\begin{tinfoil hat} I see now! Hell hasn't frozen over. It's all a conspiracy! The Senators passed the Do Not Call List, and then had their buddies challenged it. Now the well meaning diligent congress critters, can come to the american public and say, "You know we'd like to stop telemarketers, but this misguided first amendment is getting in our way." It's just a setup for the patriot act 2 where we loose are freedom of Speech! Terrorism wasn't scary enough, but as everyone knows it's inconvience that really gets Americans all rile'd up. \end{tinfoil hat}
yeah, I think that bundles are a nice way of distributing applications.
In the past, UNIX was not so much application based, but rather you had files, and commands that worked on files. In this situation, the UNIX way of organizing file makes more sense. In addition, by having file system organized by how the files are used (ie/boot and/bin are hardware dependant, read-often, write-rarely,/usr/share is hardware independant,/var is write-often, etc) was (and still is to a lesser extent) really usefull because you could use differnent media for different parts of the file system.
With bundles, you loose these capabilites but gain a filesystem that makes more sense for application-centric systems. While there is nothing keeping people from making a distro like this, there are a lot of people that would not like changing the standard UNIX filesystem we have come to know and love. And most of the people would be in favor of it would likely prefer OS X anyway:) So, for good or bad, I don't see this happening anytime soon.
I do have some question about the OS X implementation, not having used it extensively. When talking about bundles, most people talk about how installing an application can be as simple as copying the bundle. Is this how most OS X Apps do it? If so, disk space would be wasted storing multiple copies of shared libraries. Is it much space, or insignificant compared to all the beautiful hi-res icons?
Its cool that more of these services exist. But I can't say that any of them serves the use that I had for Napster.
Now I can't speak for everyone but I will speak for myself. I love MP3's. I listen to my MP3's far more often than my CD's. However, I have never wanted to buy MP3's. I like owning CD's, and there are alot of good reasons for this. But the main one, is that is is a high quality, lossless, patent free, universally supported format. What if I don't' want to (or am not able to) use the IP encumbered MP3 or AAC file formats? What if the mp3's that sounded fine on cheap computer speakers, are not up to par with my new system? File formats change, and transcoding sucks. That's why I insist on having CD's, because I want my music to be usable for lifetime.
I don't want to buy mp3's on the internet. I want to discover music on the internet. Five years ago, things would work like this. I would hear about a cool band from a friend in a different town, or find their website, or see them in a cdnow.com "people who bought x, also bought y." message. So I would jump on napster, download some music from them, (oh, and do some lyrics searches to make sure it was labeled propely) and if I liked them I would put them on my cdnow wishlist, which I then bought every couple months (save on shipping).
Now when I find out about some band I go to amazon.com - can't play their crappy samples in linux. Go to their website - no mp3's or just radio songs. Look for fansites with bootlegs - usually none. And with half an hour wasted, I walk away frustrated that I now know nothing more about the band than I did before. I can tell you for certain that I have bought less CD's since napster went down, just because it is harder to find out about new music. I have been temped to sign up with eMusic, as it would make this task far easier and more enjoyable, but cannot justify the cost, as I will end up buying CD's for all the artists I like, anyway.
So here is my suggestion. Create a subscription based mp3 service that also sells CD's and gives credit (say 3 weeks access, or 75 downloads) for each CD that you buy. Then people that buy enough CD's will have free access to download mp3's, and those who don't buy CD's will pay as well. Couple this with "if you like foo, try bar" info, and streaming radio shows which have the entire catalogue of music to legally draw from, and you would have one very enjoyable, and affordable venue for fans to discover new music. And the artist gets paid.
The only part of this that has potential problems at the moment is the radio station. I have seen so much contradictory information about internet streaming that I don't know what the exact legal situation is. However, one would think that if you had express permission of all the artists you were playing you should not have to pay the stupid FCC royalty license. If this is not the case the policy should be changed, and while Joe "I want to stream any music I want over the internet, without permission" Schmoe may not be able to get that change, I guarantee you that if Apple and Dell got together and pushed for this, people would listen. But suppose now that it is legal. Why should the service hire DJ's when they can get people to do it for free? That's right, let anyone who wants to run a simple radio show on your site. The costs shouldn't be high, they just put together a song list (.m3u) every week, (or month, or afternoon, or hour) and people stream the mp3's, like on mp3.com. So, the major cost is the bandwidth, which is dependant on the total number of listeners, not DJ's. If a dj becomes popular, you can offer him perks like being able to run his show like a real studio (ie, talk between songs, etc), you give him credit to support him music finding habit, and you can multicast his show to save money.
Now not only would the artist be paid for use of their music, independent labels would be on equal footing with big labels, since the big labels would not control the similar band links (they are autonomou
Here's the situation with installing stuff on linux. Developers are hellbent against statically compiling things (in many cases for good reason). In addition, due to the asyncronous nature of the open source development, there are all sorts of version of libraries in use by people at any one time. Therefore it isn't really possible for me as a developer to give you a package that installs on your system and just works, because I don't know what all your system entails. Dependency checking *has* to be done.
