There's some rough editing, as you say, but the more annoying thing is that the MPEG version of the show (whether in the editing process or the compression phase) isn't boiled down to a nice CD-R size like 700MB. 900+ makes it too large for a single disk, and a fair chunk of my hard drive:)
The trailer at any rate works fine for me that way (using Knoppix-based Debian install). Xine complains that my processor isn't fast enough*, but that seems to me a family matter and nothing the authorities have any right to pass comment upon.
timothy
*And they mean the one on my desk, a VIA Epia-M 900. Probably right, too, but the trailer played acceptably for me...
Maybe so: but if things are under the GPL, so what?:)
There may be jingoistic reasons to support a particular software company (SUSE, so very German! Mandrake, so very French! Red Hat, from the good ol' US of A!), but if the software is under licenses which encourage sharing / reuse / improvement, then it's all for the best. It's not like Mandrake and SUSE are immune from borrowing bits and ideas from each other; the different distros have different approaches and details, but there's a useful cross-pollination on all fronts.
Huh, thanks for reminding me of that. I had forgotten that xchat came in a Windows flavor as well. Sounds like you have to install GTK+ for Windows though as well?
My question was too short of course, since I do like Chatzilla (and just found that newer versions do indeed have DCC, contradicting my claim that it didn't) and that is on Windows as well. Thanks for the info!
Re: the DEC business story, you might find the book "The Ultimate Entrepreneur" interesting; it's about Ken Olsen and the rise of DEC. Even more outdated than the link below says, but certain aspects of history, uh, tend not to change:) I found this book in a free-books pile somewhere, and enjoyed it. Olsen, says the book, was a control freak (in a good way) and in particular exacting about packaging / chassis designs.
timothy
(http://www.bitworm.com/detail/0809245590/The_Ul ti mate_Entrepreneur_The_Story_of_Ken_Olsen_and_Digit al_Equipment_Corporation.html)
It seems to happen less and less, but when I end up working on a borrowed computer running Microsoft Windows, downloading and installing Mozilla is usually a great way to maintain some sanity. There may be a lot of great programs for Windows, but the fact that Mozilla is cross-platform and versatile means that I don't have to download several programs to do the jobs I want it for. (Besides which, maybe it's just the Windows culture, but finding non-nagware / shareware software isn't as easy as it is for the unixy world, at least for me the occasional visitor. Is there a good free/Free irc client for Windows?)
I'm not a big fan of the composer (though it's probably a lot better than it used to be), but the Mozilla IRC client (chatzilla) is great. It lacks DCC, but I'm happy with it, to the point that after a few years of using it a bit more and a bit more, it's become my main IRC client. (And since I'm in IRC all day, I've gotten used to it, a non-vicious circle.)
I used to think Chatzilla was a joke, a bit like the text-based "kitchen sink" thing, but with the Composer (my own taste aside), excellent mail client, great browser and IRC client, it's very nearly a complete internet --duh -- "suite." If there was a terminal with a built-in SSH client, it would be the perfect Windows conversion tool:)
Two in particular I'd like to mention. There are probably a lot of great ones I'm forgetting and terrible ones which deserve to be well raked over the coals, but... life is short.
1) Math textbooks by John Saxon. Few illustrations, but well written and helpful. As a genuine mathophobe, for me to like any math textbook is high praise. These are often used in home-schooling, while public schools get the books with more pictures and worse grammar;) Of the few Eureka moments I've ever had wrt math beyond arithmetic, most have come from reading one or another of the Saxon books.
2) The Horance Mann Reader. Since the contents of the Horace Mann Reader are so old, I assume that the contents could be re-assembled via Project Gutenberg or similar...
(No relation to this strange thing in which books are given to-the-decimal "reading level" ratings. What a crock of bovine excrement.)
I'm not terribly familiar with the HMR other than that I used to own a particular and quite old copy; maybe there are hundreds of different compilations by that title. However, the one I had and loved to read as a kid had all kinds of stories, some with a punchy moral, some simply adventure stories, some with endings I consider bafflingly ambiguous. (Like the one where a maurading giant caterpillar is killed with a spit-wet arrow, and the upshot is something like "There is power is a brave man's spit.")
It seems like a flashed Linksys access point could be turned into a (limited memory, but them's the breaks) BBS system... probably would far exceed the original Community Memory Project's, pardon me, "memory." Now, a smart thing for some access point maker to add is a flash reader, or a USB port for a thumbdrive. (And probably, hopefully, someone will point to a perfect Soekris board... however, those aren't available for $60... )
If you spot someone with a laptop hooked up to an outlet, ask politely if you can share it, and supply one of these splitters:)
I have a few of the non-splitting variety, useful for getting full use of a powerstrip. (And often that has the same happy result if you're looking for a spot at a coffeeshop, namely un-blocking an outlet...)
