In English, at least nouns and verbs are separate words. Your C syntax combines them. If we did that in English, the number of words would be approximately squared. Now of course, there could be conventions for how to do this (just like the conventions for subject-verb agreement in languages that use endings, like Latin or Russian), and you are doing that... your convention is to use an underscore. But still, every useful combination of verb/noun must be _implemented_ separately, whereas in OO languages you have polymorphism and inheritance to cut down some of the work; lines of code get re-used more.
I'm presently working on a project this way (using C for some semi-OO stuff) but only because performance is more important than anything (it's a Postscript interpreter; the high-level language is Postscript, and I intend to minimize my use of C as much as possible, and implement parts of the interpreter in Postscript). And I don't really like C++ syntax very much. But I wouldn't write largish GUI desktop applications (like a lot of the GTK apps out there intend to be) with OO-C. It's just too verbose and confusing, and typical non-trivial GUI apps really depend on the OO abstraction.
They got some masks for making some older Intel processor (8086 maybe?) somehow, but couldn't make pure enough silicon, so they scaled the design up to a larger size, and its maximum speed ended up being only a few hundred khz.
Also heard about the navy capturing Soviet sonobuoys and discovering that they had some modified Atari game computers in them.
But, this stuff is only hearsay... who knows. I put even less faith in those stories than the average slashdot comment.:-)
Seems like they could have done some pretty advanced stuff depending on whether it was a priority for the government.
Hmmm, I thought it was around 150 kbytes/sec raw throughput, about the same as a 1X CD drive. But dd is probably taking a lot of precautions (verifying, maybe). It certainly seems to notice when a disk has bad tracks.
DOS systems seem to be able to write to floppies faster than anything else. I think the controller hardware can make a difference too; my very first XT had a floppy controller that seemed a lot faster to me than other systems of that era. It was critical because there wasn't a hard drive.:-)
ASU Surplus is at Price & Rio Salado, SE corner. Anything is liable to show up there. They used to only have auctions, but now it's actually a retail operation.
There is a place called Gold Circuit but I haven't been there. There is SEX (Surplus Electronics eXchange) on 7th Ave. and Magnolia, a bit south of I17. That is mostly a recycling yard, but sometimes you can buy stuff before they get around to melting it down. The owner is inclined towards making it more of a store, I think; building some buildings to keep some of it inside. I traded some AutoCAD work (helping him visualize his buildings) for some junk.:-)
First, AFAICT, the Purdue project is not a self-adjusting chair... it only senses your position.
But I thought of an idea to build a self-adjusting chair several years ago... a lattice of triangular shapes, and a linear actuator underneath each corner. (But the corners of 3 different triangles meet at each motor, so raising the motor at a point would "pitch a tent"... 3 different triangles angle upwards.) The resultant stretching would require the triangles to be stretchy, so it'd probably be best to make a single sheet of molded rubber for the whole chair, with the triangles being thicker and the joints between them thinner. The triangles should have rounded corners so they don't poke you too much. There would be a strain-gauge type sensor at the end of each motor's shaft. There would be some software which simply tries to adjust all the motors in such a way that the force distribution fits a nice smooth 3d spline patch... thus over a small area of your body, the forces would be approximately equally distributed. The chair frame could be built like a chaise lounge, a seat and a back and a leg-piece each with the adjustable surface, and also with an angle adjustment so that you can either sit up straight or lie down flat or anything in between. You could use it for everything from coding to reading to sleeping: just use a high-resolution projector instead of a monitor, and a wireless keyboard, and a trackball.
Now imagine a futon looking thing made this way... and "presets" which either make a hump in the middle to keep the two people apart, or make one big depression in the middle for cuddling. Kindof erotic. Some hacker would probably write some software to simulate a partner by shaping the surface appropriately. Put on your VR goggles, and shazam...virtual Natalie Portman. Much cheaper than an android if you are happy with the missionary position.
