The following comment is neither deep nor original, but...
Waterjets are cool.
When I was small (too small to remember, but I've been back to the place), I lived in a house with central vacuum. Central vacuums always puzzle me; Sure, it's a bit lighter than carrying around a complete vac, but it seems to introduce fiddly bits in places (like walls) where trouble could become Trouble when something goes wrong, and introduces a much longer tube along which suction must be maintained.
However, waterjets are another story. Central waterjets would rock:)
Dremel? What's that, the 20th century? Forget about keeping a loaded pistol around for burglars, save that for the range and the black helicopters -- just have your water pressure set to "maim."
I'd like to see a Blofeld-type villain set up his elaborate death trap so the protagonist would be (if not rescued / escapes) sliced in pieces by a waterjet
H. Seldon himself could not have come up with a better way** to improve Linux GUIs than the rivalry (mostly friendly) among the various approaches to Linux GUIs. (And though there are other Free Software desktops, I'm going to ignore them for part of this comment;))
KDE's approach looks a lot like Windows, is very well integrated down to having a "burn data cd" (with k3b) option in a menu reachable with a mouse click on any file. Neat. (I'm typing on a KDE desktop right now, appreciating how much more I like KDE now than I did a few years ago.) (Knoppix comes with KDE, this machine's installation was from the Knoppix HDD install script... )
GNOME is IMO slightly slicker graphically, and -- in ways that are not easy to pin down -- a little more user friendly. No accounting for taste (and I certainly have questionable taste), but I happen to like a lot of GNOME apps more than their KDE equivalents... mostly a "so what?" since most apps I use don't care one way or the other;)
The Seldonmost part of the KDE/GNOME "battle" (in which actual developers mostly get along well, share beers in pubs when they're not coding) is that their [conspiratorially arranged?] back-and-forth wrt feature lists and ease of use distracts people from, for instance:
The point being, KDE and GNOME may be the most complete / comprehensive approaches to Free Software desktops, but they're far from alone. Fluxbox and Afterstep in particular I like for defaulting to extremely clean desktops, making apps easy to get to through menus available with a mouseclick from anywhere. We're not all in the same gang, because we're not in gangs, gong long a gong a gong a long long fee phi pho fee phum.
Whenever people talk about "standardizing" as if this was an obvious good thing, I wonder if they feel the way to end illiteracy is to settle on one accepted book as The Standard, and making sure people know *that* book. Architecture, too, would be a lot less confusing if we didn't have all these different *types* of housing or approaches to engineering large buildings -- let's just settle on the right one, dammit!
Having only one choice in a given context might make sense -- but it depends on the context.The owner of Amalgamated Consolidated Products, Inc.* is free to declare that Windows 3.1 is the only acceptable desktop standard for his company's employees while they're at work: Fine. Dumb, or maybe it's smart for that company, but fine. Likewise, if NASA decides its billions in tax dollars would contribute the most to the commonwealth if some of them went to creating a standard GNOME-based desktop and ignoring KDE, well, that might make sense in that context.
When I hear lots of 1st-person plural handwringing about how "we" ought to adopt a standard *anything* though, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I get a little defensive. 1st person plural is always annoying when someone seems to be speaking on my behalf but without my consent or agreement. What if I *like* the standard you don't? Think Low-flush toilets as a mandated standard. Think building codes that make inexpensive legal housing a legislated near-impossibility. Building codes, of course, are standards imposed for the good of all, and if you don't like it, you can stick it your ear, fill out this form in triplicate, and wait for the county inspector, who is currently on extended leave in Botswana. Citizen.
To the extent that actual programmers voluntarily combine their efforts, it's nice to see some convergence, even a lot of it. But there's no g
Actually, the two people whose mention of the R1's availability are listed in this story are simply the first two submitters who I saw that linked to it. Things don't always work that way (often submissions are unrunnable for some reason or another... broken links, baffling content, etc, too many submissions on a given topic for us to use them all, etc.), but in this case it did.
Addressing the idea that this is an ad, the answer is pretty easy: Nope -- it's not.:)
[Second layer answer is, there are always going to be people who will actually be convinced by any such answer that the exact opposite is true, to which I can only shrug and think of other things. For nearly any Slashdot post, I guess you could come up with a theory that it was paid for by someone to promote commercial interests in some manner. One guy in this thread suggests -- jokingly -- that budgetlinuxcds was linked to by a competitor.]