So the "download a package and click on the icon" scenario will only work if clicking on that icon starts a program that does dependency checking, downloads dependencies off the internet, and then installs. This would be better, but not optimal, because you have to start downloading the package, wait for package to download, then start the install, then wait for the libraries to down load and install. The problem is the act,wait,act,wait. It would be better to have act,act,wait,wait - same amount of time overall, but free's up the user to do something else (ie, workflow is controled by the user, not the computer).
Here's an idea. It is simular to how streaming integrates with the browser. Say we create a redirection file type whose contents is just the name (or url) of a debian package. Within the filemanager and browser, this file type (MIME type) is associated to a GUI version of apt. Then as a developer I (or my debian maintainer) would put the debian package on the debian server, and I would put a link to a redirect file on my site. When the user clicked on the link it would start the apt gui which would look up the package specified by the redirect, determine dependencies, and then (after prompting the user for root password) would proceed to install all the necisarry packages for that app. One click installing. (hmm, I should patent this:)
This is actually easier than the windows method, and meshes better with the technical issues that OSS has to deal with.
I was thinking the same thing, but something caught my attention. It only has a mini-PCI connector. Does anyone know of any mini-PCI TV tuner cards? are there mini-PCI to PCI adaptors?
One thing that has been noted about E-Ink and it's like is that it only needs power to change display, while a static image is retained with no power usage. This is because the fluid that the particles are suspended in is viscous enough that they pretty much stay in place, unless a voltage is applied. This means that they can operate at very low power levels.
While it didn't say so in the paper, it appears that this new technology requires continous voltage to be applied to keep the ink from spreading out acrossed the full surface of the pixel. So this paper would likely use more power than the particle approach, and would be pure black when no power was applied, basically functionally equivalent to LCD's today. I wonder how the power consumption / price of this device will compare to LCD's once they are being mass produced. Regardless, it would be worth it to have a laptop that was easily readable outside.
I have to say amen to that. My experiances are nearly identical. I love slackware for all it taught me and the simlpicity in design that made it easy to learn how linux worked.
Where our paths depart is that when I grew tired of doing everything myself I was decieved into the way of redhat. I dare say that the RPM dependancies I found were far worse than the dependencies that I had to deal with in slackware. In slackware, all the dependencies were real - if you can't compile a package it is because you really do need that other package. Compared to RPM, where a large number of the dependencies are artificial - you need the latest, greatest version of this library, not because the new features are used, but because it was what the packager compiled against, or you need to download these three other libraries because the packager decided to package them seperately, even though they are used only for a couple programs. It is frustrating that so many of the dependancy issues in rpm are really social problems, not technical ones. I also disliked how the system configuration was complicated with layers of tools each with their own config files.
I tried debian after a year of redhat. Unfortuneately, this was not a good experiance. It took me weeks to install. The CD's I bought would not install at all, nor the ones I downloaded. Eventually got ahold of really old CD's from a friend, installed them, then spent a couple days apt-getting up to the newest version. From then on everytime I tried to update a package apt-get would update my entire system. I'm sure it was something simple but I didn't have time to figure it out. Then a couple weeks latter my deskstar harddrive died on me:)
Needless to say I was not in the mood to go through that ordeal again, and bounced from RedHat to SuSE back to slackware to Madrake, untill I finnaly rediscovered debian years later. I have never looked back.
Or better, how many Libraries of Congress could those 3.5" floppies fill? Well, lets see.... they would fill a room 40ft x 22ft x 10ft. What that's all? And they could only pave half a mile of road. Quite lame.
However you could stitch together some fine floppy-disk jump-suits for 10 blue whales! Much more impressive.
For a while, my desk was in the closet behind the networked printer. It was funny to have people come in and wonder who this new person was, and why he was behind the printer:)
Whats to say that this hasn't already happened. I only know a handfull of people that actually belive that the government is looking out for the best interests of the people. My generation doesn't trust the government, my parents generation doesn't trust the government. I don't think it's a matter or realizing our government is corrupt, so much as being put in such a bad position that we are willing to do somthing about it. And I don't have great hopes for this. Look at how bad things got with labor in the late 1800s, early 1900s, before change took place. Things are going to get alot worse before people are going to do anything about it. Furthermore, the way things are going with power slowly shifting to more global institutions, it will take more than a local (ie national) uprising to bring about change.
The truth of the matter is that America does have alot to offer. We are the most prosperous country in the world, and that provides a good deal of "freedom" (opportunity is the better word) to live your life as you wish. This is what people see in their day to day lives. These invasions of our rights are annoying, but unless they directly effect you or someone you are close to, they are easy to ignore. People have more concrete problems in their lives to care about these abstract ones.
So the bleak truth is that we have woken up and decided it's not worth the effort to make change.
(l) "Preexisting or current business relationship," as used in connection with the sending of a commercial e-mail advertisement,means that the recipient has made an inquiry and has provided his or her e-mail address, or has made an application, purchase, or transaction, with or without consideration, regarding products or services offered by the advertiser. . . . (o) "Unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement" means a commercial e-mail advertisement sent to a recipient who meets both of the following criteria:
(1) The recipient has not provided direct consent to receive advertisements from the advertiser.
(2) The recipient does not have a preexisting or current business relationship, as defined in subdivision (l), with the advertiser promoting the lease, sale, rental, gift offer, or other disposition of any property, goods, services, or extension of credit.
