Nothing in the articles says it does, and the 5 hour capacity that they gave in the article, could be done with as little as 256 MB (probably 512 MB - don't know what XM's average bitrate is). I think that was just a faulty assumption on the editor's part. So you could only hold five or six albums, which you would likely want to switch out often. IMHO, that isn't worth the hassle when you have all the XM stations to listen to, and it would increas the complexity, support issues, and (to a lesser extent) the overall cost. If they did give it enough space to hold an entire music collection, then it would be far too expensive. So I can see why they left that capability out.
We here are slashdot are very sensitive about the right to privacy, but it seems that many others in the country are not. They don't seem to see the problem with these bills, thinking "it will make me safer" and "I'm not doing anything wrong, so what do I have to hide". Typically when people do try to argue for it they invoke scary images of 1984 and evil shadowing totalitarian government, and the general public tends to respond to this by brushing them off as a bunch of conspiracy theorist loons. I must admit that of all my political beliefs the right to privacy is the one that I am weakest at arguing, which tends to mean that I don't rigorously understand it myself.
So my question to you all out there is this - What good writings do you know of that explain clearly why privacy is fundamentally important to free society? What ways of explaining the issue have you found the general public to be receptive to? I ask this not only to learn to be more persuasive, but to deepen (and perhaps challenge) by own views on the subject.
for the fact that none of the things that the Bush campain has characterized as flip-flops were anything of the sort. Concider Iraq. Prior to the first Iraqi war Kerry opposed because we had not exhausted all diplomatic measures. Before the second Iraqi war he gave the president authority to use force provided that he first exhaust all diplomatic measures. And now after the war, he is still saying that we should not have gone to war until we had exhausted all diplomatic measures. The only reason that he "voted for the second war", and against the first, is that what they were actually voting (not the war directly) was very different. In fact several republicans have flat out said that that piece of legislation was intentionally crafted in a way that regardless of how someone opposing the war voted, it could be used against them in the next election.
You just have to listen to Kerrys speeches over the last 30 years and see that he has had the exact same position on war ever since he returned from Vietnam - that war is sometimes necisarry but we should never again send out troops to battle until we are certain that there is no other option.
This whole flip-flop garbage is nothing more than a FUD campain started by Karl Rove - one in a long line of FUD campains which he is a master of. There are a lot of legitimate reason to dislike Kerry as a candidate and I respect those who cannot vote for him because of fundemental disagreements on the role of government. But I find it deeply distubing how many of my otherwise intellegent friends are basing their entire opinion of Kerry on the Bush campains' FUD.
Then again, it doesn't help that the people running Kerry's campain are incompetant. They won't let him explain his full position, because of his history of getting into long drawn out discussions that bore the public, and create more words that can be twisted and taken out of context, so they try to boil it down to sound bites. Well that might work for someone like Bush whose opinions are mostly ideological in nature, but for someone like Kerry it makes it sound like he is avoiding the question.
And it isn't hard to craft a simple explaination either, for example: "When you the people of the United States vote an official into office you give him the power necisarry to do his job. If he abuses that power, and does not live up to the promises he made, you are rightly angry. It is not a flip-flop to be state the fact that your trust was abused.
I voted to give the President the power to use force in Iraq if all other options were exhausted. I did this because this president, any president, would need that power to effectively negotiate at the UN. But this president abused that power and rushed into war. My opinion on this war has never changed, but my trust in this Comander in Chief has."
In this (DCMA) situation, he is not flip flopping but rather refusing to take a position, which both candidates do when they do not concider the subject to be important, but are afraid of alienating voters.
My reaction to the book was simular to yours. The idea that captured my imagination the most was the concept of getting rid of applications all together and creating a system architecture based on documents and tools that operate on those documents. There are so many aspects of this idea that would cause it to be a very powerfull and flexible system.
For example, he proposes doing away with folders, filenames, and indeed separate files altogether and allowing users to find whatever they need via an incremental search of their disks
I understood the reasoning for this. One of his axioms was that you should never have to manually save a file, that it continuously trickles the changes you made to disk, as you make them. I whole heartedly agree with this principle, and have ideas about how to simplify this task for developers. Given that, you need to have someplace to save documents before they are given a name, or any other sort of label, so the idea of saving them in situ in the ZUI world solves that problem nicely.