So, thanks to adjacent submissions about the release, I linked to a bittorrent file and a company selling cheap ISOs by mail. (I'd never heard of budgetlinuxcds before this post, but a quick google search convinced me they seemed legitimate; I *can* vouch that I've been a happy cheapbytes customer, though.)
If you have bandwidth and interest, the bittorent seems like a good idea; if you have only the interest part, maybe a mailed ISO makes sense. For a good part of yesterday, I was working from a slow dialup connection, and wasn't about to download 3 CDs worth of data;) YMMV, and probably does.
A lot of stories on Slashdot mention companies or their products, sometimes with links to particular ones. This is because we're interested in a particular technology or product, for good or ill.
(On the front page right now is a story that there are two new models of the Roomba automated vacuum cleaner. I realize there are people who sincerely believe that this means Roomba and Slashdot are plotting to promote Roomba in secret Dr. Strangelove black-and-white war-room sessions. Nope to that one, too.)
Is every mention of AMD an advertisement for AMD? Game reviews are often positive, and often link to merchants selling the games mentioned. [Conspiracy.] Should we replace every company or product name (and their URLS) with asterices? What if I'd linked to several ISO providers (adding in cheapbytes, say)? Should every link to commercial sites or mentioning available products in a positive light be stripped from submissions? These are supposed to be rhetorical questions (;) !) , but I'm sure some people really believe the answer to that last one is Yes.
I think if I *had* linked to cheapbytes, an instant conspiracy theory would pop up that Slashdot posts are really the manifestation of shadowy bidding wars among low-margin free software purveyors, who are using their vast gains to purchase evil patent portfolios from gnomes, take over the world, etc etc. (I have seen one episode of the animated show "Stripperella" -- it was about the world's cheapest criminal mastermind; he might want to get it on this at the ground floor...)
To respond to several at once, I'm just picking this one randomly:)
Re:Is the the slasdot version of text ads?
"It seems more like a product advertisement than anything else. May be this is an ad disguised as a story?"
Err... an ad for what, exactly? What product do you mean?
Seattle Wireless is an amateur group who are putting a lot of their own money and time into creating a complex network in the Seattle / Tacoma area, and (in this case) producing / distributing a show about wireless technologies *because they think they're cool.*
Personal Telco is trying to blanket Portland with free 802.11 access. Sounds like a fun, laudable idea to me.
I posted this because I admire what these groups are doing, and want to see similar things happen around the world. (And they are happening -- BAWAG, consume.net, etc etc.)
(If I could only persuade these groups to contribute a portion of their gigantic profits to slashdot... hmmm, idea quickly retracted as complete nonsense;))
sirius bbr wrote: "If I wrote the book, that'd be exactely what I want. If the book's outdated, it means it has brought all those problems to the attention, and that proper solutions were made. What more can you wish?"
A: A new edition of the Linux Annoyances book. I'm sure they can't fit them all in one book;
Can't find the actual article I was seeking, but on a similar note, here is a less-popular view that says the reason Tucker failed is because the cars themselves were less good than promised, rather than because of evil machinations by competitors. (Though there may have been quite a bit of that, too;))
Seattle Wireless folks are doing this because it's fun. Sure, this is an "advertisement" in the sense that this is a notice that brings public attention / publicity, but *not* in the sense that you seem to using that word, as in part of a for-profit marketing campaign. I think 100% of the profit from a run-for-fun-and-glory wireless network (with hardware, bandwidth and electricity) would still be a negative number, so I'm glad we're not getting kickbacks:) (Kickforwards? Simple kicks?)
I just think the the Mt. Baldi link in particular is an astounding DIY project.
