I like the SDI approach. I never favoured MDI for anything. Tabbing is sometimes ok, if it makes sense. In KDevelop and spreadsheets it makes sense.
I tend to run a *lot* of apps at a time. It's just the way I use a computer after many years of UNIX. This is the main reason I have trouble running Windows. The taskbar isn't suited for it. I find myself resizing the bar a lot. Application switching gets really slow, too.
I like having the taskbar in the upper left, like in BeOS. That way, the entries don't get smaller as I open more windows. I tend to size everything like a page anyway, so I have room on the right for a panel (NeXtStep style) and some icons. KDE 2 won't let me do this properly like 1 did, which is my main complaint. Gnome can do it, but it's a pain in the ass to set up.
I guess I'm stuck with the default for a little while...
The/proc/sys directory and the modules are intended for exactly this. There is a nice hierarchial structure in/proc/sys that allows you to change many parameters on the fly. You can put echo <whatever> >/proc/sys/<whatever> in init scripts to set many parameters.
For the modules, you can add stuff to/etc/conf.modules to load modules as they are needed.
This stuff is very well documented, take a look around.
KMenu -> Panel Menu -> Configure -> Menu Editor...
There's a bunch you can't remove, unfortunately, like bookmarks, etc.
Myself I usually avoid the menu altogether and make icons for commonly used apps. If I use something a lot I drag the icon to the panel. For many things I simply hit Alt-F2 and start typing the name of the app I want. The autocomplete is cool. I use Netscape only when necessary and a simple "Alt-F2 n " will run it much quicker than any menu. I find myself also hitting "Alt-F2 im " to load up imwheel as well and "Alt-F2 kp " to manage processes when Netscape freaks out.
What I really miss is KDesktopViewer from KDE 1, which placed a little icon in the tray which produced, on mouse click, a simple menu containing all of the entries from my desktop. I imagine you'd like that as well.
This movie doesn't have a cellphone, computer, or explosion in it.
Oh, so you didn't notice the three Macs on Elijah's desk, with flat-panel displays, shown multiple times.
I loved the movie. I'm actually glad I saw it before The Sixth Sense. I went in with a clean slate and was blown away.
I see a lot of people saying, "It's no Sixth Sense," etc. I saw it after Unbreakable and thought, "very cool, but Unbreakable was better."
It goes to show that you shouldn't have watched it with another movie in mind. That's what ruined it for you. It's not called, "The Sixth Sense: Part 2."
Looks cool, but I'm a mobile user (my main work computer is a notebook) that hunts and pecks. It looks like another solution for the people who didn't type their own way whenever the typing teacher wasn't looking:-)*
I never type "properly." In fact, I'm typing with a cigarette in my right hand now. It's still faster than I can do properly. I'm also a musician, so chording keyboards seem natural to me.
It doesn't look very one handed to me. Just because there's only one hand in the pic doesn't mean that it can reach all of those buttons on the other side.
Actually, it looks a hell of a lot more like a gamepad. A hell of a lot more confusing.
I haven't tried it, obviously, but it looks really hard to get comfortable with. They appear to claim 50wpm. I bet that's the maximum someone's been able to get out of a prototype, the average being much lower.
It looks ok for games which require keyboard keys all the time, but most intelligent people play those with a mouse or a one-handed analog joystick anyway. The Twiddler looks much better for someone looking for a keyboard, rather than a gamepad.
This is all well and good for a hobbyist. In fact, there's quite a bit of Linux software for doing instrumentation this way.
If your application is professional or you want dead accuracy, please do not do this. How calibrated is that input amp? How about noise? What if you have to manually calibrate?
If you must use a laptop, NI sells some cool PCMCIA cards for this sort of use. Expect to pay for it, though.
That said, I'll have to mention that any x86 is probably overkill. I'd likely use a PIC and some choice Analog Devices chips. They are dirt cheap, and would be much easier to make immune to noise. You can control the whole design, which is a good thing. The less bloat, the less chance of interference.
For extremely critical apps, you'd probably end up doing some expensive testing, but you'd end up doing that for anything off-the-shelf anyway.
As for the data transport, if the speed isn't critical, you could do this. Just pick a frequency that you can use freely and make sure that nothing else around will interfere with the signal.
There are also a lot of other ways to do it. Radio is cheap to do, and more fault-tolerant than IR.
Basically, I focused on three potential issues.
How do you distinguish between the two beings? This becomes more important as people begin to add mechanical parts to their bodies like pacemakers, prosthetics, brain implants, etc. How about a being where the only human part is the brain?
