So far no problems, except that she complains that she can't use Excel or Access on it like they teach in her classes, and I didn't buy Office and don't plan to. Anyway she's been dropping out of those classes like a loser. So I suppose she mostly uses it to print web pages. Religious web pages. (big shudder)
This enables the sales associate to spend more time attending personally to a customer, and less time chasing to the stock room to check for available items.
I was impressed the other day at Walmart when I wanted to buy something that was out-of-stock, and a salesman scanned the barcode and then right there on his wireless scanner, reported to me which other stores claimed to have that item in stock. So you don't necessarily need RFID for that feature, at least.
(But then, he said that often the system was wrong, and he spent 15 minutes or so to call all those other stores on the phone for me to check stock, and they were almost all out-of-stock anyway. So something's not connecting properly in their system, but it's a good idea, at least.)
I am running xinerama on a dual-port G550 card and use these two old 19" limited-frequency monitors (they can do 1024 x 1024 and 1280 x 1024, I think that's it). I use graphical console too, so I can stay out of icky old text mode. Just if I ever need to access BIOS settings I have to plug in another monitor.:-)
My wife's machine has a G200 card and a Mentor Graphics branded Sony 21" monitor. It has only 3 BNC's and requires composite sync on the green signal, but the Matrox cards can do that. I love Matrox.
I want LCD's someday but have to plan on buying 2 of them big enough to make the switch worthwhile... and then, if I want DVI, I'll still be limited to 1280 x 1024 resolution, so what's the point? (Wonder what kludge they will have to come up with to "extend" DVI for higher resolutions?) Might as well wait until DLP projectors get cheaper, and buy about 6 of them, and run a seamless 3840 x 2048 video-wall desktop... now that would be worthwhile.
Well they just need to finish with it and find ways to produce it cheaply. By fall 2004 a 1 GHz processor is going to be pretty underpowered (especially running XP); it won't be a laptop replacement anymore, it'll just be a souped-up PDA, and should be priced accordingly, like whatever is the hot new Zaurus by then, or a tad more. $800 might be OK.
From the ego-reassurance dept....
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 1
Doooooood! I've never seen ANYTHING like that before!
(Now I'll go check out your site if it's not slashdotted yet.)
Sun of all companies shouldn't be tacitly admitting that MS is the authority on windowing OS's. I mean come on... a start button, apps iconify to the bottom, they have a tray. No doubt it has the usual usability problem that when you iconify too many apps you don't have space for the titles, and only the icons end up being shown.
And after, what, 6 years of Java being the hot new thing (but cooling off lately...) they could have had a real pure Java desktop, and made it fast enough to use, too. (Around the same time, MS "standardized" today's Windows UI by making it the same in NT 4.0 as it was in Windows 95. And Sun's _just_ getting around to being the latest copycat, _now_?) What's the point of calling it Java Desktop if it's just Gnome with a Java VM available so you can run the occasional Java app (slowly and ugly), like every other Linux distro can do?
All of Europe can't collectively tell us to take a hike on this issue?
Anyway it's just foot-dragging. Ultimately people always have to adapt to new technologies... take the good with the bad, develop better missile countermeasures, etc. GPS has so many more good uses than bad.
How does it follow from "hydrocarbons pre-existed the formation of the earth" that "we're probably not going to run out of them"? I'd think you could draw the opposite conclusion - if we use up the accessible stuff and it's not a renewable resource... how far are we going to have to dig or go out in space to get more? It becomes rather impractical doesn't it? Or is there some mechanism by which they are supposed to get replenished right here on earth?
But ASN.1 encodes the meaning of data positionally; there aren't any tags. You just have to know that byte 1 is a char, bytes 2-5 are a float, byte 6 is a boolean, etc. and also what they mean. XML can potentially allow you to specify attributes inside a tag in any order, and omit as many of them as make sense (provided your DTD isn't too strict and your parsing code is flexible), where ASN.1 would require you to specify all of them in the correct order, and agree on a value that means "not defined" in cases where you want to omit things. I think it should be possible to have a binary format that has all the advantages of XML, but ASN.1 isn't it. Those who have experience with EDI (I've not had the pleasure myself) seem to agree it was a pain in the ass, and like the readability of XML much more, if not the size.
