That's a pretty weird definition of mostly usable.
Just to recap: you have no reliable WiFi or Bluetooth, no external video output, duff power management so your laptop can't be treated like a laptop, and you can't type in your native language easily. Sounds great!
The menu is at the top of the screen because you can move there more quickly with a mouse because you can hit the edge of screen therefore don't need to take as much care.
Click to focus is a no-brainer, no accidental focus changing and clicking doesn't take appreciably more time than just moving, compared to the recovery time from occasional misfocusing.
I have some sympathy for desiring to be able to focus windows without raising them. It'd be nice if this was a right-click-on-title-bar feature or something. Obviously it shouldn't be the default, because you are more likely to want the window raised than not, so the common case should be the quickest and not take two operations (focus and raise).
But only a little: if I found someone who looked sufficiently like me AND I could gain access to their passport the system is just a compromised. Arguably moreso as the claimed extra security will lead to an unjustifiable rise in trust.
This is the main point really.. the system doesn't fail, it's still marginally better than paper passports in theory (you can not only copy them pretty easily, but also amend them quite easily unlike these signed digital versions). But in practice, it will be trusted much more because there's a machine involved. That's human nature, unfortunately.
.. and that very point illustrates why this isn't a handedness issue but a directionality issue. No matter which hand you use, Windows puts the scrollbar at the 'line end' and 'page end' sides of the window, because the 'end' is where you expect to find the tools to see more.
It's not like anyone complains that Windows favours left-handed people by putting the Start Menu and Application File menus on the left... they are at the 'start' just like the scroll bars are at the 'end'.
Re:Bandwidth solves this problem soon?
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 1
The local stations are not peddling 'almost' exactly the same type of music in the UK, they are peddling exactly the same type of music. The majority of them are owned by the same company. Folks in London, the North-West of England and a few other big cities don't notice so much because they have proper indies but the rest of us have to put up with this lot.
They have the same logo, with the words changed, the same jingles and slogans (sometimes with the station name clumsily dubbed over), the same competitions (so you're competing with the whole country, not your area), the same theme weekends, etc, etc. And the same music. A lot of the programming is shared too.
I wouldn't mind so much, if they didn't pretend to be local stations rather than a national station with local opt-out segments. When people phone in, they carefully avoid giving out their location. When there's OBs, they just say "James and Kerry are out and about 'in the city'" but don't identify which one, so everyone thinks it's theirs.
I hope digital broadcasting will change this, but I doubt it - these WERE originally local licenses, but Big Radio took over.
I wrote some Java code to deal with colourspace stuff.. it converts in the way you describe, returns the "difference" between two colours, and can also tell you if two colours are "different" for dichromatic colour deficient users. It's on Freshmeat here, LGPL license, and the project homepage (at my previous employers' site) is here.
If anyone wishes to add to or improve this code, I'm sure the changes would be welcomed.. I'm no longer maintaining the code but there is a mailing list at the project site which can be posted to.
Wouldn't it be easier to just be able to say "don't show me any results from this site in future" ? And then at the bottom of your searches, you could be given an option to include your previously excluded sites in the same way as google lets you include previously excluded "similar matches". There can't be that many commercial sites that match your queries on a regular basis.
The company I work for (e-Government Solutions (UK) Ltd) is part-owned by NIC, whose sole purpose is e-government in the US. So it does exist but as other posters have rightly pointed out, it's mostly at state level. One recent example is the State of Colorado portal.
Don't forget the RISC OS on netBook ("Ron") project, either. Although it's not a 1024x768 screen, the Psion netBooks run on StrongARMS, are very rugged, and have insanely long battery life as requested. They support PCMCIA and CF cards. I'm surprised we haven't seen ARMLinux on them yet, or maybe there is...
Lutris used Sun's reference implementation, hence the problems... couldn't they switch in an open source impl of that component (e.g. JBoss's) for an OS release?
I know this has probably been said before, but I really don't get the point of.info. All the promotional material I've seen is encouraging business to register their names in the.info TLD, presumably the same business that registered the same name in the.com TLD. So.info will be pretty much an exact mirror of.com, except for a few confusing exceptions. Fantastic.
Do it all in Java, server-side, with three Apache tools - Xerces, Xalan, and Fop.
Generate your data in XML format, use XSL with Xalan to produce formatting objects which Fop can then turn into PDFs and deliver to the user. Reports exactly as you want them. That's the way we're doing it, anyway.
As with everything though, it's a trade-off. Keeping the database workload down is no good if that means the database has to return you 10000 rows instead of 2. That's a lot of data to shift around (between processes and possibly across a network) and it's not fast to move it around. With a couple of indexes and a join, the database can avoid looking through the data at all except for the couple of rows you want.
Answering the poster's question is impossible, although my piece of anecdotal evidence is that a database-heavy web application performs around 2-3 times faster implemented with JSP for presentation and standard Java classes for business logic and database lookup than it did with page-centric PHP. Cacheing the results of slow-changing database queries is a very useful speed-up too.
