I dont' know how many of you out there noticed (I'd suspect at least half of you) but they had no image or data from the Hubble on that page. Only an "Artists Concept" Hubble is a telescope for Bob's sake! It makes images (or at least pretty graphs if its a raido telescope) When a theorist is telling me about black holes, then I like to see artists concepts, but when I hear about evidence of black holes from a huge telescope, I want to see the pictures!
I have two smp boxes, both are dual PII/III's.
So far I've tried Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, and win2k on them. I usually use Linux, I like it, and it runs well, for the most part, under smp. There are a few issues though with linux SMP. For starters, before the 2.4 kernel FreeBSD was much faster. I'm not sure if the 2.4 kernel is faster than FreeBSD, I havn't run numbers yet.
From my experience I'd say, if your going to use linux, make sure the drivers for your hardware all work under SMP. I've had some scsi cards, and some ultraDMA 66 ide cards whos drivers are terribly unstable under SMP. (You might have to read the code for the drivers and look at the comments)
Of course EVERYTHING I've done with smp has been on Intel hardware, and while I'm sure you can pick up 200K smb Xenon boxes, there probably not the most bang for the buck. If you really want to run linux SMP on a machine of this size, you'll probably have to go Sun, SGI or Alpha. Linux is pretty good on all three platforms there, but I'd stay away from RedHat on anything but intel hardware (ok me personally, even on intel).
So maybe the steps you should take will be,
1 Decide if you need 32 or 64 bit machines.
2 Pick up a dual proc workstation with similar processors, to develop and test on. Lets say you think you want an e450, so pick up used dual spark station from one of the many used dealers that cater to ISPs.
3 Make SURE all the drivers and code work well on it.
4 Buy the HUGE machine.
As far as I recall (and note I'm no geneticist, not even a biologist...or even a college grad) the animal thats born will look almost identical to a guar, but act, and on a genetic level be mostly a cow. I'm trying to remember what I read this from, but it had something to do with the fact that this is not a guar egg, but a cow egg with guar dna. I also recall something about cross cloning of zebras... but that was awhile ago, and I don't know how it turned out.
Why isn't there the humor foot for this article? This is funny. Scary too. But mostly funny. Mostly funny because they almost deffinately will not enforce their TOS. Despite how stupid their lawers obviously are, their PR department probably won't let them get all the bad press that enforcing this would entail..
Personal experience here, don't use Yellow Dog if your going for mac-linux. I consider myself competent and installing and maintaining unix boxes, (I have a Ultrix, netbsd and linux running on various platforms constantly), and have had nothing but trouble with yellowdog. I'd use slack for ppc...but as far as I can see, there is no slack for ppc. Debian isn't my favorite distro, but its a damn sight better than those RPM ones. Since your used to BSD anyway use Deb, it should be [more] familer.
Good. Not to be to cynical, but there is just to much junk in orbit around the earth anyway. What somone needs to do is put up some garbage collectors and make some sort of spacehulk out there. A space station out of the junk. But what they shouldn't do is clutter space up worse than new jersy. You can't build new buildings when half your state is a garbage dump (ok sorry to all you folk in NJ)
Ok some might veiw this as flame bait, others will say this is off topic, but why bother with glide? Are there any games that only use glide that people really want to use? Sure unreal can use glide instead of opengl, but that really isn't because the glide drivers are better than opengl, they just don't do as much. For me, there are NO games that use glide only that I want to play. So what to do for the glide/opengl games that run incredibly faster under glide? Simple, make some type of openGL control panel that can dynamically turn on and off features in the opengl driver. Now that would be an awsome little tool, much much more usefull then bothering to make more glide drivers.
Belive it or not, this ac really ins't a troll...
every old isa video card I have works under XFree3.x and 4.x usually at 8bit color, 800x600, and the trident 512k cards at 1024x768 as I reacall. For awhile I had a cheesy 4meg agp card that wasn't supported under Xfree, and used the isa one. Gimp ran fine, Netscape ran fine, text was clear, crisp etc. Some 2d games even ran ok. If your not doing heavy graphics, there fine...especialy to use for a second display or a web browsing terminal.