You could also do force feedback for games if the motors were fast enough, but it might be kindof power-hungry with all of them jerking you around at once.
But it would be rather expensive... would require thousands of motors. I also thought of making a webbed chair or loveseat, but having motors on each horizontal and vertical strap, so that the basic shape can be adjusted by adjusting the tensions of the straps... but it wouldn't be quite as flexible. At least it could be built at a reasonable cost.
That's my dream too. It simplifies the architecture vastly; and it allows arbitrary data structures to be used, instead of having to shoehorn everything into tables or hierarchical sets of files. "indexing" and "querying" can be as fast and as optimal for the application as you need them to be... because you have to write your own.:-) (or use some reusable library)
fsck time?!?! How quaint. For one thing this is memory we're talking about, not a hard drive; and for another, let's hope we can think of a better technique to correct any corruption that might occur.
I know. Debian distributes it linked against LessTif, so I don't think that's the reason it's non-free; it would have to do with NEdit's own license. I also have never had it crash.
I love NEdit. At home it's always my first choice for any kind of
coding. At work we have SlickEdit but that's expensive, and annoyingly slow
sometimes.
For some reason Debian puts NEdit in the non-free section. That means it doesn't come on
the CDs. I was doing an install for a friend on his laptop, and NEdit is his favorite
editor too, so this was kindof annoying; now he's got to get a NIC working in order to
download it. So maybe you could look into making it truly free software? I wish I knew
what the objection is...probably something silly.
I also don't like the use of Motif. Not that Motif is getting in the way, it's just a
minor nit for the usual reasons (lack of themability, having to load a library that I
don't use for much else, or use a statically linked version which wastes memory). I do
love the fact that it runs on other platforms like Solaris, but now that Sun is going to be
using Gnome I guess that means GTK will always be available also.
I have a lot of trouble with shortcut keys lately; in older versions they used to work
perfectly, but now it seems that it takes time to notice that the control key is down;
for instance I usually have to press control-C several times to successfully copy to the
clipboard. Sometimes I've even seen it insert control characters into the text when I
press the keys, like control-S comes out as or something like that; but this is an
intermittent problem which often goes away if I close NEdit and start a new copy. The
not-noticing-control-C problem does not go away.
I love the column selection features; that and indent/outdent and macros are the major
things I want to have in a code editor beyond the usual features. It's just a little
quirky compared to other editors like SlickEdit or most Windows code editors that
indent/outdent is not done with tab/shift-tab, and drag-n-drop is done with the middle
mouse button. I can deal with these quirks but I'd rather be able to customize them.
A means to choose a character encoding and thereby switch to an appropriate font would be
nice. I sometimes use NEdit to practice my Russian, and have to manually change the font
to Cronyx Fixed, which is KOI8 encoded. (But I don't want to use that font all the time,
because it is not as easy on the eyes as Lucida.) Fortunately NEdit allows me to type
8-bit characters (I use xrus to switch the keyboard into that mode), otherwise it would
not have been possible at all. But there is that dialog where the default fonts are set;
it would be nice if I could also set fonts to use for various other encodings, in an
extensible way (like add an encoding, add a font to go with it, instead of only having a
fixed set of encodings). Then have an easy-to-access menu to choose an encoding while
editing, from the known set.
I hope NEdit continues to improve and asymptotically approach a bug-free state. Good luck to you with it.
I'm hoping genetic manipulation will provide the ability to recreate diversity some day. We could clone thousands of animals, each with small mutations, and let natural selection sort them out, or later, maybe we'd come to understand the effects of individual changes, and try to reproduce the kinds of diversity which we expect existed in nature before the extinction.
I'm using a G200 right now because it has sync-on-green, and because there is a console driver in the kernel. This allows me to keep it at 1280x1024 all the time, even on the console, so I can use my surplus Mentor Graphics workstation monitor (which has only 3 BNC connectors, the sync is part of the "green" signal). But I do have two of those monitors. I wonder if I could install a second G200 and do dual-head with that...