OK, Flash has its purposes. maybe I'll re-install it sometime. But when I don't have it installed, I'd like to stop being pestered by every Flash-containing site about it. Is there a simple way in Mozilla / Firebird / anything to preemptively ignore the [Install Flash Now / Cancel] dialogs?
Oh, and site designers: most sites' use of Flash is silly and wasteful. Just think what hell will be like, and enjoy the animation down there.
Now, a) companies have come back from way below where SCO is now b) crazy legal judgements may declare D. McBride Emperor of the U.S. without significantly decreasing the sanity level of the whole system c) it's not nice to be vindictive.
However, one of my favorite slogans is "Humble to the humble, unyielding to the arrogant." Darl falls into the second category to me, since he would like, on what seem to be wildly spurious suppositions and with dirty tactics worthy of Ayn Rand's slimiest villains, to take away the Free software I use every day.
I continue to be impressed by how much faster my iBook (old, 500MHz) acts with 10.3 than the earlier iterations of OS X.
Memory makes a difference, too, as you said -- this one is at 384, won't be getting any higher. I hope 10.4 has a similar speed boost, it's like getting a hardware upgrade;)
OK, I work for Slashdot, but am not writing in any official capacity:)
- Slashdot takes advertising.
- Some of the advertising Slashdot takes is from Microsoft.
- Microsoft advertising is paid for in U.S. dollars.
- The editorial side neither sells the ads nor chooses the advertisers; whether the ad at the top is for Microsoft, Red Hat, or The Estate of Jonas Savimbi, I'm just as surprised as anyone else by the particular banner that appears.
Above is just to point out that the ad-choice decision is not one I make;)
However (But! Nevertheless!), I don't think it's all that important anyhow. So long as ads are respectful of your browser (I hate Flash ads, and it goes without saying that no one is friends with popup ads or other eye-pokers), their content doesn't concern me a whole lot. (Could there be exceptions? Yes. But the MS ads I've seen on Slashdot, for example, have been tame as a churchmouse. Most of them don't even rise to the level of puffery, more straight 'product exists' notification.)
Ads for Microsoft Visual Studio appear on Slashdot; a lot of readers use that or similar products in their work. Ignoring the possibility that readers use source-secret software would be dumb on the part of the advertisers; they would be ignoring a rationally valuable resource. I'd prefer that people use more free, Free software --and they will. But I'm confident enough that people will choose open source stuff on their own for their own reasons that I don't think advertisements for The Other Kind are a huge concern. What would it say if they were? (Solar and wind power is great; there are still ads for gasoline generators in the back of Mother Earth News.)
I like seeing IBM and other companies push their open-source agendas (parallel and connected to their other agendas) in ads and other forums, but here, too, I don't think advertisements matter except as an input; people will still make up their own minds based on multiple, sometimes ineffable factors.
As at least one other poster has commented, wouldn't you rather the money flowed this direction than the other?
You're right. Those two share a neuron (I'm short of them), and I let my fingers type the wrong name. As you say, pico is what I mean to say there. Of course, if you install pine, you get pico, but, uh, that's not a good excuse.
"Also, the "unorganised approach to open source" comment in the story is very unfair."
It's not meant as a jibe at all, so if it was easy to interpret that way, I apologize. My fault!
The reason I quoted that word is because it's often misapplied to projects (like this one) which have underlying organization not obvious to a casual observer, and which accept contributions from outsiders / amateurs / unseen helpers / what-have-yous. Specifically, the patch which inspired the linked article:)
In no way did I mean to be pejorative or negative, just the opposite. (Inkscape is a project I follow, because Inkscape, along with Scribus, I consider one of the most important things in getting free software in common use at schools.)
"And that's the problem. The USPO tends to behave as if they have no familiarity (or willingness to research) the fields in which they grant patents."
Much agreed. I wasn't arguing for nutty patents on the basis that everything is novel, somewhere and to someone. I wish that an icon was the right size to feature the illustration from the cat-with-laser-pointer patent;)
that for most of human history, no forks were available. They only came into widespread use in (iirc) the 16th century. Might be off a couple of centuries, but that's not the point;) (There's a Henry Petroski book which goes through a long, fun, history of flatware; but it's been a long time since I read it.