Another primary focus was on civil liberties. Would "cyborg" be a derogatory term for "cybernetic organism"? (defined as someone who adds functions controlled cybernetically, in a Norbert Weiner sense) This sort of thing has happened before, I'm sure the reader can figure that out...
Would "human mutts" be relegated to the back of the bus?
What about machine intelligence? That issue is explored in Asimov's short story, "The Bicentennial Man" and explored much further in Robert Silverberg's novelisation, "The Positronic Man." Very interesting reading.
Well, here's my list. I'm sure most, if not all of these are addressed in other comments. In the spirit of surveys, I'll mention everything I can think of right now.
Palm Pilot integration on the client. I'm disappointed with the current UNIX offerings. I like KDE's tools, I used them until I got a Visor, and others in my office are still using them. I'm only using KDE2's KMail client right now. Unfortunately, this is a function of client software, not server software, unless the server can grok pdb. Actually, if the server can read and modify pdb files, a client would be simplified as you only need to do it once. The client doesn't have to grok it.
Cross-platform support. I mean UNIX, Windows, web, and WAP. I would like to be able to use native KDE tools and a web interface. Some people in my office use GNOME, the administration staff uses Windows.
Project management. This is something I have no problem using a web-only interface for. It's the easiest way. For this, I'd like support for separate departments, access control, team creation (sometimes among multiple departments), milestones, GANTT, project diaries (I'd like to be able to write down what I do as I do it), and dependencies (a milestone of one project is often dependant on a milestone of another).
Contact management. This should have the ability to set permissions (user, team, department, all, specific groups). It should also store public keys.
Email integration. Preferably, I'd like the server to PGP encrypt anything it sends me because I often get my mail from home, VBN/VCN ports, other offices, etc.
XML. Not just for buzzword-compliance. It would simplify a lot of data exchange.
Those features would definitely do it for me. In fact, I'd like to work on it. I'm one of those alpha software freaks anyway and I've been searching for something good, but didn't have the time to start from scratch.
there's more to it than that, you have to realize that we make sure EVERY componant on a motherboard and system is FULLY functional in Linux before we aprove it for use.
If only they tested the damn second serial port on the new 2130's...
I had to use one of those motherboard serial cables that waste a slot (quite valuable in a 2U). I found one in a box 'o' cables and it worked. Then we told VA (we asked for two serials in the first place) and they sent us a box of them, all different. None of them worked. I can get the winmodem in my notebook working, but not a simple external USR 28800?
Tested, huh?
Maybe I'm angry because my thumb is still a little scarred from removing a hard drive from one a couple of weeks ago. Ouch.
I have no experience with any of the other companies (except that I've been considering Emac).
I have to mention that I've had glorious problems with Tern boards, and I've been personally BS'ed by their CEO, who answered a support call.
He claimed that the reason serial communication was unreliable at 57.6k was that the serial ports on all of my PCs (all fairly new, some Dells) were "non-standard." He claimed I was alone with that problem until later, after some hammering, he told me how a giant client (I won't say who, specifically, let's just say they're incredibly huge and R&D oriented) couldn't get it to work on 100 different computers in their lab. I doubt they had the patience for that.
Then we had a defective board, but hooking it up voided the warranty. We couldn't know it was defective without hooking it up.
There were many other problems, like their built-in timer functions, which were ridiculously inaccurate. A handheld stopwatch timed an 8 second delay to 5.5 seconds. I had to reimplement.
We dumped them after thousands of dollars in replacements and ~5 months of development time.
We went to ZWorld after that. High quality, cheap boards, and an awesome development environment (Dynamic C, with realtime goodness). I reimplemented the software in a matter of weeks.
Not to be negative, or anything. Just a warning. Tern's stuff isn't all that useful for wearable anyway. The core is usually plugged into a larger board with varying components. You can't really mix and match. ZWorld's PLCbus stuff is small and highly modular.
I'm still thinking of trying out the Emac stuff, though.
Here in Halifax, NS I get Cable (Eastlink) for $50 (US$33.56), static IP (real), no firewall or proxy, 5 email addresses, web page space (10 or 15 MB, I didn't bother with it), 300kBytes or more from some sites (I can FTP install SuSE from ftp.gwdg.de in no time at all), bing reports, on average, 5Mbits to the router, and equipment rental. They even run Quake/Quake2 servers for customers to play on. Elsewhere, with Shaw, you get all of that with 5 static real IPs (!!!) and no Quake servers (I think) for $50. My employer pays for the connection, hehheh.
