My first Linux box monitor (a 14" Emerson) blew its top after only a few weeks use (I had been running the monitor at 65Hz when it only supported 60Hz), so I got ahold of a 19" fixed-frequency Tektronix sync-on-green monitor and built a sync-converter circuit with a little resistor coming out the top pot to help align the signal. I still have the schematic filed away somewhere...
Then I spent the afternoon trying to see what I could get out of the monitor, finally settling on 1088x702 or something like that at about 58Hz (ugh, flicker!) with of course no hardware text mode or CTRL-ALT-PLUSMINUS magic, just that one mode. When I booted the machine, I saw nothing at all until the magic 'X' cursor in the middle of the stipple pattern would appear. Beautiful. I probably still have the XF86Config file on a DC6150 tape somewhere.;)
Damn fun. These days it's all about water cooling and big CPU fans and neon lights in case holes, but it's somehow less entertaining...
X kicks ass, XFree86 doubly so.
on
XFree86 10 Years Old
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For the inevitable "X sucks, I hate X, let's replace X, screw X" crowd: Suck eggs.
X works, works now, and has worked for over a decade. I can still run some very old, but very useful software, and I can do it in a network-transparent fashion. X is fast, elegant (not the code necessarily, the functionality), does 2D, 3D and applications wonderfully, and is free and fully multiplatform, across all *nixes, Linux, MacOS and Windows.
Come back when you have something that works for real work that isn't just a theory, and if it's better than X without losing any of the benefits or extensibility, I'm suree the *nix community will thank you for it. Until then, X and XFree86 (the gold standard) are here to stay, and that's a good thing.
Another interesting book: Sam's Teach Yourself Unix in 10 Minutes. It's a very short, reference-oriented book that's physically little and easy to carry, and it's a lovely introduction to the shell, redirection and I/O paths, permissions, navigating the file system and the network, etc. -- a kind of "Unix Users' 101" if you will.
I have no financial interest in promoting the book since I didn't write it, but I was an editor for the book and found it to be lean and concise and still recommend it to this day.
I've had some problems like this. I sold a 9GB SCSI hard drive that way a couple of years ago. The auction listed it clearly as "9GB ST410800N full-height narrow SCSI hard drive" and stated "This hard drive requires a SCSI controller card and two drive bays; please know what you are buying!"
Some lady wins the auction, I get paid, send the drive immediately and packed well. Later that week she e-mails me asking for my phone number so we can discuss some "problems" she is having. Wanting to provide good customer service, I give it to her.
When she calls, I get an earful from some completely incompetent lady who wants her money back. Why? Because "Maybe you packed it well, but this thing looks like it was pulled out of some proprietary server 20 years ago! It's as big as a tank, no way it'll fit in my tower, and the connecter is wierd, it's like a centimeter too long and won't work in a PC!" I tell her that I clearly stated that it was a full-height SCSI hard drive and that it will work in any properly equipped PC. She responds with "I'm a licensed computer technician, bud, so don't try to scam me!"
Next week I get a chargeback and a fraud investigation by my bank. She didn't bother to return the drive to me after getting her money back. Nice lady.
Re:Slashdot != Professional Journalism
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 3
Don't confuse Slashdot with journalism. The site is still run like a college kid's pet project. Sure they're making money and have thousands of readers but that doesn't make the staff qualified journalists/editors.
Slashdot is journalism (journalism lies in how it is read, now how it is written), and it is professional (after all, it is for-profit)-- it's just also a tabloid for the geeks. An in the greatest tradition of tabloid, Slashdot cares not about the subjects it covers, only about getting the "scoop" for its readership and then sensationalizing it.
1. Corporate America built the towers and staffed them. SO? Buildings are built and staffed all over the globe by billions of people every day. What is your point?
Name any building or building pair with a capacity of 50,000+ individuals that is not related to international capitalism. The only reason to build buildings of that size, especially in the US where so much land is available, is to maximize the value of the rent space by consolidating it in the business district at the expense of the safety of the workers therein.
Since when does corporate America "label" anybody anything at all? Did Cantor-Fitzgerald "label" those poor Muslims something they didn't like? As last I recall, the only people that like to "label" anything these days are spinmeisters, talking heads, and religious zealots. Either way, that has no bearing whatsoever on the involvement of corp. America in causing the towers to be attacked. Proclaiming otherwise is like saying a rape victim caused her rape because she was female (i.e. an obvious target).
Watch CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et. al. These are all Corporate America and depend on ratings and ad revenue for survival. All of them are happy to support the party line in the US these days -- Arabs are bad, non-whites are bad, non-Christians are bad.
And your analogy about "those poor Muslims" (your rhetorical shame, not mine) is flawed. What has gone on in the US since September 11th is more like executing all males between the ages of 15 and 50 because one girl got raped.
3. Market demand indeed. The one failing of capitalism that I routinely hate is that it sometimes bears a striking resemblance to a parent and child. If the child (i.e. consumer) wants something from the parent (i.e. the market), the child doesn't want to be told "no", and does not understand why some things are better that way. Consumers want to have their cake and eat it, too, and many businesses (and governments) do not have the gonads to deny them what is clearly not in their best interests.
It's not about gonads, it's about turning a profit in the marketplace, running as many flights as possible in the smallest amount of space and smallest amount of time. It's why the US had poor airport security and why the US has Jerry Springer, who you Libertarians love. It's a failing of capitalism -- getting people to want what will make the most money most quickly, then selling it to them, regardless of actual utility or risks.
