You wrote: "I use my Acer Travelmate T102i every weekday for about 8 hours a day."
Curious, do your classrooms have electric outlets all over? If not, how do you handle battery life? Do you carry spares, or does your schedule just work so you can recharge at the right points?
Battery life is my biggest complaint about nearly every notebook I've owned; the lead-acid battery in the Toshiba from which I type has actually been surprisingly hardy, better than any of the Li-Ions I've had in other laptops. (Who knows why?)
My 2nd biggest complaint also applies especially to tablets, which is screen brightness, but I suppose in a classroom it shouldn't be too bad...
A word of caution: I have not seen / used the Canon, but I've seen the output of Panasonic's $900 SD based little video camera, and what *that* one claims is DV quality looked awfully blocky / pixelated to me even at its lowest (least) compression.
A neat thing, but nowhere as smooth as the video from my low-end digital8 Sony camcorder.(The lens was disappointing, too, but, that's more understandable given the size; this Canon has what seems to be a much better lens, just going by specs...)
(I too would like an all-flash, decent-capacity video camera -- ones like the Canon you point out are probably the best way to go for now, despite the shape which makes the user think of snapshots, not extended video sessions...ah well. I wish the toy-like ones weren't such crap, but then, they wouldn't be toys, and wouldn't cost $199 from Gateway:) )
"This looks nice. I'll download it when the heat dies down a bit."
If you're getting a torrent, you'll probably grab it faster while a lot of others are getting it, too.
Yesterday I finally joined the bittorent fad, found it worked well (that was using the OS X bittorrent client, which was dead easy to install and use:))
The c't version is German centric, of course, because it's a German-language magazine...
Some people on the forums at knoppix.net have said they're working on (or at least thinking about) remastering this version, and I bet an English-default version will likely come out of that. So scan those forums, and an English torrent will probably appear in the coming weeks...
According to predictions there, based on previous knoppix release cycles, probably a 2.6-based official Knoppix version will come out in March or early April...
However, on my own system (not the one I'm typing from:), I run into problems when I try to run Gnome and specify lang=us -- I just get a blank screen. My German should be enough to let me muddle through, though, soon I will see what happens when I specify desktop=gnome without trying to do it in English...
Since none of these names are opaque (so I can ignore your explanations in parentheses), I'll guess what each one does:
Powerpoint -- a powerful hand-shaped icon, for when quadruple clicking isn't enough
Access - allows one to make spy-movie-style effortless break-ins to computers, buildings, locked safes... anything, really.
Outlook - provides an 8-ball style simple fortune telling device. . Visual Studio - nifty painting tool
And though you didn't mention it, Word -- a dictionary application with a limited vocabulary. Watch for the sequel, coming soon, called "Words."
Also, Excel, the application that's really, really good at whatever it is that it happens to do.
My point is (and I do have one) that these program names are fine and dandy, catchy even, but in no way are the programs' functions anything more than hinted at by the name. If you *know* that Access refers to *database* Access, then great, Access may then seem awfully intuitive. If you don't already know that, "access" is a pretty ambiguous term. Access would also be a great name for a financial records application, or a password generator, or a password-keyring type application, or a tool for analyzing computer security. Likewise Word... it's a cool name for a word processor, but in fact still pretty ambiguous. If it wasn't a word processor, maybe it would be a Bible study tool ("In the beginning was the Word"), or a scrabble player's lookup tool, or a rhyming dictionary, etc etc.
On the other hand, "Internet Explorer" and "Windows Media Player" (there is something called that, right?) seem clearer to me, even if not perfect. ("OK honey, I'm going to play some media now" would be a strange sentence, because the word "play" doesn't act cleanly on "media"... )
On the other, other hand... "BackOffice" is IMO a pretty good name for that suite. Not perfect, just good.
My thought: pretty much all names suck -- either they're hopelessly and boringly descriptive, or not descriptive enough -- unless they catch on, in which case people may even think of them as being intuitive:) (One frequently dragged-out fact: I liked "WriteNow" as a word processor, and as a name for a word processor.)
Oh, I bet surveillance cameras in Britain are effective.
They're probably effective at making people feel watched and uneasy whenever they're in any public space, on the reasonable basis that they might be being watched and recorded.
