Like many people, I also kicked the caffeine habit, years ago in my case. I used to get bad headaches now and then, and didn't know why, until eventually I realized it happened when I happened to go without caffeine for a few days. I decided I'd better either have caffeine every day, or give it up (in my case, I used to drink iced tea pretty much all the time).
After years being mostly caffeine-free, I'm terribly sensitive. If I have a can of coke today, and a can tomorrow, then I will almost certainly get a headache the day after.
I really love chocolate, but limit myself to just a few bites a day. If I have more than that, and then lower the amount again, I get a headache.
I don't mind, I just have to be careful about what I consume. And I make sure I only buy headache medicines which are caffeine-free, otherwise, it just postpones the problem but doesn't really help in the long run.
When I travel in China, sometimes it's not easy convincing people that no, I really don't want to drink tea. (And I do like tea, so I'll have it once in a while, but I really have to be careful to space it out, just once every several days at most.) Chinese people are so polite, and they think I'm just being polite, so I really have to explain that no, it'll give me a headache, which they often think is just crazy.
By the way, a friend of mine who knows about my sensitivity to caffeine cut out a little chart from a box of herbal tea she had, which I have hung onto since then, since I found it interesting. It shows the rough amounts of caffeine in various things, in milligrams per 8oz cup or equivalent:
herbal tea: 0 (of course, that's why they put the chart on their box of herbal tea) decaffeinated coffee: 5mg chocolate bar: 25 antioxidant green tea: 30 cola: 45 drip coffee: 90 double espresso: 160
Ever since I was about 10 years old and heard about those experiments of putting people in caves to study their natural time cycles, I've always been interested in participating in such an experiment.
The closest I came was when I was an undergrad, spending summers working at Los Alamos National Lab. I was doing some computer work, and my boss didn't really care what time of day I worked, as long as I did my stuff. So for about a month I stopped paying attention to clocks and schedules. I'd sleep when I was tired, until I woke up naturally. Go in to work, and when I felt like I'd done enough, go home. Fortunately there was a 24-hour supermarket nearby, so I could do my shopping at 3am. My apartment had heavy curtains, so I could keep the place pretty dark when I wanted to sleep, even if it was sunny outside.
I ended up on roughly a 25-hour day, although it varied. It was really quite relaxing. It was a little odd though, when my boss came in to the office at 7:30am and saw me there, he wouldn't know if I was just getting started, or about to go home.
I wish I could do it again, but now I'm teaching classes, I can't exactly do that on my own schedule.
What does make me wonder is why the obscure page with a few oddball pictures of myself gets more hits than the whole rest of that section combined (or for that matter, how they get to it without going thru the main site).
If you are able to look at the referrer logs from your web server, those questions would be answered. It can be pretty amusing, by the way.
When I was at Cornell, my web page mentioned that I lived in "beautiful Ithaca, NY", and that I worked on "mathematical models in biology". I found that some people ended up at my home page after searching for "beautiful models".
I also wrote a children's story about a monkey, and had some info about it on my web page, along with pictures of a magazine it was published in. By far the most popular way people found my web pages was via searching for "monkey pictures", it's mind-boggling how many people were searching for that. But this was my favorite. You know how with some search engines you can search for some terms, but exclude others? Well, one person found my web page after doing a search for "monkey pictures", but excluding "sex"! It really made me wonder what they had found before, that caused them to add that exclusion term...
There have been many disappointed people coming to my web pages over the years (yeah yeah, 'cause my web pages are crappy, right?)
My problem with D-Link di604 routers is they time out idle ssh connections after a while. E.g. I stay logged into my office machine from home (going through the di604 at home) via ssh. After a while, the ssh connection gets closed.
It used to close after about 15-20 minutes. After I complained to them, their next firmware upgrade increased the timeout to several hours, but it still times out. WTF? If I want a router to time out my connections, I'll tell it that's what I want. Since then I've unplugged the di604, and have gone back to using an old 133MHz Pentium running Linux as my firewall/router.
Tim: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.
I don't know any kids who talk like that ("fear my pink line"?), but it's still funny.
