yeah and supposed they had a little "oops" in their practice run and deflected it the WRONG WAY?
Then instead of being no where near earth, it will be slightly less no where near earth.
For an asteroid already heading towards Jupiter or the Sun, there is nothing at all we could do to overcome the gravity pulling it to cause it to veer off towards Earth or anything.
Practice makes perfect, and waiting until we need it to even make the first attempt is a recipe for failure.
I can understand anti-piracy measures, and even to some extent tolerate them,
The best part about all of this, the pirates will do some combination of designing a local-network server to hand out the correctly signed code (I'll take the WRT module version plz), and/or simply rip this whole bit of Windows code right out and replace it with something that functions offline.
This at least is guaranteed (Proven with a 100% track record of success so far.)
The only people who suffer at such stupid decisions are the people who pay for the software, who by definition are not pirates. The pirates will have to wait a couple months after release (maybe) and put up with none of that.
All Microsoft will do is delay the pirates a short time, and cause corporate users to avoid it like it was named Vista.
The shift towards virtualization represents a further shift in control away from each person towards a reliance on the honest of others.
And who exactly are you to tell me what I can and can not do with my own hardware?
If I choose to run zero, one, or a hundred OSs on my virtualized hypervisor on the hardware I purchased, what right do you have to say it is a bad thing?
If anything, you dictating that I shouldn't virtualize my own hardware because it is evil, is what would be taking control away from me. Virtualization gives me control. MUCH more control than the hardware itself can.
And what are you going on about relying on the honesty of others? How does other peoples honesty even come into play when I choose to use my hardware in one way versus another? Other people aren't even involved, let alone their honesty!
> There's nothing in the article to indicate that the energy capture on this technology is variable. > If you can't control how much dimming these provide by capturing photons, on an individual basis, then your point is moot.
Liquid crystals naturally work variable. The amount of current through the crystal determines how bendy it gets. If it's bent out straight, it lets basically all the light through and you see a colored dot. The more current, the more bendy it gets blocking more of the light, until its bent so much it's curled up in a little disk shape blocking most all of the light.
The article clearly states: "Equipping LCD-enhanced devices with so-called polarizing organic photovoltaics will recoup battery loads of lost power,"
If these "polarizing organic photovoltaics" are an enhancement to the liquid crystal itself, then each crystal will not only block light getting past it but reabsorb that light at the same time. It can only absorb what it is blocking in the first place, which has been variably controlled for decades now.
Yea, it's a machine. They tend to do that at this scale. It's on par with the noise level of most other industrial machines at that size, especially important for comparison are hydrolic machines
2. What is with the bar?
That holds it up and feeds it power. As stated, they are only testing forward balance, so the only requirement for that test is no support on the forward/backward axis. They said it can't yet balance completely. (And with no feet, I can understand why!)
3. We have so much better things to spend money on.
No we don't. Basic research is fundamental to humanity progressing. Very very little exists that both deserves more money and hasn't already had money given to it to demonstrate the lack of success of throwing money at them. If anything, basic research needs more money given to it, since time and time again it has been demonstrated you get the largest return on investment that way.
In my opinion one should be using existing laws against the "troublemakers", but there is some justification in assigning some share of the responsibility for problems with the people who "organized" the event in the first place.
Let me first say, just because the above is all I am quoting, doesn't mean I'm dismissing the rest of your post. In fact I'm singling the above out because I agree with that statement 110%
I also realize things are pretty different in the UK than the US (I'm in the latter) so quite possibly don't know what I'm talking about..
But as I've said in another post, it seems to me the problem is not the water fights themselves, but the punk thugs showing up starting real fights. There are already laws against all of that, as you say, and those should very much be acted on. But unless the people organizing such a thing are purposely trying to entrap a bunch of people into showing up at a real fight when expecting just to soak people (and get soaked) then I can't see how they would share any of the blame at all.
About the only thing I can see even being an option (Other than to simply stop hosting such gatherings) is to contact the police ahead of time and ask for some sort of watch to be there when the water soakings go down. Personally, I wouldn't really have thought of that myself if I was to organize such a thing, thinking that is way too overkill... But here we don't seem to have such problems as often or as bad.
