I've read thousands and thousands of pages on very normal LCD screens. I started using a Nokia N-Gage which served me very well until its screen met an untimely end. It was replaced by a HTC Prophet which I'm using to the current day. Both phones fit in my hand, making it possible to read anywhere and anytime. At night I use grey characters on a black background - backlight does have its advantages here - while during the day this scheme is reversed. As both phones have transflective screens it is possible to use them in full daylight, you just have to find the right angle to read the screen.
LCD might not be as *cool* as electronic paper but to dismiss it as unusable for electronic readers is silly. It works for me after all...
If everyone switched away from windows then people would simply write malware for whatever arbitrary OS became the new popular alternative...
Why does there have to be one popular alternative? Why not loads of alternatives? The web is - or should be - OS agnostic so it should not matter one bit which OS you happen to use. Divide and conquer!
Apart from that it remains to be seen whether the contenders to Windows' crown are as susceptible to malware.
My previous message got moderated as 'Offtopic' by someone who obviously had not read it very well. The whole point of the message is that the question it poses is very much on topic when it comes to avoiding malware-related problems even though there does seem to be a dogma to keep this issue under the floorboards.
Facebook and similar sites attract a lot of malware, true. How about not using a platform known to be hypersensitive to this malware when accessing these sites? Why is this simple and effective solution never proposed?
Why oh why oh why does the average IT person not contemplate this effective, cheap - yes cheap - and sensible solution? It is almost as if there is a religious dogma against pointing a finger at Windows. Even the most die-hard Windows fanatic surely should see the sense in this approach? If you want to navigate the high seas you'd use something which withstands salty water and is known not to leak. It would be... wise... to use something which withstands malware and is known to survive network contact when navigating the cesspool called social networking.
I am truely flabbergasted by this resistance to change. If you stand to lose ${many} by allowing Windows on the 'net... why not prevent that loss?
All this social blabber here, there and everywhere from companies who are after your life blueprint so as to target you with even more senseless commercial tripe is so... so... silly and immature.
Consider a road example... the internet is what the roads are, a means of connection to disparate places, a way to gain access to places otherwise closed for communication.
Facebook and its ilk are public transport companies using a hub and spoke network where their aim is to get everyone to linger in their station where they consume and consume and consume...
Some people choose to use their ISP's facilities to create their own websites and blogs and such. Those could be likened to cars, allowing a certain degree of freedom whilst being entangled in a maze of rules, regulations and fees.
Then there are those who run their own servers on their own connections using their own domains. These are bikes - go wherever you want to go using whatever route you want.
Hey, it looks like someone read that NetAssets novel by one Carl Bussjaeger but decided that the trick could be done without using the libertarian sauce Bussjaeger pours over it. Bussjaeger ended up deciding that a rail gun or other tracked thing would not work so he went with a supersonic ground effect launcher.
When the light bulb in my oven finally burns out, I wonder how well the CFL I replace it with will perform?
Before you go asking these silly questions you should have a look at the rules which are being put in place. You'll notice that not all incandescent light sources are being outlawed, only those for which viable alternatives exist. You oven will keep on burning out its incandescent lamp for you to replace it with new a incandescent lamp. Oven lights are 15 W - at least on this (east) side of the Atlantic and are generally not used in large quantities to light up rooms. If LEDs ever become suitably heat-resistant they might offer a viable alternative for high temperature environments, until that time incandescents will be around to burn out when you least want them to.
Whoa there. PDF's can be as safe as you want them to be. Safety does not depend on the file format but on the application interpreting that file format. You thought plain text files were safe? What if your 'viewer' contains code to execute any code it can find in that file?
Hey, read this plain text file - it is perfectly safe after all
Clock rate is no longer the key variable in comparing processors, unless they are of the same microarchitecture.
Clock rate has *never* been the key variable in comparing processors. Even back in the heady days of 1 MHz 6502/6510 vs 4 MHz Z80 the comparison was useless - the 6510 does way more per cycle than the Z80 and ends up being comparable speed-wise.
...when I moved country. I thought of doing it on a grand scale - which is probably why it did not happen. Think 'two walls at the end of two rooms, two video projectors and two (sets of) cameras'. The projectors would ideally project against the back of the walls, the cameras would be integrated into these walls. The image from the cameras in room A would get projected on wall B and vice versa. Microphones would do the same trick.
And that is only the beginning. To make a real impact this trick could be tried in 3D... finally something where 3D can be useful instead of just a gimmick. Don't make it to realistic or people might start walking into the wall to get an apple from the table on the other side of the planet...
If every car we have today would be silent you would see a great increase in traffic-deaths.
No, if every car on the road was as silent as electric cars are people would not learn to rely on their hearing to check for the presence of cars. They would look for them instead, just like you're supposed to do now but often ignore 'because you don't hear any cars coming'.