I hated touchpads for pretty much the same reasons as you. I loved the little eraser-head pointer control on my old Toshiba. But my school recently bought a Thinkpad T-30 for me, which has both the trackpoint and the touchpad. I figured I'd never use the touchpad. But it turns out that's almost the only thing I use now; it's hard to say exactly why, but somehow IBM has "gotten it right" and made the only touchpad that feels natural to me.
Using the google calculator to look up "megabytes in mebibytes" says that "1 megabytes = 1 mebibytes". Google has spoken.
Re:Sense of being in a room with it.
on
Mirror, Mirror
·
· Score: 1
Yet when people stop looking at it and live with it there is still the background noise and movement which serves to soften the environment and make it feel more alive.
I think it'd be really cool to have two of them on opposite walls, facing each other. If someone walked by every once in a while, that should add some life to it for quite a while, depending on how long the mirrors' reaction times are. Wave your arm in front of it, then watch the reflections propagate between them for half an hour...
Back when it originally came out, I only ever played Space Invaders using 3 buttons (left, right, and shoot). I never even knew there was an arcade model with a joystick until now (as one of the links indicates, the Taito version had a joystick; the Midway version only had buttons). I think I prefer the buttons, but probably only because that's what I was used to.
Hang in there. Once you're done, you can learn things at a rate you can only dream of now.
No need to wait until you're done. When I was in school, I spent a fairly small percentage of my time on actual schoolwork, and tons of time working on various projects in my spare time. I learned a lot more out of class than in, which has been useful to me in the years since.
The only steering wheel I like is the Thrustmaster Nascar Pro Digital 2. It's not force-feedback, but it has a great solid feel to it, much better than others I've used, although they're somewhat hard to find. I've got a couple, and also got one for my dad to play racing games with.
The last one I got, the brake pedal wasn't mounted on its potentiometer correctly, so I had to pop the cover off and spin the dial a bit before putting it together again, but it works great now too.
Using mouse/keyboard/joystick for driving games just isn't as good.
As others have said, you can always buy the unboxed movies later on, unless you are such a collector that you really need the complete set in a box (and if you are that much of a collector, I guess you should have all of the boxed sets anyway, right?).
I am more annoyed by the growing trend of rereleasing movies with more extras. E.g. I bought Terminator 2 and Dances With Wolves on DVD more than a year ago, and now it seems both of those have been rereleased with more extras (e.g. extra footage for Dances With Wolves). I don't want to pay to buy the whole movie again, just for those extras, but I would like to see that stuff. I wish they'd just decide on all the stuff they're going to put on the DVD, release it, and be done with it (although I can understand them rereleasing "historically important" films decades later with more stuff, that's a different situation).
According to a Chinese friend of mine in Boston, even many Chinese people are worried about SARS in Boston Chinatown, and thus avoiding the area somewhat, which surprised me. (Unfortunately, I wasn't terribly shocked when I heard that some Americans were avoiding Chinese restaurants in general because of fear of SARS.)
I have to admit, I was scheduled to spend about 6 weeks in China myself from May-July, but cancelled because of SARS. Not really out of fear of getting sick, but more out of concern about being stuck in my hotel for most of the trip, since universities are being pretty strict about who can enter and leave campus; and even some parks have closed. Most of my co-workers seemed more concerned about the possibility that I'd be quarantined for a while upon returning to the US. Personally, that wouldn't bother me so much.:-) Heck, I practically quarantined myself for a pretty good stretch of time while finishing up my PhD dissertation.
I agree, Gauntlet is good. My girlfriend and I played through it on the N64 a few years ago, now we're going through it on the PS2. She's not that great at games (although she did get pretty good at Mario Kart 64 after we played it for hundreds and hundreds of hours:-) ), and I like the mindless slashing and exploring in Gauntlet. Plus there are a few pretty funny things in there, such as when you find the egg -- "Red Warrior is now poultry" and you turn into a chicken running around squawking.
And also, like others, we have enjoyed some 1-player games where I'm doing the controlling, but we're both figuring out what to do next.
Also like others, in Mario Kart 64, we'd do competitive racing, but promise to try not to hurt each other, and only to hurt the other computer players. We are really looking forward to the new Mario Kart for Gamecube.
