I recently recovered my very first data files (on 5 1/4" floppies from my high school days - programs I wrote myself plus software from that time) using an Apple IIe from a thrift store, a serial cable, and ADTPro on my Linux box. Now I can in theory run stuff on an emulator, although I didn't get around to it yet. The IIe is now for sale if anybody wants it (only reason being the impending move... otherwise I'd just keep it). tinyurl.com/2f684um
This is just an attention-whoring headline, nothing more. Yeah so other devices sell more than PCs... doesn't mean people will stop using PCs. I can't imagine doing everything I need to do on such small screens. For the kind of light reading / heavy video watching that passes for web surfing with most people, it's understandable, but not for some kinds of work.
Oh and for those who say "finally, good riddance to MS" well we just have new overlords on the other devices. Thank goodness Android and Meego offer some alternatives to the Apple app lock-in. It's the same story all over again with Apple replacing MS this time around, except that this time the playing field is somewhat less tilted at the beginning.
As long as the TSA is allowed to flaut the 4th amendment like that, our standing as a "free society" has been greatly reduced. There is no way that "fixing" the actual images or safeguarding the privacy of them makes up for making you stand there submissively with your arms up inside a scanner which risks your health. You as a citizen should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around; and that's all there is to it.
I use a personal wiki for stuff I don't mind sharing, and usually plain text files in ~/ideas or ~/notes or ~/journal for stuff I don't want to share (backed up occasionally to another system of course). Very rarely I need to use inkscape or dia or gimp to make an illustration of something, although I plan on doing a bit more of that now that I got a Cintiq (it was cheap at a computer swap meet, couldn't resist). It's far from ideal, but we don't have good enough software for that yet... at least, not software which I consider will have a long enough lifetime to be worth using (MS OneNote doesn't count because I don't run Windows often, and can't control what will happen to OneNote or any data that I might store in it. But the UI is slick.) Also I have been using toodledo on the iphone for really terse notes about random ideas that come up while I'm out and about (when I go hiking and get the endorphins going I come up with the most far-out ideas), and also for shopping lists. Again, not ideal, but at least it syncs to their site... I have been planning to write a better tool for that eventually, so I can control where the data is stored.
It's cool that Apple will help indie startups to do the marketing of their apps. What I'm worried most about is whether they will start to impose their idea of "quality" control as they have for the iPhone app store: nothing off-color, no scripting languages (or outright requirement to use Objective C and Cocoa rather than say Qt and C++), must follow their UI design guidelines, etc. Of course it's going to be difficult for them to rein stuff like that in since MacOS is not a new platform. But I think they really shouldn't try as hard as they have on the iPhone, and it's going to suck even harder if they do try.
An "open" app store is a good idea. But it's too bad (and ironic) it will have taken an event like this to prod developers to try to make it slick and popular and to make everything worth having available there. At least fink and macports have already existed for quite a while now. But a unified store for both closed-source and open-source software, and friendly enough for non-geeks to use, is another step beyond. What we will probably get instead will be several open app stores, all of them incomplete.
I've been thinking it would be nice if any operating system could treat the whole universe of available software as if it was readily available: e.g. you could right-click a document and "open with" an application you don't have yet, transparently. Sometimes it would be fulfilled by installing free software, sometimes by prompting you to buy the app, sometimes by using a free cloud app and sometimes by renting a non-free cloud app (filtered according to your preferences of course). Same deal with spotlight, perhaps (although it could get cluttered, showing more stuff that you don't have than stuff that you do). VMs can enable using non-native apps too, so those could also be made available if there is no other choice.