First, a large proportion of address lists can be traced back to someone missing a checkbox that said "I agree to let this crappy company and it's affiliates send me email about anything". The way I read this, if you accidently leave a single one of these boxes unchecked, then crappy company can sell your address to anyone, who can then legaly send you spam, since you requested information.
Therefore, all this law requires is a little more bookkeeping on part of the people who harvest lists, so that they can prove that you did request information, if they ever go to court.
Well, no I don't think it would be more elegant. Latitude and longitude tell you where something is located, it doesn't tell you how to get there. "On Adams street, just north of McAlister", will always be more usefull to humans than 35.31234' N 108.47343' W (and we would need that many decimal places). That, however, does not mean that the underlying implementation can't use lat, long.
Well from what I can tell it doesn't just look in the yellow pages. For example I think I could do a search for linux, and it would display any addresses in my area that appeared on a linux website. Or I could search for the words "sale", and "shoes".
Unfortunately, I was about to try some searches to see what other usefull things it could do other than yellow pages searches, when the site came to grinding halt. Sure enough, the story had just made the front page for non subscribers:)
For yellow page type searches, I usually use mapquest, and I'm sure if this is better. The mapquest yellow page info seems to be out of data as it has turned up places that are out of business, and ommitted new ones. On the other hand the listing of results is much simple to read on mapquest. In addition, I don't know how smart google is on dealing with pages that have lists of addresses.
I have a question. I know that cancer is caused my a mistake when duplicating DNA strands. (some mistakes caught and corrected, others effectless, others fatal, and a tiny percentage cancerous) I was of the impression that most of these mistakes were due to cosmic rays. Is this the case? How much life could one add by keeping the mouse in a radiation sheilded lead box and carfully monitoring the food it eats?
Oh, and I for one welcome our new somec-sleeping mouse overlords.
This fall, you intuitively seem to know how to find work-arounds for problems that perplex others. Well, this happens to me all the time. It's most likely just a matter of human nature - different people with different experience look at things differently, so that a difficult problem to one person is intuitive to others. So the likelyness of this happening really depends on the type of people and situations I expose myself to this fall.
Pay particular attention to flashes of insight and write them down before they fade away. One of these ideas could play a big part in your future. This is intriguing. I have recently finished my undergrad and have been drifting aimlessly for the last year or so trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. (then again most people are not happy with their jobs, or are looking for meaning in their life) While no closer to an answer, I have noticed that I am very idea oriented. It is ideas that energize and drive me, while seeing things through to the final implementation is almost always anti-climatic, and by that time I'm usually off on another idea already.
If you're thinking of going back for training, try an online course. This is a good time for in-depth learning because you'll have the self-discipline and resolve you'll need to succeed. This one is completely wrong. I can't think of any time in my life that I have been more complacent and apathetic (noticeable by the increase of slashdot posts in the last three months:) Self-discipline and resolve are two things I have not had in a quite a while. (Unless previously mentioned idea provides such drive and resolve:)
If you travel on business, pay particular attention to your laptop, cell phone and PDA as you go through airport security. I don't travel on business, and don't have a laptop or PDA.
Your short-term memory is not functioning at optimal levels. Good Lord, considering how often I misplace things normally I don't want to see how bad my short-term memory is at suboptimal levels.
The interesting thing is, that while these "predictions" are bunk, if I were to believe them and follow their advice, would probably be better off because of it.
I just spent some time looking at MessageEase, and agree that it looks very interesting, especially the fact that it can work on both keypad and stylus input devices. Out of curiosity I did an off-the-cuff analysis.
MessageEase (on a keypad) requires a double tap 70% of the time and two taps about 30% of the time. Wordwise requires a single tap about 50% of the time and a shift-tap about 50% of the time. Since one usually keeps a finger on the shift key when using WordWise, the shift-tap would take about as long as a double-tap. A single tap naturally takes half the time that two taps do. So letting 'T' be the time for a single tap, and 'D' be the time for a double tap we have
So I would guess that WordWise would be about 25% faster than MessageEase, which matches the claims on the respective websites of MessageEase = 29 wpm, Wordwise = 35-40 wpm.
In addition there were a few things I did not like about the demo Wordwise Keypad implementation they had on their site. Mainly that it is highly modal. It has a button to toggle between dictionary and non-dictionary mode. I think dictionary mode is unnecessary myself, so it is comparable to the insert key on a normal keyboard - since you never use it, it would cause problems only when accidentally hit, and then the user would be confused because the keypad was functioning differently. It also has a toggle between the numeric and alphabetic input. I can see this one biting people all the time, as they would rarely remember to exit alphabetic mode after typing a name, and would then go to dial a telephone number, and get letters. Also, double-taping the backspace key deletes an entire word. This is very bad, as it require conscious effort on the part of the user to wait between taps when needing to delete more than one letter. This is a prime example of an interface in which (uncontrollable) habituation hurts the user rather than helping them. Fortunately, I did not see any of these problems in the stylus version:)
A numerical comparison to QuickWriting is harder. Like MessageEase, it has 9 sectors. You draw a letter by starting in the middle, moving the stylus out into one sector, and then renter the middle from another sector. (It's easier to explain with pictures:) The nice thing about it is that you never have to pick up the pen between letters, but instead each letter is a loop, which flow nicely together and common words become fluid gestures. It's hard to say which of these would require more pen movement, since MessageEase has most of the movement between letters, while QuickWriting has all the movement in the production of the letters. They both share the good feature that you can look at the letter-map as you are learning, as opposed to grafitti, where you have to memorize all the glyphs before you can be productive. One potential concern I had was once you learn MessageEase, how much do you have to keep your eyes on stylus, rather than the text it is generating. I know that with QuickWriting you really don't have to look at the stylus at all, once you get used to it. What has been your experience with this?
