Telkom South Africa do exactly this. I should know, I spent about three hours last week debugging a PHP application that would not accept the cookie if it came from a different IP address. I found that successive requests from one machine were appearing at the server to originate from two different IPs. No idea how/why this happens - no proxy was set in the OS or browser of the client.
Not that you wouldn't want to avoid Telkom in the first place... but then, if we could avoid them we wouldn't be using them in the first place!
I read an
article in my college newspaper about one of these vending machines. The idea seemed dumb when I heard about it and even more so when I read this little nugget:
Since its premiere this semester, only one iPod Shuffle has been sold. Four, however, have been stolen.
Whoever came up with this idea should be fired, bankrupted and exiled.
I have a Voltaic solar-panel bag. It definitely gets a lot of attention. People often ask me (usually on the way out of a room/office/store) what the solar panels are for. I'm not sure how useful the solar panels are though - I live in New York and got the bag as a xmas present so it hasn't really seen much sunshine yet!
I use it to charge my PDA, mp3 player and crappy cell phone which runs out of batteries after an hour because it can't get a signal in Manhattan. So far I've been plugging the bag in at the office, then using the built in batteries to charge the gadgets in emergencies.
Basically, it's a nice idea, and a good conversation piece, but it's not really all that useful (well, it does a great job of carrying my laptop and papers around at least!)
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 1
The physics preprint server (originally xxx.lanl.gov, now residing at the more innocuous arXiv.org) started in mid-1991.
I assume that since this predates the web, it was accessible through ftp and email at the beginning. It looks like the web interface has remained the same since it was added at some later date - i.e. a real 1994-style user interface!
Despite its clunkiness, this is a fantastic resource used by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists to pre-publish papers, get the newest results out there (albeit in an unofficial form) and generally grease the wheels of the peer review and publication process.
There's a great (and dated) discussion of the history and technical aspects of running the service, linked to as a postscript file here: . Some choice quotes:
The system originally ran as a background job on a small Unix workstation (a 25MHz NeXTstation)... which was primarly used for research purposes by another member of my group.
An active archive such as hep-th requires about 70 megabytes per year (that is, $40 per year) for storing papers, including figures (I'm sure that's increased a little in the last ten years!
Hep-th for example would be come less useful if it were to become inundated by submissions from "crackpots" promoting their perpetual motion machines. - OOOOOPS! That did somewhat happen, and now there is a system of "endorsements" in order to post to arxiv.org, but the basic idea of opening access to the newest papers has worked and continues to serve the needs of an ever broadening scientific community.
I have a Psion Revo, sold in the U.S. as the Diamond Mako. It's a clamshell design with a small qwerty keyboard and a half-decent word processor. It runs the Epoc OS (which later became Symbian). There's plenty of third party software including a nice Python port and a bash-like shell. I also love the PIM software that comes with it - nothing like being able to actually enter in an appointment (with PDAs I usually just get a load of crap from Graffiti because my handwriting is awful.) It pretty much answers the O.P.'s question, since it was designed as a low price device in the typically expensive handhelds-with-keyboards niche.
The Revo is a great size to slip in a pocket, and not too embarrassing to use on the subway. It's designed to be held in two hands and thumb-typed or held in one hand and one-hand typed. That works pretty well, even though the keyboard is hinged. The keys are hinged at the bottom, so you need to be somewhat careful when pressing them.
The main problems with the Revo are the lack of backlight (nice reflective screen, but useless in really low light) and absence of expansion slots (it'd be nice to have a CF slot for storage or wifi).
This has generally led me to try other similar devices. The obvious one is a Psion 5mx, which is the bigger brother to the Revo, with more expansion slots, a backlight and a non-hinged keyboard. The Epoc software really is great and there's even a linux distro for the Psions. I haven't been able to find one in my price range (they go for about $150 on eBay at the moment).
I recently picked up an HP Jornada 680. That's a handheld PC formfactor, with a pretty nice qwerty keyboard with proper (if tiny) keys and a color backlit screen. I picked mine up for about $100. The downside is that it runs Windows CE from ROM (shudder!) although it comes with Pocket Word which is definitely sufficient for banging out text. There's a linux distribution for this too, but it's not really useable yet (no power saving, so the batteries die after a few hours) - although it is being actively worked on.
