VR developers' goals need to be very close to those of 3-D game designers, i.e.: simple, easy, fun.
Back in the late 1990's I remember downloading and running an "interactive VRML viewer", the thought of which really excited me.
The particular package I tried out was the worst implementation of 3-D world I have ever seen. Sure, it was painfully slow (very low FPS), that's not the part that bothered me. What really irked me was how the system handled camera-wall collisions. When "you", the viewer, encountered a wall, your movement stopped dead - even if you were pushing into the wall at an angle!
Every 3-D game ever made does better than that. You should slide along the wall, parallel with the wall! This is simple physics. Nobody would ever buy a game where you had to "move back when you hit a wall, and don't touch any more walls or you'll get stuck!"
Observe the world around you. What happens to your body when you lean against a wall at an angle? Don't you slide along the wall? I mean, come on. Won't someone please put the Reality back into Virtual Reality.
I had a high-end Ipaq for a while, but gave it up after realizing how much harder it was to do the things I want to do with it. I wanted something to replace my Franklin Dayplanner. I thought an Ipaq could do it, but I was wrong.
Dayplanners have a big section to write notes in, every day. You can look at the entire page without scrolling up/down/left/right. At the same time you can see a 30+ line task list for the day, small area for financial notes, a tiny month-calendar, today's date, and even a quote of the day. I don't care about the quote of the day. But I need those other things.
How do you handle that on any PDA? The screen is way too small to handle it. Are you going to launch all those "separate applications" at once, and somehow flip back-and-forth between them? It takes mental power to do that, distracting you from your work. A dayplanner supplements your work, by being extremely useful without distracting you very much, once you've learned how to use it fully. Once you've fully learned a PDA, the operations you have to perform are still very brain-intensive and motor-skill-intensive ("now I click the little tab. Oh no, I clicked the thing NEXT TO the tab! what mode did it switch me into NOW?!? The whole screen changed!")
My Ipaq was slippery. They make slippery cases on $400+ electronic devices, what brainiac came up with that? Rubberize the case around the edges, dammit, and maybe I wouldn't drop it so often. Even my free Nokia phone's plastic case has more friction than a teflon Ipaq.
My Ipaq completely wiped it's memory without warning. More than once. I lost everything after having it a week; I later started sync'ing everything to my laptop so I could restore everything WHEN it happened again. And again. Wiping memory without my permission is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. I have since traced it back to 1 bad pin on the charger-connector. One of the outer pins. The one that bent a little when I accidentally whacked the cable lightly into a soft wall. When I charge the Ipaq with the docking bay, it's fine, but if I charge it with just the screwed up cable, there's a 100% chance of total disaster. It's now my guaranteed "erase everything cable!" That never should happen.
There's no good input system for PDA's. Hand writing recognition is the wrong thing - you have to constantly monitor it for errors, then figure out how to fix the error. Distraction! Besides, I can't write as fast as I can type. The teeny tiny keyboard you can pop up and "click the buttons with your stylus" is stupid too. You can't do meta keys like shift in the normal way. You should be allowed to use two styluses at the same time (1 fingernail and 1 stylus, perhaps), but you can't. No chording allowed. This is counter-intuitive and painful.
With a dayplanner, you can put bookmark tabs that opens the book to the right section, the exact page, that you bookmarked. You can't do that with a PDA -- some kind of "tab" interface on the main screen that you customized to jump you to the very page of a certain document in a certain application of your choice.
Holding a dayplanner in 1 hand, you can keep 2 or 3 places "temporarily bookmarked" with your fingers inserted at the page. You can flip back and forth between the finger-marked pages, cross-referencing in an instant. With one hand. Your other hand is free to talk on the phone, write notes, tap nervously on the table, whatever. PDA's can't do that. Switching between apps is painful and slow. Some apps "quit" instead of suspend, so when you re-run them, they've forgotten where you were, last time. That choice should be left up to the user, me, not the application writer.
So what do I use now? Outlook 2003 on my laptop. Seriously! It has the best contact manager I've ever seen (many phone, email, and address fields, customizable), the best task manager (customizable fields, separate sorting and grouping), easy to use notepad, and an acceptably usable mail reader, all integrated (cut-n-paste or drag-n-drop any of these things into any of these things). Best of all, I can use a full size keyboard; important to me because I type much faster than I write.
And the Ipaq? Gave it to my girlfriend, she plays "Mars needs Cows" on it, daily.
"...his conclusions: better not to send radio transmission, when physical media like DNA on an asteroid can declare a terrestrial presence."
That's stupid. We did that centuries ago - plenty of our asteroids reached Earth, but you never noticed. We're so past that now... why haven't you noticed our UWB transmissions of 4D fractals? We've been sending them for 5 years. It goes without saying that spread-spectrum hyperspacial mandelbrots can't possibly be found in nature. There's no better proof of civilization than that!