On Saturday there was that link to Macintosh history, and from there, there was a link to this, which espouses a rather pessimistic view of the future... it had me questioning what is the point of it all. The author makes the point that in the 60's there were two opposing viewpoints - the belief that redemption will be found by returning to our natural state, and the opposite idea that technology is going to be our salvation - that the only path is forward, pressing on through the grimy industrial tunnel and hoping that there is a light at the other end. Or perhaps a third viewpoint would be an uneasy synthesis of the two - that after technology has eliminated all our drudgeries, we will be enabled to return to nature while still benefitting from the technology. That's pretty much the Star Trek philosophy. Seems kindof naive though doesn't it?
On the one hand, there is no point in trying to go back in time and live simpler lives. Any attempt to go backwards instead of forwards is doomed. But on the other hand, to go forwards in the same way we are currently doing will lead to more of the same problems - more environmental pollution, more overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, excessive use of artifical energy sources, and more exploitation. If present trends continue we will find ourselves in Neil Stephenson's world, more or less. But there doesn't seem to be any other choice either; the momentum will play out and either we will find our salvation afterall, or life will suck.
So for these guys (Rees-Mogg and Davidson) to say that somehow we're going to achieve further liberation, seems naive to me too. Nature abhors a vacuum. All of history is occupied by power struggles. Even the animals have them. If we can achieve a temporary state of complete freedom, then out of the ensuing chaos, some kind of power base will emerge. If it's not the government, as Stephenson would surmise, it'll probably be the big corporations (or organized crime... is there really a difference?). I hope that some kind of positive outcome is achieved, but I fear that it won't; we're just exchanging masters and maintaining the same old enslavement. As Roszak theorized (in the article I linked to at the top of this), the "information society" enables the big evil organizations (corporations, the military and other snoops) even more than it enables the individual. Can we keep up with the threats? Will it be possible for the state-of-the-art encryption techniques to outpace the ability of the snoops to crack them? Or will the state-of-the-art continue to be effectively illegal? Will our abilities to colonize space ultimately outstrip our reproductive rates? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile strangely enough it doesn't make me want to be a geek any less than I did before. I must still have a little hope left that technology will save us after all. Or at least, out of habit, I would think that my life was meaningless without doing something to advance the state of the art. Even if I'm ultimately building my own shackles, I don't know what else I could do that would have any long-term meaning.
I predict the teacher will say that the reason is to make grading easier because he/she doesn't know how to use other programming environments, and wants to verify the program works.
This happened to me in my first C programming class (c. 1990, ASU), only it was the other way around - I wanted to use Turbo C so I could do it at home, and they wanted us to huddle around old-fashioned green screens, 10 of which were connected to each 286-based Xenix server. And I didn't know vi, and wanted to lynch the TA who suggested that vi was such a wonderful editor we ought to use it to write letters and stuff like that in addition to the classwork. (But those machines were such awful multitaskers, that even vi in all its initial horror as it appears to a newbie, was much much worse... several seconds between you hitting a keystroke and it noticing, in some cases.) How times change, how the mind and the computers both mature...
Fortunately these "servers" had floppies and there was a way to load my code which I had written at home, and merely test it on those beasts.
They even had automated testing tools which provided input to your program and verified the output. Your grade was based on passing those tests.
Re:whats up with the no keyboard fetish?-Leather
on
The Computer of 2010
·
· Score: 1
what would this input device register if the only finger being moved around in "this certain way" was the middle one?
