I know that some sailing companies sell transreflective TFT screens.
These are screens that behave like a gameboy advance screen. IE the screen is backed with a mirrored surface as well as a backlight. Thus in high light conditions they become more visible, rather than getting washed out by the sun.
These are very common in competitive yachting, and the leading companies sell laptops and flatscreen monitors that are transreflective. They are about 1.5 to 3 times more expensive than the regular screens but are usually dust and water resistant also.
Those same 60's "radicals" are now scrambling to prop up social security, etc so that they can get "their" money back out of the system that they revile so much. In doing so, they are complete hypocrites.
No one should sell out the future for their own gratification, but that is what they did in the sixties and what they still do. It was about sex and drugs and "freedom" from conformity and responsibility. Now it is the middle aged version of that, with "security" and "peace of mind," with no thought of the cost to anyone other than themselves.
In truth none of the things that make up our society are free or easy, and we are all going to have to work for them. It is wrong to desire them, but publically revile them and that is what that generation has always done.
Just a rant. Write me off as another X-er who is frustrated to see how the baby boomers f-ed the three generations after them. They'll eventually die off though... Joking.
Blind selfishness almost never pays dividends to society.
People have been trying to change society since it began. I sympathize with you when you lament the fact that society isn't as idealistic as you. I felt that way when I was 20 also.
The reality is that you are a part of a material oriented society. No one has offered any ostensibly workable alternative to it.
If you take this as an unfortunate truth, how then can you convince people to come around to your way of thinking?
If you can't force something on people, as we live in a society with some freedom of choice, you need to make it desirable to them.
Make green products and lifestyles desirable to people and they will be adopted. There is no social way to force the majority to adopt your ideals. Use an economic and practical way by making your ideals cheaper and more attractive.
If THE COOLEST products coming out were green, or even the cheapest ones, then green products would sell.
They don't now because they cost more and vary between marginally better to inferior to non-green products.
If the fastest production car in the world, think Viper, ran on a clean engine (pick your fuel/engine combo of choice) and was made with superrigid carbon fiber and green materials, would people buy them? What if you had an alternative to a gas sucking SUV that cost a similar amount but used clean power and green materials? Now what if production facilities were developed that made these cheaper to produce?
Lots of what ifs, but that is what we need. Don't waste design on JUST trying to build green, make it cooler than the alternative and people will flock to it.
People will always pick the thing that offers the greatest good to them at the least cost. I believe that people will readily choose green products when they offer more than those which aren't, at a similar price.
Check out the Viridian project if you want to see a group of people who speak to this better than I ever could.
It is nice to hear him talking about a preemptible kernel, as it will seriously help on older machines, (where it already runs well.)
I can't seem to find any info on pcmcia/pccard development though. I read somewhere that they were working on expanding the support for cardbus cards...
Unfortunately I'm stuck using a cardbus card (till I come up with more moola...) and FreeBSD doesn't have any way to handle it. Pretty standard realtek 8139 card too. Damn!
So I am using Debian. Not ideal but it'll play. If anyone out there has info on the freeBSD networking progress in this area, I would love to hear it.
Regardless, I'm sure that lots of us out here are eager to see 5.0, and will welcome 4.5 happily. Good work- keep it up!
Agreed.
Freebsd was a beautiful thing for me, as it weaned me from the bloat of redhat.
I have since switched to debian, but that is only because I need the nvidia binary drivers for my main system, and I like my systems to behave exactly the same way.
If you don't need those damnable drivers, there is no reason not to use *bsd. They are way more old-school unix-y, and seem more concerned with "correctness" then the linux camp.
Blackbox is great, but it has been out of development for a while. It is a bit NeXt-ish but super lightweight, and quite attractive. There is current development on the same codebase under "fluxbox". A few guys got tired of waiting for improvements, and just went for it. I love open source... I use fluxbox on my p133 laptop w/ 32 mb of ram, and it works great.
Icewm can be made to look more win32-ish. I have used it on and off, and think it is ok. It seems slower on my system than blackbox or fluxbox.
If you really want minimal, check wmx or aewm++. They are pretty cool, but do not have many features (by design).
For mail, try sylpheed or mutt. sylpheed is a nice gui mail client, mutt is console.