I worked in a computer room environment that was fairly loud; my responsibilities caused me to move around a lot between the computer room and the labs nearby. My office was on the other side of the computer room (opposite the labs), and I had a digital phone (not very loud), so I would miss phone calls every day, any time I was not completely in my office.
My boss decided to help me out by having the Telecom department install an extra telephone ringer bell - a very loud one - in the center of the computer room. He was proud of himself for this, because anytime my phone would ring, it could be heard from all of the labs, the computer room, and my office.
But there was a problem. Something was wrong with the circuitry supporting that bell; occasionally it would miss the "start ringing" signal (which is OK; I'd miss one ring, but hear the next one). BUT, sometimes, it missed the "stop ringing" signal! If I picked up the phone between rings, and it had just missed the stop-ringing signal, it would keep ringing continuously until the next phone call!
Of course you can't call yourself to make your own phone ring, so I had to walk thru the computer room directly beneath the loud bell, into the lab, and call my office phone from the lab phone, just to get it to stop.
[Consumers who register by] August 31, 2003 will notice a downturn in telemarketing calls starting October 1, 2003. Consumers who register after September 1, 2003 will notice a drop in telemarketing calls within three months of the date they register.
So I'm gonna register exactly on Sept 1, just to see if my entry goes into limbo.
When I started getting carpal tunnel pains in my wrists, I tried a number of things to overcome it; here's what I found.
The first was drinking more water. People in general do not drink enough water. This doesn't seem to matter until you reach your 30's. Around age 30 I started having numerous health problems that were "magically solved" by drinking more water.
The second thing I did was buy some gel wrist-rests for all the keyboards I use, and for each location that I might drag my laptop to. These helped immensely, as I spend at least 8 hours a day typing (usually 7 days a week).
The third thing I found was: don't aggravate the pain by trying to "work it out", flexing my wrists back and forth. That only seemed to further inflame it, causing it to take many more days to get better. For this kind of damage, being nice to your wrists (bend them less) is what helps them to heal.
Carpal tunnel pains seem to take many days to heal, so it's hard to figure out what helps and what doesn't. Look for results/changes after 5 days or so, at least.
I played with a coworker's wacky split-keyboard for a while, and hated it - I touch-type extremely fast, but use my own variation on touch-typing that causes me to reach for keys that are on the "other side of the split", causing many typing errors and frustration. I think that *I* should decide which fingers hit which keys, not some generic "standard".:)
For me, there never was any tingling, and it never got bad enough to have to go see a nurse/doctor about it, and now I don't have any wrist issues like that at all - and haven't for 6 months at least.
That's my personal experience anyway. Whaddya know, a happy ending.
Wow, I didn't know there was a name for this. I have associated colors to numbers since I was about 4 years old at least, and the colors haven't changed in that time (I'm 38 now).
Here's my color chart.
0 - clear
1 - white
2 - pink/red
3 - yellow
4 - green
5 - red
6 - yellow
7 - orange
8 - blue
9 - black
The uneven distribution is fascinating to me - there's no purple. Also, I am constantly confusing 3 and 6, because they are the same shade of yellow to me.
Numbers above 9 seem to either be mixes of the colors of the associated numbers (10 = watered down milk color, 11 = milk, 12 = pink frosting, 13 = lemon merangue,...) or are simply separate non-mixed colors, (345 = yellow next to green next to red).
Hey - do others associate the same colors-to-numbers, or different? I always wondered about that. The article mentioned a test subject associated red to 5, when I read that I said, woo hoo!:)
No remote control solution will enable me to do what I want to do - place both of my Sony TV's in the same room. I bought them many years apart (the 27" crt is about 3 years old, the 12" is probably 8 years old), but they both use the same IR signals!
Push the remote's "on/off" button, they both go on or off, together.
Volume controls, channel, etc. are all shared between the two.
Both remotes control both devices.
Until AV equipment joins the 1980's and starts making devices uniquely addressable (ala IP addresses), I will not be able to happily play on my PS2 with the small screen while watching the news on the big one.
Now this modular, "slab" hybrid fuel-cell car design is a revolutionary step in car making. You won't mind them pulling out of the electric car world once you read about it.
I can remember the earliest apps on the earliest computers that let you quit without saving your work; people lost work, people complained, and the programmers said "oh yeah, we otta warn them when they quit, give 'em a chance to cancel, or save their work, or something." So now, all applications do that.
But how do you define this "work", that you might want to save? For those of us in the technology sector, reading is part of our work.
So if you've opened a bunch of tabs in Opera, then quit without reading them, Opera should bring up the you-haven't-saved-your-work dialog box!
I mean, Opera can already tell when you've opened a tab in the background and haven't switched over to it yet -- it colors the tab text blue, instead of black! The hardest part is already solved.
