I'm in the same (or a similar) boat, awaiting the rising tide...
The used-to-be-ThinkPad background of the Lenovo laptop line is probably the biggest reason this one is high on the list -- I'm hoping the keyboard on this will be more tolerable than for instance that on the early EEE (I will *not* tempt fate to say it could hardly be worse); the Acer Aspire One is very similarly specced / priced, but I read yesterday that Acer's planning to sell a 6-cell battery for (ack!) $130, which strikes me as a poor bargain. If only this was still IBM / ThinkPad branded, there'd be good reason to hope for lots of 3d-party accessories. Right now I'm just trying to anticipate which of the various near-identical cheap subnotebooks will have the greatest network effects, specifically thinking of battery price / watt hour.
As the recipient, I hate voice mail. I ask people not to leave voicemail. Voicemail sucks. If I could pick up the phone I would; since I can't, I'll call you back when I *can.*
I know this is annoying to callers; I know that leaving a message is now a pretty normal thing, and consequently people are expected to listen to messages regularly, etc. That is, if someone's phone greeting is "Please leave a message at the tone!", then leaving a message it would seem should reach them. So I try to at least have an honest voice message which requests that callers *not* leave a message. But Yes, there are times when leaving a message is the only rational thing on the part of the caller ("My battery is dying, my camel is dragging me out of reception range, I am trapped in the desert, please come get me.") and that's just an annoyance of life. I am not insensitive to this, just don't have a good solution.
HOWEVER: Usually, I'm more likely to (quickly) check email than voice mail, because most voice messages are rambly time wasters; if I have to listen to voice messages, what I'd like is an MP3 or similar sound file, sent as an email with associated caller info, rather than the voice-mail blob of goo, in which people leave long, wandering missives, often without well identifying themselves. Even better, email with accompanying text derived from speech recognition. Even if it's crazily rough-edged, this would be useful.
You're right; it was an off-the-cuff comment. At greater length: I don't usually care for video games of the kind that actually require high-end hardware to play. I did like Aztek quite a bit on the C64, though:)
I enjoy the Scrabble-alike game on Facebook (Scrabulous) quite a bit, and before that, eScrabble (RIP). But the Wii Fit actually looks fun enough that it overcomes my natural anti-video-game skepticism.
Cheers,
timothy
One easy thing they could do: nix some char sets
on
Spammers Choose GMail
·
· Score: 1
Hey, if your character set (or any of your character sets) is non-Roman, this wouldn't apply -- sorry.
But for me, I can't read Arabic, or Sanscrit, or Farsi, or any language written using Cyrillic... and gmail's masters should be smart enough to let me exclude character sets I don't want or need. I would imagine that most people could name one, or a small set, of character sets that are likely to apply, and specify exceptions as appropriate. But every time I get Cyrillic spam, I think dark thoughts about easy-to-automate solutions.
Since this is a fantastic and unimpeachable idea, I have decided to create a FAQ about it, consisting only of questions I have just asked myself in the same voice I use to imitate cats and babies:
Q: Would spammers try to get around it? A: Yes; they are spammers.
Q: Would there be complications and annoyance? A: Quite possibly; they are the spammers' fault.
A: Should one suffer a spammer to live? Q: Only at your own peril.
Errr... actually, I've kept safely away from the computer in question by the convenient means of never having met nor spoken to the fellow who submitted the question. So I guess it's POSSIBLE that I've already have this strain and am immune, but the odds are lower than you might think;)
Maybe as an parable, it's good, but the "space pen vs. the humble Russian pencil" has been widely debunked as an urban legend. Still an interesting pen!
Lots of fun things you can imagine doing with this:)
Gather as many cellphones as possible (from cooperating friends etc). Put them all in a small basket.
Have them visit for a while in... the dressing room at Victoria's Secret / Stall 3 in the bathroom at Baskin Robbins / the service elevator in any place you can find with a service elevator.
Or just have people do a lot of trading, so person A keeps visiting place 3, over and over and over. (Also works with grocery loyalty oath cards.)
