And then when it comes down to it, nobody wants to buy a specialized piece of a computer when they can get their generalized computer to work.
I prefer a standalone DVD player to a PC. I prefer to use a Palm for storing addresses. PCs, even notebooks, don't carry around very well. I'd prefer to carry a mini MP3 player around than to carry a PC around. I prefer a PlayStation for many games over a PC.
I'd prefer it if my microwave had it's own embedded computer for timing, rather than having to hook a PC up to it in order to cook up my KD.:-)*
Judging by sales, I'd think the general public agrees with me, too.
Fact is, it's simpler to just hit a single button on a separate physical device than it is to hit a bunch of buttons on one. It seems that many programmers completely forget about ease-of-use on a physical level.
Of course, I'm just a grumpy old engineer, and an embedded one at that. I guess I'm the guy you're all rallying against right now...
Usually, in that case, the mouse will still work in Windows or X. In Linux I hit ctrl-alt-esc and my pointer turns into a jolly-roger. I then click on the misbehaving window. If your mouse won't move, you can either hit that reset switch (I hope your FS does journalling) or, in Linux, hit alt-sysrq-s, alt-sysrq-u, then alt-sysrq-b. That is, in order, sync all FS, unmount all FS (actually remount RO), and boot.
Either way, modal dialogs will not work in many cases and you'll have to go to lower levels to recover somewhat cleanly.
If there was an LCD and a couple of buttons on the front panel, however, I would fully support a confirmation.
That is a neat little interface to the standard X clipboard which is what is used by KDE, including KMail. You will also notice that anything you select, whether by Ctrl-C (using the keyboard entirely) or simply selecting with the mouse, will be in the clipboard. The little icon also has history, so you can select something from the history, and it will be in the X clipboard. It is truly seamless and friendly.
Netscape's handling is what is wrong here. KDE is doing the right thing, IMO. Besides, with the current Konqueror, I no longer need Netscape. I haven't used it since KDE 2.1 was released. I was buying stuff the other night and found that Konqueror worked were the latest Netscape didn't...
I work on the damn things all day, I go to bars to get away.
When I'm drunk the last thing I want to do is hack. My girlfriend, a total non-geek, would definitely hate going with me to somewhere with computers everywhere. There's tons of cafe's with them around here that I avoid.
Actually, I want live music. If Pink Floyd (great hacking music also) played around here I'd be happy:-)* Basically I like going to places where the bands have horn sections. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Velvet Olive is cool for that stuff.
Meanwhile, I have some drinking to do, so I'm off to meet my coworkers.
I set up slash for a simple intranet at work. Naturally, some people forgot their passwords. No problem, right? Just clear out the encrypted field and let the user create a new one. Using KMySQL, I brought up the table and, to my horror, the passwords were not encrypted. The passwords for everyone in my company were staring at me.
Disclaimer: I work for a competitor in this space called SolutionInc. I do not speak for them and none of what I say is official. What I can say is that ours is Linux-based.:-)*
Your speed could probably be explained by the fact that it gets tunneled through Salt Lake City. IIRC, when I was in a Marriott in San Francisco there were, something like, 18 hops back to Halifax, and I was behind two or three levels of masquerading. Apparently, you can do a PPTP VPN only if you're the only guy doing it. IPSec is generally out of the question.
In fact, it's fairly rare to get a real IP in a hotel. Our server allows the user to select whether they want a masqueraded or real IP when you open up a browser, if the site has any and you're willing to pay a few extra dollars.
Ooops, I've rambled...
I-something, I think.
That's CAIS' I-Port, now owned by Cisco. It runs on a Windows NT server.
I had to do it in college before they let me into the CAD lab. From doing it, I know why they made that decision.
From that, on my own, I designed my first PC board on paper, transferred it to copper-clad with carbon-paper. I then learned how to do it with EDA software.
I even designed one by hand at a job because it was a simple circuit and I wanted to do it quickly.
It's kind of like understanding assembly better when you've done digital courses.
I like it, even though they sometimes forego technical accuracy for entertainment. (remember that it may annoy us but wow the majority of the target market)
I think it does a fairly good job of showing culture and motivation. Watch Dean Haglund's shirts.
