I've seen a lot of them and most of them have various things wrong with them.
The only type of tray that I've seen work is one that is built into a properly ergonomic desk. Those are nice. They are generally sturdy stuff, match the rest of the desk, and are of the same quality as the rest of the desk.
Given that I'm a pretty big person, I actually find that I don't like keyboard trays because normal desk height is perfectly comfortable for me. Any lower and I'd be knocking my knees against it.
Well, my project is using OpenGL and OpenAL as the 3D library and audio library, respectively. For a 2D library, OpenPTC is always nice, but you can also try faking some 2D under OpenGL. That is the first step on getting your software cross-platform.
Input is not as problematic as you'd think and is relitively easy to port across platforms. Especially for joystick, mouse, and keys.
Right now I'm using GLUT to handle input and windowing for the actual game executable and wxWindows for the other tools. I'm tempted to switch entirely over to wxWindows, although it doesn't have an up-to-date Mac port. The problem with GLUT is that it isn't fast and isn't powerful, but it's great for getting things up and running quickly.
But as long as you just have to rewrite the program that popps up a window and sets up the OpenGL/OpenAL contexts, it's not as big as starting in DirectX and porting to GL. Just carefully architect the basic framework and there won't be any problems.
Also note that Mozilla's C++ Portability guide may prove to be useful. The goal is to think about portability from the beginning.
The problem is, banner ads and popups are not working at all.
Adding popups or bigger banners isn't going to fix that. It's just going to annoy the user.
The problem is that we need a new way to pay for the free information on the 'net. That will probably either be an "Internet Tax" where users pay a certain amount of cash a month and then that cash gets divied up among all of the sites that the user accesses. Or a micropayment system that is reasonably painless.
I've been saying this for a few years now. The 'net market is going to change a LOT and a good percentage of the commercial content is going to go down.
The 'net is still like the early days of TV. In the early days of TV, they modified radio and movie programming a little bit and called that TV. Then, later, real TV programming developed.
First, it is severely unethical for you to pull the wool over your supervisor's eyes and make them agree to making the code GPL. You are no better than the consultant who convinces his boss to buy something that he doesn't need.
Having said that, the situation has two ways it can play out:
1) Your bosses could have not had the authority to deligate the IP rights to your code, which would therefore mean that they get the copyright and you get the shaft.
2) Your bosses could have given you the IP rights to the code and therefore you can do whatever you want with it.
Now, in case 2, there are two ways that it can pan out.
First, writing code under the GPL does not necessarily imply that's the only terms it can be distributed under. You can cut a deal where the military can keep it proprietary and the rest of the world has the GPL to deal with. This is the nice thing to do, because it probably won't result in you pissing off your bosses.
Second, you could be forced to sign your code over via various techniques. You could be summarily fired, blacklisted, or sued in various creative ways.
I'd suggest you try to work things out the first way. Since they assigned the copyright to you, you are empowered to license it under any number of license agreements. And you will be giving a lot of open source people a bad name if you tie them up with the GPL.
1) Even if you overwrite the data with a "Military grade" data wipe tool, there exist pieces of hardware that will still be able to recover your data, if they want to enough.
2) Low-level formating is left for the factory. Modern drives have embedded servo information that you can't recreate without the aid of expensive factory hardware. And that wouldn't help you too much, anyways, given that it won't do a satisfactory job of wiping the disk.
This is why the manual warns you to not degaus the drive.
So your best bet is to just destroy the sucker. First wipe the drive using one of the wiping tools mentioned and then have fun.
I'd suggest you try microwaving it. But don't use your own microwave, because it'll probably end up frying the microwave given enough time. The fireworks are sure to be a crowd pleaser.
You also might consider playing hard disk platter frisbee. Although, with modern 3.5" drives, it's a lot harder than 5.25" or 8" platters.
And, once you've had your fun -- make sure that your disk platter frisbee buddies are people you trust -- just thermite the platters. You can find instructions on how to do thermite at any popular anarchist webpage.
If you leave the drive usable, there is always the possibility of discovery.