So things can seem obvious in restrospect sometimes which previously did not!
a) I think you're right; people are overestimating the demand here, analogizing from small music players (nifty, useful, amenable to things like typing as in the movie "Haiku Tunnel") to small video players (nifty, somewhat less useful, not at all amenable to background work or play).
b) At the same time, Hey, how many kids have had Gameboys or their newer, smarter cousins, used 'em to while away the ride to school, family vacations, the time they're supposed to spend sleeping, etc? That tells me there sure is *some* audience for watching TV shows and movies on a small handheld device.
For shows where I have a limited interest, where I could happily watch / glance at way less than perfect quality, high compression in a handhold video device would be great: I could watch a few minutes when I had the chance to, skip forward TiVo-like, etc.
I just took a long car trip, relying mostly on (purchased and municipally provided*) 802.11 access, and in preparation for that trip bought a highish-end 802.11 card and extrernal patch antenna, which indeed came in handy.
I considered one of the USB 802.11 donglers, but passed on account of ignorance: Are any of them of Linux-friendly? Are some brands better than others? Can anyone provide reception figures or anecdotes?
It certainly would be nice to have a rooftop mount on my station wagon to which I could as necessary string up a 15' USB cable and thumb-drive-style 802.11 thing:)
timothy
*Thanks, taxpayers and politicians of Salt Lake City!
Should have noted this when I posted ;): SHADE!
on
Computing Al Fresco?
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· Score: 1
I spent all of April and much of May away from my home in Seattle, and worked from my car quite a few times. (802.11 is wonderful stuff.)
A useful item, I found, and one which applies in your case, is a velcro-attached sun-shade. I've seen ones that look both more functional and more durable than the cheap-n-cheerful one I picked up from a MicroCenter in Columbus or Cleveland (it was a long trip -- this map is largely accurate, just misses a dip I ended up making to the Four Corners area), but even the one I bought -- $15 on sale -- was a big help. It may also let you get away with *less* than the maximum brightness on your screen, so if battery life is a concern it's an important addition.
... it was just after I signed on with two friends to be the 3rd tenant in a Brooklyn apartment.
Two months without phone service (gosh, sorry, we're really trying to install it... soon as our strike is over, and as soon as the resulting backlog is gone through, and soon as we damn well please, haveanicedaythiscallmaybemonitoredforqualityassura nce) which meant I couldn't telecommute from the apartment even by dialup. Verizon controlled the lines, too, making it impossible to get service for a while even if you wanted another company to provide its rendition of the fabled dialtone. DSL? Ha, just you wait. Cable? Sorry, must have local phone service, we were told.
So, Verizon's strike cost me about two months of rent -- that is, time during which I could either a) pay daily for internet cafes and such or b) stay in MD and work from my connection there while paying the sunk rent in Brooklyn, which is what I did except for a few weekends. Thanks, Verizon, thanks a bunch. Brotherhood of man, greatly pleased by your extended middle digit, progress marches ever on. Oh, and the (crap, fraudulently false adversing) Merlin wireless service from Verizon sucked as bad as the worst reports about it would suggest. I did get that, because I could order it from MD and have it work (well, not "work" exactly, but y'know, try to work) in NYC (unlike local physical phone hookup, which pretty much has to be done on-premises;)) And they kept charging me, months after my account was alleged to have been closed.
I'm not a huge fan of Starbucks, except to defend it (or them, to UK readers) against kneejerking knee-jerkers' jerking knees;)
However, the perception that Starbucks has "driven out local coffee houses with inferior, burnt-tasting coffee" is at least mostly baloney. (In this, to be clear, I am agreeing with the parent poster, just strenuously enough to say more than "me too!")
Starbucks (and now other notable Evil Chains) have probably done more to increase coffee appreciation than any other single factor. When I was younger, there *was* no established coffee scene; Yes, there was a restaurant (semi-greasy spoon) called The White Coffee Pot, Jr. in my childhood small town (now part of an obscure and probably defunct chain, I think), but there was no source of sit-and-read-a-paper coffee of any quality worth coming back to for the coffee.
Starbucks coffee itself may not be worth much snobbery, but realize that the culture of coffee snobbery in the U.S. (nascent, or at best adolescent) certainly owes a lot of Starbucks, with its network (cells?) of consistently OK coffee outlets throughout the country. It's hip to be above Starbucks -- a few years ago, Starbucks was something to aspire to (strong, rich coffee served in comfy surroundings); since the chain is now successful and ubiquitous, it's hard to maintain aspirational status when you're a much-mocked franchise commodity.