I also found the "Octium IV" sequence quite interesting as a nod to the PIII serial number fiasco.
I almost fell on the floor laughing when I saw Lisp scrolling on the screen. My boss, a Lisp freak, would get a kick out of it.
Then again, people keep telling me that I look a helluva lot like Dean Haglund...
Re:What about Canada's Cold Squad?
on
C.S.I.
·
· Score: 2
Then again our shows are probably just rip-offs of previous British dramas.
When I first saw "The Newsroom" I thought of "Behind the Frontline" from Australia. Both shows were extremely funny as long as you can pay attention. It seems that only American comedies have laugh tracks ("You can laugh now, and fit in...")
An exception to the rule: "Made in Canada" which is a lot like "The Larry Sanders Show" only much more cynical and more of a focus on office environments (people taking credit for other people's work, etc).
Then again "Larry Sanders" was an exception to the rule for American comedies...
If you use Konqueror, set the "disable window.open()" in the configuration. It's the only browser that currently does this. For those of you that think it's unstable, you haven't been using it lately. The final bugs that annoyed me during the beta2 are gone. I no longer need to open Netscape or Mozilla anymore for anything.
Of course, you could always hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc (basically xkill) and click the app to make it disappear without having a popup.
Perl is most often used in web sites, so I guess HTML owns Perl.
I've made CGIs in C before. I guess HTML owns C.
My point was that PHP is a C like scripting language that has no dependence on a web server whatsoever. The perception that it's like JavaScript or that it's not a "real" language is ridiculous. I've written non-web scripts in PHP before. This is no different than GTKPerl or PyGTK or the original C-based GTK.
Well, it is different from GTKPerl in that the language is better suited for large graphical applications, especially to a C developer. I'm not trashing Perl here, it's just the way the languages were designed.
If you want to create an interactive database driven website (and you don't know perl) use PHP.
Wow, methinks we have a troll here.
For the record, I know Perl and PHP.
If you want to do a large project, using an OOP implementation that isn't fscked and a language that is actually readable, use PHP.
Actually, it's Perl that didn't stay focused. It was meant for more powerful shell scripts. Now people are writing web sites, email clients, MAME frontends, etc...
PHP originally was meant for web sites, but it was designed to be C-like for a reason. I, the other day, was wondering why nobody had written bindings.
That's not something I wanted to hear. I would have liked to implement it. Now that they're giving up, I don't think anyone would want to move to it.
Don't give up *all* hope, however. There is a little known product from Bynari called TradeServer. It's compatible with Outlook (100% I'm told), $500 for unlimited users, runs on Linux, and (here's the kicker) the fully featured UNIX client is open source. They even host it on SourceForge.
It doesn't have PGP support yet, but the client is quite impressive, usable as a standalone client.
I don't know why nobody has been mentioning it here, though.
So for all of you that have been trying to stave off that management push for an Exchange install by showing them OpenMail info (like I have), here's a solution they might like (plus they wouldn't know the difference if you just installed it, wink, wink).
I haven't got an mailing list email for it in a couple of months, and the last few were about LinuxBIOS.
I, however, will continue to listen and help out if other poeple do. I may be changing jobs soon (I'm fscking bored with my current one), and hope that maybe my next employer will like the idea. I'm looking at Amirix in my city who does embedded Debian and if they think so too (I'm specifically trained in embedded), there might be a chance for revival. I want to change my dev board design to PCI and make it better.
I'm giving my current employer one more chance before I take off (long story, even though it's a Linux company...).
Of all the projects I've been involved in, I thing OpenBIOS is the most important, though I haven't shown it lately...
If you're interested, I'd be extremely happy to talk to you. I still have a load of great OB email talking about the initial design issues.
personally python annoys me but that's just cuz' the whitespace-as-block-delimiter thing rubs me the wrong way
That bugged me too at first, but I got used to it. It still sometimes freaks me out when a function ends at a large indentation, but the rest of the language just make too much sense.
ESR said pretty much the same thing on a story you'll find on python.org. I agree with him, except I still use Python for small things I don't want to do in bash.
When I bought a Visor Deluxe, I was horrified by the amount of shareware for the Palm.