4. Corporate America has lobbied heavily? While this is true, it pales in comparison to what the past presidential administration lobbied for. Democrats would even like to see illegal immigrants allowed to vote, for crying out loud -- alongside convicted felons and the mentally insane. Please note I'm NOT a Republican, as I have no taste for their spinelessness. I'm Libertarian, but back to the chase...
So you don't believe that the political infrastructure in a media-driven democracy like the US is beholden at all to economic realities? Give me a break.
All other forms of government have either failed (Communism, Socialism) have encroached on personal liberties (Monarchy), or brutally supress their own people and dissidents (Despotism, Religous Oligarchy).
You commit an obvious fallacy here by extrapolating from the specific incident to the general case. Communism and Socialism have not failed. A few communist and socialist economies have failed, as have a fair share of capitalist economies (most recently Argentina -- but don't forget the US's own narrow escape early in the century -- saved only by war, America's other favorite pastime).
I just can't stand to see people mouth off on things they either (a) have no knowledge of or (b) can't back up anyway.
My friend, you appear to have a huge chip on your shoulder that is clouding your judgement. People died because madmen hijacked two jetliners and deliberately slammed them into skyscrapers full of thousands of innocent human beings. Corporate greed and stockholders had nothing to do with it, and it is callous, irresponsible, and shallow of you to even suggest such a thing to further your obvious hatred of corporate America.
1. Corporate America was the reason for these dubiously large towers' existence in the first place as well as the only entity who at the time could have funded their construction; as one would expect, the vast majority of the dead workers were direct participants in Corporate America.
2. The reasoning behind the terrorists activity is a hatred of the spread of economic colonialism and Corporate America at the expense of what Corporate America labels "more primitive" traditional or religious lifestyles.
3. Cutthroat competitiveness in the airline industry (i.e. Corporate America) is the reason for the lax security which allowed hijackers to board the planes which hit the buildings. The consumer demanded faster security, takeoffs, and landings at airports and the consumer got them. Market demand, my friend.
4. Corporate America has lobbied the government and the INS heavily over the past decade to loosen immigration restrictions and slow-downs, especially from the east, from which many tech workers have come. Apparently, some of them were terrorists.
Anti-capitalist is not an insult. At least I don't take it as one.
Re:Ummm....What?
on
SedSokoban
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· Score: 3, Informative
I hope whoever moderated this to "informative" isn't taking it entirely seriously...
sed stands for "Stream EDitor" yes, but it is not at all to do with Microsoft. sed has been a staple command used with Unix operating systems for a long, long time and you'll find details about using it in any good Unix book.
Actually, Sharp Zarus MI-EX1 has a 480x640 4" LCD capable of 64k color now selling for 2 years already. Though the price is very steep, the display itself shows really amazing quality.
Oh ho! I just saw a picture of one thanks to Google. Now I'm really interested. Can any of these VGA Zaurus machines support English or German? And will they run Paragraph's Calligrapher for handwriting recognition? (i.e. are the Windows CE?) And can I rotate the display for "portrait" position instead of "landscape" position?
Except for a few extremist zealots, the Newton is thoroughly dead.
Extremist zealots? Are you terrified of Newton users for some reason? Some people prefer it and there is still an active eBay selling community. Are they all dangerous? Should they be locked up for not buying a newer PDA? Hardly. The Newton 2x00 series died because it was a $1000+ piece of technology before it was discontinued. There's no doubt that's too much for a PDA, no matter how advanced. But of course it was so expensive when new because of just how high-end it was, and that's why it survives today.
The 2000 series had an EL-backlit 100dpi 320x480 display, PCMCIA slots (shove a 256MB CF card in one and an ethernet card in the other and away you go), a standard DHCP-compliant TCP/IP stack (browse the Web, send/receive e-mail), sound (play MP3's, take voice notes), natural handwriting recognition from Paragraph (which works incredibly well and now forms the basis for Microsoft's "Transcriber" in PocketPC), a 162MHz StrongARM processor, the ability to import and edit Office documents, the ability serve Web pages, and an interface which combines the best aspects of Mac OS, Palm OS and Windows CE, all at only an inch thick and about a pound in weight.
The fact that this product was killed off years ago (as you mentioned) and that people still use it every day to listen to MP3's, edit reports, browse the Web, send/receive HTML mail, and host their Web sites makes it more amazing, not less.
But I'll be damned if these new Sony PDAs don't come close. If only they'd used CF rather than memorystick! If only Transcriber/Calligrapher were released in a Palm OS version!
There are a lot of posts saying "but all of this stuff has been done before by other PDAs..."
While this is true, the 320x480 resolution with a full-tablet mode has only been done by one PDA, the Apple Newton 2000/2100, now discontinued for five years.
A screen resolution of 320x480 makes a HUGE difference when working with information, text, graphics, etc. With a resolution of 320x480 and a virtual graffiti area (which could conceivably be left hidden and replaced with a 3rd-party natural handwriting recognition system?!) we could FINALLY have a near-Newton-killer on our hands...
Of course, it is still lacking in some areas... Only a 66MHz Dragonball CPU vs. the 162MHz StrongARM in the Newton 2x00, PalmOS vs. NewtonOS (which is still a decade ahead of its time), no PCMCIA slot(s), no 3rd party natural handwriting recognizers yet available for PalmOS, etc.
