No it's not. You do not plug your keyboard into your DVD drive to tell it you want to eject the DVD as opposed to the floppy disk. You're also assuming that having a "remote in your hand that you can push as you walk up to the door" is intuitive - which is isn't - it's far more intuitive to put a key in the lock. This is like keyless entry cars - how do you know if the system is working and your car is locked? If you go close enough to check then the car unlocks. But is the system really locking all the doors or has one of the servos broken? You'll never know.
Having the button on the keyboard is ridicuous and most of the other posters in the thread are in agreement. It's unintuitive and wrong.
The best idea I've seen is to have a soft eject button on the device which tells the OS that you want to eject it. The OS can then flush any buffers, close any windows that 'point' to folders on the device, disable the device, and tell the drive to eject the disk.
I also think that they should do a similar thing for USB. The connectors should glow red when the device shouldn't be unplugged, and have a button that tells the OS you want to eject it. When you press the button, the OS shuts down the drivers and turns the connector green (or turns the light off).
Not difficult - just ridiculously unintuitive. Kind of like putting your front door lock on one of the side windows would be. What's wrong with the eject button being next to the thing it ejects, like on all other things in the entire world like DVD players, videos, toasters, ejector seats etc etc etc.
They're not available for linux. You'd have to run it under a Windows emulator of some kind (which hardly counts as running those on linux). If you do use come kind of emulator like Cedega or something, then the games run so slowly they're hardly worth playing anyway. I can't see why any sane person would bother when you can build a dual boot system in less time and run everything much more quickly.
Hopefully the engineers at Scaled and Virgin know more than you (and the author of the linked page) do. Who's to say that a direct descendant of SS1 wil not (gasp!) change engine technologies?!
This as got to be one of the most stupid posts/pages that I've seen so far this year.
> Sure, there won't be much in the way of compact point-and-shoot within > a couple of years, but 35mm (especially slide/transparency) and medium > format will still be with us in 10-20 years' time, just like the vinyl > record is still the tool of choice for most creative DJs.
Vinyl records have clear advantages for DJs over CDs. Film doesn't really have any advantages at all over digitial. Pretty much everything about digitial photography is better.
> she says that standard digital SLR is still not high resolution enough to > be blown up to 6ft
Neither is a film camera (not one any photojournalists could afford anyway).
> chromatic aberration or 'edge fringing' which is coloured fringes > (typically cyan or red) around the border between different coloured > objects near the edge of the lens. It's caused by an interraction > between the lens' properties and the CCD, and does not happen with film.
Chromatic aberration is caused by lenses and not the CCD, although the CCD can alter the apparent colour of the abberations. It DOES happen with film cameras. It isn't really noticable on film or digital with decent lenses that a professional photographer would use. Eg Canon L series lenses.
> professional photographers don't want to have to touch these up in Photoshop > because it's losing detail.
A professional photographer would be unlikely to buy a cheap lens that would have these problems to a noticable degree. Even for average users, these problems are only visible if you zoom right in on the edge of a photo and are almost never visible in prints.
> if I can't remember the signature, its better to look up > its definition in the source so I can see the comments on the inputs.
Intellisense in VS *DOES* shows you the comments from the source. Why do you think that the source comments have to be entered in XML?? Why do think there's a whole thread of people saying how good it is even though it's an MS product? If you're not seeing the comments, then you haven't been following the templates or RTFM.
I hate to say it but it's fucking amazing - especially in VS.NET 2005.
The thread title is correct - it's Microsoft's Killer App.
> Besides, if you divide up the work correctly, you won't be using more > than a few percent of the functions in a program,
Not all companies are big enough to "divide up the work". I have to do the entire project on my own. Which after 6 months is a LOT of functions. I guarantee it would take nearly everyone except genius autistic programmers more time to write large projects if if VS.NET didn't have any intellisense.
