Every computer needs either a smart-card slot or an iButton reader, and by logging in with that, you ought to be able to do challenge-response or rolling-code authentication on every system to which you are allowed access, with the key doing the computations on board. Passwords ought to be obsolete by now, or supplementary in ultra-high-security systems only. Certainly by the time the sysadmins decide that they have to be so long and changed so often, that you haven't a prayer of remembering them, then it's high time to replace them with something else.
When I saw it was made from plexiglas with round holes in it, my first thought was he was going to have it backlit in orange and tied to a stereo so it makes a deep bass "thump" every time you press a key, like in Hackers or whatever movie that was.
Battery life of a PDA depends at least as much on the screen technology as on the processors. But they can define "several weeks" however they want - turn it on once a week for a few minutes? The real question is, if I use it to read an e-book or play a game how long does it last. It better be at least 8-12 hours, in case I end up bored on a long airplane flight.
Using multiple low-speed processors with dedicated functions is a very good idea. Using an FPGA is an even better idea. More PDAs should try this; and I do not understand why a PCI card with an FPGA co-processor is still not yet a typical geek upgrade for a desktop PC. Reprogrammable hardware ought to be much more useful than, say, the MMX instruction set.
There are those multitouch keyboards that can track multiple finger positions at once; maybe their touchscreen technology is similar to that. If so that's also pretty cool. Multitouch should have been offering touchscreens from the get-go, IMO, because it's bound to be more useful in that form than as a desktop keyboard replacement. And I told them so too, but why should they listen to me, I guess.
Using the screen as a speaker is also a neat idea, as long as it doesn't make it feel funny as a touchscreen. But maybe tactile feedback via the speaker is the whole point.
Yeah it's too bad about the proprietary OS; and if they want any chance of mass adoption they need to give away the development tools, period. And there needs to be a compiler for a real language, not just some cheesy BASIC interpreter.
I suspect they will not be very successful, commercially, but slowly their ideas will be re-implemented one-by-one on other platforms. Too bad, so sad. OTOH if they are very very lucky they could have a cult following like the Newton did - but the Newton was also much earlier, when nothing remotely like it existed.
But you have to plug them in. Can you power them off via software? You can do that with hdparm for IDE drives. So I figure just have a dedicated backup appliance... a PC with as many drives as you can find controllers to support. (You could add a PCI card if the built-in controllers are not sufficient.) It can be very low-end, just so it has ethernet. Have it boot Linux from a CF card. Leave it powered on all the time, but power off the drives when they are not in use; one would get powered up each day to do one backup generation, on a different drive each day. Or, if the machine supports wake-on-LAN the whole thing could be powered off except for a once-a-day backup stint (but, it might as well run a distributed computing project of some sort in its spare time).
Only trouble is a severe power surge or lightning strike could take out the whole thing, because stuff is still electrically connected. (But you could run it on DC power! I'm building a DC power system for just this reason... solar panels and a big bank of batteries. 12V is fine for EPIAs, but I found some 24V ATX supplies on Ebay so will use those for a couple systems.) But it's automatable, whereas plugging in the FireWire drives manually when you need to do backups is likely to be forgotten sometimes.
...Ampex's DIS 914 for 30 Terabytes...enough money for a new Porsche...
Yeah maybe that model number is no coincidence. (Well they don't make new 914's anymore I guess. Maybe the newest "budget" model will be called the Tapester.)
Back in 1995 or so I had a Metheus full-size VL bus video card with 4 megs of RAM. (That was really hot back then - I could actually have 24-bit color on a fairly high-res display! And I had a 17" monitor too, back when they still cost $500.) Well the computer was sitting around open most of the time due to frequent upgrade attempts, and I had this window air conditioner that had a tendency to leak water all over sometimes. The video card was the bottom one in the tower case so one day it got dripped on. I just figured I was lucky the short didn't fry anything else in that computer.
I tried to build a RAID once, with 5 SCSI drives, 4 gigs each, but it got too hot and a couple drives quit working. I said to heck with it and sold the survivors on ebay.