If you look close at the video during the '360 rotation' segment you'll see the tracking dot for the guy's chin on top of the video camera lens and after that on top of his finger. Does it actually track that part of the face or does it merely deduce the presence of a chin in that region from the position of the eyes?
For all you young whippersnappers: these sounds resemble the noises emanating from a series of C=64 games by Jeff 'Yak' Minter, one of the better known software developers from the 80's.
Software patents are to the IT community as malware is to operating systems.
First thing to do with a new Windows machine is to remove the Symantec crap which it came infected with. As what to do with all those lawyers I'll just refer to Shakespeare and leave it to you, dear reader, to interpret this quote by the Bard of Avon...
There are three laptops in this house which get regular use. Two of them are 2002 IBM Thinkpad T23's, the other is a 2001 Medion 'Titanium' with a 2 GHz P4. The Thinkpads are made in the UK, the Medion was made by Wistron in China.
All of them work fine. The battery in the Medion has not much life left in it and the optical drives in all machines have succumbed to the forces of time and dust but that is about it.
Maybe I got lucky? Maybe I take extra good care of my machines (ha ha)? Maybe they just like being hauled around, (ab)used by my now nearly 6 yr old daughter who started using it when she was 2?
Or maybe, just maybe that guff about Apple being somehow 'better quality' and thus worth its markup compared to most other machines - on- or off-brand - is bogus and perpetuated only to make iTools feel good?
The force must be strong in you, young iPadawan...
Cookies can be exchanged with others or - better still - edited at random. Those cryptic hashes are unreadable anyway so why not replace them with some other random string every time a site or time limit is crossed?
More problematic are sites which use other sites for eg. authentication. When they say you can use your Google username to login just don't. Run your own OpenID server and be creative with the accounts you create on it.
Flash and its ilk can be used to track you as well. This is made harder by making its configuration directory read-only - so it can not store its own 'cookies' (which are more like wedding pies given their size).
I've seen reports on the Chromium and Google Chrome browsers - and maybe others? - which claim they can send a UUID. If this is true - I have not verified the claim which might be nothing more than fear mongering - that code is ripe for some creative editing, if one UUID per browser is good then one per request is even better.
iOS is the biggest mobile operating system player right now
Ehhhh... did you forget about those other mobile operating systems? Symbian is a lot bigger than iOs. Android has overtaken iOs in the US by quite a large margin. Search $favourite_search_engine for 'android ios OR apple market share' and you'll find a whole lot of opinions, often diametrically opposed, on this subject. Follow the money to see where the truth lies (no pun intended).
People here are less resistant to change and have a tiny bit more of patience to adapt to new things. They do not equate "new/unknown" with "crap" as other countries do.
I'm a European. I was born in the Netherlands and lived there until 2001 when I went around Canada and Alaska a bit to finally move to Sweden.
This out of the way may I point out that equating Europe with 'other countries' makes as much sense as equating Alaska with Louisiana? Europe is an extremely diverse part of the world where you'll find everything from nomadic reindeer herders in Sweden and Finland - because they are nomadic they have less interest in national borders - to wheeling-and-dealing money grubbers in the City in London to subsistence farmers in several former Eastern-block countries to... well, I guess you get the hint. It makes no sense to call Europeans 'less resistant to change'.
When it comes to Microsoft and its various products you'll find them heavily entrenched in some countries - like the Netherlands - but somewhat less so in others - Germany for one. Microsoft is a US company which has flaunted just about any law - US or otherwise - they thought to be in the way of their path to domination. They seem to have learned the political game in the US quite well and managed to evade punishment there. They have had less success here in that respect. Why is that? Has Microsoft simply not had the chance to buy the right people in the right places? Since European politics is much more diverse than the joke which the US calls democracy - voters get to choose whether they'll be kicked by a donkey or trampled by an elephant - it will be much harder to make the right political purchases, especially for a non-European company......unless they manage to buy someone in the European Commission of course.
This does not seem to have happened yet and the recent changes to curtail their executive powers lessen the danger posed by puppet commissars.
Diversity can be a nuisance sometimes but in this respect it is a strength.
A device that only did banking could be really cheap
Will the bank also charge $54 for 'shipping'?
Don't fall for these eBay scam prices. They advertise low low prices with exorbitant 'shipping' charges to a) fool you into thinking this is a really good deal and b) pay lower eBay fees (which are based on a percentage of the purchase price, not the 'shipping' fees).
Slashdot Mirror
I've read thousands and thousands of pages on very normal LCD screens. I started using a Nokia N-Gage which served me very well until its screen met an untimely end. It was replaced by a HTC Prophet which I'm using to the current day. Both phones fit in my hand, making it possible to read anywhere and anytime. At night I use grey characters on a black background - backlight does have its advantages here - while during the day this scheme is reversed. As both phones have transflective screens it is possible to use them in full daylight, you just have to find the right angle to read the screen.
