What the heck? Where are all the Biden "myths"? Only two entries? I wanted to have his gaffes about FDR responding to the crash of '29 on television recorded for posterity. Or the time he asked a crippled man to please stand up. Or the guy from Florida who introduced him as "Senator John McCain". Or the statement that Obama would be "challenged with an international crisis" in the first few months of his Presidency. Or his various drunk appearances. Or the time he told the press that he would never, ever, ever, under any circumstances run for Vice President.
I mean, Biden is comedy gold! Not to mention the best shot for a whole list of "myths" that are "true". At this rate, he'll be the most interesting Vice President since Dan Quayle!:-P
See, back when I voted in Sauk County we had simple bubbles to fill in. The ballots were slightly confusing in the way that SAT/ACT tests are, but nothing untoward. And they were a lot easier to use than trying to draw a straight line. (Which I happen to be horrific at.:-P) Of course, the polling stations were usually much better configured and managed than in Illinois. And you didn't have to get up before the crack of dawn to get your vote in. (Though that's probably a population density issue.)
Not sure where you were that you had the "line" style optical ballot, that's the first I've heard of it.
Cook County. (Hey, I can see your county from my house!:-P) Based on what I saw on WGN, it looked like Obama was voting with the same ballot I used. They had the same machines, same booths, same privacy cover sheets (which Obama appears to have placed *under* his ballot after voting... DOH!), etc. The ballots appeared to be the same size and same number of pages, so I'd say he probably used the same system as I did.
...I had the option of either voting by electronic machine or paper ballot. As you might imagine, I chose paper ballot for the simple reason that it leaves unchangeable records. Electronic voting machines are far too easy to manipulate or are far too likely to have glitches. (Especially the Diebold machines based on Microsoft Access.)
The downside is that the Illinois ballots are *bleep*ing insane! First, there's no simple checkbox. Instead, you have these bizarre arrows you have to fill in. i.e.:
Bob < D Larry < D
You are supposed to draw a line for the vote you want to cast. e.g.:
Bob <----D Larry < D
Which is then complicated by a list of about a bazillion judges to vote in or out of office. No judge runs against another judge, so you simply fill out the arrow or you don't. Incumbent judges have a "Yes/No" option to possibly vote them out of office.
I got up pretty early this morning, so it ended up taking more time to fill out these super-ballots than it did to wait in line. I then went home and listened to WGN ponder why it was taking Obama so long to vote for himself. Perhaps someone should show them one of these ballots!:-P
Call me crazy, but eliminating X from multimedia and kiosk environments in no way implies that it is not already used in these environments. Rather, it suggests that there may be situations where direct graphical access is preferable. For example, it's always nice to know that some yahoo can't come along and press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill X-Windows. It's also nice to be able to eliminate the overhead of X in a memory constrained environment where a sophisticated interface can be achieved with a lot less hardware.
Microsoft moved the ENTIRE graphical subsystem to the kernel. Which made things faster, but did make them less stable and less secure. (Sun also had an option to take this route in Solaris.) This would be like taking the entire X server and cramming it down into the kernel.
I'm not suggesting anything quite so extreme. Rather, I'm talking about leaving device control in the hands of the device manager (i.e. the kernel or the HAL) and having the X server access the device through a standard driver interface. Much like audio, mouse, keyboard, networking, and storage are all handled by the kernel.
FWIW, Microsoft left the graphics in the kernel. They did add some extra checks to stabilize it, but we're all living with those kernel graphics today.
But if you're going to "get rid of the cruft", doesn't that suggest that you'd want to move to an architecture that depends on the kernel's graphics subsystem rather than maintaining a zoo of obsolete usermode drivers?
Hardware is the purview of the kernel. Or at least the Hardware Abstraction Layer. (Depending upon your OS's architecture.) Today's X servers still support all kinds of usermode drivers, just so that 95% of configurations can thunk it all to the kernel. Thus there doesn't seem to be much point in providing the graphics drivers in the X server. Better to let the kernel do its job while the X server does its job of drawing the GUI through interpreting a series of abstract commands.