Err the NV driver in Xfree4.0.2 is deffinately open source:)
And actually the 2d preformance was better with it, than with the 0.95 driver from Nvidia (ok shoot me if the driver version is wrong, I'm at work not on my machine)
No, there is no open source 3d driver as far as I know, but its rumored to be comming, and thats good enough for grandad, and good enough for me.
FYI: Xfree 4.0.2 has 2d drivers for Radon... although I bought a radon two months ago, then exchanged it for a geforece2mx because of the linux driver problems....not that nvidia is the greatest for linux drivers...
From the 2d standpoint the radon had a crisper image, and from the 3d standpoint it was hands down prettier IMHO, but a little slower. Problem is, there arn't even GLX drivers for the radon right now. The nvidia cards might only have glx, which is slow as hell compared to the windows drivers, or to the dri drivers for the 3dfx cards, but hell, at least they HAVE 3d drivers:)
.... but as soon as there are glx or dri drivers for the radon:) i'm buying another one...
Lets say for a moment, that they do release a distro, with full source. You don't trust them. So you install their distro, then recompile everything, and your all safe and cozy. So you think. Since you just compiled the code with their compiler, you have no way of knowing if the compiler was compromised. The compiler could be set up to stuff a little bit of code into certain programs, everytime their compiled, including itself. So if you compiled a new compiler with source you downloaded from the gnu web site lets say, your new compiler would still put in those nasty bits. I recall reading a really good article about this by Dennis Richie I think....
But the basic premise of it is, if your going to install their distro, copy all the source onto another linux box (read never had their distro on it), examine it, then compile all the peices and install from your compiled versions....and if you don't, don't you DARE ever ever ever share binaries compiled on that system with anyone. Just share source..please.
I know I"m not a doctor, and I'm not a biologist,but how/why would infared (ok near infared) light aid/speed up healing? Radiation of that sort causes minute mutations in cells, but doesn't make them regenerate faster. So how does it work? The explination, to paraphrase, "increases energy in the cells" is far to vague to be a decent explination. How does it work? On a chemical/biological level?
But I'm sad. I mean ham radio and packet radio and cb radio are fun, but not that practical/userfull. Community radio which is what they had hoped would have been great fun. Pirate radio w/out the risk of prison, internet radio without wasting your bandwidth (and everyone elses)
I for one like hearing different and obscure points of view, programs and music.
I whish I had known about a bill like this, I would have signed a petition or sent in a letter in a heartbeat!
Unfortunately Fair Use seems to mean for your own use. So you can make something, but can not distribute it and be garunteed protection under fair use. Even satire, which is supposed to be under fair use has been deemed illigal (look up some of the Disney cases if you want to..that company is EVIL).
If a company wants to ban a free, NFP game that some kids write on their own free time, just because it uses the companies carichters, they can happily sue them under our laws, and anyone else who has a copy too.
I just whish more companies were like Lucasfilm, where you can make as many Star Wars games stories comics and artwork as you want and share freely, you just can't sell it without their permission.
The reason it is important to "port" projects over when there still in development, and far from complete is two fold.
One -- Once the full version is complete it will be very difficult to start porting it, having to deal with inconsitancies in unixes and other OS's. Not to mention optimizing it for a platform, may have to be done at a lower level, which would be easy if it were built into the tree early, and hard if it were done later (so it might never happen)
Two -- By forcing yourself to develop cross platform, you run into the limitations of your design and logic sooner, forcing you to fix it. Cheap workarounds get tossed out in favor of better solutions, because cheap workarounds and sloppy hacks are system dependant, and your working cross several platforms. Just look at what a POS Netscape 4.x is (ok so there is nothing better for unix at the moment) under unix, and under macintosh. It was designed for win32 first, and not designed cross platform. The win32 version is great, and I almost never have problems with it, although I cannot say the same for the linux/freebsd/mac versions. Now compare those to QuakeIII. I've never had it crash in windows, or in Linux, or on a macintosh. (I've had numerous QuakeII crashes under linux though) And its fast under all three systems.