Have a massive "appearance" / "disappearance" fest. Hey! 50 people just appeared inside Best Buy! No... no, wait, they didn't. Errr... 50 people just appeared spaced in a grid around the parking lot! No, they've disappeared.
Two of my favorite / most-used extensions are DownloadHelpder and TabsOpenRelative.
Both of them are broken in this new RC. I installed it (before knowing that), and at least it was kind enough to say after the update was complete that a) these extensions don't work and b) that the program would seek updates periodically to find if a new version *does* work.
Would have been a lot handier to know that up-front though; I wouldn't have done the upgrade, actually, if I'd known that.
I put Opera on my XO a few days ago, which turns it from a really *neat* device to a really *useful* one.
I would rather run software freer than Opera currently is, but I also (esp. on a device like the XO, where switching tasks is notably slow) want to have tabs in my browser. Right now, as far as I know, Opera's the only way to get that -- but I'd rather it be Firefox, because of the extensions, muscle memory for shortcuts and menus, etc.
I really like the idea of PDFedit, but... on several different machines, I have found it slow and crashy. I hope that it's improved since then (last tried something like 6 months ago), but I'm glad to hear about PDF Import for OO.org. If it works *well* (or even pretty well), it would be a killer feature for me.
"One out of five laptops that your friend sells now have LINUX on them instead of the Windows operating system."
Hi! I agree with your thesis, but as I read the post to which you're responding, it's actually one out of six, rather than one out of five. (a five-to-one ratio.):)
Operating systems matter much less than do *file formats* -- and the success of the EEE, as you're pointing out, is proof that people can work with "Linux" (that is, a particular flavor of it, with a certain look) without all that much adjustment.
1) I used to work at an ad agency (a quite cool agency, as such things go, by the way -- see t-3t-3.com), where I worked mostly on projects that came in feast-or-famine style; there would often be stretches of hours where we were mostly in holding mode, waiting for writers to write, managers to manage, lawyers to dissemble, etc. At this time, I was living in a house in Austin where the other three guys in the house were two computer science students and an engineer; they showed me Slashdot, and I was hooked.
2) Then, I got a job with Slashdot, which paid somewhat more and had some other benefits as well, like getting to meet in person some of the geniuses who pump out the free software I like to use. (This step won't work for everyone, though.)
"In fact, I think I'll use my Florida permit next time I fly as my "state issued picture ID".:)"
Though there are some who argue that concealed carry permit holders should be ultra-secretive about the fact that they have this permit, I think it's an excellent thing to use anytime someone demands a "state-issued ID" or "government ID." a) it's confusing to people who don't realize they exist, which (sadly) is a pretty big group b) it's informative to those same people, might get some of them thinking about it.
No, not a joke -- thanks for that link! I have never played the actual game, but from screenshots and descriptions, I know that I *want* to play TBG:) Awesome!
a) it's amusing to see people clamor for the "good old days" when "brick" meant a very specific form of computer disablement. Yes, those were the days, long ago, perhaps even before the television writers' strike began, why way back in... aw, heck, you can't expect me to believe quite *that* far back, can you? I imagine a cadre of formerly peaceful hippies in a battle to the death on the proper etymology of "roach," and whether a joint which can still be successfully smoked while held between the fingers is or is not technically a roach.
b) Brick clearly means more than "a small glitch in a basically working device," but "renders useless until a complete system re-install" doesn't seem too crazy; I've seen this use many times, esp. wrt gadgets whose firmware can be replaced with firmware. It's certainly used sometimes to refer to the kind of situation where (as here) the device becomes a doorstop until a complete new system image is installed.
You can choose to fixate on the word (hey, it's a free world!:)), but there's some evidence that not everyone agrees that a bricking is forever.
And if anyone would like to argue some sort of Ur-grammar definition into "brick" in the hyper-recent use to refer to borked electronics, complain about how today's kids aren't true enough to their l447sp3@k roots, may I introduce the brick (older meaning).
