I'm glad that my digital photos don't all take up 19TB apiece -- but I am puzzled by the idea that I should be complacent with a given MP number as "good enough." I want shots that are infinitely detailed, and (at least in the area of interest) infinitely sharp. Since neither of these is an available option, I've got to settle for for "sharp enough that I can stand it" and "as detailed as the lens and sensor let me get."
Doesn't everyone at some point end up cropping their digital photos, and hitting the jaggies? The main reason I'd like more (and more and more) resolution is because I don't *know* how big I want that photo to be shown in the future, and I don't know if cousin Vinny has a hilarious expression on his face that will be lost in the haze at 5MP but might be a treasure at 10MP...
The idea that 8 or 10 MP is "enough" and that now everyone can just go home and be happy isn't completely groundless (we've certainly reached a point where "more pixels" isn't the main thing being sought by camera buyers), but it's only true while other things (sensor designs, storage capacity, cheap-yet-bright-and-not-too-heavy lenses) catch up and remind us that data uncaptured is data that can't be restored.
I'm sort of hoping that mid-range DSLRs hit 12MP in the next 2 years, and that Pentax still makes one that runs on AA batteries;)
If I ran a firm that specialized in aggressive defense of property rights as construed to protect titled owners rather than (for instance) squatters, would I want to keep an avowed communist, or pro-squatter of any kind, on the payroll? Probably not.
What if that communist squatter (hey, pile it on!) was in fact the best person in the firm at pursuing the cases we undertook, and managed to set aside his personal beliefs / leanings / preferences in order to zealously prosecute his job? The probably not might become only a "maybe." (And I'd suggest this person get counseling, or some ulcer medication.) I might choose to have a "less effective" total team of staffers (in one dimension) if it meant that people agreed on basic principles of what they did (meaning perhaps a more effective total team in another sense).
Point is, that's something that should be left to the discretion of the one doing the hiring, WHEN THE CONTEXT IS PRIVATE.
When it's public, that's a far different thing. I'd be pretty bristly if the government required everyone with a government job to take a specific, narrow political view.
a) Kudos for saying something which frequently gets the kind of (sarcastic) response that this already has. It's heresy to many to suggest that OS X (not that there's anything wrong with that) is not necessarily the very best thing out there in the world, the be-all-end-all unix/unix-like OS. I use OO.o all the time (grad school, sshhh, don't tell anyone I'm not using the required Word or WordPerfect:)), and it's a shame that it's less available for OS X.
b) re the 2d-class citizen status, well, there is a full-fledged version of Ubuntu for PPC, which I know works well on G3s and G4s, not sure about G5s... it's been the OS on my 500MHz G3 iBook for the last year-or-so, and for me, it beats OS X. YMMV:) Red Hat recently promised RH for the new Intel Macs, which of course means nothing until it arrives, but I'd be surprised if RH, Debian / variants, Gentoo and more don't soon have versions for that hardware.
Hey disease researchers! I know where this virus is living! There are hordes of afflicted wandering around Philadelphia! Perhaps this has to do with the city's justified reputation (though one that's contested by other cities craving the honor) as the home of modern movie-style zombies. Makes sense to me... after you're zombified, well, you're hungry!
a) By starting a note that's admittedly pedantic, I open myself to close scrutiny which may reveal the various mistakes I have inserted into this message as a test.
b) Contracts generally *are* "verbal" -- and I say "generally" only because I can't think of any exceptions offhand. *Oral* contracts are different, though they're sometimes valid, too. Ask me again after I finish law school;)
As others have noted, Flying J's service definitely doesn't require Windows or IE. It's also gotten better; I used to have a lot of trouble logging in with anything other than IE, actually, and luckily still had it on the OS X partition of my iBook's drive (which itself I luckily still had at that point;)).
However, the big problem was actually reaching the login page itself; that login / signup page was reached by automatic redirection when you tried to attach to the wireless network. That is, you'd start your browser (IE, especially) and would after a minute or so, instead of whatever home page you would get on an open network, see the login screen instead. This had an address something like https://highpeedl/ogin/tonservices.com, and from that page you could sign up (or sign in), pay for more time, etc.
After that step was done, you could connect to any program which needed the connection -- it was just the establishment that was a pain. So I could use Mozilla, after connecting through IE.