Hell, what if the organizers DID go out of their way to inform the police and try to get a more official gathering going? Would it make any difference as far as being able to get arrested for setting it up? On another topic, would it even help, given the current story about the police being there anyway and being attacked? Shut down the water fights, and won't the problem just move elsewhere? After all the thugs knifing people will still be on the street, since that doesn't seem to be the problem people are focusing on. Couldn't one even say that by closing one event, forcing the thugs to go elsewhere, could be claimed as endangering other people now? (Not that those others weren't already in danger as things stand now)
It just sounds like taking a problem of a drug dealer selling drugs on the street corner, instead of addressing the selling of drugs, instead they make standing on the street corner illegal. It doesn't address the real problem one wit, and ruins a perfectly normal activity for a whole bunch of others.
I still don't see how either of those points matter.
Water fights are just that. The idea is to soak everyone and get soaked yourself. The idea is not to punch people and start real fights.
Is this seriously that big of a problem in the UK, where -most- turn outs like this end up with thugs showing up picking real fights? Seems a bit hard to believe, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you say its true.
Either way, everything these thugs have done is already illegal. Arrest them for that.
But to me it sounds like the problem is punks showing up starting fights, not the water fights themselves.
If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place.
There have been injuries and deaths resulting from posts made to online web forums before too. Are you implying the activity we both just did should be illegal? By your logic, it sure seems so! I'll let you turn yourself in first however...
Granted, FAR more posts are made safely every day than those that result in injury or death, however the exact same is true of water fights.
Of course our water fights always involved just water, no asshole kids punching people in the face for being squirted with water at a water fight, like in the article you link to.
Perhaps what should be illegal is going to random unrelated events and punching people in the face! (Quite a bit to expect out of our current legal framework I know, but it's nice to dream)
... Honestly the only thing holding me to linux at this point is a lack of desire to have to repartition my disks using bsd slices,...
Don't let that stop you - FreeBSD at least has supported GPT partitioning for some time, so you don't have to mess around with slices if you don't want to.
Oh thank {$deity} and praise {$baby_deity} ! That was one huge learning curve I was NOT looking forward to getting over.
Yup, this is basically like VESA mode for video cards.
You load the basic VESA driver and can get text mode and basic 640x480 (or if y our lucky 800x600) graphics mode. To get any higher resolution, or any acceleration, you load the specific video card driver.
But it at least works more than not at all before that specific driver is loaded.
Most printers do support a basic ascii text mode, but sounds like they now want a basic pixel addressing mode as well, which in this day and age is long over due.
Heck, if I could FedEx myself, I'd never take a commercial jet again.
It has been done before. Heck at least one man got away with it. He was packaged, put on a plane (3 planes actually), delivered and signed for. He only got caught because he came out of the box too soon before the delivery guy left!
There has been at least one other man that claimed to do the same and made it. Of course he had no evidence of this to show, so who knows if it's true. But the first guy made the news so is legit.
Makes one wonder how many others did this, made it, and kept their mouth shut about it to avoid getting busted in the future?
Not so easy to put a surge protector on that. I don't even know how you'd design an effective one at that level, much less how much it'd cost.
For the "low" amperage lines that operate under a few thousand amps, they actually do make surge fuses rated for that amperage. They are pretty interesting, using a special mixture of basically sand. At a high enough amperage level, the sand melts into glass and expands destroying the connectivity metal and turning into a non-conductor.
Granted, these are more like fuses than surge suppressors, and need replacing after being 'blown', but they do protect the low end transformers.
For the very long transmission lines at high amperage however, I do not believe there are any solutions in place to handle that type of energy.
Either way, your point stands. What we can do about the problem is very limited, and requires manual intervention with a lot of lead time.
If we're talking terrible peripherals, the U-Force has to top the list for least-likely-to-ever-respond-to-input-correctly.
The U-Force sure does make that list, but hardly at the top.
I'm pretty sure the Power Glove still holds #1 place. The rolling rocker is way up there too, as is the Atari 5300 controllers.
Ironically, the U-force responds surprisingly well for a horrible terrible peripheral, in that it works a good 10% of the time compared to the rest of the list that can't even manage that.
If these could serve as fuel, you just know that every alien civilization with space travel capabilities is already harvesting these as they go. This could serve as evidence that the earth has never been visited by extra-terrestrials, or if a significant fraction of the expected particles are missing, it's possible evidence that we were once visited.
That would be like BP offering a single shot glass worth of free gas, and then since no one wants to spend the $10 in gas to drive there and back to get a free $0.10 shot glass worth, then using it as proof that no one wants free gas...
This is especially true if they plan to *start* throttling users.