For users who like hierarchies (who he feels are few), he proposes a system of pages, documents, and folders based on various numbers of page breaks... But in the preceding chapters he has done away with hierarchical structure, and thus in adding a ZUI he is effectively adding a dual structure to his filesystem.
The first system he was explaining is what the Cannon Cat used, and was effectively just a big scroll with new documents treated more like subsections of a bigger document. I share your disdain for this system. However, the way I read it, the ZUI he suggested later was presented as a seperate idea in place of, not dual to, the first one. In that case, the hierarchical ZUI would be the only file system organization.
I am skeptical of the ZUI. I have never had a chance to use one - perhaps if I did it might chage my mind. But it seems to me that if users have difficulty organizing files now, that having what is essentually a hierachical file system, with the added burden of sizing and laying out files graphicly, would not make things easier. It seems like a nice interface for tasks like the hospital example, where someone took the time to layout the file system once, and then it stayed that way for years, but does not look practical for users that would be constantly adding documents on a day to day basis.
Furthermore, you will always have the case where you need to work with multiple documents that are not stored in the same directory (not near each other in the ZUI) and I haven't seen any way of doing that that is as fast or easy as the current overlaping window managers that are used in traditional WIMP interfaces.
It is interesting that so many UI experts are of the opinion that filenames and directories are a complete failure for the average user. All the people that I know organize their files just fine this way. I need to get around to reading the studies that cause them to feel this way.
Anyway it seems to me that a good comprimise to the autosave/filename problem would be to maintain the traditional overlapping windows interface and automatically save documents to the current workspace (as Linux WM's define workspace), and have these workspaces maintained across logouts and power cycles. Then as a workspace became cluttered the user could file documents at his leisure in either nested directories, or a more advanced database store (interface would be like email or mp3 jukebox, except the users supplied the metadata) depending on his needs. You can get all the benifits of the non-modal application-free architecture without radically changing the basic way we store and access documents.
This has been reported all over the place, including interviews with John Carmak himself. It is still slightly vaporware, but is definately not a hoax.
Sorry Jeff, but you appear to be concerned with designing interfaces for folks that do not know how to use computers.
Having read his book, I don't think that that is the case at all. The main thrust of his dream OS is to get rid of a certain class of errors (modal errors) which cause problems, regardless of your skill level. Infact the more you become familiar with the system the worse they get. A perfect example of this is shortcut keys. I have to use a half dozen text editors in windows, (for various IDEs etc), each of which has keyboard shortcuts. After using an interface for a while you get used to it and the actions become reflexive. So I find myself constantly hitting the wrong shortcut key in the wrong program. Is find Ctrl-F, Ctrl-S, or Ctrl-E, F3, or Shift-F3? I reflexively hit Ctrl-F, to find myself with a forwarded email or error message. The Mac is better because more of the shortcuts are standardized and more applications actually follow them, but I still run into the error. These errors decrease my productivity slightly, but more importantly they make using the computer frustrating. It is impossible not to develop a reflex when you use an interface often, and when that reflex betrays me, and the computer does not do what I expected because someone swapped the gas and brake pedals out from under me, it makes me agrivated. So that is his primary vision - not necisarrily to make computers easier or more efficient but more pleasant. Concidering how much stress there is concerning computers even among people who know how to use them, I think that this is a laudable goal.
But in addition to that I also get the impression that he is overly obsessed with perfection in interface efficiency and elegence. Think of the kind of person who will spend days hand coding assembly, even when the same program written in python still has tons of CPU cycles to spare. His current prototype project to implement his OS seems bogged down in optimizing the low level atomic user interactions. Theortically, some of these changes will let me work faster, but in reality, my limiting factor when typeing is not how fast my fingers move, but how fast my brain words and rewords what I want to say. The same for 2D and 3D graphics.
His arguments in this article are also primarily esthetic - OS X is very complicated and no-one will every understand it all. It is the age old argument between an elegant, small well-designed system, and an amalgemation of existing parts which does the same tasks, but is 10 times more complex because it carries the baggage of compatibility.