It could be a handy shortcut meaning find the root partition in/etc/fstab and run
The usual objection against virtual keyboards is lack of tactile feedback. It's not just to let you know that you pressed a key, but to reclaim some kinetic energy; it takes less work if your fingers bounce back from the keys instead of you having to pull them back. Touchscreens are intuitively compelling, and also bad with respect to this feedback if used exclusively - you're punching fingers down against an immovable object and it could probably be rather fatiguing. Your finger is absorbing most of the impact energy. But maybe the problem is not so bad with gloves, because you don't have to move your fingers quite as forcefully in the first place, and vibratory or audio feedback would be enough to let you know that you hit a key. I'd probably get tired of having to put on the gloves, myself; like how could you eat or drink and compute at the same time while wearing them? (I do this a lot, I'm eating dinner right now.)
I believe that a touchscreen is a good replacement for a mouse; and a trackball would also be an even better replacement under certain circumstances (such as smooth navigation, as opposed to point-and-click). Inspired by the non-existent technology of the Starfire project, I've been pondering the idea of using a combination of a large screen for viewing documents, with no controls on it; a small touchscreen for application-specific controls; a trackball for smooth motion; and a keyboard for typing text. I could operate GIMP entirely via the touchscreen, or a combination of touchscreen and trackball. The trackball could be the 3-axis type which would allow some interesting 3D navigation (but Linux is short on apps which would make use of it, so far). Eventually the keyboard (and some other input modalities) could be gradually replaced by voice recognition.
The metawidget idea (that link is getting old, I need to write about my more recent ideas) would be useful in such a system to separate "control" functionality from the document and view parts of the MVC pattern. GIMP for example would keep a socket connection open with the touchscreen display software, on which it would exchange messages about which controls to make available, and receive messages about which controls were selected. So the palettes, the toolbox, and some context-sensitive stuff would be the main things on the touchscreen, and there would be enough real estate to have many more of them available at once, so that most actions can be done with fewer clicks. Cascading menus should be replaced with something more appropriate for punching a touchscreen (when you "dive in" to the next level, the next level replaces the current level; or perhaps with a menu structure that resembles the NeXT file browser). Eventually I will get around to putting up a website at www.metawidgets.org to discuss these ideas.
In short, I think improving ergonomics ought to be done in a holistic way rather than just putting more bells and whistles on existing devices like mice and keyboards. And there is more than one path to experiment with. I like touchscreens but they are not practical in every situation.
Now, I'm going to go ramble on a bit here about my ergonomic workstation idea, in case you haven't already had enough...
I was thinking with electricity... and the point was to avoid transportation costs, even though doing it with electricity is less efficient than doing it at the power plant.
I agree the priority is to find cleaner ways to generate electricity, at any scale.
As for hydro being bad for the river, I sortof don't buy that... it seems to me that the advantage of clean air outweighs the changes in the river flow. Rivers change course now and then on their own, and nature adapts. It bothers me a lot when people propose to tear down dams that already exist and restore the river to its "natural state", because the natural state has now changed; trees grow further down the banks than they did before, and there are new habitats for animals which would be destroyed by "restoring" the river. It's prudent to take steps to ensure that no extinctions are caused, and also to ensure that the rate of flow out of the dam is somewhere near constant (the large, intermittent gushing when there is too much rain and they have to do something with it now are destructive) but I think hydro power can be managed well.
With fuel cells, you still have fuel transportation costs, unless you can manufacture that in your backyard too (well, maybe you could generate some alcohol from kitchen garbage and grass clippings, but probably not enough). Natural gas has proven that pipelines are cost-effective in cities. A hydrogen pipeline might not be a very popular idea though.
I think I'd rather just cover the roof of my house with solar panels, that way it's totally free energy, and I think you could get a few kilowatts during the day with current technology, which would probably be enough to charge an electric car and run the appliances. You'd need more efficient appliances to optimize its use, and of course a big bank of batteries to store power for nighttime; or the ability to sell energy to the power companies during the day and buy it back at night. I'm planning to build a small-scale system like that, so that 2 or 3 computers can be "off the grid", to avoid power surges and outages. I've got 2 golf-cart batteries and 2 120-watt solar panels; I just need to get a charge controller, and some 12V PC power supplies, and time to put it all together.
