While it's probably not ready for prime-time yet, won't Helixcode'sEvolution eventually do all these things? I know it won't be the perfect solution for everyone, but it's way of storing queries as "folders" and other features should eventually make it quite powerful.
Dial-up internet access? Does anyone still do that? That's like, sooooooo 1990's!
(better read all that with a big fat;) !!!)
Why the desktop isn't smooth...
on
The LEGO Desk
·
· Score: 2
I'm pretty sure if I were to get a lego desk, I wouldn't want a smooth top either. The fun you could have just building stuff stuck on top of your desk...
Writing (by hand, you know; I think some people still do this) wouldn't be a problem with one of those desk-protector/calendar underlay thingys, but I'm sure the impression patterns from the dots on arms (and elbows, ouch!) aren't going to be much fun. Of course, there's always going to be the problem of cleaning it...
Well, it looks like different species in the family Unix (Unicacea?) can interbreed and produce viable hybrid offspring. For example, the species Linuxus mklinuxii appears to be a hybrid formed from the mating of the two species Machus tertiarii and Linuxus gnuii. Of course, some of the mating habbits of the various species is still a mistery; if one considers that the primeal species of OSFium has three distinct parents. That's just too kinky to be considered scientific!
Alas, this chart also appears to show that a large phase of extinctions is currently in progress. Many species may already be lost. Whether this is due to competition for domination between the many genera of Unicacea, or predation by outside species, such as those in the family Gatesium remains to be seen.
The amazing part is how quickly Linux has matured. Other unices have been around for decades longer, and in about ten years Linux has caught up to them in many respects. Don't get me wrong, I know Linux isn't quite up to par in many heavy-duty applications-- yet!
Hardware considerations aside, I doubt many of the commercial unices became as solid as they did in this short of a time period. Now what does *that* say for open-source software?
The simpsons wadfile was pretty cool, but i also liked the one that changed all the sound effects to ones from the movie Predator. "Jeezus, you killed a pig!"
I'm not a big fan of weight training, but a couple hours of good hard mountain biking do wonders to clear your mind. For me this works in two ways; being tired from the physical exertion relaxes me and takes my mind off everything computer related. Also, while going through the trails quickly, you really *can't* let your mind wander off to the code, or you'll end up becoming very intimate with a tree or other immovable object!
Wow, when I first read this, I parsed it as "Stimulating Life on the Red Planet"! Visions of NASA terraforming Mars danced infront of my eyes. Next, I reinterpreted it as stimulating native martian life forms to grow and proliferate in a lab on earth. Still reading "stimulating", I was expecting an article of the "stimulating night life and culture" on Mars. No such luck. Of course, now that I know what it *really* says, I still keep thinking that the hidden message is really that NASA is simulating martian life forms by genetically engineering bacteria that could have evolved there...
I just thought it was funny how this appeared right after the Gnome story; looks almost like Rob and the/. crew got guilt-tripped into giving KDE and Gnome equal coverage (which they do deserve!). Looks like alot of work went into this; I'm starting the download to check it out when I have some time-- from a mirror site of course.;)
After reading the status report on Gnome Office here on/. yesterday, I'm actually surprised to see this here today! So what happened? Did the KDE see the Gnome article and decide to retaliate (in a nice way) with their own good news?
Seriously, though, the new KDE looks much better than previous (1.x) versions. I think most of the comments above have already summed up some of the better features and some of the shortcomings. I may still end up not liking KDE when I actually try it, but I'm sure as going to give it a good look (and give my adsl line something to do for a while)!
So I guess we can expect to see a progress report artice on KDE/Koffice here then? Seriously, even though this article produced some interesting threads, I found it a bit lacking for front-page/. "news". It would have been much nicer as a side article only visible in Ask Slashdot or some other category.
A friend of mine worked for a company for quite some time that does similar stuff with television. The software they developed scanned through the closed-captioning of all channels it had access to, and as soon as a search string was encountered, the rest of that program (full video) was recorded to the hard-drive.
Unfortunately I've forgotten the name of the company, but a web search should turn it up for anyone who's interested. Canadian based (Ottawa I think).
Their major customers were media companies such as TV stations and newspapers, and the military! The next generation of software they were developing was supposed to be able to look for specific types of video frames; i.e. all news programs with a talking head, automatically editing out (or selecting only) their actual news video footage. This is really cool stuff, but I don't find it surprising at all that things like this are now being applied to IRC and more "common" internet channels.