First, point out that there are legitimate, academics-enhancing usages of an unrestricted LAN -- i.e. things other than Napster. I keep an FTP and VNC server running on my computer -- well locked down, of course -- so that I can access files and resources on my computer when I'm in a lab or something. Given that university computers don't generally have a CD-RW drive and many files are too big for floppies these days, it is a great help. Furthermore, if you are working on a networked academic project -- which is just going to increase in the comming years -- it is extremely useful to not have to wory about it being locked down. And them just filtering from the public Internet isn't going to help, as that will prevent anybody who doesn't live on campus from aiding development of networked projects.
The second prong is more legal and philisophical. You want them to make sure that they are not going to be acting like your personal monitor. This destroys student academic freedom and exposes them to a lot of liability. Once they start blocking incomming connections, the route to first blocking porn sites, then "Objectionable" sites, and then you get the picture after that.
It's pretty easy to get a lot of Americans pissed off at your opponents. Just call them "Un-American". Just think about the House Unamerican Activities Comission and all of the American lives it ruined in the fifties.
God I'm glad I was born in '78. I missed out on the fifties AND the sixties!;)
I've had the best results not by giving gifts, but by doing things.
One thing that works is you get rose petals and roses, and put them around their room, computer desk, etc. One good thing is that, if they are a geek, they will probably be checking their e-mail as they are trying to wake up. So put some flowers around their computer and change their desktop pattern.
Turning obselete hardware into something nice is always popular, of course.;)
But you should also just generally do some nice things for your valentine, and this works for even geeks. You just need to change the paramters of what you do. Providing them with what they would consider a nice dinner out is good for just about everybody.
And if you forget about the obligatory valentines day huggle and snuggle, you deserve to be a dateless one-handed IRCer.;)
You want to keep your operating expenses as minimal as possible. This is because your profit margins need to be extrordinarily low. Whatever is moving lots of volume you can keep around, but the rest you will need to keep minimal inventory. Leave the carying of everything under the sun to Best Buy.
You need to run around like a headles chicken. You can't afford to keep many people around. Your best bet in that respect is to hire high-school students because they will work pretty hard for not too much. I did it because it was better than making pizza, so you probably will get people like me. Just keep them in the back unless they are really congenial.
Cary Linux, BSD, and other such things and know what you are doing with them. The type of person who appreciates quality enough to build the system themselves or get a custom system is going to be interested in those things. Give them good advice, but make sure that they don't get annoyed if they know more than you.
Look the other way when it's not going to be a problem for you. One time, I was upgrading and I fried a DIMM. The place looked the other way and submitted it back to their supplier for a waranty replacement. I made sure to purchase from them from then on, up until they went under.
Cary some geekish stuff, but be careful until you see what kind of clientelle you attract.
Help out the geekish community so they will help you in return. Sponsor LAN parties. Have a Linux install workshop. Things like that.
You know, it never occured to me in that article that, while American offices and homes are generally slightly roomy, the Japanese offices are probably infinitely more squished and that might be who's buying a lot of the LCD screens.
Anyways..
We won't be loosing our laptops like pieces of paper anytime soon because of all of the other hardware -- the CPU, the disk drive, etc.
And, there's always the warnings about vaporware. They have been promising something to beat the LCD for portable usage for years and years and have been promising something to beat the CRT for desktop usage, but people keep coming back.
I suspect that it will be similar to LCD screens in that there are a lot of dud screens to push the price up. This is extrapolation, so somebody might want to correct me if I'm wrong. But IIRC, the main thing that's preventing LCD screens from really taking over is that there is such a high likelyhood for a completed display to not work.
But a thinner, self-luminescent display would probably be a good thing for cell-phones, which have been moving strongly into the realm of style, which a OEL screen should help with, even if it isn't a quantom leap above LCD screens.
Actually, if you check out the ATSC standard, the standard specifies both 1080i and 1080p. 1080i is available in 59.94 and 60 Hz, while 1080p is available in 23.976, 24, 29.97, and 30 Hz.
Where the confusion lies is that 1080p is not at 60Hz, just at 30Hz. So everybody sends 1080i instead, because it's the same frame rate but the action is a little better.