Serialized Java objects do a good job of describing data, but doing it in a compact binary format. (It may encode meaning positionally but at least yoiu can download the class for every object, and then introspect it if you want.) Too bad there's so much overhead to using RMI.
For example, paths are not described by a bunch of sub-elements, but rather by a string attribute that's quite compact.
Yeah funny how XML was so inefficient they had to invent a new sub-language just for this one purpose. They could've just used Postscript operators or HPGL operators or G-code or Gerber or Lisp/Scheme, but noooo... now there's a whole new thing to parse.
That's very short-sighted of you. Flash has always been a plugin, and is still an adjunct, not core functionality. I think a web graphics thing that simply provides access via XML to the new GDI replacement, and thus makes those web graphics first-class UI rather than a plug-in, stands a very good chance of winning among web developers who believe that IE is the only audience. (far too many)
As for users not switching, I remember when Windows 98 came out, there were statistics about how many business users were still using Windows 3.1 (rather than the 3-year-old Win95 or NT) and didn't want to switch because their 16-bit apps would break. I suppose by now most of them have finally bitten the bullet. It just takes time.
Anyway if you want a _better_ example of "leaving older users in the dust", just look at Gnome.
In this same document they mention that XAML will be used to design most application UI's, so I'm thinking there will be little difference between web applications and "real" applications. That is, performance will suck just as much in either case because parsing XML will be required to build the UI. Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
Then they mention hardware acceleration, and state that XAML applications will get the benefit of it, while old-school GDI applications will have to do the graphics operations entirely in software. So it will make the inefficient new method look faster than the older more efficient way, on our 5 or 10 GHz Microsoft-designed machines that we'll have by then. (And I bet it will still take half a minute or so to log in.)
But, that just makes more work for the mono project so we can continue to look at websites on Mozilla or something. Sigh. What I hate about Flash is that it's still a pain in the ass on Linux. Now they're going to replace it with a whole new pain in the ass, but maybe XML is easier to deal with. And if we had agreed on a good 2D graphics library by now, rather than having the fractured hundreds of them that we have on Linux, maybe it would have been trivial, but I'm sure that yet another new library will be created just for this.
At least, ever since SVG it's been obvious what is important: Paths. Nobody wants to use arcs for example when you have to give the center point, foci, and start and end angles. SVG says, paths can be made of line segments, arcs, and bezier curves, in any combination, and they all have to meet each other smoothly AT THE ENDPOINTS, and you have to be able to stroke them and use different endcaps, fill them, do intersections etc. In other words, all that Postscript stuff that was in a black box in the past; but now the box is open, and any 2D graphics library which provides that kind of functionality would be a good foundation for future UI work. As opposed to mere widget toolkits like GTK and QT, which can build UIs from a fixed set of widgets but leave you on your own to do other kinds of graphics. Now if we'd been using Display Postscript or NeWS all along we wouldn't care so much about what's in the black box, and SVG would be unnecessary, or at least would be easy to translate to Postscript. IMO the widgets in normal applications should be built as vector graphics, rather than the current approach of treating a vector graphics "canvas" as just another widget, limited to the space that it occupies. But I have yet to see a small, fast, self-contained library that provides EVERYTHING you need to implement an SVG viewer, that runs natively, not in Java or some such thing. Anybody know which library actually does it all? (I know Berlin/Fresco/whatever is going there, but it's not ready yet, and it has a lot of overhead, like CORBA for example.)
Really, MS is basically going in a good direction here, except for that XML parsing bit; and it's too bad that the free software community will once again have to follow them, instead of being the leaders.
Of course we could still one-up them by beating them to true 3D interfaces...
Do they prop open their eyelids and clamp their heads in place? Do they dispense eyedrops to prevent the resultant problems? Do they force them to lick the guard's boots?
everybody's watching you, not just Big Brother. I mean, there is the world's highest density of street surveillance cameras, right? And the well-known snoopy journalists and paparrazi? and those damned speed-tracking and automatic citation systems - nobody else is quite so thorough about that yet.