I definitely want to check this out more. It looks to me that MessageEase is slower than both QuickWriting and WordWise, but not by much, and has the added advantage of working with both finger and stylus input.
I thinking along the lines of having you finger mostly over the digit button, but off center so you to would accidently bump the alpha button. I don't think this would be hard to to.
The other possiblility - aiming for an alpha and sliding and hitting a digit would be less likely, depending on how "grippy" the buttons were.
In general this keypad seems to be overkill for a cellphone, but not good enough for a PDA.
There have been several incorrect statements about how the input will work. Here's the facts that I found from a manufacturer of this device:
1) If you have small fingers you can press the inset button to get a number. 2) If you have large fingers you can press the four buttons surrounding the number.
But what happens when you hit 2 of the surrounding buttons? Or one alpabetic button and a one numeric button. This mistake could happen if you were trying to hit the letter or the number, so there is no real smarts that could be added to the device to make it "forgiving" to these types of mistakes. So, without using the device I will still have concerns about how easy it is to mash the wrong button combinations.
Also, full blown handwritting or speach recognition not panaceas, when you concider that it is not uncommon for a people to make mistakes reading their own handwritting, or listening to other people.
Although it would be interesting if hand printing and diction started being taught in school again to help with computer interfaces, I don't think that they will ever become the primary input method for a computer. Typing is faster than handwriting, and more accurate. And having cubicles full of people talking to computers all day would be too annoying (then again I've never worked in a call center:).
For cell phones, eatoni's WordWise is the best thing I have seen yet. It is a predictive method. And let me tell you I hate most predictive input methods, and usually end up switching back to multi-tap. But with wordwise you use a shift key to provide a little more info, which lets it do an incredably good job at guessing. The site has a bunch of research that shows how the number of keystrokes is smaller than both predictive and multitap methods. Plus, unlike predictive methods where your next keypress can dependant on what the current guess is, WordWise is non-modal, allowing your actions to become habituated, and thus even faster (ie you can touch type on it).
For PDA's Quick Writing is very cool. It requires you to learn the input method, just like you have to learn how to type, but is it damn fast. Faster than grafitti, and often even faster than handwriting. Think of it as cursive on amphetamines:)
What bothers me is there is no conceivable way these individuals could have performed over a billion dollars worth of labor, ever. ... The money was not earned, it was stolen. In most cases, the money was stolen from the shareholders of the corporation in question, who by rights should have either had the money in dividends or seen the money re-invested in the corporate machine.
I don't follow this. The company owners are not worthy of this money because they did not perform that much labor, yet the shareholders which did no labor whatsoever towards the betterment of the company do deserve it. Seriously, I can't think of any better example of wealth perpetuating wealth than investors. (yet without them there would be far less competition in capitalism and thus the world is better off because of them)
If anyone is "more worthy" of the money it is the employees. But as other people have pointed out, the reason the people on this list are rich is because they built something out of nothing. They took just as much, if not more, risk than the investors, as well as dumping tons of time, insight and skill into their companies. Who is more the more deserving - the genius businessman, or the investor who simply recognized their genius?
Wow, and the way that the contiki webbrowser is designed you can even view site like slashdot who's html is larger than the amount of RAM in the machine itself!
No, like most things blamed on conspiricies, the real reason is that it's simply not economical. It is cheaper to use oil out of the ground than out of plants, more than 2x as cheap in fact, and biodeisel is likely to get more expensive.
Biodiesal always seemed like a great idea to me, since plants still to do a much better job of storing energy from the sun than we have been able to. Unfortunately, as Jeremi recently pointed out to me, the sun is only half the picture when dealing with plants. The other half is soil. Since plants extract nutrients from the soil, we need to replenish those if we want the soil to continue to be usefull. Nature's mechanism for this primarily involves dead plants. However, since we want to consume all the plants we grow, we have to find another source. Currently fertilizers are primarily produced from fossil fuels, which makes sense - it's concentrated dead plant goodness. Therefore when fossil fuels run out, so does our fertilizer. Suddenly biodiesel isn't quite so cheap.
My estimation (ie I'm pulling this out of my ass - if there are any argriculture experts out there who could provide more solid numbers, I would be very interested in hearing them) is that using only sustable soil replenishment, such as crop cycling, compost fertilization (partly from garbage and partly from holding back some of the crops) would result in about 1/4 the crop yeild/$ compared to what we can get today. Therefore sustainable biodiesal would be almost 10 times the cost of gasoline today. Even with significant improvements in biodeisel effeciency, it would still not be economical to consume biodeisel at the rates we consume fossil fuels today.
Unless we have some massive breakthroughs in some type of sun energy harvesting, the only real option we have for creating energy at expected levels of consumption is nuclear power. So our choices are to find some way to store energy from nuclear power (ie, batteries or fuel cell) for use in mobile applications like vehicles, or use less energy. Which do you think will happen?