Don't get me wrong, there is great shareware out there. I paid for GetRight back in my Windows days (I don't have Windows at all anymore). However, the shareware concept has created a fsckload of apps that do the same thing from a bunch of people who want to make a little money from their efforts. Open source allows the bunch of programmers to pool their efforts.
That's why I search SourceForge first for Palm apps.
I have LispMe on my Visor, but Python makes a world of difference. I only recently tried Python and it changed my programming life. I would never imagine making C++ apps for most things anymore, even though I was heavily trained in it.
I now use Python in place of bash in many situations. As a bash freak, that's impressive. I'll type 'python' and do something to a bunch of files now, among other things. I recently had a request from a support guy, "how can I do this" and I wrote a very short script in Python on paper and gave it to him. It would have been a PITA in any other scripting language.
There's a reason why people have been calling Python the "Pascal of scripting languages" recently. It's easy, but powerful. It enforces good style.
It seems that people that learn Python become obsessed with it. I haven't been let down.:-)*
I'll definitely downlaoad it. I expect it will be a world of fun. Have I mentioned how fun Python is?
The major BIOS companies don't seem to like the idea of developing technology to benefit users. I wouldn't either, if I was stuck in that market. It gives them no competitive advantage.
Companies have tried and created better BIOS software but failed because the big guys can sell them cheaper, and will continue to do so by not caring about useability and such.
It seems the only way to actually improve it is to remove the financial burden on the developer's part.
This is an application open source is perfect for. Individual developers, chipmakers, and motherboard manufacturers can make a much better BIOS through collaboration and openness. SiS has already jumped on it, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have created a temporary solution called LinuxBIOS, which is fulfilling a current need.
Costs go down for everybody at a point and a community will undercut companies like Phoenix. The end result is a better BIOS and an open system.
So far the only problem has been time and resources. Debugging a BIOS is more complicated than debugging a CLI app, and those of us already involved are quite busy with other things. We need to get over the first hump of a well planned initial design that satisfies all requirements yet allows for easy expansion.
Neither is the US. The US has government owned companies that make money such as the US Postal Service.
Canada has more of these companies, we call them crown corporations. The belief is that some services are too important to allow them to go bankrupt. If they don't make enough money, the taxpayers pay the difference and we still get the service. If they make more money than they need, the money can go to other crown corporations such as health care and education.
That's how it's supposed to work at least. I am, for the most part, very happy with it. Essential services stay cheap for everyone and our health care and education remains fairly good, despite the low funding (I am comparing to the States here).
Over the last while the trend has been to spin some of them off, especially at the provincial level. Those ones sometimes end up having a hard time because of the potential outcries of increased prices but services and wages usually ramp up in the end, once it all settles. Larger companies are free to buy them as well.
I don't know of any totally capitalist societies out there, and I doubt it would actually work. Successful countries have done it with a careful mix.
There is a reason they the mouse came with a red LED to begin with....
Yes there is: price.
Have you ever compared red vs. blue LED prices lately? 500 to 1000% is pretty big.
Red LEDs are also highly available in a huge number of package types. I used to use these cool Siemens LEDs (forgot the part number) that allowed you to stuff fibers down to a lens extremely close to the PN junction. For only CDN$1.05, they were a steal. You simply can't get blue LEDs in that package. If they were available, they'd cost at least $10-$15, probably more considering the lack of benefit.
The circuitry/firmware reading the sensor, as well as the sensor itself, was probably tuned to the wavelengths output by that red LED. It also would help if the actual luminance characteristics were constant between the LEDs, which I highly doubt.
All of that said, I've always found infrared much better for sensors, but it's much harder to debug.
Why do you want to "burn out" the tag? ("burn out" is a pretty dumb term, considering that you would just want to remove them. Any process the "burn out" will describe would be likely to damage you or your equipment.)
That serial number on the bottom of your equipment can be read at a greater distance. Do you scratch out serial numbers from the bottoms of equipment you buy?
Do you realise that they already know if you bought it if you sent in that warranty card?
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I prefer a standalone DVD player to a PC. I prefer to use a Palm for storing addresses. PCs, even notebooks, don't carry around very well. I'd prefer to carry a mini MP3 player around than to carry a PC around. I prefer a PlayStation for many games over a PC.