With most commercial software you end up being on your own in the end, and the end comes sooner than you think. They are greedy after all. I have tried switching to MacOS for some tasks, and now I'm reminded again why I hate proprietary software. One of my latest disappointments there has been GarageSale... a few months after buying it, there's a new version for which I'd have to pay to upgrade. And ebay changes their APIs too much, so I'm afraid pretty soon there will be a change which they will not "support". Being closed-source software it would then become useless. I bought it though because there aren't any good free software alternatives these days, and it saves time when creating auctions compared to using the ebay site... just stuff like drag-and-drop of images, and easy formatting (even though I've got lots of experience writing HTML by hand, it's a boring time-wasting thing to do). Another is Parallels. TWO MONTHS after I bought it, I'm already ineligible for a free upgrade to the next version, in which they supposedly made it much more efficient. So my impression of that company is even worse, but OTOH I do have free alternatives (just not as nicely integrated, I suspect).
Several times I've worked at companies which insist on using expensive software because it has "support", e.g. ClearCase and ClearQuest. Again, they suck in some ways, you can't fix it, and you can get better results with svn or git by just investing a little sweat equity in setting it up and getting use to the workflow. So to me the word "support" is always a weasel word: As soon as someone utters it, watch out... here comes a snow job.
I just saw it in SFO a couple weeks ago. Never knew what it was until now... I always figured it was somebody's cell phone acting as an ad-hoc access point, and maybe it didn't work because the GPRS signal was weak or something. That's really stupidly mislabeled. I can see how they would have wanted to "make networking easier" between Windows machines, but why not label it as that instead of like an advertisement or a honeypot?
That's interesting, thanks for posting, although I wonder if you have the details about LCDs right. I didn't know 3D movie glasses are circularly polarized but had wondered why they don't act like regular polarized material.
I just put on a pair of Real 3D glasses; looking at my LCD seems to change the color balance: if my head is straight it's fairly normal, if I tilt to the right it looks warmer, if I tilt to the left the blue starts to dominate more. It's not an absolute blockout of some colors, just a shift in the proportion of them, which seems to have its max effect if my head is tilted about 45 degrees.
I bet they will do a better job. Most of what they do turns out pretty good. But it's getting a little scary that we depend on Google for so many net infrastructure pieces now. This will be just one more. I can imagine a future in which something goes wrong and the gov't would have to step in because of the risk to society if some of their most critical services were allowed to fail. Or, in which Google is broken up after having monopolized too many industries.
I'd say the "best format" needs journaling absolutely, and preferably also extended attributes which work consistently between the two OS's, hardlinks and symlinks working consistently, long filenames, case sensitive, separate metadata for creation time and modification time, suitability to be used on a USB flash drive as well as a hard disk, and ability to mount it in Windows too. Haven't found any such mythical beast yet. If somebody would just finish the journaling support for Linux HFS+....
Here's a commercial $39.95 implementation of ext2/3/4 for MacOS. No idea if it's actually any good. I'd really like to hear if someone here has tried it, because I might like to use it for a shared/home between Linux and MacOS if it would work. I tried hfs+ (or it was it just hfs?) without journaling, and the dang thing needs to be fsck'd nearly every time I booted the alternate OS, which wastes a lot of time. Particularly, when shutting down Linux it's unmounted cleanly (such that Linux is happy if I just boot back into Linux again), but MacOS is still not happy and does the fsck in the background for 15 minutes or so before I can access it again. Sometimes it fails too, and has to be done manually from Disk Utility. Quite annoying.
Just to name them with the date & time, I routinely use exiftool for that. I copy the files from the camera's memory card and rename them at the same time.
However the OP seems to be asking for more than that. Of course you can use exiftool to edit any metadata tags that JPEG supports but it's not a GUI. Would be easy enough to write a GUI which uses exiftool to do the actual editing.
They are missing the communication with fellow humans, and the feeling of connectedness, knowing what's going on. You could do a study in which older folks try to avoid talking to anyone at all for a day, and try to also avoid any kind of information intake (newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.) and probably get similar results.
Reminds me of the hue and cry when I was a kid about how grocery stores got so dependent on barcode scanners and cash registers that they couldn't sell stuff at all if the power went out. Apparently in my parents' day they would have gotten by with a pad of paper and a pencil in that kind of situation.
