The other countries probably regulate the prices more than we do. But cable is fundamentally a monopoly, just because somebody has to own the cables. The only competition is coming from alternatives like DSL, powerline, wireless etc. And both the cable and DSL businesses belong to stagnant, big, slow-moving companies. So in this kind of case the government-regulated (or g-owned, or g-mandated in some countries) model is working better, as long as the government happens to have decent leadership in this department. There are counter-examples too, in some of the former Soviet republics for example - the government has the telecomm monopoly and it sucks, worse than it did in 1970's America.
Capitalism will triumph eventually, when there are enough alternatives. Meanwhile I still feel kindof privileged to have such fast broadband over cable, and don't really mind the price that much. The total bill is a bit steep ($85); I just get TV along with it in order to get the broadband discount (and plain old analog at that, without any premium channels). But after the discount, the broadband portion of that isn't too bad. And there are extra government fees and taxes and crap that shouldn't be there. Right now in this country we have most of the disadvantages of both systems, and not all the advantages.
There have been some efforts to force cable companies to offer a choice of ISP; not sure what happened, probably got derailed, but when there is a natural monopoly it might be a good idea to have regulations like that. Then again, maybe it just ruins the efficiency of the natural monopoly by burying both companies (the cable plant company and the ISP) in extra red tape.
Just because Emacs takes up every possible key combination all by itself doesn't mean the rest of us have to deal with that limitation.:-)
Realistically the control key should be used for control functions, and alt (or option) key should be somehow involved in accessing alternate characters. Doesn't the labeling make it obvious?
And if you need more control keys than you can get with just control, then maybe you need to be using a command line. Using esc from "insert mode" to get to a command line makes reasonable sense doesn't it? Or alternatively (or additionally) there are function keys and menus, and function keys could be used to navigate menus, too. IMO you should be able to see on the screen what a function key does. WordPerfect couldn't do it that way in 80 x 25 text mode but nowadays we could do it. And some day there might be keyboards with displays in their function keys.
(note - I'm not advocating either vi or emacs, or any other program that I've actually seen and used. All these existing programs are so steeped in stupid traditions that we now just take for granted, that most people can't even imagine a truly usable alternative.)
So back on topic - what's wrong with having an onscreen menu that you use to select an alternate character set, which can be accessed either by mouse or a simple keyboard shortcut? Then you can switch easily back and forth between English, some other language, math symbols, dingbats and so on.
Just because words sound the same doesn't mean you can switch them.
While pouring over messageboard posts
Well you are making the dude's point now aren't you? Only way you can pour yourself over the posts is if you are Odo from Deep Space 9. Or Bjork, perhaps; she claims to be able to do this in one of her songs ("come over, and I'll pour myself all over you").
Not sure whom he's exhorting here... open-source developers? Microsoft? Linux is the OS by the people and for the people, so if the people don't add the features that he thinks they want to their apps, then maybe they don't want them as bad as he thinks.
But tagging along on MS's coattails isn't going to get us anywhere. What is needed is for Windows people to use Jabber; then we can really have interoperability and end the IM wars. And if it doesn't have enough features to make that compelling, then they need to be added. And the Jabber server used to be interoperable with other IM's (including MSN I think), not sure if it still is but that was a really good feature. Hopefully its interoperability includes file transfer. Voice IMO already has a couple of good implentations (asterisk for sure, and then there are skype and some others), and if people think that IM and voice belong together then the IM client could include a SIP client as well. Next they will be wanting video. CUCMe anybody? I remember it working already in 1994, perhaps earlier...why don't we leapfrog for once and get video well-integrated into IM as well?
As for me, I don't really "get" IM - don't like to be interrupted all the time. Email works just fine, thank you.
True hardcore Linux users just use talk/ntalk/ytalk, of course.:-)
That's what I was thinking when I first read that! I figured it had something to do with recruiting (either Google's, or Google is starting a job search site or something).
Actually doing it in hardware would be foolish; even Symbolics abandoned that path. Their last-generation products were a tagged-memory RISC architecture and a VM system that ran Genera (and Symbolics Common Lisp) on top of UNIX on the DEC Alpha.
