I set the alarm clock for 5:40 (EST), and refreshed the order page a few times... but discovered I had to update my PayPal info, so I missed my chance to have the order in at 6:00 am on the dot;)
One thing I'd like this for is to take on my next (very infrequent) plane flight -- the cheapo laptops I have right now have both terrible battery life and more heft than airline trays like. (Oh, and don't open well in that tiny space the airlines call enough room for a passenger.) With the T-Mobile deal, it also means I can take it to the local Borders bookstore.
If I were more employed than indebted, I'd have gotten one for my niece, too; maybe next year they'll have another (next-gen) sale of XOs, if the project is still around.
For the AT keyboard, just get an AT-PS/2 adapter, and (my preference at least) a PS/2 - USB adapter, too. Works great -- that's the sort of setup I'm typing from right now, and it works great:) (Annoyingly, some Linux apps have started to assume that everyone has a "Windows" key on their keyboards, which I don't, but there's always some way to work around this...)
Same here -- if at all possible, I like to be seated next to an actual baby (18 months or smaller, say), both because they tend to be hilarious to watch (if parents don't mind) and because they never steal my armrest. And unless I have a truly terrible headache, if they cry I just try to convert it to singing in my head, which works more often than it sounds like it would.
The T-Mobile deal really does change the equation (in the happy direction), but I was already 98pct intending to get one.
Frankly, there are things I don't like about it (I bet the keyboard may drive me crazy, and I'd much prefer it in colors other than anti-theft green), but as a certified laptop abuser (I am required to disclose certain information to all my neighbors) I hope that it can tolerate my penchant for accidental computer mayhem. The ultra-long battery life is right up there, too (in the eBook mode).
Also, since I think the hardware seems cool enough to be worth $400, full stop, I don't mind getting a warm fuzzy or two about helping send one to Nepal or elsewhere; I'd *rather* buy two for myself (and give the 2d one to my young niece, say) for that money, or get one for $200 instead of $400, but the question of markets is What will the market bear, and at least for me, the asking price is annoyingly well set;)
I've been wiggling back and forth on it... the $400 (buy 2 get 1) OLPC costs nearly as much (really!) as I've made in a semester of TAing for two law-school classes, but I do plan to get one with that money.
Every time I hear anything at all about that movie, I am so glad never to have spent two hours watching it. Is "You can't handle my 28.8 modem" *really* in there, or are you just pulling my leg? And is there a director's cut somewhere where I can watch just the A. Jolie scenes?
Oh, sure -- at some point it made the leap from conventional photography to digital format (after all, we can ogle Lenna on The Innernet now:)), but it was not "a digital photo" in the sense that phrase would be used today -- the "capture" part was well after the creation of the image as an image (via photosensitive chemical film).
Don't mean to niggle -- I just don't think the original photo qualifies as "digital";)
By that I don't mean that the Stix fonts are illegal -- far from it!
What I mean is that the legal profession could use a similarly open-licensed set of fonts for all aspects of the legal process, so that (among other things) it would be one notch* easier to have completely open source case-management / report-creation software at all layers of the legal system. (I'm thinking of American courts, law offices, etc, right now, but not reason why this should apply only within the U.S.)
Something as trivial (and as tangential to content) and which particular font is chosen is one thing that I'd love to see gone. You might be amazed at how difficult it is to computerize even some very busy court systems / law offices (partly because they're busy). I'm doing a clinical at a defender's office with quite a brisk business, and the computer situation is straight out of a Kafka -- lots of PCs are 8 or more years old, there's no reliable Internet service over which to do research (besides which, the computers are so virus-ful that this wouldn't happen anyhow, because browsers don't work on them anyhow. Or, should I say, "browser." Guess which one?) Oh, and installing any superior software is "against policy." Also, offices aroudn the state (New Jersey) are being flopped over to Word, despite everyone preferring an ages-old version of WordPerfect, "for consistency." Goodbye to years of macros -- many documents must be literally retyped.
So most of the above rant has nothing to do with fonts, I realize -- but it does have to do with supporting anything which would ease the replacement of proprietary junkware with something more open on as many fronts as possible.
timothy
* For whatever value of "notch" you think makes sense, that is.
Well, the Lenna pic is commonly used to demonstrate imaging / digitization, but the original image wasn't *captured* digitally, so your above claim makes more sense if you move the closing parenthesis to just after the word "used.":)
There's (naturally) a great Wikipedia article about both Lena / Lenna and that photograph, which says that of the image that "Lenna is so widely accepted in the image processing community that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997."