Orwell's 1984 and the movie Brazil are both very distinctively English, probably for good reason.
So I always assume that London is going to continue to be the leader in the transition to a world devoid of privacy. (And the USA may be right behind, the way things are going. Or maybe Australia.)
Not that I don't still want to visit the UK someday.:-)
So an SLM could be just one of those TI-invented micromirror arrays right, like they use in projectors? Probably they already had to figure out how to calibrate those, to get smooth color blending for the projectors, so that for example if you set one mirror to the position 128 you get exactly half as much light as if you set it to 256, and half as much again at 64, and so on.
Vector-matrix multiplication involves summing the products of the vector cells and the matrix column cells to get one output value for each matrix column. So if the "input" VCSELs are confined to optical channels such that the light from one VCSEL (input vector cell) is distributed evenly to one matrix column, and then you detect the total amount of light coming out of the matrix (SLM) you've got a sum of the products of the micromirror positions with the intensities of the VCSELs. (Or maybe if they are truly lasers no such confinement is necessary - it's only important to choose the right optics such that the laser has its energy spread out very evenly into a line segment rather than a point. Maybe that could be done using holographic optics.) But... rather than modulate the intensities of the VCSELs, I suspect they would turn them full-on or full-off, and clock the input values and the output A/D together. That way the number of discrete analog intensities that they have to detect is smaller (and accurately changing the intensity of a VCSEL is probably hard anyway). You're always multiplying an analog matrix cell by either a one or zero, for each bit in the input vector cell... but doing it for 8 vector cells at the same time.
ebook readers with real CRTs and vacuum-tube drivers, rather than cold silicon transistors and LCDs. Finally... ebooks with _warmth_, and that glow and smell associated so fondly with vacuum tubes. The pixels will blur together slighly, making a smoother display and making digital source material seem analogue again. Requires one A battery, one B, 4 C cells, and your choice of books on special miniature magnetic tapes. Fresnel magnifier sold separately.
(...ducks...)
Better get a patent on it while it's hot.
Re:Strongly encouraging change and migration...
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
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· Score: 1
So the switch from ADB to USB created a third-party opportunity for adapters. No problem. The iMac wasn't the one to get for peripheral support anyway; at least with a tower box you could add a SCSI card. Things have to evolve eventually.
I saw a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard. So probably that means it isn't dead... they're going to choose it over Wireless USB, Zigbee or some proprietary stuff for wireless peripherals.
It's pretty ironic that so many devices are sharing this dirty little bit of spectrum with all the microwave ovens. Probably the FCC deemed it worthless long ago, so then it got to be one of those rare open bands where experiments could be done, and then spread-spectrum experiments got done, and now we have all these devices. It's amazing they work at all, the interference they have to put up with, from microwave ovens, and each other, and now, tinfoil-hat parents.
In KDE I like to use an auto-hiding external taskbar in the upper-right corner of my screen, so if I jam the mouse over there it flies out, and the windows are shown in a vertical list rather than across the whole screen. This method uses real estate more efficiently than a Windows 95 style taskbar, because the horizontal space is only as much as is needed for a single window title, and I never open enough windows to run out of vertical space, and my window titles are seldom truncated. It's like a stack of books, and you're looking at the spines. It's also like the Mac task switcher in systems 7-9.
I think the one on the back is the Mini PCI - now that I read about that a bit. There are 3 form-factors for MiniPCI cards, and the edge-connector type (Type III) is the most popular apparently. You can buy a triple-standard WiFi card to stick in it, which is supported with Linux:
Slashdot Mirror
... as in the Bill Gates type in the _Fifth Element_.
So far no problems, except that she complains that she can't use Excel or Access on it like they teach in her classes, and I didn't buy Office and don't plan to. Anyway she's been dropping out of those classes like a loser. So I suppose she mostly uses it to print web pages. Religious web pages. (big shudder)
Yeah and then you find out that pennies explode too when thrown into the fire.