For news try pan, or slrn etc. I use pan exclusively now, as it is acceptably fast and has great features.
rxvt is blindingly fast, as an xterm replacement, and aterm is quick with cool features. i use aterm.
try Feh for images. It is lightweight and powerful. The montage feature is uber hip.
nedit is a good editor, as is kde's kate. Vim always runs quick.
Get mess and mame for games, they are lightweight and run a million old console or arcade roms.
Good luck to you,
Cuchullain
PS: management of your system becomes an issue with slow boxes, try debian with dselect. It seems to kick right along even on my slow boxes.
He/she may be disgruntled with the BSD folks, but there is no history of trolling that I can discern.
Seems like a qualified developer working for apple, (with whom he is definitely frustrated) who might be straight up about this.
What I am interested in is what he has to say about the 5.0 kernel. I understand that it is supposed to address the kernel problems.
Also, I was under the impression that the BSD tcp stack was pretty damn good.
I can't address the security stuff, as it isn't my forte.
I can also see a BSD dev guy asking that their code be removed. There are some pretty sanctimonious people in the BSD group. Would you want your code to be sold, if you didn't agree with the stuff it was with? With the BSD license, it just might.
Progeny contained 2.4.2 as of rc1. It should still have that in it... That way you get all of that debian loving, that Woody goodness, and a nifty graphical installer, and last but not least, the 2.4 kernel.
I found it to be immensely simpler than Debian (for newbies, like my dad), but it has some simple gotchas, like the fact that it doesn't ask whether the second CD is available. Other than that little annoyance, Progeny is pretty tight!
They usually have two pci slots, and if you look hard enough you can find one with a decent embedded video card. I have seen one with the ati rage -whatever- in it. (they are all rage "something".) Ok, so embedded video isn't great, but it is the form factor that matters, not the power right?
Don't let him torque you off. Debian is very user unfriendly in my experience also. I am from the BSD world, where even text installs JUST WORK. I found that the Distro that they are talking about in this article, Storm, was quite good. It had polish, and ease of use and configuration. It did most things correctly.
If you want the good of debian, ie: massive variety, idealogical purity, etc, but the good of mandrake: ease of install, eye candy, just works. You need to try one of the deb based distros, and Storm was the best.
I find that deb based distros handle dependencies more gracefully than rpms. You do have to get that apt-get list updated right though, and avoid unstable. They are REALLY unstable usually.
Don't let the zealots get you down. They just don't know how to express their enthusiasm politely. Probably been working tech support with very stupid users for too long, and are in "talk down to the idiot" mode permanently.
I understand that BlackBox and Windowmaker are currently KDE "aware", but are you working with the people who maintain them to make them more interoperable with KDE 2.0?
Which direction are you guys headed with Kwin, other than the stated purposes of skinning and cutting down on the memory load?
Finally, have you considered(and please forgive me if this is asinine) setting up a way to install a kind of KDE "Lite" that uses fewer resources and has less core function, but runs on older and less powerful machines?
Sounds like he is shaking in his shoes about there being a competitive standard other than java.
It really threatens Sun's core business to have every other vendor on the market adopt an open source, open standard os like Linux because it undermines the Java movement. Write once, Run anywhere means a lot less when every vendor is offering Linux. Heck, even if every vendor offered a *nix solution, it would wound them.
When you encode an MP3 you do so directly from a raw file ripped from a CD. Not a wav file. So You shouldn't get too horrible of a loss. Assuming that the mp3 writes its info the the MD with little to no loss and noise, it might not be as bad as you think.
History proves that this is true. We struggle with freedom and with evil, and often evil wins.
When you examine the greater portion of it though, the material accomplishments of Man are mostly positive, and in every age we strive to make ourselves into better beings. Freedom comes from that internal struggle between our base and higher instincts.
No external bond can negate that which is won internally. The external world can only assist or hinder the struggle which we all must engage in to become truly free and human. Those who chose not to try, relegate themselves to a world forever dominated by the external.
GOOD THOUGHT, WRONG APPROACH. JUST BECAUSE A CULTURE IS STABLE, IT IS NOT NECESSARILY PREFERABLE. TAKE FOR INSTANCE INDIA, THEY DO HAVE A GOOD AND STABLE SYSTEM. ONE THAT KEPT THE CASTES NICE AND SEPARATE AND PREVENTED ANYONE FROM MAKING SOMETHING DIFFERENT OF THEIR LIFE. IT VERY EFFECTIVELY FROZE THEM IN A EARLY FEUDAL STATE UP THROUGH THE BRITISH EMPIRE.