I can't see how it can be annoying. If you type quickly without pausing then it doesn't even appear. If you really do know what you're supposed to be typing then you probably won't pause because. The only reason I can think of to pause halfway though typing a function call is if you're having to go and find the function definition because you can't remember what the next argument is:)
You obviously haven't used it for more than a few minutes. The alternative would be learn the entire of the framework off by heart. Apparently if you print out all the help pages in VS.NET it would be a stack of paper 14 meters high.
> If I see a store with a sign labeled 'open' on the front of it, would you > consider me a burglar if I walked into it without asking the shopkeeper first?
RTFA. This was not a public access point in a shop - this was someone's private AP in their house. Likening it to a shop with an "open" sign on it is ridiculous - the AP was private. My unlocked house analogy was much more accurate. 99% of people would realise that it's not their own and therefore realise that it's not theirs to connect to.
> The AP this guy connected to had a big giant sign *actively* saying "OPEN" on it.
-5, Wrong. Nowhere does it say "OPEN" in the protocol stream or anywhere else. It simply isn't secured - just like your house doesn't say "OPEN" on it if you forget to lock it. Houses have lots of ways of being locked. Not locking them is not equivalent in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER that any normal non looter would think to having a sign outside saying "OPEN". Why do you think that people selling their houses have to stick a big fucking sign on the lawn saying "OPEN DAY"? Answer: Because no normal people would come in if they didn't!
> Windows and Linux are modern enough to make room in the RAM when new programs are launched.
You can't "make more RAM". You have to buy it and install it in your machine. If firefox uses up too much memory on my machine then eventually windows starts throwing errors like "system is low on virtual memory". It cannot simply ask firefox to use less ram please - and it doesn't. The only way to free up the ram is to quit firefox and reload it.
>So I'm here at work and Word is using 50 MB out of 256 MB. Notepad is only using 2 MB. WTF BBQ!
No idea what on earth your point is there. Of course Word uses more ram - it has vastly more features. Firefox does not have 4 times as many features as IE.
> Wrong. It's more like going up a private road which isn't marked as a > private road
Which is illegal. What's your point? You can't possibly have any legitimate reason to go up the private road as it only leads to other stuff which isn't yours.
> Don't want people to go driving up your private road? Put some signs up or > a gate.
I have 200 acres of land. How can I put up signs or a gate on 200 acres of land? You shouldn't be trespassing - you have no legitimate reason to go on to my land.
Say you park your car on the street and one night you forget to lock it. Would you be happy if someone took that to mean that they had an open invitation to get in your car and drive around in it (even if they brought it back again)? I doubt it...
You seem to be under the gross misconception that if you haven't been physically prevented from using something, then it must be entirely legal and morally correct for you to use it. It's the other way round - by default, you can't do anything with anyone's private property unless they have expressly permitted you to do so - whether or not they have secured it. Simply "not securing" something is not any kind of permission to use or abuse an object or service! I think that's fairly fucking obvious to pretty much everyone in the world apart from thieves (and even they probably realise it's wrong - they just don't give a shit).
Of course there is. He did not merely "look" at wireless network. He connected to it and was using it. That's hijacking.
This is more like getting into an unlocked car and driving it around just because the owner left the keys in the ignition. Hardly fair or legal.
> How about 'permission to view' the flowers in front of my house?
No but if you haven't secured them, then I reserve the right to pick them all and give them to my girlfriend. This guy was not just *looking*! Have you not even read the article?! He CONNECTED to the network concerned and used it to access to the Internet. "Looking" doesn't come into it - if he'd simply seen it in a list of available wireless networks then I doubt he would be prosecuted.
> Do you need permission to turn on the TV and watch open air TV shows?
How is that related? A wireless network that hasn't been secured is not a public service. Anyway - this is a UK case and in the UK we require a TV license to watch open air TV shows, so yes, we do need permission. You picked a bad analogy...
> If people are too ignorent to use a piece of hardware > they shouldnt purchase it
People leave their cars/houses unlocked. This doesn't mean it's perfectly acceptable to steal/rob them!