They're probably effective in wearing away (a big lop this time) at the idea that governments should exist to serve citizens, rather than the other way around.
One of the most memorable meals I've ever had (and in a good way, not in the "... and then the waiter was stabbed by the Mob guys!" way) was a few years ago in Utah, I think in Provo (well, somewhere in the Provo / Park City / Salt Lake City triangle, anyhow;)), but at any rate at a Brazilian Grill, the name of which is nearly at hand, but oh, well. ("Rodizio Grill"?)
a) the good was delicious, and it was not heavy on the spinach n' cucumber side of things. Beef, chicken, pork, rattlesnake sausage...
b) Good system, a sort of reverse buffet. Each table has a red / green wooden token, a traffic signal for the wait staff, who are bringing around food on platters. Red-side-up means "We're still dangerously full," green-side-up means "Please bring us more, we have discovered a leak and it needs to be plugged with, among other things, quail eggs."
I know that there are now lots of these Brazilian grills around the country. If only there was a good source of vat-meat... it's hard to reconcile the idea of vegetarianism (the not eating animals part at least) with the tastiness of, well, ex-animals.
As impressive as the food, though, is the system which prevents the table-service game of trying to make eye contact with waiters etc. It's a more elegant solution than my long-contemplated idea which would be to have a sort of steward/ess light over the tables in restaurants. The wooden token is simple, uses red/green cues which (non-colorblind) people are used to. (Though the semantics are also reversable; it would be as sensible to say "red means Stop to the waiter, green means the waiter can pass you by.") I think there was a little guide on the table.
The rest of the state, perhaps, but SLC and Park City do not lack for excellent food, casual to quite formal.
"So you're a guy on the run - you decide to switch towns, put down some roots and start dating again. But if your special new friend happens to be someone who checks her potential dates by searching on Google, you're in trouble."
I feel burned by KOffice, because it's crashed a lot for me over the past few years. I like that it's frame-based, and it really seems nice... until it crashed for the Xth time.
OpenOffice has not crashed in my (occasional but sometimes extended) use, which may be blind luck, peculiarity of my personal magnetic field, etc... but whyever:)
I like that KOffice is there, and I appreciate that it's a different project and that many people like KOffice -- I just don't like crashing:)
re: "mainly that its ultimate goal is apparently to DDoS SCO":
Maybe, but I doubt it.
I think the ultimate goal is the same as most viruses (and it may not be clear even to the ones doing it) -- to make people dislike and distrust each other, inch by inch. In this case, the writer has tried to put a big kick-me sign on the backs of two different groups, two-for-one. Incidentally, I think that's the same goal that drives a lot of the malicious stuff posted on Slashdot and any other forum nice enough to provide a soapbox to the jerks as well as the nice guys.
When someone posts (posted? one can hope, about a particular site with a.cx domain...) a link to shocking or hateful stuff, or (read at -1 sometime) posts the shocking, hateful stuff itself, he's not doing it because they're nice, or because they're cute pranksters. They're expressing anger / derision / hatred / malice that they didn't learn in kindergarten to sublimate or control. If I were a psychologist, maybe you'd take more seriously my guess that they're mostly angry with their parents, if not The Whole World. It's a lot easier to ruin a conversation than take part in one as a positive contributor, and if your goal is destruction, a lot more satisfying, too.
The same sort of people (when / if they interact with the real world) are probably tempted to kick dogs and push old ladies down stairways, pee in public pools, feed exlax to pigeons, and leave flaming lunchbags on doorsteps. Oh, well.Hopefully one day the old ladies will be armed, the dogs will bite, the pigeons will explode over their lunch, and the swimming pool incident will lead to an indecent exposure charge.
You wrote: "And no, I don't drive nice new cars. I don't believe in car payments. If I can't write a check for it I won't buy it."
Hear, hear! This philosophy led me to purchase my own Escort a few years ago. Very minor problems, mostly I was happy with it, recently gave to charity at 170,000 miles (the tax writeoff is probably fair given its minor-work-needed and market value vs. hassle and time).
Now I'm in a more expensive, mountain-friendly Subaru (a bigger check to write, sadly, but hopefully in the end still a good bargain), but I nonetheless slightly miss the Escort -- especially when I'm filling up the tank!
