I'd like to see software to enable, in increasing order of complexity (and I think not *all* that complex, though I'm certainly not a programmer, so I'm just naming the ideas:))
- For games with loose / free-form answers, paddles like on Jeopardy (or any game show with "buzzing in"), where tapping a sensor is associated with a physical device or a contestant, and it can be displayed on a screen, etc. A Griffen PowerMate would be good for this, and would look cool, too. Every contestant gets a powermate attached to a USB extender cable...
- a multi-part answer device (hey, it could be a 4-button trackball for all I care!) so constestants with identical input devices could each hit one of the buttons to select from multiple answers. Or, with a trackball, they could be told to roll lower left for A, upper left for B, upper right for C, lower right for D.
- Pretty, flashy software to display Quiz questions, answers, point totals, etc in the say that thos machines behind contestants (or stuck in their lecterns) do on game shows.
This could be based (thematically, I don't mean the code is the same) on things like Open Office presenter, so questions could be programmed to fade off or slide off, etc. There'd have to be a separate "display" part vs. the controller part, so no answers are revealed in advance;)
I've trawled freshmeat looking for this sort of thing (and have run a lot of quiz-show style games for kids, summers) -- anyone have help with using a commodity computer instead of an expensive rented buzzer system?
The house where I rent a room (in El Paso) is owned by the grandparents of my housemate. His grandmother's computer was pretty much infected with Windows spyware, to the point that it was unusable. Bootup took forever, lots of error messages, millions of spyware / adware pustules errupting everywhere...
a) I used Mepis to rescue her documents
b) I showed her the machine working with Linux (Mepis and Ubuntu, both of which work fine with her hardware), and *didn't* take forever like Windows does for her. [Old Windows - ME, oldish hardware by current standards] She likes it, and except that I'm out of town until next month, I would install it (her request) on her machine. That's still the plan.
Partly, Linux has gotten better, Partly Windows is just a big pain in the butt. (Some people say otherwise, and more power to 'em. YMMV, etc.)
It seems that for the first time in history an semi-realistic American cartoon character has purchased a lordship. When Zonker Harris - plant-whisperer and babysitter extraordinaire - was asked by BBC News about the honor he simply said "It's come completely out of the blue, I never would have guessed that I'd have that kind of honour, right up until when the credit card confirmation came through." For the world of fictional people as a whole, this is very much a good thing. It's great that cartoon characters are being recognized for their hard work and cultural impact on the world.
Having seen smart people struggle to get Asterisk working (cool a system as it is!), I imagine there would be quite a brisk market for a pre-configured, low-power box running asterisk ready for the user to plug in some custom messages, and / or rely on existing generic ones. That is, something truly plug-and-play, providing your have at least one POTS line to which it can be connected.
Such a system needn't be *cheap* exactly in order to be quite a bit less expensive than typical PBXes, which are usually overkill for small businesses, as well as for any but the most elaborate homes. (Should be doable for a few hundred dollars, I'd guess.)
Or am I just missing that someone is selling such a beast already?
Apple hardware tends to keep its value well. (For instance, I'm typing this on a 4.5-year-old iBook which has been heavily abused, survived international travel with little padding and 60-or-so-thousand miles of road tripping, is on its 2nd battery.)
This is good for the owners, bad for anyone who's ever looked for used Apple gear. The presence of a low-end but decent new machine would be good for those seeking used stuff:)
Re: 4. Everybody who says they would never buy one of the current Macs, but would buy this one for $500 out of impulse, is a damn liar. You can already buy a headless G4 Mac for under $600. Just go to eBay and buy an old G4 tower from about two years ago. Hell, for that matter, you can buy an old G3 tower which will run OS X just fine for about $300. Add a $100 CPU upgrade, and there's your G4 right there.
Two reasons I think you're wrong:
1) New (and with warranty) beats used, out of warranty, and off eBay. My dad just might buy something from eBay, but my mom almost certainly will not, and my sister is unlikely to anytime soon. (And she's a 24-year-old with an iBook.) Buying from retail is more comfortable and familiar for many people. I like on-line prices, but I certainly sometimes check out the MegaStores to see things in person before buying, and sometimes am overcome with the special brain-disabling gas they pump through such stores, and buy there.