What's foolish IMO is having to give up some bits of resolution on fixnums in order to do type tagging. (e.g. only using 29 bits like Chez Scheme does) And there is no choice on a 32-bit architecture unless you do something much less efficient. But exchanging data with other systems or C functions is more work because you have to range-check every int to make sure its value can fit in 29 bits, or else upgrade it to a bignum. Right? I don't really know the internals that well but that's my understanding.
So when you say "tagged memory" what I'm thinking is that any machine that can address a 36-bit memory bus instead of 32 bits (or maybe 72 instead of 64) would be a good start. The extra bits could be thought of as "metadata" for every word, and this technique might even be useful for other languages. But it sounds like on the Alpha they just used the upper half of a 64-bit register for 8 bits of metadata, and that is also a "waste" of the power of 64-bit computing in some sense. The same problem will recur - when the world switches to the 64-bit int as the new standard, because all machines have 64 or more bit ALUs, again you will encounter numbers which fit into a 64-bit int but cannot become fixnums.
But if a Lispish OS and programming environment were as popular at some point in the future as Linux is today, some custom hardware would be justifiable.
Today it could maybe be prototyped using one or more FPGAs, and just use the old 30-pin SIMMs for memory - you will just need to use them in groups of 5 instead of 4, and will then get a 40-bit-wide data bus. Too bad it takes so many to get a decent amount of memory.:-)
Flash can survive being submersed just fine as long as you dry it out before using it. But the USB flash drives seem likely to get mechanically messed up because of the way they stick out. I didn't get to use mine that long before it got pried the wrong direction by accident and went "crunch," so now I just use CF and SD cards. Of course, if you don't use it a lot, only often enough to keep the documents up-to-date, maybe it won't be a problem.
Transflash or SmartMedia would be sturdier. But SmartMedia is obsolete and transflash is so small that it's very easy to lose.
You could just store the docs on your cellphone and plan not to lose it, or store on a memory card which is in your cell phone. But then the memory will get used more and be more subject to wearing out.
iButtons are about the sturdiest format there is, and they have encrypted ones too, but they don't have enough memory for much data. There are also flash-based smart cards you could keep in your wallet. But neither of those is common enough - it's hard to find a reader for them, harder than finding a usb port anyway. Smartcards _should_ be standard equipment for securely storing all your passwords and personal info, but it hasn't caught on, mostly because of paranoia about "big brother" or "mark of the beast" or identity theft or some such.
Maybe you could pop open an SD card, fill the empty space with epoxy and put it back together. It would probably be more durable that way. Or, do the same with a USB drive. Or use the SD card by itself most of the time, and keep a compact new USB SD reader in your knapsack.
Yeah somebody should be manufacturing a really tiny usb key that has encrypted flash, implements some smart-card-like protocols for partitioning information with different keys, and sticks out of the port less than 1 cm, and is very sturdy. Having it stick out less would reduce the leverage when it gets bumped against something.
Most phones only let you install J2ME apps. IMO this sucks for geeks. There is a market for a geek pda/cell phone, which must be purchased at full price with no subsidy, works on any GSM network, and has a free and open implementation so you can write cool new apps without obstacles. But I don't know of any companies directly catering to that market yet. Danger should've been doing that; they were independent and maybe even had the balls for it, at first. Now apparently they don't.
But then again, maybe the carriers won't allow such devices on their networks at all. I'm not sure if they could block them, but I can imagine they'd have a hissy fit, not being able to charge extra for every little feature like they do now. But it's quite obviously the future, whether they like it or not; if not on any of today's networks, then on future networks like WiMax or something.
At least you can get a GPRS card and stick it in your favorite PDA and do what you want. Maybe do VOIP over the data network.
I figured size mattered up until that article a few weeks ago that said that Blu-Ray players will have to "phone home" to report usage and get permission to play every disc. Sounds like !$#%^ DiVX (the original one, not the kewl new video file format) all over again. Any player that works that way is a loser in my book, and I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Getting a hot new game console shouldn't even be enough justification to put up with that shit, if you care about your civil rights.
Now if they mess up HD-DVD the same way, then I don't know what to say... it's getting to be a longer wait each time, before the hackers get us back our fair use rights after having them temporarily stripped by any new technology. Besides the fact that the hackers have to work in places like Norway and Russia now because of the !@%%@#$ DMCA.