Slashdot Mirror
\begin{tinfoil hat}
I see now! Hell hasn't frozen over. It's all a conspiracy! The Senators passed the Do Not Call List, and then had their buddies challenged it. Now the well meaning diligent congress critters, can come to the american public and say, "You know we'd like to stop telemarketers, but this misguided first amendment is getting in our way." It's just a setup for the patriot act 2 where we loose are freedom of Speech! Terrorism wasn't scary enough, but as everyone knows it's inconvience that really gets Americans all rile'd up.
\end{tinfoil hat}
yeah, I think that bundles are a nice way of distributing applications.
/boot and /bin are hardware dependant, read-often, write-rarely, /usr/share is hardware independant, /var is write-often, etc) was (and still is to a lesser extent) really usefull because you could use differnent media for different parts of the file system.
:) So, for good or bad, I don't see this happening anytime soon.
In the past, UNIX was not so much application based, but rather you had files, and commands that worked on files. In this situation, the UNIX way of organizing file makes more sense. In addition, by having file system organized by how the files are used (ie
With bundles, you loose these capabilites but gain a filesystem that makes more sense for application-centric systems. While there is nothing keeping people from making a distro like this, there are a lot of people that would not like changing the standard UNIX filesystem we have come to know and love. And most of the people would be in favor of it would likely prefer OS X anyway
I do have some question about the OS X implementation, not having used it extensively. When talking about bundles, most people talk about how installing an application can be as simple as copying the bundle. Is this how most OS X Apps do it? If so, disk space would be wasted storing multiple copies of shared libraries. Is it much space, or insignificant compared to all the beautiful hi-res icons?
Its cool that more of these services exist. But I can't say that any of them serves the use that I had for Napster.
Now I can't speak for everyone but I will speak for myself. I love MP3's. I listen to my MP3's far more often than my CD's. However, I have never wanted to buy MP3's. I like owning CD's, and there are alot of good reasons for this. But the main one, is that is is a high quality, lossless, patent free, universally supported format. What if I don't' want to (or am not able to) use the IP encumbered MP3 or AAC file formats? What if the mp3's that sounded fine on cheap computer speakers, are not up to par with my new system? File formats change, and transcoding sucks. That's why I insist on having CD's, because I want my music to be usable for lifetime.
I don't want to buy mp3's on the internet. I want to discover music on the internet. Five years ago, things would work like this. I would hear about a cool band from a friend in a different town, or find their website, or see them in a cdnow.com "people who bought x, also bought y." message. So I would jump on napster, download some music from them, (oh, and do some lyrics searches to make sure it was labeled propely) and if I liked them I would put them on my cdnow wishlist, which I then bought every couple months (save on shipping).
Now when I find out about some band I go to amazon.com - can't play their crappy samples in linux. Go to their website - no mp3's or just radio songs. Look for fansites with bootlegs - usually none. And with half an hour wasted, I walk away frustrated that I now know nothing more about the band than I did before. I can tell you for certain that I have bought less CD's since napster went down, just because it is harder to find out about new music. I have been temped to sign up with eMusic, as it would make this task far easier and more enjoyable, but cannot justify the cost, as I will end up buying CD's for all the artists I like, anyway.
So here is my suggestion. Create a subscription based mp3 service that also sells CD's and gives credit (say 3 weeks access, or 75 downloads) for each CD that you buy. Then people that buy enough CD's will have free access to download mp3's, and those who don't buy CD's will pay as well. Couple this with "if you like foo, try bar" info, and streaming radio shows which have the entire catalogue of music to legally draw from, and you would have one very enjoyable, and affordable venue for fans to discover new music. And the artist gets paid.
The only part of this that has potential problems at the moment is the radio station. I have seen so much contradictory information about internet streaming that I don't know what the exact legal situation is. However, one would think that if you had express permission of all the artists you were playing you should not have to pay the stupid FCC royalty license. If this is not the case the policy should be changed, and while Joe "I want to stream any music I want over the internet, without permission" Schmoe may not be able to get that change, I guarantee you that if Apple and Dell got together and pushed for this, people would listen. But suppose now that it is legal. Why should the service hire DJ's when they can get people to do it for free? That's right, let anyone who wants to run a simple radio show on your site. The costs shouldn't be high, they just put together a song list (.m3u) every week, (or month, or afternoon, or hour) and people stream the mp3's, like on mp3.com. So, the major cost is the bandwidth, which is dependant on the total number of listeners, not DJ's. If a dj becomes popular, you can offer him perks like being able to run his show like a real studio (ie, talk between songs, etc), you give him credit to support him music finding habit, and you can multicast his show to save money.
Now not only would the artist be paid for use of their music, independent labels would be on equal footing with big labels, since the big labels would not control the similar band links (they are autonomou
Here's the situation with installing stuff on linux. Developers are hellbent against statically compiling things (in many cases for good reason). In addition, due to the asyncronous nature of the open source development, there are all sorts of version of libraries in use by people at any one time. Therefore it isn't really possible for me as a developer to give you a package that installs on your system and just works, because I don't know what all your system entails. Dependency checking *has* to be done.