I like simple games, and simple driving games. One of my favorites is Midtown Madness (1 and 2) for PC. I've finally got 2 decent PC's running Windows set up in my apartment, and 2 steering wheels, so I'm hoping to start doing some racing with her, although I expect it will take a while for her to get the hang of that. (I bought Midtown Madness 2 and a steering wheel for my dad after I bought my parents a new PC 2 years ago, since my dad used to race real cars. I finally did network racing against him last month when I brought my laptop and steering wheel home, but was fairly disappointed because I totally kicked his butt).
Ah, that solves one mystery I had been wondering about. I went to Boston for dim sum last month (I live up in Maine, and hadn't heard any rumors about SARS in Boston Chinatown). The place I go usually has at least 50 people waiting for tables, but last time I went, I was able to just walk right in, there was no one waiting. I've never seen the place so empty. I wondered where everyone was.
I went back again last weekend, and business was starting to pick up again, although still not nearly up to its usual levels.
I also often call myself a computational ecologist (degrees in computer science and applied math, but my PhD was basically spatial population ecology models).
I don't think biology at the level of ecology will fundamentally rewrite CS; mostly the transfer of technology is in the other direction, using computational models to study ecological dynamics. But I think you could apply some insights from (evolutionary) ecology to areas such as genetic algorithms, e.g. things like Danny Hillis' paper on using coevolving parasites to improve efficiency in searching for a minimal sorting network (there was a paper on it in the second Artificial Life conference proceedings way back around 1990 or so).
I bet this guy and this guy (builders of monorail and roller coaster in their backyards, respectively) are drooling over this auction, and their neighbors are thinking "please god, no".
I'm a math prof, and I use LaTeX, but I convert stuff to PDF before putting them on my web page for my students, since I think they have an easier time seeing pdf files on their computers than they do with dvi or ps files.
My pdf files used to look ugly on the screen (but print OK) when I used latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf I guess because of font madness that I never understood, but now I use pdflatex directly. That makes the text look good, but figured that I include in my documents don't get resized properly (I use \includegraphics from the graphicx package). Oh well, I can't win them all.
I'm an applied mathematician (mathematical biologist) and use a very similar set of tools:
Matlab for code that isn't too computation-intensive, and for visualization. I like Matlab's "pcolor" function to plot a raster image of a 2-D array (unfortunately Octave couldn't do that last time I tried; I used to use Gnuplot all the time, but outgrew it when I started wanting to plot these 2-D raster images).
C code for the big simulations that involve trillions of random events. In some cases, Matlab code that I translated to C ran 300 times faster. What took hours in Matlab takes seconds in C. I tried that Matlab compiler, but never had much luck with it.
Putting it all together, I usually write Perl scripts that run my C simulation programs many times; those programs dump out data arrays which I read into Matlab to visualize.
What would happen anyway if they did get rid of CDs? They would just put the same amount of songs on a DVD and sell them at a higher price:P
I'm not sure about the "higher price" bit. It seems like these days you can almost buy a movie on DVD for less than it costs to buy the soundtrack on CD. I don't have a specific example, but it sure feels like it's getting close enough to that that there must be at least one example.
I just got a PC that came with Windows XP. I wiped the hard drive, installed Linux, then installed VMWare. Inside the VMWare virtual machine, I put in the Windows XP CD that came with the computer, and installed XP there, and completed the WinXP activation with no problems. WinXP thinks it's running on a regular PC, it doesn't know it's inside VMWare.
(I had even more fun later when I tried Cygwin for the first time. I installed it under XP running in VMWare. So I ran X11 under Cyngwin under XP in VMWare under Linux, it gave me kind of a creepy feeling to see that X11 desktop inside the window on my other X11 desktop, even though I've had essentially the same view when using VNC before, but I always knew I was just looking at some remote machine.)
The one key I really missed on the pc keyboard is "front"....Raising windows to the front with one keypress or sending them to the very back (the important 2nd function of this key) is so ergonomic, it's just perfect.