We can have bitterly cold winters (-40 degrees, Celsius or Fahrenheit, whichever you prefer),
Well weather like that would reduce the efficiency a lot anyway, I'd think... you can't get the gas to expand quite as much as you can in hot weather, so it would take more of it to get the car moving. You could then supplement it with some kind of fuel-powered heater, but that would kindof defeat the purpose...as well as providing you with supplemental heat in the wilds of Canada.
Some people who use electric cars in cold climates like to use kerosene heaters, because electric heat is wasteful (but like air conditioning, only costs you on the order of 10% of your range). And lead-acid batteries lose some range anyway in cold weather; the chemical reaction is aided by heat. But the batteries are usually OK if you drive the car every day (the current helps keep them warm) and the battery box is well insulated, and the car is kept in a garage when not being driven. And I think NiCad batteries don't mind the cold quite as much.
As for oxygen depravation, ummm depravation means creation of depravity, or moral debasement. But I know what you meant... and one solution would be to use a heat exchanger. The last time I heard this nitrogen-powered car idea (indeed it isn't a new one...) that was being proposed.
Slashdot Mirror
In English, at least nouns and verbs are separate words. Your C syntax combines them. If we did that in English, the number of words would be approximately squared. Now of course, there could be conventions for how to do this (just like the conventions for subject-verb agreement in languages that use endings, like Latin or Russian), and you are doing that... your convention is to use an underscore. But still, every useful combination of verb/noun must be _implemented_ separately, whereas in OO languages you have polymorphism and inheritance to cut down some of the work; lines of code get re-used more.
I'm presently working on a project this way (using C for some semi-OO stuff) but only because performance is more important than anything (it's a Postscript interpreter; the high-level language is Postscript, and I intend to minimize my use of C as much as possible, and implement parts of the interpreter in Postscript). And I don't really like C++ syntax very much. But I wouldn't write largish GUI desktop applications (like a lot of the GTK apps out there intend to be) with OO-C. It's just too verbose and confusing, and typical non-trivial GUI apps really depend on the OO abstraction.
They got some masks for making some older Intel processor (8086 maybe?) somehow, but couldn't make pure enough silicon, so they scaled the design up to a larger size, and its maximum speed ended up being only a few hundred khz.
:-)
Also heard about the navy capturing Soviet sonobuoys and discovering that they had some modified Atari game computers in them.
But, this stuff is only hearsay... who knows. I put even less faith in those stories than the average slashdot comment.
Seems like they could have done some pretty advanced stuff depending on whether it was a priority for the government.
Hmmm, I thought it was around 150 kbytes/sec raw throughput, about the same as a 1X CD drive. But dd is probably taking a lot of precautions (verifying, maybe). It certainly seems to notice when a disk has bad tracks.
:-)
DOS systems seem to be able to write to floppies faster than anything else. I think the controller hardware can make a difference too; my very first XT had a floppy controller that seemed a lot faster to me than other systems of that era. It was critical because there wasn't a hard drive.
ASU Surplus is at Price & Rio Salado, SE corner. Anything is liable to show up there. They used to only have auctions, but now it's actually a retail operation.
:-)
There is a place called Gold Circuit but I haven't been there. There is SEX (Surplus Electronics eXchange) on 7th Ave. and Magnolia, a bit south of I17. That is mostly a recycling yard, but sometimes you can buy stuff before they get around to melting it down. The owner is inclined towards making it more of a store, I think; building some buildings to keep some of it inside. I traded some AutoCAD work (helping him visualize his buildings) for some junk.
I wonder how hard it would be to port.
First, AFAICT, the Purdue project is not a self-adjusting chair... it only senses your position.