When I am creating a document that's a) intended for someone who has reason / need to edit it (rather than only read it) and b) is stuck on Microsoft Word like that stupid crush you can't get out of your mind, no matter how destructive.
But mostly I use the.odt default, because it's the default, and I have no reason to do choose something else.
D'oh! Looks like it's been moved to Independence Brew Pub -- which is easier to reach, nice, but I was sort of hoping to see what a self-labeled Dive would look like;)
Surprised there's not one going on in West Philly -- but this makes it an easier bike for me, so I'm not complaining;)
Un-notable authors Emmett Plant and timothy I think will both be at The Dive in Philadelphia on the 23d of this month. (timothy may have to skip some class to get there...)
Thanks for the picture. I can see why the photo got put in an ad -- she's a (very) cute girl! I hope she gets compensated for Virgin's stupidity in exploiting that.
"The hardcore [personal computer] proponents can deny it all they want, the simple fact of the matter is that when the average user sits down with a [personal computer], there are still numerous shortcomings that may make it unacceptable."
I haven't found a system yet without plenty of flaws. Of the readily available, in-production computer operating systems (in the broad sense including window managers etc -- not the C.S. sense) with which I'm familiar enough to have formed *some* opinion, I am least angry most of the time with a nice Debian-based system running Gnome like Ubuntu (or, as of the system I'm typing from, LinuxMint, which makes it a Debian-derived system by way of Ubuntu). Next comes OS X (still plenty of frustrations trying to make it do things that are simple on my Linux machines), and then comes Windows 98/XP. (I haven't tried Vista yet.)
The least acceptable computer I've run into lately is one owned by a retirement-aged distant cousin by marriage. Completely owned (p0wn3d, even) by some garbage-heap subhumans who have decided to accept money to vandalize computers with maliciously installed advertising junk. Never happens (yet!) on my Linux machines. (Not that there couldn't be big enough security hole one day for similar disgusting acts, but I'll keep knocking on wood.)
I bought an iPod in spring (or perhaps late winter) 2005 in order to use it as a portable hard drive, in combination with the little device (Belkin? Kensington?) that gives (Gen III, iirc) iPods the capability of automatically grabbing and storing photos from digital cameras. I was about to go on a trip to China, and no way could I have afforded the memory cards to take as many pictures as I knew I wanted to take in the course of the trip.
(Current iPods I think can all be used to grab photos from cameras this way *without* the additional device. The curse of the not-really-early-adopter;))
After that, I installed Rockbox. Rockbox is not perfect -- the odd crash happens, which is frustrating. But I am unimpressed with the iTunes / ITMS "experience" -- which doesn't mean that other people can't be as happy as the happiest of clams! I see my iPod as a portable hard drive with some audio capabilities, including playing ogg files, which is one thing that the stock iPod doesn't do, and one of the chief reasons I put on Rockbox in the first place. (The other, perhaps bigger reason, is because I prefer mass storage to "managed" storage. I am fickle about computers and operating systems; devices that expect to be plugged into the same machine, or even just one of a handful of machines, over their operational lifespans seem too limited to me.
You're right that it certainly isn't intuitive, but sadly it also doesn't seem to work as you've described it (though I wish it did!)
I just typed a four-item list, like so:
1) I typed "1) alison" and then hit return 2) As I then typed (on the next line) "2) That short 1L student," it did the expected, annoying auto-listmaking behavior, converting my hyphen into a dash, auto-indenting, etc. But this time, I hit cntrl-z immediately, and both reverted to the point I'd like. (So it was looking right, and good, and I was about to praise your tip as exactly what I wanted!) 3) I then typed (on the next line) "3) Claire" -- and all went south. 1) and 2) stayed right where they are, but "3) Claire" was suddenly indented, and "4) Cathy" (which I typed immediately after) was aligned right under the 3).
So maybe it's *supposed* to break the stupid auto-numbering behavior, but it does it in a way uniquely appropriate to the sadistic nonsense that is pseudo-intuitive outlining heuristics:)
Please, please, someone somewhere stop assaulting me with bulleted lists.
When I type "1) rutabagas" and then "2) milk," please, PLEASE, PLEASE don't assume that I want to start a specially formatted chunk of list. Can't I please just use it as a typewriter by default?
