I had a very strict old grammar teacher in 5th - 7th grades (at a private school) who taught English and Latin. It's somewhat interesting to see the relationships between the two languages; and if you learn the highly structured grammar of Latin, you will understand the parts of speech very well, whereas in English with its lack of structure (conjugations and delensions, agreement of person and gender and number etc.) they are not so painfully obvious. But alas she stressed grammar much more than vocabulary, and not having used Latin since, I forgot most of the words.
When I began to learn Russian however, the grammar concepts were so familiar already. (Russian has a much more pure Latin heritage than English, and very similar grammar rules). So in a sense it was useful, accidentally.
I'd like a duplex page scanner. A few years ago, narrow page scanners where you just feed in one sheet at a time, and the software automatically captures when it detects paper there, were popular; but why not have it capture the backside too?
It would be great to have one in the living room, mounted on top of a trash can (shredder-style), or even on top of a shredder, to convert s-mail to email.
Of course there are production autofeeder duplex scanners but I keep looking on ebay and the working ones always end up rather expensive.
I might try to mechanically wed two page scanners, and just deal with the two data streams.
Well I don't know how to skip the FBI warning... but since y'all are talking up Apex I'd like to say the Sampo players are IMO da bomb. I got a 631CF, which is the first DVD player to also include a CF slot for viewing digital pictures and playing MP3s. There are hacked firmware versions available which enable region-free use. Even with stock firmware, it can convert NTSC to PAL or vice-versa. It's one of the few that can play SVCD format. The power supply works on any typical powerline voltage/frequency. So basically you can play any form of 5" disc video anywhere in the world. And probably the build quality of these players is better than Apex.
I wonder how this hacked firmware is made though. Maybe it'd be possible to modify it so that "mandatory viewing" parts are no longer mandatory.
right? They've been mentioned on Slashdot before. Their products can detect multiple fingers at once.
They are selling tablets and keyboard replacements, not touchscreens, but I think I read somewhere (on their website maybe) that they believe it would be possible some day to use this tech in a touchscreen.
The cool thing is it sees your whole hand via infrared, so it can tell which finger you're using. For the first time, you can "right click" on a touch surface, or use other finger combinations/gestures for various operations (drag, pan/scroll, rotate, etc.)
DJVU was designed for scanning paper documents, mainly. It doesn't include actual ASCII text like scanned PDFs can, but it is tuned for accurate visual representation of printed pages. The images have a couple of layers - the high-contrast material (such as text) and the background nuances (shading of the paper etc.) So it's possible to view the image with or without the background. And the background, being low res smooth shading, doesn't cost much space. I've been using it for a couple of years for this purpose, because neither JPEG nor PNG are ideally suited for it. Separating the foreground from the background strikes me as a really good idea.
It wasn't completely free at first so that was good news when it was announced a while back.
Of course to be truly useful as a JPEG replacement it needs to be included in browsers. People don't like having to mess with plugins.
Anyway I bet the JPEG patent stuff will blow over soon enough. This company obviously has brass balls and no brains to think they can pull that off. Maybe they will manage to sue a few big guys, bully some little ones, make some money and then get a little more complacent as their time runs out. But I imagine we will still be seeing lots of JPGs 10 years from now (just like GIFs didn't go away).
CUPS for printing. The only thing you have to configure on a client is which server is the print server; and you can use a web GUI to manage print jobs, printers etc. I have no compliants whatsoever. KDE integrates with it very very well too. Only minor nit is they could've used broadcasts to announce print servers, instead of having to configure that on the client. Then it would really be zero-maintenance.
As for an editor that does wordwrap without embedding newlines... well NEdit has had this as one mode for years. You can set it with newlines, or without, or don't wrap at all. Only problem is it's a Motif program, but you can get a statically linked one, and it still comes up fast enough. But I've been wanting somebody to port it to GTK or QT for years too. Then maybe a Windows port would also be possible.