As a bonus, the graphical system becomes available to a variety of programs that desire low-level access to the graphics card rather than running an X server.
Perhaps I'm being naive, but why wouldn't a clean separation between the graphics system and the kernel drivers be an advantageous goal?
If I understand the article correctly, this is a new X server, not a new API or protocol. Programs would still compile against XLib and still access the server through TCP/IP or unix sockets. The only difference is that the rendering engine that interprets those commands has been swapped out.
Then there is that stuff from NeXT which is similar to OS X.
OS X *is* NeXT. So I'd say that "that stuff" went to good use.
Then there is that BeOS-like server.
Not sure what you're referring to. But BeOS was awesome. Especially when it came to multimedia.
Framebuffer.
LFB is a pretty standard module in Linux these days. It's why Linux can boot with fancy graphical screens rather than staring at boring off-white text.
I think there was some sort of OpenGL server a number of years ago.
OpenGL is a standard part of modern X servers. Are you perhaps thinking of Project Looking Glass? That was an attempt at creating a new window manager rather than a new API. It's still under development, but it's coming along at Enlightenment speeds. Its development should not be impacted by a new X server.
Uh, what else? None of these have replaced the X11 standard.
...spell the death-knell of X-based graphics drivers? Does this mean that such drivers will finally be folded into pure kernel modules with no fancy wrappers required? Does that also mean that we can eliminate X as a dependency for playing video games, and using Linux in multimedia or kiosk environments?
You and I both know there are games that have physical components or are active enough to induce sweat/physically exercise someone, if that is your concern.
As counter-intuitive as it may sound, we limit games like Wii Sports even more than regular video games. While my wife and I love the idea of physical gaming, we've noted that our son is not responsible enough to watch out for his younger brother or even himself. Unless a parent is there to ensure that he doesn't get too wild, someone is likely to end up hurt. Whether it be his younger brother getting clobbered on a back-swing, a lamp getting knocked over, or the older one sliding into the desk while he's bowling, Wii Sports is simply not a safe activity!:-)
I wish it were that simple. However, we did have to play with the timeframe a bit. If we let him play for too long, he'd have behavioral problems regardless of whether or not he was aware of the impending requirement that he do something else. The time he played had to be limited to a shorter period to ensure good behavior. (We ended up with 3 turns of 15 minutes each, to be used separately or consecutively.)
The exact issue we observed appeared to be related to the physiological issues you had when you spend too much time watching television. You know how spending hours in front of the television often makes you feel less and less like doing anything else? i.e. You start to feel lazy and like you "need to relax". One would think that the long periods of inactivity would cause one to want to become active. While I'm sure that's true for some, it's more common that the inactivity merely leads to more inactivity.
Video games only make this situation worse. Not only is the child feeling lazy, but they are also agitated from their interaction with the video game. I recall several examples where my son was done with video games for the day, but refused to go anywhere. Instead, he just rolled around the couch grumbling that he didn't want to do anything.
These observations are a key reason why loss of video games became a cornerstone of his punishments. If he misbehaves during the day, a common punishment is loss of one of his three turns, or even complete loss of video games for the day. This punishment appears to doubly effective because it not only takes away something he likes, but it also removes him from the possibility that he's focused on video games to the detriment of his behavior.
Interestingly, this punishment was never all that effective for his younger brother. The younger one was never as interested in video games and is more capable of entertaining himself without prompting. While he has the same video game limits as his older brother, they have always seemed less necessary as he is commonly seen self-abandoning video games for some other activity. The downside is that his behavioral problems (every kids has them) tend to be more complex, seemingly stemming from external relations with school friends.
That's exactly my experience. It has nothing to do with violence in video games and everything to do with sitting on their butts while getting more and more excitable.
The results are consistent with my own experience. When my older son was younger, I provided him with access to an NES emulator so that he could play the old Nintendo games I had sitting in the closet. (I was missing cabling and didn't find them until later.) What we noticed is that if he was allowed to play video games for too long, he became a) lazy about doing anything else and b) very temperamental and difficult to deal with.