In Newfoundland, I got, for $29.95 (US$20), cable, real DHCP IP (rarely changed), they explicitly let people run web and ftp sites, but block mail servers, 5 email addresses, 10 MB web page space, decent speeds (150 kBytes from many sites). You could buy a good (Toshiba) modem for $200 (US$134.23), or rent for $10/month.
As you can see, the CRTC guidelines are minimum qualities, reality is often much better.
So where on TrollTech's page can I buy a KDE CD? No T-shirts or stuffed dragons either. (Yes, I know some of these things are available elsewhere, but not through Troll Tech)
HelixCode sells GNOME and GNOME accesories.
Trolltech sells QT. KDE is a powerful example of the kind of software you can make under QT. They fund it's development for that reason but does not sell it.
I think it's... cool. It's very different from the GNOME Foundation in that it does not affect development. Development will go on the way it always did, and members can contribute if they wish, but the KDE League is specifically for PR only.
Also, Ettrich did not set up a company as an attempt to make money from KDE like certain other people...
I've gone through a number of distros. Here's my method for conversion:
Backup/home,/usr/local,/etc, and some of the directories in/opt if necessary. I stick to/usr/local and/opt for stuff I compile myself. I also have htdocs there.
Generate a list of installed packages. With an RPM distro this is easy: rpm -qa > rpmbackup.txt
Backup the database.
Install the new distro from scratch.
Restore from backups. I drop/home,/usr/local, and whatever I saved from/opt in place.
Copy the appropriate lines from/etc/password,/etc/shadow, and/etc/groups into the new system.
Configure any software. This often means restoring a file into/etc, sometimes it's easier to just reconfigure.
Restore the database.
Install any software the new distro didn't. I now use SuSE, so this part is fairly short, TkPGP, OSS commercial, and CivCTP. I now shudder at the thought of moving to Red Hat, or anything other than Debian, due to the amount of software I'd have to install individually...
Slashdot Mirror
I like the SDI approach. I never favoured MDI for anything. Tabbing is sometimes ok, if it makes sense. In KDevelop and spreadsheets it makes sense.
I tend to run a *lot* of apps at a time. It's just the way I use a computer after many years of UNIX. This is the main reason I have trouble running Windows. The taskbar isn't suited for it. I find myself resizing the bar a lot. Application switching gets really slow, too.
I like having the taskbar in the upper left, like in BeOS. That way, the entries don't get smaller as I open more windows. I tend to size everything like a page anyway, so I have room on the right for a panel (NeXtStep style) and some icons. KDE 2 won't let me do this properly like 1 did, which is my main complaint. Gnome can do it, but it's a pain in the ass to set up.
I guess I'm stuck with the default for a little while...
The /proc/sys directory and the modules are intended for exactly this. There is a nice hierarchial structure in /proc/sys that allows you to change many parameters on the fly. You can put echo <whatever> > /proc/sys/<whatever> in init scripts to set many parameters.
/etc/conf.modules to load modules as they are needed.
For the modules, you can add stuff to
This stuff is very well documented, take a look around.
For a fellow Zappa fan:
KMenu -> Panel Menu -> Configure -> Menu Editor...
There's a bunch you can't remove, unfortunately, like bookmarks, etc.
Myself I usually avoid the menu altogether and make icons for commonly used apps. If I use something a lot I drag the icon to the panel. For many things I simply hit Alt-F2 and start typing the name of the app I want. The autocomplete is cool. I use Netscape only when necessary and a simple "Alt-F2 n " will run it much quicker than any menu. I find myself also hitting "Alt-F2 im " to load up imwheel as well and "Alt-F2 kp " to manage processes when Netscape freaks out.
What I really miss is KDesktopViewer from KDE 1, which placed a little icon in the tray which produced, on mouse click, a simple menu containing all of the entries from my desktop. I imagine you'd like that as well.
The whole freakin' system is out of order!
Why did a simple lamp that *anyone* could have done get 1st while a clock, a clock with AOL CDs as the gears, gets 2nd, and a car gets third?
Move the freakin' lamp to third place, incrementing the clock and the car, and you'll have a better judging.
Making a clock takes real skill that not just anybody can do.
Oh, so you didn't notice the three Macs on Elijah's desk, with flat-panel displays, shown multiple times.
I loved the movie. I'm actually glad I saw it before The Sixth Sense. I went in with a clean slate and was blown away.
I see a lot of people saying, "It's no Sixth Sense," etc. I saw it after Unbreakable and thought, "very cool, but Unbreakable was better."
It goes to show that you shouldn't have watched it with another movie in mind. That's what ruined it for you. It's not called, "The Sixth Sense: Part 2."