Of course doing without the net once in a while might be good as a survival exercise, kindof like power outage preparedness...
Firefox and webkit and apache are extremely popular. Why not introduce a new security model, just for that combination at first, in which the browser holds the private key, encrypts the submission with it, and sends the public key to the server with which to encrypt the response, on top of using a server-side key at the same time? And augment that with a chain-of-trust model in which you can see how many of your friends (people you know personally and trust) have accepted that particular server-side cert as valid. Or any other such techniques which I don't understand because I'm not a security wonk.:-) Anyone with some clout in the community (Mozilla and/or Apache forefathers) could easily make something like this happen, since free software projects are in control of both ends. In that light I don't see why this wasn't fixed long ago.
"Just use SSH" could also be an answer for the web as well, but maybe it's better not to put all our eggs in one basket.
Casio made several label printers, for which PEGG was written. I have used it successfully with the KL-P1000 "mouse pad" printer. You will probably have to buy it used though... I think they are out of production. Also the Casio labels are annoyingly hard to peel from the backing paper. Most others (e.g. Brother, Brady) are much better in that regard.
You can really print via CUPS, but it's kindof a kludge. My favorite way so far was perl CGI -> postscript -> convert to pgm -> convert to casio raw format -> send via USB to the printer. I had a web form for each type of label I was interested in printing, and the perl CGI substitutes fields into a postscript template. (CUPS doesn't have to be involved, the printer just has to be connected via USB to the web server.)
(Disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer but I didn't write it, and haven't done any actual maintenance yet, other than writing the CGI/Postscript stuff.:-)
Stacks of 360k floppy drives... check. Hundreds of floppies from the DOS days... check. Couple of spare 486 boxen (and even a 386)... check. (I still have an original IBM XT too, just in case it becomes a valuable collectible.)
I'd probably put an ISA IDE adapter in it (have some of those? check) and an IDE-CF adapter, and use a CF card for a hard drive. A machine like that doesn't know what to do with even one full gigabyte.:-) I remember a buddy had bought a 300 meg drive back in the day, when most folks had Seagate 40 meggers, and had to make a bazillion 32meg partitions because that's all DOS could handle. Different programs went on different drive letters, and he had a long printout to keep track of it all.:-)
The old stuff was better made, of course. Nowadays you're lucky to get the electrolytic caps on your mobo to last more than 2-3 years.
I just got another Zip drive on ebay because mine had died and I wanted to recover some data from the old disks, and guess what? I managed to read every last byte off every one of them, all in an evening. Now I can bulk-erase the disks and put the whole pile on ebay again.
I just love that feature on my Logitech Revolution: you give the wheel a spin and zzzooom down the page. But that one uses a proprietary dongle, which sucks. Finally, finally (!) they released a Bluetooth mouse with "hyper-fast" scrollwheel: the m555b. I just ordered one on ebay today (they aren't showing up in stores just yet). We'll see how it turns out.
Of course you also need a middle mouse button. With the Revolution you can use the wheel (as with most mice), only if you have remapped the action to toggle between free-scroll mode and click-to-click (the mode I never use anymore) to some other button. (If you succeed in changing the mapping to toggle modes, the mouse remembers, so you only need to do it once.) But the wheel is harder to press than most mice. The m555b though appears to have a real middle button, so I will find out when I get it whether it acts like a normal middle button on Linux.
There is also a corded cheap USB version, the RX1500, so I got one of those for work, too. Again, we'll see about the middle button...
My previous choice has been the Evoluent vertical mouse. At least it has 4 buttons plus the wheel, and it's very comfortable and ergonomic, and the wheel click is kindof loose and easy, but it's not free-scrolling. The one I have at home is getting worn out (keeps dropping off the USB bus randomly) and the one at work doesn't get along with the slick desk surface that I have now, since it's not a laser mouse.
The RIAA reference is obvious. Also should mean if a neighbor uses my wireless AP for some kind of crime, I'm not liable.