So I second the recommendation is go used, and pick up a Psion (Revo or 5mx depending on price range). My worry is that these machines are all 5 years old and no-one is producing new hardware in the handheld form factor. I find a keyboard so much more useful than a stylus and I really don't understand why the markety just died (well, the $600 price tags probably didn't help). Hopefully phones-with-keyboards like the Sidekick may grow up to fill the gap.
Insipid, absolutley. Instantly forgettable? I wish.
That Katrina and the Waves song "Love Shine A Light" from 8 years ago still haunts my dreams on a regular basis. And it won!
Love shine a light, in every corner of my heart
Let the love light carry, let the love light carry
Lite up the magic in every little part
Let our love shine a light, in every corner of our hearts
It's pretty esoteric, but I've been using the Python interface to the ROOT particle physics framework for all my plotting needs.
It has a bunch of specialised features that appeal to physicists, not least the brain-dead histogramming. I do find the whole framewok poorly documented in general, and wouldn't recommend it to the general numerical computation public.
However, I think this demonstrates the great thing about using a general purpose language like Python for numerical work. You can really use tons of different libraries and frameworks together. I use ROOT almost exclusively, since it enables me to talk in th esame terms as my colleagues. The power lies in being able to add in network or gui or input code written in python and any number of available libraries.
By air, though Charles De Gaulle and Houston:-P (seriously - one of those dumb fly-though-five-cities-and-save deals)
Austin's a very cool place. Even a euro-trash bum like me can see that. I fell in love with the place (but alas! Ye olde tech boom was over so fast!). I miss you Barton Springs, Alamo Draft House and Crown & Anchor.
Just a note from a Brit - we need H1Bs as well if we want to work in the states (and are perfectly capable of "taking an American's job". I did it myself!)
Just kidding. I was hired in early 2000 - back when people seemed to be recruiting in every bar in Austin...
I don't think anybody/really/ wants to relearn how to deploy Linux anyway.
Well, most of us don't/really/ want to relearn *anything*. Sometimes, however, when you hear a new idea relating to an area you work in, the penny drops, and you are left thinking "wow, what a great idea".
For instance, I work in a scientific research environment (high energy physics) where most of our software is Free (capital F), we work in different places at different times (planning, lab, analysis), we have a great deal of customized and hand written software and the ideal development environment so far has been NFS mounted home directories (running RedHat and now Fedora). In theory every machine I log into is running the same OS, with/usr/local NFS mounted from an [application|file] server, I login though NDIS and my home directory is also NFS mounted.
This works fine in theory - except without a serious admin budget, different OS versions spring up... I have access to machines running RH9, FC1, FC2... and that's an improvement, whilst RedHat were still supporting RHL, we had 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0, with wildly different GCC versions. What happens? I end up using specific machines with a similar enough environment that all my simulations will at least compile without tweaking, and all my scripts etc work the same way. Homogenous environments, no matter how ideal, are not a possibility without a manpower commitment that many SMBs and other small operations can't afford.
This stateless project LEAPS out at me as an ideal way for small operations (like up to 100 seats) to be managed by a single (even part time) admin.
Not to mention the attempt to tackle laptops - which is the reality of the workplace. Many people have laptops. A lot of them (and their CTOs) would love to be running the same environment as the workplace LAN. At my lab most people have a laptop due to the amount of travelling we do - I'd guess that 90% of them are running XP, since even if they did run linux, they'd have to administer it themselves, wouldn't have clearance to access the NFS shares for $HOME and/usr/local.
Although the laptop aspect still has a troubling achilles heel: most of us (well, my colleagues at least) have laptops in order to present our work to others. Even ignoring the ubiquitousness of PowerPoint, who amongst us would want to be on the road with a "cached client" laptop with NO write-access to anything but $HOME. Sure, the system worked at the office, and you fixed all the bugs that cropped up when you connected from home on you DSL, but what about a strange environment. You need to connect over someone elses WiFi to get the latest figures (sure, TFA talked about user-configured WiFi, but still, what if they have different security like WEAP that needs a new package and root access), or if you NEED to plug in a USB key to give a collaborator or customer your files. What then?
Regardless, this to me is a prospective Killer App for linux, and is definitely tackling a bunch of issues that may niggle an admin for several years before they could even define what the problem is. Automatic updates across _all_ your workstations. Backups that require 10 minutes work after a crash - and I can attest that a recent HD crash to our "distributed" system took a few hours to get the machine back together, but several days before all the little minor tweaks we needed had been applied (things like monitor resolution, 'sudo' configuration, extra packages, sound drivers.