I WOULD SUGGEST THAT A STABLE CULTURE IS NOT ALWAYS A PREFERABLE ONE. FOR THE "SHORT" LIFESPAN OF ROME, IT PRODUCED A GREAT DEAL OF INTERESTING INNOVATIONS. THE FUTURE MAY SEE THE END OF OUR SOCIETY, AND ITS EVOLUTION INTO SOMETHING BETTER OR WORSE, OR JUST DIFFERENT, BUT IT IS DOUBTFUL THAT THEY WILL JUDGE US TO BE BAD SHEERLY BECAUSE WE WERE NOT STABLE. STABILITY IS NOT ALWAYS A SIGN OF SUPERIORITY. CULTURE IS DIFFERENT THAN CODE FOR A COMPUTER SYSTEM.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that anything like the famous Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"?
Deniro shouting "NO! Stop! Its a cookbook!"
Cuchullain
(Yes I know it was saves the world, but this would make a better movie)
I know that some sailing companies sell transreflective TFT screens.
These are screens that behave like a gameboy advance screen. IE the screen is backed with a mirrored surface as well as a backlight. Thus in high light conditions they become more visible, rather than getting washed out by the sun.
These are very common in competitive yachting, and the leading companies sell laptops and flatscreen monitors that are transreflective. They are about 1.5 to 3 times more expensive than the regular screens but are usually dust and water resistant also.
Good luck,
Hope this helped.
Cuchullain
Try Gasoline.
That should solve the problem of only having it work great initially.
Cuchullain
Love it. The syntax highlighting and general simplicity make it a winner.
I use the macro feature to dump stuff out to SQL and run the script I am working on with one key press.
It seriously works great, and it is freeware.
Cuchullain
How in Heaven's Name would you power this bad boy?
I can't imagine having 5 other teeth replaced by a lithium ion battery that needs to be recharged after an hour or two of use.
"Don't mind those jumper cables coming out the side of my mouth, my cell phone battery is running a bit low..."
Cuchullain
You are so correct, that it hurts.
Those same 60's "radicals" are now scrambling to prop up social security, etc so that they can get "their" money back out of the system that they revile so much. In doing so, they are complete hypocrites.
No one should sell out the future for their own gratification, but that is what they did in the sixties and what they still do. It was about sex and drugs and "freedom" from conformity and responsibility. Now it is the middle aged version of that, with "security" and "peace of mind," with no thought of the cost to anyone other than themselves.
In truth none of the things that make up our society are free or easy, and we are all going to have to work for them. It is wrong to desire them, but publically revile them and that is what that generation has always done.
Just a rant. Write me off as another X-er who is frustrated to see how the baby boomers f-ed the three generations after them. They'll eventually die off though... Joking.
Blind selfishness almost never pays dividends to society.
Cuchullain
People have been trying to change society since it began. I sympathize with you when you lament the fact that society isn't as idealistic as you. I felt that way when I was 20 also.
The reality is that you are a part of a material oriented society. No one has offered any ostensibly workable alternative to it.
If you take this as an unfortunate truth, how then can you convince people to come around to your way of thinking?
If you can't force something on people, as we live in a society with some freedom of choice, you need to make it desirable to them.
Make green products and lifestyles desirable to people and they will be adopted. There is no social way to force the majority to adopt your ideals. Use an economic and practical way by making your ideals cheaper and more attractive.
IE cooler and cheaper.
Cuchullain
It isn't just "your fault".
If THE COOLEST products coming out were green, or even the cheapest ones, then green products would sell.
They don't now because they cost more and vary between marginally better to inferior to non-green products.
If the fastest production car in the world, think Viper, ran on a clean engine (pick your fuel/engine combo of choice) and was made with superrigid carbon fiber and green materials, would people buy them? What if you had an alternative to a gas sucking SUV that cost a similar amount but used clean power and green materials? Now what if production facilities were developed that made these cheaper to produce?
Lots of what ifs, but that is what we need. Don't waste design on JUST trying to build green, make it cooler than the alternative and people will flock to it.