Also, just because I've started two lines with a dash, because I'm listing sub-elements, doesn't mean I want you (the program) to start giving them funky alignment. I just started OO.org (I'm using the 2.2 version that comes with Linux Mint 3.0) to make sure I'm not speaking out of turn, and Yep -- if I start a line with "- Natalie," hit return, and start a new line with another dash, it lengthens *both* dashes before I even get a chance to type "Sharona." When I hit return *after* typing Sharona, I get not a blank line, but another stupid dash. WHY WHY WHY WHY? It's moronic as a default. It makes me long for clippy, and I do *not* generally long for clippy. Clippy might at least have said "Hi! It looks like you're making a bulleted list! Would you like me to rearrange your furniture?"
Autobulleting is the worst excuse for a bug that I've ever seen intentionally included as a feature, in OO.org, Office (which is I think even worse than OO.org for this), and I bet in a lot of others. (Congratulations to AbiWord -- I just checked, and it doesn't seem to have that stupid behavior.)
If people want automatic bullets, they should do check a box somewhere that turns them on -- and in case someone else needs to use their machine, I hope there's an easy, visible button that says "END THE MADNESS" or similar.
Now defunct, but WriteNow was the speediest, friendliest word processor around for a long time. I think the whole thing took 4 floppies (the version before the last one I used was on two floppies, I think). If I remember the marketing hype correctly, it was all written in assembly, hence its high speed and good power-weight ratio.
It was originally for the NeXT, I think, then ported to Apple.
Heh, no, I had it backwards -- see this very nice Wikipedia article:) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow This is exactly the sort of thing for which I praise WP about 20 times a day.
Slashdot Mirror
I set the alarm clock for 5:40 (EST), and refreshed the order page a few times ... but discovered I had to update my PayPal info, so I missed my chance to have the order in at 6:00 am on the dot ;)
One thing I'd like this for is to take on my next (very infrequent) plane flight -- the cheapo laptops I have right now have both terrible battery life and more heft than airline trays like. (Oh, and don't open well in that tiny space the airlines call enough room for a passenger.) With the T-Mobile deal, it also means I can take it to the local Borders bookstore.
If I were more employed than indebted, I'd have gotten one for my niece, too; maybe next year they'll have another (next-gen) sale of XOs, if the project is still around.
timothy
For the AT keyboard, just get an AT-PS/2 adapter, and (my preference at least) a PS/2 - USB adapter, too. Works great -- that's the sort of setup I'm typing from right now, and it works great :) (Annoyingly, some Linux apps have started to assume that everyone has a "Windows" key on their keyboards, which I don't, but there's always some way to work around this ...)
timothy
Same here -- if at all possible, I like to be seated next to an actual baby (18 months or smaller, say), both because they tend to be hilarious to watch (if parents don't mind) and because they never steal my armrest. And unless I have a truly terrible headache, if they cry I just try to convert it to singing in my head, which works more often than it sounds like it would.
timothy
The T-Mobile deal really does change the equation (in the happy direction), but I was already 98pct intending to get one.
;)
Frankly, there are things I don't like about it (I bet the keyboard may drive me crazy, and I'd much prefer it in colors other than anti-theft green), but as a certified laptop abuser (I am required to disclose certain information to all my neighbors) I hope that it can tolerate my penchant for accidental computer mayhem. The ultra-long battery life is right up there, too (in the eBook mode).
Also, since I think the hardware seems cool enough to be worth $400, full stop, I don't mind getting a warm fuzzy or two about helping send one to Nepal or elsewhere; I'd *rather* buy two for myself (and give the 2d one to my young niece, say) for that money, or get one for $200 instead of $400, but the question of markets is What will the market bear, and at least for me, the asking price is annoyingly well set
timothy
I've been wiggling back and forth on it ... the $400 (buy 2 get 1) OLPC costs nearly as much (really!) as I've made in a semester of TAing for two law-school classes, but I do plan to get one with that money.
Are you planning to get one? Why / Why not?
timothy
Every time I hear anything at all about that movie, I am so glad never to have spent two hours watching it. Is "You can't handle my 28.8 modem" *really* in there, or are you just pulling my leg? And is there a director's cut somewhere where I can watch just the A. Jolie scenes?
timothy
Just pay for a Slashdot subscription :)
timothy
Oh, sure -- at some point it made the leap from conventional photography to digital format (after all, we can ogle Lenna on The Innernet now :)), but it was not "a digital photo" in the sense that phrase would be used today -- the "capture" part was well after the creation of the image as an image (via photosensitive chemical film).