I agree, and I also spent many years using Sun keyboards (on machines running SunView) and got used to popping windows to the front/back with just a keypress.
Under Linux now, I've just remapped my F11 key to do exactly that. I use the old fvwm2 window manager with AnotherLevel macros, which I started using in RedHat 5. It gets harder and harder to get it running under later RedHat releases. But I've got about 20 function key (some in combo with shift and/or control) mappings which warp me to my emacs, mozilla, xdvi, and other windows. I tried to figure out how to do that mapping under Gnome or KDE once, but couldn't figure it out. Oh well, fvwm2 is simple and does what the trick for me, so I won't be giving it up until finally I just can't get it to run any more under whatever version of Linux I'm using.
Every once in a while I check to see what new papers have come out that cite any of my papers.
I've had a couple of mine get cited for reasons which were not at all the main ideas in them. E.g. one got cited just so they could quote one phrase which was not at all important, and it seemed silly to cite me just to quote that phrase. But on the other hand, maybe other authors I've cited feel the same way, that I took some idea away from their paper which wasn't at all their main focus.
I have a Handspring Visor Neo, nothing too fancy. I use the address book, calendar, and memo pad all the time, although I was doing OK keeping that stuff on paper before. But then I got a Chinese/English dictionary for PalmOS, and suddenly didn't have to carry around my little hardcopy dictionary, and found the PDA very convenient in that aspect. It also has Chinese character recognition so I can look stuff up either by pronunciation or by writing. I've ended up using my PDA more than I expected to.
Of course, another advantage over paper calendars is that if I have a meeting scheduled regularly (e.g. every week), I just need to put it in once and can tell it to repeat that item at fixed intervals until a specified ending date.
> Oy the idiosy. Why are people obsessed with using pipes frivolously? > more/var/spool/mail/$USER
There is a good reason for using "cat" in this way. If you are using "more" directly as you suggest, then if someone else logged in on the same machine uses the command "w" to see what everone else is doing, they will see that you are reading your mail spool file directly, and either (a) laugh at you for being such a unix geek, or (b) realize that you are someone they can ask all their dumb unix questions. On the other hand, if you are using "cat" as the previous poster suggested, anyone else doing "w" will simply see that you are running "more", but won't know what you are reading with "more".
(And yes, of course anyone who knows enough to be familiar with the "ps" command will know what you are doing either way.)
Slashdot Mirror
Like many people, I also kicked the caffeine habit, years ago in my case. I used to get bad headaches now and then, and didn't know why, until eventually I realized it happened when I happened to go without caffeine for a few days. I decided I'd better either have caffeine every day, or give it up (in my case, I used to drink iced tea pretty much all the time).
After years being mostly caffeine-free, I'm terribly sensitive. If I have a can of coke today, and a can tomorrow, then I will almost certainly get a headache the day after.
I really love chocolate, but limit myself to just a few bites a day. If I have more than that, and then lower the amount again, I get a headache.
I don't mind, I just have to be careful about what I consume. And I make sure I only buy headache medicines which are caffeine-free, otherwise, it just postpones the problem but doesn't really help in the long run.
When I travel in China, sometimes it's not easy convincing people that no, I really don't want to drink tea. (And I do like tea, so I'll have it once in a while, but I really have to be careful to space it out, just once every several days at most.) Chinese people are so polite, and they think I'm just being polite, so I really have to explain that no, it'll give me a headache, which they often think is just crazy.
By the way, a friend of mine who knows about my sensitivity to caffeine cut out a little chart from a box of herbal tea she had, which I have hung onto since then, since I found it interesting. It shows the rough amounts of caffeine in various things, in milligrams per 8oz cup or equivalent:
herbal tea: 0 (of course, that's why they put the chart on their box of herbal tea)
decaffeinated coffee: 5mg
chocolate bar: 25
antioxidant green tea: 30
cola: 45
drip coffee: 90
double espresso: 160
Take it with a grain of salt, but there it is.
Ever since I was about 10 years old and heard about those experiments of putting people in caves to study their natural time cycles, I've always been interested in participating in such an experiment.