Now nobody reading this here is John Carmack (exept of course for John, if he reads this far down in the posts) so yea, none of us are going to pull it off quite as well, but we can at least try. Come to think of it, its probably the least painfull way we could all improve our own projects.
Because a railway is far more efficent for some things than an airplane is. Its just not as quick, comfortable, shiny or new.
Same thing with Mir. Its not as new or comfey, but its already there. I for one don't take a sledge hammer to my old Athalon (pardon the AMD plun) just because I'm getting a new one. I USE the old one for other tasks:)
Don't worry, the FDA will probably require it to be listed as a food aditive. A few years ago someone bred a strain of bugs that would eat all the worms and other pests that would try to invade and eat corn(maize for non amiercans) in silos. Even though the bugs and their remains could not be found in the corn they had been in, the FDA said it had to be listed as a food additive. Why is this interesting? Because if you hose down your crop with chemical pesticides, which are found in abundant amounts in the food even when we eat it, the FDA does not require it being listed as a food aditive.
Basically, the FDA or some other goverment agency will find a way to make using any wonderfull and great new processies illigal, while keeping wastefull, dangerous and enviornmentally hostile processies standard and perfectly legal.
K, this is a dumb question here but...
at $20, with a built in modem... can they connect to any ppp provider? Sorry I never looked into webtv so I'm not sure how it worked. Anyway if it can hook up to any ppp provider, why not probe the thing till you can use the modem as a serial port and hook it up to a *nix box that has slirp. Maybe not the fastest thing in the world, but it should pop web pages decently...and as secondary terminals, that aint to shabby...even if it isn't running a *nix os:)
Call me silly, but why bother going through tons of very hard processies (I belive isotopes can be derived/speperated through chemical processies..but its HARD!)just to keep on using silicon? There are far better semiconductors out there. Gold for instance, when put in the proper geomeric shapes (at molecular levels) becomes a semiconductor with many more logic levels the silicon. Silicon has two. Gold has the possibility of having 7 or more. (lookup nanoscale physics if your interested, I only have very curssory knowedge of the subject)
Why not spend the reasearch money on developing processors with other better semiconducts is all i'm saying? Instead of putting more and more into an almost tapped out tech (like how we still do research into gasoline internal combustion engines, when we should be doing research on power cells and other eletric vehicles)
So is it proprietary hardware? Why is it needed?
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 1
I really have to ask, if it does have proprietary hardware, why is it needed?
In the past 15 years computers have been continuously moving away from proprietary hardware. Sure your sound and video cards are proprietary, but they all connect to a common set of connectors (pci/isa/agp)
Considering how expensive it would be to create integrated neural net chips, we can only assume they are using a normal mass market processor (x86 pa-risc, alpha, etc.
To me it sounds like they just wrote [some extentions to] an operating system, and slapped it in a fancy box w/ some propritary hardware to justify the price.
Way back when, when I worked dialup tech support, we had a coustomer with an Atari jaguar. They used it to dial up, check their mail etc. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure, that they could do web browsing on it too. It was incredibly finicky. I also saw a friends sega genisis hooked up to the sega channel way back when. You could do e-mail, download games, do multiplayer, funn stuff (today I'm sure they could do browsing too), but not worth the hassle if its your mail net device. IMHO, if your going to get them something to browse the net with, don't get them a game system that also acts as a net-applicence. There horrid to use for anything but games. Hell, after playing with a web-tv at a hotel last year (hey it was free to use!) I'd even encourage against getting them any net applience, and just get them an e-machine...there cheap, there not fast, but they WORK (and like that/. article from earlier mentioned, netplicences dont always have plugin support!)
