I agree, it's not very fast. It takes a very long time to start up. Some operations also visibly lag. Overall, though, I don't find that too big of a problem-- it gets the job done.
Frankly, I don't find either option that important (kill excel & flawless interoperability). Rather, I appreciate having a featureful set of office apps for free; if I were running a business, I already could use exclusively open source-- from OS to the apps. The office apps like this one or Staroffice are similar enough to Windows stuff that low-level workers could use it without much trouble.
Fair enough, it's your point of view. I agree Excel will never be Gnumeric. My point of view is that Excel is the alternative for Gnumeric, useful if you are forced by your management to interoperate by exchanging Excel spreadsheets.;)
Also check out StarOffice's presentation program. It's more stable than Powerpoint, and has more features.
IBM spelling chequer (Was: Re:IBM Desctops sucked)
on
IBM To Leave The Desktop?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
Right, that's essentially what the previous post said. The UWB transmissions occur in a very wide band of frequencies, thus overlapping with other services like amateur radio. To the other services any power not coming from the original transmitter is counted as noise; that's why UWB transmissions are said to raise the noise floor.
The argument for UWB is that a single UWB transmitter's power is spread so much that it adds only tiny amounts of noise to other services. However, the question is what happens when there are massive amounts of UWB transmitters contributing noise.
It seems this would be useful for getting simple kinds of statistics about the currency, such as the last 10 bank transactions a certain bill was involved in. I can imagine a little USB bill reader with software that shows a map of locations a bill was last seen, along with dates. It would be fun to come home, take out the money from your wallet and check where it came from.
Not much opportunity for the Man here, though, just fun.
What are you talking about? The guy built 10 Mbps transceiver out of some LEDs-- a far cry from 10 Gbps. He used ordinary Ethernet NICs with AUI ports and converted the signal into light. Replacing the LEDs with laser diodes should be easy .
I appreciate the information you posted in the above comment-- it is quite useful.
I understood the article to be suggesting more unlicensed spectrum, based on the fact that there are some quite successful technologies already operating in unlicensed bands, such as 802.11*.
The circumstances at the time the current spectrum regulation was created were different majorly in that there wasn't any technology to allow efficient medium sharing. Thus, I can see that it was logical to restrict any single spectrum band to single players.
The situation today is different in that there exists technology which can allow multiple cooperating parties to efficiently share a piece of spectrum. For example, multiple 802.11 devices can divvy up the 11 mbps or so of total bandwidth without much loss due to collisions. Note that the multiple devices do not talk simultaneously; they use a medium access protocol to take turns using the entire channel bandwidth. Also note that the use of spread spectrum is irrelevant for this purpose.
This naturally begs the argument that not all devices in an unlicensed band can be expected to cooperate (i.e. run the same MAC protocol); there are examples of say, Bluetooth, or various cordless phones like you mention above, which can seriously degrade 802.11 performance. I believe that this is not a serious problem if the unlicensed bands are regulated properly-- and in particular, if the transmitting power is limited like in the ISM band. The result is that any uncooperating devices potentially only disturb users within a very small area. The situation gets even less problematic with directional antennas.
You have got to admit it would be nice to have a 1GHz wide chunk of spectrum for unlicensed, power-limited use. Think 802.11h at 1Gbps.
According to an urban legend, the Soviet army used vodka to power their tanks when they ran out of diesel in WWII. Unfortunately, this didn't work very well because the soldiers drank the fuel.
I imagine using vodka in fuel cells would have a similar result in a corporate environment. I can already picture a stressed out developer taking a shot or two out of their laptop's fuel cell, or an executive chugging a few before a tough meeting.
Actually, for Lucent cards, both the 2.4 and latest pcmcia-cs drivers seem to have dropped support for changing the MAC addresses. You may think you've changed the hardware address at interface level, but the change won't get written to the card. And if the card doesn't know about it, it won't send any frames.
I don't understand why everyone cares about the VM so much. It is mostly useful in a situation where a machine's working set doesn't fit into RAM-- a situation which can only really be fixed by adding more RAM or activating fewer applications. Who cares if the bad case is a little faster or slower-- it is still a bad case, and better avoided.