But I'm thinking maybe MS and Intel have decided that extreme DRM is not cool and maybe prefer the one that's less work to make it useful on PC's. So maybe it won't be quite so bad as Blu-Ray is turning out to be. Hopefully even if the movie discs end up totally fubar, at least we can use the writers for a bigger backup format. And if people in general don't want to quit buying DVD movies, then they will probably continue to be manufactured for a long time. If they make the DRM too tight on _both_ new formats, I bet that's what will happen.
it's nearly impossible to convince everyone otherwise. One scientist was being interviewed on NPR after this latest discovery and said he and many scientists used to like to argue that Pluto was not a planet, but have now given up the fight due to overwhelming public opinion that it's already been a planet for many decades now, so why change our minds? And if Pluto is a planet, this newly discovered object must be one too by the same criteria. (Unless you disqualify it on the basis of its inclined orbit.) It'd probably be even more contentious than switching to the metric system. At least most of the world managed to do that though.
Use about 12 SXGA DLP video projectors, to make a 4800x3000 or so video display. There needs to be some overlap, and you can fade out the edges to smoothly connect the images so that it really looks like one super-high-res display. Then you can read several JavaDocs and still see your code and UML and an xterm for compiling and another for running, all at the same time.
It should fill up a somewhat curved wall, and you sit in front of it in your La-Z-Boy with a wireless keyboard and a trackball or touchpad on the keyboard or a mouse on the arm of the chair, or a Wacom tablet in your lap. I think I'd like two half-keyboards actually, one on each arm of the chair, mounted so that they can be adjusted into a comfortable position.
Of course I'm not sure what kind of video options you have to drive that many monitors at once, especially from a single computer, but stuff like this exists for trade shows etc. Maybe it involves multiple computers and some cooperative version of Xinerama between them.
Hey you said cost is no object, and what I want most is massive desktop real estate without borders between the tiles.
Alternatively, rear-project all that video onto some kind of touchscreen surface, and sit closer.
Not being able to afford all that, I built myself a desk with a top shelf at eye level for the main monitors (2 for my Linux box plus another for the KVM, so I can get to auxiliary systems easily), a shelf underneath for misc peripherals and someday maybe a bank of touchscreens, and a height-adjustable, narrow keyboard shelf sticking out in front. It's fairly ergonomic and accommodates way more hardware than any desk you can buy. The bottom part (underneath the bottom shelf) has 3 19" rack cages for computers. I have my main Linux box, a multiboot box (Linux/Windows/QNX/DOS), and an old mac in there so far.
is a simple little clear button next to the search field. Often I select text to paste into it, and then get there and find out I cannot paste because it's already got text in it; so I have to select the last search text, delete it, and then re-select what I wanted (elsewhere in another window sometimes) and finally paste it in. (I'm talking about on X Window where the middle-mouse-paste works with what you selected, and is not persistent if you select something else.) What a huge pain, and I'm doing it several times a day. Galeon had a clear button next to this search field. Surely there is a way to add this by editing some XML somewhere?
The URL field could have a similar clear button, but that annoys me less, because I can middle-click anywhere in the browser window to go to a selected URL, so I don't paste into the URL field very often.
Also important to understand is that the lower the transmitting frequency, the further the signal will go (given the same transmitter strength). Going from 1 Ghz to 500 Mhz and you double the transmission range without increasing the transmitter strength.
As someone else pointed out this is really way oversimplified. And in practice the reasons that lower frequencies go longer distances has more to do with side effects of the environment. For example HF signals will bounce off the ionosphere and come back to earth, whereas VHF and higher will go on out into space. And the higher the frequency, the more likely it is to be blocked by some physical substance. This is why they use ultra-low frequencies to communicate with subs underwater - anything much higher just doesn't travel through water very well. At high enough frequencies even a single sheet of paper can be opaque. (Just as it can be opaque to light.)
Anyway Shannon's equation that you posted does not have a frequency component at all.
They were already using unmanned Progress craft to re-supply their Mir space station for a really long time. I doubt the technology has changed much since then.
I had 4 megs of VRAM in 1995 as well. Bought a full-length VL-bus board for my 486, used, from an ad on usenet. But then one day I had the computer open, and running, and my little window air conditioner started spewing condensation water, and a few drops landed on that card and fried it. The rest of the computer was OK, but I was pretty bummed. Had to go buy a cheap S3 card to replace it.