My laptop is a Toughbook, and it has survived an actual drop about 4' onto concrete and still works fine. Supposedly can survive the coffee-in-the-keyboard-thing too but I haven't tested that. I just wouldn't spend "several thousand dollars" on a laptop unless I was really rich - it's just asking for trouble.
That's what MythTV is for. You can also put the PC in the living room and use a TV for a monitor if you like. Or not. (Are you trolling? Thought this was obvious...)
1.) Stealth wallpaper goes on sale. 2.) Terrorist buys it and builds a makeshift stealth bomber drone from a model plane kit. 3.) Sale of wallpaper is banned for national security reasons. 4.) People with this wallpaper on their walls rip it down and put it on ebay. 5.) Profit!
1.) For spatial anything, you need a big workspace. If you've seen the Sun StarFire video you know what I mean - a screen the size of a drafting table, or even bigger, with resolution fine enough that you don't notice the dots. Then specific things can have specific homes. But even at 1600x1200 it's usually impossible to avoid stacking windows on top of each other. At home I use dual 1280x1024 monitors, and this much space begins to afford "homes" for things - along with multiple virtual desktops. I tend to use a desktop for email and generic browsing, plus one per active project. (Active being a relative term; sometimes a desktop goes untouched for weeks, and I hate having to log out, because then I lose the context of what I was doing. Session management has room for a huge amount of improvement.)
IMO tabbed browsing is a workaround for this; before it was available, I used to open links in new windows all the time by middle-clicking. But then my desktop gets quite cluttered. This probably has a psychological reason - maybe I'm a linear, methodical thinker. Some people like to interrupt one train of thought, read something else, and then use the back button; others like to postpone links for future research. That's what tabs do for me - put a page "into the future" to be read after I finish what I'm reading. But this hasn't got much to do with file management.
2.) I agree with the comment that if folders represented search results, this idea would be much more useful.
3.) When you double-click My Computer, you get one folder window, not a tree. As someone who prefers the tree, I find this slightly annoying (although I appreciate the reasons for it), and always have to right-click and select Explore. (And if My Computer is not visible I will sometimes explore the Start Menu or the trash, just to get a tree view showing, and then go somewhere else.) (I'm speaking mostly of my usage of XP at work, since I do very little with Windows at home, and have not given MS any money in years.) Furthermore you have a choice, either in those simple windows or in the tree view, to remember each folder's settings, including icon positions and view style. It can be downright Mac-like if you want, and I notice that most users (especially ones whose experience doesn't go all the way back to Windows 3.0 like mine!) tend to use it in this way, and avoid the tree. So I don't know what he's talking about, deploring how users like the tree view so much. I thought that was just me. Anyway it's not his business to tell me I'm wrong for liking it.
4.) Starting with System 7, even MacOS permits showing a tree view inside a window. So I think Nautilus should do something similar. Remembering each folder's settings is a good idea; and if you like to view some folders as trees, and others as large icons, and others as previews, and others with custom backgrounds (like in OS/2 Warp), so be it. There's no point in restricting users to just one paradigm, otherwise yeah they will complain about it, because they're used to more freedom, and freedom is a good thing.
Anyway if the new Nautilus has successfully replicated a user experience even as good as System 6, then that's a giant leap for Linux. Makes me want to try it out. For now, at home, usually I still do file management at the command line, partially out of habit and partially because of quirks in the existing file managers that make them seem less than usable in some situations; whereas at work, I hardly ever do that, and the file manager works just fine. I've been looking forward to a small, fast, usable file manager on Linux (at least as good as the System 7 finder) for about 10 years now, and have yet to find one I totally like. But it sounds like Nautilus still fails on the "small" and "fast" bits.
Well, native X'an means "born in X". So I guess I'm a Native American, 'cause I'm not an immigrant. (And my parents were not either, FWIW.) Nobody has any problem with me saying I'm a native Arizonan, or a native of the Phoenix metro area.
Regarding "indigenous", what does that mean exactly? People on most of the continents probably didn't evolve there. Well, they evolved a little, maybe, but they became Homo Sapiens much earlier, and somewhere else. Isn't it just one place in Africa or some such (or maybe the garden of Eden, wherever that is) where Homo Sapiens emerged? So everywhere else, they walked, floated or flew. Anyway I think "indigenous" probably has a narrower definition than "native", and neither word is meant to be so narrow as "having lived there since the dawn of the species" because that would rule out almost everybody in every place.