If not for its wimpiness in mountains, I would have kept that (1995, manual, wagon) Escort until one of us died. As other posters have said, 40mpg highway, dogged (though not rugged) reliability, and in the wagon version would carry an incredible amount of stuff. Since it's a Mazda at heart (I think guts are basically those of a 303, but that's distant memory, so probably wrong), it has Japanese-car goodness. That people think of them as ugly is a convenient plus:) (Not stolen or broken into even when it was frequently parked in Brooklyn in a neighborhood where that was a legitimate worry.)
Aesthetically, I actually like it *as a microwagon.* I don't like the sedan versions -- those are in fact butt ugly. The wagon version, on the other hand, is like an everyday European car. Not fancy, but practical, frugal, and (dare I say it) fun to drive, at least in manual. It's hardly a muscle car, but it's definitely sprightly enough in lower gears.
So there!:) Funny to see what a loyal following the Escort has here, judging from responses to your query!
timothy
p.s. The new car is one I also consider good looking, but apparently famously ugly by others -- the Subaru outback wagon.
apt4rpm (if I recall correctly) was developed by Conectiva employees, and Conectiva has used apt for several years, possibly since their first public release. They're not based on Debian, correct -- they're more like Mandrake, a Red Hat based distro that has diverged as it's matured.
I have hard-disk-installed Knoppix on two machines (a Duron desktop and a Celeron laptop).
On both of them, I found that apt-get dist-upgrade broke (I forget the exact error) as your describe. However, by apt-getting the excellent package manager synaptic, and using the upgrade feature from there, it worked fine.
Why this should be is beyond me, since as I understand things, synaptic is nothing more than a pretty wrapper, and is calling the same commands. However, it's hard to argue with success, and all I can say is that this mysteriously worked. Perhaps it would work for you, too:)
Well, the URL is incredibly convoluted, but it doesn't appear to be session specific or anything, so here you go:)
(I searched at walmart.com on "Lindows" and then "all results in Electronics.")
It's not the latest or greatest, but it's got a faster processor than any machine I own, a hard drive we (I) would have (figuratively speaking) killed for a few years ago, enough RAM to run a nice GUI, etc. And obviously, it runs Linux, if that matters to you, courtesy of Michael Robertson:)
a) realize that high-end copiers have had currency-detecting features (with varying degrees of success / accuracy) for many years. So, modern, but not really new.
b) Currency detection, though the involved technologies could certainly be called Orwellian, intrusive, heavy-handed, etc, is not as surprising as some people make it out to be, as a particular example. The problem is more with the general case.
What *other* things is policeware looking for on user's computers, and what things will it look for in the near future? You may be convinced by arguments that the famous porn-centric image recognition software is easy to fool, but that's not the point -- it exists, it will get better, and it will probably be loaded in just such programs. There's good reason to think that copyright holders will embed symbols analogous to those in currency in every magazine image that's more than thumbnail sized, and it wouldn't take a full-blown OCR program to look for certain trigger words in scanned text, and just about nothing to look for words stored as plaintext.
This seems to be less of a worry with open source code. Hmmm.
Well, these days, GNUStep, but Yes -- better apps. I especially like the Mail.app. However, the K desktop folks have a wider range of available apps...
Which I downloaded as proof of concept, heard a few seconds of to confirm that it was, in fact, a music file with an Erasure remix, then never listened all the way through. (I have since downloaded a few others.)
For amusement?:) (And that's just one of many such interviews, of course.)
I can't imagine using Ask Jeeves as a search engine, but it makes a funny Eliza substitute.
timothy
I prefer the suite for a couple of reasons ...