I might fire up the browser on my phone twice or maybe three times a week. It takes at least 15 seconds to fully load the front Google search page! Waiting at least a full minute for the search results to come back. Most websites with any content end up timing out for the first couple reloads
If they already provide only 0.5k/sec or less to normal usage customers, I can't imagine how painful it will be once you get throttled...
From Ubisoft's perspective, anything more than zero is a win if they assume it will more than offset those who won't buy because of the DRM. Not a happy thought, but I suspect the numbers add up the right way for them.
Personally I somehow doubt they would announce anything at all different from what they just announced, no matter what the numbers are.
Sales up? "We did the right thing! Go us!" Sales down? "We did the right thing! Go us!" Piracy up and sales non-existent? "We did the right thing! Go us!" Cat died and car blew up in the parking lot? "We did the right thing! Go us!"
Without such knowledge, we would still think the sun goes around the earth, there are only 5 planets which also orbit the earth, the moon is a god, the sun is a god, and there are no real stars just tiny white dots painted on the teeny shell wrapped around our solar system, which is also the entire universe, and which is only 6000 years old.
Such knowledge moved us from the center of a very tiny universe, out to a fairly unimportant rock orbiting a fairly standard star, about half way out from the center of a galaxy, which is just one of many such galaxies, all doing the gravity dance inside a universe of which is so large and old that we can not even see it all.
Some humans do not think 'knowing things' is much of a benefit, however it is by 'knowing things' that all of our technology comes from. Without that technology, you would be unable to post a message on a vast computer network spanning our planet, with a post asking why making said post is important.
They ARE xenoforming our planet, and we have limited time to stop them before they begin constructing saltwater-filled vehicles to roam the lands and take over
A salt-water filled vehicle, that's the real news for nerds here. I just hope they post how they made it on instructables!
Actually, you know what really fried my chicken? There's no support for a bluetooth headset!
Try pairing one with it. You might be surprised! You don't even need to jailbreak it for this one.
Stereo sound out, as well as sound in, are supported.
Regarding the mouse, once you jailbreak it even that is supported. It's not really pleasant to use with normal apps, since all are designed for touch instead of a pointer, but it does work and has a pointer.
The mouse is really handy however for the VNC client, remote desktop client, and x window server built into the ssh client app.
I carry a bluetooth keyboard and mouse with my iPad for just those reasons, and really only use them for the remote type apps when controlling a PC or mac using the iPad.
My bluetooth keyboard happens to be built into the ipad case, so I do use it for more than just remote apps, but really not too much. I have command-1 to command-6 set to run the apps in my dock. It's also handy for getting an idea into notepad quickly, to be emailed to my desktop for further formatting.
(I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
Keyboard shortcuts are provided by an app called Activator. All the special keys are handled, as well as command anything (I suppose this would be windows-key anything on non-apple keyboards)
As for interpreters, my iPad has perl and python installed. Java too, thou not exactly an interpreter there. I do wish TCL was ported over, as I much prefer that language. Ah well.
As for forking subprocesses, you need to install the BSD subsystem and you can fork processes just as you do in any unix environment. In C you use fork(). In bash you append a &
My iPad runs a bash script on boot that sits in a while [1]; do loop. It gets the location services coordinates, and makes an http get request using wget to my webserver. The result back is checked to make sure its an integer, and passes that to the sleep command, before repeating the loop.
On the server side, that script just logs timestamped cords to a database, which can be pulled up on a google map. I can also change the sleep time this way, from the normal 30 minutes down to 1 minute if the device goes missing, and do near-real time tracking.
All of that runs as bash scripts on the iPad, forked in the background, using standard unix tools (and one non-standard package, 'erica utilities')
You should really check them out. I have both my iPad and iPhone 3gs setup this way and it makes life so much nicer and easier. Plus you get to keep the polished UI that no one has yet copied well.
In conclusion, you not wanting to install the software to do all those things, does NOT mean one can't install the software to do those things.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah and supposed they had a little "oops" in their practice run and deflected it the WRONG WAY?
Then instead of being no where near earth, it will be slightly less no where near earth.
For an asteroid already heading towards Jupiter or the Sun, there is nothing at all we could do to overcome the gravity pulling it to cause it to veer off towards Earth or anything.
Practice makes perfect, and waiting until we need it to even make the first attempt is a recipe for failure.
I can understand anti-piracy measures, and even to some extent tolerate them,
The best part about all of this, the pirates will do some combination of designing a local-network server to hand out the correctly signed code (I'll take the WRT module version plz), and/or simply rip this whole bit of Windows code right out and replace it with something that functions offline.