That way David Hyatt, and many others, won't lose many minutes time having to re-read a web page with many links / news articles to re-select the pages we want to read further.
It's work: you decide you are going to read Slashdot today. What you really mean is, scan the most recent articles on Slashdot, down to the old articles you've seen previously, then stop. From that set of articles (perhaps 10-20), at least 5 of them require further reading. You might desire to follow the source link, or read the comments posted by other slashdotters. Or something in a slashbox like Kuro5hin or Advogato or Old Stuff that caught your eye, and you opened a tab to read that later on too.
You want to be "done" with the main slashdot web page, having skimmed everything on the page, then progress to the individual articles that caught your eye. Then, once you finish reading all those articles separately, you're done "reading" slashdot (for the moment).
I do it this way all the time. And when I close my big Opera window, I am mad, because I lost work - the work of collecting what further information I needed to read to stay up to date with today's technology.
Today we're still in the early days of information browsing, the learning & experimenting stage. You can still quit without saving your work. You can still bookmark a web page, then sit down at someone else's computer and none of your bookmarks are there. You log in to a computer with name and password, and the "scope" of that login is only the local environment, the computer does not know who you are in a global sense. This is wrong, and someday it will be fixed.
Someday all this will be standardized, globalized, and simplified. Yes, we're still in the early days of information browsing.
GTA-VC is the greatest console game I've ever played. I absolutely love it. The cool slow-motion jumps, being chased by the police, harassing pedestrians, eavesdropping on pedestrians conversations, and so much more.
The attention to detail is amazing - at the right time of day, the sun can be "in your eye", so it's hard to see where you're going, AND the light will glint off the sides of the cars in traffic!
I especially love all the secret stuff in the game.
I don't just mean the 100 or so "hidden packages", but the real stuff you can find if you try.
Have you managed to get a golf-cart out of the country club? You can do it - and drive it around on the regular streets. Have you found "the" motorcycle, the one that lets you try to complete a sequence of highspeed jumps in a 2 minute time period? How many Unique stunt bonuses have you gotten? Have you been up in the top of the lighthouse?
Then - when you get tired of the game (I assume that may actually happen to me some day), there s many pages of cheats out there, some that are really original, and a lot of fun. Don't go and download a cheat-sheet until you've played the game for a few weeks, though.
I haven't owned the game for very long, but I bought a PS2 just so I could play it. GTA Vice City rocks.
One step that would go a LONG way to improving usability of window managers, and ALL window managers do this wrong today:
provide one, and only one, way to access the hierarchical list of files. If clicking on icons to open folders full of more icons is how people learn to use the window manager, then why doesn't the save file dialog box allow the same interface?
The user goes to Save the letter to Aunt Gazelda they just crafted, and all of a sudden they're thrust into a new universe - files listed by filename, with little "plus signs" next to folders! The "current directory" on their desktop is not the "current directory" of the file chooser! This new tiny window looks totally different than anything they ever saw on the desktop.
This single issue has been confusing my parents for many years now. When I visit them, I have to search around their hard drive to find all the files they accidentally threw in the top level directory, or other wrong directories.
The concept that you can have multiple views of your files and folders is just overwhelming, for some reason.
The United States developing this weapon is really, really stupid. We've seen our own weapons, and soviet weapons, in the hands of enemy nations before. Our enemies are usually 3rd world nations who could never develop such a thing themselves. India has nukes, Pakistan has nukes, North Korea has nukes, and now we're worried about Iraq having nukes - but who invented nuclear technology to begin with?
The U.S. Army doesn't "build" such weapons anyway, government contractors do, which are ordinary corporations whose goal is to make and sell products to make a profit and stay afloat. Any old customer will do, so they sell some of these weapons to other friendly nations. Those nations turn around and sell them to somewhat questionable nations. Those turn around and sell them to nations that we would never sell to, such as Iraq (for a huge sum, probably).
So, now, if we and our enemies both have such a weapon, who will sustain the most damage from its use? The U.S. of course! We are more dependent on electronics guidance systems and computers and radios than any 3rd world nation!
Iraq/Palestine/Al Qaeda are probably jumping for joy at this news. Dammit.
Seems ashame to spend all that time and effort to produce only 1 episode. I just had an idea - why not "open" the movie set to others to record their own episodes? Or, accept scripts from creative trekkies on the net, and make a few more ep's from the best ones you get.
Wouldn't it be cool if there was a publically-accessable trek movie set? Week after week, different people fly over there to participate in some new episode. If you got the inkling, you could be in an episode yourself! "Number N+1, make it so!" Some of us with mediocre acting skills would have a blast with it, without having to build an entire set for 7 years ourselves.
Maybe some minimum charge for maintenance/repairs, paid by each group of people who wants to use the set. And a scheduling web page so you know when your group can use the set, or join a group if you're on your own, etc.