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
I don't use the Mozilla mail component generally. (I have with the account that came with my dialup ISP, but I don't generally use that.) However, I still prefer the suite, because...
a) I like the default look better. This is the least important reason, but I prefer Mozilla Modern to the default Firebird look. Yes, there are skins available for both to make this a picayune complaint / compliment, but Hey, YMMV:)
b) OK, it's another one that may strike you as trivial, but since I use the browser a lot, it builds up to a moderately important point to me: I prefer to search with a drop-down from the URL / Location bar than from the separate search bar on the right. I guess some people (including the programmers, who do get more say than me:)) like it there, but it seems to me a needless complication. Maybe there's a simple way to squeeze this behavior from Firebird, but I haven't really tried except a glance through the preferences, where I didn't see it. (Is it possible, is it easy?)
c) I have a few shortcuts / bookmarklets built up for Mozilla. Maybe they also work with Firebird, but I haven't investigated how or tried to move them over to Firebird. Again: perhaps it's easy, but switching's a bitch when staying feels fine:) Which I'm sure a lot of IE users say, too, but *staying's* a bitch when it's staying with a browser that doesn't have tabs:)
d) Mozilla suite has what has become a very good IRC client (Chatzilla). Since I'm going to start Mozilla anyhow, unless I need to use DCC (which I generally do not use), I just hit control-6 and get a Chatzilla window, too.
I keep a version of the Mozilla suite installer for Windows on my 64MB memory key, it's come in handy a few times when it was easier to borrow a connected, powered-up Windows machine than boot up my laptop.
timothy
WMA is proprietary, but widespread ...
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 1
not as widespread as MP3, but I think moreso than AAC, and way more than Ogg (so far). At CES, there was a booth showing off lots of WMA-playing portables, like the Rio Nitrus etc. I think every one played MP3 as well, some probably also played AAC. I wish that one played Ogg, too, it's a great shape and now up to 4 GB;) (They did not have the Karma at the same booth, I did not notice any ogg-capable players there, but this display I guess was meant to be representative, rather than comprehensive, so that's not necessarily a conspiracy:) )
unfortunately for me, the program's author spells it as "Speak Freely" rather than "speakfreely," and as a result the search engine doesn't actually find that article when searching on the name.
However, if I do break down and get a hard-drive based portable, the Rio Karma looks nicest to me -- good interface, ethernet jack (on dock), plays FLAC even (does that iRiver?).
Slashdot Mirror
You wrote: "I use my Acer Travelmate T102i every weekday for about 8 hours a day."
...
Curious, do your classrooms have electric outlets all over? If not, how do you handle battery life? Do you carry spares, or does your schedule just work so you can recharge at the right points?
Battery life is my biggest complaint about nearly every notebook I've owned; the lead-acid battery in the Toshiba from which I type has actually been surprisingly hardy, better than any of the Li-Ions I've had in other laptops. (Who knows why?)
My 2nd biggest complaint also applies especially to tablets, which is screen brightness, but I suppose in a classroom it shouldn't be too bad
timothy
A word of caution: I have not seen / used the Canon, but I've seen the output of Panasonic's $900 SD based little video camera, and what *that* one claims is DV quality looked awfully blocky / pixelated to me even at its lowest (least) compression.
...)
...ah well. I wish the toy-like ones weren't such crap, but then, they wouldn't be toys, and wouldn't cost $199 from Gateway :) )
A neat thing, but nowhere as smooth as the video from my low-end digital8 Sony camcorder.(The lens was disappointing, too, but, that's more understandable given the size; this Canon has what seems to be a much better lens, just going by specs
(I too would like an all-flash, decent-capacity video camera -- ones like the Canon you point out are probably the best way to go for now, despite the shape which makes the user think of snapshots, not extended video sessions
timothy
(To mix a metaphor ;))
:))
"This looks nice. I'll download it when the heat dies down a bit."
If you're getting a torrent, you'll probably grab it faster while a lot of others are getting it, too.
Yesterday I finally joined the bittorent fad, found it worked well (that was using the OS X bittorrent client, which was dead easy to install and use
The live-server idea is great.
timothy
The c't version is German centric, of course, because it's a German-language magazine ...
...
...
Some people on the forums at knoppix.net have said they're working on (or at least thinking about) remastering this version, and I bet an English-default version will likely come out of that. So scan those forums, and an English torrent will probably appear in the coming weeks
According to predictions there, based on previous knoppix release cycles, probably a 2.6-based official Knoppix version will come out in March or early April
timothy
Gnome is included, 2.4 I believe.
:), I run into problems when I try to run Gnome and specify lang=us -- I just get a blank screen. My German should be enough to let me muddle through, though, soon I will see what happens when I specify desktop=gnome without trying to do it in English ...