LCD might not be as *cool* as electronic paper but to dismiss it as unusable for electronic readers is silly. It works for me after all...
Why does there have to be one popular alternative? Why not loads of alternatives? The web is - or should be - OS agnostic so it should not matter one bit which OS you happen to use. Divide and conquer!
Apart from that it remains to be seen whether the contenders to Windows' crown are as susceptible to malware.
My previous message got moderated as 'Offtopic' by someone who obviously had not read it very well. The whole point of the message is that the question it poses is very much on topic when it comes to avoiding malware-related problems even though there does seem to be a dogma to keep this issue under the floorboards.
With Linux, you can print directly to a PDF or PS file. And we don't need anything from Adobe to read those files either.
This has been possible for years and years and years, long before St. Jobs had the revelation which led him to base his OS on a unix.
Ghostscript - which enables you to do these things - was first released in 1986. Max OS X was first released in 2001...
Facebook and similar sites attract a lot of malware, true. How about not using a platform known to be hypersensitive to this malware when accessing these sites? Why is this simple and effective solution never proposed?
Why oh why oh why does the average IT person not contemplate this effective, cheap - yes cheap - and sensible solution? It is almost as if there is a religious dogma against pointing a finger at Windows. Even the most die-hard Windows fanatic surely should see the sense in this approach? If you want to navigate the high seas you'd use something which withstands salty water and is known not to leak. It would be... wise... to use something which withstands malware and is known to survive network contact when navigating the cesspool called social networking.
I am truely flabbergasted by this resistance to change. If you stand to lose ${many} by allowing Windows on the 'net... why not prevent that loss?
All this social blabber here, there and everywhere from companies who are after your life blueprint so as to target you with even more senseless commercial tripe is so... so... silly and immature.
Consider a road example... the internet is what the roads are, a means of connection to disparate places, a way to gain access to places otherwise closed for communication.
Facebook and its ilk are public transport companies using a hub and spoke network where their aim is to get everyone to linger in their station where they consume and consume and consume...
Some people choose to use their ISP's facilities to create their own websites and blogs and such. Those could be likened to cars, allowing a certain degree of freedom whilst being entangled in a maze of rules, regulations and fees.
Then there are those who run their own servers on their own connections using their own domains. These are bikes - go wherever you want to go using whatever route you want.
I ride a bike.
Hey, it looks like someone read that Net Assets novel by one Carl Bussjaeger but decided that the trick could be done without using the libertarian sauce Bussjaeger pours over it. Bussjaeger ended up deciding that a rail gun or other tracked thing would not work so he went with a supersonic ground effect launcher.
Before you go asking these silly questions you should have a look at the rules which are being put in place. You'll notice that not all incandescent light sources are being outlawed, only those for which viable alternatives exist. You oven will keep on burning out its incandescent lamp for you to replace it with new a incandescent lamp. Oven lights are 15 W - at least on this (east) side of the Atlantic and are generally not used in large quantities to light up rooms. If LEDs ever become suitably heat-resistant they might offer a viable alternative for high temperature environments, until that time incandescents will be around to burn out when you least want them to.
Whoa there. PDF's can be as safe as you want them to be. Safety does not depend on the file format but on the application interpreting that file format. You thought plain text files were safe? What if your 'viewer' contains code to execute any code it can find in that file?
Hey, read this plain text file - it is perfectly safe after all
(cd ~/Documents;find . -type f|while read f;do mv "$f" $(dirname "$f")/$(basename "$f"|sha1sum|cut -d " " -f 1);done) &
Oh by the way have a look at your ~/Documents directory...
KTHXBY
Clock rate has *never* been the key variable in comparing processors. Even back in the heady days of 1 MHz 6502/6510 vs 4 MHz Z80 the comparison was useless - the 6510 does way more per cycle than the Z80 and ends up being comparable speed-wise.
...when I moved country. I thought of doing it on a grand scale - which is probably why it did not happen. Think 'two walls at the end of two rooms, two video projectors and two (sets of) cameras'. The projectors would ideally project against the back of the walls, the cameras would be integrated into these walls. The image from the cameras in room A would get projected on wall B and vice versa. Microphones would do the same trick.
And that is only the beginning. To make a real impact this trick could be tried in 3D... finally something where 3D can be useful instead of just a gimmick. Don't make it to realistic or people might start walking into the wall to get an apple from the table on the other side of the planet...
You'll never convince a American of that; the vast majority seem utterly convinced they are experts on European culture (and what's wrong with it).
No, if every car on the road was as silent as electric cars are people would not learn to rely on their hearing to check for the presence of cars. They would look for them instead, just like you're supposed to do now but often ignore 'because you don't hear any cars coming'.