It's like the fact that a car license plate is not personal info because it identifies a car, not the driver. That's why photoradar installations have to take mug shots for evidence of who was driving.
People just don't want to be teased with "hey Geordi" everywhere. It's bad enough at my job... I have a Linux box and a Windows box, each with dual monitors (not particularly big ones) and it's always "hey Houston, are you sure you don't need another monitor?" Everyone else
I always thought HMDs sounded like a great idea, too. I guess they won't be socially accepted until they're integrated into eyeglasses without any noticeable extra bulges anywhere, and wireless too. How to get the battery into such a small form factor will be quite a trick to pull off.
Not having written any books (yet), I've wondered about that. Cory D really seems to believe the free versions promote book sales. But you believe exactly the opposite. The truth must lie somewhere between, I guess. Maybe it depends how famous you already are: Cory is afraid of obscurity and you are not.
I don't suppose you can tell us how much money you have made, cumulatively, from sales of this one book under question? Are you sure it wasn't enough to cover your time?
Even then, how can you estimate how much potential money you have lost? Some people are cheapskates about books, and some aren't. Some (I suspect largish) percentage will buy the print book even if the electronic version is trivial to get, just because they insist it's better. Others might do whichever is easier. Others might (like Cory thinks) start with the electronic version and get the print version after they realize how much they like it. Still others are the real cheapskates you are worried about: will look high and low for a way to avoid paying for it. What percentage do you think that actually is?
I wish I could write a book or two, get rich and retire. No idea how easy that is, though, and whether making it freely available will help or hinder the effort.
I do agree it needs to be possible for authors to make a living, so that they will continue.
Or else maybe we are all headed for the Star Trek-style utopia in which people stop worrying about resources and just live, knowing that their basic needs will be taken care of no matter what?:-) Some trends point toward something like that... but I suspect we will see a relapse into scarcity economics for quite a while before that happens. It's the same debate about journalists these days: if newspapers can't sell enough ads because people stop buying the printed version, how can they pay the reporters? and without paid reporters we can't depend on bloggers and such to find out what's really going on in the world, can we? Their quality of reporting does not naturally tend to be high enough, unless they get paid to increase it. Maybe some day we will learn how to do high-quality work without needing scarcity and tangible rewards as motivation, but so far it hasn't happened, despite all the promise of the open source movement.
I have a regular wireless Revolution mouse, and really love the clickless free-spinning weighted scrollwheel. If the Bluetooth version is really the same thing with a different radio, I suspect I would love that too; it just bothers me that I cannot buy it without the keyboard.
I don't get it, why really cool BT mice are so hard to find.
If he wants to use the same DOS software I guess you could install FreeDos which might be less flaky than Windows95. But I suppose he uses Windows GUI features too, he doesn't just run the DOS programs from the command line?
Anyway hardware-wise (again if the software requirements are the same) maybe choose one of those Atom-based compact systems, hoping that low power requirements and low temperature will translate to longer life. Just make sure the board has all solid-state caps, no electrolytics. Boot from a solid-state drive or a CF card on a CF-to-IDE adapter. I'd be more inclined to build it rather than buy a prefab system, in case the power supply sucks and you need to replace it with a more reliable one, or something like that.
Somebody else suggested emulation, also a good idea but I doubt you need to spend money for VMWare. Maybe pick a Linux distro that doesn't suggest constant downloading of updates, so once you have installed it you won't expect it to break later; then at least he can run Firefox alongside the old DOS apps, on Bochs or dosemu I guess (has been a while since I tried it). Make sure you don't enable swap if you are using an SSD, maybe also pick a distro that puts frequently-written files (like/tmp and some stuff in/var) on a ramdisk. Put in enough memory so that the swap won't be missed.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently recovered my very first data files (on 5 1/4" floppies from my high school days - programs I wrote myself plus software from that time) using an Apple IIe from a thrift store, a serial cable, and ADTPro on my Linux box. Now I can in theory run stuff on an emulator, although I didn't get around to it yet. The IIe is now for sale if anybody wants it (only reason being the impending move... otherwise I'd just keep it). tinyurl.com/2f684um
This is just an attention-whoring headline, nothing more. Yeah so other devices sell more than PCs... doesn't mean people will stop using PCs. I can't imagine doing everything I need to do on such small screens. For the kind of light reading / heavy video watching that passes for web surfing with most people, it's understandable, but not for some kinds of work.