Now, with 720p, you can do it at 60Hz.
I suspect that in the future, HDTV manufacturers will be adding functionality so that their sets will be able to display 1920x1080x75 Hz or at least 60Hz progressive. Right now, this is not the case, so most HDTV sets are constrained to 1920x1080x30Hz p or 60Hz i, so they make you use 800x600, because they don't want to de-interlace the video.
HDTV does 1920x1080 frames. They can be up to 30Hz progressive scanned or 60Hz interlace (that is, drawing half of the screen at a time) scanned.
Or, you can bump the resolution down to 1280x720 60Hz progressive.
1080i, as they call the 1920x1080x60Hz Interlaced standard, is still a pretty good resolution and is nothing to sneeze at. In a few years, there will probably be HDTV sets with computer-friendly inputs that will do 1920x1080x75Hz progressive.
I mean, the people at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been against Wireless Ethernet for a while, primarily because -- even before WEP was known to be crackable -- Wireless Ethernet was a shared medium open to sniffing.
I know what I'd use one for. I'd snake an ethernet cable out the back and use it as a Linux box within my Windows box, without needing to deal with the space that an extra machine would take up.
Then I'd run an X server on my Windows box so that I didn't need two monitors.
Guys, we've known for a LONG time that there are a set of things that need to be done in order to make stable software. None of that is anything new.
So the problem is not that we don't know what to do. It's either that it's not sticking in people's heads or that there are outside forces that are preventing this.
In the case of your average software developer, both of these are happening. Good programming practice gets put on the back burner because they *need* to ship.
I'd go with FAT. It's a lowest common denominator -- Windoze, MacOS, Linux, BeOS, heck, even GS/OS on the Apple IIgs can read it. It's also not as complex as you'd think, as long as you don't try to get too fancy with it.
I'm wondering, however.. Given that an 66MHz 486 has issues playing MP3s, do you have enough horsepower with an 8 bit 30MHz processor to decode an MP3? It's 360 30MHz cycles per floating point multiply on the CPU.
Slightly related, Is it just me or is shorthand falling out of fashion? Nobody writes it anymore. A good typist can type faster than a good shorthand writer. Voice recording is cheap.
I, personally, find that the best solution is to cary a laptop around with me for notetaking. I haven't had any real cases where I couldn't type fast enough to keep up.
There is a good reason for having it. I'm pretty much undecided on the whole issue, but I can see a few issues and some good reasons.
Mainly, it's a lot easier to prosecute somebody for putting what clearly looks to be a minor in a porn vid by just stating that it "looks like kiddie porn" than trying to dig up the creator of the vid (hard), and then proving the age of the person in the vid (also hard).
So by making it illegal to even LOOK like there is a minor in the vid, you therefore save the afformentioned effort.
Now, I will say that, either way, there's a lot of holes in this. What is the difference between a 17 year old person before their 18th and an 18 year old person after their 18th? A few thousand dead cells here, a few thousand cell divisions there, and a few new neuron patterns established.
And I'm not sure what to think of all of this. I mean, people need to distinguish between the truly wrong -- an unwilling 12 year old girl getting graphically raped on camera -- the merely sick -- a girl who may be 16 or 20 that some guys find attractive dancing around naked -- and the artistic -- the boatloads of paintings from ages past that involve naked people of all ages, from 1 to 80.
Some of those have possibilities for convenience. Imagine if you could have the flourescent light on when the computer was not. I always find that it's annoying to be prodding around on the inside of my case when it's under the desk and blocking the light. I don't want to have to pull out everything to swap a card out, I want to be able to lie on the floor and do it. So in that case, a neon light would be really useful, kinda like the little bulb underneath the hood of a car.
Maybe I should get into the case-mod scene. I never really liked the overclocking scene because I do real work on my computer. But some of those mods look rather interesting..;)
I think you are talking about the SuperMicro SC750-A case. That's what I have, and it's not very fancy but very very nice. It's got four drive bay cooler fans, two fan mounts in front, one fan mount directly over the CPU, one fan mount above the power supply, the traditional screw-in for a fan behind the CPU, and a crapload of drive bays.