However, on my own system (not the one I'm typing from
timothy
Since none of these names are opaque (so I can ignore your explanations in parentheses), I'll guess what each one does:
... anything, really.
... it's a cool name for a word processor, but in fact still pretty ambiguous. If it wasn't a word processor, maybe it would be a Bible study tool ("In the beginning was the Word"), or a scrabble player's lookup tool, or a rhyming dictionary, etc etc.
... )
... "BackOffice" is IMO a pretty good name for that suite. Not perfect, just good.
:) (One frequently dragged-out fact: I liked "WriteNow" as a word processor, and as a name for a word processor.)
Powerpoint -- a powerful hand-shaped icon, for when quadruple clicking isn't enough
Access - allows one to make spy-movie-style effortless break-ins to computers, buildings, locked safes
Outlook - provides an 8-ball style simple fortune telling device.
.
Visual Studio - nifty painting tool
And though you didn't mention it, Word -- a dictionary application with a limited vocabulary. Watch for the sequel, coming soon, called "Words."
Also, Excel, the application that's really, really good at whatever it is that it happens to do.
My point is (and I do have one) that these program names are fine and dandy, catchy even, but in no way are the programs' functions anything more than hinted at by the name. If you *know* that Access refers to *database* Access, then great, Access may then seem awfully intuitive. If you don't already know that, "access" is a pretty ambiguous term. Access would also be a great name for a financial records application, or a password generator, or a password-keyring type application, or a tool for analyzing computer security. Likewise Word
On the other hand, "Internet Explorer" and "Windows Media Player" (there is something called that, right?) seem clearer to me, even if not perfect. ("OK honey, I'm going to play some media now" would be a strange sentence, because the word "play" doesn't act cleanly on "media"
On the other, other hand
My thought: pretty much all names suck -- either they're hopelessly and boringly descriptive, or not descriptive enough -- unless they catch on, in which case people may even think of them as being intuitive
timothy
Oh, I bet surveillance cameras in Britain are effective.
They're probably effective at making people feel watched and uneasy whenever they're in any public space, on the reasonable basis that they might be being watched and recorded.
They're probably effective in wearing away (a big lop this time) at the idea that governments should exist to serve citizens, rather than the other way around.
As you were, citizens.
timoMPPHGHGHAPHAAaaauuugh!
Vegetarians, beware of the following statement:
;)), but at any rate at a Brazilian Grill, the name of which is nearly at hand, but oh, well. ("Rodizio Grill"?)
...
... it's hard to reconcile the idea of vegetarianism (the not eating animals part at least) with the tastiness of, well, ex-animals.
One of the most memorable meals I've ever had (and in a good way, not in the "... and then the waiter was stabbed by the Mob guys!" way) was a few years ago in Utah, I think in Provo (well, somewhere in the Provo / Park City / Salt Lake City triangle, anyhow
a) the good was delicious, and it was not heavy on the spinach n' cucumber side of things. Beef, chicken, pork, rattlesnake sausage
b) Good system, a sort of reverse buffet. Each table has a red / green wooden token, a traffic signal for the wait staff, who are bringing around food on platters. Red-side-up means "We're still dangerously full," green-side-up means "Please bring us more, we have discovered a leak and it needs to be plugged with, among other things, quail eggs."
I know that there are now lots of these Brazilian grills around the country. If only there was a good source of vat-meat
As impressive as the food, though, is the system which prevents the table-service game of trying to make eye contact with waiters etc. It's a more elegant solution than my long-contemplated idea which would be to have a sort of steward/ess light over the tables in restaurants. The wooden token is simple, uses red/green cues which (non-colorblind) people are used to. (Though the semantics are also reversable; it would be as sensible to say "red means Stop to the waiter, green means the waiter can pass you by.") I think there was a little guide on the table.
The rest of the state, perhaps, but SLC and Park City do not lack for excellent food, casual to quite formal.
timothy
"So you're a guy on the run - you decide to switch towns, put down some roots and start dating again. But if your special new friend happens to be someone who checks her potential dates by searching on Google, you're in trouble."
All too true, all too true.
timothy
I feel burned by KOffice, because it's crashed a lot for me over the past few years. I like that it's frame-based, and it really seems nice ... until it crashed for the Xth time.