Looks cool, but I'm a mobile user (my main work computer is a notebook) that hunts and pecks. It looks like another solution for the people who didn't type their own way whenever the typing teacher wasn't looking :-)*
I never type "properly." In fact, I'm typing with a cigarette in my right hand now. It's still faster than I can do properly. I'm also a musician, so chording keyboards seem natural to me.
A twiddler, I can just drop into my laptop bag.
It doesn't look very one handed to me. Just because there's only one hand in the pic doesn't mean that it can reach all of those buttons on the other side.
Actually, it looks a hell of a lot more like a gamepad. A hell of a lot more confusing.
I haven't tried it, obviously, but it looks really hard to get comfortable with. They appear to claim 50wpm. I bet that's the maximum someone's been able to get out of a prototype, the average being much lower.
It looks ok for games which require keyboard keys all the time, but most intelligent people play those with a mouse or a one-handed analog joystick anyway. The Twiddler looks much better for someone looking for a keyboard, rather than a gamepad.
This is all well and good for a hobbyist. In fact, there's quite a bit of Linux software for doing instrumentation this way.
If your application is professional or you want dead accuracy, please do not do this. How calibrated is that input amp? How about noise? What if you have to manually calibrate?
If you must use a laptop, NI sells some cool PCMCIA cards for this sort of use. Expect to pay for it, though.
That said, I'll have to mention that any x86 is probably overkill. I'd likely use a PIC and some choice Analog Devices chips. They are dirt cheap, and would be much easier to make immune to noise. You can control the whole design, which is a good thing. The less bloat, the less chance of interference.
For extremely critical apps, you'd probably end up doing some expensive testing, but you'd end up doing that for anything off-the-shelf anyway.
As for the data transport, if the speed isn't critical, you could do this. Just pick a frequency that you can use freely and make sure that nothing else around will interfere with the signal.
There are also a lot of other ways to do it. Radio is cheap to do, and more fault-tolerant than IR.
Look around, you might find something else.
Hmmm, lessee, Office goes to subscription model and holds your documents hostage until you pay up...
I don't want to pay and I wanted to move to StarOffice anyway. I use StarOffice to import the documents and then save them in sdw format.
So would StarOffice be a tool for circumvention?
Could MS sue Sun under the DMCA for the distribution of such a tool?
It was 8th grade quality, of course.
Basically, I focused on three potential issues.
How do you distinguish between the two beings? This becomes more important as people begin to add mechanical parts to their bodies like pacemakers, prosthetics, brain implants, etc. How about a being where the only human part is the brain?
Another primary focus was on civil liberties. Would "cyborg" be a derogatory term for "cybernetic organism"? (defined as someone who adds functions controlled cybernetically, in a Norbert Weiner sense) This sort of thing has happened before, I'm sure the reader can figure that out...
Would "human mutts" be relegated to the back of the bus?
What about machine intelligence? That issue is explored in Asimov's short story, "The Bicentennial Man" and explored much further in Robert Silverberg's novelisation, "The Positronic Man." Very interesting reading.
Those features would definitely do it for me. In fact, I'd like to work on it. I'm one of those alpha software freaks anyway and I've been searching for something good, but didn't have the time to start from scratch.
I'm in the 24.222.88.0/21 netblock (Eastlink) and I get the same error.
I'm guessing the site blocked 24.0.0.0/8.
Who would block a class A?
Ah yes, someone running IIS. I get it now.
If only they tested the damn second serial port on the new 2130's...
I had to use one of those motherboard serial cables that waste a slot (quite valuable in a 2U). I found one in a box 'o' cables and it worked. Then we told VA (we asked for two serials in the first place) and they sent us a box of them, all different. None of them worked. I can get the winmodem in my notebook working, but not a simple external USR 28800?
Tested, huh?
Maybe I'm angry because my thumb is still a little scarred from removing a hard drive from one a couple of weeks ago. Ouch.
...have a bunch of hidden speakers whisper, "get out.."
It might not deter thieves, but it would be cool.
I have no experience with any of the other companies (except that I've been considering Emac).
I have to mention that I've had glorious problems with Tern boards, and I've been personally BS'ed by their CEO, who answered a support call.
He claimed that the reason serial communication was unreliable at 57.6k was that the serial ports on all of my PCs (all fairly new, some Dells) were "non-standard." He claimed I was alone with that problem until later, after some hammering, he told me how a giant client (I won't say who, specifically, let's just say they're incredibly huge and R&D oriented) couldn't get it to work on 100 different computers in their lab. I doubt they had the patience for that.
Then we had a defective board, but hooking it up voided the warranty. We couldn't know it was defective without hooking it up.