Still, wow. For a long time, I've thought that since nobody would ever make another PDA with a 320x480 display, nobody would ever even begin to come close to Newton. But this does! In fact, get me that natural handwriting recognizer and a nice "natural" database like Notion for Newton and you could see me switch... Maybe... Well, okay, probably not.
Again, an American right-winger insults in both backhanded and forehanded ways two of the most prominent European natinons, the Germans and the French. No doubt you are one of the Swiss-haters as well.
You American right wingers... it's a lonely world for you. You hate the far east because you think everyone there is a Chinese maoist and you can't get along with them, you hate the middle east because you think they're all Muslim terrorists, you hate the Germans because you're sure they're Nazis, the French because you're sure they're really on the same side as the communists and the terrorists, the Swiss because they were neutral during the war, the South Americans because they continue to enter your "land of opportunity" without "papers" and you even hate the liberal half of the population in your own country because you're sure they're all peacenik hippie pinko commies.
The only people right wing Americans do like and trust are themselves and the British, which is funny because many of the British aren't all that keen on American's military and international foibles (not to mention nuclear war) either!
Point being, if it wasn't for the U.S., you, along with all of Europe would be singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alis" every morning.
Rather than wanting the world to thank you for this, I think the American right wing should itself be thankful that the rest of the world (including the other half of the American population) hasn't already chased it into the ocean once and for all!
You're an idiot. If the US dropped a nuke on anybody it would instantly lose every ally it has in Europe and NATO with the exception of the UK. China, North Korea and Russia would become loose cannons in a new, unbalanced (3-to-1) cold war which could quickly turn hot, possibly even as a matter of course. US embassies in every part of the globe would be shut down in response and US citizens anywhere around the world would be in immediate danger.
Worse, if the US were to drop "the" bomb on Baghdad specifically, it would also have every last Arab state aligned specifically against it as well; worldwide terrorism would increase 1000% and would be supported by all of the eastern nations either covertly or even explicitly. "The west" would suddenly find itself reduced to "US, Canada, UK" and positioned vs. The Entire East including most of Europe, as well as in a full-scale Protestant vs. Islam war which could last for centuries.
The fact that there are people out there who actually think that the US could *improve* international relations and world peace by using nuclear weapons demonstrates just how disconnected Americans are from reality.
As someone who owns (and uses) an old stylus-based x86 touchpad with an 8-inch screen, it's hard enough on that screen to accurately select things like forms or manipulate windows. Shrink the screen size to half of that, and certain Windows or X controls will be downright lilliputian.
I haven't read the specs for this device because all links appear to be/.ed, but it's perfectly possible to have a very small, but very accurate, touchscreen. Apple's Newton 2000 series did it.
How? Use a much higher resolution for the touchscreen than for the LCD behind it. While the Newton 2000's LCD display was 100dpi, the touchscreen sampled at 800dpi. If you read the original Newton 2000 marketing information (some of it can still be found around the Web), it's in the specs.
This is part of what made the late model Newtons' handwriting recognition work so well while other handheld PDAs still have trouble with it. With a touchscreen resolution four times higher than the display resolution, a well-calibrated screen is pinpoint accurate.
You got it backward. I worked for three years for a top-10 (per Media Metrix) network. We started by paying for impressions in the mid-to-late '90s, but by the year 2000, we were only paying for click-thrus because market research had shown that by paying for impressions we were basically paying for people to ignore us.
Click-thrus are more expensive but are also meaningful and in the final cost-benefit analysis proved to be much more efficient than impressions. This is why so many sites out there say "please click on a banner to support our sponsors" -- most of them are getting nothing for impressions.
I think the issue is how Slashdot markets itself... that is, whether it claims to be disseminating facts or merely repeating the allegations of others.
For me the answer is clear... The first thing on every Slashdot page is a large graphic prominently containing the word "News" -- from this I think Slashdot cannot simply use the "we are only a bulletin board" defense to escape liability. A major portion of Slashdot's traffic clearly comes from those who are seeking news coverage; there isn't even a disclaimer anywhere saying "but of course we aren't really news and anything you see here may be or is even likely to be fictitious or merely opinion."
That is not to say I'm happy about Slashdot's liability. I think one of the things most sorely lacking in our culture is a forum for the disgruntled to come together and try to figure out just what the "truth" is, without the mediation of corporate and government propaganda in the mainstream media. That such a forum (i.e. Slashdot) likely won't survive much longer without greater controls is truly unfortunate.
Yes, there are Web sites done entirely in Flash, which completely suck on modems. Hint: avoid them.:-)
Amazon.com, Outpost.com and eBay.com are not done entirely in flash.
Yeah. And you need 100.PDF files for each paper you write, or for a thesis? I suspect that most of that time is spent deciding what you actually want -- I happily preview on a modem via google's pdf indexing service.
A typical paper will have 40-60 citations. So, I am deciding which 50% of the 100 I want, yes. As I have already mentioned to another poster, if you think you will find abstracts and complete papers by searching Google, you have no connection to the word "scholarly" -- Google does not give me access to them because they are not publicly available on the Web. Some of them aren't even accessed through a Web browser, but through other proprietary clients. (If you start bitching about how that's what I deserve for using "proprietary software" I'm going to laugh.)
I'm very dubious as to whether you actually get 3.3 MB of email per day, as you're claiming.
If you count attachments, I often get 100MB of e-mail per day.
The only people that really need broadband are warez traders, in my experience.
And the only people who object to government surveillance have something to hide and the only people wear turbans are terrorists and the only people who need big hard drives are pedophiles.
Even with high-speed access to the internet, there is no substitute for browsing my university's library.