"We Are Familiar With Elephants By Virtue Of Their Size" -- that sounds like something that should be familiar, but isn't. Is this the basis of a mnemonic device? Did I spell the mn-word correctly? I wonder if there's an easily-remembered sentence with words whose first letters spell out the right version;)
timothy
God damned input jacks on car stereos
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 1
Some do have such damned jacked;)
I spent a long time shopping for a car stereo, because I wanted a few things lamentably rare:
1) simple, understandable, clean-cut controls 2) logic-control tape deck (luckily now the other kind is rare, but 5 years ago, it was the other way around). Even though I rarely listen to tapes... just don't like the big clunky-button transports -- I'm great at wrecking tapes with them. 3) Like you, an input jack.
I ended up finding an old Blaupunkt (model is "Reno," aka CM147 -- I think it came out in 1987, when it was standard equipment on Porsche 928s, it seems... google, the random) that claims to deliver iirc 45 watts X 4 channels.
Has an aux input built in, I use with a cable running out the (unused) ashtray, sometimes use my laptop as my music player.
1) An available, no-futzing, no-fooling portable ogg player
2) that uses AA batteries (rechargables are now well worth it, and standard battery sizes are so much more convenient than a billion sculpted-to-fit li-ions)
3) that reads from CD / CD-R / CD-RW
4) and hopefully from DVD / DVD recordable formats as well
5) and even more hopefully, a slot for CF would be nice, or some amount (even 64 megs) of built-in flash
6) that costs less than buying a middlin' color PDA;) [Except for the choice of media, my Zaurus with its AA external battery back for power is nearly there... ]
"And speaking of bloat, it's interesting to note that the version of SimpleText that shipped with Mac OS 8 was bigger, in kBs, than the original MacWrite (which had more features). That's progress!"
Yes, I wish the original MacPrograms had been kept around and included, even if only as kitsch, but with appropriate updating to make them run on current systems;)
MacWrite really could take care of most of my word processing needs!
OTOH, now you can have a complete Linux system with more programs than you can shake a stick at for, what, $500 including an LCD monitor?:)
There's a ridiculous argument that comes up whenever someone (here, you & others working on Scribus) comes up with a program functionally similar to an existing favorite:
"FrobnitzPro is already here, and anything that's not Frobnitz compatible is doomed to failure!"
The world changes, happily.
Even if for certain things users find that Quark (or whichever application) really is better, that doesn't take away the value of Scribus. (Duh!)
Kids who learn DTP with Scribus won't all of a sudden freeze up when shown Quark, and professionals who use Quark in the office but don't want to shell out for a personal copy won't suddenly be afflicted with hives to use a free DTP program.
" the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market."
OK, I am guilty of having some favorite / sentimental applications, but WriteNow was available on the NeXT, in fact I think the copyright even mentions NeXT. I think it was versions 3 and 4 that I used -- but I was using the Mac version. I only know that it was NeXT related because people have told me this;)
Too bad WriteNow went to the software afterlife... if it had been under a friendlier license, perhaps it would have led directly to a clean, fast word processor today;)
Reasons for my sentiment: Word crashed frequently, was slow to start -- WriteNow started up near-instantly, never crashed. Very nice UI, simple but not simplistic, did the things I needed to write papers in high school and part of college. Much cheaper than Word, too. Faster spell-checker. Less bloat.
OpenOffice is one of my favorite pieces of software (and projects), but I'd still like to see a quick, nimble thing like WriteNow for most writing tasks.
timothy
remember how IBM wants to spend $1 bil. on Linux?
on
Darl McBride Interview
·
· Score: 1
How much is left in that kitty?:)
This could simplify things, so they don't have to go through the whole Brewster's Million scene of finding new things to pay for...
How plausible would a parallel article have been (a few years back), perhaps in Byte or Dr. Dobbs announcing that Amiga was ready for the masses?
(If someone can point to one, I'll take this back, but I don't *think* Amiga -- or BeOS, or a lot of others -- ever got past the Beautiful Swandive phase, no matter how nice they are, or how many people persist in not burying them:))
Bob Young's book about Red Hat's (so-far) success is titled "Under the Radar" -- seems like an apt phrase not just for Red Hat but more generally for the way Linux (or, to be fair, BSD) desktops have semi-suddenly become hip to heap praise on, much of it deserved.