Oh and for those who say "finally, good riddance to MS" well we just have new overlords on the other devices. Thank goodness Android and Meego offer some alternatives to the Apple app lock-in. It's the same story all over again with Apple replacing MS this time around, except that this time the playing field is somewhat less tilted at the beginning.
As long as the TSA is allowed to flaut the 4th amendment like that, our standing as a "free society" has been greatly reduced. There is no way that "fixing" the actual images or safeguarding the privacy of them makes up for making you stand there submissively with your arms up inside a scanner which risks your health. You as a citizen should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around; and that's all there is to it.
I use a personal wiki for stuff I don't mind sharing, and usually plain text files in ~/ideas or ~/notes or ~/journal for stuff I don't want to share (backed up occasionally to another system of course). Very rarely I need to use inkscape or dia or gimp to make an illustration of something, although I plan on doing a bit more of that now that I got a Cintiq (it was cheap at a computer swap meet, couldn't resist). It's far from ideal, but we don't have good enough software for that yet... at least, not software which I consider will have a long enough lifetime to be worth using (MS OneNote doesn't count because I don't run Windows often, and can't control what will happen to OneNote or any data that I might store in it. But the UI is slick.) Also I have been using toodledo on the iphone for really terse notes about random ideas that come up while I'm out and about (when I go hiking and get the endorphins going I come up with the most far-out ideas), and also for shopping lists. Again, not ideal, but at least it syncs to their site... I have been planning to write a better tool for that eventually, so I can control where the data is stored.
It's cool that Apple will help indie startups to do the marketing of their apps. What I'm worried most about is whether they will start to impose their idea of "quality" control as they have for the iPhone app store: nothing off-color, no scripting languages (or outright requirement to use Objective C and Cocoa rather than say Qt and C++), must follow their UI design guidelines, etc. Of course it's going to be difficult for them to rein stuff like that in since MacOS is not a new platform. But I think they really shouldn't try as hard as they have on the iPhone, and it's going to suck even harder if they do try.
An "open" app store is a good idea. But it's too bad (and ironic) it will have taken an event like this to prod developers to try to make it slick and popular and to make everything worth having available there. At least fink and macports have already existed for quite a while now. But a unified store for both closed-source and open-source software, and friendly enough for non-geeks to use, is another step beyond. What we will probably get instead will be several open app stores, all of them incomplete.
I've been thinking it would be nice if any operating system could treat the whole universe of available software as if it was readily available: e.g. you could right-click a document and "open with" an application you don't have yet, transparently. Sometimes it would be fulfilled by installing free software, sometimes by prompting you to buy the app, sometimes by using a free cloud app and sometimes by renting a non-free cloud app (filtered according to your preferences of course). Same deal with spotlight, perhaps (although it could get cluttered, showing more stuff that you don't have than stuff that you do). VMs can enable using non-native apps too, so those could also be made available if there is no other choice.
With most commercial software you end up being on your own in the end, and the end comes sooner than you think. They are greedy after all. I have tried switching to MacOS for some tasks, and now I'm reminded again why I hate proprietary software. One of my latest disappointments there has been GarageSale... a few months after buying it, there's a new version for which I'd have to pay to upgrade. And ebay changes their APIs too much, so I'm afraid pretty soon there will be a change which they will not "support". Being closed-source software it would then become useless. I bought it though because there aren't any good free software alternatives these days, and it saves time when creating auctions compared to using the ebay site... just stuff like drag-and-drop of images, and easy formatting (even though I've got lots of experience writing HTML by hand, it's a boring time-wasting thing to do). Another is Parallels. TWO MONTHS after I bought it, I'm already ineligible for a free upgrade to the next version, in which they supposedly made it much more efficient. So my impression of that company is even worse, but OTOH I do have free alternatives (just not as nicely integrated, I suspect).