So Starbucks, while it isn't exactly dying on the vine, has a) made people think about coffee and b) -- or maybe this should be a', but that makes for an ugly list -- made for a much better environment for hipper coffee bars to inhabit. There may be some coffee bars that Starbucks has driven out of business -- no doubt. But there are also a lot that Starbucks has caused to spring up, or to spruce themselves up. And like the parent poster says, some of them have free WiFi;) (Around Seattle, a lot more have pay-for WiFi, but that's better than nothing, when you need a connection.)
[Subliminal message: Avoid that corporate exploiter Starbucks, that cheap mangler of souls and exploiter of little girls! Come over to Tim's Javanation, which uses exclusively fair-trade coffee beans processed by exotic but happy parrots, steam pressed in a brick oven. We're still working on the franchise bit and have only this hired clown to exploit... for now. But just you wait -- we're going to be the next Starbucks! Avoid that corporate exploiter Starbucks... oh.]
People born before 1980 may remember when the Gap's clothes were *cool* among a huge chunk of the population, mostly the population under 20; now they're pleasant enough, but unremarkable. Unhip, mostly, or at least ahip. ("I'm not a hipster; I'm an ahipster.") Shopping at the Gap is an essentially conventional, socially conservative act (and hey -- The Big Shirt!). In 1985, the Gap was not a place many parents would shop for themselves, only for their kids. Not so now. Extended metaphor over.
Just the like the ludicrous "pod race" in Ep. I, and the (admittedly cute) hovering-Yoda saber fight in II, the only possible rational justification is videogame possibilities. Just like scenes where people and robots get tossed by-complete-coincidence onto moving conveyor belts with stamping machinery...
Remember, A-B-B-A-up will let you kick-flip your lava board; B-B-A-B-down-up does a stalefish grab.
I have recently and at long last become reacquainted with my bikeE recumbent. Or, well, semi-recumbent as some people like to call them, since it's more like a propped-against-a-wall position. However, I guess a *true* recumbent would involve you lying senseless on a mattress or something, so I call kibosh on that aspect of the name game;)
As recumbents go, bikeE bikes are (or were, since the company is now out of business, but *are* in that their products still exist...) low-end: a bit heavy, a lot cheap (compared to many recumbents, which are designed and priced like sculpture). I had hoped they represented a sufficient mainstreaming of recumbent bikes, and a sufficient lowering of the price, that they would fill an obvious market gap and thrive, but... No. Turns out they were not able to pull an eMachines, despite the similar naming scheme.
So, now after a year of not riding it (long story, friend's delivery plan from the other coast was interrupted), I have the pieces, and soon will re-assemble my heavy but super-cruisy blue semi-recumbent.
Riding recumbent takes a few minutes to adjust, less so probably on the bikeE than on the truly radical ones, which I have long wanted to try but never have. It's cruisy! turns are a bit slow (long wheelbase), hills are enough to make me walk a lot of them, in contradiction to claims that they're no worse on a recumbent than on a conventional upright bike. Uh, Yeah right:) For Steve Roberts with his 210 gears, maybe, but not for me with my mere 21;) It's also more for streets and other flattish surfaces than for mountainous territory;) However, the tires are sufficiently knobby it's certainly not confined to artificially perfect racing conditions. For the places and reasons I'm likely to ride it (mostly urban transport, for fun and utility, grabbing milk from the store etc) it's perfect.
However (and this is the reason I have bothered to type this much on an old bike), I have not yet located a bike rack that would hold one of these on the *back* of my small station wagon (subaru legacy outback). Has anyone seen one of these? I don't want a rooftop rack for it -- unless someone can provide evidence that rear carriers are just as bad, fuel-wise. Around town, the fuel difference is not so bad. I just ended a 9,500 mile road trip though, and may be taking one of similar length in August. At current gas prices, and even at old ones we may ne'er see again, I don't want to add anything unnecessary to the fule bill.
Slashdot Mirror
There's some rough editing, as you say, but the more annoying thing is that the MPEG version of the show (whether in the editing process or the compression phase) isn't boiled down to a nice CD-R size like 700MB. 900+ makes it too large for a single disk, and a fair chunk of my hard drive :)
timothy
The trailer at any rate works fine for me that way (using Knoppix-based Debian install). Xine complains that my processor isn't fast enough*, but that seems to me a family matter and nothing the authorities have any right to pass comment upon.