I'd prefer it if my microwave had it's own embedded computer for timing, rather than having to hook a PC up to it in order to cook up my KD.
Judging by sales, I'd think the general public agrees with me, too.
Fact is, it's simpler to just hit a single button on a separate physical device than it is to hit a bunch of buttons on one. It seems that many programmers completely forget about ease-of-use on a physical level.
Of course, I'm just a grumpy old engineer, and an embedded one at that. I guess I'm the guy you're all rallying against right now...
What if the system can't bring up a dialog?
Isn't that what ctrl-alt-delete is for?
Usually, in that case, the mouse will still work in Windows or X. In Linux I hit ctrl-alt-esc and my pointer turns into a jolly-roger. I then click on the misbehaving window. If your mouse won't move, you can either hit that reset switch (I hope your FS does journalling) or, in Linux, hit alt-sysrq-s, alt-sysrq-u, then alt-sysrq-b. That is, in order, sync all FS, unmount all FS (actually remount RO), and boot.
Either way, modal dialogs will not work in many cases and you'll have to go to lower levels to recover somewhat cleanly.
If there was an LCD and a couple of buttons on the front panel, however, I would fully support a confirmation.
Did you notice the little clipboard icon in KDE?
That is a neat little interface to the standard X clipboard which is what is used by KDE, including KMail. You will also notice that anything you select, whether by Ctrl-C (using the keyboard entirely) or simply selecting with the mouse, will be in the clipboard. The little icon also has history, so you can select something from the history, and it will be in the X clipboard. It is truly seamless and friendly.
Netscape's handling is what is wrong here. KDE is doing the right thing, IMO. Besides, with the current Konqueror, I no longer need Netscape. I haven't used it since KDE 2.1 was released. I was buying stuff the other night and found that Konqueror worked were the latest Netscape didn't...
Especially considering I do most of my game playing when my cable modem is out...
I work on the damn things all day, I go to bars to get away.
:-)* Basically I like going to places where the bands have horn sections. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Velvet Olive is cool for that stuff.
When I'm drunk the last thing I want to do is hack. My girlfriend, a total non-geek, would definitely hate going with me to somewhere with computers everywhere. There's tons of cafe's with them around here that I avoid.
Actually, I want live music. If Pink Floyd (great hacking music also) played around here I'd be happy
Meanwhile, I have some drinking to do, so I'm off to meet my coworkers.
Yup.
I set up slash for a simple intranet at work. Naturally, some people forgot their passwords. No problem, right? Just clear out the encrypted field and let the user create a new one. Using KMySQL, I brought up the table and, to my horror, the passwords were not encrypted. The passwords for everyone in my company were staring at me.
Sigh...
Your speed could probably be explained by the fact that it gets tunneled through Salt Lake City. IIRC, when I was in a Marriott in San Francisco there were, something like, 18 hops back to Halifax, and I was behind two or three levels of masquerading. Apparently, you can do a PPTP VPN only if you're the only guy doing it. IPSec is generally out of the question.
In fact, it's fairly rare to get a real IP in a hotel. Our server allows the user to select whether they want a masqueraded or real IP when you open up a browser, if the site has any and you're willing to pay a few extra dollars.
Ooops, I've rambled...
That's CAIS' I-Port, now owned by Cisco. It runs on a Windows NT server.
You can joke all you want, but it is, in fact, true in my case.
I just dare you to try running LyX on Windows. I know it's possible, but I wouldn't want to try it.
Can you get Broadcast 2000 for Windows? Is there an equivalent *free, open source* package?
Star Office runs much better on Linux than Windows, judging from what I've seen here.
Just because you can't run a few games, or an insipid office package...
I had to do it in college before they let me into the CAD lab. From doing it, I know why they made that decision.
From that, on my own, I designed my first PC board on paper, transferred it to copper-clad with carbon-paper. I then learned how to do it with EDA software.
I even designed one by hand at a job because it was a simple circuit and I wanted to do it quickly.
It's kind of like understanding assembly better when you've done digital courses.
I like it, even though they sometimes forego technical accuracy for entertainment. (remember that it may annoy us but wow the majority of the target market)
I think it does a fairly good job of showing culture and motivation. Watch Dean Haglund's shirts.