Proj. Gutenberg is great, but (sticking to books that are not found in mysterious warez channels!) there are two other good choices I've hit lately and recommend:
1) manybooks.net (not.org, as I'd remembered it;)) -- just downloaded quite a few childhood favorites (Bobbsey Twins!), but not everything on it is old; for instance, I look forward to reading The Hacker Crackdown, which B. Sterling kindly allowed them to host.
2) Scribd -- http://www.scribd.com/ unbelievable assortment; I think it's been called "YouTube for PDFs," and if not, there just called it that.
There are also quite a few random ebooks out there hosted online by their authors or with their permission; I *think* Baen has lots of books like this online. In the Beginning Was the Command Line used to be up, though it looks like Harper Collins has changed Cryptonomicon.com to be just a plug for the book by that name. (Nothing wrong with that, though! Good marketing.) Read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, PDF from https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml, and Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do from http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/aint/ This last is not a downloadable eBook, but rather the entire content of the (compelling!) book online; that (I assert) is a good argument for the OLPC XO.
However, my XO came in the mail yesterday, so you can count me biased if you please;) I got it in large part as an eBook reader, and so far I am very impressed with its capabilities. The keyboard is small (tiny!), but it beats the one on the Kindle, and it beats the one (that isn't) on the Sony even worse;) It also has a color screen when you want one, and all the other goodies that the XO comes with.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in the same (or a similar) boat, awaiting the rising tide ...
The used-to-be-ThinkPad background of the Lenovo laptop line is probably the biggest reason this one is high on the list -- I'm hoping the keyboard on this will be more tolerable than for instance that on the early EEE (I will *not* tempt fate to say it could hardly be worse); the Acer Aspire One is very similarly specced / priced, but I read yesterday that Acer's planning to sell a 6-cell battery for (ack!) $130, which strikes me as a poor bargain. If only this was still IBM / ThinkPad branded, there'd be good reason to hope for lots of 3d-party accessories. Right now I'm just trying to anticipate which of the various near-identical cheap subnotebooks will have the greatest network effects, specifically thinking of battery price / watt hour.
timothy
Now that this problem has been addressed, what about a quick essay on how to fix the poor usability of non-Free software?
timothy
As the recipient, I hate voice mail. I ask people not to leave voicemail. Voicemail sucks. If I could pick up the phone I would; since I can't, I'll call you back when I *can.*
I know this is annoying to callers; I know that leaving a message is now a pretty normal thing, and consequently people are expected to listen to messages regularly, etc. That is, if someone's phone greeting is "Please leave a message at the tone!", then leaving a message it would seem should reach them. So I try to at least have an honest voice message which requests that callers *not* leave a message. But Yes, there are times when leaving a message is the only rational thing on the part of the caller ("My battery is dying, my camel is dragging me out of reception range, I am trapped in the desert, please come get me.") and that's just an annoyance of life. I am not insensitive to this, just don't have a good solution.
HOWEVER: Usually, I'm more likely to (quickly) check email than voice mail, because most voice messages are rambly time wasters; if I have to listen to voice messages, what I'd like is an MP3 or similar sound file, sent as an email with associated caller info, rather than the voice-mail blob of goo, in which people leave long, wandering missives, often without well identifying themselves. Even better, email with accompanying text derived from speech recognition. Even if it's crazily rough-edged, this would be useful.
timothy
You're right; it was an off-the-cuff comment. At greater length: I don't usually care for video games of the kind that actually require high-end hardware to play. I did like Aztek quite a bit on the C64, though :)
I enjoy the Scrabble-alike game on Facebook (Scrabulous) quite a bit, and before that, eScrabble (RIP). But the Wii Fit actually looks fun enough that it overcomes my natural anti-video-game skepticism.
Cheers,
timothy
Hey, if your character set (or any of your character sets) is non-Roman, this wouldn't apply -- sorry.
But for me, I can't read Arabic, or Sanscrit, or Farsi, or any language written using Cyrillic ... and gmail's masters should be smart enough to let me exclude character sets I don't want or need. I would imagine that most people could name one, or a small set, of character sets that are likely to apply, and specify exceptions as appropriate. But every time I get Cyrillic spam, I think dark thoughts about easy-to-automate solutions.