I found that by bookmarking the actual login page address in Mozilla though, the problem went away: though automatic redirection didn't work under Mozilla (so you couldn't reach that login page by trying to hit google, say), by going straight to the login page, all was fine.
However, like I said, that was then. Now, I've had no problem with automatic redirection or logging in with an iBook running Ubuntu linux (it's an old iBook, and the original Airport works just fine with Ubuntu), and the biggest problem is that the coverage footprint at Flying Js is often poor.
I still spend too much time reading Slashdot, though no longer posting stories to the site. I wrote up a little thing (long ago -- itself quite flawed, but I hope useful nonetheless) about how to make a story submission which is likely to be accepted on the site. No promises, but... whaddya want, this *is* Slashdot:)
Aw, he was just sayin' that because he was such a gentleman.
And cleverly said, too -- "Why Elizabeth, you are every bit as attractive as a much younger woman, just as soon as I put this giant basket over the top half of your body and extinguish all the lights..."
timothy
I can't be the only one to switch day to day :)
on
KDE 3.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Gnome: Awesome! KDE: Wonderful! Fluxbox / Openbox / Waimea / Blackbox (in random order): Sweet! Enlightenment: Neat! WindowMaker: Fun!
It's like the Seldon plan with more than 2 Foundations. I'm using Windows right now (schoolday; lecture in progress) and though I get to use lots of nice open-source apps, it's not as fun (in my own twisted perception; your fun-house mirror may vary) as any of the desktops on my Linux machines at home...
I've driven across the country several times, so I just did a few double takes at your original comment, started counting on my fingers etc, before seeing this part of the conversation;)
My Ford Escort wagon sometimes topped 40mpg; that, plus the fixed costs (for a current car owner at least) like insurance, licensure, etc, and the flexibility of setting one's own pace and stopping points, are why I liked to travel ludicrous distances by car. However, the Escort wasn't so hot at topping things like, say, mountains.
Glad I'm now somewhat city-bound for a while, what with the price of gas...
"Presumably you don't know about the idiom of right-click file, select Open With... ?"
Oh, that I can do -- but an averageish Linux install has a whole bunch of apps either already installed or easily installed (through synaptic or other pkg manager) that I happen to like. I know there are a lot of media players for OS X, too, but my iBook is now running Ubuntu instead.
With iTunes (not that this information is impossible to find, but I never explored enough to overcome my annoyance), I'm not even sure where the music files lived. Doesn't mean other people can't like these "type managers" just fine -- just saying why they annoy *me*:)
I have a file system / organization already -- not that it's perfect, or that I'm not constantly shifting it around in a confusing attempt to clarify my thought pattern, but I have an organizational system such that things are clasified the way I want them to be, roughly. And when something is not, I messed up, so can in theory trace the error. These "type managers" tend to stash files places where I don't know that they are (and rely on files being in those places), etc.
It's annoying to be forced into someone else's paradigm -- what if I want to view my files in a different way than someone else's "type manager"? This is not to say smart people aren't making intelligent choices, for them and even for other people, but that doesn't mean any *given* person is going to like their choices.
I don't use Mac OS X much any more, and one reason is that (while again, I know a lot of people *do* like them) I don't like iTunes or iPhoto. When using a modern UNIXy desktop, I'd rather navigate to files (whether GUI or CLI) and then choose an app with which to manipulate... whatever it is I want to manipulate. I might open a text file in any of a dozen programs, might open a photo with The GIMP or with a dedicated viewer program, or a slideshow program, or a browser.
But wrt: "Sure, VLC does everything winamp and media player does, but what an ugly, but fuctional, interface (I'm only using vlc as an example)."
Hah! When I watch a DVD on any Windows machine, I always wonder if the player interface (I can't recall the name of the players I'm thinking of right now) will be even gaudier than the last one I used. They look (ahem) a bit like certain Enlightenment themes sometimes (which is no slag on Enlightenment, if you're into the ultra-matrixy / brushed metal stuff -- it's just that I'm not), with tiny, hard-to-read buttons surrounded by meaningless, distracting goo. VLC is just the opposite:) When watching a movie in Linux, I like that VLC and (Kaffeine?) -- and I'm sure others, too -- have nice slider bars to locate one's position in a given file, too. Maybe some Windows players do, too, but not the random one that came on my Toshiba laptop; the DVD player is bizarrely branded by Toshiba, too. Huh?