No, the important thing for them is to sell chips, and since they are the under-under-dog (behind Intel even, until they prove themselves again), they can use every advantage they can get. Open-source drivers (or at least specs to enable writing them) would make them downright popular with the Linux crowd. I'd buy their cards exclusively if they did that (assuming they have at least so-so OpenGL performance).
I think C&P represents pretty much exactly how much security we need for ordinary transactions. The next obvious step beyond, for extra security, would be biometrics, or implanted chips, and I see 2 big problems with that - 1.) a would-be thief has to escalate from mere theft to assault in order to be successful. That is, if your hand is being used for biometrics, then the probability that some day it's going to get cut off by a mugger goes up quite a bit. The same goes for any other body part. 2.) Obviously biometrics or implants will ring alarm bells in a lot of people's heads (mark of the beast, 1984, whatever). So there just isn't any point in trying that anytime soon. But durable, reliable, multi-purpose smart cards are exactly what we need.
I would like to see multiple cards get replaced with multi-purpose smart cards though. Mixing government, commercial and medical uses would be bad, but at least have a single smart card that can handle all the commercial uses - various credit and cash accounts, public transportation, loyalty tracking etc. There's no reason it couldn't be secure; there simply needs to be strict testing & enforcement of relevant standards to make sure that the information on the card stays partitioned by owner, and that partitioning is physically impossible to violate. E.g. Safeway can't get your Fry's loyalty ID nor your financial stuff nor personal info of any kind without your consent, and without revealing exactly which items they are reading. Every partition must be protected by a different private key, which is only ever stored on the card and never read out. But I think the smartcard standards for this behavior are already in place. Certainly with iButtons it's possible. And iButtons would be another very good alternative to smart cards, but in the end there should be just one good standard.
Another possible step forward from there would be the wireless smart cards, but people have privacy issues with those. But that scenario shown in that commercial where the guy pushes a shopping cart right out the front door and automatically gets charged for everything, is only possible if RFID is used both for tagging the goods and in the debit card.
I'm just sick and tired of carrying so many cards, and having them rub together and destroy each other's magnetic strips. About damn time they start using smart cards.
Of course we'll all have to start using smartcard readers at home, in order to buy anything on the net. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner, outside of a couple of trials.
And a good consequence of computers generally having smartcard readers, is that they can be used to log in as well. No more usernames and passwords to remember, potentially! (Except for paranoid sysadmins who inevitably will worry about the cards getting stolen, and continue to require as much extra authentication baggage as they can get away with.) That's the other huge authentication pain-in-the-ass that needs to be eliminated once and for all. I can deal with one card and one PIN for everything, and even with being required to change the PIN every few months, but any more than this is just wrong.
When I was a kid my dad got some surplus "sea rations" that included cigarettes. (Nobody in our family smoked so they got thrown out.) It was the kind that comes in a box, maybe 6 x 6 x 3 inches, and included a couple of sturdy steel cans painted olive drab (containing the main dish usually - stew or slices of ham or hash or whatever) and usually some crackers (interesting round crackers in a can - they tasted very unique, kindof good actually) or bread, and there would be bags of stuff that could be in bags (applesauce for example) and a can of Sterno-type fuel, and a bag with all the accessories (cigarettes, gum, a spoon, salt, pepper, coffee, sugar, toilet paper, etc.) The case of rations included some more stuff like a knife and an awful primitive can opener that it's unbelievable anybody could actually open those thick tough cans with.
I can believe those have a 30 year shelf life.:-) Everything tasted a little weird, from all the preservatives I suppose, or strange recipes optimized for long life rather than flavor. Some were stamped with the address of the factory where they were made.
MREs are the more modern version where everything is freeze-dried rather than canned.
Dead links - that's a good point regardless of the bookmarking technology. One solution is to automatically cache everything you consider worth bookmarking, permanently. (Tie a bliki to a proxy like squid, maybe?) Another is to design the bookmarking system to go to archive.org whenever the link is dead.
I'd like a blog which is also part of a wiki (aka a "bliki"). And I'd like to be able to set each post public or private - so I can record my own thoughts about ideas which I do not want to share, vs. plain links and comments which I do want to share. Probably I will try to use MediaWiki for this but I'm not sure about the privacy aspect of it. I have used it at work for an internal blog; the "my talk" page that each user gets is very much like a blog. You can mod the code a little bit to automatically put the time and date in each post.
It's also nice to be able to email posts to one's blog.