Since this is a fantastic and unimpeachable idea, I have decided to create a FAQ about it, consisting only of questions I have just asked myself in the same voice I use to imitate cats and babies:
Q: Would spammers try to get around it?
A: Yes; they are spammers.
Q: Would there be complications and annoyance?
A: Quite possibly; they are the spammers' fault.
A: Should one suffer a spammer to live?
Q: Only at your own peril.
timothy
Errr ... actually, I've kept safely away from the computer in question by the convenient means of never having met nor spoken to the fellow who submitted the question. So I guess it's POSSIBLE that I've already have this strain and am immune, but the odds are lower than you might think ;)
Cheers,
timothy
Maybe as an parable, it's good, but the "space pen vs. the humble Russian pencil" has been widely debunked as an urban legend. Still an interesting pen!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
timothy
This is truly insensitive.
Please phrase weights in "stone," or "oxenweight."
Thanks!
timothy
"There is only one american politician that I can think of that didn't rise to power by stepping on people on the way up and it's not Obama."
You have left *this* as an excercise for the reader? Ay carumba!
timothy
Well, I went to law school, and it just sort of got dropped as a priority during that time :)
Perhaps it'll return one day -- or not.
timothy
Yep -- I teared up reading some of these. This helps erase my envy of people's Denon DJ setups with matched pitch-controlled CD players :)
timothy
I thought so at first, too, but in depressing fact, that's the real price from Denon.
:)
And it looks like you save 100 pennies if you order from Denon rather than Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM
The reviews are hilarious
timothy
Lots of fun things you can imagine doing with this :)
... the dressing room at Victoria's Secret / Stall 3 in the bathroom at Baskin Robbins / the service elevator in any place you can find with a service elevator.
... no, wait, they didn't. Errr ... 50 people just appeared spaced in a grid around the parking lot! No, they've disappeared.
Gather as many cellphones as possible (from cooperating friends etc). Put them all in a small basket.
Have them visit for a while in
Or just have people do a lot of trading, so person A keeps visiting place 3, over and over and over. (Also works with grocery loyalty oath cards.)
Have a massive "appearance" / "disappearance" fest. Hey! 50 people just appeared inside Best Buy! No
timothy
Two of my favorite / most-used extensions are DownloadHelpder and TabsOpenRelative.
Both of them are broken in this new RC. I installed it (before knowing that), and at least it was kind enough to say after the update was complete that a) these extensions don't work and b) that the program would seek updates periodically to find if a new version *does* work.
Would have been a lot handier to know that up-front though; I wouldn't have done the upgrade, actually, if I'd known that.
timothy
You're thinking of Steve Roberts, and you're right -- even if it didn't look quite as (intentionally) goofy, he was way ahead on this stuff.
http://microship.com/flotilla/skr.html
timothy
Mea culpa for not spotting that and fixing before. My weak excuse, but real: higher-res screen than I've ever used before, and tighter pixels.
For the rest of the day, I've bumped up the font size a bit.
timothy
I put Opera on my XO a few days ago, which turns it from a really *neat* device to a really *useful* one.
I would rather run software freer than Opera currently is, but I also (esp. on a device like the XO, where switching tasks is notably slow) want to have tabs in my browser. Right now, as far as I know, Opera's the only way to get that -- but I'd rather it be Firefox, because of the extensions, muscle memory for shortcuts and menus, etc.
timothy
I really like the idea of PDFedit, but ... on several different machines, I have found it slow and crashy. I hope that it's improved since then (last tried something like 6 months ago), but I'm glad to hear about PDF Import for OO.org. If it works *well* (or even pretty well), it would be a killer feature for me.
timothy
"One out of five laptops that your friend sells now have LINUX on them instead of the Windows operating system."
:)
Hi! I agree with your thesis, but as I read the post to which you're responding, it's actually one out of six, rather than one out of five. (a five-to-one ratio.)