I sympathize with his desires, but I don't know that complete elegance will ever win out over ugly practibility. Elegant systems are a joy to use for tasks that mesh with the flexibility built into the system, but once one needs to do something that doesn't quite fit the system, the grand design becomes an obsticle instead of a help, and those loosely bound, ugly amalgamations begin to look more appealing for the absolute freedom that they provide.
As any mouse user can tell you, taking your hands off your keyboard is damaging to your productivity.
And blinding quoting rules out of the text book, without understanding why they are correct is harmfull to interface design.
This is for use with video effect software! How much typing do you think they will be doing? In fact, it appears that this is a kiosk set-up, and this simple knob replaces the keyboard altogether. This is a much cleaner and intuitive interface for this application than using a full keyboard, will decrease the amount of time learning the system, and if anything will improve productivity.
I know that Windows 98 will run fine on that system. Perhaps they were concerned with 98 being EOL'd soon and 2000 and XP were too heavyweight for 366 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM. That would leave CE as the only real options.
I really like the size, shape and styling and price of that box. Make a version with a faster VIA Eden processor, bump the RAM to 512 MB, and replace the modem with a NIC, and I would be happy to pay $350 for that machine.
The only advantage to IRV at all is that at an intuitive surface level it seems like a good idea. All of the real analysis of it that I have seen have shown that it is the only alternative voting system that is just as bad if not worse than plurality. If we instituted IRV, at best it would end up in a situation like Australia, where third parties are still weak enough to not make a difference. But at worst - if a third party candidate was nearly as popular as the two major party candidates, then the outcome of the election would be completely irradic. Not random, more like a chaotic pendulum, where the order in which minor candidate drop out has more effect on the outcome of the election than the overal popularity of the (three) major candidates. It really is a horrible election system.
I absolutely agree with your endorsement of Approval voting. It is simple and a definate improvement over plurality voting. Even more importantly the intuitively apparent advantages and disadvantages are the same as the real mathmatical advantages and disadvatages. This means that the average voter can understand it, unlike condocert, and their intuitive notions of why it is fair will be correct, unlike IRV. The only argument against it is that it is not a big enough improvement, but moving in small steps is not a bad thing.
The whole point of this kit is to learn by doing and the if you don't have the XGS, you can't do anything, so large sections of the book will be useless to you. There are other books that are better for learning abstract hardware architecture that are not tied to a specific platform like this one.
The data on the laptop is insecure. Anyone with physical access to a machine can read the unencrypted data on that machine. It has been that way forever. The existance of this product doesn't make it any less secure than it already was.
However, the person with this USB fob has increased his security. Thus a net gain in securtity. If you want to be secure you need to take care of yourself. Sticking your head in the ground is not a viable security plan.
The differences are greater than between DVD+/-RW. HD-DVD is easier for manufacturers, because the production process is simular to DVD.
Blue-ray on the other hand has larger capacities. This is important as some experts think that fitting a HD (1080i or 720p) movie onto HD-DVD will be a tight squeeze so there will be no room for special features, and higher compression than desired may be required:(
Building players that can handle DVD will be equally easy for both formats. I don't know about a single player that could do both HD-DVD and Blue-ray.
AFAIK, all the linux PDAs and phones on the market use Qtopia , which is as standardized as PalmOS or PocketPC, when it comes to running programs on multiple devices.
You mispelled Dork:) Seriously, if all you are is a consumer (of video games, anime, pornography) then you are not a geek. Geeks are people who have an internal desire to take things apart and know how they work. That may be electronics or software or chemistry or physics or pure math or any number of things. I know those emo kids have tried to coopt the word geek to simply mean not part of the in crowd (and I have no problem with them) but that is not what it means.
To reinforce what other people have said, this is not something that is exclusive to the "elite parasitic subsociety". Have you ever had to live on the streets? Social connections and networking are as much at work there as in the elite. Have you ever had a friend get you job at a fast-food restaurant in high school by talking to his manager? That's networking. Have you ever helped your friends out in a college classes you were both taking? Same thing. I have been in all sorts of social rings and they all act the same. This is not a great conspiracy to keep you down, it is just the simple fact that people make friends with people in their proximity with similar interests and they talk to these friends. That's it.