But I thought of an idea to build a self-adjusting chair several years ago... a lattice of triangular shapes, and a linear actuator underneath each corner. (But the corners of 3 different triangles meet at each motor, so raising the motor at a point would "pitch a tent"... 3 different triangles angle upwards.) The resultant stretching would require the triangles to be stretchy, so it'd probably be best to make a single sheet of molded rubber for the whole chair, with the triangles being thicker and the joints between them thinner. The triangles should have rounded corners so they don't poke you too much. There would be a strain-gauge type sensor at the end of each motor's shaft. There would be some software which simply tries to adjust all the motors in such a way that the force distribution fits a nice smooth 3d spline patch... thus over a small area of your body, the forces would be approximately equally distributed. The chair frame could be built like a chaise lounge, a seat and a back and a leg-piece each with the adjustable surface, and also with an angle adjustment so that you can either sit up straight or lie down flat or anything in between. You could use it for everything from coding to reading to sleeping: just use a high-resolution projector instead of a monitor, and a wireless keyboard, and a trackball.
Now imagine a futon looking thing made this way... and "presets" which either make a hump in the middle to keep the two people apart, or make one big depression in the middle for cuddling. Kindof erotic. Some hacker would probably write some software to simulate a partner by shaping the surface appropriately. Put on your VR goggles, and shazam...virtual Natalie Portman. Much cheaper than an android if you are happy with the missionary position.
You could also do force feedback for games if the motors were fast enough, but it might be kindof power-hungry with all of them jerking you around at once.
But it would be rather expensive... would require thousands of motors. I also thought of making a webbed chair or loveseat, but having motors on each horizontal and vertical strap, so that the basic shape can be adjusted by adjusting the tensions of the straps... but it wouldn't be quite as flexible. At least it could be built at a reasonable cost.
It's not at all well explained either here or on his site, AFAICT.
That's my dream too. It simplifies the architecture vastly; and it allows arbitrary data structures to be used, instead of having to shoehorn everything into tables or hierarchical sets of files. "indexing" and "querying" can be as fast and as optimal for the application as you need them to be... because you have to write your own. :-) (or use some reusable library)
fsck time?!?! How quaint. For one thing this is memory we're talking about, not a hard drive; and for another, let's hope we can think of a better technique to correct any corruption that might occur.
I know. Debian distributes it linked against LessTif, so I don't think that's the reason it's non-free; it would have to do with NEdit's own license. I also have never had it crash.
For some reason Debian puts NEdit in the non-free section. That means it doesn't come on the CDs. I was doing an install for a friend on his laptop, and NEdit is his favorite editor too, so this was kindof annoying; now he's got to get a NIC working in order to download it. So maybe you could look into making it truly free software? I wish I knew what the objection is...probably something silly.
I also don't like the use of Motif. Not that Motif is getting in the way, it's just a minor nit for the usual reasons (lack of themability, having to load a library that I don't use for much else, or use a statically linked version which wastes memory). I do love the fact that it runs on other platforms like Solaris, but now that Sun is going to be using Gnome I guess that means GTK will always be available also.
I have a lot of trouble with shortcut keys lately; in older versions they used to work perfectly, but now it seems that it takes time to notice that the control key is down; for instance I usually have to press control-C several times to successfully copy to the clipboard. Sometimes I've even seen it insert control characters into the text when I press the keys, like control-S comes out as or something like that; but this is an intermittent problem which often goes away if I close NEdit and start a new copy. The not-noticing-control-C problem does not go away.
I love the column selection features; that and indent/outdent and macros are the major things I want to have in a code editor beyond the usual features. It's just a little quirky compared to other editors like SlickEdit or most Windows code editors that indent/outdent is not done with tab/shift-tab, and drag-n-drop is done with the middle mouse button. I can deal with these quirks but I'd rather be able to customize them.
A means to choose a character encoding and thereby switch to an appropriate font would be nice. I sometimes use NEdit to practice my Russian, and have to manually change the font to Cronyx Fixed, which is KOI8 encoded. (But I don't want to use that font all the time, because it is not as easy on the eyes as Lucida.) Fortunately NEdit allows me to type 8-bit characters (I use xrus to switch the keyboard into that mode), otherwise it would not have been possible at all. But there is that dialog where the default fonts are set; it would be nice if I could also set fonts to use for various other encodings, in an extensible way (like add an encoding, add a font to go with it, instead of only having a fixed set of encodings). Then have an easy-to-access menu to choose an encoding while editing, from the known set.