For the first time, I stand up and say, THANK YOU REDHAT and THANKS FEDORA. This project tells me that you are thinking about your installed customer base and offering _really_ innovative ideas to the community. Anyone want to moan about how Linux is always playing catchup to MS and Apple and how F/OSS is doomed to lag behind forever?
You just set up your filter on your primary email account to send an email to "number"@"provider".net with the subject of the email that matched the filter.
No need for any other notification of email at the cell provider - you get the email alert your filter sent directly on your phone as an SMS.
No! The folding property of book should not be artificially inserted into new ebooks hardware. I can think of a couple of reasons why not:
Reading a book whilst lying down forces me to adjust position when reading left/right pages of a book. This is even worse if I'm trying to use a small light source like a booklight. Using a single-page ebook (Franklin eBookman currently) is easier - you just position(hold) the display at a comfortable distance and leave it there.
Reading whilst standing on public transport is much easier with the eBookman (like a large Palm Pilot) - just hold it in one hand, thumb on the page-turn wheel, and hold on to a pole with the other hand. With a book, I'd at least have to use two hands to turn the page, probably it'd be uncomfortable to hold & hold open with one hand.
I agree with the note-taking/bookmarking suggestions - as for rechargable, yes of course, but also it's nice to be able to carry spare batteries. So rechargeable AAAs or user-changeable Lithium-Ion batteries (much like video cameras etc use) would be preferable to non-changeable batteries (as seen in the iPod)
I'm a physics grad student... I teach a lab course to lucky pre-med students taking a general physics class.
One day I learned a lesson about reading up on the lab before it is time to teach: I was trying to diagnose my students' setup, which was a 300V power supply that was supposed to charge a small capacitor until it reached about 250V, then the circuit would discharge through a tiny neon bulb (rinse and repeat)...
Unfortunately I hadn't been paying attention and they'd connected a 30uF capacitor (about a million times bigger than the one they were supposed to use) that was only supposed to be charged to 15V. At 300V I touched the wrong thing whilst probing the circuit. My arm flew back and almost knocked one of the poor students out.
At least it was only their lowly TA that got the shock. We are replaceable: $30k/year students are not!
You can use the Cygwin/X server (also Xwin, a commercial product) which runs in a multi-window or rootless mode. This will allow you to run any remote X app in it's own window with Windows widgets for the titlebar, close buttons etc. It's pretty simple to setup (Xwin is even easier IMHO, but I have no idea how much it costs).
I don't think VNC can currently do anything like this, although I recall hearing it as a feature they might work towards.
Of course, this won't help if the app you want to export is running no a remote windows server, but it would work just the same for client machines is running X on *nix.
This in the same country where you can lose a hand for stealing something... although quite what financial scams you could perform with a starving thief's amputated fingers I don't know.
It might be more useful in Japan if you pick up a fingertip or two from struggling Yakuza.
Uh-huh. I bought a Franklin eBookman a couple of years ago - I use it all the time. It's great to read in bed with a soft backlight, not so good in dim light though.
The screen is bigger than any PDAs of the same age, and the processor is really slow - it was designed as an ereader. There is some really substandard PIM software that comes with it, but is too crappy to trust your organization to.
Franklin still sells them on their website for $200 but they're on ebay used in the $50 range. They stopped making them after getting the shaft from Microsoft, who were going to port the MS reader to the platform then backed out after the launch (I guess in favor of Pocket PCs?)
Anyway, I thoroughly recommend the value-for-money my eBookman has given me. I use NiMH batteries, one pair in the eBookman and one in the charger. , which seems like less trouble than an internal battery to me, since I never have to remember to charge it, just swap the batteries whenever they're low.
And to the people who say they could never leave books, I understand the sentiment, I love having a book in my hands... but I also love being able to hang on to a pole in the subway with one hand and read with the other, slipping it back in my pocket when I get to the other end. I also love being able to read in bed without a light on (my s.o. loves that too). Ew. I just realised I take something from the subway into my bed. I should invest in some heavy duty bleach!
VNC is the way to go. Install either tightvnc or Real VNC, configured as an NT service, and set the password. Now you can use most desktops apps through VNC (don't bother with anything video related though, although I've never tried that on giga-ethernet).
For network shares, I use Samba on linux. Click through the "My Network Places" tree to find your linux box, select the share you wish to mount and then right-click to select "Map as Network Drive", and you will be automatically connected at boot to the share.
