I used to use the "Scotch tape" method, and it worked quite well. However, I have since found an improved method. While at a woodworking show, I purchased a thin (~1/64 inch thick) strip of PFTE, about 3 inches wide by 2 feet long, with adhesive backing on one side. (It's meant to be applied to the fence of a table saw, to make the wood slide more easily.) I hadn't yet attached it to my saw fence, so when the cellophane tape wore out, I cut a small section off the end of the strip, then cut this in half, yielding two strips about 1/2 inch by 1.5 inches long. I stuck these to the feet of my mouse. That was several years ago, and I haven't had to replace them yet.
Also, for a mouse pad, I have a plastic kitchen cutting board that's about the same size as a standard mouse pad. It seems to work much better than a normal mouse pad. It doesn't wear out, except that once a year or so, I have to sand the surface with 80-grit sandpaper to keep it rough. I have stuck little pads to the bottom to keep it from sliding around on my desk.
... a manufacturer you have carefully researched and is known to make very good CD-Rs
How does one do this research? Where does one go? (I have acouple of links to pages of test data, but they no longer work.) And anyway, how can one be sure that the results on a particular web site are unbiased?
What I do now is make two copies of each archive disc on two different brands of CD-R/RW (in hopes that if one fails, the other won't), but if discs are rebranded, then I can't be sure that I'm not using discs from the same manufacturer (except that, since the two discs appear to have different sizes (e.g., 651 and 657 Mb), I can hope that they are).
Oh, thanks for the ATIP, uh, tip. It's too bad that we have to do this kind of research. The discs should just work. Yeah, I know, that's naive.
So keep in mind: you get what you pay for. Don't store anything you want to keep around for a long time on bargain basement media.
Unfortunately, that's the kind of media I buy, or, at least, have bought so far. It would be nice to know how medium-scale brands (e.g., Phillips, Imation, etc.) fare. I have heard some bad things about Memorex CD-RWs (and have experienced some problems with them myself), so it seems that name-brand does not necessarily imply good quality. ("Is it live or is it Memorex?" "It's dead.") CD-R/RWs are cheap enough that I can make two copies, and I do, but I may have to start buying the more expensive stuff.
I have compact discs that are pushing 15 years old that play just fine in my car, computer and home CD player. Is it not possible to make this kind of durable media available to the public?
The CDs that you play in your car are stamped; i.e., the information is stored in physical pits in the media. These pits aren't likely to degrade for some time. In contrast, any current CD-R/RW of which I am aware stores information photochemically; i.e., the information is stored in a dye that changes state due to the application of light from a laser beam. These chemicals are likely to degrade much more quickly than are physical pits. I don't believe that this situation will change any time soon.
This recent article in The Register refers to a test by a Dutch magazine called PC Active. They tested 30 different brands of CD that had been recorded only 20 months earlier.
"Several data CDs developed serious errors, or became virtually unreadable."
Here is a picture of one of the CDs. The red area can no longer be read.
This is pretty hideous. I use CDs for archival storage. It looks like it will become necessary to copy everything to new media every year or so, lest it become lost, forever lost, never to be seen again by the eys of mortal man. It's very annoying.
Try fabric softener sheets, the kind that you throw into a clothes dryer to soften clothes and prevent wrinkles. The only problem with them is that they leave a slight hazy film on the plastic/safety glass, but that's not as bad as fog. (You can try wiping them with a tissue to remove the haze, but removing too much negates the anti-fogging effect.)
Yes, it is a law. Why do you think that Intel, IBM, et al are working so hard to continue to shrink their electronics? It's because of Moore's law. If they break Moore's law, they are facing some serious jail time.
The Jimmy Carter who made the famous "malaise" speech, where he blames the citizens for feeling badly. The Jimmy Carter who tried to micromanage everything. The Jimmy Carter who promised to reduce the size of the Federal government, but ended up expanding it (not that that's different from any other president).
The first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote was the 1976 election. I voted for Carter (the only time that the person for whom I voted became President). I have regretted it ever since.
