribute to a federal fund, equal in proportion to the amount in which the corporation sues non-corporate entities. That fund would then be used to supply non-corporate individuals with the civil equivalent of a public defender.
Can't you see the house & senate passing something like this? Ok, stop laughing.
It's still not simple. You still need to know if state x taxes product/service y and sometimes under condition z. i.e.: CT doesn't tax clothing $100 except shoes (or something like that).
This would work best if the law absolutely *guaranteed* a separate online sales tax with well-defined rules that were consistent across all states, while still allowing for each state to charge different percentages. i.e.: All states charge sales tax for clothing $100 except shoes 365 days/year. CT could charge say 6.5%, while MA could charge 8%. Additionally, states would only be allowed to change their percentage rates once per year, and all at the same time as the other states. Barring a centralized state-tax clearing house, registration for state taxes would standardized, using the same forms, (small if any) registration fees, and same filing procedure, forms, reporting, etc.
I don't have a lot of faith in politicians coming up with a simple plan like that.
Epilogue: lawyers organize a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit against the cat food company. They get the billions of dollars, and you get a coupon for more cat food.
BUT.. if you were falsely accused of something, would a defense attorney have equal access to this type of evidence?
And if it were, how easy would it be (legally) for this type of information to be used for civil cases? Why can I easily see a situation where someone is caught selling pirated DVDs at a flea market, and the MPAA subpoena's phone records of anyone who was in that area..
Would y'all quit your bitching? Almost every comment is complaining about how HDTV is confusing, unnecessary, overpriced, broken, lacks programming, etc.
Any time there's a transition there's always going to be the same type of grief:
1950's: "Oh lol they bought a color TV set and the only color show on is Bonanza." 1960's: "What's this FM bullshit?" 1970's: "I can't keep these standards straight: Reel-to-reel? 8-track? Cassette? wtf? And metal-oxide what?"
Relative to all the other consumer technology transitions we've gone through in the past few hundred years, HDTV will probably be the quickest and easiest.
Confusing? Sure, but what new technology isn't a little confusing when it's first released. Isn't figuring out this stuff that part of the fun? Expensive? I dunno, compared to the cost of a vacation, $1500 for a plasma didn't seem too expensive, and provides many hours of entertainment. Unnecessary? Yeah, duh, it's not food and shelter. Lack of programming? Again, transition period waiting for a tipping point which will come pretty soon.
I wish there was a way for these companies to opt-out. Sure they'll fracture the internet. Eventually they'll realize that search engines will bring users to their competitors, but by then it will probably be too late. Maybe that's why they want to change the way the net works for them en-mass. In any case, I would love to see the publishers make a single dollar of what Google gets in ad revenues in Google's absence.
There are plenty of examples of industries that make money off the demands generated by others, without paying tribute to the industry creating the demand. Computer manufacturers make money off the demand generated by internet. Radio manufacturers make money off of radio programming. Sure it gets sticky when you're talking about copyright, but even then there's precedence. TV Guide makes money indexing TV programming. Book review magazines make moneys off the books they review.
Other pranks have been committed like this without a profit motive. There have been several cases of people making bogus coupons and emailing them as chain spam. Store clerks often take them without knowing any better.
Reminds me of a nonsense prank my wife did while driving across country. When she went though a town she'd go through a few parking lots and collect flyers from car windshields that were advertising local (non-chain) restaurants. She's save them and put them on cars a few states away.
I love her more and more each time I think of that story.
The question you should ask is why the hell your company is giving you a "very high spec'd machine with dual-head 1600x1200 screens." if your work only "involves web/e-Mail/SSH access".
Really; is your company's IT department stupid? Is your company run by dot-com-bubble-wanna-be's who want to repeat the past? When your tasks are so system-resource-undemanding, why did they pay for that machine for you? You could do your work on a 486! Literally!
I don't know. My tasks at work are split roughly 50/50 between serious coding and sys admin work, which I do on a medium-spec'd dual-head Linux desktop. The sys admin part alone can get pretty resource intensive, especially when using multiple terminal sessions, X11 clients, and web-based monitoring and system administration applications (some with Java, javascript, ajax, etc). I'm constantly amazed at how much resources all that takes up.
Anyway, my favorite time saving tip is to use GNU Screen, a nifty virtual terminal multiplexer. You start it from a terminal window like xterm (or rxterm, or gterm...), and it immediately gives you your regular shell prompt. With a few key combinations you can start new terminal "windows," each with a new shell prompt, then switch back and forth between them. All this within one Screen process running in xterm.