Or perhaps at least that when you try to mix metaphors you can sometimes find that they are hazardously incompatible.
I was impressed the other day at Walmart when I wanted to buy something that was out-of-stock, and a salesman scanned the barcode and then right there on his wireless scanner, reported to me which other stores claimed to have that item in stock. So you don't necessarily need RFID for that feature, at least.
(But then, he said that often the system was wrong, and he spent 15 minutes or so to call all those other stores on the phone for me to check stock, and they were almost all out-of-stock anyway. So something's not connecting properly in their system, but it's a good idea, at least.)
Or like this:
M ac Girl.jpg
http://www.theapplecollection.com/iMac/images/i
I am running xinerama on a dual-port G550 card and use these two old 19" limited-frequency monitors (they can do 1024 x 1024 and 1280 x 1024, I think that's it). I use graphical console too, so I can stay out of icky old text mode. Just if I ever need to access BIOS settings I have to plug in another monitor. :-)
My wife's machine has a G200 card and a Mentor Graphics branded Sony 21" monitor. It has only 3 BNC's and requires composite sync on the green signal, but the Matrox cards can do that. I love Matrox.
I want LCD's someday but have to plan on buying 2 of them big enough to make the switch worthwhile... and then, if I want DVI, I'll still be limited to 1280 x 1024 resolution, so what's the point? (Wonder what kludge they will have to come up with to "extend" DVI for higher resolutions?) Might as well wait until DLP projectors get cheaper, and buy about 6 of them, and run a seamless 3840 x 2048 video-wall desktop... now that would be worthwhile.
Well they just need to finish with it and find ways to produce it cheaply. By fall 2004 a 1 GHz processor is going to be pretty underpowered (especially running XP); it won't be a laptop replacement anymore, it'll just be a souped-up PDA, and should be priced accordingly, like whatever is the hot new Zaurus by then, or a tad more. $800 might be OK.
Doooooood! I've never seen ANYTHING like that before!
(Now I'll go check out your site if it's not slashdotted yet.)
Sun of all companies shouldn't be tacitly admitting that MS is the authority on windowing OS's. I mean come on... a start button, apps iconify to the bottom, they have a tray. No doubt it has the usual usability problem that when you iconify too many apps you don't have space for the titles, and only the icons end up being shown.
And after, what, 6 years of Java being the hot new thing (but cooling off lately...) they could have had a real pure Java desktop, and made it fast enough to use, too. (Around the same time, MS "standardized" today's Windows UI by making it the same in NT 4.0 as it was in Windows 95. And Sun's _just_ getting around to being the latest copycat, _now_?) What's the point of calling it Java Desktop if it's just Gnome with a Java VM available so you can run the occasional Java app (slowly and ugly), like every other Linux distro can do?
Where the hell is the innovation?
All of Europe can't collectively tell us to take a hike on this issue?
Anyway it's just foot-dragging. Ultimately people always have to adapt to new technologies... take the good with the bad, develop better missile countermeasures, etc. GPS has so many more good uses than bad.
How does it follow from "hydrocarbons pre-existed the formation of the earth" that "we're probably not going to run out of them"? I'd think you could draw the opposite conclusion - if we use up the accessible stuff and it's not a renewable resource... how far are we going to have to dig or go out in space to get more? It becomes rather impractical doesn't it? Or is there some mechanism by which they are supposed to get replenished right here on earth?
But ASN.1 encodes the meaning of data positionally; there aren't any tags. You just have to know that byte 1 is a char, bytes 2-5 are a float, byte 6 is a boolean, etc. and also what they mean. XML can potentially allow you to specify attributes inside a tag in any order, and omit as many of them as make sense (provided your DTD isn't too strict and your parsing code is flexible), where ASN.1 would require you to specify all of them in the correct order, and agree on a value that means "not defined" in cases where you want to omit things. I think it should be possible to have a binary format that has all the advantages of XML, but ASN.1 isn't it. Those who have experience with EDI (I've not had the pleasure myself) seem to agree it was a pain in the ass, and like the readability of XML much more, if not the size.