Firefox is good, but it's far from perfect. Both Firefox and Thunderbird eat RAM like cheese (turn on the VM column in the Task Manager and take a look at how much RAM it's using. At one stage this morning, I had 8 tabs open and firefox was using over 200mb of memory (on a 512mb machine). I exited and reloaded the same tab group (using an extension) and that seemed to free up most of the ram so it was only using 50mb. I hate to say this but this RAM mismanagement (I won't call it a leak as it is fixed by a restart) doesn't seem to occur with IE 7.
I think the Firefox and Thunderbird developers need to take a serious look at memory management in both these products. Thunderbird is currently using 110mb of RAM on my machine. It seems totally unsuited to people who like to keep a lot of their email on IMAP servers (a few thousand messages - which I have to, for work).
It also has several annoying bugs which are marked as "WONT FIX" in bugzilla - despite the fact that hundreds of users find these bugs an irriation.
I also seem to end up with Firefox opening two windows when I load it. The second window has most of the toolbars missing and is usually displaying the blue update icon. No idea what's causing this...
> You assume they're recording analog broadcasts, which they aren't. > Recording UK terrestrial digital broadcasts requires no compression.
It doesn't matter! His figures (estimates) are still roughly correct. You still have to store all the compressed data whether it was compressed by the broadcaster, compressed on a PCI card or compressed by the CPU. It's still more data than you could possibly fit on a hard disk array in one single day - let alone a whole month. Do the maths yourself if you don't belive me (us).
Lets have a go:
BBC 1 on Freeview is 5.5Mbps and is the highest quality channel Lower quality channels like Sky Sports News is 2.0Mbps.
Lets take the BEST case scenario and assume that all channels are low quality 2.0Mbps channels.
If you wanted to record just ONE single channel for a month, then: 2Mbps in gigabytes per month= 642 gigabytes per month
642 gigabytes per month * 30 channels = 19.260TB (terrabytes)
19 terrabytes would take up 50 400GB hard disks. A poster below said that he thought the machine concerned had 3.2TB of hard disks in it. But even disks this huge seems conservative to me as I reckon you'd need 20TB (you can knock a bit off because some channels don't broadcast 24 hours) - implying that it is not really recording "all 30 UK channels" or is severely degrading the already non-optimal quality.
50 3.5" one inch high disks would be a stack of disks over 4 feet high and would cost £193 * 50 = £9,650 (or 16,400USD).
So assuming you can even get a DTV tuner card which lets you record a whole multiplex at once (you'd need 5 of them), the system would be prohibitively expensive.
Therefore I'm assuming that if they really have made a system that can do this, it records only a handful of channels (perhaps 5) at very very low quality (maybe VCD quality at best) as otherwise you couldn't physically fit the machine under your TV let alone afford to purchase it.
Of course, I probably don't need to say that resampling and recompressing the video to save disk space would be completely impossible with currently available hardware and probably will be for many more years to come. There is probably no consumer machine on earth that could simultanously resample and encode 30 full resolution channels in realtime (even with a hardware accellerator of some kind unless you could somehow get 30 PCI cards on a machine). A fairly powerful machine would struggle to recompress just one or two channels into MPEG 4 format in real time - let alone 30.
You probably are. Maybe you're a software developer or you work for a tech related company of some type? I was talking about an AVERAGE employee. Or maybe you've mainly worked for large companies which are big enough to employ someone to setup and maintain that kind of set up.
> The image is projected onto the inside of the glass tube, which is nearly > 1cm thick. > Your eyes are continually shifting focus between the front of the glass, > and the back (where the image is).
No they're not. If your monitor is even vaguely clean then it's pretty much impossible to focus on the glass (try it yourself. It's 99% transparent after all). You shouldn't be able to see it unless there's a massive refection on it (eg a window right behind you) - in which case, adjust the position of your monitor so this doesn't happen.