My university library (Mariott at University of Utah, a notable research university) has 3.5 million volumes, over 1 million photos, 14,000+ journals, 180,000+ maps, a 50,000+ rare books collection, crammed into 500,000 square feet of space...
But compare the list of journals that it carries in my subject area (10-15) compared to the actual number of journals out there in the world in my subject area (50+) and I still need to use additional sources to get at the remaining information somehow.
No university can afford to carry EVERY journal in EVERY subject. Of course I can always have the journal volume/issue I need sent from another school. All I have to do is wait days for it to arrive, only *then* to find out if I can even *use* the paper or article in question... Or I can grab the related.PDF file over my broadband connection in the space of five minutes and search it.
Which would you rather do?
Sure, things like email may have made some things easier to do. Unfortunately, many people have come to believe that they are absolute necessities.
Are you in the real world? As an undergrad, I was required to submit fully half of my assignments by e-mail. Computer access and e-mail were not optional; if you didn't want to do it, you could just go home.
The world is changing. Sure, telephone access is not, strictly speaking, necessary either...
If your main use for the web is email and web browsing, the speed-up is almost guaranteed not to be worth it. Think about it: when browsing the web, how much time is spent waiting for downloads as opposed to reading content?
I don't do much reading on the Web. Really on the Web I do two things almost exclusively: 1) Shop. Books, bookshelves, CDs and CD players are all often half-price bought online. Shopping on the Web is almost entirely clicking and very little reading. 2) Download. Articles, research papers, documents, manuals, e-texts for my PDA, images that are going to press and photos of my friends' kids, etc. Again, no reading, all waiting for the download to finish.
The extent of my reading in a browser window falls across two sites, Slashdot.org for Linux-bias tech news (yes, I want it that way) and news.bbc.co.uk for news beyond what CNN can give me.
Really, the time I save shopping and downloading is enough to justify broadband for me. My PC probably spends a good 12-15 hours over the course of a month downloading files (esp. PDF documents and full-res digital photos or scans of all kinds, some using a browser, most in e-mail) via my cable connection. That's around 600+ hours of continuous download a month if I had to do it over a modem. You try keeping a modem-based connection up 25 straight days out of every month!
More to the point, not having broadband would probably mandate serious lifestyle changes or even career changes for me, as much of what I do wouldn't be practical if I didn't have a fast 'net connection. At the very least, I'd be less productive by far and therefore less competitive as well.
But then again, why would I be less competitive? Because others would be using their broadband to get more things done! I think much of the western world these days depends on the 'net for the pace of everyday business and tasks. Some of my friends in marketing do nearly everything over the net (they practically live on it, and no, not just browsing) and they have broadband at home so that they can take work home with them and spend their time actually working, rather than waiting for images and documents to transfer and swearing when the carrier drops.
Why would your average person spend hours in front of a computer screen trying to navigate some byzantine e-commerce site, when they could call up a couple friends and go down to the local shopping center?
Um, because my budget for christmas shopping isn't $2000, it's more like $200 -- i.e. Amazon.com, not Macy's.
200 emails a day sounds like a rather exceptional number to me; I doubt I receive more than 10 pieces a day.
If you're involved in academics or publishing in any way, *everything* is done via e-mail. You get papers, chapters, invoices, complaints, and everything else via e-mail. Busy people use e-mail. If you don't use a lot of e-mail, you must not have to deal with very many busy people. I've got friends in corporate america (no, not technology) who get twice as much e-mail as me. They e-mail at their desk, on their cell phone, on their blackberry, in their living room, and in their bathroom on their Palm, and they're not even in technology.
Once again, I would probably head down to the library with a friend or two
You certainly can't get most academic journals at a library, even a university library usually only carries a small subset of them. You certainly won't find any articles from such journals on the net through Google. The only way to get scientific research (no, not the NBC article on the research, the actual research) is to either pay for the journal ($$$$$$$) or pay for a membership to an online database which carries the journal (only $$$$)... But even with the membership, the papers are provided in.PDF format. 100 papers on cranial morphology at 8-25MB each is 800MB to 2GB of.PDF files. If you can show me where to find papers from, say, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology just by searching Google... Please let me know so that I can save $$$$! Of course, even then, I'd still have to download all those pesky.PDF files...
Your average person doesn't download operating systems or game demos off the Internet. I know I sure don't.
What exactly makes you average over me? I have two little sisters (out of a total of four) still living with my parents. These two (with their friends) download at least 2-4 game demos a month and play them all the way through, I understand. I don't game very much but they apparently do, and they're girls, 13 and 16 with N'Sync and Dragonball Z posters on their walls. I didn't teach them where to get game demos, I don't even know! Of course, I do download Linux...
Please realize that people like you who depend on the Internet for everything are a minority.
Woah. As I said, I depend on the Internet to: 1) save me money when I shop, 2) talk to bosses and colleagues via e-mail, 3) get academic research or other content-rich information (not just Google-searching) and 4) get free software whenever I can. Same as everyone else in the college world and many people in the non-college world.
Ever think maybe you're a little behind the curve of what "average" is?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Those were the days.
;)
My first Linux box monitor (a 14" Emerson) blew its top after only a few weeks use (I had been running the monitor at 65Hz when it only supported 60Hz), so I got ahold of a 19" fixed-frequency Tektronix sync-on-green monitor and built a sync-converter circuit with a little resistor coming out the top pot to help align the signal. I still have the schematic filed away somewhere...