Citrix MetaFrame for Windows allows the Administrator to take control of other user's sessions, with permission (implicit or explicit). I would imagine the Unix one would work similarly, but I think it's only available for Solaris.
That sounds right to me.. but the chances are that once distributed once, it will be then free (beer) to everyone.
The trouble with the GPL (alright, one of the troubles with the GPL) is that it's an accidental political tool. A lot of authors write small pieces of code that they intend to make freely available (such as an encryption library) and they pick the GPL as the natual license, whereas what they possibly wanted having understood the implications is the LGPL (this applies particularly to Java code!).
It's ludicrous to have a small library force the opening of the source to a piece of software which may have taken ten programmers a year to create, at company X's expense and to earn company X revenue so that those ten programmers can eat. Too many tiny-but-useful pieces of code are under GPL rather than LGPL.
Luckily, I suspect many GPL software authors would happily give their code to you under a different license if you ask them.
If not, the usual solution is to daemonize the code and connect to it via sockets.. but get there before the next iteration of the GPL which is designed to protect against such use.
The Lucent WaveLAN (as was) Orinoco cards worked with no problems at all for me on Linux (RH7), Windows 98 or Windows 2000. They're around 120UKP iirc. I'm using them with an Apple AirPort base station, which has got to be the cheapest access point around. I think I remember reading somewhere that it used a Lucent card internally as well.
The drivers included with the newer Linux kernels worked fine with the Orinoco (Silver) card for me, but Lucent do supply source code on CD for their own Linux driver (which may or may not be the same one, I haven't checked).
Rebel.com make NetWinders which are StrongARM/Linux-based desktop and rackmount computers, intended as server or developer machines. They consume 15W and take up very little physical space.
They include iRDA, speaker, mic, dual NIC, all the usual ports. The desktop takes up the same sort of size as a paperback book and the rackmount takes up half of a 1U chassis.
The next generation of NetWinders will be based on Transmeta's Crusoe instead of StrongARM. Shame, because a NetWinder based on a 1GHz Intel XScale (successor to StrongARM) would have been very nice.
Have you looked at Enhydra? It includes XMLC which compiles static HTML files containing dummy data which can be prepared by a web designer into classes which can be used by the app programmer to display dynamic content. Take a look at it, it sounds like it might just suit your requirements. It's Java, so runs pretty much anywhere.
I felt a moral reponsibility to do number 4; I persuaded my bosses and now we release anything which it wouldn't harm our business to release as Free software - libraries, bits and pieces, whatever we invent that has wider application than we are making of it.
Donating to the FSF is making a bit more of a political statement than simply doing unto others as they have done to you (they let you use their software so you let them use yours).
Yup, I run Linux (RedHat 6.2 beta originally) on an Ultra 10 w/ Creator 3D and it sure blows Solaris' performance out of the water, and the ease of compiling/installing etc is greatly improved.
The main problem with Solaris was its phenomenal memory usage - I've got 256MB and that wasn't enough for it. I agree with others that Solaris is probably great for a server OS but useless as a desktop.
I originally got it for Java work, thinking Sun's JVM on their own OS on their own hardware would probably outperform the Linux/x86 one, and possible even JView/Win32. I was very wrong.
Just an idea, but as speech recognition gets better, commercially-offensive code could be distributed as samples of someone speaking it. Any geek with speech recog software could turn that into code. Who could say that code wasn't speech then?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty weird definition of mostly usable.
Just to recap: you have no reliable WiFi or Bluetooth, no external video output, duff power management so your laptop can't be treated like a laptop, and you can't type in your native language easily. Sounds great!
The menu is at the top of the screen because you can move there more quickly with a mouse because you can hit the edge of screen therefore don't need to take as much care.
Click to focus is a no-brainer, no accidental focus changing and clicking doesn't take appreciably more time than just moving, compared to the recovery time from occasional misfocusing.
I have some sympathy for desiring to be able to focus windows without raising them. It'd be nice if this was a right-click-on-title-bar feature or something. Obviously it shouldn't be the default, because you are more likely to want the window raised than not, so the common case should be the quickest and not take two operations (focus and raise).
I suspect it is digitally signed because the article says several times that the data cannot be amended on the copy, only cloned identically.
.. and that very point illustrates why this isn't a handedness issue but a directionality issue. No matter which hand you use, Windows puts the scrollbar at the 'line end' and 'page end' sides of the window, because the 'end' is where you expect to find the tools to see more.
It's not like anyone complains that Windows favours left-handed people by putting the Start Menu and Application File menus on the left... they are at the 'start' just like the scroll bars are at the 'end'.
just say w-uh w-uh w-uh
They have the same logo, with the words changed, the same jingles and slogans (sometimes with the station name clumsily dubbed over), the same competitions (so you're competing with the whole country, not your area), the same theme weekends, etc, etc. And the same music. A lot of the programming is shared too.
I wouldn't mind so much, if they didn't pretend to be local stations rather than a national station with local opt-out segments. When people phone in, they carefully avoid giving out their location. When there's OBs, they just say "James and Kerry are out and about 'in the city'" but don't identify which one, so everyone thinks it's theirs.