As for optical drive, I guess Samba is the way to go there as well.
To be honest, I agree with the comments below that point out that you have already answered your over-obvious question in the asking... use VNC and Samba.
There are plenty of 1.0, stable window managers out there. E16 has never gone gold because the developers (i.e. Rasterman) want to turn it into an entire desktop environment, not just a window manager. They launched on a massive rewrite (and then another, and another).
We already have enough stable window managers (especially for use with GNOME and KDE)... The Enlightenment team are working on something new and different, the lack of which is something often lamented around here always complain about in these X discussions. Let them work it out at their own pace, and maybe you'll be blown away by the next release.
Whatever. The only difference betweeen L1 and H1 is that L1 is for people who already work for the company overseas and want a visa to work for the same company in the US. H1 is for people who are not currently employed by the company.
All these comments about it being "only fair" to totally drop H1Bs are racist and stupid. The people on H1B visas are generally getting a pretty shitty dea; themselves. What's needed is real visa reform, with labor protections built in. If you want to blame somebody for outsourcing your job, blame the fat-cat who actually did it, not the $1/hour schmuck in India.
Bell's theorem states that there may be an underlying, hidden theory which we do not understand, which would account for the probabalistic nature of some ("quantum") results. Any form of such hidden theories is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics (the crux of Bell's inequality).
It was proven by Aspect et al in experiments on correlated photons that there is no such hidden variable theory, the probabilities we see are quantum mechanics, and really are unknowns.
This does really offend many people of religious persuasion, and also many people who like a nice, logical, ordered science, and are not fully aware of the tests that an established theory like quantum mechanics has been through.
First, it's good to hear the ZX81 references. One of our family friends was considered something of a computer boffin, and he advised my parents to get a ZX81 when I was about 4 or 5... I'd mostly just sit inthralled as my sisters spent all day trying to get "ZX Galaxians" to load, the space invader game. Later I tried typing in a few games, but the RAM was knackered and the tape player never saved anything. My mum sold it at a boot sale a few years ago. SOmeone picked it up for 5 quid I think. Wish I still had it though.
I had a very similar game to the one you describe on the C64, called "Challenger" IIRC. Of course, being a spanky 64K colour game, it had many different cities, including Seattle and Delhi I think. I loved that game. Does anyone have any more info? This would be a great game for PDA/cell phones... (so I could play it on the toilet!!)
Wish I still had the C64 even more. Emulation just isn't the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Telkom South Africa do exactly this. I should know, I spent about three hours last week debugging a PHP application that would not accept the cookie if it came from a different IP address. I found that successive requests from one machine were appearing at the server to originate from two different IPs. No idea how/why this happens - no proxy was set in the OS or browser of the client.
Not that you wouldn't want to avoid Telkom in the first place... but then, if we could avoid them we wouldn't be using them in the first place!
Whoever came up with this idea should be fired, bankrupted and exiled.
I have a Voltaic solar-panel bag. It definitely gets a lot of attention. People often ask me (usually on the way out of a room/office/store) what the solar panels are for. I'm not sure how useful the solar panels are though - I live in New York and got the bag as a xmas present so it hasn't really seen much sunshine yet!
I use it to charge my PDA, mp3 player and crappy cell phone which runs out of batteries after an hour because it can't get a signal in Manhattan. So far I've been plugging the bag in at the office, then using the built in batteries to charge the gadgets in emergencies.
Basically, it's a nice idea, and a good conversation piece, but it's not really all that useful (well, it does a great job of carrying my laptop and papers around at least!)
The physics preprint server (originally xxx.lanl.gov, now residing at the more innocuous arXiv.org) started in mid-1991.
I assume that since this predates the web, it was accessible through ftp and email at the beginning. It looks like the web interface has remained the same since it was added at some later date - i.e. a real 1994-style user interface!
Despite its clunkiness, this is a fantastic resource used by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists to pre-publish papers, get the newest results out there (albeit in an unofficial form) and generally grease the wheels of the peer review and publication process.
There's a great (and dated) discussion of the history and technical aspects of running the service, linked to as a postscript file here: . Some choice quotes:
The system originally ran as a background job on a small Unix workstation (a 25MHz NeXTstation)... which was primarly used for research purposes by another member of my group.