There were many other problems, like their built-in timer functions, which were ridiculously inaccurate. A handheld stopwatch timed an 8 second delay to 5.5 seconds. I had to reimplement.
We dumped them after thousands of dollars in replacements and ~5 months of development time.
We went to ZWorld after that. High quality, cheap boards, and an awesome development environment (Dynamic C, with realtime goodness). I reimplemented the software in a matter of weeks.
Not to be negative, or anything. Just a warning. Tern's stuff isn't all that useful for wearable anyway. The core is usually plugged into a larger board with varying components. You can't really mix and match. ZWorld's PLCbus stuff is small and highly modular.
I'm still thinking of trying out the Emac stuff, though.
Here in Halifax, NS I get Cable (Eastlink) for $50 (US$33.56), static IP (real), no firewall or proxy, 5 email addresses, web page space (10 or 15 MB, I didn't bother with it), 300kBytes or more from some sites (I can FTP install SuSE from ftp.gwdg.de in no time at all), bing reports, on average, 5Mbits to the router, and equipment rental. They even run Quake/Quake2 servers for customers to play on. Elsewhere, with Shaw, you get all of that with 5 static real IPs (!!!) and no Quake servers (I think) for $50. My employer pays for the connection, hehheh.
In Newfoundland, I got, for $29.95 (US$20), cable, real DHCP IP (rarely changed), they explicitly let people run web and ftp sites, but block mail servers, 5 email addresses, 10 MB web page space, decent speeds (150 kBytes from many sites). You could buy a good (Toshiba) modem for $200 (US$134.23), or rent for $10/month.
As you can see, the CRTC guidelines are minimum qualities, reality is often much better.
I've been using AMD forever and I never had trouble using them in servers. They're rock solid for me.
Oh, I get it, you're using Windows on servers. No wonder you're having stability problems.
I would never imagine using Windows on a server, I don't even have it on my desktop.
Besides, do you think I'm going to listen to FUD from someone whose login name is buttfucker2000?
Ooops, must be the crack :-)*
It was a while ago...
I heard a commercial on the radio today about the .tv TLD. I had not heard of this before, especially from this site (except as speculation).
You can now get one from, appropriately, www.tv. The prices generally seem reasonable, expect for special cases, where they get ridiculous.
I was surprised. How did Slashdot miss this one?
So where on TrollTech's page can I buy a KDE CD? No T-shirts or stuffed dragons either. (Yes, I know some of these things are available elsewhere, but not through Troll Tech)
HelixCode sells GNOME and GNOME accesories.
Trolltech sells QT. KDE is a powerful example of the kind of software you can make under QT. They fund it's development for that reason but does not sell it.
That's the difference.
One of the startup tips in KDE2 recommends trying out UDE. I thought that was pretty cool.
I highly doubt there will be a UDE Clan, though.
A non-profit IPO? That doesn't even make sense.
Did you read the release?
I think it's... cool. It's very different from the GNOME Foundation in that it does not affect development. Development will go on the way it always did, and members can contribute if they wish, but the KDE League is specifically for PR only.
Also, Ettrich did not set up a company as an attempt to make money from KDE like certain other people...
I've gone through a number of distros. Here's my method for conversion:
/home, /usr/local, /etc, and some of the directories in /opt if necessary. I stick to /usr/local and /opt for stuff I compile myself. I also have htdocs there.
/home, /usr/local, and whatever I saved from /opt in place.
/etc/password, /etc/shadow, and /etc/groups into the new system.
/etc, sometimes it's easier to just reconfigure.
Backup
Generate a list of installed packages. With an RPM distro this is easy: rpm -qa > rpmbackup.txt
Backup the database.
Install the new distro from scratch.
Restore from backups. I drop
Copy the appropriate lines from
Configure any software. This often means restoring a file into
Restore the database.
Install any software the new distro didn't. I now use SuSE, so this part is fairly short, TkPGP, OSS commercial, and CivCTP. I now shudder at the thought of moving to Red Hat, or anything other than Debian, due to the amount of software I'd have to install individually...
I loved Mars Attacks!
They took much that was stupid about ID4 and made it funny on purpose. ID4 was stupid while trying to be serious.
I like the language selection on the DVD: English, French, and Martian.
I remember doing sites and saying, "IE SUCKS!"
I don't have Windows, so I couldn't check stuff out until people told me IE problems.
Then again, I now say, "NETSCAPE, IE, AND MOZILLA SUCKS!" I now use Konqueror almost exclusively.
Of course, I doubt anyone cares about what your webmaster has to say if your post is that content-free.
Your post reminds me of adolescent "<band a> sucks, <band b> rulez" banter.