Slashdot Mirror
The other countries probably regulate the prices more than we do. But cable is fundamentally a monopoly, just because somebody has to own the cables. The only competition is coming from alternatives like DSL, powerline, wireless etc. And both the cable and DSL businesses belong to stagnant, big, slow-moving companies. So in this kind of case the government-regulated (or g-owned, or g-mandated in some countries) model is working better, as long as the government happens to have decent leadership in this department. There are counter-examples too, in some of the former Soviet republics for example - the government has the telecomm monopoly and it sucks, worse than it did in 1970's America.
Capitalism will triumph eventually, when there are enough alternatives. Meanwhile I still feel kindof privileged to have such fast broadband over cable, and don't really mind the price that much. The total bill is a bit steep ($85); I just get TV along with it in order to get the broadband discount (and plain old analog at that, without any premium channels). But after the discount, the broadband portion of that isn't too bad. And there are extra government fees and taxes and crap that shouldn't be there. Right now in this country we have most of the disadvantages of both systems, and not all the advantages.
There have been some efforts to force cable companies to offer a choice of ISP; not sure what happened, probably got derailed, but when there is a natural monopoly it might be a good idea to have regulations like that. Then again, maybe it just ruins the efficiency of the natural monopoly by burying both companies (the cable plant company and the ISP) in extra red tape.
Just because Emacs takes up every possible key combination all by itself doesn't mean the rest of us have to deal with that limitation. :-)
Realistically the control key should be used for control functions, and alt (or option) key should be somehow involved in accessing alternate characters. Doesn't the labeling make it obvious?
And if you need more control keys than you can get with just control, then maybe you need to be using a command line. Using esc from "insert mode" to get to a command line makes reasonable sense doesn't it? Or alternatively (or additionally) there are function keys and menus, and function keys could be used to navigate menus, too. IMO you should be able to see on the screen what a function key does. WordPerfect couldn't do it that way in 80 x 25 text mode but nowadays we could do it. And some day there might be keyboards with displays in their function keys.
(note - I'm not advocating either vi or emacs, or any other program that I've actually seen and used. All these existing programs are so steeped in stupid traditions that we now just take for granted, that most people can't even imagine a truly usable alternative.)
So back on topic - what's wrong with having an onscreen menu that you use to select an alternate character set, which can be accessed either by mouse or a simple keyboard shortcut? Then you can switch easily back and forth between English, some other language, math symbols, dingbats and so on.
While pouring over messageboard posts
Well you are making the dude's point now aren't you? Only way you can pour yourself over the posts is if you are Odo from Deep Space 9. Or Bjork, perhaps; she claims to be able to do this in one of her songs ("come over, and I'll pour myself all over you").
Not sure whom he's exhorting here... open-source developers? Microsoft? Linux is the OS by the people and for the people, so if the people don't add the features that he thinks they want to their apps, then maybe they don't want them as bad as he thinks.
:-)
But tagging along on MS's coattails isn't going to get us anywhere. What is needed is for Windows people to use Jabber; then we can really have interoperability and end the IM wars. And if it doesn't have enough features to make that compelling, then they need to be added. And the Jabber server used to be interoperable with other IM's (including MSN I think), not sure if it still is but that was a really good feature. Hopefully its interoperability includes file transfer. Voice IMO already has a couple of good implentations (asterisk for sure, and then there are skype and some others), and if people think that IM and voice belong together then the IM client could include a SIP client as well. Next they will be wanting video. CUCMe anybody? I remember it working already in 1994, perhaps earlier...why don't we leapfrog for once and get video well-integrated into IM as well?
As for me, I don't really "get" IM - don't like to be interrupted all the time. Email works just fine, thank you.
True hardcore Linux users just use talk/ntalk/ytalk, of course.
That's what I was thinking when I first read that! I figured it had something to do with recruiting (either Google's, or Google is starting a job search site or something).
What's foolish IMO is having to give up some bits of resolution on fixnums in order to do type tagging. (e.g. only using 29 bits like Chez Scheme does) And there is no choice on a 32-bit architecture unless you do something much less efficient. But exchanging data with other systems or C functions is more work because you have to range-check every int to make sure its value can fit in 29 bits, or else upgrade it to a bignum. Right? I don't really know the internals that well but that's my understanding.