Serialized Java objects do a good job of describing data, but doing it in a compact binary format. (It may encode meaning positionally but at least yoiu can download the class for every object, and then introspect it if you want.) Too bad there's so much overhead to using RMI.
Yeah funny how XML was so inefficient they had to invent a new sub-language just for this one purpose. They could've just used Postscript operators or HPGL operators or G-code or Gerber or Lisp/Scheme, but noooo... now there's a whole new thing to parse.
That's very short-sighted of you. Flash has always been a plugin, and is still an adjunct, not core functionality. I think a web graphics thing that simply provides access via XML to the new GDI replacement, and thus makes those web graphics first-class UI rather than a plug-in, stands a very good chance of winning among web developers who believe that IE is the only audience. (far too many)
As for users not switching, I remember when Windows 98 came out, there were statistics about how many business users were still using Windows 3.1 (rather than the 3-year-old Win95 or NT) and didn't want to switch because their 16-bit apps would break. I suppose by now most of them have finally bitten the bullet. It just takes time.
Anyway if you want a _better_ example of "leaving older users in the dust", just look at Gnome.
In this same document they mention that XAML will be used to design most application UI's, so I'm thinking there will be little difference between web applications and "real" applications. That is, performance will suck just as much in either case because parsing XML will be required to build the UI. Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
Then they mention hardware acceleration, and state that XAML applications will get the benefit of it, while old-school GDI applications will have to do the graphics operations entirely in software. So it will make the inefficient new method look faster than the older more efficient way, on our 5 or 10 GHz Microsoft-designed machines that we'll have by then. (And I bet it will still take half a minute or so to log in.)
But, that just makes more work for the mono project so we can continue to look at websites on Mozilla or something. Sigh. What I hate about Flash is that it's still a pain in the ass on Linux. Now they're going to replace it with a whole new pain in the ass, but maybe XML is easier to deal with. And if we had agreed on a good 2D graphics library by now, rather than having the fractured hundreds of them that we have on Linux, maybe it would have been trivial, but I'm sure that yet another new library will be created just for this.
At least, ever since SVG it's been obvious what is important: Paths. Nobody wants to use arcs for example when you have to give the center point, foci, and start and end angles. SVG says, paths can be made of line segments, arcs, and bezier curves, in any combination, and they all have to meet each other smoothly AT THE ENDPOINTS, and you have to be able to stroke them and use different endcaps, fill them, do intersections etc. In other words, all that Postscript stuff that was in a black box in the past; but now the box is open, and any 2D graphics library which provides that kind of functionality would be a good foundation for future UI work. As opposed to mere widget toolkits like GTK and QT, which can build UIs from a fixed set of widgets but leave you on your own to do other kinds of graphics. Now if we'd been using Display Postscript or NeWS all along we wouldn't care so much about what's in the black box, and SVG would be unnecessary, or at least would be easy to translate to Postscript. IMO the widgets in normal applications should be built as vector graphics, rather than the current approach of treating a vector graphics "canvas" as just another widget, limited to the space that it occupies. But I have yet to see a small, fast, self-contained library that provides EVERYTHING you need to implement an SVG viewer, that runs natively, not in Java or some such thing. Anybody know which library actually does it all? (I know Berlin/Fresco/whatever is going there, but it's not ready yet, and it has a lot of overhead, like CORBA for example.)
Really, MS is basically going in a good direction here, except for that XML parsing bit; and it's too bad that the free software community will once again have to follow them, instead of being the leaders.
Of course we could still one-up them by beating them to true 3D interfaces...
Do they prop open their eyelids and clamp their heads in place? Do they dispense eyedrops to prevent the resultant problems? Do they force them to lick the guard's boots?
everybody's watching you, not just Big Brother. I mean, there is the world's highest density of street surveillance cameras, right? And the well-known snoopy journalists and paparrazi? and those damned speed-tracking and automatic citation systems - nobody else is quite so thorough about that yet.