Besides that NEdit has everything else you'd want in an editor (programer's editor or otherwise) while managing to be the least ungainly one I've ever seen on any Unix. And it will run on any Unix; so I can use the same editor both at work and at home.
Toyota RA4 EV - yes
it's an SUV but the NiMH batteries are supposed to last
100,000 miles, maintenance free; and it gets 126 miles to
the charge; and it has all the creature comforts. I think
it's kindof ironic all this high-tech stuff is being put in
an SUV. Just think how much better the range would be if
they'd put the same powertrain in a sports car with good
drag coefficient and low frontal area. But, as far as I
can tell this is the best new EV that you can actually buy
right now. Only in California, unfortunately. I presume
for charging it uses the GM paddle system like your EV1 but
haven't confirmed that.
You could just get a used one on ebay; I was very tempted
to bid on
this
but decided to wait on an electric for now.
Here's
an electric S10 pickup. I test drove one of these
once; it's a lot like an EV1, same technology in a pickup.
Supposedly you can buy these in California too, but I'm not
sure whether new or used. Otherwise they tend to show up
as surplus from electric-company fleet programs now and
then.
How has your service from GM been? I was tempted to buy one
of these S10s but I figured GM has been acting like they
want to forget that they ever had electric cars, so what
are the chances of getting good service 5 or 10 years from
now? And these things are too complicated to fix yourself,
probably. Whatcha gonna do if the inverter fails? AC
drives are not common in conversion EVs, and tend to be
rather pricey.
Finally, if you're not on the EV mailing
list, you should be. You will get a ton of good advice
there; most of the subscribers are hard-core electric
vehicle hobbyists who build their own conversions at
home.
And congratulations on having a brain and being willing to
put up with all the stupid naysayers out there, or the ones
who keep repeating the same tired old objections about
powerplants using fossil fuels (nevermind that they do it
so much more efficiently than even the best IC engine) or
"why don't you connect a generator to the wheels and make
your own electricity." I'm always surprised how otherwise
seemingly-smart people will laugh at you when you mention
something about electric vehicles. Every new technology has
to have its pioneers. And in the long term the earth isn't
giving us much choice about switching away from fossil
fuels anyway. This is why I do not advocate hybrid
vehicles. You can conserve gas with those, but I think in
any conceivable future there will always be some
alternative way to generate electricity, so maybe electric
cars are here to stay in one form or another.
But this is an abomination against nature, and probably responsible for mad cow disease too. If pigs don't eat meat when left to their own devices, it doesn't make sense to trick them into eating it, because that's not what they're evolved to eat.
Seems to me that rescue disks always use a ramdisk for the root partition, because you can't mount a read/write/etc or/var on top of a read-only root. Am I missing something here?
I want to do the same thing with compact FLASH for various embedded applications (the car MP3 player I want to build, etc.) That is writeable but it has limited life, so it would be best to mount it read-only most of the time.
I agree. My wife (from Belarus) really likes it, but my Russian isn't good enough to really understand. She says that it's not about the sci-fi, it's about this higher intelligence in the ocean teaching people about how to really love each other, and that the links between people are the most important thing in the world.
I have it on laserdisc (damned expensive on ebay!) but so far have only watched it once.
My wife on the other hand thinks 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most difficult film she's ever seen.
I can imagine the American version of Solaris will be totally different; I just hope it's not as bad as that godawful Time Machine release. The old Time Machine was sooo much better in sticking to the story, even if the morlocks did look like ordinary humans with bad makeup.
I think if you extract some rotational energy from a yo-yo to charge a battery, it'll be a lousy yo-yo... just sort of drop and then not have enough momentum to come back up again.
The best reason for ethernet in the bathroom would be to listen to MP3s in the shower, I'd think.
I'd like to have a waterproof touchscreen control panel that would replace a single ceramic tile, to control the music. Well, if somebody comes to the front door you could use it to see the camera view, too, and decide whether this visitor is worth getting out of the shower for or just another Jehovah's Witness.