The only thing is, most of the fans you have to buy seperately.
This can go two ways. Either things will be like Data General in the 70s, where all of the DEC salespeople told their customers how Data General was an awful company with an awful product and stuff. So the clients would make sure to call Data General and see what they had to say before they made their decision. In this case, MS's attacks will merely serve as extra advertising for Linux.
And companies will port their crown jewels to Linux to give them a crowbar to use on MS the next time they negotiate anything.
Or Linux will die. There are a LOT of interpersonal open-source issues that Linux has to deal with. MS has the advantage of writing a single desktop system. Linux has KDE and GNOME, plus various other efforts. Linux has all of the features of Unix, now it needs to innovate and cover new area, and it isn't doing as well at that.
Plus, remember that MS almost got caught with their pants down with that whole Internet thing and they still managed to come out on top. They have been watching the Linux and BeOS developments for a while. The Halloween documents date from 1998. That's over 2 years of examining the Linux crowd's behaviour. That's NOT their behaviour with regards to the 'net, where they got whapped in the ass and needing to make a costly u-turn.
There's a good reason. Each density of CD needs a different laser, or else it won't be able to read the pits on the disk.
The optical storage industry went through the same thought process. They decided that they could make multi-layer disks at the same time. And they came up with DVD's.
Your idea is just about the same as a DVD. In both cases, you need a second laser and a more accurate focusing assembley.
Besides, by the time that such a quad-density or dual-density CD-RW would be developed, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, or DVD+RW would be on the mass market. I just hope that SOMEBODY blinks and that at least one, hopefully two, will die.
Or maybe the FMD disks will take over. That would be nice, but I've seen similar promises before that haven't actually panned out.
Slashdot Mirror
The best keyboard tray is none at all.
I've seen a lot of them and most of them have various things wrong with them.
The only type of tray that I've seen work is one that is built into a properly ergonomic desk. Those are nice. They are generally sturdy stuff, match the rest of the desk, and are of the same quality as the rest of the desk.
Given that I'm a pretty big person, I actually find that I don't like keyboard trays because normal desk height is perfectly comfortable for me. Any lower and I'd be knocking my knees against it.
Well, my project is using OpenGL and OpenAL as the 3D library and audio library, respectively. For a 2D library, OpenPTC is always nice, but you can also try faking some 2D under OpenGL. That is the first step on getting your software cross-platform.
Input is not as problematic as you'd think and is relitively easy to port across platforms. Especially for joystick, mouse, and keys.
Right now I'm using GLUT to handle input and windowing for the actual game executable and wxWindows for the other tools. I'm tempted to switch entirely over to wxWindows, although it doesn't have an up-to-date Mac port. The problem with GLUT is that it isn't fast and isn't powerful, but it's great for getting things up and running quickly.
But as long as you just have to rewrite the program that popps up a window and sets up the OpenGL/OpenAL contexts, it's not as big as starting in DirectX and porting to GL. Just carefully architect the basic framework and there won't be any problems.
Also note that Mozilla's C++ Portability guide may prove to be useful. The goal is to think about portability from the beginning.
The problem is, banner ads and popups are not working at all.
Adding popups or bigger banners isn't going to fix that. It's just going to annoy the user.
The problem is that we need a new way to pay for the free information on the 'net. That will probably either be an "Internet Tax" where users pay a certain amount of cash a month and then that cash gets divied up among all of the sites that the user accesses. Or a micropayment system that is reasonably painless.
I've been saying this for a few years now. The 'net market is going to change a LOT and a good percentage of the commercial content is going to go down.
The 'net is still like the early days of TV. In the early days of TV, they modified radio and movie programming a little bit and called that TV. Then, later, real TV programming developed.
There are a number of issues at play here.
First, it is severely unethical for you to pull the wool over your supervisor's eyes and make them agree to making the code GPL. You are no better than the consultant who convinces his boss to buy something that he doesn't need.
Having said that, the situation has two ways it can play out:
1) Your bosses could have not had the authority to deligate the IP rights to your code, which would therefore mean that they get the copyright and you get the shaft.