2) Size. G3/G4 towers may not be as big as G5s, and they may be nice to work with, but they're not small. A small G4 would be a decent thing -- I'm picturing something the size of a IIci, say, or even smaller. Centris 610 was a lousy machine to work with, but pizza-box size is nice.
Mine beeped with or without the AC adapter in place, and I found at the time that I wasn't alone. (It would only *work* as a KVM with the excess mice plugged in and the power adapter plugged in.) Ah, well:)
The answer is Yes, it would -- but so what?:) The Alpine deck must suffer the same thing, right? (Correction welcome; I've only even touched an iPod a few times in my life, and have never see the Alpine unit, only read about it.)
Pick a starting point ("This will work only with 4th Gen iPods"), or sell models which differ in their width, or make the opening flexible enough to take all models... all of these are messy, but model incompatibilities are a fact of life. It would still be a cool piece of hardware:)
(And since HP is now selling / branding iPods, I'm reminded of the HP tower computer I saw a few months ago with a removable hard drive right on its front panel. Just like with my iPod idea here, it will only work with the models it was designed for, but that's just the nature of the thing.)
It might be be as flexible as firewire port + cable, but a drivebay device with an iPod slot would be a popular thing. Imagine one that would swallow the iPod the way a nice car cassette deck does tapes.
I bought mine about the same time you did -- same model exactly.
Mine works OK, but has the strange property of being unhappy unless all its USB input ports are occupied. It took me a while to find out what the problem was, but that was it. A pretty kludgy solution:) (cheap mice in the slots I didn't need to use.) Until I did figure that out, even though I owned a KVM, it was useless to me, it would just emit a series of BBEEEEEEEEEPPs.
I'm looking forward to using this; $15/day is a bit steep, but this sounds like a pleasant vacation perk. Texas state parks tend to be excellent, too -- the ones I've stayed at have always been well-maintained, pretty, friendly, reasonably priced.
I will soon check out RE-PC (Seattle used PC store; one of their location has Mac stuff) to see if they have any fantastic-bargain elder-statesman PPC machines.
I'm also considering putting Ubuntu on the iBook, but only if / when it's all backed up and ready to undo if that's not satisfactory:)
It's not hard (in certain parts of the country, anyhow) to find PIIIs being tossed out / nearly free, but I'd like to find a free / cheap G3 system. Where do you see them being thrown out? (Serious question.) My iBook is a G3, and I'm quite happy with it, at least as happy as I could reasonably expect from a 4.5 year old machine... I would not mind a G3 desktop running Linux.
This seems like a lot of hand-wringing over something not worth the time.
Why not say (friendly, or cordial, or casual, or merely polite, however the split you describe has left things) "Hey, we're looking through your code to see if anything applies to our half of the great divide. Is that OK with you?"
If the source is freely open, why is it a question? If you don't find it "ethical," why would someone else's opinion matter to you? If you *do* find it ethical, even more so...
At the moment I'm sitting at an all-night sidewalk Chinese joint near the Jalan Bulan Kiosk hotspot, where I pigged out for $0.75. No power outlet but the price is right (and the food wasn't bad at all). There's a perfect breeze, and good music in the background."
Where is the Jalan Bulan Kiosk? This sounds really nice...
Agreed with you re: the searching functions of the location bar (though I no have mine set to search now, thanks to some helpful slashdot comment on that very thing), Mozilla's default is smarter.
However, about your other point:
I like having Chatzilla around too. Just because I could add it back in doesn't mean I think that would be a worthwhile way to spend my time."
While I do wish it was an included-by-default extension, the Chatzilla extension is a matter of just a few clicks to install, and works well. Anything I can do doesn't count as "hacking":)
I'm enjoying Firefox more lately, though I use Mozilla part of the time, too. Finding lately that Firefox has grown on me quite a bit...
It comes down to Woody Allen's punchline: "... and such small portions!"
If Microsoft wants to charge money for security fixes, Hey, great.
The more money, the better!