The closest I came was when I was an undergrad, spending summers working at Los Alamos National Lab. I was doing some computer work, and my boss didn't really care what time of day I worked, as long as I did my stuff. So for about a month I stopped paying attention to clocks and schedules. I'd sleep when I was tired, until I woke up naturally. Go in to work, and when I felt like I'd done enough, go home. Fortunately there was a 24-hour supermarket nearby, so I could do my shopping at 3am. My apartment had heavy curtains, so I could keep the place pretty dark when I wanted to sleep, even if it was sunny outside.
I ended up on roughly a 25-hour day, although it varied. It was really quite relaxing. It was a little odd though, when my boss came in to the office at 7:30am and saw me there, he wouldn't know if I was just getting started, or about to go home.
I wish I could do it again, but now I'm teaching classes, I can't exactly do that on my own schedule.
What does make me wonder is why the obscure page with a few oddball pictures of myself gets more hits than the whole rest of that section combined (or for that matter, how they get to it without going thru the main site).
If you are able to look at the referrer logs from your web server, those questions would be answered. It can be pretty amusing, by the way.
When I was at Cornell, my web page mentioned that I lived in "beautiful Ithaca, NY", and that I worked on "mathematical models in biology". I found that some people ended up at my home page after searching for "beautiful models".
I also wrote a children's story about a monkey, and had some info about it on my web page, along with pictures of a magazine it was published in. By far the most popular way people found my web pages was via searching for "monkey pictures", it's mind-boggling how many people were searching for that. But this was my favorite. You know how with some search engines you can search for some terms, but exclude others? Well, one person found my web page after doing a search for "monkey pictures", but excluding "sex"! It really made me wonder what they had found before, that caused them to add that exclusion term...
There have been many disappointed people coming to my web pages over the years (yeah yeah, 'cause my web pages are crappy, right?)
My problem with D-Link di604 routers is they time out idle ssh connections after a while. E.g. I stay logged into my office machine from home (going through the di604 at home) via ssh. After a while, the ssh connection gets closed.
It used to close after about 15-20 minutes. After I complained to them, their next firmware upgrade increased the timeout to several hours, but it still times out. WTF? If I want a router to time out my connections, I'll tell it that's what I want. Since then I've unplugged the di604, and have gone back to using an old 133MHz Pentium running Linux as my firewall/router.
My favorite is when they were playing pong:
Tim: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.
I don't know any kids who talk like that ("fear my pink line"?), but it's still funny.
I hated touchpads for pretty much the same reasons as you. I loved the little eraser-head pointer control on my old Toshiba. But my school recently bought a Thinkpad T-30 for me, which has both the trackpoint and the touchpad. I figured I'd never use the touchpad. But it turns out that's almost the only thing I use now; it's hard to say exactly why, but somehow IBM has "gotten it right" and made the only touchpad that feels natural to me.
Using the google calculator to look up "megabytes in mebibytes" says that "1 megabytes = 1 mebibytes".
Google has spoken.
Yet when people stop looking at it and live with it there is still the background noise and movement which serves to soften the environment and make it feel more alive.
I think it'd be really cool to have two of them on opposite walls, facing each other. If someone walked by every once in a while, that should add some life to it for quite a while, depending on how long the mirrors' reaction times are. Wave your arm in front of it, then watch the reflections propagate between them for half an hour...
Back when it originally came out, I only ever played Space Invaders using 3 buttons (left, right, and shoot). I never even knew there was an arcade model with a joystick until now (as one of the links indicates, the Taito version had a joystick; the Midway version only had buttons). I think I prefer the buttons, but probably only because that's what I was used to.
Hang in there. Once you're done, you can learn things at a rate you can only dream of now.
No need to wait until you're done. When I was in school, I spent a fairly small percentage of my time on actual schoolwork, and tons of time working on various projects in my spare time. I learned a lot more out of class than in, which has been useful to me in the years since.
The only steering wheel I like is the Thrustmaster Nascar Pro Digital 2. It's not force-feedback, but it has a great solid feel to it, much better than others I've used, although they're somewhat hard to find. I've got a couple, and also got one for my dad to play racing games with.