About that time my wife instituted a time-limit for games each day that my son could spend at any time during the day. when he wasn't playing games, he was required to find some other activity to do. (e.g. play with Duplos, ask to go to the park, etc.) This change was very effective in smoothing out his behavior.
The problem does not appear to be the violence in video games as Mr. Thompson, no longer esquire, would have you believe. The problem appears to be that playing games for a long period of time results in a lot of pent-up energy. That energy is tempered by a reduced desire to perform any task besides play video games. In result, the energy ends up expended via a behavior route.
-1 Flamebait? I see the mods have taken leave of their senses again.
No matter which way you cut it, Safari is a superior browser to Opera Mini. And since iPhones must have unlimited data plans, the usual cost savings of less bandwidth simply isn't there. In result, it would only make sense for Opera to port the full browser to compete with Safari. Offering a substandard experience is not competition.
You can disagree with me on that, but it's not flamebait. It's truth. Learn the difference.
Opera Mini supports a great deal of JavaScript / "AJAX" functionality (I frequently use it to access various Google services, including the full Gmail),
You do realize that you're looking at GMail Basic, right? Most of Google's services have to be downgraded because of various pieces of functionality that Opera Mini does not support. (e.g. setTimeout/setInterval are intentionally disabled.)
If you're using the "full" GMail, you're not using Opera Mini. You're using Opera Mobile.
You will excuse me if I DO know what I'm talking about.
When you have a full featured browser (I.E.) already in windows.....
For incredibly forgiving definitions of "fully featured". There was a time when IE was the absolute best web browser on the market. I was a huge fan of Netscape at the time, but I told everyone who would listen that IE5 was THE ANSWER. It was a wonderful browser in its time.
However, it hasn't budged an inch. IE7 is IE5 with tabs and a few minor fixes. Basic stuff like DOM constants, DOM2 support, CSS layout, Javascript compliance, etc, etc, etc, are all broken according to the standards that Microsoft helped layout 10 years ago. On top of that, IE is slow, clunky, and a massive security hazard.
The situation with Safari and Opera Mini is quite the opposite. Safari is fast, fully featured, standards compliant, and more than sufficient for surfing the web. Whereas Opera will tell you on their own site that Opera Mini can only do basic AJAX and is useless for anything that requires setTimeout/setInterval. However, Opera has a true competitor in the form of their desktop browser codebase. As the Wii version demonstrates, Opera is very adept at stripping down their browser to a minimal desktop environment. Why don't they put their best foot forward with that solution rather than trying to push a solution they know will be rejected due to the Java requirement?
It doesn't make any sense. Unless it's a publicity stunt. That's the only answer that makes a lick of sense.
Correction to myself. I misunderstood what the author was saying. He was saying that Opera Mini is a JavaME browser, not that anything other than Opera Mini is a JavaME browser. My mistake.
See, that's also confusing. When you have a fully featured browser already in the phone, why compete with a substandard browser that's incapable of surfing anything more than static sites? About the only thing that makes sense is that this was all a publicity stunt.
Having read the article in greater depth, I see that the author has made a few incorrect assumptions. One of them appears to be that if it's not Opera Mini, it is therefore Opera JavaME. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Not only does Opera have their Opera Mobile product that is designed to run on a variety of non-Java smartphones, but they also have products like the Wii Internet Channel. The Internet Channel is a stripped down version of the desktop browser running in an environment that's not too dissimilar to the iPhone.
So take the information in the article with a large grain of salt.
...would they port the JavaME version? Doesn't that seem a bit circuitous when Apple provides a sophisticated toolkit to compile their Mac codebase down? It's not like the iPhone is underpowered.
3. Now here's the really tricky part. Go into your nearest Starbucks and attempt to access the Wifi. When you are prompted for user/pass, enter the username and password you registered the card with.
Voila! Free Wifi! Make sure you charge or refill the card at least once a month or this hack will stop working.