Software is never finished, only released, as the old saying goes, and it's a more accurate old saying than a lot of the weird ones like "a stitch in time saves nine." Not quite as old, I warrant, but still.
Security fixes cost time to produce and propagate. It's *nice* when Microsoft (or any company) provides free fixes to previously released products, but hardly morally incumbent on them unless there was a moral failing in the initial sale. (A point I won't argue here wrt Windows' and security, note!:))
If Microsoft wants to charge for security updates, it's one more reason to point out that Free software distributors *can* charge for the distribution of that software, but need not and often do not.
As other people have pointed out in this thread already, Microsoft is in a strange position: if they release things free (esp. bundled with their OS, people complain (justifiably) that they're making it hard on competitors; if they charge for them, people complain that they're gouging for obvious functionality that customers should reasonably expect. Just as justifiable:)
Briefly, it was an actual mirror of one of the images from the story. However, the mirror-poster soon changed it. What can ya do? It's hard to find good parents these days, and many kids just have no better outlet once the rubber sheets are in place.
The CDs I have are mostly pretty easy to tell top from bottom by feel, simply because of the silkscreened or otherwise applied label (the exceptions are mostly manufacturing mistakes, like a CD single with both sides equally shiny, only one of which actually holds music). Players will also generally not play upside-down disks:) I don't know if attempting to play disks wrong-side-up is harmful to the players, but I have, uh... "tried" it, with no evident harm to the player.
Send your local branch a copy of PDF Creator (found on TheOpenCD, and on the Live CD version of Ubuntu -- just run the disk under Windows rather than booting up from it).
If they're jerks, tell them you'll sic the FSF on them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see software to enable, in increasing order of complexity (and I think not *all* that complex, though I'm certainly not a programmer, so I'm just naming the ideas :))
...
;)
- For games with loose / free-form answers, paddles like on Jeopardy (or any game show with "buzzing in"), where tapping a sensor is associated with a physical device or a contestant, and it can be displayed on a screen, etc. A Griffen PowerMate would be good for this, and would look cool, too. Every contestant gets a powermate attached to a USB extender cable
- a multi-part answer device (hey, it could be a 4-button trackball for all I care!) so constestants with identical input devices could each hit one of the buttons to select from multiple answers. Or, with a trackball, they could be told to roll lower left for A, upper left for B, upper right for C, lower right for D.
- Pretty, flashy software to display Quiz questions, answers, point totals, etc in the say that thos machines behind contestants (or stuck in their lecterns) do on game shows.
This could be based (thematically, I don't mean the code is the same) on things like Open Office presenter, so questions could be programmed to fade off or slide off, etc. There'd have to be a separate "display" part vs. the controller part, so no answers are revealed in advance
I've trawled freshmeat looking for this sort of thing (and have run a lot of quiz-show style games for kids, summers) -- anyone have help with using a commodity computer instead of an expensive rented buzzer system?
timothy
-
since it comes with no supporting links.
timothy
The house where I rent a room (in El Paso) is owned by the grandparents of my housemate. His grandmother's computer was pretty much infected with Windows spyware, to the point that it was unusable. Bootup took forever, lots of error messages, millions of spyware / adware pustules errupting everywhere ...
a) I used Mepis to rescue her documents
b) I showed her the machine working with Linux (Mepis and Ubuntu, both of which work fine with her hardware), and *didn't* take forever like Windows does for her. [Old Windows - ME, oldish hardware by current standards] She likes it, and except that I'm out of town until next month, I would install it (her request) on her machine. That's still the plan.
Partly, Linux has gotten better, Partly Windows is just a big pain in the butt. (Some people say otherwise, and more power to 'em. YMMV, etc.)
timothy
For how many years have I been using the ampersand without realizing this?
It's like you've just shown me the old-lady / young-lady illusion.
Wow.
timothy -- beats head with mallet to shake loose a brain cell
It seems that for the first time in history an semi-realistic American cartoon character has purchased a lordship. When Zonker Harris - plant-whisperer and babysitter extraordinaire - was asked by BBC News about the honor he simply said "It's come completely out of the blue, I never would have guessed that I'd have that kind of honour, right up until when the credit card confirmation came through." For the world of fictional people as a whole, this is very much a good thing. It's great that cartoon characters are being recognized for their hard work and cultural impact on the world.