;)
Don't mean to niggle -- I just don't think the original photo qualifies as "digital"
timothy
By that I don't mean that the Stix fonts are illegal -- far from it!
What I mean is that the legal profession could use a similarly open-licensed set of fonts for all aspects of the legal process, so that (among other things) it would be one notch* easier to have completely open source case-management / report-creation software at all layers of the legal system. (I'm thinking of American courts, law offices, etc, right now, but not reason why this should apply only within the U.S.)
Something as trivial (and as tangential to content) and which particular font is chosen is one thing that I'd love to see gone. You might be amazed at how difficult it is to computerize even some very busy court systems / law offices (partly because they're busy). I'm doing a clinical at a defender's office with quite a brisk business, and the computer situation is straight out of a Kafka -- lots of PCs are 8 or more years old, there's no reliable Internet service over which to do research (besides which, the computers are so virus-ful that this wouldn't happen anyhow, because browsers don't work on them anyhow. Or, should I say, "browser." Guess which one?) Oh, and installing any superior software is "against policy." Also, offices aroudn the state (New Jersey) are being flopped over to Word, despite everyone preferring an ages-old version of WordPerfect, "for consistency." Goodbye to years of macros -- many documents must be literally retyped.
So most of the above rant has nothing to do with fonts, I realize -- but it does have to do with supporting anything which would ease the replacement of proprietary junkware with something more open on as many fronts as possible.
timothy
* For whatever value of "notch" you think makes sense, that is.
Well, the Lenna pic is commonly used to demonstrate imaging / digitization, but the original image wasn't *captured* digitally, so your above claim makes more sense if you move the closing parenthesis to just after the word "used." :)
There's (naturally) a great Wikipedia article about both Lena / Lenna and that photograph, which says that of the image that "Lenna is so widely accepted in the image processing community that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997."
timothy
When I am creating a document that's a) intended for someone who has reason / need to edit it (rather than only read it) and b) is stuck on Microsoft Word like that stupid crush you can't get out of your mind, no matter how destructive.
.odt default, because it's the default, and I have no reason to do choose something else.
But mostly I use the
timothy
Also good have been Durgan Park ... a place I've been to once, and enjoyed, but found pretty overrated for the price.
timothy
... that this is the one fish poison I'll want to take all year?
(Think of the Eskimo market!)
timothy
(Yes, yes -- "Inuit," among other words.)
D'oh again -- looks like Independence Brew Pub went belly up, at least according to a post on the page for the Philly party.
:)
So I guess it will be someplace else!
timothy
D'oh! Looks like it's been moved to Independence Brew Pub -- which is easier to reach, nice, but I was sort of hoping to see what a self-labeled Dive would look like ;)
;)
Surprised there's not one going on in West Philly -- but this makes it an easier bike for me, so I'm not complaining
Cheers,
timothy
Un-notable authors Emmett Plant and timothy I think will both be at The Dive in Philadelphia on the 23d of this month. (timothy may have to skip some class to get there ...)
That is all.
timothy
"Is the Internet Bad for Professional Writers"
:)
I am not sure -- did the professional writers get so mad at the Internet that they stole all the closing punctuation marks
If so, will they sell them back once the market conditions are right
I sure hope so
timothy
which also fit into a briefcase.
...)
(In the category "Things I want vs. things I need"
timothy
Thanks for the picture. I can see why the photo got put in an ad -- she's a (very) cute girl! I hope she gets compensated for Virgin's stupidity in exploiting that.
timothy
The ACLU has (perhaps rarely, but still) occasionally defended gun rights; recently in Texas, for instance.
See http://www.theppsc.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1836
Cheers,
timothy
Could be rephrased for generality:
"The hardcore [personal computer] proponents can deny it all they want, the simple fact of the matter is that when the average user sits down with a [personal computer], there are still numerous shortcomings that may make it unacceptable."
I haven't found a system yet without plenty of flaws. Of the readily available, in-production computer operating systems (in the broad sense including window managers etc -- not the C.S. sense) with which I'm familiar enough to have formed *some* opinion, I am least angry most of the time with a nice Debian-based system running Gnome like Ubuntu (or, as of the system I'm typing from, LinuxMint, which makes it a Debian-derived system by way of Ubuntu). Next comes OS X (still plenty of frustrations trying to make it do things that are simple on my Linux machines), and then comes Windows 98/XP. (I haven't tried Vista yet.)