Jimmy Carter has done much more for his country and the world after he left office than he did while he was in office (Carter Center, elections supervision in emerging democracies, Habitat for Humanity, etc.). I like to say that Jimmy Carter was a horrible president, but is a great ex-President.
Re: Arms reduction It was Reagan (much as I hate to admit it), with his over-the-top, John Wayne, militaristic Star Wars fantasies that got the Soviet Union talking seriouly about actual, verifiable, arms reduction.
We tried that with Jimmy Carter (a nuclear engineer). It didn't work.
What we need to do is elect politicians who will listen to engineers and other actual productive people, rather than to their corrupt CEO buddies (current president) or to their socialist buddies (last president), both groups of whom tend to move wealth from the productive people who create it to the leeches who don't deserve it.
research company has so many nobel laureates and so many patents and technology breakthroughs. [...] businesses know that future cold, hard cash comes from R&D paying off.
This may have been true in the last millenium, but it's becoming less and less true as time goes by. Most (American) companies are spending less on R&D these days than they did in the past. I don't know whether this is due to the recession, or due to an increasing "let's not look beyond next quarter" mentality. Probably both.
Face it, like the British before us, and the French and Spain before them, we are stagnating, as anyone at the top always does. We can only hope that China becomes more free and open as it passes us to become the world's next dominant power. (There are already signs of this happening, albeit somewhat more slowly than most of us would like.)
Unfortunately, MS-IE v6 doesn't run on MS-Win95 (at least, according to what I've read).
I'm in the process of moving to Mozilla, anyway (I already use it as my browser), so it doesn't really matter that much. The reason that I asked how to turn HTML off was that, several years ago, I tried everything that I could to turn all of that junk off, and could not disable HTML. When you wrote that it was possible to turn it off, I wondered what I'd missed.
check the checkbox next to "Read all messages in plain text"
There is no "Read all messages in plain text" checkbox in the "Read" tab in my version of Outlook Express. (There are four checkboxes in the "Reading Messages" of that tab, none of which can be used to turn off HTML. Maybe it was added in MS-Win98 or later.)
My "Send" tab has plain text radio buttons for both mail and news, which I set to plain text a long time ago. I also turned off all scripting and ActiveX a long time ago.
... as soon as the PBC forces those four towns to change their names.
That might sound funny, but several years ago, someone, on behalf of Hollywood, California brought suit against Hollywood, Florida, to try to get it to change its name.
I'll grant you that in a world with matter duplicators, all physical objects are software. But it's absurd to make that claim in a world that neither has such technology nor has a chance of obtaining it in the near future.
I was using the "matter duplicator" thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of treating a program sold on physical media differently than the hardware on which it runs. Nevertheless, matter duplicators may be closer than you think, due to advances nanotechnology. (Note that I don't mean the replicators as seen on Star Trek, which turn energy into matter; I mean the kind that you feed raw materials, energy and a pattern.) It wouldn't surprise me if specialized duplicators for some items consisting of a single element were to appear within the next ten years.
You can transfer the hardware because of the principle of first purchase (the idea that once you buy the physical object you can do with it as you please, like with books).
But the software is a "physical object". It is a pattern of magnetic domains on a hard disk, or pits on a CD-ROM. Why is that any less physical than the rest of the hardware?
Now, some may argue that "software" is different because it can more easily be copied than the rest of the hardware. Here is a thought experiment: If tomorrow, someone invented a "matter duplicator" that could duplicate any item, then could CISCO have a EULA for the hardware as well? Does this make any sense?
I think that so-called "software" should be treated no differently than any other hardware; i.e., there should be reasonable protections against making copies of it (copyrights/patents), but that one should be able to resell what one buys.
Apple just don't want to admit Microsoft beat them there on a UI-related issue
Three-button mice were around before MS. It may be that the reason for the one-button mouse may have been cost, rather than a belief that more than one button is confusing. It's too bad that they're too stubborn to change it, now that they've been shown to be wrong.
The uses for a trackball in the mouse would incredible for a gamer.