If you're sitting the correct distance away (at least 16 inches) then the fact that the glass is 1cm thick is totally inconsequential. ie, if you DO focus on the glass front somehow, then the phospor layer is still almost perfectly focused anyway (after all, it's only about 2.5% further away than the bit you're focused on).
Your eye always wants to focus on the thing which is most visible and that's going to be the phosphor layer rather than the front of the glass (unless you have a very dark background or your monitor is turned off). This is one reason why word processors now display text as black on white rather than white on black as this has been proven more legible (on both paper and monitors as it happens). They give you eyestrain because most people have their monitors too close or set up badly (too much contrast/not enough contrast, brightness too high etc) or they have a poor quality CRT which has blurry pixels.
Why are you saying that like they've done something wrong? KDE, XWindows (and nearly all other things which have windows) is directly ripped off Microsoft Windows, but I don't see anyone moaning about the theft of innovation in that direction.
Anyway - as far as I'm aware - KDE can only do this on TEXT files, so it's pretty shit compared to what Vista can do.
> Chalk another one up for the Microsoft hall of innovation.
I will actually. Nearly every single thing in any XWindows based system is ripped directly from Windows - from a button to a scroll bar to the little X you click to close a window, pull down menus etc ALL came from Microsoft. Stop winging.
Slashdot Mirror
No it's not. You do not plug your keyboard into your DVD drive to tell it you want to eject the DVD as opposed to the floppy disk. You're also assuming that having a "remote in your hand that you can push as you walk up to the door" is intuitive - which is isn't - it's far more intuitive to put a key in the lock. This is like keyless entry cars - how do you know if the system is working and your car is locked? If you go close enough to check then the car unlocks. But is the system really locking all the doors or has one of the servos broken? You'll never know.
Having the button on the keyboard is ridicuous and most of the other posters in the thread are in agreement. It's unintuitive and wrong.
The best idea I've seen is to have a soft eject button on the device which tells the OS that you want to eject it. The OS can then flush any buffers, close any windows that 'point' to folders on the device, disable the device, and tell the drive to eject the disk.
I also think that they should do a similar thing for USB. The connectors should glow red when the device shouldn't be unplugged, and have a button that tells the OS you want to eject it. When you press the button, the OS shuts down the drivers and turns the connector green (or turns the light off).
No but there are viruses for all of those systems. Read the post. ...and I would hardly call OSX an embedded OS!
Or you right click on the drive and choose "eject". Which also doesn't work on a mac because there's no right click.
Not difficult - just ridiculously unintuitive. Kind of like putting your front door lock on one of the side windows would be. What's wrong with the eject button being next to the thing it ejects, like on all other things in the entire world like DVD players, videos, toasters, ejector seats etc etc etc.
> How do you do it in Windows?
You press the eject button on the drive.
> Okay, now try the same thing on the Mac.
You can't because an iMac doesn't have an eject button on the drive.
What's your point????
They're not available for linux. You'd have to run it under a Windows emulator of some kind (which hardly counts as running those on linux). If you do use come kind of emulator like Cedega or something, then the games run so slowly they're hardly worth playing anyway. I can't see why any sane person would bother when you can build a dual boot system in less time and run everything much more quickly.
> Then how come OSX is so freakin' easy for everyone to use? It only takes a few minutes.
It's not. It took me about 15 minutes to work out how to get my CD back out of the "screen" on our office iMac when I put it in there once.
> After a decade, they still can't get out code that DOESN'T NEED
> an anti-virus out of the box.
Name anyone who can. Unless you install a really obscure OS, then it's very probable there are lots of viruses for it.
Hopefully the engineers at Scaled and Virgin know more than you (and the author of the linked page) do. Who's to say that a direct descendant of SS1 wil not (gasp!) change engine technologies?!
This as got to be one of the most stupid posts/pages that I've seen so far this year.
> Apple's pro class machines are not going Intel until '97
How thick do you have to be to not even know which millennium you're living in?
What the flying fsck do you mean by "not until '97"? Is that some crappy joke?