I agree that making an effort to increase relationships between social circles is a good thing. But let's turn that coin around. If you have helped your friends with homework, why didn't you grab a random stranger in class and help them? If you have helped a family member get a job why haven't you found random strangers and gotten them jobs? Because you are an evil person who only cares for his subsociety? Of course not.
Like the tutoring example, while you may not think to offer help to a stranger, you will be much more likely to help them if the come to you and ask. If you look at all of the stories of people that have risen to great things from humble beginnings, you will see that all of them made the effort to go out and make themselves notice by people who could help them. While there are those who care only about themselves in all economic rings there are also those who are willing to help.
Now, look at this particular situation again. You are criticizing two people for networking when the entire reason that they met was because they both chose to make an effort to help those outside of their own social circles. So you are criticizing people who are trying to solve the very problem you state. And before you tell me that these are just empty token gestures: The way I got my current job is that a "rich elite" got involved helping out the Boy Scouts. He met me (along with hundreds of other kids over time) and discovered that I was a smart, hard working guy planning on going to college to study computers so he got me an internship. I proved myself during the internship and now have a great job with that company.
Some advice in general. There are many things in this world that are less than ideal, but hatred never fixed any of them. During college I had a roommate that was an extremely zealous activist, who was set out to change the world - and hateful of those who opposed him. Now he is completely burnt out - disillusioned that anything will ever change and consumed with bitterness. He has stopped the productive things that he was once doing to make things better. This world moves slowly - change for the better happens but it takes time, and it will never be perfect. By all means work for that change, but don't let anger be your driving force because it will only hurt you.
for a swarm of viru has been leashed upon your household. For thus spoke the internet - "Thou shalt no longer hold my people captive to your worldly laws and regulations". And so it was.
1. Only if you are certain that that switch is really enforced in hardware. Most of them are not.
2. A citation isn't necisarry, just basic knowledge of how computers work. A virus can run any code that the user has permission to run. That includes "attrib -r".
Now that Qutopia is likely out of the market, and RIM is now attempting to compete directly with the other PDA developers, we are left with PalmOS, PocketPC, and the blackberry OS as the main PDA operating environments. Which leads me to ask:
What is development like on the blackberry, compared to PalmOS? How nice are the APIs and documentation. How open are they in terms of licencing of the OS and viewing code to base applications? What choices of development environments are there? Is there as vibrant of a developer community surrounding it as with the other platforms. I know some of these questions could be answered by RTFWWW, but it would be nice to hear about experiences that developers have had with the platform.
First, unless his TV can display 480p, 720p or 1080i, he isn't missing anything, using svideo instead of a standalone player. If his TV can display 720p or 1080i, it almost certainly has DVI inputs, and there are many converters from vga->composite, or vga->dvi, that work with any video card. They can be expensive, but if he can afford an HDTV, than he can afford those convertors, and they will come in handy for more than playing divx.
The radius of the earth is about 6400 km, and hubble only orbits about about 570 km above that. If you do the trig, hubble only has a 225 deg feild of view at any one time compared to 180 on the earth (disregarding the atmosphere in both cases).
Furthermore, both hubble and an earth bound telescop would have a somewhat limited view due to their "orbit". Concider a telescope on the equator. It would have a 180 degree field of view at any given time, and over the course of a day, everything would be in it's field of view except a cylinder the width of the earth, centering around the earths rotational axis, and extending to infinity in either direction. If you have telescope further north, it's daily field of view would have a cone shaped blind spot to the south. Hubbles orbital blind spot would be nearly non-existant over its orbit period, slightly better than the observatory at the equator, but that is easily solved by having two observatories - one in each hemisphere.
Concidering how inexpensive these are to build relative to a space based telescope, there is no reason why we can't do this. In fact we have hundreds of observatories across the world, each new or improved one slightly better than the one befores, but only one space based telescope. Improvements in ground telescopes will also be available to many more researchers, than with just one expensive space telescope.