I hope digital broadcasting will change this, but I doubt it - these WERE originally local licenses, but Big Radio took over.
Don't you think users with poor vision might appreciate being able to zoom their screen?
Java3D is the answer to most of those questions.
If anyone wishes to add to or improve this code, I'm sure the changes would be welcomed.. I'm no longer maintaining the code but there is a mailing list at the project site which can be posted to.
Wouldn't it be easier to just be able to say "don't show me any results from this site in future" ? And then at the bottom of your searches, you could be given an option to include your previously excluded sites in the same way as google lets you include previously excluded "similar matches". There can't be that many commercial sites that match your queries on a regular basis.
In the UK, we're still catching up with the US!
Don't forget the RISC OS on netBook ("Ron") project, either. Although it's not a 1024x768 screen, the Psion netBooks run on StrongARMS, are very rugged, and have insanely long battery life as requested. They support PCMCIA and CF cards. I'm surprised we haven't seen ARMLinux on them yet, or maybe there is...
Lutris used Sun's reference implementation, hence the problems... couldn't they switch in an open source impl of that component (e.g. JBoss's) for an OS release?
I know this has probably been said before, but I really don't get the point of .info. All the promotional material I've seen is encouraging business to register their names in the .info TLD, presumably the same business that registered the same name in the .com TLD. So .info will be pretty much an exact mirror of .com, except for a few confusing exceptions. Fantastic.
Do it all in Java, server-side, with three Apache tools - Xerces, Xalan, and Fop.
Generate your data in XML format, use XSL with Xalan to produce formatting objects which Fop can then turn into PDFs and deliver to the user. Reports exactly as you want them. That's the way we're doing it, anyway.
As with everything though, it's a trade-off. Keeping the database workload down is no good if that means the database has to return you 10000 rows instead of 2. That's a lot of data to shift around (between processes and possibly across a network) and it's not fast to move it around. With a couple of indexes and a join, the database can avoid looking through the data at all except for the couple of rows you want.
Answering the poster's question is impossible, although my piece of anecdotal evidence is that a database-heavy web application performs around 2-3 times faster implemented with JSP for presentation and standard Java classes for business logic and database lookup than it did with page-centric PHP. Cacheing the results of slow-changing database queries is a very useful speed-up too.
Citrix MetaFrame for Windows allows the Administrator to take control of other user's sessions, with permission (implicit or explicit). I would imagine the Unix one would work similarly, but I think it's only available for Solaris.
That sounds right to me.. but the chances are that once distributed once, it will be then free (beer) to everyone.
The trouble with the GPL (alright, one of the troubles with the GPL) is that it's an accidental political tool. A lot of authors write small pieces of code that they intend to make freely available (such as an encryption library) and they pick the GPL as the natual license, whereas what they possibly wanted having understood the implications is the LGPL (this applies particularly to Java code!).
It's ludicrous to have a small library force the opening of the source to a piece of software which may have taken ten programmers a year to create, at company X's expense and to earn company X revenue so that those ten programmers can eat. Too many tiny-but-useful pieces of code are under GPL rather than LGPL.
Luckily, I suspect many GPL software authors would happily give their code to you under a different license if you ask them.
If not, the usual solution is to daemonize the code and connect to it via sockets.. but get there before the next iteration of the GPL which is designed to protect against such use.
The Lucent WaveLAN (as was) Orinoco cards worked with no problems at all for me on Linux (RH7), Windows 98 or Windows 2000. They're around 120UKP iirc. I'm using them with an Apple AirPort base station, which has got to be the cheapest access point around. I think I remember reading somewhere that it used a Lucent card internally as well. The drivers included with the newer Linux kernels worked fine with the Orinoco (Silver) card for me, but Lucent do supply source code on CD for their own Linux driver (which may or may not be the same one, I haven't checked).
They include iRDA, speaker, mic, dual NIC, all the usual ports. The desktop takes up the same sort of size as a paperback book and the rackmount takes up half of a 1U chassis.
The next generation of NetWinders will be based on Transmeta's Crusoe instead of StrongARM. Shame, because a NetWinder based on a 1GHz Intel XScale (successor to StrongARM) would have been very nice.
I think that answers the question :-)
Have you looked at Enhydra? It includes XMLC which compiles static HTML files containing dummy data which can be prepared by a web designer into classes which can be used by the app programmer to display dynamic content. Take a look at it, it sounds like it might just suit your requirements. It's Java, so runs pretty much anywhere.
Donating to the FSF is making a bit more of a political statement than simply doing unto others as they have done to you (they let you use their software so you let them use yours).
The main problem with Solaris was its phenomenal memory usage - I've got 256MB and that wasn't enough for it. I agree with others that Solaris is probably great for a server OS but useless as a desktop.
I originally got it for Java work, thinking Sun's JVM on their own OS on their own hardware would probably outperform the Linux/x86 one, and possible even JView/Win32. I was very wrong.
Just an idea, but as speech recognition gets better, commercially-offensive code could be distributed as samples of someone speaking it. Any geek with speech recog software could turn that into code. Who could say that code wasn't speech then?