As for what to do in general, I just made it clear from the beginning (a few weeks after I met her online, before we even met in person) that I was always going to be a geek, spend a lot of my time doing techy stuff, and she better not try to change me, because that's my life, and I have some goals that I need to try to reach. So far so good, except that she has a bit of an obsession about keeping things clean, like most women I suppose. Which means I don't get to pile up nonfunctional junk in every room anymore, but still there is some sort of computing device in just about every room, and I still have a total mess in 2 rooms plus semi-mess in the main computer room. She even likes the Audrey in the kitchen because she can check the weather, TV guide etc.
In general I think a geek has to decide if his geekhood is important enough to you to wait until he can find the sort of woman who can tolerate or appreciate it. If that's really who you are, then I don't think you should have to give up everything for love. But, it sounds like in your case, small compromises or compensation are keeping both of you happy, so what problem? Good luck.
It should be coupled with a physical key of some kind like a smartcard or iButton. In some cases the physical key may be enough; it's not easy for a hacker to simulate, at least not remotely. And in cases which warrant extra security a key combined with a password would be even better. That way you're not depending entirely on the password for security. This is the method used at ATMs - you bring your card and remember your PIN.
And for the ultimate security you would need 3 things - 1.) bring something (the key) 2.) remember something (the password) 3.) prove something about who you are (biometrics)
Cheap USB or serial iButton readers could be a quick and easy fix for many corporate environments. I heard there is an implementation for Windows to permit logon only by this method.
I wanted to design a ring/wedding band set which would interlock, and came up with this design. This guy Boone is selling it as one of his regular designs now, but I think it's my wife's ring in that picture.
I also got my groom's ring from him (this one). I intended it to be reminiscent but not an exact match to the bride's ring.
Re:How about a voltage converter
on
Emigrating DVD's?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A region 2 DVD player is probably also PAL or SECAM instead of NTSC so you'd need such a TV too; also not easy in the US.
What the world needs is this... a virtual filesystem which aggregates storage on multiple machines, storing the data redundantly, with different levels of quality-of-service (so that video is stored on faster storage and archives on slower), encryption by chunks so that no complete file is stored on any one machine, capable of handling both write-once and read-write media (while still allowing any file to be changed), built-in version control, etc. If some machines in this network go down, the data (or most of it) should still be accessible.
Yes I know there are lots of incomplete implementations of such an idea (AFS, some peer-to-peer projects, another FS whose name has slipped my mind at the moment, etc), but I think there is still not one good implementation which has all the right features, can be mounted on multiple OS's, reliable enough, etc. If this were done right, backups would be obsolete.
You probably also have customized stuff in/var (databases, web sites, etc.),/etc (config files),
/usr/local (packages you had to compile because there weren't any.debs for them), maybe/usr/src (standard place for Linux kernel trees, and usually I keep source trees for other packages there, sometimes with patches), and maybe even/usr/share.
You know, the funny thing about/usr/share is it is supposed to be where you put "data" which can be shared by users, right? I'd be inclined to NFS-mount it. But Debian installs so many things there. At my job,/usr/local is NFS, but I don't like the semantics of that (it should be _local_, dammit!) So at home I've taken to storing MP3's, video files etc. under/var, and/var has a whole 100 gig drive dedicated to it on one server. But it's a little strange because then on other machines I NFS-mount this machine's/var (under/mnt/something, not/var), but only parts of it are interesting to other machines.
Anyway I think there should be a standard place for stuff which will be shared between users (everything from documentation to icons to MP3s to programs which users have compiled themselves); then that would be a very high-priority directory to back up, right after/home, and there wouldn't be so much of that kind of stuff scattered around.
This was my first significant web effort back in 1994 and since then, I never managed to acquire much hardware, or find the time for any 3D programming, or even think of very many good applications for it. I have experimented with a couple of "toggle goggle" designs (one big LCD shutter for each eye, synchronized with alternating images on your monitor); they work, but are a little cumbersome and for me, the applications are very few. I'm not a big-time gamer, although I did play Descent in 3D a few times (in 1995 or so). I would like to think that VR has many general-purpose uses, but so far not many. Actually I don't completely understand myself why I lost interest, just too much else to do maybe.