Then I spent the afternoon trying to see what I could get out of the monitor, finally settling on 1088x702 or something like that at about 58Hz (ugh, flicker!) with of course no hardware text mode or CTRL-ALT-PLUSMINUS magic, just that one mode. When I booted the machine, I saw nothing at all until the magic 'X' cursor in the middle of the stipple pattern would appear. Beautiful. I probably still have the XF86Config file on a DC6150 tape somewhere.
Damn fun. These days it's all about water cooling and big CPU fans and neon lights in case holes, but it's somehow less entertaining...
For the inevitable "X sucks, I hate X, let's replace X, screw X" crowd: Suck eggs.
X works, works now, and has worked for over a decade. I can still run some very old, but very useful software, and I can do it in a network-transparent fashion. X is fast, elegant (not the code necessarily, the functionality), does 2D, 3D and applications wonderfully, and is free and fully multiplatform, across all *nixes, Linux, MacOS and Windows.
Come back when you have something that works for real work that isn't just a theory, and if it's better than X without losing any of the benefits or extensibility, I'm suree the *nix community will thank you for it. Until then, X and XFree86 (the gold standard) are here to stay, and that's a good thing.
Definitely a candidate for "post of the month" on /.
Another interesting book: Sam's Teach Yourself Unix in 10 Minutes. It's a very short, reference-oriented book that's physically little and easy to carry, and it's a lovely introduction to the shell, redirection and I/O paths, permissions, navigating the file system and the network, etc. -- a kind of "Unix Users' 101" if you will.
I have no financial interest in promoting the book since I didn't write it, but I was an editor for the book and found it to be lean and concise and still recommend it to this day.
I've had some problems like this. I sold a 9GB SCSI hard drive that way a couple of years ago. The auction listed it clearly as "9GB ST410800N full-height narrow SCSI hard drive" and stated "This hard drive requires a SCSI controller card and two drive bays; please know what you are buying!"
Some lady wins the auction, I get paid, send the drive immediately and packed well. Later that week she e-mails me asking for my phone number so we can discuss some "problems" she is having. Wanting to provide good customer service, I give it to her.
When she calls, I get an earful from some completely incompetent lady who wants her money back. Why? Because "Maybe you packed it well, but this thing looks like it was pulled out of some proprietary server 20 years ago! It's as big as a tank, no way it'll fit in my tower, and the connecter is wierd, it's like a centimeter too long and won't work in a PC!" I tell her that I clearly stated that it was a full-height SCSI hard drive and that it will work in any properly equipped PC. She responds with "I'm a licensed computer technician, bud, so don't try to scam me!"
Next week I get a chargeback and a fraud investigation by my bank. She didn't bother to return the drive to me after getting her money back. Nice lady.
Don't confuse Slashdot with journalism. The site is still run like a college kid's pet project. Sure they're making money and have thousands of readers but that doesn't make the staff qualified journalists/editors.
Slashdot is journalism (journalism lies in how it is read, now how it is written), and it is professional (after all, it is for-profit)-- it's just also a tabloid for the geeks. An in the greatest tradition of tabloid, Slashdot cares not about the subjects it covers, only about getting the "scoop" for its readership and then sensationalizing it.
1. Corporate America built the towers and staffed them. SO? Buildings are built and staffed all over the globe by billions of people every day. What is your point?
Name any building or building pair with a capacity of 50,000+ individuals that is not related to international capitalism. The only reason to build buildings of that size, especially in the US where so much land is available, is to maximize the value of the rent space by consolidating it in the business district at the expense of the safety of the workers therein.
Since when does corporate America "label" anybody anything at all? Did Cantor-Fitzgerald "label" those poor Muslims something they didn't like? As last I recall, the only people that like to "label" anything these days are spinmeisters, talking heads, and religious zealots. Either way, that has no bearing whatsoever on the involvement of corp. America in causing the towers to be attacked. Proclaiming otherwise is like saying a rape victim caused her rape because she was female (i.e. an obvious target).
Watch CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, et. al. These are all Corporate America and depend on ratings and ad revenue for survival. All of them are happy to support the party line in the US these days -- Arabs are bad, non-whites are bad, non-Christians are bad.
And your analogy about "those poor Muslims" (your rhetorical shame, not mine) is flawed. What has gone on in the US since September 11th is more like executing all males between the ages of 15 and 50 because one girl got raped.
3. Market demand indeed. The one failing of capitalism that I routinely hate is that it sometimes bears a striking resemblance to a parent and child. If the child (i.e. consumer) wants something from the parent (i.e. the market), the child doesn't want to be told "no", and does not understand why some things are better that way. Consumers want to have their cake and eat it, too, and many businesses (and governments) do not have the gonads to deny them what is clearly not in their best interests.
It's not about gonads, it's about turning a profit in the marketplace, running as many flights as possible in the smallest amount of space and smallest amount of time. It's why the US had poor airport security and why the US has Jerry Springer, who you Libertarians love. It's a failing of capitalism -- getting people to want what will make the most money most quickly, then selling it to them, regardless of actual utility or risks.
4. Corporate America has lobbied heavily? While this is true, it pales in comparison to what the past presidential administration lobbied for. Democrats would even like to see illegal immigrants allowed to vote, for crying out loud -- alongside convicted felons and the mentally insane. Please note I'm NOT a Republican, as I have no taste for their spinelessness. I'm Libertarian, but back to the chase...
So you don't believe that the political infrastructure in a media-driven democracy like the US is beholden at all to economic realities? Give me a break.