:)
So the "download a package and click on the icon" scenario will only work if clicking on that icon starts a program that does dependency checking, downloads dependencies off the internet, and then installs. This would be better, but not optimal, because you have to start downloading the package, wait for package to download, then start the install, then wait for the libraries to down load and install. The problem is the act,wait,act,wait. It would be better to have act,act,wait,wait - same amount of time overall, but free's up the user to do something else (ie, workflow is controled by the user, not the computer).
Here's an idea. It is simular to how streaming integrates with the browser. Say we create a redirection file type whose contents is just the name (or url) of a debian package. Within the filemanager and browser, this file type (MIME type) is associated to a GUI version of apt. Then as a developer I (or my debian maintainer) would put the debian package on the debian server, and I would put a link to a redirect file on my site. When the user clicked on the link it would start the apt gui which would look up the package specified by the redirect, determine dependencies, and then (after prompting the user for root password) would proceed to install all the necisarry packages for that app. One click installing. (hmm, I should patent this
This is actually easier than the windows method, and meshes better with the technical issues that OSS has to deal with.
If you need to have more power than that, you can also go with a micro ATX power supply. They are about 1/2 the volume of a normal ATX power supply.
In case you were wondering what it looked like
I was thinking the same thing, but something caught my attention. It only has a mini-PCI connector. Does anyone know of any mini-PCI TV tuner cards? are there mini-PCI to PCI adaptors?
One thing that has been noted about E-Ink and it's like is that it only needs power to change display, while a static image is retained with no power usage. This is because the fluid that the particles are suspended in is viscous enough that they pretty much stay in place, unless a voltage is applied. This means that they can operate at very low power levels.
While it didn't say so in the paper, it appears that this new technology requires continous voltage to be applied to keep the ink from spreading out acrossed the full surface of the pixel. So this paper would likely use more power than the particle approach, and would be pure black when no power was applied, basically functionally equivalent to LCD's today. I wonder how the power consumption / price of this device will compare to LCD's once they are being mass produced. Regardless, it would be worth it to have a laptop that was easily readable outside.
I have to say amen to that. My experiances are nearly identical. I love slackware for all it taught me and the simlpicity in design that made it easy to learn how linux worked.
:)
Where our paths depart is that when I grew tired of doing everything myself I was decieved into the way of redhat. I dare say that the RPM dependancies I found were far worse than the dependencies that I had to deal with in slackware. In slackware, all the dependencies were real - if you can't compile a package it is because you really do need that other package. Compared to RPM, where a large number of the dependencies are artificial - you need the latest, greatest version of this library, not because the new features are used, but because it was what the packager compiled against, or you need to download these three other libraries because the packager decided to package them seperately, even though they are used only for a couple programs. It is frustrating that so many of the dependancy issues in rpm are really social problems, not technical ones. I also disliked how the system configuration was complicated with layers of tools each with their own config files.
I tried debian after a year of redhat. Unfortuneately, this was not a good experiance. It took me weeks to install. The CD's I bought would not install at all, nor the ones I downloaded. Eventually got ahold of really old CD's from a friend, installed them, then spent a couple days apt-getting up to the newest version. From then on everytime I tried to update a package apt-get would update my entire system. I'm sure it was something simple but I didn't have time to figure it out. Then a couple weeks latter my deskstar harddrive died on me
Needless to say I was not in the mood to go through that ordeal again, and bounced from RedHat to SuSE back to slackware to Madrake, untill I finnaly rediscovered debian years later. I have never looked back.
Or better, how many Libraries of Congress could those 3.5" floppies fill? Well, lets see .... they would fill a room 40ft x 22ft x 10ft. What that's all? And they could only pave half a mile of road. Quite lame.
However you could stitch together some fine floppy-disk jump-suits for 10 blue whales! Much more impressive.
For a while, my desk was in the closet behind the networked printer. It was funny to have people come in and wonder who this new person was, and why he was behind the printer :)
Whats to say that this hasn't already happened. I only know a handfull of people that actually belive that the government is looking out for the best interests of the people. My generation doesn't trust the government, my parents generation doesn't trust the government. I don't think it's a matter or realizing our government is corrupt, so much as being put in such a bad position that we are willing to do somthing about it. And I don't have great hopes for this. Look at how bad things got with labor in the late 1800s, early 1900s, before change took place. Things are going to get alot worse before people are going to do anything about it. Furthermore, the way things are going with power slowly shifting to more global institutions, it will take more than a local (ie national) uprising to bring about change.
The truth of the matter is that America does have alot to offer. We are the most prosperous country in the world, and that provides a good deal of "freedom" (opportunity is the better word) to live your life as you wish. This is what people see in their day to day lives. These invasions of our rights are annoying, but unless they directly effect you or someone you are close to, they are easy to ignore. People have more concrete problems in their lives to care about these abstract ones.
So the bleak truth is that we have woken up and decided it's not worth the effort to make change.
First, a large proportion of address lists can be traced back to someone missing a checkbox that said "I agree to let this crappy company and it's affiliates send me email about anything". The way I read this, if you accidently leave a single one of these boxes unchecked, then crappy company can sell your address to anyone, who can then legaly send you spam, since you requested information.
Therefore, all this law requires is a little more bookkeeping on part of the people who harvest lists, so that they can prove that you did request information, if they ever go to court.