Now if they could make it so you don't have to start up a separate VM for every application...because it takes too much memory AND too much time.
They've needed a process model for a long time. That's still the critical piece needed to make a "Java OS" a reality. (AFAIK it still is missing...)
Of course there is the copout that the interpreter ends up in shared memory anyway. But what about loaded classes? Are they shared between apps? I think not.
Of course, applications can be written to become threads in an existing VM rather than intended to start up on their own, but that generally isn't done. This way Sun can ignore security issues between apps within the sandbox by saying well, just start up a new sandbox for every application, and there is no way they can step on each other. Moore's law has had many cycles now since Java came out, and the cost of even one VM is still not negligible, let alone one per application.
Then there is the fact that Swing applications always look so unique, so volatile and unreliable, due to the fact that they paint slower, and you can sometimes see unpainted gray areas, at least temporarily. They make a bad impression, like old cars going down the road perpetually in primer, the "restoration" incomplete for years on end, making you want to ask "when are you ever going to use real paint!" They should instead work on fleshing out AWT to include the missing widgets, like trees (just implement their own native versions on the few OS's whose GUI toolkits don't have them), and screw pluggable look-n-feel. That should be a toolkit feature for the whole OS, not just for Swing applications. This approach is largely responsible for Swing apps looking and feeling so crappy.
The hand nibbler tool from Radio Shack is great for cutting square holes, provided the sheet metal you are cutting is thin enough. (Surely must exist in the UK too) Or, an air-powered nibbler. That's the next toy I want to get.
Also why use a switch for a hard drive? Just use hdparm to turn it on and off; I doubt the electronics on the drive take a lot of power in "sleep" mode. Besides, powering it on with a switch might be able to cause transient pulses that could be harmful to the IDE controller, maybe.
FWIW don't forget that CF cards make wonderful "hard drives" for embedded systems, but you can't get 30 gig ones yet. Still not bad for a root filesystem, and just power-up and mount big media-storage filesystems when necessary.
Caps lock is where control ought to be
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Is Caps Lock Dead?
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So I mapped it to be a second control key. I have been able to do this on both Windows and Linux (on the console, and in X too). I was always getting confused after using a Sun machine at work. (Also confuse the esc with the `/~ key after that.) Now I find that I actually use both control keys, depending on which one feels less awkward.
I tried it the other day, and my first impression is man, I won't be missing Corel Draw anymore! It even has some features Corel doesn't. I liked Sodipodi somewhat before, but this is much better.
Now somebody needs to fork Dia and make it work as well as Visio.
I've been thinking for a while... if geeks with computers in their cars would store GPS tracks everywhere they drive, and then upload them to a central server, any line segment which overlaps a lot of other people's line segments could be considered a road (as opposed to a driveway, or somebody went off-road or something). Maps could be created and updated automatically, and there would even be statistics about how much traffic is on each road, and the system would find out about new roads, road closures etc. But it would take a lot of geeks.
Just like the US with its use of NTSC television, obsolete pre-metric unit systems, 60 Hz 120V power, failure to comply with the Kyoto protocols, etc. What a bunch of mavericks. (Of course, 60 Hz is better for running clocks, so maybe we were right about that. I don't know who came up with 50 Hz and why.)
In Soviet Russia (and Red China, and Timbuktoo for that matter), American lifestyle is interested in YOU!
That's what security is all about. Every company should have a single standard - iButtons or smart cards - which replace door key cards, login names, passwords etc., and work on every system to which an employee is supposed to have access. Authentication should be automatic - plug the iButton into your terminal, and you can ssh transparently to any machine to which you have access, without any further passwords. That way there is just one thing for the employee to "guard with his life"; and by increasing convenience you increase productivity too. The cards or iButtons should use a rolling-code system, with computation performed on-chip, so that it is extremely hard to duplicate a key. And in cases where extreme security is required, it could be supplemented with a password, but I think the extra security which that provides is minimal.
But probably the open-source, cross-platform software to make it possible still needs to be written.