While you're viewing one "window," Screen will track any changes to the other windows, and restore their state when you switch to them. So for example, if you start Pine on one, create another window and log in to ssh, you can then switch back and forth between Pine and ssh without loosing any of the text or having to manually refresh.
Sure you can do all that with multiple xterms, but Screen gives you many extra features. Terminal names can be set for each window, which can be presented in a list. Windows can be monitored for activity or bells. A status-line can also be configured to tell you various information (i.e.: current window name, cpu load, date..).
The biggest feature for me is the ability to attach to a single Screen process multiple times from different xterms, or even disconnect from and reconnect to a Screen process. I typically ssh to a half dozen development boxes, and `tail -f` various logs on each. Then if I need to check a log quickly I switch to the appropriate screen. If I need to actively monitor one or more logs, I start up new xterms, connect to the Screen instance, and switch to different windows with logs.
Of course you can use it for more than ssh: Pine, foreground apps that log to the console, local logs, top, console based IRC or IM clients, etc. You can also connect to your Screen process remotely via ssh. Since Screen will continue to run in the background if you disconnect, you can restart or crash your window manager or X server, and reconnect to your Screen session (a bonus for some of us bleeding edge early-adopters).
BTW, I've been using Screen since the mid 90's. My last Screen process was up for almost 400 days. I modified it slightly at compile-time to support 60 windows, up from the default max of 40, and typically had almost 60 windows running at any given time. I also run it on a dedicated headless small bsd box outside my linux desktop. The system is so stripped-down and bare-bones, it will only run screen, ssh, and sshd. Still, I can connect to it using multiple xterms, remotely, etc.
That, to my mind, is the huge, gaping hole in VLC. And the latest version doesn't solve the problem, as WMV3 isn't supported on any now-Windows platform. I would think that somebody would have reversed engineered the codec by now. It's hard to be the Swiss Army CanOpener of video formats when it doesn't open half of all the cans coming off the line...
Same with Indeo codecs under *nix. I can't believe how long they've been out but haven't been reversed engineered.
I would love to see operations on very large databases, say 100 million or 1 billion records (or even more). Operations like bulk loading, inserting, querying, deleting; against indexed and un-indexed tables; reindexing a whole table (*).
(*) Reindexing caused me a ton of grief. I inherited a huge mysql db once that required an emergency reindex. Unfortunately mysql locked the table while it did a full table copy, which took hours.
The previous two posters in this thread (at least visible to my threshold) mentioned that they switched to Mac. I'm getting close to doing the opposite.
About 3 years ago I built my own PCs, then switched to Macs. I've been using the same 1ghz Powerbook for two and a half years, and it still feels zippier than my 2ghz work machine that has to run Windows for Outlook.
Recently someone gave me a hand-me-down 2ghz P4 Prescott bare-bones system, with Twinview-capable NVidia card. I loaded it up with Ubuntu and started using it as a developer workstation, and I can't believe how well it works (despite the fact that I just learned I didn't enabled HT).
I'm still addicted to my Mac OSX, mainly the consistency of user interface things like keyboard shortcuts and copy/paste. Gnome and KDE is getting better by the minute, approaching the usability OSX. I can see myself switching back in the near future.
Things I'll miss in OSX: - UI Consistency - Application integration (i.e.: mail and address book) - Quartz speed - Subtle GUI elements (i.e.: slightly darker shadows for the foreground window) - Constant Fonts - WoW - Adium, iTunes, iCal, Photoshop (I *hate* Gimp)
Things I'm looking forward to in Linux: - Faster system for cheaper price - Using my old OSX-unsupported hardware (Hauppauge TV card, USB radio receiver, scanner)
Teacher: So y = r cubed over 3. And if you determine the rate of change in this curve correctly, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. [The class laughs except for Bart who appears confused.] Teacher: Don't you get it, Bart? Derivative dy = 3 r squared dr over 3, or r squared dr, or r dr r.
TFA says it's not the value of the software but rather the service and content that matters. I'd tend to agree with that statement. But a little part of me can't help but dislike and be paranoid about all these web services. Do you really want the future of web processing to be entirely web based and saved on somebody else's machine? G-mail bothers me like that -- even though I pretty much use it exclusively for e-mail now.
I'm with you. It's a stong statement that I trust my (low-sensitivity) personal data to an external service like GMail, but I would never risk harming my company by storing any potentially sensitive information on one server outside our own control. The risks are too great that somehow, some proprietary information (financial figures, business plan, project schedule) could leak into the hands of a competitor.
On the other hand, I might be won over if Google (or any service-based office product) provide open and demonstrably strong storage encryption.