...
timothy
*And they mean the one on my desk, a VIA Epia-M 900. Probably right, too, but the trailer played acceptably for me
Maybe so: but if things are under the GPL, so what? :)
There may be jingoistic reasons to support a particular software company (SUSE, so very German! Mandrake, so very French! Red Hat, from the good ol' US of A!), but if the software is under licenses which encourage sharing / reuse / improvement, then it's all for the best. It's not like Mandrake and SUSE are immune from borrowing bits and ideas from each other; the different distros have different approaches and details, but there's a useful cross-pollination on all fronts.
timothy
Huh, thanks for reminding me of that. I had forgotten that xchat came in a Windows flavor as well. Sounds like you have to install GTK+ for Windows though as well?
My question was too short of course, since I do like Chatzilla (and just found that newer versions do indeed have DCC, contradicting my claim that it didn't) and that is on Windows as well. Thanks for the info!
timothy
Re: the DEC business story, you might find the book "The Ultimate Entrepreneur" interesting; it's about Ken Olsen and the rise of DEC. Even more outdated than the link below says, but certain aspects of history, uh, tend not to change :) I found this book in a free-books pile somewhere, and enjoyed it. Olsen, says the book, was a control freak (in a good way) and in particular exacting about packaging / chassis designs.
l ti mate_Entrepreneur_The_Story_of_Ken_Olsen_and_Digit al_Equipment_Corporation.html)
timothy
(http://www.bitworm.com/detail/0809245590/The_U
It seems to happen less and less, but when I end up working on a borrowed computer running Microsoft Windows, downloading and installing Mozilla is usually a great way to maintain some sanity. There may be a lot of great programs for Windows, but the fact that Mozilla is cross-platform and versatile means that I don't have to download several programs to do the jobs I want it for. (Besides which, maybe it's just the Windows culture, but finding non-nagware / shareware software isn't as easy as it is for the unixy world, at least for me the occasional visitor. Is there a good free/Free irc client for Windows?)
:)
I'm not a big fan of the composer (though it's probably a lot better than it used to be), but the Mozilla IRC client (chatzilla) is great. It lacks DCC, but I'm happy with it, to the point that after a few years of using it a bit more and a bit more, it's become my main IRC client. (And since I'm in IRC all day, I've gotten used to it, a non-vicious circle.)
I used to think Chatzilla was a joke, a bit like the text-based "kitchen sink" thing, but with the Composer (my own taste aside), excellent mail client, great browser and IRC client, it's very nearly a complete internet --duh --
"suite." If there was a terminal with a built-in SSH client, it would be the perfect Windows conversion tool
timothy
Are you referring to *this* Zoolander? If so, I shall have to ask you to step outside!
- Derek, to tiny cellphone: "God?!"
- Dammit Derek, I'm a coal miner, not a professional film and television actor." (Jon Voigt)
- David Bowie cameo, proving that he transcends the nutty world of ultra hipdom even while being part of it.
- Christine Taylor
- David Duchovny as the former hand model
- Will Farrell
- "What is this, a center for *ants*?!"
You must be thinking of a different cinematic masterpiece.
timothy
Two in particular I'd like to mention. There are probably a lot of great ones I'm forgetting and terrible ones which deserve to be well raked over the coals, but ... life is short.
;) Of the few Eureka moments I've ever had wrt math beyond arithmetic, most have come from reading one or another of the Saxon books.
...
1) Math textbooks by John Saxon. Few illustrations, but well written and helpful. As a genuine mathophobe, for me to like any math textbook is high praise. These are often used in home-schooling, while public schools get the books with more pictures and worse grammar
2) The Horance Mann Reader. Since the contents of the Horace Mann Reader are so old, I assume that the contents could be re-assembled via Project Gutenberg or similar
(No relation to this strange thing in which books are given to-the-decimal "reading level" ratings. What a crock of bovine excrement.)
I'm not terribly familiar with the HMR other than that I used to own a particular and quite old copy; maybe there are hundreds of different compilations by that title. However, the one I had and loved to read as a kid had all kinds of stories, some with a punchy moral, some simply adventure stories, some with endings I consider bafflingly ambiguous. (Like the one where a maurading giant caterpillar is killed with a spit-wet arrow, and the upshot is something like "There is power is a brave man's spit.")
timothy
It seems like a flashed Linksys access point could be turned into a (limited memory, but them's the breaks) BBS system ... probably would far exceed the original Community Memory Project's, pardon me, "memory." Now, a smart thing for some access point maker to add is a flash reader, or a USB port for a thumbdrive. (And probably, hopefully, someone will point to a perfect Soekris board ... however, those aren't available for $60 ... )
timothy
http://www.hometech.com/power/wallwart.html#GC-CAM YAF1
:)
...)