This at least is guaranteed (Proven with a 100% track record of success so far.)
The only people who suffer at such stupid decisions are the people who pay for the software, who by definition are not pirates.
The pirates will have to wait a couple months after release (maybe) and put up with none of that.
All Microsoft will do is delay the pirates a short time, and cause corporate users to avoid it like it was named Vista.
The shift towards virtualization represents a further shift in control away from each person towards a reliance on the honest of others.
And who exactly are you to tell me what I can and can not do with my own hardware?
If I choose to run zero, one, or a hundred OSs on my virtualized hypervisor on the hardware I purchased, what right do you have to say it is a bad thing?
If anything, you dictating that I shouldn't virtualize my own hardware because it is evil, is what would be taking control away from me. Virtualization gives me control. MUCH more control than the hardware itself can.
And what are you going on about relying on the honesty of others?
How does other peoples honesty even come into play when I choose to use my hardware in one way versus another? Other people aren't even involved, let alone their honesty!
> There's nothing in the article to indicate that the energy capture on this technology is variable.
> If you can't control how much dimming these provide by capturing photons, on an individual basis, then your point is moot.
Liquid crystals naturally work variable. The amount of current through the crystal determines how bendy it gets. If it's bent out straight, it lets basically all the light through and you see a colored dot. The more current, the more bendy it gets blocking more of the light, until its bent so much it's curled up in a little disk shape blocking most all of the light.
The article clearly states: "Equipping LCD-enhanced devices with so-called polarizing organic photovoltaics will recoup battery loads of lost power,"
If these "polarizing organic photovoltaics" are an enhancement to the liquid crystal itself, then each crystal will not only block light getting past it but reabsorb that light at the same time. It can only absorb what it is blocking in the first place, which has been variably controlled for decades now.
1. God it's loud.
Yea, it's a machine. They tend to do that at this scale.
It's on par with the noise level of most other industrial machines at that size, especially important for comparison are hydrolic machines
2. What is with the bar?
That holds it up and feeds it power.
As stated, they are only testing forward balance, so the only requirement for that test is no support on the forward/backward axis. They said it can't yet balance completely. (And with no feet, I can understand why!)
3. We have so much better things to spend money on.
No we don't.
Basic research is fundamental to humanity progressing. Very very little exists that both deserves more money and hasn't already had money given to it to demonstrate the lack of success of throwing money at them.
If anything, basic research needs more money given to it, since time and time again it has been demonstrated you get the largest return on investment that way.
4. God it's loud.
Yea, it's a machine...
I can think one method: a blacklist.
You mean an antivirus program?
In my opinion one should be using existing laws against the "troublemakers", but there is some justification in assigning some share of the responsibility for problems with the people who "organized" the event in the first place.
Let me first say, just because the above is all I am quoting, doesn't mean I'm dismissing the rest of your post.
In fact I'm singling the above out because I agree with that statement 110%
I also realize things are pretty different in the UK than the US (I'm in the latter) so quite possibly don't know what I'm talking about..
But as I've said in another post, it seems to me the problem is not the water fights themselves, but the punk thugs showing up starting real fights.
There are already laws against all of that, as you say, and those should very much be acted on. But unless the people organizing such a thing are purposely trying to entrap a bunch of people into showing up at a real fight when expecting just to soak people (and get soaked) then I can't see how they would share any of the blame at all.
About the only thing I can see even being an option (Other than to simply stop hosting such gatherings) is to contact the police ahead of time and ask for some sort of watch to be there when the water soakings go down.
Personally, I wouldn't really have thought of that myself if I was to organize such a thing, thinking that is way too overkill... But here we don't seem to have such problems as often or as bad.
Hell, what if the organizers DID go out of their way to inform the police and try to get a more official gathering going? Would it make any difference as far as being able to get arrested for setting it up? On another topic, would it even help, given the current story about the police being there anyway and being attacked?
Shut down the water fights, and won't the problem just move elsewhere? After all the thugs knifing people will still be on the street, since that doesn't seem to be the problem people are focusing on.
Couldn't one even say that by closing one event, forcing the thugs to go elsewhere, could be claimed as endangering other people now? (Not that those others weren't already in danger as things stand now)
It just sounds like taking a problem of a drug dealer selling drugs on the street corner, instead of addressing the selling of drugs, instead they make standing on the street corner illegal.
It doesn't address the real problem one wit, and ruins a perfectly normal activity for a whole bunch of others.
I still don't see how either of those points matter.
Water fights are just that. The idea is to soak everyone and get soaked yourself.