An active archive such as hep-th requires about 70 megabytes per year (that is, $40 per year) for storing papers, including figures (I'm sure that's increased a little in the last ten years!
Hep-th for example would be come less useful if it were to become inundated by submissions from "crackpots" promoting their perpetual motion machines. - OOOOOPS! That did somewhat happen, and now there is a system of "endorsements" in order to post to arxiv.org, but the basic idea of opening access to the newest papers has worked and continues to serve the needs of an ever broadening scientific community.
Long live XXX!
I have a Psion Revo, sold in the U.S. as the Diamond Mako. It's a clamshell design with a small qwerty keyboard and a half-decent word processor. It runs the Epoc OS (which later became Symbian). There's plenty of third party software including a nice Python port and a bash-like shell. I also love the PIM software that comes with it - nothing like being able to actually enter in an appointment (with PDAs I usually just get a load of crap from Graffiti because my handwriting is awful.) It pretty much answers the O.P.'s question, since it was designed as a low price device in the typically expensive handhelds-with-keyboards niche.
The Revo is a great size to slip in a pocket, and not too embarrassing to use on the subway. It's designed to be held in two hands and thumb-typed or held in one hand and one-hand typed. That works pretty well, even though the keyboard is hinged. The keys are hinged at the bottom, so you need to be somewhat careful when pressing them.
The main problems with the Revo are the lack of backlight (nice reflective screen, but useless in really low light) and absence of expansion slots (it'd be nice to have a CF slot for storage or wifi).
This has generally led me to try other similar devices. The obvious one is a Psion 5mx, which is the bigger brother to the Revo, with more expansion slots, a backlight and a non-hinged keyboard. The Epoc software really is great and there's even a linux distro for the Psions. I haven't been able to find one in my price range (they go for about $150 on eBay at the moment).
I recently picked up an HP Jornada 680. That's a handheld PC formfactor, with a pretty nice qwerty keyboard with proper (if tiny) keys and a color backlit screen. I picked mine up for about $100. The downside is that it runs Windows CE from ROM (shudder!) although it comes with Pocket Word which is definitely sufficient for banging out text. There's a linux distribution for this too, but it's not really useable yet (no power saving, so the batteries die after a few hours) - although it is being actively worked on.
So I second the recommendation is go used, and pick up a Psion (Revo or 5mx depending on price range). My worry is that these machines are all 5 years old and no-one is producing new hardware in the handheld form factor. I find a keyboard so much more useful than a stylus and I really don't understand why the markety just died (well, the $600 price tags probably didn't help). Hopefully phones-with-keyboards like the Sidekick may grow up to fill the gap.
Insipid, absolutley. Instantly forgettable? I wish.
That Katrina and the Waves song "Love Shine A Light" from 8 years ago still haunts my dreams on a regular basis. And it won!
Love shine a light, in every corner of my heart
Let the love light carry, let the love light carry
Lite up the magic in every little part
Let our love shine a light, in every corner of our hearts
Oh god! Noooooooooooo!
So it begins...
It's pretty esoteric, but I've been using the Python interface to the ROOT particle physics framework for all my plotting needs.
It has a bunch of specialised features that appeal to physicists, not least the brain-dead histogramming. I do find the whole framewok poorly documented in general, and wouldn't recommend it to the general numerical computation public.
However, I think this demonstrates the great thing about using a general purpose language like Python for numerical work. You can really use tons of different libraries and frameworks together. I use ROOT almost exclusively, since it enables me to talk in th esame terms as my colleagues. The power lies in being able to add in network or gui or input code written in python and any number of available libraries.
And naturally, in such speciallised fields, YMMV.
By air, though Charles De Gaulle and Houston :-P (seriously - one of those dumb fly-though-five-cities-and-save deals)
Austin's a very cool place. Even a euro-trash bum like me can see that. I fell in love with the place (but alas! Ye olde tech boom was over so fast!). I miss you Barton Springs, Alamo Draft House and Crown & Anchor.
Just a note from a Brit - we need H1Bs as well if we want to work in the states (and are perfectly capable of "taking an American's job". I did it myself!)
Just kidding. I was hired in early 2000 - back when people seemed to be recruiting in every bar in Austin...
Well, most of us don't /really/ want to relearn *anything*. Sometimes, however, when you hear a new idea relating to an area you work in, the penny drops, and you are left thinking "wow, what a great idea".