I also found the "Octium IV" sequence quite interesting as a nod to the PIII serial number fiasco.
I almost fell on the floor laughing when I saw Lisp scrolling on the screen. My boss, a Lisp freak, would get a kick out of it.
Then again, people keep telling me that I look a helluva lot like Dean Haglund...
When I first saw "The Newsroom" I thought of "Behind the Frontline" from Australia. Both shows were extremely funny as long as you can pay attention. It seems that only American comedies have laugh tracks ("You can laugh now, and fit in...")
An exception to the rule: "Made in Canada" which is a lot like "The Larry Sanders Show" only much more cynical and more of a focus on office environments (people taking credit for other people's work, etc).
Then again "Larry Sanders" was an exception to the rule for American comedies...
If you use Konqueror, set the "disable window.open()" in the configuration. It's the only browser that currently does this. For those of you that think it's unstable, you haven't been using it lately. The final bugs that annoyed me during the beta2 are gone. I no longer need to open Netscape or Mozilla anymore for anything.
Of course, you could always hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc (basically xkill) and click the app to make it disappear without having a popup.
Perl is most often used in web sites, so I guess HTML owns Perl.
I've made CGIs in C before. I guess HTML owns C.
My point was that PHP is a C like scripting language that has no dependence on a web server whatsoever. The perception that it's like JavaScript or that it's not a "real" language is ridiculous. I've written non-web scripts in PHP before. This is no different than GTKPerl or PyGTK or the original C-based GTK.
Well, it is different from GTKPerl in that the language is better suited for large graphical applications, especially to a C developer. I'm not trashing Perl here, it's just the way the languages were designed.
Unless the virus makes you accept an EULA, this argument is invalid.
A trojan horse, on the other hand, could easily add an EULA.
Wow, methinks we have a troll here.
For the record, I know Perl and PHP.
If you want to do a large project, using an OOP implementation that isn't fscked and a language that is actually readable, use PHP.
Actually, it's Perl that didn't stay focused. It was meant for more powerful shell scripts. Now people are writing web sites, email clients, MAME frontends, etc...
PHP originally was meant for web sites, but it was designed to be C-like for a reason. I, the other day, was wondering why nobody had written bindings.
What do you mean? What language used to own it? I don't understand...
I'm a PHP guy, though I've been preferring Python lately. I still really like PHP.
That's not something I wanted to hear. I would have liked to implement it. Now that they're giving up, I don't think anyone would want to move to it.
Don't give up *all* hope, however. There is a little known product from Bynari called TradeServer. It's compatible with Outlook (100% I'm told), $500 for unlimited users, runs on Linux, and (here's the kicker) the fully featured UNIX client is open source. They even host it on SourceForge.
It doesn't have PGP support yet, but the client is quite impressive, usable as a standalone client.
I don't know why nobody has been mentioning it here, though.
So for all of you that have been trying to stave off that management push for an Exchange install by showing them OpenMail info (like I have), here's a solution they might like (plus they wouldn't know the difference if you just installed it, wink, wink).
...and Bill Gates wanted to make people pay him for it.
I wonder if he offered any of that money back to the actual creators?
:-)*
Unfortunately, you are pretty much right.
I haven't got an mailing list email for it in a couple of months, and the last few were about LinuxBIOS.
I, however, will continue to listen and help out if other poeple do. I may be changing jobs soon (I'm fscking bored with my current one), and hope that maybe my next employer will like the idea. I'm looking at Amirix in my city who does embedded Debian and if they think so too (I'm specifically trained in embedded), there might be a chance for revival. I want to change my dev board design to PCI and make it better.
I'm giving my current employer one more chance before I take off (long story, even though it's a Linux company...).
Of all the projects I've been involved in, I thing OpenBIOS is the most important, though I haven't shown it lately...
If you're interested, I'd be extremely happy to talk to you. I still have a load of great OB email talking about the initial design issues.
That bugged me too at first, but I got used to it. It still sometimes freaks me out when a function ends at a large indentation, but the rest of the language just make too much sense.
ESR said pretty much the same thing on a story you'll find on python.org. I agree with him, except I still use Python for small things I don't want to do in bash.