Themes for VLC would be nice, though, I agree -- I'd just like them to be mostly simple and clean (art in function) rather than controls tacked onto roccoco background fluff, like a lot of XMMS themes are.
We might disagree about "bling" in general, but at the moment I use daily both Linux machines and a Windows laptop*, strictly for "desktop use" (word-processing, simple games, web, email, etc). When I get home and switch from laptop to desktop, I am always glad to be in the nicer, cleaner, *less* blingy environments (just about any of them!) that I can work in on my Linux box; going back to Windows for my "day job" always feels primitive.
timothy
* School requires Windows -- so I bought a laptop running it. Better than Windows used to be, certainly, but still...
I have a bunch of OO files I'd like to combine -- they contain classnotes, one file per class per day over the past 2 months.
I could just open each one and dump the result at the bottom of a single new file until the contents are all in there, but it sure would be nice to say "Make me a big file, with the following smaller files as inputs." (The file names all start out with the date in YYYYMMDD format, so the order would be easy to deal with I think.) Something like "cat file1 file2 file3 > files-1-through 3" but for other than text files:)
Since it's XML and open, I wonder if anyone else has done this, and given the world a nice script resulting:)
"[U]sing encryption with VoIP can prevent the FBI from implementing wire taps."
So... what's the downside?
Oh, right: the elusive hope of catching the very stupidest of criminals. That's clearly worth subverting personal privacy and autonomy for -- especially since the world of communication possibilities has been successfully finished, and no more room for experimentation or change exists.
So this is off-topic. But re: the Twiddler 2 (which you ask about in your sig): I had a twiddler (original version) and found it pretty neat, but quirky, and not so neat that I spent the time it would have taken to become truly proficient. I gave it to a friend a while ago; it refused to operate for me through a USB adapter, and fewer and fewer of my computers have PS/2 ports.
The device itself was well-constructed and sturdy, but the buttons are... they're not *unresponsive*, but they felt to me a bit like a Fischer-Price toy or a volvo -- externally smooth and well-finished, but sort of clunky / chunky in their operation, required more finger pressure to depress than I would have liked. However, my overall impression was good, and I did at least for a while have it down well enough to laboriously "type" a few hundred words at a time, but the backspace key was the one most often pressed;) (I can't recall if that was a chord or a single key to press...)
These comments sound negative, but part of this is also that I'm a slow developer of muscle memory; very possibly you're more adept at learning new typing systems. I'm sure it *is* learnable, but I didn't get well into the groove. I would be happy to try the current version, if it works well with Linux and Mac OS X, and doesn't have a complicated cabling system:) (I'm lazy enough that I'll check later, but IIRC it just has a USB plug, eh?)
The Relax the Back store has the Zero Gravity lounger series (http://www.relaxtheback.com/) and I'm sure there are worthy competitors. One day I want to get one of these; if they weren't quite so expensive, I'd have gotten one long ago.
What I'd like is to be able to type / compute / watch movies etc. in Astronaut position, and to that end, my ideal (or at least one idealized system) would be a chair in roughly this configuration (leaning back / facing up), with a split keyboard (one part on either side of the body), a trackball mounted in easy reach (or two of them, symmetrically), and a large LCD panel mounted over the body on a support arch.
"Ah yes...the 'espionage' mode. I had a Sony with a special mode that would convert the image to a b/w GIF, so you could store like 10,000 pages on a memory stick."
Do you know which model that was? I've idly wished for a camera with that very feature, for exactly the same purpose -- cheap and cheerful document "scanning" (for non-OCR purposes, just on-screen reference).
If it's a model one can find on eBay, I might search for it...
OK, I might be wrong about the TIE fighters (they look black to me -- what color are they, "Dark Vader Grey"?), but there surely was a black case for the SE/30. Not that it was an Apple product, but it was available, and I wanted one... very nearly spent around a hundred bucks on it, but right around that time, United Airlines busted up my SE/30, and I decided against putting any more money into (around?) it.