For instance, I work in a scientific research environment (high energy physics) where most of our software is Free (capital F), we work in different places at different times (planning, lab, analysis), we have a great deal of customized and hand written software and the ideal development environment so far has been NFS mounted home directories (running RedHat and now Fedora). In theory every machine I log into is running the same OS, with /usr/local NFS mounted from an [application|file] server, I login though NDIS and my home directory is also NFS mounted.
This works fine in theory - except without a serious admin budget, different OS versions spring up... I have access to machines running RH9, FC1, FC2... and that's an improvement, whilst RedHat were still supporting RHL, we had 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0, with wildly different GCC versions. What happens? I end up using specific machines with a similar enough environment that all my simulations will at least compile without tweaking, and all my scripts etc work the same way. Homogenous environments, no matter how ideal, are not a possibility without a manpower commitment that many SMBs and other small operations can't afford.
This stateless project LEAPS out at me as an ideal way for small operations (like up to 100 seats) to be managed by a single (even part time) admin.
Not to mention the attempt to tackle laptops - which is the reality of the workplace. Many people have laptops. A lot of them (and their CTOs) would love to be running the same environment as the workplace LAN. At my lab most people have a laptop due to the amount of travelling we do - I'd guess that 90% of them are running XP, since even if they did run linux, they'd have to administer it themselves, wouldn't have clearance to access the NFS shares for $HOME and /usr/local.
Although the laptop aspect still has a troubling achilles heel: most of us (well, my colleagues at least) have laptops in order to present our work to others. Even ignoring the ubiquitousness of PowerPoint, who amongst us would want to be on the road with a "cached client" laptop with NO write-access to anything but $HOME. Sure, the system worked at the office, and you fixed all the bugs that cropped up when you connected from home on you DSL, but what about a strange environment. You need to connect over someone elses WiFi to get the latest figures (sure, TFA talked about user-configured WiFi, but still, what if they have different security like WEAP that needs a new package and root access), or if you NEED to plug in a USB key to give a collaborator or customer your files. What then?
Regardless, this to me is a prospective Killer App for linux, and is definitely tackling a bunch of issues that may niggle an admin for several years before they could even define what the problem is. Automatic updates across _all_ your workstations. Backups that require 10 minutes work after a crash - and I can attest that a recent HD crash to our "distributed" system took a few hours to get the machine back together, but several days before all the little minor tweaks we needed had been applied (things like monitor resolution, 'sudo' configuration, extra packages, sound drivers.
For the first time, I stand up and say, THANK YOU REDHAT and THANKS FEDORA. This project tells me that you are thinking about your installed customer base and offering _really_ innovative ideas to the community. Anyone want to moan about how Linux is always playing catchup to MS and Apple and how F/OSS is doomed to lag behind forever?
You just set up your filter on your primary email account to send an email to "number"@"provider".net with the subject of the email that matched the filter.
No need for any other notification of email at the cell provider - you get the email alert your filter sent directly on your phone as an SMS.
I know for a fact that AT&T give you an address @attwireless.net and T-Mobile give you a username@tmomail.net.
Of course, you'd be lucky to get any reception anywhere unpopulated like, say, MANHATTAN! with either of those services.
-- Just a bitter cell phone loser
I agree with the note-taking/bookmarking suggestions - as for rechargable, yes of course, but also it's nice to be able to carry spare batteries. So rechargeable AAAs or user-changeable Lithium-Ion batteries (much like video cameras etc use) would be preferable to non-changeable batteries (as seen in the iPod)
I'm a physics grad student... I teach a lab course to lucky pre-med students taking a general physics class.
One day I learned a lesson about reading up on the lab before it is time to teach: I was trying to diagnose my students' setup, which was a 300V power supply that was supposed to charge a small capacitor until it reached about 250V, then the circuit would discharge through a tiny neon bulb (rinse and repeat)...
Unfortunately I hadn't been paying attention and they'd connected a 30uF capacitor (about a million times bigger than the one they were supposed to use) that was only supposed to be charged to 15V. At 300V I touched the wrong thing whilst probing the circuit. My arm flew back and almost knocked one of the poor students out.
At least it was only their lowly TA that got the shock. We are replaceable: $30k/year students are not!
I don't think VNC can currently do anything like this, although I recall hearing it as a feature they might work towards.
Of course, this won't help if the app you want to export is running no a remote windows server, but it would work just the same for client machines is running X on *nix.
This in the same country where you can lose a hand for stealing something... although quite what financial scams you could perform with a starving thief's amputated fingers I don't know.