I mean springboard is cool and all, but really, a visor is an expensive, and not all that powerfull of a solution....admitedly it would be tres cool! But a visor has alot of overhead, including an input device (the touchpad) that you wouldn't use, and a display (the lcd) that you woudln't use. At home I have some links to several companies that sell the type of parts you really want, and sell them peicemeal, I'll post them when I get home tonight. You can get a 486 on a stick (simm) pretty cheaply, and that would include ide channels serial and parallel ports. Its not just the power of the device that matters you see, but also the expandibility. A visor has three ports really, serial, ir and springboard (do the serial and ir share? or are they seperate?) Ok I'm rambling now. Anyways my point is, for $200 a visor isn't very powerfull, and doesn't have alot of ports. I promise to post the urls once I get home:)
Of course making trains a viable alternative to driving from city to city or flying is a good start, but its not really what needs to be done.
What needs be done, is a good network of public transportation trains for metropolotin areas, to replace all that damnd rush hour, commuter and burb to burb traffic.
I don't care right now, how fast amtrak can get me from boston to new york, the'll still charge me more than American Airlines half the time....now if they could get one of these for a crosstown express.....now THAT would be cool. From one end of Chicago to the other, in 10 minutes;) that would be usefull!
Really quick note, I've read about the file descriptor problem before, but have never run into it myself. If you read through some of the ducmentation in the kernel source, I belive (it was a while ago when I read this info, so just samck me if I'm wrong) it is a simple matter to increase the number of file descriptors that the kernel can handle. I kindof recall this being a variable set through a makefile, but that doesn't sound quite right... anway it is supposed to be a simple matter to inrease the number of file descriptors that your kernel can handle, however it will give you a performance hit in some other areas.
I was under the impression that Lucas had always allowed people to make and distribute fan artwork, games, models video clips etc as long as they didn't charge for them? There was never a question of legality with troops, as far as I konw. Lucas just happend to love that one clip (hell who didn't??) so he contacted them to thank them. It would be frightening to think this may have set his precedent for "allowed" parodies. I just hope he doesn't become kindof like Disney, who constantly goes after parodies that should be legaly protected under fair use.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont' know how many of you out there noticed (I'd suspect at least half of you) but they had no image or data from the Hubble on that page. Only an "Artists Concept" Hubble is a telescope for Bob's sake! It makes images (or at least pretty graphs if its a raido telescope) When a theorist is telling me about black holes, then I like to see artists concepts, but when I hear about evidence of black holes from a huge telescope, I want to see the pictures!
</gripe>
I have two smp boxes, both are dual PII/III's.
So far I've tried Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, and win2k on them. I usually use Linux, I like it, and it runs well, for the most part, under smp. There are a few issues though with linux SMP. For starters, before the 2.4 kernel FreeBSD was much faster. I'm not sure if the 2.4 kernel is faster than FreeBSD, I havn't run numbers yet.
From my experience I'd say, if your going to use linux, make sure the drivers for your hardware all work under SMP. I've had some scsi cards, and some ultraDMA 66 ide cards whos drivers are terribly unstable under SMP. (You might have to read the code for the drivers and look at the comments)
Of course EVERYTHING I've done with smp has been on Intel hardware, and while I'm sure you can pick up 200K smb Xenon boxes, there probably not the most bang for the buck. If you really want to run linux SMP on a machine of this size, you'll probably have to go Sun, SGI or Alpha. Linux is pretty good on all three platforms there, but I'd stay away from RedHat on anything but intel hardware (ok me personally, even on intel).
So maybe the steps you should take will be,
1 Decide if you need 32 or 64 bit machines.
2 Pick up a dual proc workstation with similar processors, to develop and test on. Lets say you think you want an e450, so pick up used dual spark station from one of the many used dealers that cater to ISPs.
3 Make SURE all the drivers and code work well on it.
4 Buy the HUGE machine.
As far as I recall (and note I'm no geneticist, not even a biologist...or even a college grad) the animal thats born will look almost identical to a guar, but act, and on a genetic level be mostly a cow. I'm trying to remember what I read this from, but it had something to do with the fact that this is not a guar egg, but a cow egg with guar dna. I also recall something about cross cloning of zebras... but that was awhile ago, and I don't know how it turned out.