Ones and zeroes degrading on magnetic media is something that needs to be fixed, for long-term data storage. Tape drive vendors are always working on the next technology to stay competitive: being able to read/write weaker signals and higher-resolution magnetic media in order to cram bits closer together, to get more storage per tape.
Well, I say they should do nearly the opposite -- write bits more strongly, further apart so that the data can be read 10-20 years from now!
Let's look at a fictitious tape-technology timeline.
3 years ago - write resolution: 250 strength units, read: 150 units
Meaning: a fresh tape is written, reading it back yields a signal strength of 250 units of some sort, which will probably degrade over time; and as long as that strength is 150 units or more, the data can still be read properly.
This year - write resolution: 25 units, read: 15 units
The problem is that the ratio of write/read sensitivity is the same in both cases! The "ability to accurately retain data over time" has not improved over the years.
We need the equivalent of:
write resolution: 250 units, read: 5 units
Meaning: we write the data super-powerfully, and as long as a tiny amount of signal is retained over time, we can still read the data.
If 1's and 0's blend into each other, then write a whole bunch of 1's to mean ONE, and a whole bunch of zeroes to mean ZERO.
When you go to read it back in 20 years, the middle-most 1's and 0's will still be readable, to tell whether it's a ONE or a ZERO.
My favorite sci fi universe has to be the one in Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End". In that story, the main character lives in a dome-like limited universe on some far-off place. It's a cool world to live in, the way it's described. And, naturally, his curiosity takes him to places beyond which anyone in that limited world had ever been before. The story line that unrolls is truly amazing, unique as far as I've seen, from all the sci fi books and movies I've experienced.
My other favorite is "Stranger in a Strange Land".
The universe in this case is our own, in the possibly-near-future; just wait until you see what the martian hero of the story accomplishes during by the end of the story.
I've left a lot of the detail out intentionally. Those of you who've read these stories know how cool and amazing they are. The rest of you, well, what are you waiting for: go out and read these stories!
Exactly what will happen when Earth's magnetic field disappears... is also difficult to assess. Compasses would point to the wrong pole - a minor inconvenience.
Not my compass! My compass is made of metal and plastic; it will long since have biodegraded 1,000 years from now. Why would people in the year 3000 still be making compasses exactly the way we do today?
More importantly, low-orbiting satellites would be exposed to electromagnetic batterings, wrecking them.
You mean today's low-orbiting satellites? Do you really think they have enough fuel to maintain orbit-path error correction for the next 1,000 years? All the satellites we have today will be gone by then! Humanity will have replaced them with far cooler technology that we cannot even dream of today.
In addition, many species of migrating animals and birds - from swallows to wildebeests - rely on innate abilities to track Earth's magnetic field. Their fates are impossible to gauge.
Oh my God! Since the animals will be exactly the way they are today 1,000 years from now, they are doomed! Since animals can never adapt to their natural environment generation after generation. At the very least, adaptation takes time, and animals only have 1,000 years to do it! This is horrible!
Time now for some math.
Suppose a swallow is born 500 years from now.
It's life span is what, 2-3 years?
At the beginning of its life, the earth's magnetic strength is 0.5 as strong as it is today (500 years left/1000). By the end of the swallow's life it is 0.497 as strong (497 years left/1000), for a 0.6% change in magnetic field strength during the course of it's entire life. Less than one percent! Yeah, I think a swallow can deal with that.
If you are born with something (sound, energy, happiness, whatever) that is weaker than it was 1000 years ago, you do not even notice. It's that way all your life, and you cope with it. You never even consider it.
Support for large files has improved in 8.0 over 7.2.
In RedHat 7.2, file-globbing (* operator) in tcsh had a bug that it would silently ignore any file larger than 2GB! If you typed out the whole filename, you could work with the file, but globbing would not match it. This is fixed in 8.0.
Also in 7.2, the gzip utility could not write more than 2GB when streaming stdin to stdout (gzip -c). I was using it in a pipeline to compress backups, and it would die at exactly 2^31 bytes. This is also fixed in 8.0.
If you have written a utility that could potentially work with more than 2GB of data, please make sure to recompile it with the O_LARGEFILE option (see open(2)). Please!
I never used RedHat 7.3 so I don't know if these things were fixed in that release.
I don't think it will work
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 1
Just how can this work? Send _original_ haiku with fake copyright!
I wonder how they're going to discern between a terrorist nervous about what he's doing, and the 70% of the passengers in the airport nervous about their very body being remotely monitored at this moment by people unknown to them.
It's like trying not to be nervous at the doctor's office. Just thinking about being nervious makes you more nervous, which, when you think about it, makes you even more nervous!
Unless they figure that whoever shows no signs whatsoever of being nervous must be the twisted assailant - hmmm, that just might work. Because we all know that it's OK to cause fear and panic for millions, just as long as we catch the 1 terrorist per year. Or, maybe, every other one.