It might be more useful in Japan if you pick up a fingertip or two from struggling Yakuza.
The screen is bigger than any PDAs of the same age, and the processor is really slow - it was designed as an ereader. There is some really substandard PIM software that comes with it, but is too crappy to trust your organization to.
Franklin still sells them on their website for $200 but they're on ebay used in the $50 range. They stopped making them after getting the shaft from Microsoft, who were going to port the MS reader to the platform then backed out after the launch (I guess in favor of Pocket PCs?)
Anyway, I thoroughly recommend the value-for-money my eBookman has given me. I use NiMH batteries, one pair in the eBookman and one in the charger. , which seems like less trouble than an internal battery to me, since I never have to remember to charge it, just swap the batteries whenever they're low.
Oh yeah, and there's a way to load books on from linux. Maybe one day I'll even finish it!
And to the people who say they could never leave books, I understand the sentiment, I love having a book in my hands... but I also love being able to hang on to a pole in the subway with one hand and read with the other, slipping it back in my pocket when I get to the other end. I also love being able to read in bed without a light on (my s.o. loves that too). Ew. I just realised I take something from the subway into my bed. I should invest in some heavy duty bleach!
GNU/kFreeBSD???
Sad truth - this looks like an April Fools Joke!
If this project is real (and I guess Debian is known much better for their scruples than their sense of humour) then they really need a name change.
Either that or I should register K-Free-GNU-GKLin-RMS-BSDSpire.org right now.
For network shares, I use Samba on linux. Click through the "My Network Places" tree to find your linux box, select the share you wish to mount and then right-click to select "Map as Network Drive", and you will be automatically connected at boot to the share.
As for optical drive, I guess Samba is the way to go there as well.
To be honest, I agree with the comments below that point out that you have already answered your over-obvious question in the asking... use VNC and Samba.
Also, at home I use the brilliant ZINA (Zina Is Not Andromeda) which offers a great way to stream your mp3s on demand.
If you want an itunes-a-like (without the store and iPod stuff, but pretty fast) try Musik for windows and linux.
The store is cool though... too bad you'll never be able to use it without upgrading your knackered hardware and painfully out of date OS.
E has become a place for experimental ideas that just wouldn't be accepted into a more stable project. Check out Rasterman's research into software vs OpenGL hardware rendering for Evas.
We already have enough stable window managers (especially for use with GNOME and KDE)... The Enlightenment team are working on something new and different, the lack of which is something often lamented around here always complain about in these X discussions. Let them work it out at their own pace, and maybe you'll be blown away by the next release.
Whatever. The only difference betweeen L1 and H1 is that L1 is for people who already work for the company overseas and want a visa to work for the same company in the US. H1 is for people who are not currently employed by the company.
All these comments about it being "only fair" to totally drop H1Bs are racist and stupid. The people on H1B visas are generally getting a pretty shitty dea; themselves. What's needed is real visa reform, with labor protections built in. If you want to blame somebody for outsourcing your job, blame the fat-cat who actually did it, not the $1/hour schmuck in India.
Bell's theorem states that there may be an underlying, hidden theory which we do not understand, which would account for the probabalistic nature of some ("quantum") results. Any form of such hidden theories is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics (the crux of Bell's inequality).
It was proven by Aspect et al in experiments on correlated photons that there is no such hidden variable theory, the probabilities we see are quantum mechanics, and really are unknowns.
This does really offend many people of religious persuasion, and also many people who like a nice, logical, ordered science, and are not fully aware of the tests that an established theory like quantum mechanics has been through.
First, it's good to hear the ZX81 references. One of our family friends was considered something of a computer boffin, and he advised my parents to get a ZX81 when I was about 4 or 5... I'd mostly just sit inthralled as my sisters spent all day trying to get "ZX Galaxians" to load, the space invader game. Later I tried typing in a few games, but the RAM was knackered and the tape player never saved anything. My mum sold it at a boot sale a few years ago. SOmeone picked it up for 5 quid I think. Wish I still had it though.
I had a very similar game to the one you describe on the C64, called "Challenger" IIRC. Of course, being a spanky 64K colour game, it had many different cities, including Seattle and Delhi I think. I loved that game. Does anyone have any more info? This would be a great game for PDA/cell phones... (so I could play it on the toilet!!)
Wish I still had the C64 even more. Emulation just isn't the same.