Several times I've worked at companies which insist on using expensive software because it has "support", e.g. ClearCase and ClearQuest. Again, they suck in some ways, you can't fix it, and you can get better results with svn or git by just investing a little sweat equity in setting it up and getting use to the workflow. So to me the word "support" is always a weasel word: As soon as someone utters it, watch out... here comes a snow job.
I just saw it in SFO a couple weeks ago. Never knew what it was until now... I always figured it was somebody's cell phone acting as an ad-hoc access point, and maybe it didn't work because the GPRS signal was weak or something. That's really stupidly mislabeled. I can see how they would have wanted to "make networking easier" between Windows machines, but why not label it as that instead of like an advertisement or a honeypot?
That's interesting, thanks for posting, although I wonder if you have the details about LCDs right. I didn't know 3D movie glasses are circularly polarized but had wondered why they don't act like regular polarized material.
I just put on a pair of Real 3D glasses; looking at my LCD seems to change the color balance: if my head is straight it's fairly normal, if I tilt to the right it looks warmer, if I tilt to the left the blue starts to dominate more. It's not an absolute blockout of some colors, just a shift in the proportion of them, which seems to have its max effect if my head is tilted about 45 degrees.
I bet they will do a better job. Most of what they do turns out pretty good. But it's getting a little scary that we depend on Google for so many net infrastructure pieces now. This will be just one more. I can imagine a future in which something goes wrong and the gov't would have to step in because of the risk to society if some of their most critical services were allowed to fail. Or, in which Google is broken up after having monopolized too many industries.
I'd say the "best format" needs journaling absolutely, and preferably also extended attributes which work consistently between the two OS's, hardlinks and symlinks working consistently, long filenames, case sensitive, separate metadata for creation time and modification time, suitability to be used on a USB flash drive as well as a hard disk, and ability to mount it in Windows too. Haven't found any such mythical beast yet. If somebody would just finish the journaling support for Linux HFS+....
Here's a commercial $39.95 implementation of ext2/3/4 for MacOS. No idea if it's actually any good. I'd really like to hear if someone here has tried it, because I might like to use it for a shared /home between Linux and MacOS if it would work. I tried hfs+ (or it was it just hfs?) without journaling, and the dang thing needs to be fsck'd nearly every time I booted the alternate OS, which wastes a lot of time. Particularly, when shutting down Linux it's unmounted cleanly (such that Linux is happy if I just boot back into Linux again), but MacOS is still not happy and does the fsck in the background for 15 minutes or so before I can access it again. Sometimes it fails too, and has to be done manually from Disk Utility. Quite annoying.
Seems to be an oldie. Is it better than HFS? More reliable or higher performance? Still requires the occasional fsck right?
Just to name them with the date & time, I routinely use exiftool for that. I copy the files from the camera's memory card and rename them at the same time.
http://ecloud.org/index.php?title=Organizing_digital_photos#Script:_get-photos_.28cut_to_the_chase.29
However the OP seems to be asking for more than that. Of course you can use exiftool to edit any metadata tags that JPEG supports but it's not a GUI. Would be easy enough to write a GUI which uses exiftool to do the actual editing.
to protect all those jobs.
They are missing the communication with fellow humans, and the feeling of connectedness, knowing what's going on. You could do a study in which older folks try to avoid talking to anyone at all for a day, and try to also avoid any kind of information intake (newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.) and probably get similar results.
Reminds me of the hue and cry when I was a kid about how grocery stores got so dependent on barcode scanners and cash registers that they couldn't sell stuff at all if the power went out. Apparently in my parents' day they would have gotten by with a pad of paper and a pencil in that kind of situation.