Except for actual anarchists (which I'm not), we agree that there should be some form(s) of government in the world, even if we vastly disagree about governments' proper scope and place. That being so, we'd probably at least mostly agree that governments, however constituted, are going to need *things* to operate, whether its a meeting tent and some whiteboards or a new set of smoke signals. The modern, bloated, greedy U.S. government needs a *lot* of things, and this being (largely) a market economy, the government generally buys stuff on the (largely) open market, and that includes the operating systems for most government employees' personal computers.
In the U.S., too, the government is formulated as subordinate to and responsible to the citizens; it does not exist *by right,* but nominally by consent.
Unlike when the government buys (or, this case, requires its citizens to use) a particular believed-good brand of folding chair, disposable coffee cup or helicopter, when it buys closed-source software, it in some ways invites known, knowable dangers, and in others simply fails to maximize the use of the money it has borrowed from taxpayers to spend on their behalf and for their benefit.
The dangers (at least some of them) are obvious: ask a group of computer users whether they've ever lost time or money to malicious software installed against their will on their own system or someone else's; odds are that most such losses are thanks to malware targeting Microsoft systems. That's not Microsoft's fault, exactly, but it's reality.
If it's released with a liberal license and source code -- whichever exact formulation you prefer for those things -- software for personal computers, unlike the chair, cup, or 'copter, can be reused at low cost, and modified or improved (or simply used) by anyone with a computer and the skill to do so. By requiring software that runs on only one company's computer operating system (here, Microsoft's), the government is robbing some of the market's potential for efficiency, an ever more glaring misstep as the price of an "adequate" personal computer's hardware drops in relation to the cost of Microsoft's operating systems. Please don't blame this on the "free" part of the free market; this is the government failing to take advantage of the free market.
Imagine a privately donated computer kiosk carried by pickup truck from community to community just for people to apply for FEMA relief; what percentage of the cost of such a hardware setup should be paid to a favored government supplier simply because FEMA has locked themselves into a single-supplier system? The answer is None.
If you have a wireless USB device (or a USB wireless device;)), I'd appreciate knowing if it works, and with how much tweaking, under this version of SUSE. I just got email after an inquiry I sent to a writer who wrote about LiveCDs working with USB wireless devices, and he tells me that PC-OS (Mandrake based Live CD) works with his USB devices, though I have not yet replied to inquire which one/s.
Anyone else frustrated by wireless USB on Linux?:)
Microsoft pushed *personal* computing when this was unusual, and emphasized (for their own reasons rather than out of philanthropy, which is hardly the point) a computer on every desk, computers at home, etc.
They also made operating systems cheaper than they had been before; they had to, to sell them at a price that individuals could afford; they put price pressure on computer and OS vendors of all kind.
Microsoft also came out with a free Web browser when the competition was (while not outrageous) still payware. [Of course, then they integrated it into their operating systems and claimed it was an inseparable component.]
The company employs a lot of smart, interesting people.
Does Microsoft have some problems, and do Microsoft employees sometimes have ethical lapses? Yep. But it's a big company which (despite its current reputation) produces an operating system which most computer users tolerate well enough to use, and lots of other software besides.
The idea that Microsoft is uniquely eeeeeevil or something seems to be everywhere; some of the companies which complain most about Microsoft's success (read "domination") I get the impression would like nothing better than to the be ones enjoying that success / domination.
I mentioned Shuttleworth because he's the the founder of Ubuntu, and thus sufficient reason to say that it's got African roots. (And in my mind, Ubuntu is one of the most interesting Linuxy things to come along in a long time; I'm typing from my Ubuntu-ized iBook right now, and happy with it.)
Mark Shuttleworth is South African. Read the Slashdot interview with him for some interesting stuff about how that affects his ideas for the distro / software in general.
There's no such thing as "International 911" -- it's just that it seems with any telecom method even semi-similar to conventional POTS service, everyone gets up in arms about it not supporting 911 in exactly the same way (or at all) that the old conventional system has evolved to use it.
911 is an interesting, positive thing for the most part, but it's far from a birthright, and shouldn't be the basis on which new means of communication are applauded or rejected. That's all I meant:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad that my digital photos don't all take up 19TB apiece -- but I am puzzled by the idea that I should be complacent with a given MP number as "good enough." I want shots that are infinitely detailed, and (at least in the area of interest) infinitely sharp. Since neither of these is an available option, I've got to settle for for "sharp enough that I can stand it" and "as detailed as the lens and sensor let me get."