That said, I don't think that while not ground breaking, making a drum playing robot would still be a lot of work, especially one that was easy to program.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. Can't find a transcript, but here is an article from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nothing in the articles says it does, and the 5 hour capacity that they gave in the article, could be done with as little as 256 MB (probably 512 MB - don't know what XM's average bitrate is). I think that was just a faulty assumption on the editor's part. So you could only hold five or six albums, which you would likely want to switch out often. IMHO, that isn't worth the hassle when you have all the XM stations to listen to, and it would increas the complexity, support issues, and (to a lesser extent) the overall cost. If they did give it enough space to hold an entire music collection, then it would be far too expensive. So I can see why they left that capability out.
I don't know, but I want to marry her.
We here are slashdot are very sensitive about the right to privacy, but it seems that many others in the country are not. They don't seem to see the problem with these bills, thinking "it will make me safer" and "I'm not doing anything wrong, so what do I have to hide". Typically when people do try to argue for it they invoke scary images of 1984 and evil shadowing totalitarian government, and the general public tends to respond to this by brushing them off as a bunch of conspiracy theorist loons. I must admit that of all my political beliefs the right to privacy is the one that I am weakest at arguing, which tends to mean that I don't rigorously understand it myself.
So my question to you all out there is this - What good writings do you know of that explain clearly why privacy is fundamentally important to free society? What ways of explaining the issue have you found the general public to be receptive to? I ask this not only to learn to be more persuasive, but to deepen (and perhaps challenge) by own views on the subject.
for the fact that none of the things that the Bush campain has characterized as flip-flops were anything of the sort. Concider Iraq. Prior to the first Iraqi war Kerry opposed because we had not exhausted all diplomatic measures. Before the second Iraqi war he gave the president authority to use force provided that he first exhaust all diplomatic measures. And now after the war, he is still saying that we should not have gone to war until we had exhausted all diplomatic measures. The only reason that he "voted for the second war", and against the first, is that what they were actually voting (not the war directly) was very different. In fact several republicans have flat out said that that piece of legislation was intentionally crafted in a way that regardless of how someone opposing the war voted, it could be used against them in the next election.
You just have to listen to Kerrys speeches over the last 30 years and see that he has had the exact same position on war ever since he returned from Vietnam - that war is sometimes necisarry but we should never again send out troops to battle until we are certain that there is no other option.
This whole flip-flop garbage is nothing more than a FUD campain started by Karl Rove - one in a long line of FUD campains which he is a master of. There are a lot of legitimate reason to dislike Kerry as a candidate and I respect those who cannot vote for him because of fundemental disagreements on the role of government. But I find it deeply distubing how many of my otherwise intellegent friends are basing their entire opinion of Kerry on the Bush campains' FUD.
Then again, it doesn't help that the people running Kerry's campain are incompetant. They won't let him explain his full position, because of his history of getting into long drawn out discussions that bore the public, and create more words that can be twisted and taken out of context, so they try to boil it down to sound bites. Well that might work for someone like Bush whose opinions are mostly ideological in nature, but for someone like Kerry it makes it sound like he is avoiding the question.
And it isn't hard to craft a simple explaination either, for example: "When you the people of the United States vote an official into office you give him the power necisarry to do his job. If he abuses that power, and does not live up to the promises he made, you are rightly angry. It is not a flip-flop to be state the fact that your trust was abused.
I voted to give the President the power to use force in Iraq if all other options were exhausted. I did this because this president, any president, would need that power to effectively negotiate at the UN. But this president abused that power and rushed into war. My opinion on this war has never changed, but my trust in this Comander in Chief has."
In this (DCMA) situation, he is not flip flopping but rather refusing to take a position, which both candidates do when they do not concider the subject to be important, but are afraid of alienating voters.
My reaction to the book was simular to yours. The idea that captured my imagination the most was the concept of getting rid of applications all together and creating a system architecture based on documents and tools that operate on those documents. There are so many aspects of this idea that would cause it to be a very powerfull and flexible system.
... But in the preceding chapters he has done away with hierarchical structure, and thus in adding a ZUI he is effectively adding a dual structure to his filesystem.
For example, he proposes doing away with folders, filenames, and indeed separate files altogether and allowing users to find whatever they need via an incremental search of their disks
I understood the reasoning for this. One of his axioms was that you should never have to manually save a file, that it continuously trickles the changes you made to disk, as you make them. I whole heartedly agree with this principle, and have ideas about how to simplify this task for developers. Given that, you need to have someplace to save documents before they are given a name, or any other sort of label, so the idea of saving them in situ in the ZUI world solves that problem nicely.