Of course doing without the net once in a while might be good as a survival exercise, kindof like power outage preparedness...
Firefox and webkit and apache are extremely popular. Why not introduce a new security model, just for that combination at first, in which the browser holds the private key, encrypts the submission with it, and sends the public key to the server with which to encrypt the response, on top of using a server-side key at the same time? And augment that with a chain-of-trust model in which you can see how many of your friends (people you know personally and trust) have accepted that particular server-side cert as valid. Or any other such techniques which I don't understand because I'm not a security wonk. :-) Anyone with some clout in the community (Mozilla and/or Apache forefathers) could easily make something like this happen, since free software projects are in control of both ends. In that light I don't see why this wasn't fixed long ago.
"Just use SSH" could also be an answer for the web as well, but maybe it's better not to put all our eggs in one basket.
Casio made several label printers, for which PEGG was written. I have used it successfully with the KL-P1000 "mouse pad" printer. You will probably have to buy it used though... I think they are out of production. Also the Casio labels are annoyingly hard to peel from the backing paper. Most others (e.g. Brother, Brady) are much better in that regard.
You can really print via CUPS, but it's kindof a kludge. My favorite way so far was perl CGI -> postscript -> convert to pgm -> convert to casio raw format -> send via USB to the printer. I had a web form for each type of label I was interested in printing, and the perl CGI substitutes fields into a postscript template. (CUPS doesn't have to be involved, the printer just has to be connected via USB to the web server.)
(Disclaimer: I'm the current maintainer but I didn't write it, and haven't done any actual maintenance yet, other than writing the CGI/Postscript stuff. :-)
Stacks of 360k floppy drives... check. Hundreds of floppies from the DOS days... check. Couple of spare 486 boxen (and even a 386)... check. (I still have an original IBM XT too, just in case it becomes a valuable collectible.)
I'd probably put an ISA IDE adapter in it (have some of those? check) and an IDE-CF adapter, and use a CF card for a hard drive. A machine like that doesn't know what to do with even one full gigabyte. :-) I remember a buddy had bought a 300 meg drive back in the day, when most folks had Seagate 40 meggers, and had to make a bazillion 32meg partitions because that's all DOS could handle. Different programs went on different drive letters, and he had a long printout to keep track of it all. :-)
The old stuff was better made, of course. Nowadays you're lucky to get the electrolytic caps on your mobo to last more than 2-3 years.
I just got another Zip drive on ebay because mine had died and I wanted to recover some data from the old disks, and guess what? I managed to read every last byte off every one of them, all in an evening. Now I can bulk-erase the disks and put the whole pile on ebay again.
I just love that feature on my Logitech Revolution: you give the wheel a spin and zzzooom down the page. But that one uses a proprietary dongle, which sucks. Finally, finally (!) they released a Bluetooth mouse with "hyper-fast" scrollwheel: the m555b. I just ordered one on ebay today (they aren't showing up in stores just yet). We'll see how it turns out.
Of course you also need a middle mouse button. With the Revolution you can use the wheel (as with most mice), only if you have remapped the action to toggle between free-scroll mode and click-to-click (the mode I never use anymore) to some other button. (If you succeed in changing the mapping to toggle modes, the mouse remembers, so you only need to do it once.) But the wheel is harder to press than most mice. The m555b though appears to have a real middle button, so I will find out when I get it whether it acts like a normal middle button on Linux.
There is also a corded cheap USB version, the RX1500, so I got one of those for work, too. Again, we'll see about the middle button...
My previous choice has been the Evoluent vertical mouse. At least it has 4 buttons plus the wheel, and it's very comfortable and ergonomic, and the wheel click is kindof loose and easy, but it's not free-scrolling. The one I have at home is getting worn out (keeps dropping off the USB bus randomly) and the one at work doesn't get along with the slick desk surface that I have now, since it's not a laser mouse.