If you spot someone with a laptop hooked up to an outlet, ask politely if you can share it, and supply one of these splitters
I have a few of the non-splitting variety, useful for getting full use of a powerstrip. (And often that has the same happy result if you're looking for a spot at a coffeeshop, namely un-blocking an outlet
Cheers,
timothy
OK, Flash has its purposes. maybe I'll re-install it sometime. But when I don't have it installed, I'd like to stop being pestered by every Flash-containing site about it. Is there a simple way in Mozilla / Firebird / anything to preemptively ignore the [Install Flash Now / Cancel] dialogs?
Oh, and site designers: most sites' use of Flash is silly and wasteful. Just think what hell will be like, and enjoy the animation down there.
timothy
Right now, the top 5 headlines listed are:
STREET WISE: Little Cheer for SCO Shareholders
SCO Group Posts Loss
SCO posts loss vs profit; revenue down 52 pct
SCO Group Stumbles on Revenue Drop
SCO Keeps Sinking
Now, a) companies have come back from way below where SCO is now b) crazy legal judgements may declare D. McBride Emperor of the U.S. without significantly decreasing the sanity level of the whole system c) it's not nice to be vindictive.
However, one of my favorite slogans is "Humble to the humble, unyielding to the arrogant." Darl falls into the second category to me, since he would like, on what seem to be wildly spurious suppositions and with dirty tactics worthy of Ayn Rand's slimiest villains, to take away the Free software I use every day.
timothy
I continue to be impressed by how much faster my iBook (old, 500MHz) acts with 10.3 than the earlier iterations of OS X.
;)
Memory makes a difference, too, as you said -- this one is at 384, won't be getting any higher. I hope 10.4 has a similar speed boost, it's like getting a hardware upgrade
timothy
OK, I work for Slashdot, but am not writing in any official capacity :)
;)
- Slashdot takes advertising.
- Some of the advertising Slashdot takes is from Microsoft.
- Microsoft advertising is paid for in U.S. dollars.
- The editorial side neither sells the ads nor chooses the advertisers; whether the ad at the top is for Microsoft, Red Hat, or The Estate of Jonas Savimbi, I'm just as surprised as anyone else by the particular banner that appears.
Above is just to point out that the ad-choice decision is not one I make
However (But! Nevertheless!), I don't think it's all that important anyhow. So long as ads are respectful of your browser (I hate Flash ads, and it goes without saying that no one is friends with popup ads or other eye-pokers), their content doesn't concern me a whole lot. (Could there be exceptions? Yes. But the MS ads I've seen on Slashdot, for example, have been tame as a churchmouse. Most of them don't even rise to the level of puffery, more straight 'product exists' notification.)
Ads for Microsoft Visual Studio appear on Slashdot; a lot of readers use that or similar products in their work. Ignoring the possibility that readers use source-secret software would be dumb on the part of the advertisers; they would be ignoring a rationally valuable resource. I'd prefer that people use more free, Free software --and they will. But I'm confident enough that people will choose open source stuff on their own for their own reasons that I don't think advertisements for The Other Kind are a huge concern. What would it say if they were? (Solar and wind power is great; there are still ads for gasoline generators in the back of Mother Earth News.)
I like seeing IBM and other companies push their open-source agendas (parallel and connected to their other agendas) in ads and other forums, but here, too, I don't think advertisements matter except as an input; people will still make up their own minds based on multiple, sometimes ineffable factors.
As at least one other poster has commented, wouldn't you rather the money flowed this direction than the other?
timothy
You're right. Those two share a neuron (I'm short of them), and I let my fingers type the wrong name. As you say, pico is what I mean to say there. Of course, if you install pine, you get pico, but, uh, that's not a good excuse.
timothy
"Also, the "unorganised approach to open source" comment in the story is very unfair."
:)
It's not meant as a jibe at all, so if it was easy to interpret that way, I apologize. My fault!
The reason I quoted that word is because it's often misapplied to projects (like this one) which have underlying organization not obvious to a casual observer, and which accept contributions from outsiders / amateurs / unseen helpers / what-have-yous. Specifically, the patch which inspired the linked article
In no way did I mean to be pejorative or negative, just the opposite. (Inkscape is a project I follow, because Inkscape, along with Scribus, I consider one of the most important things in getting free software in common use at schools.)
Cheers,
timothy
"And that's the problem. The USPO tends to behave as if they have no familiarity (or willingness to research) the fields in which they grant patents."