For users who like hierarchies (who he feels are few), he proposes a system of pages, documents, and folders based on various numbers of page breaks
The first system he was explaining is what the Cannon Cat used, and was effectively just a big scroll with new documents treated more like subsections of a bigger document. I share your disdain for this system. However, the way I read it, the ZUI he suggested later was presented as a seperate idea in place of, not dual to, the first one. In that case, the hierarchical ZUI would be the only file system organization.
I am skeptical of the ZUI. I have never had a chance to use one - perhaps if I did it might chage my mind. But it seems to me that if users have difficulty organizing files now, that having what is essentually a hierachical file system, with the added burden of sizing and laying out files graphicly, would not make things easier. It seems like a nice interface for tasks like the hospital example, where someone took the time to layout the file system once, and then it stayed that way for years, but does not look practical for users that would be constantly adding documents on a day to day basis.
Furthermore, you will always have the case where you need to work with multiple documents that are not stored in the same directory (not near each other in the ZUI) and I haven't seen any way of doing that that is as fast or easy as the current overlaping window managers that are used in traditional WIMP interfaces.
It is interesting that so many UI experts are of the opinion that filenames and directories are a complete failure for the average user. All the people that I know organize their files just fine this way. I need to get around to reading the studies that cause them to feel this way.
Anyway it seems to me that a good comprimise to the autosave/filename problem would be to maintain the traditional overlapping windows interface and automatically save documents to the current workspace (as Linux WM's define workspace), and have these workspaces maintained across logouts and power cycles. Then as a workspace became cluttered the user could file documents at his leisure in either nested directories, or a more advanced database store (interface would be like email or mp3 jukebox, except the users supplied the metadata) depending on his needs. You can get all the benifits of the non-modal application-free architecture without radically changing the basic way we store and access documents.
This has been reported all over the place, including interviews with John Carmak himself. It is still slightly vaporware, but is definately not a hoax.
Sorry Jeff, but you appear to be concerned with designing interfaces for folks that do not know how to use computers.
Having read his book, I don't think that that is the case at all. The main thrust of his dream OS is to get rid of a certain class of errors (modal errors) which cause problems, regardless of your skill level. Infact the more you become familiar with the system the worse they get. A perfect example of this is shortcut keys. I have to use a half dozen text editors in windows, (for various IDEs etc), each of which has keyboard shortcuts. After using an interface for a while you get used to it and the actions become reflexive. So I find myself constantly hitting the wrong shortcut key in the wrong program. Is find Ctrl-F, Ctrl-S, or Ctrl-E, F3, or Shift-F3? I reflexively hit Ctrl-F, to find myself with a forwarded email or error message. The Mac is better because more of the shortcuts are standardized and more applications actually follow them, but I still run into the error. These errors decrease my productivity slightly, but more importantly they make using the computer frustrating. It is impossible not to develop a reflex when you use an interface often, and when that reflex betrays me, and the computer does not do what I expected because someone swapped the gas and brake pedals out from under me, it makes me agrivated. So that is his primary vision - not necisarrily to make computers easier or more efficient but more pleasant. Concidering how much stress there is concerning computers even among people who know how to use them, I think that this is a laudable goal.
But in addition to that I also get the impression that he is overly obsessed with perfection in interface efficiency and elegence. Think of the kind of person who will spend days hand coding assembly, even when the same program written in python still has tons of CPU cycles to spare. His current prototype project to implement his OS seems bogged down in optimizing the low level atomic user interactions. Theortically, some of these changes will let me work faster, but in reality, my limiting factor when typeing is not how fast my fingers move, but how fast my brain words and rewords what I want to say. The same for 2D and 3D graphics.
His arguments in this article are also primarily esthetic - OS X is very complicated and no-one will every understand it all. It is the age old argument between an elegant, small well-designed system, and an amalgemation of existing parts which does the same tasks, but is 10 times more complex because it carries the baggage of compatibility.