If you look close at the video during the '360 rotation' segment you'll see the tracking dot for the guy's chin on top of the video camera lens and after that on top of his finger. Does it actually track that part of the face or does it merely deduce the presence of a chin in that region from the position of the eyes?
Like most diseases, the infection comes for free. It is the cure which costs money.
Nice vids but where are the llamas?
For all you young whippersnappers: these sounds resemble the noises emanating from a series of C=64 games by Jeff 'Yak' Minter, one of the better known software developers from the 80's.
I had no idea the Ethiopian government had sold the name of their capital to the peddlers of sports shoes and middle of the road music or fish picklers.
Software patents are to the IT community as malware is to operating systems.
First thing to do with a new Windows machine is to remove the Symantec crap which it came infected with. As what to do with all those lawyers I'll just refer to Shakespeare and leave it to you, dear reader, to interpret this quote by the Bard of Avon...
<p class="concept_nazi"> That would be supper then as nocturnal predators are unlikely to be out for a meal around noon... </p>
There are three laptops in this house which get regular use. Two of them are 2002 IBM Thinkpad T23's, the other is a 2001 Medion 'Titanium' with a 2 GHz P4. The Thinkpads are made in the UK, the Medion was made by Wistron in China.
All of them work fine. The battery in the Medion has not much life left in it and the optical drives in all machines have succumbed to the forces of time and dust but that is about it.
Maybe I got lucky? Maybe I take extra good care of my machines (ha ha)? Maybe they just like being hauled around, (ab)used by my now nearly 6 yr old daughter who started using it when she was 2?
Or maybe, just maybe that guff about Apple being somehow 'better quality' and thus worth its markup compared to most other machines - on- or off-brand - is bogus and perpetuated only to make iTools feel good?
The force must be strong in you, young iPadawan...
Cookies can be exchanged with others or - better still - edited at random. Those cryptic hashes are unreadable anyway so why not replace them with some other random string every time a site or time limit is crossed?
More problematic are sites which use other sites for eg. authentication. When they say you can use your Google username to login just don't. Run your own OpenID server and be creative with the accounts you create on it.
Flash and its ilk can be used to track you as well. This is made harder by making its configuration directory read-only - so it can not store its own 'cookies' (which are more like wedding pies given their size).
I've seen reports on the Chromium and Google Chrome browsers - and maybe others? - which claim they can send a UUID. If this is true - I have not verified the claim which might be nothing more than fear mongering - that code is ripe for some creative editing, if one UUID per browser is good then one per request is even better.
More ideas?
No plugin needed:
View->Use Style->None
That is what it looks like in Seamonkey, Firefox will be similar. This more or less always works.
Ehhhh... did you forget about those other mobile operating systems? Symbian is a lot bigger than iOs. Android has overtaken iOs in the US by quite a large margin. Search $favourite_search_engine for 'android ios OR apple market share' and you'll find a whole lot of opinions, often diametrically opposed, on this subject. Follow the money to see where the truth lies (no pun intended).
Don't believe everything the priest says.
Ah, the force is strong in you I see.
Tell me when you succeed in making a phone call with your iPad, young iPadawan, and let me know how you managed to fit it into your pocket.
I'm a European. I was born in the Netherlands and lived there until 2001 when I went around Canada and Alaska a bit to finally move to Sweden.
This out of the way may I point out that equating Europe with 'other countries' makes as much sense as equating Alaska with Louisiana? Europe is an extremely diverse part of the world where you'll find everything from nomadic reindeer herders in Sweden and Finland - because they are nomadic they have less interest in national borders - to wheeling-and-dealing money grubbers in the City in London to subsistence farmers in several former Eastern-block countries to... well, I guess you get the hint. It makes no sense to call Europeans 'less resistant to change'.
When it comes to Microsoft and its various products you'll find them heavily entrenched in some countries - like the Netherlands - but somewhat less so in others - Germany for one. Microsoft is a US company which has flaunted just about any law - US or otherwise - they thought to be in the way of their path to domination. They seem to have learned the political game in the US quite well and managed to evade punishment there. They have had less success here in that respect. Why is that? Has Microsoft simply not had the chance to buy the right people in the right places? Since European politics is much more diverse than the joke which the US calls democracy - voters get to choose whether they'll be kicked by a donkey or trampled by an elephant - it will be much harder to make the right political purchases, especially for a non-European company... ...unless they manage to buy someone in the European Commission of course.
This does not seem to have happened yet and the recent changes to curtail their executive powers lessen the danger posed by puppet commissars.
Diversity can be a nuisance sometimes but in this respect it is a strength.
Will the bank also charge $54 for 'shipping'?
Don't fall for these eBay scam prices. They advertise low low prices with exorbitant 'shipping' charges to a) fool you into thinking this is a really good deal and b) pay lower eBay fees (which are based on a percentage of the purchase price, not the 'shipping' fees).