;)
Much agreed. I wasn't arguing for nutty patents on the basis that everything is novel, somewhere and to someone. I wish that an icon was the right size to feature the illustration from the cat-with-laser-pointer patent
Cheers,
Tim
that for most of human history, no forks were available. They only came into widespread use in (iirc) the 16th century. Might be off a couple of centuries, but that's not the point ;) (There's a Henry Petroski book which goes through a long, fun, history of flatware; but it's been a long time since I read it.
So things can seem obvious in restrospect sometimes which previously did not!
timothy
a) I think you're right; people are overestimating the demand here, analogizing from small music players (nifty, useful, amenable to things like typing as in the movie "Haiku Tunnel") to small video players (nifty, somewhat less useful, not at all amenable to background work or play).
b) At the same time, Hey, how many kids have had Gameboys or their newer, smarter cousins, used 'em to while away the ride to school, family vacations, the time they're supposed to spend sleeping, etc? That tells me there sure is *some* audience for watching TV shows and movies on a small handheld device.
For shows where I have a limited interest, where I could happily watch / glance at way less than perfect quality, high compression in a handhold video device would be great: I could watch a few minutes when I had the chance to, skip forward TiVo-like, etc.
timothy
I just took a long car trip, relying mostly on (purchased and municipally provided*) 802.11 access, and in preparation for that trip bought a highish-end 802.11 card and extrernal patch antenna, which indeed came in handy.
:)
I considered one of the USB 802.11 donglers, but passed on account of ignorance: Are any of them of Linux-friendly? Are some brands better than others? Can anyone provide reception figures or anecdotes?
It certainly would be nice to have a rooftop mount on my station wagon to which I could as necessary string up a 15' USB cable and thumb-drive-style 802.11 thing
timothy
*Thanks, taxpayers and politicians of Salt Lake City!
I spent all of April and much of May away from my home in Seattle, and worked from my car quite a few times. (802.11 is wonderful stuff.)
A useful item, I found, and one which applies in your case, is a velcro-attached sun-shade. I've seen ones that look both more functional and more durable than the cheap-n-cheerful one I picked up from a MicroCenter in Columbus or Cleveland (it was a long trip -- this map is largely accurate, just misses a dip I ended up making to the Four Corners area), but even the one I bought -- $15 on sale -- was a big help. It may also let you get away with *less* than the maximum brightness on your screen, so if battery life is a concern it's an important addition.
Cheers,
timothy
... it was just after I signed on with two friends to be the 3rd tenant in a Brooklyn apartment.
... soon as our strike is over, and as soon as the resulting backlog is gone through, and soon as we damn well please, haveanicedaythiscallmaybemonitoredforqualityassura nce) which meant I couldn't telecommute from the apartment even by dialup. Verizon controlled the lines, too, making it impossible to get service for a while even if you wanted another company to provide its rendition of the fabled dialtone. DSL? Ha, just you wait. Cable? Sorry, must have local phone service, we were told.
;)) And they kept charging me, months after my account was alleged to have been closed.
Two months without phone service (gosh, sorry, we're really trying to install it
So, Verizon's strike cost me about two months of rent -- that is, time during which I could either a) pay daily for internet cafes and such or b) stay in MD and work from my connection there while paying the sunk rent in Brooklyn, which is what I did except for a few weekends. Thanks, Verizon, thanks a bunch. Brotherhood of man, greatly pleased by your extended middle digit, progress marches ever on. Oh, and the (crap, fraudulently false adversing) Merlin wireless service from Verizon sucked as bad as the worst reports about it would suggest. I did get that, because I could order it from MD and have it work (well, not "work" exactly, but y'know, try to work) in NYC (unlike local physical phone hookup, which pretty much has to be done on-premises
Not that I'm bitter.
timothy
I'm not a huge fan of Starbucks, except to defend it (or them, to UK readers) against kneejerking knee-jerkers' jerking knees ;)
;) (Around Seattle, a lot more have pay-for WiFi, but that's better than nothing, when you need a connection.)
... for now. But just you wait -- we're going to be the next Starbucks! Avoid that corporate exploiter Starbucks ... oh.]
However, the perception that Starbucks has "driven out local coffee houses with inferior, burnt-tasting coffee" is at least mostly baloney. (In this, to be clear, I am agreeing with the parent poster, just strenuously enough to say more than "me too!")