I hope NEdit continues to improve and asymptotically approach a bug-free state. Good luck to you with it.
I'm hoping genetic manipulation will provide the ability to recreate diversity some day. We could clone thousands of animals, each with small mutations, and let natural selection sort them out, or later, maybe we'd come to understand the effects of individual changes, and try to reproduce the kinds of diversity which we expect existed in nature before the extinction.
that's why you should't put Descartes before the horse.
I bet my mom would give the place a good scrubbing in exchange for a free ride! :-)
Seriously though, fungus tends to grow in damp places. Maybe it just needs a good dehumidifier.
I'm using a G200 right now because it has sync-on-green, and because there is a console driver in the kernel. This allows me to keep it at 1280x1024 all the time, even on the console, so I can use my surplus Mentor Graphics workstation monitor (which has only 3 BNC connectors, the sync is part of the "green" signal). But I do have two of those monitors. I wonder if I could install a second G200 and do dual-head with that...
You must be a shape shifter... err, maybe you meant "pore".
On the one hand, there is no point in trying to go back in time and live simpler lives. Any attempt to go backwards instead of forwards is doomed. But on the other hand, to go forwards in the same way we are currently doing will lead to more of the same problems - more environmental pollution, more overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, excessive use of artifical energy sources, and more exploitation. If present trends continue we will find ourselves in Neil Stephenson's world, more or less. But there doesn't seem to be any other choice either; the momentum will play out and either we will find our salvation afterall, or life will suck.
So for these guys (Rees-Mogg and Davidson) to say that somehow we're going to achieve further liberation, seems naive to me too. Nature abhors a vacuum. All of history is occupied by power struggles. Even the animals have them. If we can achieve a temporary state of complete freedom, then out of the ensuing chaos, some kind of power base will emerge. If it's not the government, as Stephenson would surmise, it'll probably be the big corporations (or organized crime... is there really a difference?). I hope that some kind of positive outcome is achieved, but I fear that it won't; we're just exchanging masters and maintaining the same old enslavement. As Roszak theorized (in the article I linked to at the top of this), the "information society" enables the big evil organizations (corporations, the military and other snoops) even more than it enables the individual. Can we keep up with the threats? Will it be possible for the state-of-the-art encryption techniques to outpace the ability of the snoops to crack them? Or will the state-of-the-art continue to be effectively illegal? Will our abilities to colonize space ultimately outstrip our reproductive rates? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile strangely enough it doesn't make me want to be a geek any less than I did before. I must still have a little hope left that technology will save us after all. Or at least, out of habit, I would think that my life was meaningless without doing something to advance the state of the art. Even if I'm ultimately building my own shackles, I don't know what else I could do that would have any long-term meaning.
This happened to me in my first C programming class (c. 1990, ASU), only it was the other way around - I wanted to use Turbo C so I could do it at home, and they wanted us to huddle around old-fashioned green screens, 10 of which were connected to each 286-based Xenix server. And I didn't know vi, and wanted to lynch the TA who suggested that vi was such a wonderful editor we ought to use it to write letters and stuff like that in addition to the classwork. (But those machines were such awful multitaskers, that even vi in all its initial horror as it appears to a newbie, was much much worse... several seconds between you hitting a keystroke and it noticing, in some cases.) How times change, how the mind and the computers both mature...
Fortunately these "servers" had floppies and there was a way to load my code which I had written at home, and merely test it on those beasts.
They even had automated testing tools which provided input to your program and verified the output. Your grade was based on passing those tests.