All other forms of government have either failed (Communism, Socialism) have encroached on personal liberties (Monarchy), or brutally supress their own people and dissidents (Despotism, Religous Oligarchy).
You commit an obvious fallacy here by extrapolating from the specific incident to the general case. Communism and Socialism have not failed. A few communist and socialist economies have failed, as have a fair share of capitalist economies (most recently Argentina -- but don't forget the US's own narrow escape early in the century -- saved only by war, America's other favorite pastime).
I just can't stand to see people mouth off on things they either (a) have no knowledge of or (b) can't back up anyway.
Same, kid.
My friend, you appear to have a huge chip on your shoulder that is clouding your judgement. People died because madmen hijacked two jetliners and deliberately slammed them into skyscrapers full of thousands of innocent human beings. Corporate greed and stockholders had nothing to do with it, and it is callous, irresponsible, and shallow of you to even suggest such a thing to further your obvious hatred of corporate America.
1. Corporate America was the reason for these dubiously large towers' existence in the first place as well as the only entity who at the time could have funded their construction; as one would expect, the vast majority of the dead workers were direct participants in Corporate America.
2. The reasoning behind the terrorists activity is a hatred of the spread of economic colonialism and Corporate America at the expense of what Corporate America labels "more primitive" traditional or religious lifestyles.
3. Cutthroat competitiveness in the airline industry (i.e. Corporate America) is the reason for the lax security which allowed hijackers to board the planes which hit the buildings. The consumer demanded faster security, takeoffs, and landings at airports and the consumer got them. Market demand, my friend.
4. Corporate America has lobbied the government and the INS heavily over the past decade to loosen immigration restrictions and slow-downs, especially from the east, from which many tech workers have come. Apparently, some of them were terrorists.
Anti-capitalist is not an insult. At least I don't take it as one.
You seem to have a chip on your shoulder as well.
How about paradigm?
*rimshot*
I hope whoever moderated this to "informative" isn't taking it entirely seriously...
sed stands for "Stream EDitor" yes, but it is not at all to do with Microsoft. sed has been a staple command used with Unix operating systems for a long, long time and you'll find details about using it in any good Unix book.
Actually, Sharp Zarus MI-EX1 has a 480x640 4" LCD capable of 64k color now selling for 2 years already. Though the price is very steep, the display itself shows really amazing quality.
Oh ho! I just saw a picture of one thanks to Google. Now I'm really interested. Can any of these VGA Zaurus machines support English or German? And will they run Paragraph's Calligrapher for handwriting recognition? (i.e. are the Windows CE?) And can I rotate the display for "portrait" position instead of "landscape" position?
Maybe *that* would be a near-Newton-killer, too!
Except for a few extremist zealots, the Newton is thoroughly dead.
Extremist zealots? Are you terrified of Newton users for some reason? Some people prefer it and there is still an active eBay selling community. Are they all dangerous? Should they be locked up for not buying a newer PDA? Hardly. The Newton 2x00 series died because it was a $1000+ piece of technology before it was discontinued. There's no doubt that's too much for a PDA, no matter how advanced. But of course it was so expensive when new because of just how high-end it was, and that's why it survives today.
The 2000 series had an EL-backlit 100dpi 320x480 display, PCMCIA slots (shove a 256MB CF card in one and an ethernet card in the other and away you go), a standard DHCP-compliant TCP/IP stack (browse the Web, send/receive e-mail), sound (play MP3's, take voice notes), natural handwriting recognition from Paragraph (which works incredibly well and now forms the basis for Microsoft's "Transcriber" in PocketPC), a 162MHz StrongARM processor, the ability to import and edit Office documents, the ability serve Web pages, and an interface which combines the best aspects of Mac OS, Palm OS and Windows CE, all at only an inch thick and about a pound in weight.
The fact that this product was killed off years ago (as you mentioned) and that people still use it every day to listen to MP3's, edit reports, browse the Web, send/receive HTML mail, and host their Web sites makes it more amazing, not less.
But I'll be damned if these new Sony PDAs don't come close. If only they'd used CF rather than memorystick! If only Transcriber/Calligrapher were released in a Palm OS version!
There are a lot of posts saying "but all of this stuff has been done before by other PDAs..."
While this is true, the 320x480 resolution with a full-tablet mode has only been done by one PDA, the Apple Newton 2000/2100, now discontinued for five years.
A screen resolution of 320x480 makes a HUGE difference when working with information, text, graphics, etc. With a resolution of 320x480 and a virtual graffiti area (which could conceivably be left hidden and replaced with a 3rd-party natural handwriting recognition system?!) we could FINALLY have a near-Newton-killer on our hands...
Of course, it is still lacking in some areas... Only a 66MHz Dragonball CPU vs. the 162MHz StrongARM in the Newton 2x00, PalmOS vs. NewtonOS (which is still a decade ahead of its time), no PCMCIA slot(s), no 3rd party natural handwriting recognizers yet available for PalmOS, etc.
Still, wow. For a long time, I've thought that since nobody would ever make another PDA with a 320x480 display, nobody would ever even begin to come close to Newton. But this does! In fact, get me that natural handwriting recognizer and a nice "natural" database like Notion for Newton and you could see me switch... Maybe... Well, okay, probably not.
Point being, if it wasn't for the U.S., you, along with all of Europe would be singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alis" every morning.
Oh, and by the way... The line is "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles."