I think that I'd prefer to have one of those little pointer stick thingees that used to be situated between the G, H, and B keys on some laptops. That way, there'd be no finger-lifting for movement, like there is now if you use the mouse (or trackball) for movement, and you could control your speed. Just push with more lateral force to move faster in a particular direction. For non-gaming uses, push harder to scroll faster. This would be much better than the current method, where you click the wheel button, then move the mouse to control scrolling speed.
it's completely possible for multiple people to independently have essentially the same idea
That's true. One day, in one of my first computer science classes, I learned about stacks and queues. Stack - Push items in one end, pop them out the same end. Queue - Push items in one end, pop them out the other end. I independently came up with the idea of a data structure where you could push and pop items from either end. I called it a "tract", and the operations were eat, vomit, excrete, and supposit. I was very disappointed the next day when we learned about deques.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at all of the social engineering that goes on there.
Free speech?
Pfah! Who needs it?
However, I have since found an improved method.
While at a woodworking show, I purchased a thin (~1/64 inch thick) strip of PFTE, about 3 inches wide by 2 feet long, with adhesive backing on one side.
(It's meant to be applied to the fence of a table saw, to make the wood slide more easily.)
I hadn't yet attached it to my saw fence, so when the cellophane tape wore out, I cut a small section off the end of the strip, then cut this in half, yielding two strips about 1/2 inch by 1.5 inches long.
I stuck these to the feet of my mouse.
That was several years ago, and I haven't had to replace them yet.
Also, for a mouse pad, I have a plastic kitchen cutting board that's about the same size as a standard mouse pad.
It seems to work much better than a normal mouse pad.
It doesn't wear out, except that once a year or so, I have to sand the surface with 80-grit sandpaper to keep it rough.
I have stuck little pads to the bottom to keep it from sliding around on my desk.
Where does one go?
(I have a couple of links to pages of test data, but they no longer work.)
And anyway, how can one be sure that the results on a particular web site are unbiased?
What I do now is make two copies of each archive disc on two different brands of CD-R/RW (in hopes that if one fails, the other won't), but if discs are rebranded, then I can't be sure that I'm not using discs from the same manufacturer (except that, since the two discs appear to have different sizes (e.g., 651 and 657 Mb), I can hope that they are).
Oh, thanks for the ATIP, uh, tip.
It's too bad that we have to do this kind of research.
The discs should just work.
Yeah, I know, that's naive.
It would be nice to know how medium-scale brands (e.g., Phillips, Imation, etc.) fare.
I have heard some bad things about Memorex CD-RWs (and have experienced some problems with them myself), so it seems that name-brand does not necessarily imply good quality.
("Is it live or is it Memorex?" "It's dead.")
CD-R/RWs are cheap enough that I can make two copies, and I do, but I may have to start buying the more expensive stuff.
These pits aren't likely to degrade for some time.
In contrast, any current CD-R/RW of which I am aware stores information photochemically; i.e., the information is stored in a dye that changes state due to the application of light from a laser beam.
These chemicals are likely to degrade much more quickly than are physical pits.
I don't believe that this situation will change any time soon.
see if you can follow my bizarre circular logic: [blah blah blah]
That logic is not circular.
Nor is it rectangular, oblong, or triangular.
It is not ovoid, or spherical, or hypercuboidal.
It is not even logic.
They tested 30 different brands of CD that had been recorded only 20 months earlier. Here is a picture of one of the CDs.
The red area can no longer be read.
This is pretty hideous.
I use CDs for archival storage.
It looks like it will become necessary to copy everything to new media every year or so, lest it become lost, forever lost, never to be seen again by the eys of mortal man.
It's very annoying.
Try fabric softener sheets, the kind that you throw into a clothes dryer to soften clothes and prevent wrinkles.
The only problem with them is that they leave a slight hazy film on the plastic/safety glass, but that's not as bad as fog.
(You can try wiping them with a tissue to remove the haze, but removing too much negates the anti-fogging effect.)
Why do you think that Intel, IBM, et al are working so hard to continue to shrink their electronics?
It's because of Moore's law.
If they break Moore's law, they are facing some serious jail time.