People will always pick the thing that offers the greatest good to them at the least cost. I believe that people will readily choose green products when they offer more than those which aren't, at a similar price.
Check out the Viridian project if you want to see a group of people who speak to this better than I ever could.
Cuchullain
Hey all,
It is nice to hear him talking about a preemptible kernel, as it will seriously help on older machines, (where it already runs well.)
I can't seem to find any info on pcmcia/pccard development though. I read somewhere that they were working on expanding the support for cardbus cards...
Unfortunately I'm stuck using a cardbus card (till I come up with more moola...) and FreeBSD doesn't have any way to handle it. Pretty standard realtek 8139 card too. Damn!
So I am using Debian. Not ideal but it'll play. If anyone out there has info on the freeBSD networking progress in this area, I would love to hear it.
Regardless, I'm sure that lots of us out here are eager to see 5.0, and will welcome 4.5 happily. Good work- keep it up!
Cuchullain
As a married man, I only somewhat agree.
I will stay in, get tipsy, put the kid to bed, then get laid.
Maybe even drunk, post 8pm baby bedtime. So I miss out on desperately searching for someone in a bar. Why should that disappoint me?
Later
Cuchullain
Agreed.
Freebsd was a beautiful thing for me, as it weaned me from the bloat of redhat.
I have since switched to debian, but that is only because I need the nvidia binary drivers for my main system, and I like my systems to behave exactly the same way.
If you don't need those damnable drivers, there is no reason not to use *bsd. They are way more old-school unix-y, and seem more concerned with "correctness" then the linux camp.
Cuchullain
Hey,
Blackbox is great, but it has been out of development for a while. It is a bit NeXt-ish but super lightweight, and quite attractive. There is current development on the same codebase under "fluxbox". A few guys got tired of waiting for improvements, and just went for it. I love open source... I use fluxbox on my p133 laptop w/ 32 mb of ram, and it works great.
Icewm can be made to look more win32-ish. I have used it on and off, and think it is ok. It seems slower on my system than blackbox or fluxbox.
If you really want minimal, check wmx or aewm++. They are pretty cool, but do not have many features (by design).
For mail, try sylpheed or mutt. sylpheed is a nice gui mail client, mutt is console.
For news try pan, or slrn etc. I use pan exclusively now, as it is acceptably fast and has great features.
rxvt is blindingly fast, as an xterm replacement, and aterm is quick with cool features. i use aterm.
try Feh for images. It is lightweight and powerful. The montage feature is uber hip.
nedit is a good editor, as is kde's kate. Vim always runs quick.
Get mess and mame for games, they are lightweight and run a million old console or arcade roms.
Good luck to you,
Cuchullain
PS: management of your system becomes an issue with slow boxes, try debian with dselect. It seems to kick right along even on my slow boxes.
Shipstones?
The lager? What are you talking about?
Enlighten us.
As for the IBook, they are great. Using the ports collection with OSX you can have the best of all worlds...
K
Cool.
Thanks man. I hate it when I get taken for a ride.
I didn't have the technical knowledge to discern truth. I thought the tcp stack part sounded fishy though.
Cuchullain
I don't think this guy is trolling here.
He/she may be disgruntled with the BSD folks, but there is no history of trolling that I can discern.
Seems like a qualified developer working for apple, (with whom he is definitely frustrated) who might be straight up about this.
What I am interested in is what he has to say about the 5.0 kernel. I understand that it is supposed to address the kernel problems.
Also, I was under the impression that the BSD tcp stack was pretty damn good.
I can't address the security stuff, as it isn't my forte.
I can also see a BSD dev guy asking that their code be removed. There are some pretty sanctimonious people in the BSD group. Would you want your code to be sold, if you didn't agree with the stuff it was with? With the BSD license, it just might.
my 2 cents.
Cuchullain
Excellent troll. The best that I have seen in a long time...
Progeny contained 2.4.2 as of rc1. It should still have that in it... That way you get all of that debian loving, that Woody goodness, and a nifty graphical installer, and last but not least, the 2.4 kernel.
I found it to be immensely simpler than Debian (for newbies, like my dad), but it has some simple gotchas, like the fact that it doesn't ask whether the second CD is available. Other than that little annoyance, Progeny is pretty tight!