Again, an American right-winger insults in both backhanded and forehanded ways two of the most prominent European natinons, the Germans and the French. No doubt you are one of the Swiss-haters as well.
You American right wingers... it's a lonely world for you. You hate the far east because you think everyone there is a Chinese maoist and you can't get along with them, you hate the middle east because you think they're all Muslim terrorists, you hate the Germans because you're sure they're Nazis, the French because you're sure they're really on the same side as the communists and the terrorists, the Swiss because they were neutral during the war, the South Americans because they continue to enter your "land of opportunity" without "papers" and you even hate the liberal half of the population in your own country because you're sure they're all peacenik hippie pinko commies.
The only people right wing Americans do like and trust are themselves and the British, which is funny because many of the British aren't all that keen on American's military and international foibles (not to mention nuclear war) either!
Point being, if it wasn't for the U.S., you, along with all of Europe would be singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alis" every morning.
Rather than wanting the world to thank you for this, I think the American right wing should itself be thankful that the rest of the world (including the other half of the American population) hasn't already chased it into the ocean once and for all!
You're an idiot. If the US dropped a nuke on anybody it would instantly lose every ally it has in Europe and NATO with the exception of the UK. China, North Korea and Russia would become loose cannons in a new, unbalanced (3-to-1) cold war which could quickly turn hot, possibly even as a matter of course. US embassies in every part of the globe would be shut down in response and US citizens anywhere around the world would be in immediate danger.
Worse, if the US were to drop "the" bomb on Baghdad specifically, it would also have every last Arab state aligned specifically against it as well; worldwide terrorism would increase 1000% and would be supported by all of the eastern nations either covertly or even explicitly. "The west" would suddenly find itself reduced to "US, Canada, UK" and positioned vs. The Entire East including most of Europe, as well as in a full-scale Protestant vs. Islam war which could last for centuries.
The fact that there are people out there who actually think that the US could *improve* international relations and world peace by using nuclear weapons demonstrates just how disconnected Americans are from reality.
The new G4 iMac looks like a supermodel, all curvy and slim and sleek and chic.
The Gateway looks like a 60-year-old Janitor.
I know who I'd rather "plug in".
As someone who owns (and uses) an old stylus-based x86 touchpad with an 8-inch screen, it's hard enough on that screen to accurately select things like forms or manipulate windows. Shrink the screen size to half of that, and certain Windows or X controls will be downright lilliputian.
/.ed, but it's perfectly possible to have a very small, but very accurate, touchscreen. Apple's Newton 2000 series did it.
I haven't read the specs for this device because all links appear to be
How? Use a much higher resolution for the touchscreen than for the LCD behind it. While the Newton 2000's LCD display was 100dpi, the touchscreen sampled at 800dpi. If you read the original Newton 2000 marketing information (some of it can still be found around the Web), it's in the specs.
This is part of what made the late model Newtons' handwriting recognition work so well while other handheld PDAs still have trouble with it. With a touchscreen resolution four times higher than the display resolution, a well-calibrated screen is pinpoint accurate.
You got it backward. I worked for three years for a top-10 (per Media Metrix) network. We started by paying for impressions in the mid-to-late '90s, but by the year 2000, we were only paying for click-thrus because market research had shown that by paying for impressions we were basically paying for people to ignore us.
Click-thrus are more expensive but are also meaningful and in the final cost-benefit analysis proved to be much more efficient than impressions. This is why so many sites out there say "please click on a banner to support our sponsors" -- most of them are getting nothing for impressions.
What's the point of this? Maybe networking a bunch of animals together? Or the proverbial Beowulf cluster of stuffed animals?
Wow, I can see this. Put MicroATX PCs inside teddy bears... one paw for power, the other for net... create beowulf cluster...
"See that pile of stuffed animals over there? That's my teraflop supercomputer."
Just watch out when your male cat starts coming in to hump the nodes. Gives a whole new meaning to "wiping data".
I think the issue is how Slashdot markets itself... that is, whether it claims to be disseminating facts or merely repeating the allegations of others.
For me the answer is clear... The first thing on every Slashdot page is a large graphic prominently containing the word "News" -- from this I think Slashdot cannot simply use the "we are only a bulletin board" defense to escape liability. A major portion of Slashdot's traffic clearly comes from those who are seeking news coverage; there isn't even a disclaimer anywhere saying "but of course we aren't really news and anything you see here may be or is even likely to be fictitious or merely opinion."
That is not to say I'm happy about Slashdot's liability. I think one of the things most sorely lacking in our culture is a forum for the disgruntled to come together and try to figure out just what the "truth" is, without the mediation of corporate and government propaganda in the mainstream media. That such a forum (i.e. Slashdot) likely won't survive much longer without greater controls is truly unfortunate.
Yes, there are Web sites done entirely in Flash, which completely suck on modems. Hint: avoid them. :-)
.PDF files for each paper you write, or for a thesis? I suspect that most of that time is spent deciding what you actually want -- I happily preview on a modem via google's pdf indexing service.
Amazon.com, Outpost.com and eBay.com are not done entirely in flash.
Yeah. And you need 100
A typical paper will have 40-60 citations. So, I am deciding which 50% of the 100 I want, yes. As I have already mentioned to another poster, if you think you will find abstracts and complete papers by searching Google, you have no connection to the word "scholarly" -- Google does not give me access to them because they are not publicly available on the Web. Some of them aren't even accessed through a Web browser, but through other proprietary clients. (If you start bitching about how that's what I deserve for using "proprietary software" I'm going to laugh.)