> If I want to save a few bucks I will ride my motorcycle (40mpg) on occasion.
Your bike only gets 40mpg?!! My Ford Focus gets that and it's a 5 seat car!
I thought most bikes did more like 100mpg.
...must be an American manufactured car. Have you seen how much it rolls when you go round corners? No other country's cars do that... dead giveaway.
> Sure, there won't be much in the way of compact point-and-shoot within
> a couple of years, but 35mm (especially slide/transparency) and medium
> format will still be with us in 10-20 years' time, just like the vinyl
> record is still the tool of choice for most creative DJs.
Vinyl records have clear advantages for DJs over CDs. Film doesn't really have any advantages at all over digitial. Pretty much everything about digitial photography is better.
> she says that standard digital SLR is still not high resolution enough to
> be blown up to 6ft
Neither is a film camera (not one any photojournalists could afford anyway).
> chromatic aberration or 'edge fringing' which is coloured fringes
> (typically cyan or red) around the border between different coloured
> objects near the edge of the lens. It's caused by an interraction
> between the lens' properties and the CCD, and does not happen with film.
Chromatic aberration is caused by lenses and not the CCD, although the CCD can alter the apparent colour of the abberations. It DOES happen with film cameras. It isn't really noticable on film or digital with decent lenses that a professional photographer would use. Eg Canon L series lenses.
> professional photographers don't want to have to touch these up in Photoshop
> because it's losing detail.
A professional photographer would be unlikely to buy a cheap lens that would have these problems to a noticable degree. Even for average users, these problems are only visible if you zoom right in on the edge of a photo and are almost never visible in prints.
> if I can't remember the signature, its better to look up
:)
> its definition in the source so I can see the comments on the inputs.
Intellisense in VS *DOES* shows you the comments from the source. Why do you think that the source comments have to be entered in XML?? Why do think there's a whole thread of people saying how good it is even though it's an MS product? If you're not seeing the comments, then you haven't been following the templates or RTFM.
I hate to say it but it's fucking amazing - especially in VS.NET 2005.
The thread title is correct - it's Microsoft's Killer App.
> Besides, if you divide up the work correctly, you won't be using more
> than a few percent of the functions in a program,
Not all companies are big enough to "divide up the work". I have to do the entire project on my own. Which after 6 months is a LOT of functions. I guarantee it would take nearly everyone except genius autistic programmers more time to write large projects if if VS.NET didn't have any intellisense.
I can't see how it can be annoying. If you type quickly without pausing then it doesn't even appear. If you really do know what you're supposed to be typing then you probably won't pause because. The only reason I can think of to pause halfway though typing a function call is if you're having to go and find the function definition because you can't remember what the next argument is
You obviously haven't used it for more than a few minutes. The alternative would be learn the entire of the framework off by heart. Apparently if you print out all the help pages in VS.NET it would be a stack of paper 14 meters high.
> If I see a store with a sign labeled 'open' on the front of it, would you
> consider me a burglar if I walked into it without asking the shopkeeper first?
RTFA. This was not a public access point in a shop - this was someone's private AP in their house. Likening it to a shop with an "open" sign on it is ridiculous - the AP was private. My unlocked house analogy was much more accurate. 99% of people would realise that it's not their own and therefore realise that it's not theirs to connect to.
> The AP this guy connected to had a big giant sign *actively* saying "OPEN" on it.
-5, Wrong. Nowhere does it say "OPEN" in the protocol stream or anywhere else. It simply isn't secured - just like your house doesn't say "OPEN" on it if you forget to lock it. Houses have lots of ways of being locked. Not locking them is not equivalent in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER that any normal non looter would think to having a sign outside saying "OPEN". Why do you think that people selling their houses have to stick a big fucking sign on the lawn saying "OPEN DAY"? Answer: Because no normal people would come in if they didn't!
> Windows and Linux are modern enough to make room in the RAM when new programs are launched.