Having seen smart people struggle to get Asterisk working (cool a system as it is!), I imagine there would be quite a brisk market for a pre-configured, low-power box running asterisk ready for the user to plug in some custom messages, and / or rely on existing generic ones. That is, something truly plug-and-play, providing your have at least one POTS line to which it can be connected.
Such a system needn't be *cheap* exactly in order to be quite a bit less expensive than typical PBXes, which are usually overkill for small businesses, as well as for any but the most elaborate homes. (Should be doable for a few hundred dollars, I'd guess.)
Or am I just missing that someone is selling such a beast already?
Apple hardware tends to keep its value well. (For instance, I'm typing this on a 4.5-year-old iBook which has been heavily abused, survived international travel with little padding and 60-or-so-thousand miles of road tripping, is on its 2nd battery.)
:)
;)
This is good for the owners, bad for anyone who's ever looked for used Apple gear. The presence of a low-end but decent new machine would be good for those seeking used stuff
Oh, I hope TS is right on this one
timothy
Re: 4. Everybody who says they would never buy one of the current Macs, but would buy this one for $500 out of impulse, is a damn liar. You can already buy a headless G4 Mac for under $600. Just go to eBay and buy an old G4 tower from about two years ago. Hell, for that matter, you can buy an old G3 tower which will run OS X just fine for about $300. Add a $100 CPU upgrade, and there's your G4 right there.
Two reasons I think you're wrong:
1) New (and with warranty) beats used, out of warranty, and off eBay. My dad just might buy something from eBay, but my mom almost certainly will not, and my sister is unlikely to anytime soon. (And she's a 24-year-old with an iBook.) Buying from retail is more comfortable and familiar for many people. I like on-line prices, but I certainly sometimes check out the MegaStores to see things in person before buying, and sometimes am overcome with the special brain-disabling gas they pump through such stores, and buy there.
2) Size. G3/G4 towers may not be as big as G5s, and they may be nice to work with, but they're not small. A small G4 would be a decent thing -- I'm picturing something the size of a IIci, say, or even smaller. Centris 610 was a lousy machine to work with, but pizza-box size is nice.
Mine beeped with or without the AC adapter in place, and I found at the time that I wasn't alone. (It would only *work* as a KVM with the excess mice plugged in and the power adapter plugged in.) Ah, well :)
timothy
The answer is Yes, it would -- but so what? :) The Alpine deck must suffer the same thing, right? (Correction welcome; I've only even touched an iPod a few times in my life, and have never see the Alpine unit, only read about it.)
... all of these are messy, but model incompatibilities are a fact of life. It would still be a cool piece of hardware :)
Pick a starting point ("This will work only with 4th Gen iPods"), or sell models which differ in their width, or make the opening flexible enough to take all models
(And since HP is now selling / branding iPods, I'm reminded of the HP tower computer I saw a few months ago with a removable hard drive right on its front panel. Just like with my iPod idea here, it will only work with the models it was designed for, but that's just the nature of the thing.)
timothy
It might be be as flexible as firewire port + cable, but a drivebay device with an iPod slot would be a popular thing. Imagine one that would swallow the iPod the way a nice car cassette deck does tapes.
timothy
I bought mine about the same time you did -- same model exactly.
:) (cheap mice in the slots I didn't need to use.) Until I did figure that out, even though I owned a KVM, it was useless to me, it would just emit a series of BBEEEEEEEEEPPs.
Mine works OK, but has the strange property of being unhappy unless all its USB input ports are occupied. It took me a while to find out what the problem was, but that was it. A pretty kludgy solution
timothy
I'm looking forward to using this; $15/day is a bit steep, but this sounds like a pleasant vacation perk. Texas state parks tend to be excellent, too -- the ones I've stayed at have always been well-maintained, pretty, friendly, reasonably priced.
I will soon check out RE-PC (Seattle used PC store; one of their location has Mac stuff) to see if they have any fantastic-bargain elder-statesman PPC machines.