I think "schizophrenia" is a catch-all for misunderstood mental problems. For example multiple-personality disorder and autism have been called schizophrenia in the past, until they figured out more specifically the nature of these cases. So have this person examined by somebody who's up with the latest research. Probably in a century or so that word will sound as quaint as "consumption" because they will have figured out a lot more about the real causes of such behavior; and in the meantime it is sad they are treating it with blunt methods with bad side-effects, like certain drugs, and the behavioral "treatment" one receives in an asylum. In general the closer such a person's life can be to "normal" the better off he or she is, IMO, even if it's inconvenient or looks unconventional to everyone else. Like with the guy in Beautiful Mind, his own denial was actually the cure - in contrast to most other situations in which "being in denial" is considered a bad thing. But, some people are mentally stronger than others; some are stubborn and self-correcting, like that guy, while others feel sorry for themselves and act as if they are just looking for some uncontrollable force to which to succumb (like all those self-committed inmates in _One Flew From the Cuckoo's Nest_). I believe strongly that many conditions, both mental and physical, can be cured with love, encouragement, humor, complete honesty, and mental fortitude; but the medical establishment doesn't recognize this enough.
My dad's second wife had MPD, and she is cured now, because her therapist was not so old-fashioned, and knew that what she needed was to merge the fractured parts of her psyche, as opposed to drugs, restraints and denial (even though in other cases some of those things might be more effective). I just hope that whatever your sister has, that somebody can be so insightful for her as well.
So does this mean it's now possible to develop software to run on the TuxScreen, in its unmodified form? I never did get around to installing Linux on it...maybe just developing Inferno apps would be easier.
Don't cut into the gas tank, don't cut into the battery either.
If only it was completely electric, then the greatest danger of all (gasoline spilling and igniting or exploding) would be eliminated. And an impact switch can isolate the battery pack in case of collision. But, they just keep making foreign-oil-dependent bombs on wheels for us to drive around in. (as well as deploying other kinds of bombs in other places to maintain our oil supply)
I wish I had known to go vote on that one. I've been a bit of a Debian snob ever since I switched from Slackware but they seem to get further behind all the time. Am trying Gentoo on one box now, and it's much better about that. Nowadays it's better for bragging about too... don't need no steenkin' unoptimized binaries, and all that jazz.
Yeah I like the stability, and I like that it's 100% free software but this is ridiculous. Maybe do it in the next version? Plan ahead a little, rather than stop the whole train?
Eric Raymond a few years ago was preaching that while Open Source software doesn't permit you to make money by selling software, at least you can sell documentation, and consulting services, and t-shirts, and still put the beans on the table. Well I guess they don't even believe in non-free documentation. Next they'll be insisting that all Debian t-shirts be made only from wild open-range hemp, harvested and woven by young virgin volunteers, stone-washed in the Rocky Mountain heights, and given away freely to anyone who knows how to sing the Free Software Song properly.
I don't know the history of the libc documentation but I don't think anybody was suing them for compensation, were they? If not, maybe it's free enough, regardless of some poorly chosen words in a preamble somewhere?
This is basically a good idea. Searching your history is particularly innovative; but it would require some memory (keep a searchable index of which words could be found on which pages in the entire history, or else leverage google to do the same work, which would be slower...) Also their use of screen real estate in this implementation is rather excessive. The OS/2 browser (I forget the name) from IBM did a much better job of showing history as a tree rather than a list (this page was accessed via link from that one, etc.) but more compactly. (Also without thumbnails, which are another good idea.)
Ideally it should offer both a simple chronological view and a threaded view, like some email programs do (mutt for example).
And, it should be integrated into a generic journal which logs everything you do, not just browsing; and provides blogging features (not only did I visit this page, but here are my thoughts about it, and do I want to publish those thoughts or just keep them to myself for searching later).
In that much time maybe lasers twice as powerful as their set of 192 all put together will be available. If it's going to take that long maybe they should try something more practical...
My mom says she got Beagle on her iMac but she only reads email via a browser, on yahoo.com. Is that possible? Is there some Mac virus with "beagle" in the name going around? Even so I thought it strange that it could infect her machine via a browser. She is running OS 10.2.1.