How do these DJ's get the good stuff to mix, to begin with? I'm talking about the multitrack recordings. Listen to the Christina Aguilera one and notice ONLY her voice, no other sound from the Genie track.
CD tracks you buy are equivalent to executable binaries. I want the source code!
Seriously though, how do you get all those separate audio tracks for any particular pop song? Do you haveta pay big buck$$ to the music label?
Some best known methods I've found for web site design:
simple. clear. minimum words. (a web page is not an english exam - full sentences are not only unnecessary, but wasteful to the reader)
consider your audience. include everything they need, and nothing they don't.
most popular/expected stuff should come first on the page, the rest can follow it.
similar things should look similar, different things should look different
a web page is never done; never put "under construction".
a web page is an evolving thing, just like business, recreation, or anything else in life. Be prepared to revise your web page as needed.
Read your own web pages regularly. Fix them as needed. Incorrect/outdated info is worse than no info at all, because it misleads the reader into thinking they found the answer.
If you think of a better way of expressing data, do it. Right now. That way, when you realize an EVEN BETTER way tomorrow, and do that, your site will be that much better and easier to use.
every complaint you get from customers represents 10 other customers who thought the same thing, but didn't tell you.
if someone asks where stuff is, do two things:
(1) tell them, (2) fix your web pages so you won't be asked that again
not everybody thinks the way you do. learn how people think. if there's 3 ways they might search for something on your site, make it possible to find it using all 3 ways.
put a small link on the bottom of each page for the user to submit a bug report about the web page. Because you want to know about mistakes in the first 5-10 visits, not realize it yourself after 31597 visits.
do not keep multiple copies of data in separate places. That always results in out-of-date data. store data in 1 place, access it from there to generate different web pages (or whatever you're doing).
HTML is no place to store data. XML, data files, and databases are where data should be stored. HTML is an output-only format, like PostScript.
There's two important "ergonomic" aspects to adding new terminology to language and actually have it be accepted by society.
Rule #1Don't break existing terminology, supplement it.
Leave megabytes (megs, MB) = 1048576, and add some new pronunciation to mean 1000000.
Rule #2Change enough pronunciation so people will never misunderstand the new term with an old term
"Mebibytes" is too close to "Megabytes". Over a weak phone line it will sound the same.
You need to change the first vowel, not the second; perhaps "Mobibytes" would be better. Also consider the abbreviations; "Mobs" "MOB" might be acceptable. But make it as extreme a difference as you can; how about "makibytes"? "mortibytes"? Those would be better because there's more change. Abbreviations would be clearer, 16MK (16 makibytes) is visually clear. A printed invoice, faxed and re-faxed, would still be easy to visually discern MK versus MB.
It should stay easy to pronounce, but sound very different.
Make it easy to learn, and add to existing terminology (not change existing), and you have a chance of success. Even then, it's a small chance.
Slashdot Mirror
VR developers' goals need to be very close to those of 3-D game designers, i.e.: simple, easy, fun.
Back in the late 1990's I remember downloading and running an "interactive VRML viewer", the thought of which really excited me. The particular package I tried out was the worst implementation of 3-D world I have ever seen. Sure, it was painfully slow (very low FPS), that's not the part that bothered me. What really irked me was how the system handled camera-wall collisions. When "you", the viewer, encountered a wall, your movement stopped dead - even if you were pushing into the wall at an angle!
Every 3-D game ever made does better than that. You should slide along the wall, parallel with the wall! This is simple physics. Nobody would ever buy a game where you had to "move back when you hit a wall, and don't touch any more walls or you'll get stuck!"
Observe the world around you. What happens to your body when you lean against a wall at an angle? Don't you slide along the wall? I mean, come on. Won't someone please put the Reality back into Virtual Reality.
But right now, Mars needs cows.
Dayplanners have a big section to write notes in, every day. You can look at the entire page without scrolling up/down/left/right. At the same time you can see a 30+ line task list for the day, small area for financial notes, a tiny month-calendar, today's date, and even a quote of the day. I don't care about the quote of the day. But I need those other things.
How do you handle that on any PDA? The screen is way too small to handle it. Are you going to launch all those "separate applications" at once, and somehow flip back-and-forth between them? It takes mental power to do that, distracting you from your work. A dayplanner supplements your work, by being extremely useful without distracting you very much, once you've learned how to use it fully. Once you've fully learned a PDA, the operations you have to perform are still very brain-intensive and motor-skill-intensive ("now I click the little tab. Oh no, I clicked the thing NEXT TO the tab! what mode did it switch me into NOW?!? The whole screen changed!")
My Ipaq was slippery. They make slippery cases on $400+ electronic devices, what brainiac came up with that? Rubberize the case around the edges, dammit, and maybe I wouldn't drop it so often. Even my free Nokia phone's plastic case has more friction than a teflon Ipaq.