So when you say "tagged memory" what I'm thinking is that any machine that can address a 36-bit memory bus instead of 32 bits (or maybe 72 instead of 64) would be a good start. The extra bits could be thought of as "metadata" for every word, and this technique might even be useful for other languages. But it sounds like on the Alpha they just used the upper half of a 64-bit register for 8 bits of metadata, and that is also a "waste" of the power of 64-bit computing in some sense. The same problem will recur - when the world switches to the 64-bit int as the new standard, because all machines have 64 or more bit ALUs, again you will encounter numbers which fit into a 64-bit int but cannot become fixnums.
But if a Lispish OS and programming environment were as popular at some point in the future as Linux is today, some custom hardware would be justifiable.
Today it could maybe be prototyped using one or more FPGAs, and just use the old 30-pin SIMMs for memory - you will just need to use them in groups of 5 instead of 4, and will then get a 40-bit-wide data bus. Too bad it takes so many to get a decent amount of memory. :-)
Flash can survive being submersed just fine as long as you dry it out before using it. But the USB flash drives seem likely to get mechanically messed up because of the way they stick out. I didn't get to use mine that long before it got pried the wrong direction by accident and went "crunch," so now I just use CF and SD cards. Of course, if you don't use it a lot, only often enough to keep the documents up-to-date, maybe it won't be a problem.
Transflash or SmartMedia would be sturdier. But SmartMedia is obsolete and transflash is so small that it's very easy to lose.
You could just store the docs on your cellphone and plan not to lose it, or store on a memory card which is in your cell phone. But then the memory will get used more and be more subject to wearing out.
iButtons are about the sturdiest format there is, and they have encrypted ones too, but they don't have enough memory for much data. There are also flash-based smart cards you could keep in your wallet. But neither of those is common enough - it's hard to find a reader for them, harder than finding a usb port anyway. Smartcards _should_ be standard equipment for securely storing all your passwords and personal info, but it hasn't caught on, mostly because of paranoia about "big brother" or "mark of the beast" or identity theft or some such.
Maybe you could pop open an SD card, fill the empty space with epoxy and put it back together. It would probably be more durable that way. Or, do the same with a USB drive. Or use the SD card by itself most of the time, and keep a compact new USB SD reader in your knapsack.
Yeah somebody should be manufacturing a really tiny usb key that has encrypted flash, implements some smart-card-like protocols for partitioning information with different keys, and sticks out of the port less than 1 cm, and is very sturdy. Having it stick out less would reduce the leverage when it gets bumped against something.
Somebody needs to design a modern Lisp Machine. It would be a nice "open hardware" project. Maybe could run on an FPGA PCI board or something.
Most phones only let you install J2ME apps. IMO this sucks for geeks. There is a market for a geek pda/cell phone, which must be purchased at full price with no subsidy, works on any GSM network, and has a free and open implementation so you can write cool new apps without obstacles. But I don't know of any companies directly catering to that market yet. Danger should've been doing that; they were independent and maybe even had the balls for it, at first. Now apparently they don't.
But then again, maybe the carriers won't allow such devices on their networks at all. I'm not sure if they could block them, but I can imagine they'd have a hissy fit, not being able to charge extra for every little feature like they do now. But it's quite obviously the future, whether they like it or not; if not on any of today's networks, then on future networks like WiMax or something.
At least you can get a GPRS card and stick it in your favorite PDA and do what you want. Maybe do VOIP over the data network.
I figured size mattered up until that article a few weeks ago that said that Blu-Ray players will have to "phone home" to report usage and get permission to play every disc. Sounds like !$#%^ DiVX (the original one, not the kewl new video file format) all over again. Any player that works that way is a loser in my book, and I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Getting a hot new game console shouldn't even be enough justification to put up with that shit, if you care about your civil rights.
Now if they mess up HD-DVD the same way, then I don't know what to say... it's getting to be a longer wait each time, before the hackers get us back our fair use rights after having them temporarily stripped by any new technology. Besides the fact that the hackers have to work in places like Norway and Russia now because of the !@%%@#$ DMCA.
But I'm thinking maybe MS and Intel have decided that extreme DRM is not cool and maybe prefer the one that's less work to make it useful on PC's. So maybe it won't be quite so bad as Blu-Ray is turning out to be. Hopefully even if the movie discs end up totally fubar, at least we can use the writers for a bigger backup format. And if people in general don't want to quit buying DVD movies, then they will probably continue to be manufactured for a long time. If they make the DRM too tight on _both_ new formats, I bet that's what will happen.