Cuchullain
Look for a decent flex atx case and mb.
They usually have two pci slots, and if you look hard enough you can find one with a decent embedded video card. I have seen one with the ati rage -whatever- in it. (they are all rage "something".) Ok, so embedded video isn't great, but it is the form factor that matters, not the power right?
Cuchullain
Dude,
Don't let him torque you off. Debian is very user unfriendly in my experience also. I am from the BSD world, where even text installs JUST WORK. I found that the Distro that they are talking about in this article, Storm, was quite good. It had polish, and ease of use and configuration. It did most things correctly.
If you want the good of debian, ie: massive variety, idealogical purity, etc, but the good of mandrake: ease of install, eye candy, just works. You need to try one of the deb based distros, and Storm was the best.
I find that deb based distros handle dependencies more gracefully than rpms. You do have to get that apt-get list updated right though, and avoid unstable. They are REALLY unstable usually.
Don't let the zealots get you down. They just don't know how to express their enthusiasm politely. Probably been working tech support with very stupid users for too long, and are in "talk down to the idiot" mode permanently.
Cuchullain
I understand that BlackBox and Windowmaker are currently KDE "aware", but are you working with the people who maintain them to make them more interoperable with KDE 2.0?
Which direction are you guys headed with Kwin, other than the stated purposes of skinning and cutting down on the memory load?
Finally, have you considered(and please forgive me if this is asinine) setting up a way to install a kind of KDE "Lite" that uses fewer resources and has less core function, but runs on older and less powerful machines?
Cuchullain
Hey,
Try BlackBox again. 5.05 is out and Brad rewrote the rendering code. He claims it is 50% faster, and I tend to believe it after using it.
I can't believe that it won't race past E if speed is your only desire. E is pretty dang cool though...
Cuchullain
Sounds like he is shaking in his shoes about there being a competitive standard other than java.
It really threatens Sun's core business to have every other vendor on the market adopt an open source, open standard os like Linux because it undermines the Java movement. Write once, Run anywhere means a lot less when every vendor is offering Linux. Heck, even if every vendor offered a *nix solution, it would wound them.
just my $.02
When you encode an MP3 you do so directly from a raw file ripped from a CD. Not a wav file. So You shouldn't get too horrible of a loss. Assuming that the mp3 writes its info the the MD with little to no loss and noise, it might not be as bad as you think.
History proves that this is true. We struggle with freedom and with evil, and often evil wins.
When you examine the greater portion of it though, the material accomplishments of Man are mostly positive, and in every age we strive to make ourselves into better beings. Freedom comes from that internal struggle between our base and higher instincts.
No external bond can negate that which is won internally. The external world can only assist or hinder the struggle which we all must engage in to become truly free and human. Those who chose not to try, relegate themselves to a world forever dominated by the external.
OUCH.
PLEASE FORGIVE THE CAPS. TYPING ON A TERMINAL.
GOOD THOUGHT, WRONG APPROACH. JUST BECAUSE A CULTURE IS STABLE, IT IS NOT NECESSARILY PREFERABLE. TAKE FOR INSTANCE INDIA, THEY DO HAVE A GOOD AND STABLE SYSTEM. ONE THAT KEPT THE CASTES NICE AND SEPARATE AND PREVENTED ANYONE FROM MAKING SOMETHING DIFFERENT OF THEIR LIFE. IT VERY EFFECTIVELY FROZE THEM IN A EARLY FEUDAL STATE UP THROUGH THE BRITISH EMPIRE.
I WOULD SUGGEST THAT A STABLE CULTURE IS NOT ALWAYS A PREFERABLE ONE. FOR THE "SHORT" LIFESPAN OF ROME, IT PRODUCED A GREAT DEAL OF INTERESTING INNOVATIONS. THE FUTURE MAY SEE THE END OF OUR SOCIETY, AND ITS EVOLUTION INTO SOMETHING BETTER OR WORSE, OR JUST DIFFERENT, BUT IT IS DOUBTFUL THAT THEY WILL JUDGE US TO BE BAD SHEERLY BECAUSE WE WERE NOT STABLE. STABILITY IS NOT ALWAYS A SIGN OF SUPERIORITY. CULTURE IS DIFFERENT THAN CODE FOR A COMPUTER SYSTEM.
K