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Every computer needs either a smart-card slot or an iButton reader, and by logging in with that, you ought to be able to do challenge-response or rolling-code authentication on every system to which you are allowed access, with the key doing the computations on board. Passwords ought to be obsolete by now, or supplementary in ultra-high-security systems only. Certainly by the time the sysadmins decide that they have to be so long and changed so often, that you haven't a prayer of remembering them, then it's high time to replace them with something else.
When I saw it was made from plexiglas with round holes in it, my first thought was he was going to have it backlit in orange and tied to a stereo so it makes a deep bass "thump" every time you press a key, like in Hackers or whatever movie that was.
Battery life of a PDA depends at least as much on the screen technology as on the processors. But they can define "several weeks" however they want - turn it on once a week for a few minutes? The real question is, if I use it to read an e-book or play a game how long does it last. It better be at least 8-12 hours, in case I end up bored on a long airplane flight.
Using multiple low-speed processors with dedicated functions is a very good idea. Using an FPGA is an even better idea. More PDAs should try this; and I do not understand why a PCI card with an FPGA co-processor is still not yet a typical geek upgrade for a desktop PC. Reprogrammable hardware ought to be much more useful than, say, the MMX instruction set.
There are those multitouch keyboards that can track multiple finger positions at once; maybe their touchscreen technology is similar to that. If so that's also pretty cool. Multitouch should have been offering touchscreens from the get-go, IMO, because it's bound to be more useful in that form than as a desktop keyboard replacement. And I told them so too, but why should they listen to me, I guess.
Using the screen as a speaker is also a neat idea, as long as it doesn't make it feel funny as a touchscreen. But maybe tactile feedback via the speaker is the whole point.
Yeah it's too bad about the proprietary OS; and if they want any chance of mass adoption they need to give away the development tools, period. And there needs to be a compiler for a real language, not just some cheesy BASIC interpreter.
I suspect they will not be very successful, commercially, but slowly their ideas will be re-implemented one-by-one on other platforms. Too bad, so sad. OTOH if they are very very lucky they could have a cult following like the Newton did - but the Newton was also much earlier, when nothing remotely like it existed.
But you have to plug them in. Can you power them off via software? You can do that with hdparm for IDE drives. So I figure just have a dedicated backup appliance... a PC with as many drives as you can find controllers to support. (You could add a PCI card if the built-in controllers are not sufficient.) It can be very low-end, just so it has ethernet. Have it boot Linux from a CF card. Leave it powered on all the time, but power off the drives when they are not in use; one would get powered up each day to do one backup generation, on a different drive each day. Or, if the machine supports wake-on-LAN the whole thing could be powered off except for a once-a-day backup stint (but, it might as well run a distributed computing project of some sort in its spare time).
Only trouble is a severe power surge or lightning strike could take out the whole thing, because stuff is still electrically connected. (But you could run it on DC power! I'm building a DC power system for just this reason... solar panels and a big bank of batteries. 12V is fine for EPIAs, but I found some 24V ATX supplies on Ebay so will use those for a couple systems.) But it's automatable, whereas plugging in the FireWire drives manually when you need to do backups is likely to be forgotten sometimes.
Yeah maybe that model number is no coincidence. (Well they don't make new 914's anymore I guess. Maybe the newest "budget" model will be called the Tapester.)
Back in 1995 or so I had a Metheus full-size VL bus video card with 4 megs of RAM. (That was really hot back then - I could actually have 24-bit color on a fairly high-res display! And I had a 17" monitor too, back when they still cost $500.) Well the computer was sitting around open most of the time due to frequent upgrade attempts, and I had this window air conditioner that had a tendency to leak water all over sometimes. The video card was the bottom one in the tower case so one day it got dripped on. I just figured I was lucky the short didn't fry anything else in that computer.
I tried to build a RAID once, with 5 SCSI drives, 4 gigs each, but it got too hot and a couple drives quit working. I said to heck with it and sold the survivors on ebay.
My laptop is a Toughbook, and it has survived an actual drop about 4' onto concrete and still works fine. Supposedly can survive the coffee-in-the-keyboard-thing too but I haven't tested that. I just wouldn't spend "several thousand dollars" on a laptop unless I was really rich - it's just asking for trouble.