The least acceptable computer I've run into lately is one owned by a retirement-aged distant cousin by marriage. Completely owned (p0wn3d, even) by some garbage-heap subhumans who have decided to accept money to vandalize computers with maliciously installed advertising junk. Never happens (yet!) on my Linux machines. (Not that there couldn't be big enough security hole one day for similar disgusting acts, but I'll keep knocking on wood.)
timothy
I bought an iPod in spring (or perhaps late winter) 2005 in order to use it as a portable hard drive, in combination with the little device (Belkin? Kensington?) that gives (Gen III, iirc) iPods the capability of automatically grabbing and storing photos from digital cameras. I was about to go on a trip to China, and no way could I have afforded the memory cards to take as many pictures as I knew I wanted to take in the course of the trip.
;))
(Current iPods I think can all be used to grab photos from cameras this way *without* the additional device. The curse of the not-really-early-adopter
After that, I installed Rockbox. Rockbox is not perfect -- the odd crash happens, which is frustrating. But I am unimpressed with the iTunes / ITMS "experience" -- which doesn't mean that other people can't be as happy as the happiest of clams! I see my iPod as a portable hard drive with some audio capabilities, including playing ogg files, which is one thing that the stock iPod doesn't do, and one of the chief reasons I put on Rockbox in the first place. (The other, perhaps bigger reason, is because I prefer mass storage to "managed" storage. I am fickle about computers and operating systems; devices that expect to be plugged into the same machine, or even just one of a handful of machines, over their operational lifespans seem too limited to me.
Cheers,
timothy
You're right that it certainly isn't intuitive, but sadly it also doesn't seem to work as you've described it (though I wish it did!)
:)
I just typed a four-item list, like so:
1) I typed "1) alison" and then hit return
2) As I then typed (on the next line) "2) That short 1L student," it did the expected, annoying auto-listmaking behavior, converting my hyphen into a dash, auto-indenting, etc. But this time, I hit cntrl-z immediately, and both reverted to the point I'd like. (So it was looking right, and good, and I was about to praise your tip as exactly what I wanted!)
3) I then typed (on the next line) "3) Claire" -- and all went south. 1) and 2) stayed right where they are, but "3) Claire" was suddenly indented, and "4) Cathy" (which I typed immediately after) was aligned right under the 3).
So maybe it's *supposed* to break the stupid auto-numbering behavior, but it does it in a way uniquely appropriate to the sadistic nonsense that is pseudo-intuitive outlining heuristics
Ah, well!
Cheers,
timothy
Please, please, someone somewhere stop assaulting me with bulleted lists.
When I type "1) rutabagas" and then "2) milk," please, PLEASE, PLEASE don't assume that I want to start a specially formatted chunk of list. Can't I please just use it as a typewriter by default?
Also, just because I've started two lines with a dash, because I'm listing sub-elements, doesn't mean I want you (the program) to start giving them funky alignment. I just started OO.org (I'm using the 2.2 version that comes with Linux Mint 3.0) to make sure I'm not speaking out of turn, and Yep -- if I start a line with "- Natalie," hit return, and start a new line with another dash, it lengthens *both* dashes before I even get a chance to type "Sharona." When I hit return *after* typing Sharona, I get not a blank line, but another stupid dash. WHY WHY WHY WHY? It's moronic as a default. It makes me long for clippy, and I do *not* generally long for clippy. Clippy might at least have said "Hi! It looks like you're making a bulleted list! Would you like me to rearrange your furniture?"
Autobulleting is the worst excuse for a bug that I've ever seen intentionally included as a feature, in OO.org, Office (which is I think even worse than OO.org for this), and I bet in a lot of others. (Congratulations to AbiWord -- I just checked, and it doesn't seem to have that stupid behavior.)
If people want automatic bullets, they should do check a box somewhere that turns them on -- and in case someone else needs to use their machine, I hope there's an easy, visible button that says "END THE MADNESS" or similar.
Ahem.
timothy
Now defunct, but WriteNow was the speediest, friendliest word processor around for a long time. I think the whole thing took 4 floppies (the version before the last one I used was on two floppies, I think). If I remember the marketing hype correctly, it was all written in assembly, hence its high speed and good power-weight ratio.
:) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow This is exactly the sort of thing for which I praise WP about 20 times a day.
It was originally for the NeXT, I think, then ported to Apple.
Heh, no, I had it backwards -- see this very nice Wikipedia article
Tim