This is very great news for me.
:-)*
When I bought a Visor Deluxe, I was horrified by the amount of shareware for the Palm.
Don't get me wrong, there is great shareware out there. I paid for GetRight back in my Windows days (I don't have Windows at all anymore). However, the shareware concept has created a fsckload of apps that do the same thing from a bunch of people who want to make a little money from their efforts. Open source allows the bunch of programmers to pool their efforts.
That's why I search SourceForge first for Palm apps.
I have LispMe on my Visor, but Python makes a world of difference. I only recently tried Python and it changed my programming life. I would never imagine making C++ apps for most things anymore, even though I was heavily trained in it.
I now use Python in place of bash in many situations. As a bash freak, that's impressive. I'll type 'python' and do something to a bunch of files now, among other things. I recently had a request from a support guy, "how can I do this" and I wrote a very short script in Python on paper and gave it to him. It would have been a PITA in any other scripting language.
There's a reason why people have been calling Python the "Pascal of scripting languages" recently. It's easy, but powerful. It enforces good style.
It seems that people that learn Python become obsessed with it. I haven't been let down.
I'll definitely downlaoad it. I expect it will be a world of fun. Have I mentioned how fun Python is?
Yet another reason to support OpenBIOS.
The major BIOS companies don't seem to like the idea of developing technology to benefit users. I wouldn't either, if I was stuck in that market. It gives them no competitive advantage.
Companies have tried and created better BIOS software but failed because the big guys can sell them cheaper, and will continue to do so by not caring about useability and such.
It seems the only way to actually improve it is to remove the financial burden on the developer's part.
This is an application open source is perfect for. Individual developers, chipmakers, and motherboard manufacturers can make a much better BIOS through collaboration and openness. SiS has already jumped on it, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have created a temporary solution called LinuxBIOS, which is fulfilling a current need.
Costs go down for everybody at a point and a community will undercut companies like Phoenix. The end result is a better BIOS and an open system.
So far the only problem has been time and resources. Debugging a BIOS is more complicated than debugging a CLI app, and those of us already involved are quite busy with other things. We need to get over the first hump of a well planned initial design that satisfies all requirements yet allows for easy expansion.
Maybe someday...
Yep, we are capitalist, but not totally.
Neither is the US. The US has government owned companies that make money such as the US Postal Service.
Canada has more of these companies, we call them crown corporations. The belief is that some services are too important to allow them to go bankrupt. If they don't make enough money, the taxpayers pay the difference and we still get the service. If they make more money than they need, the money can go to other crown corporations such as health care and education.
That's how it's supposed to work at least. I am, for the most part, very happy with it. Essential services stay cheap for everyone and our health care and education remains fairly good, despite the low funding (I am comparing to the States here).
Over the last while the trend has been to spin some of them off, especially at the provincial level. Those ones sometimes end up having a hard time because of the potential outcries of increased prices but services and wages usually ramp up in the end, once it all settles. Larger companies are free to buy them as well.
I don't know of any totally capitalist societies out there, and I doubt it would actually work. Successful countries have done it with a careful mix.
Yes there is: price.
Have you ever compared red vs. blue LED prices lately? 500 to 1000% is pretty big.
Red LEDs are also highly available in a huge number of package types. I used to use these cool Siemens LEDs (forgot the part number) that allowed you to stuff fibers down to a lens extremely close to the PN junction. For only CDN$1.05, they were a steal. You simply can't get blue LEDs in that package. If they were available, they'd cost at least $10-$15, probably more considering the lack of benefit.
The circuitry/firmware reading the sensor, as well as the sensor itself, was probably tuned to the wavelengths output by that red LED. It also would help if the actual luminance characteristics were constant between the LEDs, which I highly doubt.
All of that said, I've always found infrared much better for sensors, but it's much harder to debug.
Besides, coloured lights are impressive...
Why do you want to "burn out" the tag? ("burn out" is a pretty dumb term, considering that you would just want to remove them. Any process the "burn out" will describe would be likely to damage you or your equipment.)
That serial number on the bottom of your equipment can be read at a greater distance. Do you scratch out serial numbers from the bottoms of equipment you buy?
Do you realise that they already know if you bought it if you sent in that warranty card?