... but whyever :)
:)
OpenOffice has not crashed in my (occasional but sometimes extended) use, which may be blind luck, peculiarity of my personal magnetic field, etc
I like that KOffice is there, and I appreciate that it's a different project and that many people like KOffice -- I just don't like crashing
timothy
re: "mainly that its ultimate goal is apparently to DDoS SCO":
.cx domain ...) a link to shocking or hateful stuff, or (read at -1 sometime) posts the shocking, hateful stuff itself, he's not doing it because they're nice, or because they're cute pranksters. They're expressing anger / derision / hatred / malice that they didn't learn in kindergarten to sublimate or control. If I were a psychologist, maybe you'd take more seriously my guess that they're mostly angry with their parents, if not The Whole World. It's a lot easier to ruin a conversation than take part in one as a positive contributor, and if your goal is destruction, a lot more satisfying, too.
Maybe, but I doubt it.
I think the ultimate goal is the same as most viruses (and it may not be clear even to the ones doing it) -- to make people dislike and distrust each other, inch by inch. In this case, the writer has tried to put a big kick-me sign on the backs of two different groups, two-for-one. Incidentally, I think that's the same goal that drives a lot of the malicious stuff posted on Slashdot and any other forum nice enough to provide a soapbox to the jerks as well as the nice guys.
When someone posts (posted? one can hope, about a particular site with a
The same sort of people (when / if they interact with the real world) are probably tempted to kick dogs and push old ladies down stairways, pee in public pools, feed exlax to pigeons, and leave flaming lunchbags on doorsteps. Oh, well.Hopefully one day the old ladies will be armed, the dogs will bite, the pigeons will explode over their lunch, and the swimming pool incident will lead to an indecent exposure charge.
timothy
You wrote: "And no, I don't drive nice new cars. I don't believe in car payments. If I can't write a check for it I won't buy it."
Hear, hear! This philosophy led me to purchase my own Escort a few years ago. Very minor problems, mostly I was happy with it, recently gave to charity at 170,000 miles (the tax writeoff is probably fair given its minor-work-needed and market value vs. hassle and time).
Now I'm in a more expensive, mountain-friendly Subaru (a bigger check to write, sadly, but hopefully in the end still a good bargain), but I nonetheless slightly miss the Escort -- especially when I'm filling up the tank!
timothy
If not for its wimpiness in mountains, I would have kept that (1995, manual, wagon) Escort until one of us died. As other posters have said, 40mpg highway, dogged (though not rugged) reliability, and in the wagon version would carry an incredible amount of stuff. Since it's a Mazda at heart (I think guts are basically those of a 303, but that's distant memory, so probably wrong), it has Japanese-car goodness. That people think of them as ugly is a convenient plus :) (Not stolen or broken into even when it was frequently parked in Brooklyn in a neighborhood where that was a legitimate worry.)
:) Funny to see what a loyal following the Escort has here, judging from responses to your query!
Aesthetically, I actually like it *as a microwagon.* I don't like the sedan versions -- those are in fact butt ugly. The wagon version, on the other hand, is like an everyday European car. Not fancy, but practical, frugal, and (dare I say it) fun to drive, at least in manual. It's hardly a muscle car, but it's definitely sprightly enough in lower gears.
So there!
timothy
p.s. The new car is one I also consider good looking, but apparently famously ugly by others -- the Subaru outback wagon.
apt4rpm (if I recall correctly) was developed by Conectiva employees, and Conectiva has used apt for several years, possibly since their first public release. They're not based on Debian, correct -- they're more like Mandrake, a Red Hat based distro that has diverged as it's matured.
timothy
I have hard-disk-installed Knoppix on two machines (a Duron desktop and a Celeron laptop).
:)
On both of them, I found that apt-get dist-upgrade broke (I forget the exact error) as your describe. However, by apt-getting the excellent package manager synaptic, and using the upgrade feature from there, it worked fine.
Why this should be is beyond me, since as I understand things, synaptic is nothing more than a pretty wrapper, and is calling the same commands. However, it's hard to argue with success, and all I can say is that this mysteriously worked. Perhaps it would work for you, too
timothy
unless someone wants to drug me, ship me to New York by then, provide a room and nutrition, and agree to ship me back to the Left Coast ...