You can't "make more RAM". You have to buy it and install it in your machine. If firefox uses up too much memory on my machine then eventually windows starts throwing errors like "system is low on virtual memory". It cannot simply ask firefox to use less ram please - and it doesn't. The only way to free up the ram is to quit firefox and reload it.
>So I'm here at work and Word is using 50 MB out of 256 MB. Notepad is only using 2 MB. WTF BBQ!
No idea what on earth your point is there. Of course Word uses more ram - it has vastly more features. Firefox does not have 4 times as many features as IE.
> Wrong. It's more like going up a private road which isn't marked as a
> private road
Which is illegal. What's your point? You can't possibly have any legitimate reason to go up the private road as it only leads to other stuff which isn't yours.
> Don't want people to go driving up your private road? Put some signs up or
> a gate.
I have 200 acres of land. How can I put up signs or a gate on 200 acres of land? You shouldn't be trespassing - you have no legitimate reason to go on to my land.
Say you park your car on the street and one night you forget to lock it. Would you be happy if someone took that to mean that they had an open invitation to get in your car and drive around in it (even if they brought it back again)? I doubt it...
You seem to be under the gross misconception that if you haven't been physically prevented from using something, then it must be entirely legal and morally correct for you to use it. It's the other way round - by default, you can't do anything with anyone's private property unless they have expressly permitted you to do so - whether or not they have secured it. Simply "not securing" something is not any kind of permission to use or abuse an object or service! I think that's fairly fucking obvious to pretty much everyone in the world apart from thieves (and even they probably realise it's wrong - they just don't give a shit).
> Bullshit, there is no hijacking involved!
Of course there is. He did not merely "look" at wireless network. He connected to it and was using it. That's hijacking.
This is more like getting into an unlocked car and driving it around just because the owner left the keys in the ignition. Hardly fair or legal.
> How about 'permission to view' the flowers in front of my house?
No but if you haven't secured them, then I reserve the right to pick them all and give them to my girlfriend. This guy was not just *looking*! Have you not even read the article?! He CONNECTED to the network concerned and used it to access to the Internet. "Looking" doesn't come into it - if he'd simply seen it in a list of available wireless networks then I doubt he would be prosecuted.
> Do you need permission to turn on the TV and watch open air TV shows?
How is that related? A wireless network that hasn't been secured is not a public service. Anyway - this is a UK case and in the UK we require a TV license to watch open air TV shows, so yes, we do need permission. You picked a bad analogy...
> If people are too ignorent to use a piece of hardware
> they shouldnt purchase it
People leave their cars/houses unlocked. This doesn't mean it's perfectly acceptable to steal/rob them!
Firefox is good, but it's far from perfect. Both Firefox and Thunderbird eat RAM like cheese (turn on the VM column in the Task Manager and take a look at how much RAM it's using. At one stage this morning, I had 8 tabs open and firefox was using over 200mb of memory (on a 512mb machine). I exited and reloaded the same tab group (using an extension) and that seemed to free up most of the ram so it was only using 50mb. I hate to say this but this RAM mismanagement (I won't call it a leak as it is fixed by a restart) doesn't seem to occur with IE 7.
I think the Firefox and Thunderbird developers need to take a serious look at memory management in both these products. Thunderbird is currently using 110mb of RAM on my machine. It seems totally unsuited to people who like to keep a lot of their email on IMAP servers (a few thousand messages - which I have to, for work).
It also has several annoying bugs which are marked as "WONT FIX" in bugzilla - despite the fact that hundreds of users find these bugs an irriation.
I also seem to end up with Firefox opening two windows when I load it. The second window has most of the toolbars missing and is usually displaying the blue update icon. No idea what's causing this...
It does "work" - it's just slashdotted.
> You assume they're recording analog broadcasts, which they aren't.
> Recording UK terrestrial digital broadcasts requires no compression.