Operating systems matter much less than do *file formats* -- and the success of the EEE, as you're pointing out, is proof that people can work with "Linux" (that is, a particular flavor of it, with a certain look) without all that much adjustment.
timothy
1) I used to work at an ad agency (a quite cool agency, as such things go, by the way -- see t-3t-3.com), where I worked mostly on projects that came in feast-or-famine style; there would often be stretches of hours where we were mostly in holding mode, waiting for writers to write, managers to manage, lawyers to dissemble, etc. At this time, I was living in a house in Austin where the other three guys in the house were two computer science students and an engineer; they showed me Slashdot, and I was hooked.
2) Then, I got a job with Slashdot, which paid somewhat more and had some other benefits as well, like getting to meet in person some of the geniuses who pump out the free software I like to use. (This step won't work for everyone, though.)
timothy
"In fact, I think I'll use my Florida permit next time I fly as my "state issued picture ID". :)"
Though there are some who argue that concealed carry permit holders should be ultra-secretive about the fact that they have this permit, I think it's an excellent thing to use anytime someone demands a "state-issued ID" or "government ID." a) it's confusing to people who don't realize they exist, which (sadly) is a pretty big group b) it's informative to those same people, might get some of them thinking about it.
timothy
Hey, what would you say to another Slashdot interview so you could answer more questions at greater leisure? :)
timothy
No, not a joke -- thanks for that link! I have never played the actual game, but from screenshots and descriptions, I know that I *want* to play TBG :) Awesome!
timothy
a) it's amusing to see people clamor for the "good old days" when "brick" meant a very specific form of computer disablement. Yes, those were the days, long ago, perhaps even before the television writers' strike began, why way back in ... aw, heck, you can't expect me to believe quite *that* far back, can you? I imagine a cadre of formerly peaceful hippies in a battle to the death on the proper etymology of "roach," and whether a joint which can still be successfully smoked while held between the fingers is or is not technically a roach.
:)), but there's some evidence that not everyone agrees that a bricking is forever.
b) Brick clearly means more than "a small glitch in a basically working device," but "renders useless until a complete system re-install" doesn't seem too crazy; I've seen this use many times, esp. wrt gadgets whose firmware can be replaced with firmware. It's certainly used sometimes to refer to the kind of situation where (as here) the device becomes a doorstop until a complete new system image is installed.
You can choose to fixate on the word (hey, it's a free world!
And if anyone would like to argue some sort of Ur-grammar definition into "brick" in the hyper-recent use to refer to borked electronics, complain about how today's kids aren't true enough to their l447sp3@k roots, may I introduce the brick (older meaning).
Proj. Gutenberg is great, but (sticking to books that are not found in mysterious warez channels!) there are two other good choices I've hit lately and recommend:
.org, as I'd remembered it ;)) -- just downloaded quite a few childhood favorites (Bobbsey Twins!), but not everything on it is old; for instance, I look forward to reading The Hacker Crackdown, which B. Sterling kindly allowed them to host.
;) I got it in large part as an eBook reader, and so far I am very impressed with its capabilities. The keyboard is small (tiny!), but it beats the one on the Kindle, and it beats the one (that isn't) on the Sony even worse ;) It also has a color screen when you want one, and all the other goodies that the XO comes with.
1) manybooks.net (not
2) Scribd -- http://www.scribd.com/ unbelievable assortment; I think it's been called "YouTube for PDFs," and if not, there just called it that.
There are also quite a few random ebooks out there hosted online by their authors or with their permission; I *think* Baen has lots of books like this online. In the Beginning Was the Command Line used to be up, though it looks like Harper Collins has changed Cryptonomicon.com to be just a plug for the book by that name. (Nothing wrong with that, though! Good marketing.) Read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, PDF from https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml, and Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do from http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/aint/ This last is not a downloadable eBook, but rather the entire content of the (compelling!) book online; that (I assert) is a good argument for the OLPC XO.
However, my XO came in the mail yesterday, so you can count me biased if you please
timothy