Quite some time ago I was searching around the net for exactly the same thing, just out of curiosity. Unfortunately I didn't keep any of my bookmarks on this (and they've probably 404'd anyways), but many manufacturers encode the error "codes" as a series of pulses. Using a multi-meter or a simple 12V bulb, you can count them and get the error code. They're not even encoded in any way (BCD or whatever), but rather the number of pulses is directly equal to the code. Building a simple circuit to record the error codes and later dump them in a serial port (or parallel if that's your thing) shouldn't be too difficult.
A Google search turned up some examples of codes, so they're out there; you just have to look! Ford Probe
Most of the better shop manuals you can buy also have most of these codes. Take a look through some of the aftermarket books like those from Haynes or Chiltons or whatever you can find.
While I agree that Scheme's parentheses at times can look just plain mental, I really don't think C does it all that much differently. If in your C style you were to add a { } around every statement, and then instead of putting each closing } of a block on its own line and just closed up using }}}}}, you'd be one step closer.
Scheme does introduce new parentheses, though, in how you call a function. Every function call (form) is done by calling the function similar to a mathematical one, but instead of calling f(arg1, arg2, arg3,...) where f is your function, you call (f arg1 arg2 arg3...). The function name is inside the parentheses, and the args are separated by whitespace, and can themselves be further parenthesized forms. When you end up with a form inside a form inside a..., you usually end up closing that outside form up with a giant string of ))))))))))). (And having as many as I just put there is far from being an exaggeration!).
Of course, if your editor supports auto-indentation and matching of parentheses, you should be ok, regardless of what language you're using. If not, well you may as well go back to writing qbasic in dos-edit!;)
In Gnome, Scheme is being used a fair bit. Guile is an embeddable scheme interpreter (written in C) that can be used to add scriptability to many projects, or used as a scheme interpreter in and of itself.
I don't think that The Gimp itself uses Guile, but a version of Scheme is used by it as its scripting language. A simple 'locate *.scm' will turn up loads of interesting stuff at/usr/share/gimp/1.1/scripts.
Why scheme was chosen for these things is a bit beyond me. Sure, it is a very nice language for quickly putting together simpler projects and having them work in a much shorter time than with most other languages, but I think there is a pretty heavy learning barrier you have to overcome first. This is especially true if you've done quite a bit of work in non-functional languages before. As a simple example, "pure" Scheme doesn't allow looping in the for of "while" or "for" loops, but rather you have to do this using recursion. This can be a daunting task at first, but works rather well when you get the hang of it (and you learn to fully appreciate recursion!).
There are many other neat features in Scheme that really can only be vaguely imitated in C/C++ and other languages using some severe pointer hackery, my favourite being that procedures are first-class citizens; i.e. a function can be passed and can return a procedure in the exact same way that it would a variable.
All said and done, I still wouldn't come close to calling Scheme my favourite language to use. It's a Lisp derivative, and we should all know that *really* stands for "Lots of Irritating, Stupid Parentheses", or something along those lines!
First you add a hard-drive, next comes decent sound, better video, and before you know it you have a pc and you've spent about as much on it.
Seriously, though, I think I'd like to have one of these or something similar. For my purposes, an Xterm is a bit too thin, especially when it comes to things like sound. Ideally I'd like to build myself a fairly low-end pentium-type system with no HD or at least a very small one that mounts its main file-systems remotely from a larger server. Window manager and other programs that are nice to have locally (mp3 player!) would run on this box itself, while CPU and RAM hogs would be run remotely using X on my server-type box that would be a bit more beefed up (Now that I think about it, this actually *is* sounding alot like the NIC!). Of course this desktop unit would have to be small, and have none of turbo-prop sounding fans that ATX power supplies and "modern" cpus all need. And while I'm at it, the whole thing would have to cost less than... a Win98 Upgrade CD! Am I dreaming? Of course, and this is Slashdot!
I have neither the math background nor the proper understanding of how the encoding algorithms for mp3 work, but shouldn't it be possible to design audio files that are difficult to encode in mp3 format? What I'm thinking is that the digital audio stream on the CD (or whatever original digital media we're using next week) contains sounds at frequencies and beats that we don't hear when we play the music as it is intended to. However, when the audio track is ripped and then encoded as an mp3, these frequencies "somehow" interfere with one another to produce some sort of an annoyance. Whether this is in the form of audible clicks, pops or whines, or just a serious degradation of sound quality in the encoded file, the resulting quality would be much less than that of an mp3 produced from a non-copy-protected audio track.
If this sort of thing could actually work, I'm sure record companies would be thrilled. You'd have a system that's fully reverse compatible-- the cds play in the same old cd players, but can't be distributed on-line unless you want to start sending out full-sized wave files. So, hopefully more knowledgable than me will come out and tell me my idea is full of shit and let us all go back to downloading our pr0n^H^H^H^Hmp3s.