2) Your bosses could have given you the IP rights to the code and therefore you can do whatever you want with it.
Now, in case 2, there are two ways that it can pan out.
First, writing code under the GPL does not necessarily imply that's the only terms it can be distributed under. You can cut a deal where the military can keep it proprietary and the rest of the world has the GPL to deal with. This is the nice thing to do, because it probably won't result in you pissing off your bosses.
Second, you could be forced to sign your code over via various techniques. You could be summarily fired, blacklisted, or sued in various creative ways.
I'd suggest you try to work things out the first way. Since they assigned the copyright to you, you are empowered to license it under any number of license agreements. And you will be giving a lot of open source people a bad name if you tie them up with the GPL.
A few points that haven't been mentioned yet.
1) Even if you overwrite the data with a "Military grade" data wipe tool, there exist pieces of hardware that will still be able to recover your data, if they want to enough.
2) Low-level formating is left for the factory. Modern drives have embedded servo information that you can't recreate without the aid of expensive factory hardware. And that wouldn't help you too much, anyways, given that it won't do a satisfactory job of wiping the disk.
This is why the manual warns you to not degaus the drive.
So your best bet is to just destroy the sucker. First wipe the drive using one of the wiping tools mentioned and then have fun.
I'd suggest you try microwaving it. But don't use your own microwave, because it'll probably end up frying the microwave given enough time. The fireworks are sure to be a crowd pleaser.
You also might consider playing hard disk platter frisbee. Although, with modern 3.5" drives, it's a lot harder than 5.25" or 8" platters.
And, once you've had your fun -- make sure that your disk platter frisbee buddies are people you trust -- just thermite the platters. You can find instructions on how to do thermite at any popular anarchist webpage.
If you leave the drive usable, there is always the possibility of discovery.
I would suggest two tactics.
First, point out that there are legitimate, academics-enhancing usages of an unrestricted LAN -- i.e. things other than Napster. I keep an FTP and VNC server running on my computer -- well locked down, of course -- so that I can access files and resources on my computer when I'm in a lab or something. Given that university computers don't generally have a CD-RW drive and many files are too big for floppies these days, it is a great help. Furthermore, if you are working on a networked academic project -- which is just going to increase in the comming years -- it is extremely useful to not have to wory about it being locked down. And them just filtering from the public Internet isn't going to help, as that will prevent anybody who doesn't live on campus from aiding development of networked projects.
The second prong is more legal and philisophical. You want them to make sure that they are not going to be acting like your personal monitor. This destroys student academic freedom and exposes them to a lot of liability. Once they start blocking incomming connections, the route to first blocking porn sites, then "Objectionable" sites, and then you get the picture after that.
Check your employment contract VERY CAREFULLY. Sometimes they have some explicit provisions against what you are doing.
It's pretty easy to get a lot of Americans pissed off at your opponents. Just call them "Un-American". Just think about the House Unamerican Activities Comission and all of the American lives it ruined in the fifties.
;)
God I'm glad I was born in '78. I missed out on the fifties AND the sixties!
I've had the best results not by giving gifts, but by doing things.
;)
;)
One thing that works is you get rose petals and roses, and put them around their room, computer desk, etc. One good thing is that, if they are a geek, they will probably be checking their e-mail as they are trying to wake up. So put some flowers around their computer and change their desktop pattern.
Turning obselete hardware into something nice is always popular, of course.
But you should also just generally do some nice things for your valentine, and this works for even geeks. You just need to change the paramters of what you do. Providing them with what they would consider a nice dinner out is good for just about everybody.
And if you forget about the obligatory valentines day huggle and snuggle, you deserve to be a dateless one-handed IRCer.
You want to keep your operating expenses as minimal as possible. This is because your profit margins need to be extrordinarily low. Whatever is moving lots of volume you can keep around, but the rest you will need to keep minimal inventory. Leave the carying of everything under the sun to Best Buy.
You need to run around like a headles chicken. You can't afford to keep many people around. Your best bet in that respect is to hire high-school students because they will work pretty hard for not too much. I did it because it was better than making pizza, so you probably will get people like me. Just keep them in the back unless they are really congenial.