That's what MythTV is for. You can also put the PC in the living room and use a TV for a monitor if you like. Or not. (Are you trolling? Thought this was obvious...)
1.) Stealth wallpaper goes on sale.
2.) Terrorist buys it and builds a makeshift stealth bomber drone from a model plane kit.
3.) Sale of wallpaper is banned for national security reasons.
4.) People with this wallpaper on their walls rip it down and put it on ebay.
5.) Profit!
1.) For spatial anything, you need a big workspace. If you've seen the Sun StarFire video you know what I mean - a screen the size of a drafting table, or even bigger, with resolution fine enough that you don't notice the dots. Then specific things can have specific homes. But even at 1600x1200 it's usually impossible to avoid stacking windows on top of each other. At home I use dual 1280x1024 monitors, and this much space begins to afford "homes" for things - along with multiple virtual desktops. I tend to use a desktop for email and generic browsing, plus one per active project. (Active being a relative term; sometimes a desktop goes untouched for weeks, and I hate having to log out, because then I lose the context of what I was doing. Session management has room for a huge amount of improvement.)
IMO tabbed browsing is a workaround for this; before it was available, I used to open links in new windows all the time by middle-clicking. But then my desktop gets quite cluttered. This probably has a psychological reason - maybe I'm a linear, methodical thinker. Some people like to interrupt one train of thought, read something else, and then use the back button; others like to postpone links for future research. That's what tabs do for me - put a page "into the future" to be read after I finish what I'm reading. But this hasn't got much to do with file management.
2.) I agree with the comment that if folders represented search results, this idea would be much more useful.
3.) When you double-click My Computer, you get one folder window, not a tree. As someone who prefers the tree, I find this slightly annoying (although I appreciate the reasons for it), and always have to right-click and select Explore. (And if My Computer is not visible I will sometimes explore the Start Menu or the trash, just to get a tree view showing, and then go somewhere else.) (I'm speaking mostly of my usage of XP at work, since I do very little with Windows at home, and have not given MS any money in years.) Furthermore you have a choice, either in those simple windows or in the tree view, to remember each folder's settings, including icon positions and view style. It can be downright Mac-like if you want, and I notice that most users (especially ones whose experience doesn't go all the way back to Windows 3.0 like mine!) tend to use it in this way, and avoid the tree. So I don't know what he's talking about, deploring how users like the tree view so much. I thought that was just me. Anyway it's not his business to tell me I'm wrong for liking it.
4.) Starting with System 7, even MacOS permits showing a tree view inside a window. So I think Nautilus should do something similar. Remembering each folder's settings is a good idea; and if you like to view some folders as trees, and others as large icons, and others as previews, and others with custom backgrounds (like in OS/2 Warp), so be it. There's no point in restricting users to just one paradigm, otherwise yeah they will complain about it, because they're used to more freedom, and freedom is a good thing.
Anyway if the new Nautilus has successfully replicated a user experience even as good as System 6, then that's a giant leap for Linux. Makes me want to try it out. For now, at home, usually I still do file management at the command line, partially out of habit and partially because of quirks in the existing file managers that make them seem less than usable in some situations; whereas at work, I hardly ever do that, and the file manager works just fine. I've been looking forward to a small, fast, usable file manager on Linux (at least as good as the System 7 finder) for about 10 years now, and have yet to find one I totally like. But it sounds like Nautilus still fails on the "small" and "fast" bits.
Well, native X'an means "born in X". So I guess I'm a Native American, 'cause I'm not an immigrant. (And my parents were not either, FWIW.) Nobody has any problem with me saying I'm a native Arizonan, or a native of the Phoenix metro area.
Regarding "indigenous", what does that mean exactly? People on most of the continents probably didn't evolve there. Well, they evolved a little, maybe, but they became Homo Sapiens much earlier, and somewhere else. Isn't it just one place in Africa or some such (or maybe the garden of Eden, wherever that is) where Homo Sapiens emerged? So everywhere else, they walked, floated or flew. Anyway I think "indigenous" probably has a narrower definition than "native", and neither word is meant to be so narrow as "having lived there since the dawn of the species" because that would rule out almost everybody in every place.