I think the answer really is a 2.5-party system: me, the service, and encrypted storage of my choice (which could be me, Google, another service, or my company). In the corporate scenario, my company sets up a large server capable of storing encrypted data and talking only to authorized service providers (again, encrypted). I log into Google, tell it where to find my data, issue my certificates or passphrase, and work on the data.
Copyrighted works have value and, in the case of music, it is demostrated value (people pay for it). Because people are obtaining the music without paying for it, against the wishes of the copyright holder, when they would have had to pay for it, copyright holders are deprived of that income.
By that definition, does that mean that all public Libraries should be closed because people are reading books without paying, possibly against the copyright owner's wishes and depriving them of income?
Hey you know what? I paid to see a stand-up comedian, where he told a funny joke. I retold that joke to a friend the next day. Which of us goes to jail? Or do you think me retelling increased or decreased my friend's chances of paying to see this comedian live?
Nevermind. What I meant to say was, the original historical intent of Copyright was to encourage artistic creation by giving control of the works to the artist. Nothing the RIAA is doing is encouraging artistic creation. As a matter of fact, they restrict creativity in so many ways: narrowly focusing promotion and advertising on few top popular artists that have the biggest money potential; restricting the reuse of one work to make another (i.e.: sampling, mixing, mashups); making their artists broke. The overall theme is: It's in the best competitive interests of the major RIAA labels to restrict creativity, and control the demand by making the supply of music small.
I'll take the extreme position and say we don't need copyright protection to encourage artistic creation.
That's nothing, I got laid off from my job, forgot to kill my emacs session (running inside of screen), got brought back as a consultant months later and my screen session was still running where I left it.
Multiple multiplexed ttys that stay running even after disconnect and you can reattach to them later.
Hi screen brother.:) I live and breath screen -- I sometimes open multiple windows to the same screen session, but different 'screens.' I've also changed the MAXWIN value from 40 to 60 before compiling because, well, 40 screens just isn't enough.
I had one screen session up for almost a year, which would've been longer but I upgraded my kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Behold. The Happy Hacking Lite 2 keyboard at the bottom of that page may be your best bet.
I can't tell you how many times I've grabbed my PowerBook thinking it wasn't plugged in...
Same here. I hope when the cord is yanked, the adapter is smart enough to cut the power. From the pictures, it looked like you could touch the power leads with your bare finger or any conductive surface. I'm a little concerned that the cord might get yanked when I'm not around (i.e.: dog) and the end lands on something metallic, shorting, and starting a fire.
Now that I think about it, the existing 'prong' adapter plug looks like you could bridge the contacts pretty easily.
Corporations should be required to contribute to a federal fund, equal in proportion to the amount in which the corporation sues non-corporate entities. That fund would then be used to supply non-corporate individuals with the civil equivalent of a public defender.
Can't you see the house & senate passing something like this? Ok, stop laughing.
It's still not simple. You still need to know if state x taxes product/service y and sometimes under condition z. i.e.: CT doesn't tax clothing $100 except shoes (or something like that).
This would work best if the law absolutely *guaranteed* a separate online sales tax with well-defined rules that were consistent across all states, while still allowing for each state to charge different percentages. i.e.: All states charge sales tax for clothing $100 except shoes 365 days/year. CT could charge say 6.5%, while MA could charge 8%. Additionally, states would only be allowed to change their percentage rates once per year, and all at the same time as the other states. Barring a centralized state-tax clearing house, registration for state taxes would standardized, using the same forms, (small if any) registration fees, and same filing procedure, forms, reporting, etc.
I don't have a lot of faith in politicians coming up with a simple plan like that.
Epilogue: lawyers organize a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit against the cat food company. They get the billions of dollars, and you get a coupon for more cat food.
BUT.. if you were falsely accused of something, would a defense attorney have equal access to this type of evidence?
And if it were, how easy would it be (legally) for this type of information to be used for civil cases? Why can I easily see a situation where someone is caught selling pirated DVDs at a flea market, and the MPAA subpoena's phone records of anyone who was in that area..
lol!!!!!
Would y'all quit your bitching? Almost every comment is complaining about how HDTV is confusing, unnecessary, overpriced, broken, lacks programming, etc.
Any time there's a transition there's always going to be the same type of grief:
1950's: "Oh lol they bought a color TV set and the only color show on is Bonanza."
1960's: "What's this FM bullshit?"
1970's: "I can't keep these standards straight: Reel-to-reel? 8-track? Cassette? wtf? And metal-oxide what?"
Relative to all the other consumer technology transitions we've gone through in the past few hundred years, HDTV will probably be the quickest and easiest.