...
;)
Doesn't everyone at some point end up cropping their digital photos, and hitting the jaggies? The main reason I'd like more (and more and more) resolution is because I don't *know* how big I want that photo to be shown in the future, and I don't know if cousin Vinny has a hilarious expression on his face that will be lost in the haze at 5MP but might be a treasure at 10MP
The idea that 8 or 10 MP is "enough" and that now everyone can just go home and be happy isn't completely groundless (we've certainly reached a point where "more pixels" isn't the main thing being sought by camera buyers), but it's only true while other things (sensor designs, storage capacity, cheap-yet-bright-and-not-too-heavy lenses) catch up and remind us that data uncaptured is data that can't be restored.
I'm sort of hoping that mid-range DSLRs hit 12MP in the next 2 years, and that Pentax still makes one that runs on AA batteries
timothy
If I ran a firm that specialized in aggressive defense of property rights as construed to protect titled owners rather than (for instance) squatters, would I want to keep an avowed communist, or pro-squatter of any kind, on the payroll? Probably not.
What if that communist squatter (hey, pile it on!) was in fact the best person in the firm at pursuing the cases we undertook, and managed to set aside his personal beliefs / leanings / preferences in order to zealously prosecute his job? The probably not might become only a "maybe." (And I'd suggest this person get counseling, or some ulcer medication.) I might choose to have a "less effective" total team of staffers (in one dimension) if it meant that people agreed on basic principles of what they did (meaning perhaps a more effective total team in another sense).
Point is, that's something that should be left to the discretion of the one doing the hiring, WHEN THE CONTEXT IS PRIVATE.
When it's public, that's a far different thing. I'd be pretty bristly if the government required everyone with a government job to take a specific, narrow political view.
timothy
a) Kudos for saying something which frequently gets the kind of (sarcastic) response that this already has. It's heresy to many to suggest that OS X (not that there's anything wrong with that) is not necessarily the very best thing out there in the world, the be-all-end-all unix/unix-like OS. I use OO.o all the time (grad school, sshhh, don't tell anyone I'm not using the required Word or WordPerfect :)), and it's a shame that it's less available for OS X.
... it's been the OS on my 500MHz G3 iBook for the last year-or-so, and for me, it beats OS X. YMMV :) Red Hat recently promised RH for the new Intel Macs, which of course means nothing until it arrives, but I'd be surprised if RH, Debian / variants, Gentoo and more don't soon have versions for that hardware.
b) re the 2d-class citizen status, well, there is a full-fledged version of Ubuntu for PPC, which I know works well on G3s and G4s, not sure about G5s
timothy
Hey disease researchers! I know where this virus is living! There are hordes of afflicted wandering around Philadelphia! Perhaps this has to do with the city's justified reputation (though one that's contested by other cities craving the honor) as the home of modern movie-style zombies. Makes sense to me ... after you're zombified, well, you're hungry!
timothy
a) By starting a note that's admittedly pedantic, I open myself to close scrutiny which may reveal the various mistakes I have inserted into this message as a test.
;)
b) Contracts generally *are* "verbal" -- and I say "generally" only because I can't think of any exceptions offhand. *Oral* contracts are different, though they're sometimes valid, too. Ask me again after I finish law school
timothy
As others have noted, Flying J's service definitely doesn't require Windows or IE. It's also gotten better; I used to have a lot of trouble logging in with anything other than IE, actually, and luckily still had it on the OS X partition of my iBook's drive (which itself I luckily still had at that point ;)).
However, the big problem was actually reaching the login page itself; that login / signup page was reached by automatic redirection when you tried to attach to the wireless network. That is, you'd start your browser (IE, especially) and would after a minute or so, instead of whatever home page you would get on an open network, see the login screen instead. This had an address something like https://highpeedl/ogin/tonservices.com, and from that page you could sign up (or sign in), pay for more time, etc.
After that step was done, you could connect to any program which needed the connection -- it was just the establishment that was a pain. So I could use Mozilla, after connecting through IE.
I found that by bookmarking the actual login page address in Mozilla though, the problem went away: though automatic redirection didn't work under Mozilla (so you couldn't reach that login page by trying to hit google, say), by going straight to the login page, all was fine.