I'm very dubious as to whether you actually get 3.3 MB of email per day, as you're claiming.
If you count attachments, I often get 100MB of e-mail per day.
The only people that really need broadband are warez traders, in my experience.
And the only people who object to government surveillance have something to hide and the only people wear turbans are terrorists and the only people who need big hard drives are pedophiles.
Duh.
Even with high-speed access to the internet, there is no substitute for browsing my university's library.
.PDF file over my broadband connection in the space of five minutes and search it.
My university library (Mariott at University of Utah, a notable research university) has 3.5 million volumes, over 1 million photos, 14,000+ journals, 180,000+ maps, a 50,000+ rare books collection, crammed into 500,000 square feet of space...
But compare the list of journals that it carries in my subject area (10-15) compared to the actual number of journals out there in the world in my subject area (50+) and I still need to use additional sources to get at the remaining information somehow.
No university can afford to carry EVERY journal in EVERY subject. Of course I can always have the journal volume/issue I need sent from another school. All I have to do is wait days for it to arrive, only *then* to find out if I can even *use* the paper or article in question... Or I can grab the related
Which would you rather do?
Sure, things like email may have made some things easier to do. Unfortunately, many people have come to believe that they are absolute necessities.
Are you in the real world? As an undergrad, I was required to submit fully half of my assignments by e-mail. Computer access and e-mail were not optional; if you didn't want to do it, you could just go home.
The world is changing. Sure, telephone access is not, strictly speaking, necessary either...
If your main use for the web is email and web browsing, the speed-up is almost guaranteed not to be worth it. Think about it: when browsing the web, how much time is spent waiting for downloads as opposed to reading content?
I don't do much reading on the Web. Really on the Web I do two things almost exclusively: 1) Shop. Books, bookshelves, CDs and CD players are all often half-price bought online. Shopping on the Web is almost entirely clicking and very little reading. 2) Download. Articles, research papers, documents, manuals, e-texts for my PDA, images that are going to press and photos of my friends' kids, etc. Again, no reading, all waiting for the download to finish.
The extent of my reading in a browser window falls across two sites, Slashdot.org for Linux-bias tech news (yes, I want it that way) and news.bbc.co.uk for news beyond what CNN can give me.
Really, the time I save shopping and downloading is enough to justify broadband for me. My PC probably spends a good 12-15 hours over the course of a month downloading files (esp. PDF documents and full-res digital photos or scans of all kinds, some using a browser, most in e-mail) via my cable connection. That's around 600+ hours of continuous download a month if I had to do it over a modem. You try keeping a modem-based connection up 25 straight days out of every month!
More to the point, not having broadband would probably mandate serious lifestyle changes or even career changes for me, as much of what I do wouldn't be practical if I didn't have a fast 'net connection. At the very least, I'd be less productive by far and therefore less competitive as well.
But then again, why would I be less competitive? Because others would be using their broadband to get more things done! I think much of the western world these days depends on the 'net for the pace of everyday business and tasks. Some of my friends in marketing do nearly everything over the net (they practically live on it, and no, not just browsing) and they have broadband at home so that they can take work home with them and spend their time actually working, rather than waiting for images and documents to transfer and swearing when the carrier drops.
Why would your average person spend hours in front of a computer screen trying to navigate some byzantine e-commerce site, when they could call up a couple friends and go down to the local shopping center?
.PDF format. 100 papers on cranial morphology at 8-25MB each is 800MB to 2GB of .PDF files. If you can show me where to find papers from, say, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology just by searching Google... Please let me know so that I can save $$$$! Of course, even then, I'd still have to download all those pesky .PDF files...
Um, because my budget for christmas shopping isn't $2000, it's more like $200 -- i.e. Amazon.com, not Macy's.
200 emails a day sounds like a rather exceptional number to me; I doubt I receive more than 10 pieces a day.
If you're involved in academics or publishing in any way, *everything* is done via e-mail. You get papers, chapters, invoices, complaints, and everything else via e-mail. Busy people use e-mail. If you don't use a lot of e-mail, you must not have to deal with very many busy people. I've got friends in corporate america (no, not technology) who get twice as much e-mail as me. They e-mail at their desk, on their cell phone, on their blackberry, in their living room, and in their bathroom on their Palm, and they're not even in technology.
Once again, I would probably head down to the library with a friend or two
You certainly can't get most academic journals at a library, even a university library usually only carries a small subset of them. You certainly won't find any articles from such journals on the net through Google. The only way to get scientific research (no, not the NBC article on the research, the actual research) is to either pay for the journal ($$$$$$$) or pay for a membership to an online database which carries the journal (only $$$$)... But even with the membership, the papers are provided in
Your average person doesn't download operating systems or game demos off the Internet. I know I sure don't.
What exactly makes you average over me? I have two little sisters (out of a total of four) still living with my parents. These two (with their friends) download at least 2-4 game demos a month and play them all the way through, I understand. I don't game very much but they apparently do, and they're girls, 13 and 16 with N'Sync and Dragonball Z posters on their walls. I didn't teach them where to get game demos, I don't even know! Of course, I do download Linux...
Please realize that people like you who depend on the Internet for everything are a minority.
Woah. As I said, I depend on the Internet to: 1) save me money when I shop, 2) talk to bosses and colleagues via e-mail, 3) get academic research or other content-rich information (not just Google-searching) and 4) get free software whenever I can. Same as everyone else in the college world and many people in the non-college world.
Ever think maybe you're a little behind the curve of what "average" is?