Starbucks (and now other notable Evil Chains) have probably done more to increase coffee appreciation than any other single factor. When I was younger, there *was* no established coffee scene; Yes, there was a restaurant (semi-greasy spoon) called The White Coffee Pot, Jr. in my childhood small town (now part of an obscure and probably defunct chain, I think), but there was no source of sit-and-read-a-paper coffee of any quality worth coming back to for the coffee.
Starbucks coffee itself may not be worth much snobbery, but realize that the culture of coffee snobbery in the U.S. (nascent, or at best adolescent) certainly owes a lot of Starbucks, with its network (cells?) of consistently OK coffee outlets throughout the country. It's hip to be above Starbucks -- a few years ago, Starbucks was something to aspire to (strong, rich coffee served in comfy surroundings); since the chain is now successful and ubiquitous, it's hard to maintain aspirational status when you're a much-mocked franchise commodity.
So Starbucks, while it isn't exactly dying on the vine, has a) made people think about coffee and b) -- or maybe this should be a', but that makes for an ugly list -- made for a much better environment for hipper coffee bars to inhabit. There may be some coffee bars that Starbucks has driven out of business -- no doubt. But there are also a lot that Starbucks has caused to spring up, or to spruce themselves up. And like the parent poster says, some of them have free WiFi
[Subliminal message: Avoid that corporate exploiter Starbucks, that cheap mangler of souls and exploiter of little girls! Come over to Tim's Javanation, which uses exclusively fair-trade coffee beans processed by exotic but happy parrots, steam pressed in a brick oven. We're still working on the franchise bit and have only this hired clown to exploit
People born before 1980 may remember when the Gap's clothes were *cool* among a huge chunk of the population, mostly the population under 20; now they're pleasant enough, but unremarkable. Unhip, mostly, or at least ahip. ("I'm not a hipster; I'm an ahipster.") Shopping at the Gap is an essentially conventional, socially conservative act (and hey -- The Big Shirt!). In 1985, the Gap was not a place many parents would shop for themselves, only for their kids. Not so now. Extended metaphor over.
timothy
Just the like the ludicrous "pod race" in Ep. I, and the (admittedly cute) hovering-Yoda saber fight in II, the only possible rational justification is videogame possibilities. Just like scenes where people and robots get tossed by-complete-coincidence onto moving conveyor belts with stamping machinery ...
Remember, A-B-B-A-up will let you kick-flip your lava board; B-B-A-B-down-up does a stalefish grab.
timothy
I have recently and at long last become reacquainted with my bikeE recumbent. Or, well, semi-recumbent as some people like to call them, since it's more like a propped-against-a-wall position. However, I guess a *true* recumbent would involve you lying senseless on a mattress or something, so I call kibosh on that aspect of the name game ;)
...) low-end: a bit heavy, a lot cheap (compared to many recumbents, which are designed and priced like sculpture). I had hoped they represented a sufficient mainstreaming of recumbent bikes, and a sufficient lowering of the price, that they would fill an obvious market gap and thrive, but ... No. Turns out they were not able to pull an eMachines, despite the similar naming scheme.
:) For Steve Roberts with his 210 gears, maybe, but not for me with my mere 21 ;) It's also more for streets and other flattish surfaces than for mountainous territory ;) However, the tires are sufficiently knobby it's certainly not confined to artificially perfect racing conditions. For the places and reasons I'm likely to ride it (mostly urban transport, for fun and utility, grabbing milk from the store etc) it's perfect.
As recumbents go, bikeE bikes are (or were, since the company is now out of business, but *are* in that their products still exist
So, now after a year of not riding it (long story, friend's delivery plan from the other coast was interrupted), I have the pieces, and soon will re-assemble my heavy but super-cruisy blue semi-recumbent.
Riding recumbent takes a few minutes to adjust, less so probably on the bikeE than on the truly radical ones, which I have long wanted to try but never have. It's cruisy! turns are a bit slow (long wheelbase), hills are enough to make me walk a lot of them, in contradiction to claims that they're no worse on a recumbent than on a conventional upright bike. Uh, Yeah right
(Who is Steve Roberts, you ask?)
However (and this is the reason I have bothered to type this much on an old bike), I have not yet located a bike rack that would hold one of these on the *back* of my small station wagon (subaru legacy outback). Has anyone seen one of these? I don't want a rooftop rack for it -- unless someone can provide evidence that rear carriers are just as bad, fuel-wise. Around town, the fuel difference is not so bad. I just ended a 9,500 mile road trip though, and may be taking one of similar length in August. At current gas prices, and even at old ones we may ne'er see again, I don't want to add anything unnecessary to the fule bill.
timothy