Cary Linux, BSD, and other such things and know what you are doing with them. The type of person who appreciates quality enough to build the system themselves or get a custom system is going to be interested in those things. Give them good advice, but make sure that they don't get annoyed if they know more than you.
Look the other way when it's not going to be a problem for you. One time, I was upgrading and I fried a DIMM. The place looked the other way and submitted it back to their supplier for a waranty replacement. I made sure to purchase from them from then on, up until they went under.
Cary some geekish stuff, but be careful until you see what kind of clientelle you attract.
Help out the geekish community so they will help you in return. Sponsor LAN parties. Have a Linux install workshop. Things like that.
The only warning is that some of the Epson printers have support under Linux, but only for the 4-color mode, not the 6-color mode.
I have an Epson Stylus Photo 750, but I'm using it under Win2k, not Linux.
You know, it never occured to me in that article that, while American offices and homes are generally slightly roomy, the Japanese offices are probably infinitely more squished and that might be who's buying a lot of the LCD screens.
Anyways..
We won't be loosing our laptops like pieces of paper anytime soon because of all of the other hardware -- the CPU, the disk drive, etc.
And, there's always the warnings about vaporware. They have been promising something to beat the LCD for portable usage for years and years and have been promising something to beat the CRT for desktop usage, but people keep coming back.
I suspect that it will be similar to LCD screens in that there are a lot of dud screens to push the price up. This is extrapolation, so somebody might want to correct me if I'm wrong. But IIRC, the main thing that's preventing LCD screens from really taking over is that there is such a high likelyhood for a completed display to not work.
But a thinner, self-luminescent display would probably be a good thing for cell-phones, which have been moving strongly into the realm of style, which a OEL screen should help with, even if it isn't a quantom leap above LCD screens.
Actually, if you check out the ATSC standard, the standard specifies both 1080i and 1080p. 1080i is available in 59.94 and 60 Hz, while 1080p is available in 23.976, 24, 29.97, and 30 Hz.
Where the confusion lies is that 1080p is not at 60Hz, just at 30Hz. So everybody sends 1080i instead, because it's the same frame rate but the action is a little better.
Now, with 720p, you can do it at 60Hz.
I suspect that in the future, HDTV manufacturers will be adding functionality so that their sets will be able to display 1920x1080x75 Hz or at least 60Hz progressive. Right now, this is not the case, so most HDTV sets are constrained to 1920x1080x30Hz p or 60Hz i, so they make you use 800x600, because they don't want to de-interlace the video.
HDTV does 1920x1080 frames. They can be up to 30Hz progressive scanned or 60Hz interlace (that is, drawing half of the screen at a time) scanned. Or, you can bump the resolution down to 1280x720 60Hz progressive. 1080i, as they call the 1920x1080x60Hz Interlaced standard, is still a pretty good resolution and is nothing to sneeze at. In a few years, there will probably be HDTV sets with computer-friendly inputs that will do 1920x1080x75Hz progressive.
I figured that it had to happen.
I mean, the people at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been against Wireless Ethernet for a while, primarily because -- even before WEP was known to be crackable -- Wireless Ethernet was a shared medium open to sniffing.
I know what I'd use one for. I'd snake an ethernet cable out the back and use it as a Linux box within my Windows box, without needing to deal with the space that an extra machine would take up.
;)
Then I'd run an X server on my Windows box so that I didn't need two monitors.
I'd like it..
Guys, we've known for a LONG time that there are a set of things that need to be done in order to make stable software. None of that is anything new.
So the problem is not that we don't know what to do. It's either that it's not sticking in people's heads or that there are outside forces that are preventing this.
In the case of your average software developer, both of these are happening. Good programming practice gets put on the back burner because they *need* to ship.
I'd go with FAT. It's a lowest common denominator -- Windoze, MacOS, Linux, BeOS, heck, even GS/OS on the Apple IIgs can read it. It's also not as complex as you'd think, as long as you don't try to get too fancy with it.
I'm wondering, however.. Given that an 66MHz 486 has issues playing MP3s, do you have enough horsepower with an 8 bit 30MHz processor to decode an MP3? It's 360 30MHz cycles per floating point multiply on the CPU.