However, like I said, that was then. Now, I've had no problem with automatic redirection or logging in with an iBook running Ubuntu linux (it's an old iBook, and the original Airport works just fine with Ubuntu), and the biggest problem is that the coverage footprint at Flying Js is often poor.
timothy
I still spend too much time reading Slashdot, though no longer posting stories to the site. I wrote up a little thing (long ago -- itself quite flawed, but I hope useful nonetheless) about how to make a story submission which is likely to be accepted on the site. No promises, but ... whaddya want, this *is* Slashdot :)
timothy
Aw, he was just sayin' that because he was such a gentleman.
..."
And cleverly said, too -- "Why Elizabeth, you are every bit as attractive as a much younger woman, just as soon as I put this giant basket over the top half of your body and extinguish all the lights
timothy
Gnome: Awesome!
...
KDE: Wonderful!
Fluxbox / Openbox / Waimea / Blackbox (in random order): Sweet!
Enlightenment: Neat!
WindowMaker: Fun!
It's like the Seldon plan with more than 2 Foundations. I'm using Windows right now (schoolday; lecture in progress) and though I get to use lots of nice open-source apps, it's not as fun (in my own twisted perception; your fun-house mirror may vary) as any of the desktops on my Linux machines at home
timothy
I've driven across the country several times, so I just did a few double takes at your original comment, started counting on my fingers etc, before seeing this part of the conversation ;)
...
My Ford Escort wagon sometimes topped 40mpg; that, plus the fixed costs (for a current car owner at least) like insurance, licensure, etc, and the flexibility of setting one's own pace and stopping points, are why I liked to travel ludicrous distances by car. However, the Escort wasn't so hot at topping things like, say, mountains.
Glad I'm now somewhat city-bound for a while, what with the price of gas
timothy
"Presumably you don't know about the idiom of right-click file, select Open With... ?"
:)
Oh, that I can do -- but an averageish Linux install has a whole bunch of apps either already installed or easily installed (through synaptic or other pkg manager) that I happen to like. I know there are a lot of media players for OS X, too, but my iBook is now running Ubuntu instead.
With iTunes (not that this information is impossible to find, but I never explored enough to overcome my annoyance), I'm not even sure where the music files lived. Doesn't mean other people can't like these "type managers" just fine -- just saying why they annoy *me*
Cheers,
Tim
I have a file system / organization already -- not that it's perfect, or that I'm not constantly shifting it around in a confusing attempt to clarify my thought pattern, but I have an organizational system such that things are clasified the way I want them to be, roughly. And when something is not, I messed up, so can in theory trace the error. These "type managers" tend to stash files places where I don't know that they are (and rely on files being in those places), etc.
... whatever it is I want to manipulate. I might open a text file in any of a dozen programs, might open a photo with The GIMP or with a dedicated viewer program, or a slideshow program, or a browser.
It's annoying to be forced into someone else's paradigm -- what if I want to view my files in a different way than someone else's "type manager"? This is not to say smart people aren't making intelligent choices, for them and even for other people, but that doesn't mean any *given* person is going to like their choices.
I don't use Mac OS X much any more, and one reason is that (while again, I know a lot of people *do* like them) I don't like iTunes or iPhoto. When using a modern UNIXy desktop, I'd rather navigate to files (whether GUI or CLI) and then choose an app with which to manipulate
Tim
But wrt: "Sure, VLC does everything winamp and media player does, but what an ugly, but fuctional, interface (I'm only using vlc as an example)."
:) When watching a movie in Linux, I like that VLC and (Kaffeine?) -- and I'm sure others, too -- have nice slider bars to locate one's position in a given file, too. Maybe some Windows players do, too, but not the random one that came on my Toshiba laptop; the DVD player is bizarrely branded by Toshiba, too. Huh?
...
Hah! When I watch a DVD on any Windows machine, I always wonder if the player interface (I can't recall the name of the players I'm thinking of right now) will be even gaudier than the last one I used. They look (ahem) a bit like certain Enlightenment themes sometimes (which is no slag on Enlightenment, if you're into the ultra-matrixy / brushed metal stuff -- it's just that I'm not), with tiny, hard-to-read buttons surrounded by meaningless, distracting goo. VLC is just the opposite
Themes for VLC would be nice, though, I agree -- I'd just like them to be mostly simple and clean (art in function) rather than controls tacked onto roccoco background fluff, like a lot of XMMS themes are.