Why isn't there the humor foot for this article? This is funny. Scary too. But mostly funny. Mostly funny because they almost deffinately will not enforce their TOS. Despite how stupid their lawers obviously are, their PR department probably won't let them get all the bad press that enforcing this would entail..
Personal experience here, don't use Yellow Dog if your going for mac-linux. I consider myself competent and installing and maintaining unix boxes, (I have a Ultrix, netbsd and linux running on various platforms constantly), and have had nothing but trouble with yellowdog. I'd use slack for ppc...but as far as I can see, there is no slack for ppc. Debian isn't my favorite distro, but its a damn sight better than those RPM ones. Since your used to BSD anyway use Deb, it should be [more] familer.
Good. Not to be to cynical, but there is just to much junk in orbit around the earth anyway. What somone needs to do is put up some garbage collectors and make some sort of spacehulk out there. A space station out of the junk. But what they shouldn't do is clutter space up worse than new jersy. You can't build new buildings when half your state is a garbage dump (ok sorry to all you folk in NJ)
Just my random 2 cents.
Ok some might veiw this as flame bait, others will say this is off topic, but why bother with glide? Are there any games that only use glide that people really want to use? Sure unreal can use glide instead of opengl, but that really isn't because the glide drivers are better than opengl, they just don't do as much. For me, there are NO games that use glide only that I want to play. So what to do for the glide/opengl games that run incredibly faster under glide? Simple, make some type of openGL control panel that can dynamically turn on and off features in the opengl driver. Now that would be an awsome little tool, much much more usefull then bothering to make more glide drivers.
Belive it or not, this ac really ins't a troll...
every old isa video card I have works under XFree3.x and 4.x usually at 8bit color, 800x600, and the trident 512k cards at 1024x768 as I reacall. For awhile I had a cheesy 4meg agp card that wasn't supported under Xfree, and used the isa one. Gimp ran fine, Netscape ran fine, text was clear, crisp etc. Some 2d games even ran ok. If your not doing heavy graphics, there fine...especialy to use for a second display or a web browsing terminal.
Err the NV driver in Xfree4.0.2 is deffinately open source :)
And actually the 2d preformance was better with it, than with the 0.95 driver from Nvidia (ok shoot me if the driver version is wrong, I'm at work not on my machine)
No, there is no open source 3d driver as far as I know, but its rumored to be comming, and thats good enough for grandad, and good enough for me.
FYI: Xfree 4.0.2 has 2d drivers for Radon... although I bought a radon two months ago, then exchanged it for a geforece2mx because of the linux driver problems....not that nvidia is the greatest for linux drivers...
:)
:) i'm buying another one...
From the 2d standpoint the radon had a crisper image, and from the 3d standpoint it was hands down prettier IMHO, but a little slower. Problem is, there arn't even GLX drivers for the radon right now. The nvidia cards might only have glx, which is slow as hell compared to the windows drivers, or to the dri drivers for the 3dfx cards, but hell, at least they HAVE 3d drivers
.... but as soon as there are glx or dri drivers for the radon
seriously the graphical quality was just better.
Lets say for a moment, that they do release a distro, with full source. You don't trust them. So you install their distro, then recompile everything, and your all safe and cozy. So you think. Since you just compiled the code with their compiler, you have no way of knowing if the compiler was compromised. The compiler could be set up to stuff a little bit of code into certain programs, everytime their compiled, including itself. So if you compiled a new compiler with source you downloaded from the gnu web site lets say, your new compiler would still put in those nasty bits. I recall reading a really good article about this by Dennis Richie I think....
But the basic premise of it is, if your going to install their distro, copy all the source onto another linux box (read never had their distro on it), examine it, then compile all the peices and install from your compiled versions....and if you don't, don't you DARE ever ever ever share binaries compiled on that system with anyone. Just share source..please.