The real limits might be cognitive ones; how many windows can you open before you begin to forget what is what? Already on 6 virtual desktops sometimes I leave windows open for a couple weeks at a time, and then wonder what I was using them for. And when I tried using Opera, I found that because I could leave a lot of browser windows open, inside its MDI space, that's what I did; and soon the list of open windows started looking more like a bookmarks list.
So I thought that windows should expire after some amount of disuse. They should _become_ something like bookmarks (searchable by metadata (title, keywords, URL, full text, etc.), and also organized in a timeline, and also organized in a graph of branching - which link did you follow to get there?) automatically.
Anyway for many purposes I like the idea of a tiled desktop; especially for "reference materials" which I need to glance at, but not interact with quite as much. But I think the user needs a very straightforward choice when spawning a new window, whether to take up space in the tile matrix for it. Maybe something like click with middle-mouse button on a link, to open it in a new tile-space; and click with left-mouse to open it in the same space, in a new window lying on top of the old one. So each tile-space becomes a stack of windows. (And I'm imagining a GUI in which most navigation is a lot like navigating hyperlinks.) Of course, every time you must make room for a new tile-space, it's liable to cause most other windows to be resized; and controlling that is tricky. Using virtual desktops effectively can help with that. It needs to be easy to move windows from one desktop to another, _and_ place them into the desired tile-space, in one fell swoop, without a lot of mousing around, or thinking too hard.
Maybe there should be a window manager which gives you a choice for each desktop - tile or overlap. I would bet quite a lot of money that will be done by somebody in the next few years.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a very strict old grammar teacher in 5th - 7th grades (at a private school) who taught English and Latin. It's somewhat interesting to see the relationships between the two languages; and if you learn the highly structured grammar of Latin, you will understand the parts of speech very well, whereas in English with its lack of structure (conjugations and delensions, agreement of person and gender and number etc.) they are not so painfully obvious. But alas she stressed grammar much more than vocabulary, and not having used Latin since, I forgot most of the words.
When I began to learn Russian however, the grammar concepts were so familiar already. (Russian has a much more pure Latin heritage than English, and very similar grammar rules). So in a sense it was useful, accidentally.
I'd like a duplex page scanner. A few years ago, narrow page scanners where you just feed in one sheet at a time, and the software automatically captures when it detects paper there, were popular; but why not have it capture the backside too?
It would be great to have one in the living room, mounted on top of a trash can (shredder-style), or even on top of a shredder, to convert s-mail to email.
Of course there are production autofeeder duplex scanners but I keep looking on ebay and the working ones always end up rather expensive.
I might try to mechanically wed two page scanners, and just deal with the two data streams.
Well I don't know how to skip the FBI warning... but since y'all are talking up Apex I'd like to say the Sampo players are IMO da bomb. I got a 631CF, which is the first DVD player to also include a CF slot for viewing digital pictures and playing MP3s. There are hacked firmware versions available which enable region-free use. Even with stock firmware, it can convert NTSC to PAL or vice-versa. It's one of the few that can play SVCD format. The power supply works on any typical powerline voltage/frequency. So basically you can play any form of 5" disc video anywhere in the world. And probably the build quality of these players is better than Apex.
I wonder how this hacked firmware is made though. Maybe it'd be possible to modify it so that "mandatory viewing" parts are no longer mandatory.
(I don't work for Sampo BTW)
You know about these guys:
http://www.fingerworks.com/
right? They've been mentioned on Slashdot before. Their products can detect multiple fingers at once.
They are selling tablets and keyboard replacements, not touchscreens, but I think I read somewhere (on their website maybe) that they believe it would be possible some day to use this tech in a touchscreen.
The cool thing is it sees your whole hand via infrared, so it can tell which finger you're using. For the first time, you can "right click" on a touch surface, or use other finger combinations/gestures for various operations (drag, pan/scroll, rotate, etc.)