We might disagree about "bling" in general, but at the moment I use daily both Linux machines and a Windows laptop*, strictly for "desktop use" (word-processing, simple games, web, email, etc). When I get home and switch from laptop to desktop, I am always glad to be in the nicer, cleaner, *less* blingy environments (just about any of them!) that I can work in on my Linux box; going back to Windows for my "day job" always feels primitive.
timothy
* School requires Windows -- so I bought a laptop running it. Better than Windows used to be, certainly, but still
Hey, it's about OO.o after all, eh? :)
:)
:)
I have a bunch of OO files I'd like to combine -- they contain classnotes, one file per class per day over the past 2 months.
I could just open each one and dump the result at the bottom of a single new file until the contents are all in there, but it sure would be nice to say "Make me a big file, with the following smaller files as inputs." (The file names all start out with the date in YYYYMMDD format, so the order would be easy to deal with I think.) Something like "cat file1 file2 file3 > files-1-through 3" but for other than text files
Since it's XML and open, I wonder if anyone else has done this, and given the world a nice script resulting
timothy
"[U]sing encryption with VoIP can prevent the FBI from implementing wire taps."
... what's the downside?
So
Oh, right: the elusive hope of catching the very stupidest of criminals. That's clearly worth subverting personal privacy and autonomy for -- especially since the world of communication possibilities has been successfully finished, and no more room for experimentation or change exists.
timothy
So this is off-topic. But re: the Twiddler 2 (which you ask about in your sig): I had a twiddler (original version) and found it pretty neat, but quirky, and not so neat that I spent the time it would have taken to become truly proficient. I gave it to a friend a while ago; it refused to operate for me through a USB adapter, and fewer and fewer of my computers have PS/2 ports.
... they're not *unresponsive*, but they felt to me a bit like a Fischer-Price toy or a volvo -- externally smooth and well-finished, but sort of clunky / chunky in their operation, required more finger pressure to depress than I would have liked. However, my overall impression was good, and I did at least for a while have it down well enough to laboriously "type" a few hundred words at a time, but the backspace key was the one most often pressed ;) (I can't recall if that was a chord or a single key to press ...)
:) (I'm lazy enough that I'll check later, but IIRC it just has a USB plug, eh?)
The device itself was well-constructed and sturdy, but the buttons are
These comments sound negative, but part of this is also that I'm a slow developer of muscle memory; very possibly you're more adept at learning new typing systems. I'm sure it *is* learnable, but I didn't get well into the groove. I would be happy to try the current version, if it works well with Linux and Mac OS X, and doesn't have a complicated cabling system
timothy
The Relax the Back store has the Zero Gravity lounger series (http://www.relaxtheback.com/) and I'm sure there are worthy competitors. One day I want to get one of these; if they weren't quite so expensive, I'd have gotten one long ago.
What I'd like is to be able to type / compute / watch movies etc. in Astronaut position, and to that end, my ideal (or at least one idealized system) would be a chair in roughly this configuration (leaning back / facing up), with a split keyboard (one part on either side of the body), a trackball mounted in easy reach (or two of them, symmetrically), and a large LCD panel mounted over the body on a support arch.
timothy
"Ah yes...the 'espionage' mode. I had a Sony with a special mode that would convert the image to a b/w GIF, so you could store like 10,000 pages on a memory stick."
...
Do you know which model that was? I've idly wished for a camera with that very feature, for exactly the same purpose -- cheap and cheerful document "scanning" (for non-OCR purposes, just on-screen reference).
If it's a model one can find on eBay, I might search for it
Cheers,
timothy
OK, I might be wrong about the TIE fighters (they look black to me -- what color are they, "Dark Vader Grey"?), but there surely was a black case for the SE/30. Not that it was an Apple product, but it was available, and I wanted one ... very nearly spent around a hundred bucks on it, but right around that time, United Airlines busted up my SE/30, and I decided against putting any more money into (around?) it.
timothy
Except for actual anarchists (which I'm not), we agree that there should be some form(s) of government in the world, even if we vastly disagree about governments' proper scope and place. That being so, we'd probably at least mostly agree that governments, however constituted, are going to need *things* to operate, whether its a meeting tent and some whiteboards or a new set of smoke signals. The modern, bloated, greedy U.S. government needs a *lot* of things, and this being (largely) a market economy, the government generally buys stuff on the (largely) open market, and that includes the operating systems for most government employees' personal computers.