The last one I got, the brake pedal wasn't mounted on its potentiometer correctly, so I had to pop the cover off and spin the dial a bit before putting it together again, but it works great now too.
Using mouse/keyboard/joystick for driving games just isn't as good.
As others have said, you can always buy the unboxed movies later on, unless you are such a collector that you really need the complete set in a box (and if you are that much of a collector, I guess you should have all of the boxed sets anyway, right?).
I am more annoyed by the growing trend of rereleasing movies with more extras. E.g. I bought Terminator 2 and Dances With Wolves on DVD more than a year ago, and now it seems both of those have been rereleased with more extras (e.g. extra footage for Dances With Wolves). I don't want to pay to buy the whole movie again, just for those extras, but I would like to see that stuff. I wish they'd just decide on all the stuff they're going to put on the DVD, release it, and be done with it (although I can understand them rereleasing "historically important" films decades later with more stuff, that's a different situation).
According to a Chinese friend of mine in Boston, even many Chinese people are worried about SARS in Boston Chinatown, and thus avoiding the area somewhat, which surprised me. (Unfortunately, I wasn't terribly shocked when I heard that some Americans were avoiding Chinese restaurants in general because of fear of SARS.)
:-) Heck, I practically quarantined myself for a pretty good stretch of time while finishing up my PhD dissertation.
I have to admit, I was scheduled to spend about 6 weeks in China myself from May-July, but cancelled because of SARS. Not really out of fear of getting sick, but more out of concern about being stuck in my hotel for most of the trip, since universities are being pretty strict about who can enter and leave campus; and even some parks have closed. Most of my co-workers seemed more concerned about the possibility that I'd be quarantined for a while upon returning to the US. Personally, that wouldn't bother me so much.
I agree, Gauntlet is good. My girlfriend and I played through it on the N64 a few years ago, now we're going through it on the PS2. She's not that great at games (although she did get pretty good at Mario Kart 64 after we played it for hundreds and hundreds of hours :-) ), and I like the mindless slashing and exploring in Gauntlet. Plus there are a few pretty funny things in there, such as when you find the egg -- "Red Warrior is now poultry" and you turn into a chicken running around squawking.
And also, like others, we have enjoyed some 1-player games where I'm doing the controlling, but we're both figuring out what to do next.
Also like others, in Mario Kart 64, we'd do competitive racing, but promise to try not to hurt each other, and only to hurt the other computer players. We are really looking forward to the new Mario Kart for Gamecube.
I like simple games, and simple driving games. One of my favorites is Midtown Madness (1 and 2) for PC. I've finally got 2 decent PC's running Windows set up in my apartment, and 2 steering wheels, so I'm hoping to start doing some racing with her, although I expect it will take a while for her to get the hang of that. (I bought Midtown Madness 2 and a steering wheel for my dad after I bought my parents a new PC 2 years ago, since my dad used to race real cars. I finally did network racing against him last month when I brought my laptop and steering wheel home, but was fairly disappointed because I totally kicked his butt).
Ah, that solves one mystery I had been wondering about. I went to Boston for dim sum last month (I live up in Maine, and hadn't heard any rumors about SARS in Boston Chinatown). The place I go usually has at least 50 people waiting for tables, but last time I went, I was able to just walk right in, there was no one waiting. I've never seen the place so empty. I wondered where everyone was.
I went back again last weekend, and business was starting to pick up again, although still not nearly up to its usual levels.
I also often call myself a computational ecologist (degrees in computer science and applied math, but my PhD was basically spatial population ecology models).
I don't think biology at the level of ecology will fundamentally rewrite CS; mostly the transfer of technology is in the other direction, using computational models to study ecological dynamics. But I think you could apply some insights from (evolutionary) ecology to areas such as genetic algorithms, e.g. things like Danny Hillis' paper on using coevolving parasites to improve efficiency in searching for a minimal sorting network (there was a paper on it in the second Artificial Life conference proceedings way back around 1990 or so).
I bet this guy and this guy (builders of monorail and roller coaster in their backyards, respectively) are drooling over this auction, and their neighbors are thinking "please god, no".