The idea is not to punch people and start real fights.
Is this seriously that big of a problem in the UK, where -most- turn outs like this end up with thugs showing up picking real fights?
Seems a bit hard to believe, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if you say its true.
Either way, everything these thugs have done is already illegal. Arrest them for that.
But to me it sounds like the problem is punks showing up starting fights, not the water fights themselves.
If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place.
There have been injuries and deaths resulting from posts made to online web forums before too. Are you implying the activity we both just did should be illegal? By your logic, it sure seems so! I'll let you turn yourself in first however...
Granted, FAR more posts are made safely every day than those that result in injury or death, however the exact same is true of water fights.
Of course our water fights always involved just water, no asshole kids punching people in the face for being squirted with water at a water fight, like in the article you link to.
Perhaps what should be illegal is going to random unrelated events and punching people in the face! (Quite a bit to expect out of our current legal framework I know, but it's nice to dream)
... Honestly the only thing holding me to linux at this point is a lack of desire to have to repartition my disks using bsd slices, ...
Don't let that stop you - FreeBSD at least has supported GPT partitioning for some time, so you don't have to mess around with slices if you don't want to.
Oh thank {$deity} and praise {$baby_deity} ! That was one huge learning curve I was NOT looking forward to getting over.
Yup, this is basically like VESA mode for video cards.
You load the basic VESA driver and can get text mode and basic 640x480 (or if y our lucky 800x600) graphics mode.
To get any higher resolution, or any acceleration, you load the specific video card driver.
But it at least works more than not at all before that specific driver is loaded.
Most printers do support a basic ascii text mode, but sounds like they now want a basic pixel addressing mode as well, which in this day and age is long over due.
So, to install the rootkit, you also need to exploit a bug in the user.
The user is no doubt the best thing to exploit, as it is the weakest link in the chain.
But you are assuming there are no exploits (Which there are, some Android phones installed the app with no prompt)
You also assume the Over-the-Air updates are signed somehow.
"But the first guy made the news so is legit."
really? if it's on the news it's legit?
If police reports and mug shots are on all the news outlets consistently and at the same time, then yea it's pretty likely legit.
Are you suggesting it is not a legit story? Mind sharing why?
Heck, if I could FedEx myself, I'd never take a commercial jet again.
It has been done before.
Heck at least one man got away with it. He was packaged, put on a plane (3 planes actually), delivered and signed for.
He only got caught because he came out of the box too soon before the delivery guy left!
http://articles.cnn.com/2003-09-09/us/plane.stowaway_1_cargo-security-crate-kitty-hawk?_s=PM:US
There has been at least one other man that claimed to do the same and made it.
Of course he had no evidence of this to show, so who knows if it's true.
But the first guy made the news so is legit.
Makes one wonder how many others did this, made it, and kept their mouth shut about it to avoid getting busted in the future?
Not so easy to put a surge protector on that. I don't even know how you'd design an effective one at that level, much less how much it'd cost.
For the "low" amperage lines that operate under a few thousand amps, they actually do make surge fuses rated for that amperage. They are pretty interesting, using a special mixture of basically sand. At a high enough amperage level, the sand melts into glass and expands destroying the connectivity metal and turning into a non-conductor.
Granted, these are more like fuses than surge suppressors, and need replacing after being 'blown', but they do protect the low end transformers.
For the very long transmission lines at high amperage however, I do not believe there are any solutions in place to handle that type of energy.
Either way, your point stands. What we can do about the problem is very limited, and requires manual intervention with a lot of lead time.
If we're talking terrible peripherals, the U-Force has to top the list for least-likely-to-ever-respond-to-input-correctly.
The U-Force sure does make that list, but hardly at the top.
I'm pretty sure the Power Glove still holds #1 place.
The rolling rocker is way up there too, as is the Atari 5300 controllers.
Ironically, the U-force responds surprisingly well for a horrible terrible peripheral, in that it works a good 10% of the time compared to the rest of the list that can't even manage that.
If these could serve as fuel, you just know that every alien civilization with space travel capabilities is already harvesting these as they go. This could serve as evidence that the earth has never been visited by extra-terrestrials, or if a significant fraction of the expected particles are missing, it's possible evidence that we were once visited.
That would be like BP offering a single shot glass worth of free gas, and then since no one wants to spend the $10 in gas to drive there and back to get a free $0.10 shot glass worth, then using it as proof that no one wants free gas...
Or do you want to find a reliable sight you can return to that has everything
You mean like a girl friend?