The RIAA reference is obvious. Also should mean if a neighbor uses my wireless AP for some kind of crime, I'm not liable.
It's like the fact that a car license plate is not personal info because it identifies a car, not the driver. That's why photoradar installations have to take mug shots for evidence of who was driving.
People just don't want to be teased with "hey Geordi" everywhere. It's bad enough at my job... I have a Linux box and a Windows box, each with dual monitors (not particularly big ones) and it's always "hey Houston, are you sure you don't need another monitor?" Everyone else
I always thought HMDs sounded like a great idea, too. I guess they won't be socially accepted until they're integrated into eyeglasses without any noticeable extra bulges anywhere, and wireless too. How to get the battery into such a small form factor will be quite a trick to pull off.
No one asks if they can buy printed versions.
Not having written any books (yet), I've wondered about that. Cory D really seems to believe the free versions promote book sales. But you believe exactly the opposite. The truth must lie somewhere between, I guess. Maybe it depends how famous you already are: Cory is afraid of obscurity and you are not.
I don't suppose you can tell us how much money you have made, cumulatively, from sales of this one book under question? Are you sure it wasn't enough to cover your time?
Even then, how can you estimate how much potential money you have lost? Some people are cheapskates about books, and some aren't. Some (I suspect largish) percentage will buy the print book even if the electronic version is trivial to get, just because they insist it's better. Others might do whichever is easier. Others might (like Cory thinks) start with the electronic version and get the print version after they realize how much they like it. Still others are the real cheapskates you are worried about: will look high and low for a way to avoid paying for it. What percentage do you think that actually is?
I wish I could write a book or two, get rich and retire. No idea how easy that is, though, and whether making it freely available will help or hinder the effort.
I do agree it needs to be possible for authors to make a living, so that they will continue.
Or else maybe we are all headed for the Star Trek-style utopia in which people stop worrying about resources and just live, knowing that their basic needs will be taken care of no matter what? :-) Some trends point toward something like that... but I suspect we will see a relapse into scarcity economics for quite a while before that happens. It's the same debate about journalists these days:
if newspapers can't sell enough ads because people stop buying the printed version, how can they pay the reporters? and without paid reporters we can't depend on bloggers and such to find out what's really going on in the world, can we? Their quality of reporting does not naturally tend to be high enough, unless they get paid to increase it. Maybe some day we will learn how to do high-quality work without needing scarcity and tangible rewards as motivation, but so far it hasn't happened, despite all the promise of the open source movement.
I have a regular wireless Revolution mouse, and really love the clickless free-spinning weighted scrollwheel. If the Bluetooth version is really the same thing with a different radio, I suspect I would love that too; it just bothers me that I cannot buy it without the keyboard.
I don't get it, why really cool BT mice are so hard to find.
If he wants to use the same DOS software I guess you could install FreeDos which might be less flaky than Windows95. But I suppose he uses Windows GUI features too, he doesn't just run the DOS programs from the command line?
Anyway hardware-wise (again if the software requirements are the same) maybe choose one of those Atom-based compact systems, hoping that low power requirements and low temperature will translate to longer life. Just make sure the board has all solid-state caps, no electrolytics. Boot from a solid-state drive or a CF card on a CF-to-IDE adapter. I'd be more inclined to build it rather than buy a prefab system, in case the power supply sucks and you need to replace it with a more reliable one, or something like that.
Somebody else suggested emulation, also a good idea but I doubt you need to spend money for VMWare. Maybe pick a Linux distro that doesn't suggest constant downloading of updates, so once you have installed it you won't expect it to break later; then at least he can run Firefox alongside the old DOS apps, on Bochs or dosemu I guess (has been a while since I tried it). Make sure you don't enable swap if you are using an SSD, maybe also pick a distro that puts frequently-written files (like /tmp and some stuff in /var) on a ramdisk. Put in enough memory so that the swap won't be missed.