Diamond vapor deposition to protect the surface. I bet Apple could pull it off somehow.
it's nearly impossible to convince everyone otherwise. One scientist was being interviewed on NPR after this latest discovery and said he and many scientists used to like to argue that Pluto was not a planet, but have now given up the fight due to overwhelming public opinion that it's already been a planet for many decades now, so why change our minds? And if Pluto is a planet, this newly discovered object must be one too by the same criteria. (Unless you disqualify it on the basis of its inclined orbit.) It'd probably be even more contentious than switching to the metric system. At least most of the world managed to do that though.
Use about 12 SXGA DLP video projectors, to make a 4800x3000 or so video display. There needs to be some overlap, and you can fade out the edges to smoothly connect the images so that it really looks like one super-high-res display. Then you can read several JavaDocs and still see your code and UML and an xterm for compiling and another for running, all at the same time.
It should fill up a somewhat curved wall, and you sit in front of it in your La-Z-Boy with a wireless keyboard and a trackball or touchpad on the keyboard or a mouse on the arm of the chair, or a Wacom tablet in your lap. I think I'd like two half-keyboards actually, one on each arm of the chair, mounted so that they can be adjusted into a comfortable position.
Of course I'm not sure what kind of video options you have to drive that many monitors at once, especially from a single computer, but stuff like this exists for trade shows etc. Maybe it involves multiple computers and some cooperative version of Xinerama between them.
Hey you said cost is no object, and what I want most is massive desktop real estate without borders between the tiles.
Alternatively, rear-project all that video onto some kind of touchscreen surface, and sit closer.
Not being able to afford all that, I built myself a desk with a top shelf at eye level for the main monitors (2 for my Linux box plus another for the KVM, so I can get to auxiliary systems easily), a shelf underneath for misc peripherals and someday maybe a bank of touchscreens, and a height-adjustable, narrow keyboard shelf sticking out in front. It's fairly ergonomic and accommodates way more hardware than any desk you can buy. The bottom part (underneath the bottom shelf) has 3 19" rack cages for computers. I have my main Linux box, a multiboot box (Linux/Windows/QNX/DOS), and an old mac in there so far.
is a simple little clear button next to the search field. Often I select text to paste into it, and then get there and find out I cannot paste because it's already got text in it; so I have to select the last search text, delete it, and then re-select what I wanted (elsewhere in another window sometimes) and finally paste it in. (I'm talking about on X Window where the middle-mouse-paste works with what you selected, and is not persistent if you select something else.) What a huge pain, and I'm doing it several times a day. Galeon had a clear button next to this search field. Surely there is a way to add this by editing some XML somewhere?
The URL field could have a similar clear button, but that annoys me less, because I can middle-click anywhere in the browser window to go to a selected URL, so I don't paste into the URL field very often.
As someone else pointed out this is really way oversimplified. And in practice the reasons that lower frequencies go longer distances has more to do with side effects of the environment. For example HF signals will bounce off the ionosphere and come back to earth, whereas VHF and higher will go on out into space. And the higher the frequency, the more likely it is to be blocked by some physical substance. This is why they use ultra-low frequencies to communicate with subs underwater - anything much higher just doesn't travel through water very well. At high enough frequencies even a single sheet of paper can be opaque. (Just as it can be opaque to light.)
Anyway Shannon's equation that you posted does not have a frequency component at all.
They were already using unmanned Progress craft to re-supply their Mir space station for a really long time. I doubt the technology has changed much since then.
Still there is a limit to how much concentration you can get. If you try to freeze vodka, it just doesn't.
What's your beef with folding@home?
I had 4 megs of VRAM in 1995 as well. Bought a full-length VL-bus board for my 486, used, from an ad on usenet. But then one day I had the computer open, and running, and my little window air conditioner started spewing condensation water, and a few drops landed on that card and fried it. The rest of the computer was OK, but I was pretty bummed. Had to go buy a cheap S3 card to replace it.
:-)
And yes I was running Linux and X on it.
No, the important thing for them is to sell chips, and since they are the under-under-dog (behind Intel even, until they prove themselves again), they can use every advantage they can get. Open-source drivers (or at least specs to enable writing them) would make them downright popular with the Linux crowd. I'd buy their cards exclusively if they did that (assuming they have at least so-so OpenGL performance).