I sympathize with his desires, but I don't know that complete elegance will ever win out over ugly practibility. Elegant systems are a joy to use for tasks that mesh with the flexibility built into the system, but once one needs to do something that doesn't quite fit the system, the grand design becomes an obsticle instead of a help, and those loosely bound, ugly amalgamations begin to look more appealing for the absolute freedom that they provide.
As any mouse user can tell you, taking your hands off your keyboard is damaging to your productivity.
And blinding quoting rules out of the text book, without understanding why they are correct is harmfull to interface design.
This is for use with video effect software! How much typing do you think they will be doing? In fact, it appears that this is a kiosk set-up, and this simple knob replaces the keyboard altogether. This is a much cleaner and intuitive interface for this application than using a full keyboard, will decrease the amount of time learning the system, and if anything will improve productivity.
I know that Windows 98 will run fine on that system. Perhaps they were concerned with 98 being EOL'd soon and 2000 and XP were too heavyweight for 366 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM. That would leave CE as the only real options.
I really like the size, shape and styling and price of that box. Make a version with a faster VIA Eden processor, bump the RAM to 512 MB, and replace the modem with a NIC, and I would be happy to pay $350 for that machine.
The only advantage to IRV at all is that at an intuitive surface level it seems like a good idea. All of the real analysis of it that I have seen have shown that it is the only alternative voting system that is just as bad if not worse than plurality. If we instituted IRV, at best it would end up in a situation like Australia, where third parties are still weak enough to not make a difference. But at worst - if a third party candidate was nearly as popular as the two major party candidates, then the outcome of the election would be completely irradic. Not random, more like a chaotic pendulum, where the order in which minor candidate drop out has more effect on the outcome of the election than the overal popularity of the (three) major candidates. It really is a horrible election system.
I absolutely agree with your endorsement of Approval voting. It is simple and a definate improvement over plurality voting. Even more importantly the intuitively apparent advantages and disadvantages are the same as the real mathmatical advantages and disadvatages. This means that the average voter can understand it, unlike condocert, and their intuitive notions of why it is fair will be correct, unlike IRV. The only argument against it is that it is not a big enough improvement, but moving in small steps is not a bad thing.
The whole point of this kit is to learn by doing and the if you don't have the XGS, you can't do anything, so large sections of the book will be useless to you. There are other books that are better for learning abstract hardware architecture that are not tied to a specific platform like this one.
The data on the laptop is insecure. Anyone with physical access to a machine can read the unencrypted data on that machine. It has been that way forever. The existance of this product doesn't make it any less secure than it already was.
However, the person with this USB fob has increased his security. Thus a net gain in securtity. If you want to be secure you need to take care of yourself. Sticking your head in the ground is not a viable security plan.
The differences are greater than between DVD+/-RW. HD-DVD is easier for manufacturers, because the production process is simular to DVD.
:(
Blue-ray on the other hand has larger capacities. This is important as some experts think that fitting a HD (1080i or 720p) movie onto HD-DVD will be a tight squeeze so there will be no room for special features, and higher compression than desired may be required
Building players that can handle DVD will be equally easy for both formats. I don't know about a single player that could do both HD-DVD and Blue-ray.
AFAIK, all the linux PDAs and phones on the market use Qtopia , which is as standardized as PalmOS or PocketPC, when it comes to running programs on multiple devices.
Canadians can do that without even trying :P
You mispelled Dork :) Seriously, if all you are is a consumer (of video games, anime, pornography) then you are not a geek. Geeks are people who have an internal desire to take things apart and know how they work. That may be electronics or software or chemistry or physics or pure math or any number of things. I know those emo kids have tried to coopt the word geek to simply mean not part of the in crowd (and I have no problem with them) but that is not what it means.
Reverse engineer the protocol and create a your own game server, which can serve whatever images you choose. All sorts of fun to be had with that.
To reinforce what other people have said, this is not something that is exclusive to the "elite parasitic subsociety". Have you ever had to live on the streets? Social connections and networking are as much at work there as in the elite. Have you ever had a friend get you job at a fast-food restaurant in high school by talking to his manager? That's networking. Have you ever helped your friends out in a college classes you were both taking? Same thing. I have been in all sorts of social rings and they all act the same. This is not a great conspiracy to keep you down, it is just the simple fact that people make friends with people in their proximity with similar interests and they talk to these friends. That's it.