Several hits a minute? That's a minor amount of traffic. Let's see, say 6 hits per minute, at 8 packets per TCP connection to port 80, at 125 bytes per packet. That leaves us with 1000 bytes per connection, and 6000 bytes per minute. This is 100 bytes per second, or 800 bits per second, or 0.8 Kbps. For comparison, if your cable connection is any good, you're downloading stuff at at least 1Mbps-- thousand times faster.
I would expect the real waste of bandwidth to come not from the infection probes, but from the virus trying to send junk to target websites, such as the first Code Red did try to whitehouse.gov.
There is nothing technological that Google is doing that isn't done by other engines (Excite, Hotbot).
Really. Google uses a patented ranking algorithm, described by Page and Brin (Stanford graduate students which founded Google) in a paper titled The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1998). The algorithm does very well at recognizing relevant documents. Last I looked, other search engines used mostly sets of hand-tuned hacks which did not do as well. Has this changed? I'd appreciate some references, refereed if possible.
In addition, the keywords "modern" and "slavery" which he chose to trigger the showing of the ad in the first place were poor. Only the people looking for modern slavery interested in scholarly studies were the potential clickthrough-ers. Under such circumstances, 6 hits is even not bad.
I think some laptop keyboards are much more comfortable than regular ones. For example, I find that since I got my Thinkpad 570 my hands actually hurt less, and my typing speed improved. Its keyboard is very convenient for three reasons:
There is a small wrist-resting area below the keys, so my hands don't have to hover while I type.
This came to me as a surprise: the nipple-mouse is incredibly convenient because it doesn't require me to keep switching my hand between the keys and a real mouse. I became so accustomed to one that I keep looking for it with my fingers when working on a regular keyboard.
Finally, the keys feel great and don't travel as deep as on a regular keyboard. This way, my fingers move a shorter total distance, lessening the exertion.
I would argue against consolidation. Devices which tend to combine a lot of functionality can never do all of them well. For example, cell phones available today allow you to talk, keep address books, browse the web, connect to cell modems. The desire to make such devices small, which seems to be the priority in the industry, conflicts with the desire to have a good quality display for web browsing. The web browser itself being built in conflicts the cell modem interface, and so on.
My ideal set of gadgets providing the same functionality as the above kitchen-sink cell phones would be as follows. The cell-phone unit would be a car key sized piece that clips onto a belt. It would have just the CDMA logic to talk to the cell base station, and a Bluetooth interface to talk to two kinds of items: a headset and data devices. There is no display or keyboard required, so it's possible to make the device very small.
The headset would consist of an earpiece and a microphone. The voice would come from the Bluetooth interface on the cell unit.
The data device could be a laptop, which has plenty of computing power and a large screen. It could also be a PDA, which has less computing power and a smaller screen. The data connection would come through BT, either from the cell device, or something more interesting like a universal connector which can talk to the cell device, 802.11, wired ethernet, and pipe everything into a BT connection to data devices.
The most useful of all to me would be an eyepiece display, which would have to have 1024x768 resolution, and a convenient way to receive the pixels. A VGA input would be most useful for laptops, but PDAs which don't have VGA out could export the display over a framebuffer protocol like VNC. Note that except for the framebuffer client there is no computing power involved-- that is left to other devices. The eyepiece would be extremely useful outdoors, where the sunlight makes LCD screens unreadable.
The only problem with all of the above is power. Each piece must now carry a separate supply of power, which is less efficient than using a single, well designed power source. The solution may well be some kind of conductive underwear capable of distributing the power to devices worn on one's person. This would allow the power source to be recharged from body movements, overgarments equipped with solar cells, etc. However, this is probably stretching the extent to which one may let the gadgets change everyday habits such as clothing, carrying the gadgets in separate bags, etc.
Most ironically, multicasting has very little potential to help with the bandwidth intensive applications that were traditionally most talked about-- like streaming video to large audiences, video conferencing, video on demand, etc. The problem is that the only opportunity for significant savings in bandwidth comes when the audience is really large and synchronized. This comes down to really popular live events.