So does anyone have any idea when XFree86-4.0 will start being included in the major distributions? Shall we start the old rumor that RedHat 7 will have XFree86-4, kernel 2.4, KDE 2.0 and Gnome 1.2 again?
Sure it's (afaik) completely unsubstantianted, but it's plausible, and who doesn't love a nice major-version-number rumor! What's that? Gnome 1.2's already out and mainstream? Damn. It's a conspiracy against the conspiracy theorists, I tell ya!
Perhaps we could have a new "software" section akin to the BSD section for discussing mildly momentous updates like this.
But what would we call this section? Maybe something as simple as "X"?;)
In all fairness, I do actually agree with you to a point. On the one side, minor software releases aren't really "news", even for major packages like X or the kernel. What is interesting, however, is the resulting discussion. I've learned more about X and other software from the resulting discussions here than I have from reading the announcements or installing them. While Freshmeat does have the ability to post comments, discussion there seems to be pretty much nonexistant.
As far as a separate "Software Updates" Slashdot section goes, I think this'd be more trouble than it's worth. The biggest problem I see is trying to avoid duplication of Freshmeat. If every program that's announced were posted, I think we'd effectively kill freshmeat and that section would become so watered down that discussion there would cease to exist outside of "First Post" messages. On the other hand, selectively placing annoucements in such a section wouldn't really be fair either; where do you draw the line between what's included and what isn't? The kernel? X? Apache? Gnome? Mozilla? Larger misc apps?
What's being done now by the/. crew isn't perfect, but I still like it better than some of the alternatives. Maybe take it easy on some of the really minor versions (or toss them in with the quickies).
Yeah, but it's still Calgary!;) If you want a fairly high-tech city without the redneck influence and without any serious winter, come to Vancouver. Unlike Calgary, our major stadium *isn't* called the Saddledome, we *don't* have a football team called the Stampeders, our big yearly event *isn't* a giant rodeo called the Stampede, and our town isn't nicknamed "Cowtown".
Alright, enough Calgary bashing, before I seriously offend someone.;) (Those Alberta rednecks all carry guns, you know!)
In all honesty, Vancouver is a very beautiful city, and you should all check it out some time. The only problem with living here is the tax system in BC. Taxes here are much higher than Alberta-- we've got some of the highest in Canada while Alberta is near (if not at) the bottom. I guess you get what you pay for, though...
Well, even though you've shown me to be a little uninformed, this does a lot to reinforce my point.
And that's exactly what I was trying to do (reinforce the point of course, not be a smart-ass!) I think as our techniques of observing the universe around us improve, we're going to see many, many more cases like this where we discover molecules that are simple analogs to those found in (Earth's) living systems. I'm sure this'll open up the debate again whether life here and in other places could have formed from the seeding of worlds with simple precursor molecules to life, or even more complex "living" molecules. But that's another/. article for another day in the distant future...
Slashdot Mirror
While it's probably not ready for prime-time yet, won't Helixcode's Evolution eventually do all these things? I know it won't be the perfect solution for everyone, but it's way of storing queries as "folders" and other features should eventually make it quite powerful.
Dial-up internet access? Does anyone still do that? That's like, sooooooo 1990's!
;) !!!)
(better read all that with a big fat
I'm pretty sure if I were to get a lego desk, I wouldn't want a smooth top either. The fun you could have just building stuff stuck on top of your desk...
Writing (by hand, you know; I think some people still do this) wouldn't be a problem with one of those desk-protector/calendar underlay thingys, but I'm sure the impression patterns from the dots on arms (and elbows, ouch!) aren't going to be much fun. Of course, there's always going to be the problem of cleaning it...
Well, it looks like different species in the family Unix (Unicacea?) can interbreed and produce viable hybrid offspring. For example, the species Linuxus mklinuxii appears to be a hybrid formed from the mating of the two species Machus tertiarii and Linuxus gnuii. Of course, some of the mating habbits of the various species is still a mistery; if one considers that the primeal species of OSFium has three distinct parents. That's just too kinky to be considered scientific!
Alas, this chart also appears to show that a large phase of extinctions is currently in progress. Many species may already be lost. Whether this is due to competition for domination between the many genera of Unicacea, or predation by outside species, such as those in the family Gatesium remains to be seen.
The amazing part is how quickly Linux has matured. Other unices have been around for decades longer, and in about ten years Linux has caught up to them in many respects. Don't get me wrong, I know Linux isn't quite up to par in many heavy-duty applications-- yet!