I agree that making an effort to increase relationships between social circles is a good thing. But let's turn that coin around. If you have helped your friends with homework, why didn't you grab a random stranger in class and help them? If you have helped a family member get a job why haven't you found random strangers and gotten them jobs? Because you are an evil person who only cares for his subsociety? Of course not.
Like the tutoring example, while you may not think to offer help to a stranger, you will be much more likely to help them if the come to you and ask. If you look at all of the stories of people that have risen to great things from humble beginnings, you will see that all of them made the effort to go out and make themselves notice by people who could help them. While there are those who care only about themselves in all economic rings there are also those who are willing to help.
Now, look at this particular situation again. You are criticizing two people for networking when the entire reason that they met was because they both chose to make an effort to help those outside of their own social circles. So you are criticizing people who are trying to solve the very problem you state. And before you tell me that these are just empty token gestures: The way I got my current job is that a "rich elite" got involved helping out the Boy Scouts. He met me (along with hundreds of other kids over time) and discovered that I was a smart, hard working guy planning on going to college to study computers so he got me an internship. I proved myself during the internship and now have a great job with that company.
Some advice in general. There are many things in this world that are less than ideal, but hatred never fixed any of them. During college I had a roommate that was an extremely zealous activist, who was set out to change the world - and hateful of those who opposed him. Now he is completely burnt out - disillusioned that anything will ever change and consumed with bitterness. He has stopped the productive things that he was once doing to make things better. This world moves slowly - change for the better happens but it takes time, and it will never be perfect. By all means work for that change, but don't let anger be your driving force because it will only hurt you.
for a swarm of viru has been leashed upon your household. For thus spoke the internet - "Thou shalt no longer hold my people captive to your worldly laws and regulations". And so it was.
1. Only if you are certain that that switch is really enforced in hardware. Most of them are not.
2. A citation isn't necisarry, just basic knowledge of how computers work. A virus can run any code that the user has permission to run. That includes "attrib -r".
Now that Qutopia is likely out of the market, and RIM is now attempting to compete directly with the other PDA developers, we are left with PalmOS, PocketPC, and the blackberry OS as the main PDA operating environments. Which leads me to ask:
What is development like on the blackberry, compared to PalmOS? How nice are the APIs and documentation. How open are they in terms of licencing of the OS and viewing code to base applications? What choices of development environments are there? Is there as vibrant of a developer community surrounding it as with the other platforms. I know some of these questions could be answered by RTFWWW, but it would be nice to hear about experiences that developers have had with the platform.
First, unless his TV can display 480p, 720p or 1080i, he isn't missing anything, using svideo instead of a standalone player. If his TV can display 720p or 1080i, it almost certainly has DVI inputs, and there are many converters from vga->composite, or vga->dvi, that work with any video card. They can be expensive, but if he can afford an HDTV, than he can afford those convertors, and they will come in handy for more than playing divx.
The radius of the earth is about 6400 km, and hubble only orbits about about 570 km above that. If you do the trig, hubble only has a 225 deg feild of view at any one time compared to 180 on the earth (disregarding the atmosphere in both cases).
Furthermore, both hubble and an earth bound telescop would have a somewhat limited view due to their "orbit". Concider a telescope on the equator. It would have a 180 degree field of view at any given time, and over the course of a day, everything would be in it's field of view except a cylinder the width of the earth, centering around the earths rotational axis, and extending to infinity in either direction. If you have telescope further north, it's daily field of view would have a cone shaped blind spot to the south. Hubbles orbital blind spot would be nearly non-existant over its orbit period, slightly better than the observatory at the equator, but that is easily solved by having two observatories - one in each hemisphere.
Concidering how inexpensive these are to build relative to a space based telescope, there is no reason why we can't do this. In fact we have hundreds of observatories across the world, each new or improved one slightly better than the one befores, but only one space based telescope. Improvements in ground telescopes will also be available to many more researchers, than with just one expensive space telescope.
Check out this one from toyota.
That said, I don't think that while not ground breaking, making a drum playing robot would still be a lot of work, especially one that was easy to program.