Now if they could make it so you don't have to start up a separate VM for every application...because it takes too much memory AND too much time.
They've needed a process model for a long time. That's still the critical piece needed to make a "Java OS" a reality. (AFAIK it still is missing...)
Of course there is the copout that the interpreter ends up in shared memory anyway. But what about loaded classes? Are they shared between apps? I think not.
Of course, applications can be written to become threads in an existing VM rather than intended to start up on their own, but that generally isn't done. This way Sun can ignore security issues between apps within the sandbox by saying well, just start up a new sandbox for every application, and there is no way they can step on each other. Moore's law has had many cycles now since Java came out, and the cost of even one VM is still not negligible, let alone one per application.
Then there is the fact that Swing applications always look so unique, so volatile and unreliable, due to the fact that they paint slower, and you can sometimes see unpainted gray areas, at least temporarily. They make a bad impression, like old cars going down the road perpetually in primer, the "restoration" incomplete for years on end, making you want to ask "when are you ever going to use real paint!" They should instead work on fleshing out AWT to include the missing widgets, like trees (just implement their own native versions on the few OS's whose GUI toolkits don't have them), and screw pluggable look-n-feel. That should be a toolkit feature for the whole OS, not just for Swing applications. This approach is largely responsible for Swing apps looking and feeling so crappy.
The hand nibbler tool from Radio Shack is great for cutting square holes, provided the sheet metal you are cutting is thin enough. (Surely must exist in the UK too) Or, an air-powered nibbler. That's the next toy I want to get.
Also why use a switch for a hard drive? Just use hdparm to turn it on and off; I doubt the electronics on the drive take a lot of power in "sleep" mode. Besides, powering it on with a switch might be able to cause transient pulses that could be harmful to the IDE controller, maybe.
FWIW don't forget that CF cards make wonderful "hard drives" for embedded systems, but you can't get 30 gig ones yet. Still not bad for a root filesystem, and just power-up and mount big media-storage filesystems when necessary.
So I mapped it to be a second control key. I have been able to do this on both Windows and Linux (on the console, and in X too). I was always getting confused after using a Sun machine at work. (Also confuse the esc with the `/~ key after that.) Now I find that I actually use both control keys, depending on which one feels less awkward.
I tried it the other day, and my first impression is man, I won't be missing Corel Draw anymore! It even has some features Corel doesn't. I liked Sodipodi somewhat before, but this is much better.
Now somebody needs to fork Dia and make it work as well as Visio.
I've been thinking for a while... if geeks with computers in their cars would store GPS tracks everywhere they drive, and then upload them to a central server, any line segment which overlaps a lot of other people's line segments could be considered a road (as opposed to a driveway, or somebody went off-road or something). Maps could be created and updated automatically, and there would even be statistics about how much traffic is on each road, and the system would find out about new roads, road closures etc. But it would take a lot of geeks.
Just like the US with its use of NTSC television, obsolete pre-metric unit systems, 60 Hz 120V power, failure to comply with the Kyoto protocols, etc. What a bunch of mavericks. (Of course, 60 Hz is better for running clocks, so maybe we were right about that. I don't know who came up with 50 Hz and why.)
In Soviet Russia (and Red China, and Timbuktoo for that matter), American lifestyle is interested in YOU!
That's what security is all about. Every company should have a single standard - iButtons or smart cards - which replace door key cards, login names, passwords etc., and work on every system to which an employee is supposed to have access. Authentication should be automatic - plug the iButton into your terminal, and you can ssh transparently to any machine to which you have access, without any further passwords. That way there is just one thing for the employee to "guard with his life"; and by increasing convenience you increase productivity too. The cards or iButtons should use a rolling-code system, with computation performed on-chip, so that it is extremely hard to duplicate a key. And in cases where extreme security is required, it could be supplemented with a password, but I think the extra security which that provides is minimal.
But probably the open-source, cross-platform software to make it possible still needs to be written.