It doesn't matter! His figures (estimates) are still roughly correct. You still have to store all the compressed data whether it was compressed by the broadcaster, compressed on a PCI card or compressed by the CPU. It's still more data than you could possibly fit on a hard disk array in one single day - let alone a whole month. Do the maths yourself if you don't belive me (us).
Lets have a go:
BBC 1 on Freeview is 5.5Mbps and is the highest quality channel
Lower quality channels like Sky Sports News is 2.0Mbps.
Lets take the BEST case scenario and assume that all channels are low quality 2.0Mbps channels.
If you wanted to record just ONE single channel for a month, then:
2Mbps in gigabytes per month= 642 gigabytes per month
642 gigabytes per month * 30 channels = 19.260TB (terrabytes)
19 terrabytes would take up 50 400GB hard disks. A poster below said that he thought the machine concerned had 3.2TB of hard disks in it. But even disks this huge seems conservative to me as I reckon you'd need 20TB (you can knock a bit off because some channels don't broadcast 24 hours) - implying that it is not really recording "all 30 UK channels" or is severely degrading the already non-optimal quality.
50 3.5" one inch high disks would be a stack of disks over 4 feet high and would cost £193 * 50 = £9,650 (or 16,400USD).
So assuming you can even get a DTV tuner card which lets you record a whole multiplex at once (you'd need 5 of them), the system would be prohibitively expensive.
Therefore I'm assuming that if they really have made a system that can do this, it records only a handful of channels (perhaps 5) at very very low quality (maybe VCD quality at best) as otherwise you couldn't physically fit the machine under your TV let alone afford to purchase it.
Of course, I probably don't need to say that resampling and recompressing the video to save disk space would be completely impossible with currently available hardware and probably will be for many more years to come. There is probably no consumer machine on earth that could simultanously resample and encode 30 full resolution channels in realtime (even with a hardware accellerator of some kind unless you could somehow get 30 PCI cards on a machine). A fairly powerful machine would struggle to recompress just one or two channels into MPEG 4 format in real time - let alone 30.
> Then I must be an outlier
You probably are. Maybe you're a software developer or you work for a tech related company of some type? I was talking about an AVERAGE employee. Or maybe you've mainly worked for large companies which are big enough to employ someone to setup and maintain that kind of set up.
> The image is projected onto the inside of the glass tube, which is nearly
> 1cm thick.
> Your eyes are continually shifting focus between the front of the glass,
> and the back (where the image is).
No they're not. If your monitor is even vaguely clean then it's pretty much impossible to focus on the glass (try it yourself. It's 99% transparent after all). You shouldn't be able to see it unless there's a massive refection on it (eg a window right behind you) - in which case, adjust the position of your monitor so this doesn't happen.
If you're sitting the correct distance away (at least 16 inches) then the fact that the glass is 1cm thick is totally inconsequential. ie, if you DO focus on the glass front somehow, then the phospor layer is still almost perfectly focused anyway (after all, it's only about 2.5% further away than the bit you're focused on).
Your eye always wants to focus on the thing which is most visible and that's going to be the phosphor layer rather than the front of the glass (unless you have a very dark background or your monitor is turned off). This is one reason why word processors now display text as black on white rather than white on black as this has been proven more legible (on both paper and monitors as it happens). They give you eyestrain because most people have their monitors too close or set up badly (too much contrast/not enough contrast, brightness too high etc) or they have a poor quality CRT which has blurry pixels.
> Sounds like this was directly ripped off of KDE
Why are you saying that like they've done something wrong? KDE, XWindows (and nearly all other things which have windows) is directly ripped off Microsoft Windows, but I don't see anyone moaning about the theft of innovation in that direction.
Anyway - as far as I'm aware - KDE can only do this on TEXT files, so it's pretty shit compared to what Vista can do.
> Chalk another one up for the Microsoft hall of innovation.
I will actually. Nearly every single thing in any XWindows based system is ripped directly from Windows - from a button to a scroll bar to the little X you click to close a window, pull down menus etc ALL came from Microsoft. Stop winging.