I'm a math prof, and I use LaTeX, but I convert stuff to PDF before putting them on my web page for my students, since I think they have an easier time seeing pdf files on their computers than they do with dvi or ps files.
My pdf files used to look ugly on the screen (but print OK) when I used latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf I guess because of font madness that I never understood, but now I use pdflatex directly. That makes the text look good, but figured that I include in my documents don't get resized properly (I use \includegraphics from the graphicx package). Oh well, I can't win them all.
Putting it all together, I usually write Perl scripts that run my C simulation programs many times; those programs dump out data arrays which I read into Matlab to visualize.
What would happen anyway if they did get rid of CDs? They would just put the same amount of songs on a DVD and sell them at a higher price :P
I'm not sure about the "higher price" bit. It seems like these days you can almost buy a movie on DVD for less than it costs to buy the soundtrack on CD. I don't have a specific example, but it sure feels like it's getting close enough to that that there must be at least one example.
I just got a PC that came with Windows XP. I wiped the hard drive, installed Linux, then installed VMWare. Inside the VMWare virtual machine, I put in the Windows XP CD that came with the computer, and installed XP there, and completed the WinXP activation with no problems. WinXP thinks it's running on a regular PC, it doesn't know it's inside VMWare.
(I had even more fun later when I tried Cygwin for the first time. I installed it under XP running in VMWare. So I ran X11 under Cyngwin under XP in VMWare under Linux, it gave me kind of a creepy feeling to see that X11 desktop inside the window on my other X11 desktop, even though I've had essentially the same view when using VNC before, but I always knew I was just looking at some remote machine.)
The one key I really missed on the pc keyboard is "front". ...Raising windows to the front with one keypress or sending them to the very back (the important 2nd function of this key) is so ergonomic, it's just perfect.
I agree, and I also spent many years using Sun keyboards (on machines running SunView) and got used to popping windows to the front/back with just a keypress.
Under Linux now, I've just remapped my F11 key to do exactly that. I use the old fvwm2 window manager with AnotherLevel macros, which I started using in RedHat 5. It gets harder and harder to get it running under later RedHat releases. But I've got about 20 function key (some in combo with shift and/or control) mappings which warp me to my emacs, mozilla, xdvi, and other windows. I tried to figure out how to do that mapping under Gnome or KDE once, but couldn't figure it out. Oh well, fvwm2 is simple and does what the trick for me, so I won't be giving it up until finally I just can't get it to run any more under whatever version of Linux I'm using.
Every once in a while I check to see what new papers have come out that cite any of my papers.
I've had a couple of mine get cited for reasons which were not at all the main ideas in them. E.g. one got cited just so they could quote one phrase which was not at all important, and it seemed silly to cite me just to quote that phrase. But on the other hand, maybe other authors I've cited feel the same way, that I took some idea away from their paper which wasn't at all their main focus.
I have a Handspring Visor Neo, nothing too fancy. I use the address book, calendar, and memo pad all the time, although I was doing OK keeping that stuff on paper before. But then I got a Chinese/English dictionary for PalmOS, and suddenly didn't have to carry around my little hardcopy dictionary, and found the PDA very convenient in that aspect. It also has Chinese character recognition so I can look stuff up either by pronunciation or by writing. I've ended up using my PDA more than I expected to.
Of course, another advantage over paper calendars is that if I have a meeting scheduled regularly (e.g. every week), I just need to put it in once and can tell it to repeat that item at fixed intervals until a specified ending date.
>> cat /var/spool/mail/$USER | more
/var/spool/mail/$USER
> Oy the idiosy. Why are people obsessed with using pipes frivolously?
> more
There is a good reason for using "cat" in this way. If you are using "more" directly as you suggest, then if someone else logged in on the same machine uses the command "w" to see what everone else is doing, they will see that you are reading your mail spool file directly, and either (a) laugh at you for being such a unix geek, or (b) realize that you are someone they can ask all their dumb unix questions. On the other hand, if you are using "cat" as the previous poster suggested, anyone else doing "w" will simply see that you are running "more", but won't know what you are reading with "more".
(And yes, of course anyone who knows enough to be familiar with the "ps" command will know what you are doing either way.)