Hardware considerations aside, I doubt many of the commercial unices became as solid as they did in this short of a time period. Now what does *that* say for open-source software?
If Slashdot had a flag, it should be flying at half mast.
The simpsons wadfile was pretty cool, but i also liked the one that changed all the sound effects to ones from the movie Predator. "Jeezus, you killed a pig!"
I'm not a big fan of weight training, but a couple hours of good hard mountain biking do wonders to clear your mind. For me this works in two ways; being tired from the physical exertion relaxes me and takes my mind off everything computer related. Also, while going through the trails quickly, you really *can't* let your mind wander off to the code, or you'll end up becoming very intimate with a tree or other immovable object!
Wow, when I first read this, I parsed it as "Stimulating Life on the Red Planet"! Visions of NASA terraforming Mars danced infront of my eyes. Next, I reinterpreted it as stimulating native martian life forms to grow and proliferate in a lab on earth. Still reading "stimulating", I was expecting an article of the "stimulating night life and culture" on Mars. No such luck. Of course, now that I know what it *really* says, I still keep thinking that the hidden message is really that NASA is simulating martian life forms by genetically engineering bacteria that could have evolved there...
Too many conspiracies, not enough coffee!
This is your boss. I know all about the mp3s and your /. addiction. Next week the T1 is being replaced by a 14.4 dialup. Now get back to work!
RTFA == ???
Read The Farmer's Almanac?
I didn't know they covered stuff on space travel!
I just thought it was funny how this appeared right after the Gnome story; looks almost like Rob and the /. crew got guilt-tripped into giving KDE and Gnome equal coverage (which they do deserve!). Looks like alot of work went into this; I'm starting the download to check it out when I have some time-- from a mirror site of course. ;)
After reading the status report on Gnome Office here on /. yesterday, I'm actually surprised to see this here today! So what happened? Did the KDE see the Gnome article and decide to retaliate (in a nice way) with their own good news?
Seriously, though, the new KDE looks much better than previous (1.x) versions. I think most of the comments above have already summed up some of the better features and some of the shortcomings. I may still end up not liking KDE when I actually try it, but I'm sure as going to give it a good look (and give my adsl line something to do for a while)!
So I guess we can expect to see a progress report artice on KDE/Koffice here then? Seriously, even though this article produced some interesting threads, I found it a bit lacking for front-page /. "news". It would have been much nicer as a side article only visible in Ask Slashdot or some other category.
A friend of mine worked for a company for quite some time that does similar stuff with television. The software they developed scanned through the closed-captioning of all channels it had access to, and as soon as a search string was encountered, the rest of that program (full video) was recorded to the hard-drive.
Unfortunately I've forgotten the name of the company, but a web search should turn it up for anyone who's interested. Canadian based (Ottawa I think).
Their major customers were media companies such as TV stations and newspapers, and the military! The next generation of software they were developing was supposed to be able to look for specific types of video frames; i.e. all news programs with a talking head, automatically editing out (or selecting only) their actual news video footage. This is really cool stuff, but I don't find it surprising at all that things like this are now being applied to IRC and more "common" internet channels.
Quite some time ago I was searching around the net for exactly the same thing, just out of curiosity. Unfortunately I didn't keep any of my bookmarks on this (and they've probably 404'd anyways), but many manufacturers encode the error "codes" as a series of pulses. Using a multi-meter or a simple 12V bulb, you can count them and get the error code. They're not even encoded in any way (BCD or whatever), but rather the number of pulses is directly equal to the code. Building a simple circuit to record the error codes and later dump them in a serial port (or parallel if that's your thing) shouldn't be too difficult.
A Google search turned up some examples of codes, so they're out there; you just have to look!
Ford Probe
Eagle Talon
Most of the better shop manuals you can buy also have most of these codes. Take a look through some of the aftermarket books like those from Haynes or Chiltons or whatever you can find.
Scheme does introduce new parentheses, though, in how you call a function. Every function call (form) is done by calling the function similar to a mathematical one, but instead of calling f(arg1, arg2, arg3,
Of course, if your editor supports auto-indentation and matching of parentheses, you should be ok, regardless of what language you're using. If not, well you may as well go back to writing qbasic in dos-edit!
I don't think that The Gimp itself uses Guile, but a version of Scheme is used by it as its scripting language. A simple 'locate *.scm' will turn up loads of interesting stuff at
Why scheme was chosen for these things is a bit beyond me. Sure, it is a very nice language for quickly putting together simpler projects and having them work in a much shorter time than with most other languages, but I think there is a pretty heavy learning barrier you have to overcome first. This is especially true if you've done quite a bit of work in non-functional languages before. As a simple example, "pure" Scheme doesn't allow looping in the for of "while" or "for" loops, but rather you have to do this using recursion. This can be a daunting task at first, but works rather well when you get the hang of it (and you learn to fully appreciate recursion!).