Slashdot Mirror
What the heck? Where are all the Biden "myths"? Only two entries? I wanted to have his gaffes about FDR responding to the crash of '29 on television recorded for posterity. Or the time he asked a crippled man to please stand up. Or the guy from Florida who introduced him as "Senator John McCain". Or the statement that Obama would be "challenged with an international crisis" in the first few months of his Presidency. Or his various drunk appearances. Or the time he told the press that he would never, ever, ever, under any circumstances run for Vice President.
I mean, Biden is comedy gold! Not to mention the best shot for a whole list of "myths" that are "true". At this rate, he'll be the most interesting Vice President since Dan Quayle! :-P
See, back when I voted in Sauk County we had simple bubbles to fill in. The ballots were slightly confusing in the way that SAT/ACT tests are, but nothing untoward. And they were a lot easier to use than trying to draw a straight line. (Which I happen to be horrific at. :-P) Of course, the polling stations were usually much better configured and managed than in Illinois. And you didn't have to get up before the crack of dawn to get your vote in. (Though that's probably a population density issue.)
Cook County. (Hey, I can see your county from my house! :-P) Based on what I saw on WGN, it looked like Obama was voting with the same ballot I used. They had the same machines, same booths, same privacy cover sheets (which Obama appears to have placed *under* his ballot after voting... DOH!), etc. The ballots appeared to be the same size and same number of pages, so I'd say he probably used the same system as I did.
...I had the option of either voting by electronic machine or paper ballot. As you might imagine, I chose paper ballot for the simple reason that it leaves unchangeable records. Electronic voting machines are far too easy to manipulate or are far too likely to have glitches. (Especially the Diebold machines based on Microsoft Access.)
The downside is that the Illinois ballots are *bleep*ing insane! First, there's no simple checkbox. Instead, you have these bizarre arrows you have to fill in. i.e.:
You are supposed to draw a line for the vote you want to cast. e.g.:
Which is then complicated by a list of about a bazillion judges to vote in or out of office. No judge runs against another judge, so you simply fill out the arrow or you don't. Incumbent judges have a "Yes/No" option to possibly vote them out of office.
I got up pretty early this morning, so it ended up taking more time to fill out these super-ballots than it did to wait in line. I then went home and listened to WGN ponder why it was taking Obama so long to vote for himself. Perhaps someone should show them one of these ballots! :-P
Call me crazy, but eliminating X from multimedia and kiosk environments in no way implies that it is not already used in these environments. Rather, it suggests that there may be situations where direct graphical access is preferable. For example, it's always nice to know that some yahoo can't come along and press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill X-Windows. It's also nice to be able to eliminate the overhead of X in a memory constrained environment where a sophisticated interface can be achieved with a lot less hardware.
Microsoft moved the ENTIRE graphical subsystem to the kernel. Which made things faster, but did make them less stable and less secure. (Sun also had an option to take this route in Solaris.) This would be like taking the entire X server and cramming it down into the kernel.
I'm not suggesting anything quite so extreme. Rather, I'm talking about leaving device control in the hands of the device manager (i.e. the kernel or the HAL) and having the X server access the device through a standard driver interface. Much like audio, mouse, keyboard, networking, and storage are all handled by the kernel.
FWIW, Microsoft left the graphics in the kernel. They did add some extra checks to stabilize it, but we're all living with those kernel graphics today.
But if you're going to "get rid of the cruft", doesn't that suggest that you'd want to move to an architecture that depends on the kernel's graphics subsystem rather than maintaining a zoo of obsolete usermode drivers?
Hardware is the purview of the kernel. Or at least the Hardware Abstraction Layer. (Depending upon your OS's architecture.) Today's X servers still support all kinds of usermode drivers, just so that 95% of configurations can thunk it all to the kernel. Thus there doesn't seem to be much point in providing the graphics drivers in the X server. Better to let the kernel do its job while the X server does its job of drawing the GUI through interpreting a series of abstract commands.
As a bonus, the graphical system becomes available to a variety of programs that desire low-level access to the graphics card rather than running an X server.