:)
I'm also considering putting Ubuntu on the iBook, but only if / when it's all backed up and ready to undo if that's not satisfactory
timothy
It's not hard (in certain parts of the country, anyhow) to find PIIIs being tossed out / nearly free, but I'd like to find a free / cheap G3 system. Where do you see them being thrown out? (Serious question.) My iBook is a G3, and I'm quite happy with it, at least as happy as I could reasonably expect from a 4.5 year old machine ... I would not mind a G3 desktop running Linux.
timothy
This seems like a lot of hand-wringing over something not worth the time.
...
Why not say (friendly, or cordial, or casual, or merely polite, however the split you describe has left things) "Hey, we're looking through your code to see if anything applies to our half of the great divide. Is that OK with you?"
If the source is freely open, why is it a question? If you don't find it "ethical," why would someone else's opinion matter to you? If you *do* find it ethical, even more so
timothy
That sounds like an interesting place to see ... I wish I could find 75-cent Chinese buffet ;)
:)
How well can someone with English as primary language navigate?
timothy
At the moment I'm sitting at an all-night sidewalk Chinese joint near the Jalan Bulan Kiosk hotspot, where I pigged out for $0.75. No power outlet but the price is right (and the food wasn't bad at all). There's a perfect breeze, and good music in the background."
...
Where is the Jalan Bulan Kiosk? This sounds really nice
timothy
"pendant"? :)
timothy
Agreed with you re: the searching functions of the location bar (though I no have mine set to search now, thanks to some helpful slashdot comment on that very thing), Mozilla's default is smarter.
:)
...
However, about your other point:
I like having Chatzilla around too. Just because I could add it back in doesn't mean I think that would be a worthwhile way to spend my time."
While I do wish it was an included-by-default extension, the Chatzilla extension is a matter of just a few clicks to install, and works well. Anything I can do doesn't count as "hacking"
I'm enjoying Firefox more lately, though I use Mozilla part of the time, too. Finding lately that Firefox has grown on me quite a bit
timothy
I keep squinting and saying "Huh, is that a photo? Or a rendered graphic? No ... it's a photo! But hmmm ... it looks like a cool rendering."
I'd be curious about how the photos were taken.
timothy
It comes down to Woody Allen's punchline: "... and such small portions!"
:))
:)
If Microsoft wants to charge money for security fixes, Hey, great.
The more money, the better!
Software is never finished, only released, as the old saying goes, and it's a more accurate old saying than a lot of the weird ones like "a stitch in time saves nine." Not quite as old, I warrant, but still.
Security fixes cost time to produce and propagate. It's *nice* when Microsoft (or any company) provides free fixes to previously released products, but hardly morally incumbent on them unless there was a moral failing in the initial sale. (A point I won't argue here wrt Windows' and security, note!
If Microsoft wants to charge for security updates, it's one more reason to point out that Free software distributors *can* charge for the distribution of that software, but need not and often do not.
As other people have pointed out in this thread already, Microsoft is in a strange position: if they release things free (esp. bundled with their OS, people complain (justifiably) that they're making it hard on competitors; if they charge for them, people complain that they're gouging for obvious functionality that customers should reasonably expect. Just as justifiable
timothy
Briefly, it was an actual mirror of one of the images from the story. However, the mirror-poster soon changed it. What can ya do? It's hard to find good parents these days, and many kids just have no better outlet once the rubber sheets are in place.
timothy
The CDs I have are mostly pretty easy to tell top from bottom by feel, simply because of the silkscreened or otherwise applied label (the exceptions are mostly manufacturing mistakes, like a CD single with both sides equally shiny, only one of which actually holds music). Players will also generally not play upside-down disks :) I don't know if attempting to play disks wrong-side-up is harmful to the players, but I have, uh ... "tried" it, with no evident harm to the player.
timothy
Send your local branch a copy of PDF Creator (found on TheOpenCD, and on the Live CD version of Ubuntu -- just run the disk under Windows rather than booting up from it).
If they're jerks, tell them you'll sic the FSF on them.
timothy