DJVU was designed for scanning paper documents, mainly. It doesn't include actual ASCII text like scanned PDFs can, but it is tuned for accurate visual representation of printed pages. The images have a couple of layers - the high-contrast material (such as text) and the background nuances (shading of the paper etc.) So it's possible to view the image with or without the background. And the background, being low res smooth shading, doesn't cost much space. I've been using it for a couple of years for this purpose, because neither JPEG nor PNG are ideally suited for it. Separating the foreground from the background strikes me as a really good idea.
It wasn't completely free at first so that was good news when it was announced a while back.
Of course to be truly useful as a JPEG replacement it needs to be included in browsers. People don't like having to mess with plugins.
Anyway I bet the JPEG patent stuff will blow over soon enough. This company obviously has brass balls and no brains to think they can pull that off. Maybe they will manage to sue a few big guys, bully some little ones, make some money and then get a little more complacent as their time runs out. But I imagine we will still be seeing lots of JPGs 10 years from now (just like GIFs didn't go away).
CUPS for printing. The only thing you have to configure on a client is which server is the print server; and you can use a web GUI to manage print jobs, printers etc. I have no compliants whatsoever. KDE integrates with it very very well too. Only minor nit is they could've used broadcasts to announce print servers, instead of having to configure that on the client. Then it would really be zero-maintenance.
As for an editor that does wordwrap without embedding newlines... well NEdit has had this as one mode for years. You can set it with newlines, or without, or don't wrap at all. Only problem is it's a Motif program, but you can get a statically linked one, and it still comes up fast enough. But I've been wanting somebody to port it to GTK or QT for years too. Then maybe a Windows port would also be possible.
Besides that NEdit has everything else you'd want in an editor (programer's editor or otherwise) while managing to be the least ungainly one I've ever seen on any Unix. And it will run on any Unix; so I can use the same editor both at work and at home.
Toyota RA4 EV - yes it's an SUV but the NiMH batteries are supposed to last 100,000 miles, maintenance free; and it gets 126 miles to the charge; and it has all the creature comforts. I think it's kindof ironic all this high-tech stuff is being put in an SUV. Just think how much better the range would be if they'd put the same powertrain in a sports car with good drag coefficient and low frontal area. But, as far as I can tell this is the best new EV that you can actually buy right now. Only in California, unfortunately. I presume for charging it uses the GM paddle system like your EV1 but haven't confirmed that.
You could just get a used one on ebay; I was very tempted to bid on this but decided to wait on an electric for now. Here's an electric S10 pickup. I test drove one of these once; it's a lot like an EV1, same technology in a pickup. Supposedly you can buy these in California too, but I'm not sure whether new or used. Otherwise they tend to show up as surplus from electric-company fleet programs now and then.
How has your service from GM been? I was tempted to buy one of these S10s but I figured GM has been acting like they want to forget that they ever had electric cars, so what are the chances of getting good service 5 or 10 years from now? And these things are too complicated to fix yourself, probably. Whatcha gonna do if the inverter fails? AC drives are not common in conversion EVs, and tend to be rather pricey.
Finally, if you're not on the EV mailing list, you should be. You will get a ton of good advice there; most of the subscribers are hard-core electric vehicle hobbyists who build their own conversions at home.
And congratulations on having a brain and being willing to put up with all the stupid naysayers out there, or the ones who keep repeating the same tired old objections about powerplants using fossil fuels (nevermind that they do it so much more efficiently than even the best IC engine) or "why don't you connect a generator to the wheels and make your own electricity." I'm always surprised how otherwise seemingly-smart people will laugh at you when you mention something about electric vehicles. Every new technology has to have its pioneers. And in the long term the earth isn't giving us much choice about switching away from fossil fuels anyway. This is why I do not advocate hybrid vehicles. You can conserve gas with those, but I think in any conceivable future there will always be some alternative way to generate electricity, so maybe electric cars are here to stay in one form or another.
But this is an abomination against nature, and probably responsible for mad cow disease too. If pigs don't eat meat when left to their own devices, it doesn't make sense to trick them into eating it, because that's not what they're evolved to eat.