In the U.S., too, the government is formulated as subordinate to and responsible to the citizens; it does not exist *by right,* but nominally by consent.
Unlike when the government buys (or, this case, requires its citizens to use) a particular believed-good brand of folding chair, disposable coffee cup or helicopter, when it buys closed-source software, it in some ways invites known, knowable dangers, and in others simply fails to maximize the use of the money it has borrowed from taxpayers to spend on their behalf and for their benefit.
The dangers (at least some of them) are obvious: ask a group of computer users whether they've ever lost time or money to malicious software installed against their will on their own system or someone else's; odds are that most such losses are thanks to malware targeting Microsoft systems. That's not Microsoft's fault, exactly, but it's reality.
If it's released with a liberal license and source code -- whichever exact formulation you prefer for those things -- software for personal computers, unlike the chair, cup, or 'copter, can be reused at low cost, and modified or improved (or simply used) by anyone with a computer and the skill to do so. By requiring software that runs on only one company's computer operating system (here, Microsoft's), the government is robbing some of the market's potential for efficiency, an ever more glaring misstep as the price of an "adequate" personal computer's hardware drops in relation to the cost of Microsoft's operating systems. Please don't blame this on the "free" part of the free market; this is the government failing to take advantage of the free market.
Imagine a privately donated computer kiosk carried by pickup truck from community to community just for people to apply for FEMA relief; what percentage of the cost of such a hardware setup should be paid to a favored government supplier simply because FEMA has locked themselves into a single-supplier system? The answer is None.
timothy
If you have a wireless USB device (or a USB wireless device ;)), I'd appreciate knowing if it works, and with how much tweaking, under this version of SUSE. I just got email after an inquiry I sent to a writer who wrote about LiveCDs working with USB wireless devices, and he tells me that PC-OS (Mandrake based Live CD) works with his USB devices, though I have not yet replied to inquire which one/s.
:)
Anyone else frustrated by wireless USB on Linux?
Cheers,
Tim
Microsoft pushed *personal* computing when this was unusual, and emphasized (for their own reasons rather than out of philanthropy, which is hardly the point) a computer on every desk, computers at home, etc.
They also made operating systems cheaper than they had been before; they had to, to sell them at a price that individuals could afford; they put price pressure on computer and OS vendors of all kind.
Microsoft also came out with a free Web browser when the competition was (while not outrageous) still payware. [Of course, then they integrated it into their operating systems and claimed it was an inseparable component.]
The company employs a lot of smart, interesting people.
Does Microsoft have some problems, and do Microsoft employees sometimes have ethical lapses? Yep. But it's a big company which (despite its current reputation) produces an operating system which most computer users tolerate well enough to use, and lots of other software besides.
The idea that Microsoft is uniquely eeeeeevil or something seems to be everywhere; some of the companies which complain most about Microsoft's success (read "domination") I get the impression would like nothing better than to the be ones enjoying that success / domination.
timothy
I dunno about Jeff Waugh ;)
I mentioned Shuttleworth because he's the the founder of Ubuntu, and thus sufficient reason to say that it's got African roots. (And in my mind, Ubuntu is one of the most interesting Linuxy things to come along in a long time; I'm typing from my Ubuntu-ized iBook right now, and happy with it.)
timothy
Mark Shuttleworth is South African. Read the Slashdot interview with him for some interesting stuff about how that affects his ideas for the distro / software in general.
Cheers,
Tim
Yes, it was a joke :)
:)
There's no such thing as "International 911" -- it's just that it seems with any telecom method even semi-similar to conventional POTS service, everyone gets up in arms about it not supporting 911 in exactly the same way (or at all) that the old conventional system has evolved to use it.
911 is an interesting, positive thing for the most part, but it's far from a birthright, and shouldn't be the basis on which new means of communication are applauded or rejected. That's all I meant
timothy