:-)
Orwell's 1984 and the movie Brazil are both very distinctively English, probably for good reason.
So I always assume that London is going to continue to be the leader in the transition to a world devoid of privacy. (And the USA may be right behind, the way things are going. Or maybe Australia.)
Not that I don't still want to visit the UK someday.
So an SLM could be just one of those TI-invented micromirror arrays right, like they use in projectors? Probably they already had to figure out how to calibrate those, to get smooth color blending for the projectors, so that for example if you set one mirror to the position 128 you get exactly half as much light as if you set it to 256, and half as much again at 64, and so on.
Vector-matrix multiplication involves summing the products of the vector cells and the matrix column cells to get one output value for each matrix column. So if the "input" VCSELs are confined to optical channels such that the light from one VCSEL (input vector cell) is distributed evenly to one matrix column, and then you detect the total amount of light coming out of the matrix (SLM) you've got a sum of the products of the micromirror positions with the intensities of the VCSELs. (Or maybe if they are truly lasers no such confinement is necessary - it's only important to choose the right optics such that the laser has its energy spread out very evenly into a line segment rather than a point. Maybe that could be done using holographic optics.) But... rather than modulate the intensities of the VCSELs, I suspect they would turn them full-on or full-off, and clock the input values and the output A/D together. That way the number of discrete analog intensities that they have to detect is smaller (and accurately changing the intensity of a VCSEL is probably hard anyway). You're always multiplying an analog matrix cell by either a one or zero, for each bit in the input vector cell... but doing it for 8 vector cells at the same time.
So now I think I could build one of these.
and that whole $30-million file manager fiasco. How embarassing.
Speaking of history there's a funny story about it here:
n um .html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/jargon/E/El-Camino-Big
Short summary: "It's too long to fit in a real, it must be a bignum"
ebook readers with real CRTs and vacuum-tube drivers, rather than cold silicon transistors and LCDs. Finally... ebooks with _warmth_, and that glow and smell associated so fondly with vacuum tubes. The pixels will blur together slighly, making a smoother display and making digital source material seem analogue again. Requires one A battery, one B, 4 C cells, and your choice of books on special miniature magnetic tapes. Fresnel magnifier sold separately.
(...ducks...)
Better get a patent on it while it's hot.
So the switch from ADB to USB created a third-party opportunity for adapters. No problem. The iMac wasn't the one to get for peripheral support anyway; at least with a tower box you could add a SCSI card. Things have to evolve eventually.
I saw a Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard. So probably that means it isn't dead... they're going to choose it over Wireless USB, Zigbee or some proprietary stuff for wireless peripherals.
It's pretty ironic that so many devices are sharing this dirty little bit of spectrum with all the microwave ovens. Probably the FCC deemed it worthless long ago, so then it got to be one of those rare open bands where experiments could be done, and then spread-spectrum experiments got done, and now we have all these devices. It's amazing they work at all, the interference they have to put up with, from microwave ovens, and each other, and now, tinfoil-hat parents.
In KDE I like to use an auto-hiding external taskbar in the upper-right corner of my screen, so if I jam the mouse over there it flies out, and the windows are shown in a vertical list rather than across the whole screen. This method uses real estate more efficiently than a Windows 95 style taskbar, because the horizontal space is only as much as is needed for a single window title, and I never open enough windows to run out of vertical space, and my window titles are seldom truncated. It's like a stack of books, and you're looking at the spines. It's also like the Mac task switcher in systems 7-9.
Is there a way I could that with XFCE?
I think the one on the back is the Mini PCI - now that I read about that a bit. There are 3 form-factors for MiniPCI cards, and the edge-connector type (Type III) is the most popular apparently. You can buy a triple-standard WiFi card to stick in it, which is supported with Linux:
o n- 802.11abg/Acer_NeWeb_802.11a%2Bb%2Bg_mini_pci.htm
http://www.discountechnology.com/products/wistr
The little blue connector is SATA apparently.
And the little white connector is close to the CPU so is probably a typical fan connector.
I still haven't figured out which one is the power connector.