Well, no I don't think it would be more elegant. Latitude and longitude tell you where something is located, it doesn't tell you how to get there. "On Adams street, just north of McAlister", will always be more usefull to humans than 35.31234' N 108.47343' W (and we would need that many decimal places). That, however, does not mean that the underlying implementation can't use lat, long.
Well from what I can tell it doesn't just look in the yellow pages. For example I think I could do a search for linux, and it would display any addresses in my area that appeared on a linux website. Or I could search for the words "sale", and "shoes".
:)
Unfortunately, I was about to try some searches to see what other usefull things it could do other than yellow pages searches, when the site came to grinding halt. Sure enough, the story had just made the front page for non subscribers
For yellow page type searches, I usually use mapquest, and I'm sure if this is better. The mapquest yellow page info seems to be out of data as it has turned up places that are out of business, and ommitted new ones. On the other hand the listing of results is much simple to read on mapquest. In addition, I don't know how smart google is on dealing with pages that have lists of addresses.
I have a question. I know that cancer is caused my a mistake when duplicating DNA strands. (some mistakes caught and corrected, others effectless, others fatal, and a tiny percentage cancerous) I was of the impression that most of these mistakes were due to cosmic rays. Is this the case? How much life could one add by keeping the mouse in a radiation sheilded lead box and carfully monitoring the food it eats?
Oh, and I for one welcome our new somec-sleeping mouse overlords.
Well, this happens to me all the time. It's most likely just a matter of human nature - different people with different experience look at things differently, so that a difficult problem to one person is intuitive to others. So the likelyness of this happening really depends on the type of people and situations I expose myself to this fall.
Pay particular attention to flashes of insight and write them down before they fade away. One of these ideas could play a big part in your future.
This is intriguing. I have recently finished my undergrad and have been drifting aimlessly for the last year or so trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. (then again most people are not happy with their jobs, or are looking for meaning in their life) While no closer to an answer, I have noticed that I am very idea oriented. It is ideas that energize and drive me, while seeing things through to the final implementation is almost always anti-climatic, and by that time I'm usually off on another idea already.
If you're thinking of going back for training, try an online course. This is a good time for in-depth learning because you'll have the self-discipline and resolve you'll need to succeed.
This one is completely wrong. I can't think of any time in my life that I have been more complacent and apathetic (noticeable by the increase of slashdot posts in the last three months
If you travel on business, pay particular attention to your laptop, cell phone and PDA as you go through airport security.
I don't travel on business, and don't have a laptop or PDA.
Your short-term memory is not functioning at optimal levels. Good Lord, considering how often I misplace things normally I don't want to see how bad my short-term memory is at suboptimal levels.
The interesting thing is, that while these "predictions" are bunk, if I were to believe them and follow their advice, would probably be better off because of it.
I just spent some time looking at MessageEase, and agree that it looks very interesting, especially the fact that it can work on both keypad and stylus input devices. Out of curiosity I did an off-the-cuff analysis.
:)
:) The nice thing about it is that you never have to pick up the pen between letters, but instead each letter is a loop, which flow nicely together and common words become fluid gestures. It's hard to say which of these would require more pen movement, since MessageEase has most of the movement between letters, while QuickWriting has all the movement in the production of the letters. They both share the good feature that you can look at the letter-map as you are learning, as opposed to grafitti, where you have to memorize all the glyphs before you can be productive. One potential concern I had was once you learn MessageEase, how much do you have to keep your eyes on stylus, rather than the text it is generating. I know that with QuickWriting you really don't have to look at the stylus at all, once you get used to it. What has been your experience with this?
MessageEase (on a keypad) requires a double tap 70% of the time and two taps about 30% of the time. Wordwise requires a single tap about 50% of the time and a shift-tap about 50% of the time. Since one usually keeps a finger on the shift key when using WordWise, the shift-tap would take about as long as a double-tap. A single tap naturally takes half the time that two taps do. So letting 'T' be the time for a single tap, and 'D' be the time for a double tap we have
MessageEase = 30*2*T + 70*D
WordWise = 50*T + 50*D
or
MessageEase = WordWise + 10*T + 20*D
So I would guess that WordWise would be about 25% faster than MessageEase, which matches the claims on the respective websites of MessageEase = 29 wpm, Wordwise = 35-40 wpm.
In addition there were a few things I did not like about the demo Wordwise Keypad implementation they had on their site. Mainly that it is highly modal. It has a button to toggle between dictionary and non-dictionary mode. I think dictionary mode is unnecessary myself, so it is comparable to the insert key on a normal keyboard - since you never use it, it would cause problems only when accidentally hit, and then the user would be confused because the keypad was functioning differently. It also has a toggle between the numeric and alphabetic input. I can see this one biting people all the time, as they would rarely remember to exit alphabetic mode after typing a name, and would then go to dial a telephone number, and get letters. Also, double-taping the backspace key deletes an entire word. This is very bad, as it require conscious effort on the part of the user to wait between taps when needing to delete more than one letter. This is a prime example of an interface in which (uncontrollable) habituation hurts the user rather than helping them. Fortunately, I did not see any of these problems in the stylus version
A numerical comparison to QuickWriting is harder. Like MessageEase, it has 9 sectors. You draw a letter by starting in the middle, moving the stylus out into one sector, and then renter the middle from another sector. (It's easier to explain with pictures
I definitely want to check this out more. It looks to me that MessageEase is slower than both QuickWriting and WordWise, but not by much, and has the added advantage of working with both finger and stylus input.