There are many other neat features in Scheme that really can only be vaguely imitated in C/C++ and other languages using some severe pointer hackery, my favourite being that procedures are first-class citizens; i.e. a function can be passed and can return a procedure in the exact same way that it would a variable.
All said and done, I still wouldn't come close to calling Scheme my favourite language to use. It's a Lisp derivative, and we should all know that *really* stands for "Lots of Irritating, Stupid Parentheses", or something along those lines!
Seriously, though, I think I'd like to have one of these or something similar. For my purposes, an Xterm is a bit too thin, especially when it comes to things like sound. Ideally I'd like to build myself a fairly low-end pentium-type system with no HD or at least a very small one that mounts its main file-systems remotely from a larger server. Window manager and other programs that are nice to have locally (mp3 player!) would run on this box itself, while CPU and RAM hogs would be run remotely using X on my server-type box that would be a bit more beefed up (Now that I think about it, this actually *is* sounding alot like the NIC!). Of course this desktop unit would have to be small, and have none of turbo-prop sounding fans that ATX power supplies and "modern" cpus all need. And while I'm at it, the whole thing would have to cost less than... a Win98 Upgrade CD! Am I dreaming? Of course, and this is Slashdot!
If this sort of thing could actually work, I'm sure record companies would be thrilled. You'd have a system that's fully reverse compatible-- the cds play in the same old cd players, but can't be distributed on-line unless you want to start sending out full-sized wave files. So, hopefully more knowledgable than me will come out and tell me my idea is full of shit and let us all go back to downloading our pr0n^H^H^H^Hmp3s.
Sure it's (afaik) completely unsubstantianted, but it's plausible, and who doesn't love a nice major-version-number rumor!
What's that? Gnome 1.2's already out and mainstream? Damn. It's a conspiracy against the conspiracy theorists, I tell ya!
Perhaps we could have a new "software" section akin to the BSD section for discussing mildly momentous updates like this.
;)
/. crew isn't perfect, but I still like it better than some of the alternatives. Maybe take it easy on some of the really minor versions (or toss them in with the quickies).
But what would we call this section? Maybe something as simple as "X"?
In all fairness, I do actually agree with you to a point. On the one side, minor software releases aren't really "news", even for major packages like X or the kernel. What is interesting, however, is the resulting discussion. I've learned more about X and other software from the resulting discussions here than I have from reading the announcements or installing them. While Freshmeat does have the ability to post comments, discussion there seems to be pretty much nonexistant.
As far as a separate "Software Updates" Slashdot section goes, I think this'd be more trouble than it's worth. The biggest problem I see is trying to avoid duplication of Freshmeat. If every program that's announced were posted, I think we'd effectively kill freshmeat and that section would become so watered down that discussion there would cease to exist outside of "First Post" messages. On the other hand, selectively placing annoucements in such a section wouldn't really be fair either; where do you draw the line between what's included and what isn't? The kernel? X? Apache? Gnome? Mozilla? Larger misc apps?
What's being done now by the
Yeah, but it's still Calgary! ;) If you want a fairly high-tech city without the redneck influence and without any serious winter, come to Vancouver. Unlike Calgary, our major stadium *isn't* called the Saddledome, we *don't* have a football team called the Stampeders, our big yearly event *isn't* a giant rodeo called the Stampede, and our town isn't nicknamed "Cowtown".
;) (Those Alberta rednecks all carry guns, you know!)
Alright, enough Calgary bashing, before I seriously offend someone.
In all honesty, Vancouver is a very beautiful city, and you should all check it out some time. The only problem with living here is the tax system in BC. Taxes here are much higher than Alberta-- we've got some of the highest in Canada while Alberta is near (if not at) the bottom. I guess you get what you pay for, though...
Are there any text based mail readers, as per the initial question, that understand imap though?
Pine can do IMAP. I think it may be a compile-time option to de/enable it, though.
Well, even though you've shown me to be a little uninformed, this does a lot to reinforce my point.
/. article for another day in the distant future...
And that's exactly what I was trying to do (reinforce the point of course, not be a smart-ass!) I think as our techniques of observing the universe around us improve, we're going to see many, many more cases like this where we discover molecules that are simple analogs to those found in (Earth's) living systems.
I'm sure this'll open up the debate again whether life here and in other places could have formed from the seeding of worlds with simple precursor molecules to life, or even more complex "living" molecules. But that's another