Probably not worth it.
timothy
Well, the URL is incredibly convoluted, but it doesn't appear to be session specific or anything, so here you go :)
:)
(I searched at walmart.com on "Lindows" and then "all results in Electronics.")
It's not the latest or greatest, but it's got a faster processor than any machine I own, a hard drive we (I) would have (figuratively speaking) killed for a few years ago, enough RAM to run a nice GUI, etc. And obviously, it runs Linux, if that matters to you, courtesy of Michael Robertson
timothy
a) realize that high-end copiers have had currency-detecting features (with varying degrees of success / accuracy) for many years. So, modern, but not really new.
b) Currency detection, though the involved technologies could certainly be called Orwellian, intrusive, heavy-handed, etc, is not as surprising as some people make it out to be, as a particular example. The problem is more with the general case.
What *other* things is policeware looking for on user's computers, and what things will it look for in the near future? You may be convinced by arguments that the famous porn-centric image recognition software is easy to fool, but that's not the point -- it exists, it will get better, and it will probably be loaded in just such programs. There's good reason to think that copyright holders will embed symbols analogous to those in currency in every magazine image that's more than thumbnail sized, and it wouldn't take a full-blown OCR program to look for certain trigger words in scanned text, and just about nothing to look for words stored as plaintext.
This seems to be less of a worry with open source code. Hmmm.
timothy
Well, these days, GNUStep, but Yes -- better apps. I especially like the Mail.app. However, the K desktop folks have a wider range of available apps ...
...
timothy
Yes, just kidding
Which I downloaded as proof of concept, heard a few seconds of to confirm that it was, in fact, a music file with an Erasure remix, then never listened all the way through. (I have since downloaded a few others.)
timothy
For amusement? :) (And that's just one of many such interviews, of course.)
I can't imagine using Ask Jeeves as a search engine, but it makes a funny Eliza substitute.
timothy
I don't use the Mozilla mail component generally. (I have with the account that came with my dialup ISP, but I don't generally use that.) However, I still prefer the suite, because ...
:)
:)) like it there, but it seems to me a needless complication. Maybe there's a simple way to squeeze this behavior from Firebird, but I haven't really tried except a glance through the preferences, where I didn't see it. (Is it possible, is it easy?)
:) Which I'm sure a lot of IE users say, too, but *staying's* a bitch when it's staying with a browser that doesn't have tabs :)
a) I like the default look better. This is the least important reason, but I prefer Mozilla Modern to the default Firebird look. Yes, there are skins available for both to make this a picayune complaint / compliment, but Hey, YMMV
b) OK, it's another one that may strike you as trivial, but since I use the browser a lot, it builds up to a moderately important point to me: I prefer to search with a drop-down from the URL / Location bar than from the separate search bar on the right. I guess some people (including the programmers, who do get more say than me
c) I have a few shortcuts / bookmarklets built up for Mozilla. Maybe they also work with Firebird, but I haven't investigated how or tried to move them over to Firebird. Again: perhaps it's easy, but switching's a bitch when staying feels fine
d) Mozilla suite has what has become a very good IRC client (Chatzilla). Since I'm going to start Mozilla anyhow, unless I need to use DCC (which I generally do not use), I just hit control-6 and get a Chatzilla window, too.
I keep a version of the Mozilla suite installer for Windows on my 64MB memory key, it's come in handy a few times when it was easier to borrow a connected, powered-up Windows machine than boot up my laptop.
timothy
not as widespread as MP3, but I think moreso than AAC, and way more than Ogg (so far). At CES, there was a booth showing off lots of WMA-playing portables, like the Rio Nitrus etc. I think every one played MP3 as well, some probably also played AAC. I wish that one played Ogg, too, it's a great shape and now up to 4 GB ;) (They did not have the Karma at the same booth, I did not notice any ogg-capable players there, but this display I guess was meant to be representative, rather than comprehensive, so that's not necessarily a conspiracy :) )
timothy
unfortunately for me, the program's author spells it as "Speak Freely" rather than "speakfreely," and as a result the search engine doesn't actually find that article when searching on the name.
timothy
However, if I do break down and get a hard-drive based portable, the Rio Karma looks nicest to me -- good interface, ethernet jack (on dock), plays FLAC even (does that iRiver?).
timothy