I think "schizophrenia" is a catch-all for misunderstood mental problems. For example multiple-personality disorder and autism have been called schizophrenia in the past, until they figured out more specifically the nature of these cases. So have this person examined by somebody who's up with the latest research. Probably in a century or so that word will sound as quaint as "consumption" because they will have figured out a lot more about the real causes of such behavior; and in the meantime it is sad they are treating it with blunt methods with bad side-effects, like certain drugs, and the behavioral "treatment" one receives in an asylum. In general the closer such a person's life can be to "normal" the better off he or she is, IMO, even if it's inconvenient or looks unconventional to everyone else. Like with the guy in Beautiful Mind, his own denial was actually the cure - in contrast to most other situations in which "being in denial" is considered a bad thing. But, some people are mentally stronger than others; some are stubborn and self-correcting, like that guy, while others feel sorry for themselves and act as if they are just looking for some uncontrollable force to which to succumb (like all those self-committed inmates in _One Flew From the Cuckoo's Nest_). I believe strongly that many conditions, both mental and physical, can be cured with love, encouragement, humor, complete honesty, and mental fortitude; but the medical establishment doesn't recognize this enough.
My dad's second wife had MPD, and she is cured now, because her therapist was not so old-fashioned, and knew that what she needed was to merge the fractured parts of her psyche, as opposed to drugs, restraints and denial (even though in other cases some of those things might be more effective). I just hope that whatever your sister has, that somebody can be so insightful for her as well.
So does this mean it's now possible to develop software to run on the TuxScreen, in its unmodified form? I never did get around to installing Linux on it...maybe just developing Inferno apps would be easier.
Photons somehow became protons, and then the protons had atoms in them....
Adds to that whole pseudoscience air about it.
Don't cut into the gas tank, don't cut into the battery either.
If only it was completely electric, then the greatest danger of all (gasoline spilling and igniting or exploding) would be eliminated. And an impact switch can isolate the battery pack in case of collision. But, they just keep making foreign-oil-dependent bombs on wheels for us to drive around in. (as well as deploying other kinds of bombs in other places to maintain our oil supply)
another excuse to be even later than ever.
I wish I had known to go vote on that one. I've been a bit of a Debian snob ever since I switched from Slackware but they seem to get further behind all the time. Am trying Gentoo on one box now, and it's much better about that. Nowadays it's better for bragging about too... don't need no steenkin' unoptimized binaries, and all that jazz.
Yeah I like the stability, and I like that it's 100% free software but this is ridiculous. Maybe do it in the next version? Plan ahead a little, rather than stop the whole train?
Eric Raymond a few years ago was preaching that while Open Source software doesn't permit you to make money by selling software, at least you can sell documentation, and consulting services, and t-shirts, and still put the beans on the table. Well I guess they don't even believe in non-free documentation. Next they'll be insisting that all Debian t-shirts be made only from wild open-range hemp, harvested and woven by young virgin volunteers, stone-washed in the Rocky Mountain heights, and given away freely to anyone who knows how to sing the Free Software Song properly.
I don't know the history of the libc documentation but I don't think anybody was suing them for compensation, were they? If not, maybe it's free enough, regardless of some poorly chosen words in a preamble somewhere?
This is basically a good idea. Searching your history is particularly innovative; but it would require some memory (keep a searchable index of which words could be found on which pages in the entire history, or else leverage google to do the same work, which would be slower...) Also their use of screen real estate in this implementation is rather excessive. The OS/2 browser (I forget the name) from IBM did a much better job of showing history as a tree rather than a list (this page was accessed via link from that one, etc.) but more compactly. (Also without thumbnails, which are another good idea.)
Ideally it should offer both a simple chronological view and a threaded view, like some email programs do (mutt for example).
And, it should be integrated into a generic journal which logs everything you do, not just browsing; and provides blogging features (not only did I visit this page, but here are my thoughts about it, and do I want to publish those thoughts or just keep them to myself for searching later).
In that much time maybe lasers twice as powerful as their set of 192 all put together will be available. If it's going to take that long maybe they should try something more practical...
My mom says she got Beagle on her iMac but she only reads email via a browser, on yahoo.com. Is that possible? Is there some Mac virus with "beagle" in the name going around? Even so I thought it strange that it could infect her machine via a browser. She is running OS 10.2.1.