Confusing? Sure, but what new technology isn't a little confusing when it's first released. Isn't figuring out this stuff that part of the fun? Expensive? I dunno, compared to the cost of a vacation, $1500 for a plasma didn't seem too expensive, and provides many hours of entertainment. Unnecessary? Yeah, duh, it's not food and shelter. Lack of programming? Again, transition period waiting for a tipping point which will come pretty soon.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that :)
I wish there was a way for these companies to opt-out. Sure they'll fracture the internet. Eventually they'll realize that search engines will bring users to their competitors, but by then it will probably be too late. Maybe that's why they want to change the way the net works for them en-mass. In any case, I would love to see the publishers make a single dollar of what Google gets in ad revenues in Google's absence.
There are plenty of examples of industries that make money off the demands generated by others, without paying tribute to the industry creating the demand. Computer manufacturers make money off the demand generated by internet. Radio manufacturers make money off of radio programming. Sure it gets sticky when you're talking about copyright, but even then there's precedence. TV Guide makes money indexing TV programming. Book review magazines make moneys off the books they review.
Other pranks have been committed like this without a profit motive. There have been several cases of people making bogus coupons and emailing them as chain spam. Store clerks often take them without knowing any better.
Reminds me of a nonsense prank my wife did while driving across country. When she went though a town she'd go through a few parking lots and collect flyers from car windshields that were advertising local (non-chain) restaurants. She's save them and put them on cars a few states away.
I love her more and more each time I think of that story.
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu... I want Pornubuntu.
lol. Sounds like the Evil Bit :)
(BTW, I'm joking)
The question you should ask is why the hell your company is giving you a "very high spec'd machine with dual-head 1600x1200 screens." if your work only "involves web/e-Mail/SSH access".
Really; is your company's IT department stupid? Is your company run by dot-com-bubble-wanna-be's who want to repeat the past? When your tasks are so system-resource-undemanding, why did they pay for that machine for you? You could do your work on a 486! Literally!
I don't know. My tasks at work are split roughly 50/50 between serious coding and sys admin work, which I do on a medium-spec'd dual-head Linux desktop. The sys admin part alone can get pretty resource intensive, especially when using multiple terminal sessions, X11 clients, and web-based monitoring and system administration applications (some with Java, javascript, ajax, etc). I'm constantly amazed at how much resources all that takes up.
Anyway, my favorite time saving tip is to use GNU Screen, a nifty virtual terminal multiplexer. You start it from a terminal window like xterm (or rxterm, or gterm...), and it immediately gives you your regular shell prompt. With a few key combinations you can start new terminal "windows," each with a new shell prompt, then switch back and forth between them. All this within one Screen process running in xterm.
While you're viewing one "window," Screen will track any changes to the other windows, and restore their state when you switch to them. So for example, if you start Pine on one, create another window and log in to ssh, you can then switch back and forth between Pine and ssh without loosing any of the text or having to manually refresh.
Sure you can do all that with multiple xterms, but Screen gives you many extra features. Terminal names can be set for each window, which can be presented in a list. Windows can be monitored for activity or bells. A status-line can also be configured to tell you various information (i.e.: current window name, cpu load, date..).
The biggest feature for me is the ability to attach to a single Screen process multiple times from different xterms, or even disconnect from and reconnect to a Screen process. I typically ssh to a half dozen development boxes, and `tail -f` various logs on each. Then if I need to check a log quickly I switch to the appropriate screen. If I need to actively monitor one or more logs, I start up new xterms, connect to the Screen instance, and switch to different windows with logs.
Of course you can use it for more than ssh: Pine, foreground apps that log to the console, local logs, top, console based IRC or IM clients, etc. You can also connect to your Screen process remotely via ssh. Since Screen will continue to run in the background if you disconnect, you can restart or crash your window manager or X server, and reconnect to your Screen session (a bonus for some of us bleeding edge early-adopters).
BTW, I've been using Screen since the mid 90's. My last Screen process was up for almost 400 days. I modified it slightly at compile-time to support 60 windows, up from the default max of 40, and typically had almost 60 windows running at any given time. I also run it on a dedicated headless small bsd box outside my linux desktop. The system is so stripped-down and bare-bones, it will only run screen, ssh, and sshd. Still, I can connect to it using multiple xterms, remotely, etc.
That, to my mind, is the huge, gaping hole in VLC. And the latest version doesn't solve the problem, as WMV3 isn't supported on any now-Windows platform. I would think that somebody would have reversed engineered the codec by now. It's hard to be the Swiss Army CanOpener of video formats when it doesn't open half of all the cans coming off the line...