Perhaps I'm being naive, but why wouldn't a clean separation between the graphics system and the kernel drivers be an advantageous goal?
If I understand the article correctly, this is a new X server, not a new API or protocol. Programs would still compile against XLib and still access the server through TCP/IP or unix sockets. The only difference is that the rendering engine that interprets those commands has been swapped out.
OS X *is* NeXT. So I'd say that "that stuff" went to good use.
Not sure what you're referring to. But BeOS was awesome. Especially when it came to multimedia.
LFB is a pretty standard module in Linux these days. It's why Linux can boot with fancy graphical screens rather than staring at boring off-white text.
OpenGL is a standard part of modern X servers. Are you perhaps thinking of Project Looking Glass? That was an attempt at creating a new window manager rather than a new API. It's still under development, but it's coming along at Enlightenment speeds. Its development should not be impacted by a new X server.
I don't think that most of them were trying to.
...spell the death-knell of X-based graphics drivers? Does this mean that such drivers will finally be folded into pure kernel modules with no fancy wrappers required? Does that also mean that we can eliminate X as a dependency for playing video games, and using Linux in multimedia or kiosk environments?
As counter-intuitive as it may sound, we limit games like Wii Sports even more than regular video games. While my wife and I love the idea of physical gaming, we've noted that our son is not responsible enough to watch out for his younger brother or even himself. Unless a parent is there to ensure that he doesn't get too wild, someone is likely to end up hurt. Whether it be his younger brother getting clobbered on a back-swing, a lamp getting knocked over, or the older one sliding into the desk while he's bowling, Wii Sports is simply not a safe activity! :-)
I wish it were that simple. However, we did have to play with the timeframe a bit. If we let him play for too long, he'd have behavioral problems regardless of whether or not he was aware of the impending requirement that he do something else. The time he played had to be limited to a shorter period to ensure good behavior. (We ended up with 3 turns of 15 minutes each, to be used separately or consecutively.)
The exact issue we observed appeared to be related to the physiological issues you had when you spend too much time watching television. You know how spending hours in front of the television often makes you feel less and less like doing anything else? i.e. You start to feel lazy and like you "need to relax". One would think that the long periods of inactivity would cause one to want to become active. While I'm sure that's true for some, it's more common that the inactivity merely leads to more inactivity.
Video games only make this situation worse. Not only is the child feeling lazy, but they are also agitated from their interaction with the video game. I recall several examples where my son was done with video games for the day, but refused to go anywhere. Instead, he just rolled around the couch grumbling that he didn't want to do anything.
These observations are a key reason why loss of video games became a cornerstone of his punishments. If he misbehaves during the day, a common punishment is loss of one of his three turns, or even complete loss of video games for the day. This punishment appears to doubly effective because it not only takes away something he likes, but it also removes him from the possibility that he's focused on video games to the detriment of his behavior.
Interestingly, this punishment was never all that effective for his younger brother. The younger one was never as interested in video games and is more capable of entertaining himself without prompting. While he has the same video game limits as his older brother, they have always seemed less necessary as he is commonly seen self-abandoning video games for some other activity. The downside is that his behavioral problems (every kids has them) tend to be more complex, seemingly stemming from external relations with school friends.
That's exactly my experience. It has nothing to do with violence in video games and everything to do with sitting on their butts while getting more and more excitable.
The results are consistent with my own experience. When my older son was younger, I provided him with access to an NES emulator so that he could play the old Nintendo games I had sitting in the closet. (I was missing cabling and didn't find them until later.) What we noticed is that if he was allowed to play video games for too long, he became a) lazy about doing anything else and b) very temperamental and difficult to deal with.
About that time my wife instituted a time-limit for games each day that my son could spend at any time during the day. when he wasn't playing games, he was required to find some other activity to do. (e.g. play with Duplos, ask to go to the park, etc.) This change was very effective in smoothing out his behavior.