I know I"m not a doctor, and I'm not a biologist,but how/why would infared (ok near infared) light aid/speed up healing? Radiation of that sort causes minute mutations in cells, but doesn't make them regenerate faster. So how does it work? The explination, to paraphrase, "increases energy in the cells" is far to vague to be a decent explination. How does it work? On a chemical/biological level?
Sorry I just have a hard time buying this.
But I'm sad. I mean ham radio and packet radio and cb radio are fun, but not that practical/userfull. Community radio which is what they had hoped would have been great fun. Pirate radio w/out the risk of prison, internet radio without wasting your bandwidth (and everyone elses)
I for one like hearing different and obscure points of view, programs and music.
I whish I had known about a bill like this, I would have signed a petition or sent in a letter in a heartbeat!
Just my 2 Cents.
Unfortunately Fair Use seems to mean for your own use. So you can make something, but can not distribute it and be garunteed protection under fair use. Even satire, which is supposed to be under fair use has been deemed illigal (look up some of the Disney cases if you want to..that company is EVIL).
If a company wants to ban a free, NFP game that some kids write on their own free time, just because it uses the companies carichters, they can happily sue them under our laws, and anyone else who has a copy too.
I just whish more companies were like Lucasfilm, where you can make as many Star Wars games stories comics and artwork as you want and share freely, you just can't sell it without their permission.
The reason it is important to "port" projects over when there still in development, and far from complete is two fold.
One -- Once the full version is complete it will be very difficult to start porting it, having to deal with inconsitancies in unixes and other OS's. Not to mention optimizing it for a platform, may have to be done at a lower level, which would be easy if it were built into the tree early, and hard if it were done later (so it might never happen)
Two -- By forcing yourself to develop cross platform, you run into the limitations of your design and logic sooner, forcing you to fix it. Cheap workarounds get tossed out in favor of better solutions, because cheap workarounds and sloppy hacks are system dependant, and your working cross several platforms. Just look at what a POS Netscape 4.x is (ok so there is nothing better for unix at the moment) under unix, and under macintosh. It was designed for win32 first, and not designed cross platform. The win32 version is great, and I almost never have problems with it, although I cannot say the same for the linux/freebsd/mac versions. Now compare those to QuakeIII. I've never had it crash in windows, or in Linux, or on a macintosh. (I've had numerous QuakeII crashes under linux though) And its fast under all three systems.
Now nobody reading this here is John Carmack (exept of course for John, if he reads this far down in the posts) so yea, none of us are going to pull it off quite as well, but we can at least try. Come to think of it, its probably the least painfull way we could all improve our own projects.
Because a railway is far more efficent for some things than an airplane is. Its just not as quick, comfortable, shiny or new. :)
Same thing with Mir. Its not as new or comfey, but its already there. I for one don't take a sledge hammer to my old Athalon (pardon the AMD plun) just because I'm getting a new one. I USE the old one for other tasks
Don't worry, the FDA will probably require it to be listed as a food aditive. A few years ago someone bred a strain of bugs that would eat all the worms and other pests that would try to invade and eat corn(maize for non amiercans) in silos. Even though the bugs and their remains could not be found in the corn they had been in, the FDA said it had to be listed as a food additive. Why is this interesting? Because if you hose down your crop with chemical pesticides, which are found in abundant amounts in the food even when we eat it, the FDA does not require it being listed as a food aditive.
Basically, the FDA or some other goverment agency will find a way to make using any wonderfull and great new processies illigal, while keeping wastefull, dangerous and enviornmentally hostile processies standard and perfectly legal.