Same with Indeo codecs under *nix. I can't believe how long they've been out but haven't been reversed engineered.
I would love to see operations on very large databases, say 100 million or 1 billion records (or even more). Operations like bulk loading, inserting, querying, deleting; against indexed and un-indexed tables; reindexing a whole table (*).
(*) Reindexing caused me a ton of grief. I inherited a huge mysql db once that required an emergency reindex. Unfortunately mysql locked the table while it did a full table copy, which took hours.
The previous two posters in this thread (at least visible to my threshold) mentioned that they switched to Mac. I'm getting close to doing the opposite.
About 3 years ago I built my own PCs, then switched to Macs. I've been using the same 1ghz Powerbook for two and a half years, and it still feels zippier than my 2ghz work machine that has to run Windows for Outlook.
Recently someone gave me a hand-me-down 2ghz P4 Prescott bare-bones system, with Twinview-capable NVidia card. I loaded it up with Ubuntu and started using it as a developer workstation, and I can't believe how well it works (despite the fact that I just learned I didn't enabled HT).
I'm still addicted to my Mac OSX, mainly the consistency of user interface things like keyboard shortcuts and copy/paste. Gnome and KDE is getting better by the minute, approaching the usability OSX. I can see myself switching back in the near future.
Things I'll miss in OSX:
- UI Consistency
- Application integration (i.e.: mail and address book)
- Quartz speed
- Subtle GUI elements (i.e.: slightly darker shadows for the foreground window)
- Constant Fonts
- WoW
- Adium, iTunes, iCal, Photoshop (I *hate* Gimp)
Things I'm looking forward to in Linux:
- Faster system for cheaper price
- Using my old OSX-unsupported hardware (Hauppauge TV card, USB radio receiver, scanner)
If you're doing windows cloning, you may want to look into this free NewSid Utility from sysinternals.
Ssssh! Don't tell everyone!
Teacher: So y = r cubed over 3. And if you determine the rate of change in this curve correctly, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
[The class laughs except for Bart who appears confused.]
Teacher: Don't you get it, Bart? Derivative dy = 3 r squared dr over 3, or r squared dr, or r dr r.
TFA says it's not the value of the software but rather the service and content that matters. I'd tend to agree with that statement. But a little part of me can't help but dislike and be paranoid about all these web services. Do you really want the future of web processing to be entirely web based and saved on somebody else's machine? G-mail bothers me like that -- even though I pretty much use it exclusively for e-mail now.
I'm with you. It's a stong statement that I trust my (low-sensitivity) personal data to an external service like GMail, but I would never risk harming my company by storing any potentially sensitive information on one server outside our own control. The risks are too great that somehow, some proprietary information (financial figures, business plan, project schedule) could leak into the hands of a competitor.
On the other hand, I might be won over if Google (or any service-based office product) provide open and demonstrably strong storage encryption.
I think the answer really is a 2.5-party system: me, the service, and encrypted storage of my choice (which could be me, Google, another service, or my company). In the corporate scenario, my company sets up a large server capable of storing encrypted data and talking only to authorized service providers (again, encrypted). I log into Google, tell it where to find my data, issue my certificates or passphrase, and work on the data.
Copyrighted works have value and, in the case of music, it is demostrated value (people pay for it). Because people are obtaining the music without paying for it, against the wishes of the copyright holder, when they would have had to pay for it, copyright holders are deprived of that income.
By that definition, does that mean that all public Libraries should be closed because people are reading books without paying, possibly against the copyright owner's wishes and depriving them of income?
Hey you know what? I paid to see a stand-up comedian, where he told a funny joke. I retold that joke to a friend the next day. Which of us goes to jail? Or do you think me retelling increased or decreased my friend's chances of paying to see this comedian live?
Nevermind. What I meant to say was, the original historical intent of Copyright was to encourage artistic creation by giving control of the works to the artist. Nothing the RIAA is doing is encouraging artistic creation. As a matter of fact, they restrict creativity in so many ways: narrowly focusing promotion and advertising on few top popular artists that have the biggest money potential; restricting the reuse of one work to make another (i.e.: sampling, mixing, mashups); making their artists broke. The overall theme is: It's in the best competitive interests of the major RIAA labels to restrict creativity, and control the demand by making the supply of music small.
I'll take the extreme position and say we don't need copyright protection to encourage artistic creation.
That's nothing, I got laid off from my job, forgot to kill my emacs session (running inside of screen), got brought back as a consultant months later and my screen session was still running where I left it.
That is so cool!
Hi screen brother.
I had one screen session up for almost a year, which would've been longer but I upgraded my kernel.