Seems to me that rescue disks always use a ramdisk for the root partition, /etc or /var on top of a
because you can't mount a read/write
read-only root. Am I missing something here?
I want to do the same thing with compact FLASH for various
embedded applications (the car MP3 player I want to build, etc.)
That is writeable but it has limited life, so it would be best to
mount it read-only most of the time.
I agree. My wife (from Belarus) really likes it, but my Russian isn't good enough to really understand. She says that it's not about the sci-fi, it's about this higher intelligence in the ocean teaching people about how to really love each other, and that the links between people are the most important thing in the world.
I have it on laserdisc (damned expensive on ebay!) but so far have only watched it once.
My wife on the other hand thinks 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most difficult film she's ever seen.
I can imagine the American version of Solaris will be totally different; I just hope it's not as bad as that godawful Time Machine release. The old Time Machine was sooo much better in sticking to the story, even if the morlocks did look like ordinary humans with bad makeup.
I think if you extract some rotational energy from a yo-yo to charge a battery, it'll be a lousy yo-yo... just sort of drop and then not have enough momentum to come back up again.
The best reason for ethernet in the bathroom would be to listen to MP3s in the shower, I'd think.
I'd like to have a waterproof touchscreen control panel that would replace a single ceramic tile, to control the music. Well, if somebody comes to the front door you could use it to see the camera view, too, and decide whether this visitor is worth getting out of the shower for or just another Jehovah's Witness.
As for what to do in general, I just made it clear from the beginning (a few weeks after I met her online, before we even met in person) that I was always going to be a geek, spend a lot of my time doing techy stuff, and she better not try to change me, because that's my life, and I have some goals that I need to try to reach. So far so good, except that she has a bit of an obsession about keeping things clean, like most women I suppose. Which means I don't get to pile up nonfunctional junk in every room anymore, but still there is some sort of computing device in just about every room, and I still have a total mess in 2 rooms plus semi-mess in the main computer room. She even likes the Audrey in the kitchen because she can check the weather, TV guide etc.
In general I think a geek has to decide if his geekhood is important enough to you to wait until he can find the sort of woman who can tolerate or appreciate it. If that's really who you are, then I don't think you should have to give up everything for love. But, it sounds like in your case, small compromises or compensation are keeping both of you happy, so what problem? Good luck.
Or you could get their goat.
It should be coupled with a physical key of some kind like a smartcard or iButton. In some cases the physical key may be enough; it's not easy for a hacker to simulate, at least not remotely. And in cases which warrant extra security a key combined with a password would be even better. That way you're not depending entirely on the password for security. This is the method used at ATMs - you bring your card and remember your PIN.
And for the ultimate security you would need 3 things - 1.) bring something (the key) 2.) remember something (the password) 3.) prove something about who you are (biometrics)
Cheap USB or serial iButton readers could be a quick and easy fix for many corporate environments. I heard there is an implementation for Windows to permit logon only by this method.
I also got my groom's ring from him (this one). I intended it to be reminiscent but not an exact match to the bride's ring.
A region 2 DVD player is probably also PAL or SECAM instead of NTSC so you'd need such a TV too; also not easy in the US.
What the world needs is this... a virtual filesystem which aggregates storage on multiple machines, storing the data redundantly, with different levels of quality-of-service (so that video is stored on faster storage and archives on slower), encryption by chunks so that no complete file is stored on any one machine, capable of handling both write-once and read-write media (while still allowing any file to be changed), built-in version control, etc. If some machines in this network go down, the data (or most of it) should still be accessible.
Yes I know there are lots of incomplete implementations of such an idea (AFS, some peer-to-peer projects, another FS whose name has slipped my mind at the moment, etc), but I think there is still not one good implementation which has all the right features, can be mounted on multiple OS's, reliable enough, etc. If this were done right, backups would be obsolete.