K, this is a dumb question here but... :)
at $20, with a built in modem... can they connect to any ppp provider? Sorry I never looked into webtv so I'm not sure how it worked. Anyway if it can hook up to any ppp provider, why not probe the thing till you can use the modem as a serial port and hook it up to a *nix box that has slirp. Maybe not the fastest thing in the world, but it should pop web pages decently...and as secondary terminals, that aint to shabby...even if it isn't running a *nix os
Call me silly, but why bother going through tons of very hard processies (I belive isotopes can be derived/speperated through chemical processies..but its HARD!)just to keep on using silicon? There are far better semiconductors out there. Gold for instance, when put in the proper geomeric shapes (at molecular levels) becomes a semiconductor with many more logic levels the silicon. Silicon has two. Gold has the possibility of having 7 or more. (lookup nanoscale physics if your interested, I only have very curssory knowedge of the subject)
Why not spend the reasearch money on developing processors with other better semiconducts is all i'm saying? Instead of putting more and more into an almost tapped out tech (like how we still do research into gasoline internal combustion engines, when we should be doing research on power cells and other eletric vehicles)
I really have to ask, if it does have proprietary hardware, why is it needed?
In the past 15 years computers have been continuously moving away from proprietary hardware. Sure your sound and video cards are proprietary, but they all connect to a common set of connectors (pci/isa/agp)
Considering how expensive it would be to create integrated neural net chips, we can only assume they are using a normal mass market processor (x86 pa-risc, alpha, etc.
To me it sounds like they just wrote [some extentions to] an operating system, and slapped it in a fancy box w/ some propritary hardware to justify the price.
Way back when, when I worked dialup tech support, we had a coustomer with an Atari jaguar. They used it to dial up, check their mail etc. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure, that they could do web browsing on it too. It was incredibly finicky. I also saw a friends sega genisis hooked up to the sega channel way back when. You could do e-mail, download games, do multiplayer, funn stuff (today I'm sure they could do browsing too), but not worth the hassle if its your mail net device. IMHO, if your going to get them something to browse the net with, don't get them a game system that also acts as a net-applicence. There horrid to use for anything but games. Hell, after playing with a web-tv at a hotel last year (hey it was free to use!) I'd even encourage against getting them any net applience, and just get them an e-machine...there cheap, there not fast, but they WORK (and like that /. article from earlier mentioned, netplicences dont always have plugin support!)
I mean springboard is cool and all, but really, a visor is an expensive, and not all that powerfull of a solution....admitedly it would be tres cool! But a visor has alot of overhead, including an input device (the touchpad) that you wouldn't use, and a display (the lcd) that you woudln't use. At home I have some links to several companies that sell the type of parts you really want, and sell them peicemeal, I'll post them when I get home tonight. You can get a 486 on a stick (simm) pretty cheaply, and that would include ide channels serial and parallel ports. Its not just the power of the device that matters you see, but also the expandibility. A visor has three ports really, serial, ir and springboard (do the serial and ir share? or are they seperate?) Ok I'm rambling now. Anyways my point is, for $200 a visor isn't very powerfull, and doesn't have alot of ports. I promise to post the urls once I get home :)
Of course making trains a viable alternative to driving from city to city or flying is a good start, but its not really what needs to be done.
;) that would be usefull!
What needs be done, is a good network of public transportation trains for metropolotin areas, to replace all that damnd rush hour, commuter and burb to burb traffic.
I don't care right now, how fast amtrak can get me from boston to new york, the'll still charge me more than American Airlines half the time....now if they could get one of these for a crosstown express.....now THAT would be cool. From one end of Chicago to the other, in 10 minutes
Really quick note, I've read about the file descriptor problem before, but have never run into it myself. If you read through some of the ducmentation in the kernel source, I belive (it was a while ago when I read this info, so just samck me if I'm wrong) it is a simple matter to increase the number of file descriptors that the kernel can handle. I kindof recall this being a variable set through a makefile, but that doesn't sound quite right... anway it is supposed to be a simple matter to inrease the number of file descriptors that your kernel can handle, however it will give you a performance hit in some other areas.
:)
I guess I lied when I said this would be quick.
I was under the impression that Lucas had always allowed people to make and distribute fan artwork, games, models video clips etc as long as they didn't charge for them? There was never a question of legality with troops, as far as I konw. Lucas just happend to love that one clip (hell who didn't??) so he contacted them to thank them. It would be frightening to think this may have set his precedent for "allowed" parodies. I just hope he doesn't become kindof like Disney, who constantly goes after parodies that should be legaly protected under fair use.