A small audience can already be taken care of today using individual connections. What's better, the receivers don't have to be synchronized-- each one can start their session at leisure.
The most interesting application of multicast is actually its one-to-many semantics. The first important use of this is wide-area discovery, where nodes who wish to find others with a similar interest can do so in a distributed fashion with a very low bandwith requirement.
For example, multicast in the wide-area network would be great for discovery of members in a peer-to-peer network. In say Gnutella, the current discovery system relies on a few centralized servers, which are easy targets for attacks. With multicast, new peers could discover the existing nodes without a single centralized point.
I think you need to look at VNC. It's a simple remote framebuffer protocol, inserted between the display driver and the actual video card. The server thinks it's writing pixels to a local video card, when in fact the driver ships the updates across the network to a remote viewer.
A benefit of this division of labour is the simplicity of the viewer. There are VNC viewers on many different platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, it's not very fast. It takes a very long time to start up. Some operations also visibly lag. Overall, though, I don't find that too big of a problem-- it gets the job done.
Frankly, I don't find either option that important (kill excel & flawless interoperability). Rather, I appreciate having a featureful set of office apps for free; if I were running a business, I already could use exclusively open source-- from OS to the apps. The office apps like this one or Staroffice are similar enough to Windows stuff that low-level workers could use it without much trouble.
Fair enough, it's your point of view. I agree Excel will never be Gnumeric. My point of view is that Excel is the alternative for Gnumeric, useful if you are forced by your management to interoperate by exchanging Excel spreadsheets. ;)
Also check out StarOffice's presentation program. It's more stable than Powerpoint, and has more features.
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
-Sauce unknown
Right, that's essentially what the previous post said. The UWB transmissions occur in a very wide band of frequencies, thus overlapping with other services like amateur radio. To the other services any power not coming from the original transmitter is counted as noise; that's why UWB transmissions are said to raise the noise floor.
The argument for UWB is that a single UWB transmitter's power is spread so much that it adds only tiny amounts of noise to other services. However, the question is what happens when there are massive amounts of UWB transmitters contributing noise.
It seems this would be useful for getting simple kinds of statistics about the currency, such as the last 10 bank transactions a certain bill was involved in. I can imagine a little USB bill reader with software that shows a map of locations a bill was last seen, along with dates. It would be fun to come home, take out the money from your wallet and check where it came from.
Not much opportunity for the Man here, though, just fun.
What are you talking about? The guy built 10 Mbps transceiver out of some LEDs-- a far cry from 10 Gbps. He used ordinary Ethernet NICs with AUI ports and converted the signal into light. Replacing the LEDs with laser diodes should be easy .
I appreciate the information you posted in the above comment-- it is quite useful.
I understood the article to be suggesting more unlicensed spectrum, based on the fact that there are some quite successful technologies already operating in unlicensed bands, such as 802.11*.
The circumstances at the time the current spectrum regulation was created were different majorly in that there wasn't any technology to allow efficient medium sharing. Thus, I can see that it was logical to restrict any single spectrum band to single players.
The situation today is different in that there exists technology which can allow multiple cooperating parties to efficiently share a piece of spectrum. For example, multiple 802.11 devices can divvy up the 11 mbps or so of total bandwidth without much loss due to collisions. Note that the multiple devices do not talk simultaneously; they use a medium access protocol to take turns using the entire channel bandwidth. Also note that the use of spread spectrum is irrelevant for this purpose.
This naturally begs the argument that not all devices in an unlicensed band can be expected to cooperate (i.e. run the same MAC protocol); there are examples of say, Bluetooth, or various cordless phones like you mention above, which can seriously degrade 802.11 performance. I believe that this is not a serious problem if the unlicensed bands are regulated properly-- and in particular, if the transmitting power is limited like in the ISM band. The result is that any uncooperating devices potentially only disturb users within a very small area. The situation gets even less problematic with directional antennas.
You have got to admit it would be nice to have a 1GHz wide chunk of spectrum for unlicensed, power-limited use. Think 802.11h at 1Gbps.