The problem does not appear to be the violence in video games as Mr. Thompson, no longer esquire, would have you believe. The problem appears to be that playing games for a long period of time results in a lot of pent-up energy. That energy is tempered by a reduced desire to perform any task besides play video games. In result, the energy ends up expended via a behavior route.
-1 Flamebait? I see the mods have taken leave of their senses again.
No matter which way you cut it, Safari is a superior browser to Opera Mini. And since iPhones must have unlimited data plans, the usual cost savings of less bandwidth simply isn't there. In result, it would only make sense for Opera to port the full browser to compete with Safari. Offering a substandard experience is not competition.
You can disagree with me on that, but it's not flamebait. It's truth. Learn the difference.
Cheaper how? If you have an iPhone, you have an unlimited data plan. Ergo, you don't care how much you transfer.
The Mini arguments make sense when we're talking about most cell phones. But we're not talking about most cell phones, we're talking about iPhones.
You do realize that you're looking at GMail Basic, right? Most of Google's services have to be downgraded because of various pieces of functionality that Opera Mini does not support. (e.g. setTimeout/setInterval are intentionally disabled.)
If you're using the "full" GMail, you're not using Opera Mini. You're using Opera Mobile.
You will excuse me if I DO know what I'm talking about.
For incredibly forgiving definitions of "fully featured". There was a time when IE was the absolute best web browser on the market. I was a huge fan of Netscape at the time, but I told everyone who would listen that IE5 was THE ANSWER. It was a wonderful browser in its time.
However, it hasn't budged an inch. IE7 is IE5 with tabs and a few minor fixes. Basic stuff like DOM constants, DOM2 support, CSS layout, Javascript compliance, etc, etc, etc, are all broken according to the standards that Microsoft helped layout 10 years ago. On top of that, IE is slow, clunky, and a massive security hazard.
The situation with Safari and Opera Mini is quite the opposite. Safari is fast, fully featured, standards compliant, and more than sufficient for surfing the web. Whereas Opera will tell you on their own site that Opera Mini can only do basic AJAX and is useless for anything that requires setTimeout/setInterval. However, Opera has a true competitor in the form of their desktop browser codebase. As the Wii version demonstrates, Opera is very adept at stripping down their browser to a minimal desktop environment. Why don't they put their best foot forward with that solution rather than trying to push a solution they know will be rejected due to the Java requirement?
It doesn't make any sense. Unless it's a publicity stunt. That's the only answer that makes a lick of sense.
Correction to myself. I misunderstood what the author was saying. He was saying that Opera Mini is a JavaME browser, not that anything other than Opera Mini is a JavaME browser. My mistake.
See, that's also confusing. When you have a fully featured browser already in the phone, why compete with a substandard browser that's incapable of surfing anything more than static sites? About the only thing that makes sense is that this was all a publicity stunt.
Having read the article in greater depth, I see that the author has made a few incorrect assumptions. One of them appears to be that if it's not Opera Mini, it is therefore Opera JavaME. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Not only does Opera have their Opera Mobile product that is designed to run on a variety of non-Java smartphones, but they also have products like the Wii Internet Channel. The Internet Channel is a stripped down version of the desktop browser running in an environment that's not too dissimilar to the iPhone.
So take the information in the article with a large grain of salt.
...would they port the JavaME version? Doesn't that seem a bit circuitous when Apple provides a sophisticated toolkit to compile their Mac codebase down? It's not like the iPhone is underpowered.
Something doesn't quite seem right here.
In which case you can mooch off your own damn WiFi. ;-)
Au contraire. I think the word you're looking for is "steal".
You asked without an iPhone. And you're not paying for the Wifi. Ergo, you are getting free Wifi without an iPhone.
Ok, this is a somewhat tricky hack so pay attention.
1. Buy a Starbucks Card
2. Register the Card
3. Now here's the really tricky part. Go into your nearest Starbucks and attempt to access the Wifi. When you are prompted for user/pass, enter the username and password you registered the card with.
Voila! Free Wifi! Make sure you charge or refill the card at least once a month or this hack will stop working.
You're welcome.