It could be a handy shortcut meaning find the root partition in /etc/fstab and run
fsck /dev/whatever
I believe that a touchscreen is a good replacement for a mouse; and a trackball would also be an even better replacement under certain circumstances (such as smooth navigation, as opposed to point-and-click). Inspired by the non-existent technology of the Starfire project, I've been pondering the idea of using a combination of a large screen for viewing documents, with no controls on it; a small touchscreen for application-specific controls; a trackball for smooth motion; and a keyboard for typing text. I could operate GIMP entirely via the touchscreen, or a combination of touchscreen and trackball. The trackball could be the 3-axis type which would allow some interesting 3D navigation (but Linux is short on apps which would make use of it, so far). Eventually the keyboard (and some other input modalities) could be gradually replaced by voice recognition.
The metawidget idea (that link is getting old, I need to write about my more recent ideas) would be useful in such a system to separate "control" functionality from the document and view parts of the MVC pattern. GIMP for example would keep a socket connection open with the touchscreen display software, on which it would exchange messages about which controls to make available, and receive messages about which controls were selected. So the palettes, the toolbox, and some context-sensitive stuff would be the main things on the touchscreen, and there would be enough real estate to have many more of them available at once, so that most actions can be done with fewer clicks. Cascading menus should be replaced with something more appropriate for punching a touchscreen (when you "dive in" to the next level, the next level replaces the current level; or perhaps with a menu structure that resembles the NeXT file browser). Eventually I will get around to putting up a website at www.metawidgets.org to discuss these ideas.
In short, I think improving ergonomics ought to be done in a holistic way rather than just putting more bells and whistles on existing devices like mice and keyboards. And there is more than one path to experiment with. I like touchscreens but they are not practical in every situation.
Now, I'm going to go ramble on a bit here about my ergonomic workstation idea, in case you haven't already had enough...
I agree the priority is to find cleaner ways to generate electricity, at any scale.
As for hydro being bad for the river, I sortof don't buy that... it seems to me that the advantage of clean air outweighs the changes in the river flow. Rivers change course now and then on their own, and nature adapts. It bothers me a lot when people propose to tear down dams that already exist and restore the river to its "natural state", because the natural state has now changed; trees grow further down the banks than they did before, and there are new habitats for animals which would be destroyed by "restoring" the river. It's prudent to take steps to ensure that no extinctions are caused, and also to ensure that the rate of flow out of the dam is somewhere near constant (the large, intermittent gushing when there is too much rain and they have to do something with it now are destructive) but I think hydro power can be managed well.
I think I'd rather just cover the roof of my house with solar panels, that way it's totally free energy, and I think you could get a few kilowatts during the day with current technology, which would probably be enough to charge an electric car and run the appliances. You'd need more efficient appliances to optimize its use, and of course a big bank of batteries to store power for nighttime; or the ability to sell energy to the power companies during the day and buy it back at night. I'm planning to build a small-scale system like that, so that 2 or 3 computers can be "off the grid", to avoid power surges and outages. I've got 2 golf-cart batteries and 2 120-watt solar panels; I just need to get a charge controller, and some 12V PC power supplies, and time to put it all together.
So maybe we should have an animal-fat powered vehicle... wait, that's called a horse and buggy.
Yes, but only if all the flywheels are spinning the same direction. The forces can be cancelled out by mounting them in different directions.
Some people who use electric cars in cold climates like to use kerosene heaters, because electric heat is wasteful (but like air conditioning, only costs you on the order of 10% of your range). And lead-acid batteries lose some range anyway in cold weather; the chemical reaction is aided by heat. But the batteries are usually OK if you drive the car every day (the current helps keep them warm) and the battery box is well insulated, and the car is kept in a garage when not being driven. And I think NiCad batteries don't mind the cold quite as much.
As for oxygen depravation, ummm depravation means creation of depravity, or moral debasement. But I know what you meant... and one solution would be to use a heat exchanger. The last time I heard this nitrogen-powered car idea (indeed it isn't a new one...) that was being proposed.