You probably also have customized stuff in /var (databases, web sites, etc.), /etc (config files),
.debs for them), maybe /usr/src (standard place for Linux kernel trees, and usually I keep source trees for other packages there, sometimes with patches), and maybe even /usr/share.
/usr/share is it is supposed to be where you put "data" which can be shared by users, right? I'd be inclined to NFS-mount it. But Debian installs so many things there. At my job, /usr/local is NFS, but I don't like the semantics of that (it should be _local_, dammit!) So at home I've taken to storing MP3's, video files etc. under /var, and /var has a whole 100 gig drive dedicated to it on one server. But it's a little strange because then on other machines I NFS-mount this machine's /var (under /mnt/something, not /var), but only parts of it are interesting to other machines.
/home, and there wouldn't be so much of that kind of stuff scattered around.
/usr/local (packages you had to compile because there weren't any
You know, the funny thing about
Anyway I think there should be a standard place for stuff which will be shared between users (everything from documentation to icons to MP3s to programs which users have compiled themselves); then that would be a very high-priority directory to back up, right after
This was my first significant web effort back in 1994 and since then, I never managed to acquire much hardware, or find the time for any 3D programming, or even think of very many good applications for it. I have experimented with a couple of "toggle goggle" designs (one big LCD shutter for each eye, synchronized with alternating images on your monitor); they work, but are a little cumbersome and for me, the applications are very few. I'm not a big-time gamer, although I did play Descent in 3D a few times (in 1995 or so). I would like to think that VR has many general-purpose uses, but so far not many. Actually I don't completely understand myself why I lost interest, just too much else to do maybe.
pim.pl - "pimple"? Yuck! :-)
I didn't forget the ... I think there is a SlashCode bug here.
So I thought that windows should expire after some amount of disuse. They should _become_ something like bookmarks (searchable by metadata (title, keywords, URL, full text, etc.), and also organized in a timeline, and also organized in a graph of branching - which link did you follow to get there?) automatically.
On either a tiled or overlapping desktop, the constant is that being able to minimize or collapse windows to remove them from the screen is important. But on a tiled desktop it would be even more important than usual. And I think the GUI mechanism for selecting from all open windows (including minimized ones), which one to view, is very important. I've recently fallen in love with the KDE "external taskbar". I put it in the upper right, enable auto-hide, and now it's very Mac-like, and compliant with Fitts's Law - I can slam the mouse up into that corner and I get a nice list of open windows, organized by which desktop they're on, without regard to whether they are minimized or not. There is enough space to show more of the title bar than you get on a typical minimized icon in WindowMaker, or a on one of those taskbar buttons on Windows or Gnome, yet, it still doesn't take up a lot of real estate, and still has mini-icons too. I can manage many more windows effectively this way. And it's rather like a stack of books (an approach to organizing information which has been advocated elsewhere).
Anyway for many purposes I like the idea of a tiled desktop; especially for "reference materials" which I need to glance at, but not interact with quite as much. But I think the user needs a very straightforward choice when spawning a new window, whether to take up space in the tile matrix for it. Maybe something like click with middle-mouse button on a link, to open it in a new tile-space; and click with left-mouse to open it in the same space, in a new window lying on top of the old one. So each tile-space becomes a stack of windows. (And I'm imagining a GUI in which most navigation is a lot like navigating hyperlinks.) Of course, every time you must make room for a new tile-space, it's liable to cause most other windows to be resized; and controlling that is tricky. Using virtual desktops effectively can help with that. It needs to be easy to move windows from one desktop to another, _and_ place them into the desired tile-space, in one fell swoop, without a lot of mousing around, or thinking too hard.
Maybe there should be a window manager which gives you a choice for each desktop - tile or overlap. I would bet quite a lot of money that will be done by somebody in the next few years.
You will probably never have excess monitor space. How big is big enough?
They could rename it MS Panes (slashdotters will call that MS Pains).
Windows 1.0 did this, because they hadn't figured out how to do overlapping windows yet.
So the page is slashdotted for the day... did anyone find out whether this can boot Linux from ReiserFS partitions?
Did anybody mirror the site?