I think C&P represents pretty much exactly how much security we need for ordinary transactions. The next obvious step beyond, for extra security, would be biometrics, or implanted chips, and I see 2 big problems with that - 1.) a would-be thief has to escalate from mere theft to assault in order to be successful. That is, if your hand is being used for biometrics, then the probability that some day it's going to get cut off by a mugger goes up quite a bit. The same goes for any other body part. 2.) Obviously biometrics or implants will ring alarm bells in a lot of people's heads (mark of the beast, 1984, whatever). So there just isn't any point in trying that anytime soon. But durable, reliable, multi-purpose smart cards are exactly what we need.
I would like to see multiple cards get replaced with multi-purpose smart cards though. Mixing government, commercial and medical uses would be bad, but at least have a single smart card that can handle all the commercial uses - various credit and cash accounts, public transportation, loyalty tracking etc. There's no reason it couldn't be secure; there simply needs to be strict testing & enforcement of relevant standards to make sure that the information on the card stays partitioned by owner, and that partitioning is physically impossible to violate. E.g. Safeway can't get your Fry's loyalty ID nor your financial stuff nor personal info of any kind without your consent, and without revealing exactly which items they are reading. Every partition must be protected by a different private key, which is only ever stored on the card and never read out. But I think the smartcard standards for this behavior are already in place. Certainly with iButtons it's possible. And iButtons would be another very good alternative to smart cards, but in the end there should be just one good standard.
Another possible step forward from there would be the wireless smart cards, but people have privacy issues with those. But that scenario shown in that commercial where the guy pushes a shopping cart right out the front door and automatically gets charged for everything, is only possible if RFID is used both for tagging the goods and in the debit card.
I'm just sick and tired of carrying so many cards, and having them rub together and destroy each other's magnetic strips. About damn time they start using smart cards.
Of course we'll all have to start using smartcard readers at home, in order to buy anything on the net. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner, outside of a couple of trials.
And a good consequence of computers generally having smartcard readers, is that they can be used to log in as well. No more usernames and passwords to remember, potentially! (Except for paranoid sysadmins who inevitably will worry about the cards getting stolen, and continue to require as much extra authentication baggage as they can get away with.) That's the other huge authentication pain-in-the-ass that needs to be eliminated once and for all. I can deal with one card and one PIN for everything, and even with being required to change the PIN every few months, but any more than this is just wrong.
When I was a kid my dad got some surplus "sea rations" that included cigarettes. (Nobody in our family smoked so they got thrown out.) It was the kind that comes in a box, maybe 6 x 6 x 3 inches, and included a couple of sturdy steel cans painted olive drab (containing the main dish usually - stew or slices of ham or hash or whatever) and usually some crackers (interesting round crackers in a can - they tasted very unique, kindof good actually) or bread, and there would be bags of stuff that could be in bags (applesauce for example) and a can of Sterno-type fuel, and a bag with all the accessories (cigarettes, gum, a spoon, salt, pepper, coffee, sugar, toilet paper, etc.) The case of rations included some more stuff like a knife and an awful primitive can opener that it's unbelievable anybody could actually open those thick tough cans with.
:-) Everything tasted a little weird, from all the preservatives I suppose, or strange recipes optimized for long life rather than flavor. Some were stamped with the address of the factory where they were made.
I can believe those have a 30 year shelf life.
MREs are the more modern version where everything is freeze-dried rather than canned.
Dead links - that's a good point regardless of the bookmarking technology. One solution is to automatically cache everything you consider worth bookmarking, permanently. (Tie a bliki to a proxy like squid, maybe?) Another is to design the bookmarking system to go to archive.org whenever the link is dead.
I'd like a blog which is also part of a wiki (aka a "bliki"). And I'd like to be able to set each post public or private - so I can record my own thoughts about ideas which I do not want to share, vs. plain links and comments which I do want to share. Probably I will try to use MediaWiki for this but I'm not sure about the privacy aspect of it. I have used it at work for an internal blog; the "my talk" page that each user gets is very much like a blog. You can mod the code a little bit to automatically put the time and date in each post.
It's also nice to be able to email posts to one's blog.
I'd think stuff from academic sources would be in TeX.