My Ipaq completely wiped it's memory without warning. More than once. I lost everything after having it a week; I later started sync'ing everything to my laptop so I could restore everything WHEN it happened again. And again. Wiping memory without my permission is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. I have since traced it back to 1 bad pin on the charger-connector. One of the outer pins. The one that bent a little when I accidentally whacked the cable lightly into a soft wall. When I charge the Ipaq with the docking bay, it's fine, but if I charge it with just the screwed up cable, there's a 100% chance of total disaster. It's now my guaranteed "erase everything cable!" That never should happen.
There's no good input system for PDA's. Hand writing recognition is the wrong thing - you have to constantly monitor it for errors, then figure out how to fix the error. Distraction! Besides, I can't write as fast as I can type. The teeny tiny keyboard you can pop up and "click the buttons with your stylus" is stupid too. You can't do meta keys like shift in the normal way. You should be allowed to use two styluses at the same time (1 fingernail and 1 stylus, perhaps), but you can't. No chording allowed. This is counter-intuitive and painful.
With a dayplanner, you can put bookmark tabs that opens the book to the right section, the exact page, that you bookmarked. You can't do that with a PDA -- some kind of "tab" interface on the main screen that you customized to jump you to the very page of a certain document in a certain application of your choice.
Holding a dayplanner in 1 hand, you can keep 2 or 3 places "temporarily bookmarked" with your fingers inserted at the page. You can flip back and forth between the finger-marked pages, cross-referencing in an instant. With one hand. Your other hand is free to talk on the phone, write notes, tap nervously on the table, whatever. PDA's can't do that. Switching between apps is painful and slow. Some apps "quit" instead of suspend, so when you re-run them, they've forgotten where you were, last time. That choice should be left up to the user, me, not the application writer.
So what do I use now? Outlook 2003 on my laptop. Seriously! It has the best contact manager I've ever seen (many phone, email, and address fields, customizable), the best task manager (customizable fields, separate sorting and grouping), easy to use notepad, and an acceptably usable mail reader, all integrated (cut-n-paste or drag-n-drop any of these things into any of these things). Best of all, I can use a full size keyboard; important to me because I type much faster than I write.
And the Ipaq? Gave it to my girlfriend, she plays "Mars needs Cows" on it, daily.
That's stupid. We did that centuries ago - plenty of our asteroids reached Earth, but you never noticed. We're so past that now... why haven't you noticed our UWB transmissions of 4D fractals? We've been sending them for 5 years. It goes without saying that spread-spectrum hyperspacial mandelbrots can't possibly be found in nature. There's no better proof of civilization than that!
My boss decided to help me out by having the Telecom department install an extra telephone ringer bell - a very loud one - in the center of the computer room. He was proud of himself for this, because anytime my phone would ring, it could be heard from all of the labs, the computer room, and my office.
But there was a problem. Something was wrong with the circuitry supporting that bell; occasionally it would miss the "start ringing" signal (which is OK; I'd miss one ring, but hear the next one). BUT, sometimes, it missed the "stop ringing" signal! If I picked up the phone between rings, and it had just missed the stop-ringing signal, it would keep ringing continuously until the next phone call!
Of course you can't call yourself to make your own phone ring, so I had to walk thru the computer room directly beneath the loud bell, into the lab, and call my office phone from the lab phone, just to get it to stop.
That would happen about once every couple days.
The first was drinking more water. People in general do not drink enough water. This doesn't seem to matter until you reach your 30's. Around age 30 I started having numerous health problems that were "magically solved" by drinking more water.
The second thing I did was buy some gel wrist-rests for all the keyboards I use, and for each location that I might drag my laptop to. These helped immensely, as I spend at least 8 hours a day typing (usually 7 days a week).
The third thing I found was: don't aggravate the pain by trying to "work it out", flexing my wrists back and forth. That only seemed to further inflame it, causing it to take many more days to get better. For this kind of damage, being nice to your wrists (bend them less) is what helps them to heal.
Carpal tunnel pains seem to take many days to heal, so it's hard to figure out what helps and what doesn't. Look for results/changes after 5 days or so, at least.
I played with a coworker's wacky split-keyboard for a while, and hated it - I touch-type extremely fast, but use my own variation on touch-typing that causes me to reach for keys that are on the "other side of the split", causing many typing errors and frustration. I think that *I* should decide which fingers hit which keys, not some generic "standard". :)
For me, there never was any tingling, and it never got bad enough to have to go see a nurse/doctor about it, and now I don't have any wrist issues like that at all - and haven't for 6 months at least.
That's my personal experience anyway. Whaddya know, a happy ending.
Here's my color chart.