-jackson
I thinking along the lines of having you finger mostly over the digit button, but off center so you to would accidently bump the alpha button. I don't think this would be hard to to.
The other possiblility - aiming for an alpha and sliding and hitting a digit would be less likely, depending on how "grippy" the buttons were.
In general this keypad seems to be overkill for a cellphone, but not good enough for a PDA.
There have been several incorrect statements about how the input will work. Here's the facts that I found from a manufacturer of this device:
:).
:)
1) If you have small fingers you can press the inset button to get a number.
2) If you have large fingers you can press the four buttons surrounding the number.
But what happens when you hit 2 of the surrounding buttons? Or one alpabetic button and a one numeric button. This mistake could happen if you were trying to hit the letter or the number, so there is no real smarts that could be added to the device to make it "forgiving" to these types of mistakes. So, without using the device I will still have concerns about how easy it is to mash the wrong button combinations.
Also, full blown handwritting or speach recognition not panaceas, when you concider that it is not uncommon for a people to make mistakes reading their own handwritting, or listening to other people.
Although it would be interesting if hand printing and diction started being taught in school again to help with computer interfaces, I don't think that they will ever become the primary input method for a computer. Typing is faster than handwriting, and more accurate. And having cubicles full of people talking to computers all day would be too annoying (then again I've never worked in a call center
For cell phones, eatoni's WordWise is the best thing I have seen yet. It is a predictive method. And let me tell you I hate most predictive input methods, and usually end up switching back to multi-tap. But with wordwise you use a shift key to provide a little more info, which lets it do an incredably good job at guessing. The site has a bunch of research that shows how the number of keystrokes is smaller than both predictive and multitap methods. Plus, unlike predictive methods where your next keypress can dependant on what the current guess is, WordWise is non-modal, allowing your actions to become habituated, and thus even faster (ie you can touch type on it).
For PDA's Quick Writing is very cool. It requires you to learn the input method, just like you have to learn how to type, but is it damn fast. Faster than grafitti, and often even faster than handwriting. Think of it as cursive on amphetamines
- jackson
Well yeah, but someone has to make those builtin chips. The motherboard I have right now has an onboard S3 3d graphics card.
The mapquest yellow pages work great for businesses like the example. (Did that very search for pizza places just a couple weeks ago).
What bothers me is there is no conceivable way these individuals could have performed over a billion dollars worth of labor, ever.
...
The money was not earned, it was stolen. In most cases, the money was stolen from the shareholders of the corporation in question, who by rights should have either had the money in dividends or seen the money re-invested in the corporate machine.
I don't follow this. The company owners are not worthy of this money because they did not perform that much labor, yet the shareholders which did no labor whatsoever towards the betterment of the company do deserve it. Seriously, I can't think of any better example of wealth perpetuating wealth than investors. (yet without them there would be far less competition in capitalism and thus the world is better off because of them)
If anyone is "more worthy" of the money it is the employees. But as other people have pointed out, the reason the people on this list are rich is because they built something out of nothing. They took just as much, if not more, risk than the investors, as well as dumping tons of time, insight and skill into their companies. Who is more the more deserving - the genius businessman, or the investor who simply recognized their genius?
Wow, and the way that the contiki webbrowser is designed you can even view site like slashdot who's html is larger than the amount of RAM in the machine itself!
No, like most things blamed on conspiricies, the real reason is that it's simply not economical. It is cheaper to use oil out of the ground than out of plants, more than 2x as cheap in fact, and biodeisel is likely to get more expensive.
Biodiesal always seemed like a great idea to me, since plants still to do a much better job of storing energy from the sun than we have been able to. Unfortunately, as Jeremi recently pointed out to me, the sun is only half the picture when dealing with plants. The other half is soil. Since plants extract nutrients from the soil, we need to replenish those if we want the soil to continue to be usefull. Nature's mechanism for this primarily involves dead plants. However, since we want to consume all the plants we grow, we have to find another source. Currently fertilizers are primarily produced from fossil fuels, which makes sense - it's concentrated dead plant goodness. Therefore when fossil fuels run out, so does our fertilizer. Suddenly biodiesel isn't quite so cheap.
My estimation (ie I'm pulling this out of my ass - if there are any argriculture experts out there who could provide more solid numbers, I would be very interested in hearing them) is that using only sustable soil replenishment, such as crop cycling, compost fertilization (partly from garbage and partly from holding back some of the crops) would result in about 1/4 the crop yeild/$ compared to what we can get today. Therefore sustainable biodiesal would be almost 10 times the cost of gasoline today. Even with significant improvements in biodeisel effeciency, it would still not be economical to consume biodeisel at the rates we consume fossil fuels today.
Unless we have some massive breakthroughs in some type of sun energy harvesting, the only real option we have for creating energy at expected levels of consumption is nuclear power. So our choices are to find some way to store energy from nuclear power (ie, batteries or fuel cell) for use in mobile applications like vehicles, or use less energy. Which do you think will happen?