I'd say check out used book stores.
Slightly related, Is it just me or is shorthand falling out of fashion? Nobody writes it anymore. A good typist can type faster than a good shorthand writer. Voice recording is cheap.
I, personally, find that the best solution is to cary a laptop around with me for notetaking. I haven't had any real cases where I couldn't type fast enough to keep up.
There is a good reason for having it. I'm pretty much undecided on the whole issue, but I can see a few issues and some good reasons.
Mainly, it's a lot easier to prosecute somebody for putting what clearly looks to be a minor in a porn vid by just stating that it "looks like kiddie porn" than trying to dig up the creator of the vid (hard), and then proving the age of the person in the vid (also hard).
So by making it illegal to even LOOK like there is a minor in the vid, you therefore save the afformentioned effort.
Now, I will say that, either way, there's a lot of holes in this. What is the difference between a 17 year old person before their 18th and an 18 year old person after their 18th? A few thousand dead cells here, a few thousand cell divisions there, and a few new neuron patterns established.
And I'm not sure what to think of all of this. I mean, people need to distinguish between the truly wrong -- an unwilling 12 year old girl getting graphically raped on camera -- the merely sick -- a girl who may be 16 or 20 that some guys find attractive dancing around naked -- and the artistic -- the boatloads of paintings from ages past that involve naked people of all ages, from 1 to 80.
Some of those have possibilities for convenience. Imagine if you could have the flourescent light on when the computer was not. I always find that it's annoying to be prodding around on the inside of my case when it's under the desk and blocking the light. I don't want to have to pull out everything to swap a card out, I want to be able to lie on the floor and do it. So in that case, a neon light would be really useful, kinda like the little bulb underneath the hood of a car.
;)
Maybe I should get into the case-mod scene. I never really liked the overclocking scene because I do real work on my computer. But some of those mods look rather interesting..
I think you are talking about the SuperMicro SC750-A case. That's what I have, and it's not very fancy but very very nice. It's got four drive bay cooler fans, two fan mounts in front, one fan mount directly over the CPU, one fan mount above the power supply, the traditional screw-in for a fan behind the CPU, and a crapload of drive bays.
The only thing is, most of the fans you have to buy seperately.
Yahoo's coverage of the whole thing. And it's not even smut! ;)
Damn I love my HP-48G. Once you use the beauty of RPN, you never want to go back!.
Well, that's just great.
This can go two ways. Either things will be like Data General in the 70s, where all of the DEC salespeople told their customers how Data General was an awful company with an awful product and stuff. So the clients would make sure to call Data General and see what they had to say before they made their decision. In this case, MS's attacks will merely serve as extra advertising for Linux.
And companies will port their crown jewels to Linux to give them a crowbar to use on MS the next time they negotiate anything.
Or Linux will die. There are a LOT of interpersonal open-source issues that Linux has to deal with. MS has the advantage of writing a single desktop system. Linux has KDE and GNOME, plus various other efforts. Linux has all of the features of Unix, now it needs to innovate and cover new area, and it isn't doing as well at that.
Plus, remember that MS almost got caught with their pants down with that whole Internet thing and they still managed to come out on top. They have been watching the Linux and BeOS developments for a while. The Halloween documents date from 1998. That's over 2 years of examining the Linux crowd's behaviour. That's NOT their behaviour with regards to the 'net, where they got whapped in the ass and needing to make a costly u-turn.
There's a good reason. Each density of CD needs a different laser, or else it won't be able to read the pits on the disk.
The optical storage industry went through the same thought process. They decided that they could make multi-layer disks at the same time. And they came up with DVD's.
Your idea is just about the same as a DVD. In both cases, you need a second laser and a more accurate focusing assembley.
Besides, by the time that such a quad-density or dual-density CD-RW would be developed, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, or DVD+RW would be on the mass market. I just hope that SOMEBODY blinks and that at least one, hopefully two, will die.
Or maybe the FMD disks will take over. That would be nice, but I've seen similar promises before that haven't actually panned out.