0 - clear
1 - white
2 - pink/red
3 - yellow
4 - green
5 - red
6 - yellow
7 - orange
8 - blue
9 - black
The uneven distribution is fascinating to me - there's no purple. Also, I am constantly confusing 3 and 6, because they are the same shade of yellow to me.
Numbers above 9 seem to either be mixes of the colors of the associated numbers (10 = watered down milk color, 11 = milk, 12 = pink frosting, 13 = lemon merangue, ...) or are simply separate non-mixed colors, (345 = yellow next to green next to red).
Hey - do others associate the same colors-to-numbers, or different? I always wondered about that. The article mentioned a test subject associated red to 5, when I read that I said, woo hoo! :)
Push the remote's "on/off" button, they both go on or off, together. Volume controls, channel, etc. are all shared between the two. Both remotes control both devices.
Until AV equipment joins the 1980's and starts making devices uniquely addressable (ala IP addresses), I will not be able to happily play on my PS2 with the small screen while watching the news on the big one.
This 1970's IR technology is really annoying.
Once you plug it into your switch, though, it's hard to get out unless you have really long fingernails.
You should also read Wired's article on the Hy-Wire, Popular Mechanics' article and How Stuff Works: GM Hy-Wire for more details.
But how do you define this "work", that you might want to save? For those of us in the technology sector, reading is part of our work. So if you've opened a bunch of tabs in Opera, then quit without reading them, Opera should bring up the you-haven't-saved-your-work dialog box!
I mean, Opera can already tell when you've opened a tab in the background and haven't switched over to it yet -- it colors the tab text blue, instead of black! The hardest part is already solved.
That way David Hyatt, and many others, won't lose many minutes time having to re-read a web page with many links / news articles to re-select the pages we want to read further.
It's work: you decide you are going to read Slashdot today. What you really mean is, scan the most recent articles on Slashdot, down to the old articles you've seen previously, then stop. From that set of articles (perhaps 10-20), at least 5 of them require further reading. You might desire to follow the source link, or read the comments posted by other slashdotters. Or something in a slashbox like Kuro5hin or Advogato or Old Stuff that caught your eye, and you opened a tab to read that later on too.
You want to be "done" with the main slashdot web page, having skimmed everything on the page, then progress to the individual articles that caught your eye. Then, once you finish reading all those articles separately, you're done "reading" slashdot (for the moment).
I do it this way all the time. And when I close my big Opera window, I am mad, because I lost work - the work of collecting what further information I needed to read to stay up to date with today's technology.
Today we're still in the early days of information browsing, the learning & experimenting stage. You can still quit without saving your work. You can still bookmark a web page, then sit down at someone else's computer and none of your bookmarks are there. You log in to a computer with name and password, and the "scope" of that login is only the local environment, the computer does not know who you are in a global sense. This is wrong, and someday it will be fixed.
Someday all this will be standardized, globalized, and simplified. Yes, we're still in the early days of information browsing.
The attention to detail is amazing - at the right time of day, the sun can be "in your eye", so it's hard to see where you're going, AND the light will glint off the sides of the cars in traffic!
I especially love all the secret stuff in the game. I don't just mean the 100 or so "hidden packages", but the real stuff you can find if you try. Have you managed to get a golf-cart out of the country club? You can do it - and drive it around on the regular streets. Have you found "the" motorcycle, the one that lets you try to complete a sequence of highspeed jumps in a 2 minute time period? How many Unique stunt bonuses have you gotten? Have you been up in the top of the lighthouse?
Then - when you get tired of the game (I assume that may actually happen to me some day), there s many pages of cheats out there, some that are really original, and a lot of fun. Don't go and download a cheat-sheet until you've played the game for a few weeks, though.
I haven't owned the game for very long, but I bought a PS2 just so I could play it. GTA Vice City rocks.
provide one, and only one, way to access the hierarchical list of files. If clicking on icons to open folders full of more icons is how people learn to use the window manager, then why doesn't the save file dialog box allow the same interface?
The user goes to Save the letter to Aunt Gazelda they just crafted, and all of a sudden they're thrust into a new universe - files listed by filename, with little "plus signs" next to folders! The "current directory" on their desktop is not the "current directory" of the file chooser! This new tiny window looks totally different than anything they ever saw on the desktop.
This single issue has been confusing my parents for many years now. When I visit them, I have to search around their hard drive to find all the files they accidentally threw in the top level directory, or other wrong directories.
The concept that you can have multiple views of your files and folders is just overwhelming, for some reason.
The U.S. Army doesn't "build" such weapons anyway, government contractors do, which are ordinary corporations whose goal is to make and sell products to make a profit and stay afloat. Any old customer will do, so they sell some of these weapons to other friendly nations. Those nations turn around and sell them to somewhat questionable nations. Those turn around and sell them to nations that we would never sell to, such as Iraq (for a huge sum, probably).