~
It sure is neat, but is not done in hardware, which was the whole point of the article.
According to an urban legend, the Soviet army used vodka to power their tanks when they ran out of diesel in WWII. Unfortunately, this didn't work very well because the soldiers drank the fuel.
;)
I imagine using vodka in fuel cells would have a similar result in a corporate environment. I can already picture a stressed out developer taking a shot or two out of their laptop's fuel cell, or an executive chugging a few before a tough meeting.
Actually, that doesn't sound bad at all
On the contrary, it means you can pour your beer into the laptop when you run out of fuel.
;)
Actually, for Lucent cards, both the 2.4 and latest pcmcia-cs drivers seem to have dropped support for changing the MAC addresses. You may think you've changed the hardware address at interface level, but the change won't get written to the card. And if the card doesn't know about it, it won't send any frames.
~
coke | nose > keyboard
Thanks for the laugh
~
~
I would expect the real waste of bandwidth to come not from the infection probes, but from the virus trying to send junk to target websites, such as the first Code Red did try to whitehouse.gov.
~
~
~
Really. Google uses a patented ranking algorithm, described by Page and Brin (Stanford graduate students which founded Google) in a paper titled The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web (1998) . The algorithm does very well at recognizing relevant documents. Last I looked, other search engines used mostly sets of hand-tuned hacks which did not do as well. Has this changed? I'd appreciate some references, refereed if possible.
~
~
- There is a small wrist-resting area below the keys, so my hands don't have to hover while I type.
- This came to me as a surprise: the nipple-mouse is incredibly convenient because it doesn't require me to keep switching my hand between the keys and a real mouse. I became so accustomed to one that I keep looking for it with my fingers when working on a regular keyboard.
- Finally, the keys feel great and don't travel as deep as on a regular keyboard. This way, my fingers move a shorter total distance, lessening the exertion.
~My ideal set of gadgets providing the same functionality as the above kitchen-sink cell phones would be as follows. The cell-phone unit would be a car key sized piece that clips onto a belt. It would have just the CDMA logic to talk to the cell base station, and a Bluetooth interface to talk to two kinds of items: a headset and data devices. There is no display or keyboard required, so it's possible to make the device very small.
The headset would consist of an earpiece and a microphone. The voice would come from the Bluetooth interface on the cell unit.
The data device could be a laptop, which has plenty of computing power and a large screen. It could also be a PDA, which has less computing power and a smaller screen. The data connection would come through BT, either from the cell device, or something more interesting like a universal connector which can talk to the cell device, 802.11, wired ethernet, and pipe everything into a BT connection to data devices.
The most useful of all to me would be an eyepiece display, which would have to have 1024x768 resolution, and a convenient way to receive the pixels. A VGA input would be most useful for laptops, but PDAs which don't have VGA out could export the display over a framebuffer protocol like VNC. Note that except for the framebuffer client there is no computing power involved-- that is left to other devices. The eyepiece would be extremely useful outdoors, where the sunlight makes LCD screens unreadable.
The only problem with all of the above is power. Each piece must now carry a separate supply of power, which is less efficient than using a single, well designed power source. The solution may well be some kind of conductive underwear capable of distributing the power to devices worn on one's person. This would allow the power source to be recharged from body movements, overgarments equipped with solar cells, etc. However, this is probably stretching the extent to which one may let the gadgets change everyday habits such as clothing, carrying the gadgets in separate bags, etc.
~
A small audience can already be taken care of today using individual connections. What's better, the receivers don't have to be synchronized-- each one can start their session at leisure.
The most interesting application of multicast is actually its one-to-many semantics. The first important use of this is wide-area discovery, where nodes who wish to find others with a similar interest can do so in a distributed fashion with a very low bandwith requirement.
For example, multicast in the wide-area network would be great for discovery of members in a peer-to-peer network. In say Gnutella, the current discovery system relies on a few centralized servers, which are easy targets for attacks. With multicast, new peers could discover the existing nodes without a single centralized point.
~
A benefit of this division of labour is the simplicity of the viewer. There are VNC viewers on many different platforms.
~