, for free.
Er, oh, I guess not ;}
*ducks*
AT&T has you by the nads.
This is especially true if they plan to *start* throttling users.
I might fire up the browser on my phone twice or maybe three times a week.
It takes at least 15 seconds to fully load the front Google search page!
Waiting at least a full minute for the search results to come back.
Most websites with any content end up timing out for the first couple reloads
If they already provide only 0.5k/sec or less to normal usage customers, I can't imagine how painful it will be once you get throttled...
From Ubisoft's perspective, anything more than zero is a win if they assume it will more than offset those who won't buy because of the DRM. Not a happy thought, but I suspect the numbers add up the right way for them.
Personally I somehow doubt they would announce anything at all different from what they just announced, no matter what the numbers are.
Sales up? "We did the right thing! Go us!"
Sales down? "We did the right thing! Go us!"
Piracy up and sales non-existent? "We did the right thing! Go us!"
Cat died and car blew up in the parking lot? "We did the right thing! Go us!"
what's the benefit for us here on Earth?
Without such knowledge, we would still think the sun goes around the earth, there are only 5 planets which also orbit the earth, the moon is a god, the sun is a god, and there are no real stars just tiny white dots painted on the teeny shell wrapped around our solar system, which is also the entire universe, and which is only 6000 years old.
Such knowledge moved us from the center of a very tiny universe, out to a fairly unimportant rock orbiting a fairly standard star, about half way out from the center of a galaxy, which is just one of many such galaxies, all doing the gravity dance inside a universe of which is so large and old that we can not even see it all.
Some humans do not think 'knowing things' is much of a benefit, however it is by 'knowing things' that all of our technology comes from. Without that technology, you would be unable to post a message on a vast computer network spanning our planet, with a post asking why making said post is important.
With added benefit of not having to pee.
Well there are two enormous jets of material that are light years long coming out of both sides of a quasar. http://www.google.com/search?q=quasar&tbm=isch
One might say it is leaking from both ends so to speak...
They ARE xenoforming our planet, and we have limited time to stop them before they begin constructing saltwater-filled vehicles to roam the lands and take over
A salt-water filled vehicle, that's the real news for nerds here. I just hope they post how they made it on instructables!
Oblig. http://home.pacbell.net/fakeout/futurama_fish.jpg
Actually, you know what really fried my chicken? There's no support for a bluetooth headset!
Try pairing one with it. You might be surprised!
You don't even need to jailbreak it for this one.
Stereo sound out, as well as sound in, are supported.
Regarding the mouse, once you jailbreak it even that is supported.
It's not really pleasant to use with normal apps, since all are designed for touch instead of a pointer, but it does work and has a pointer.
The mouse is really handy however for the VNC client, remote desktop client, and x window server built into the ssh client app.
I carry a bluetooth keyboard and mouse with my iPad for just those reasons, and really only use them for the remote type apps when controlling a PC or mac using the iPad.
My bluetooth keyboard happens to be built into the ipad case, so I do use it for more than just remote apps, but really not too much.
I have command-1 to command-6 set to run the apps in my dock. It's also handy for getting an idea into notepad quickly, to be emailed to my desktop for further formatting.
(I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
Keyboard shortcuts are provided by an app called Activator.
All the special keys are handled, as well as command anything (I suppose this would be windows-key anything on non-apple keyboards)
As for interpreters, my iPad has perl and python installed. Java too, thou not exactly an interpreter there.
I do wish TCL was ported over, as I much prefer that language. Ah well.
As for forking subprocesses, you need to install the BSD subsystem and you can fork processes just as you do in any unix environment.
In C you use fork(). In bash you append a &
My iPad runs a bash script on boot that sits in a while [1]; do loop.
It gets the location services coordinates, and makes an http get request using wget to my webserver. The result back is checked to make sure its an integer, and passes that to the sleep command, before repeating the loop.
On the server side, that script just logs timestamped cords to a database, which can be pulled up on a google map. I can also change the sleep time this way, from the normal 30 minutes down to 1 minute if the device goes missing, and do near-real time tracking.
All of that runs as bash scripts on the iPad, forked in the background, using standard unix tools (and one non-standard package, 'erica utilities')
You should really check them out. I have both my iPad and iPhone 3gs setup this way and it makes life so much nicer and easier. Plus you get to keep the polished UI that no one has yet copied well.
In conclusion, you not wanting to install the software to do all those things, does NOT mean one can't install the software to do those things.