So, now, if we and our enemies both have such a weapon, who will sustain the most damage from its use? The U.S. of course! We are more dependent on electronics guidance systems and computers and radios than any 3rd world nation!
Iraq/Palestine/Al Qaeda are probably jumping for joy at this news. Dammit.
Wouldn't it be cool if there was a publically-accessable trek movie set? Week after week, different people fly over there to participate in some new episode. If you got the inkling, you could be in an episode yourself! "Number N+1, make it so!" Some of us with mediocre acting skills would have a blast with it, without having to build an entire set for 7 years ourselves.
Maybe some minimum charge for maintenance/repairs, paid by each group of people who wants to use the set. And a scheduling web page so you know when your group can use the set, or join a group if you're on your own, etc.
Whaddya think?!?!?
Well, I say they should do nearly the opposite -- write bits more strongly, further apart so that the data can be read 10-20 years from now!
Let's look at a fictitious tape-technology timeline.
3 years ago - write resolution: 250 strength units, read: 150 units
Meaning: a fresh tape is written, reading it back yields a signal strength of 250 units of some sort, which will probably degrade over time; and as long as that strength is 150 units or more, the data can still be read properly.
This year - write resolution: 25 units, read: 15 units
The problem is that the ratio of write/read sensitivity is the same in both cases! The "ability to accurately retain data over time" has not improved over the years. We need the equivalent of:
write resolution: 250 units, read: 5 units
Meaning: we write the data super-powerfully, and as long as a tiny amount of signal is retained over time, we can still read the data.
If 1's and 0's blend into each other, then write a whole bunch of 1's to mean ONE, and a whole bunch of zeroes to mean ZERO. When you go to read it back in 20 years, the middle-most 1's and 0's will still be readable, to tell whether it's a ONE or a ZERO.
Sacrifice density for resiliency.
My other favorite is "Stranger in a Strange Land". The universe in this case is our own, in the possibly-near-future; just wait until you see what the martian hero of the story accomplishes during by the end of the story.
I've left a lot of the detail out intentionally. Those of you who've read these stories know how cool and amazing they are. The rest of you, well, what are you waiting for: go out and read these stories!
Time now for some math.
Suppose a swallow is born 500 years from now. It's life span is what, 2-3 years? At the beginning of its life, the earth's magnetic strength is 0.5 as strong as it is today (500 years left/1000). By the end of the swallow's life it is 0.497 as strong (497 years left/1000), for a 0.6% change in magnetic field strength during the course of it's entire life. Less than one percent! Yeah, I think a swallow can deal with that.
If you are born with something (sound, energy, happiness, whatever) that is weaker than it was 1000 years ago, you do not even notice. It's that way all your life, and you cope with it. You never even consider it.
In RedHat 7.2, file-globbing (* operator) in tcsh had a bug that it would silently ignore any file larger than 2GB! If you typed out the whole filename, you could work with the file, but globbing would not match it. This is fixed in 8.0.
Also in 7.2, the gzip utility could not write more than 2GB when streaming stdin to stdout (gzip -c). I was using it in a pipeline to compress backups, and it would die at exactly 2^31 bytes. This is also fixed in 8.0.
If you have written a utility that could potentially work with more than 2GB of data, please make sure to recompile it with the O_LARGEFILE option (see open(2)). Please!
I never used RedHat 7.3 so I don't know if these things were fixed in that release.
Just how can this work?
Send _original_ haiku
with fake copyright!
It's like trying not to be nervous at the doctor's office. Just thinking about being nervious makes you more nervous, which, when you think about it, makes you even more nervous!
Unless they figure that whoever shows no signs whatsoever of being nervous must be the twisted assailant - hmmm, that just might work. Because we all know that it's OK to cause fear and panic for millions, just as long as we catch the 1 terrorist per year. Or, maybe, every other one.
CD tracks you buy are equivalent to executable binaries. I want the source code!
Seriously though, how do you get all those separate audio tracks for any particular pop song? Do you haveta pay big buck$$ to the music label?
Rule #1 Don't break existing terminology, supplement it.
Leave megabytes (megs, MB) = 1048576, and add some new pronunciation to mean 1000000.
Rule #2 Change enough pronunciation so people will never misunderstand the new term with an old term
"Mebibytes" is too close to "Megabytes". Over a weak phone line it will sound the same. You need to change the first vowel, not the second; perhaps "Mobibytes" would be better. Also consider the abbreviations; "Mobs" "MOB" might be acceptable. But make it as extreme a difference as you can; how about "makibytes"? "mortibytes"? Those would be better because there's more change. Abbreviations would be clearer, 16MK (16 makibytes) is visually clear. A printed invoice, faxed and re-faxed, would still be easy to visually discern MK versus MB.
It should stay easy to pronounce, but sound very different.
Make it easy to learn, and add to existing terminology (not change existing), and you have a chance of success. Even then, it's a small chance.