The Jimmy Carter who made the famous "malaise" speech, where he blames the citizens for feeling badly.
The Jimmy Carter who tried to micromanage everything.
The Jimmy Carter who promised to reduce the size of the Federal government, but ended up expanding it (not that that's different from any other president).
The first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote was the 1976 election.
I voted for Carter (the only time that the person for whom I voted became President).
I have regretted it ever since.
Jimmy Carter has done much more for his country and the world after he left office than he did while he was in office (Carter Center, elections supervision in emerging democracies, Habitat for Humanity, etc.).
I like to say that Jimmy Carter was a horrible president, but is a great ex-President.
Re: Arms reduction
It was Reagan (much as I hate to admit it), with his over-the-top, John Wayne, militaristic Star Wars fantasies that got the Soviet Union talking seriouly about actual, verifiable, arms reduction.
It didn't work.
What we need to do is elect politicians who will listen to engineers and other actual productive people, rather than to their corrupt CEO buddies (current president) or to their socialist buddies (last president), both groups of whom tend to move wealth from the productive people who create it to the leeches who don't deserve it.
Most (American) companies are spending less on R&D these days than they did in the past.
I don't know whether this is due to the recession, or due to an increasing "let's not look beyond next quarter" mentality.
Probably both.
Face it, like the British before us, and the French and Spain before them, we are stagnating, as anyone at the top always does.
We can only hope that China becomes more free and open as it passes us to become the world's next dominant power.
(There are already signs of this happening, albeit somewhat more slowly than most of us would like.)
Unfortunately, MS-IE v6 doesn't run on MS-Win95 (at least, according to what I've read).
I'm in the process of moving to Mozilla, anyway (I already use it as my browser), so it doesn't really matter that much.
The reason that I asked how to turn HTML off was that, several years ago, I tried everything that I could to turn all of that junk off, and could not disable HTML.
When you wrote that it was possible to turn it off, I wondered what I'd missed.
Anyway, thanks for trying to help.
(There are four checkboxes in the "Reading Messages" of that tab, none of which can be used to turn off HTML.
Maybe it was added in MS-Win98 or later.)
My "Send" tab has plain text radio buttons for both mail and news, which I set to plain text a long time ago.
I also turned off all scripting and ActiveX a long time ago.
Why didn't you use your +2 modifier when you posted?
How?
Nevertheless, matter duplicators may be closer than you think, due to advances nanotechnology.
(Note that I don't mean the replicators as seen on Star Trek, which turn energy into matter; I mean the kind that you feed raw materials, energy and a pattern.)
It wouldn't surprise me if specialized duplicators for some items consisting of a single element were to appear within the next ten years.
It is a pattern of magnetic domains on a hard disk, or pits on a CD-ROM.
Why is that any less physical than the rest of the hardware?
Now, some may argue that "software" is different because it can more easily be copied than the rest of the hardware.
Here is a thought experiment:
If tomorrow, someone invented a "matter duplicator" that could duplicate any item, then could CISCO have a EULA for the hardware as well?
Does this make any sense?
I think that so-called "software" should be treated no differently than any other hardware; i.e., there should be reasonable protections against making copies of it (copyrights/patents), but that one should be able to resell what one buys.
It may be that the reason for the one-button mouse may have been cost, rather than a belief that more than one button is confusing.
It's too bad that they're too stubborn to change it, now that they've been shown to be wrong.
It appears that such a mouse already exists.
It is discussed below.
That way, there'd be no finger-lifting for movement, like there is now if you use the mouse (or trackball) for movement, and you could control your speed.
Just push with more lateral force to move faster in a particular direction.
For non-gaming uses, push harder to scroll faster.
This would be much better than the current method, where you click the wheel button, then move the mouse to control scrolling speed.
One day, in one of my first computer science classes, I learned about stacks and queues.
Stack - Push items in one end, pop them out the same end.
Queue - Push items in one end, pop them out the other end.
I independently came up with the idea of a data structure where you could push and pop items from either end.
I called it a "tract", and the operations were eat, vomit, excrete, and supposit.
I was very disappointed the next day when we learned about deques.