OpenOffice, AbiWord, KOffice, Mozilla, the various free programming languages, the various free desktop environments, (etc etc) have been evolving for years, and the Free software matrix is both complete and flexible enough that a Grand Unified Final Answer hasn't been necessary. Rough edges are still there, probably always will be, but they demonstrate how dynamic the whole process is. Every minor release of GCC shows this, in fact:) *That's* why suddenly there are complete systems that even many Windows diehards admit are either "good enough" or nearly there -- because it's not sudden at all.
1) For me (mechanically inept, tin ear), I think the Xbox works out as the best deal. $150 for processor, RAM, DVD drive, hard drive in a not-outrageously large case. I also spent $150 less-smart dollars on a mediocre LCD screen which (rather nifty, IMO) latches on the Xbox, making it chunkier but also now "complete." If I wanted to, I could watch movies on it, that is.
2) The screen is also my point number two. Some sort of interface is going to be necessary for any in-car computer. Small LCD screens are pricey, most a lot pricier than the clip-on one I bought. If I was more geniuslike, I would love a custom heads-up display attuned to my biorhthyms, with speech recognition etc, but alas.
3) Yes, it may not be everyone's cup of milk, but I like the idea of hardware designed for one purpose being used to do something else. ("Use the right hardware for the job!" I hear some compulsive types indignantly complain. Feh.)
I have a mini-ITX system which I (mostly) love, it's one of two main systems, and it would make a fine car computer, too. However, the kludgy invertor is already installed under my passenger seat, so that part's taken care of. Plus, I'd still need a screen somewhere, and the nice little 640x480 LCD screens are expensive, 800x600 even more so. Depending on your skill and what's already lying around, an Xbox might be a *stupid* car computer, but I'm hoping for me it's going to be slightly less stupid.
There's nothing wrong (morally or legally) with experimenting with hardware you own.
Note that this use (running a Linux distro) in particular has nothing to do with "stealing" as in running illegally copied games. I'm not going to debate whether playing illegally copied games should be called stealing, just pointing out that it's not part of running Linux on an Xbox:)
The reason I bought an Xbox (and am shopping* for a mod-chip) is to use it as a music box for my car. That may sound silly to you (and it may *be* silly to you:)) but it's very similar in price to adding a low-end CD player to my existing car stereo. And I like my head unit (which has a line-in), so I don't want to get rid of it.
A modded Xbox can also play Ogg Vorbis files, which is the format to which I've been ripping my CD collection for portable use. (Yes, many car decks now will play MP3s, but I don't have more than a handful of those.)
timothy
* Can anyone recommend an easy (no-solder), inexpensive, external-switch equipped modchip preloaded with the Cromwell BIOS?:) The external switch would be if I ever decide to buy, rent or borrow an actual XBox game;)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030319 Debian/1.3-3 here... I wonder if it's something that's changed between our versions of Mozilla, or (my guess) a Windows vs. Linux thing.
Drat -- someone caught onto our scheme! I regret that our business arrangment has come to an end, because I was looking for more of your money to subsidize my continuing purchases of Korean memory products.
We both know that long-term, your largesse has one obvious effect, long-term: namely, that your money creates some great bargains for purchasers of specially-supported companies' products.
It was fun while it lasted, though. If you care to subsidize any other products, I hope you will especially consider paying for part of my next LCD panel; they're still more expensive than I would like, and it would be nice if you could chip in a few bucks.
Thanks in advance,
timothy
p.s. In regards to our prior correspondence: maybe I wasn't clear. No, I actually don't care to artificially prop up any domestic businesses to achieve some sort of artificial parity in price or export numbers. I'll consider it, but it seems pretty irrational, except on the part of the subsidized business.
"Unlike the Ogg Theora infrastructure, the VHS infrastructure is established. Equipment that can play Theora alpha 2 video is currently much more expensive than equipment that can play VHS video. This is a practical obstacle that the government has to overcome somehow."
Yes, the "would be" is a heavy "would be.";)Until the flying cars, sometimes we haveta use those ones with wheels...
"Either that [PO Box], or videos used to train federal employees."
Fine point, but internal things -- like training videos -- might be stupid and wasteful (anyone who's visited a military installation knows what I mean;)) without making me as upset as things that make inappropriate demands on The Public. Also, I'll acknowledge that VCRs are widespread, not a point for me to press harder that it deserves!
But there is a reasonably forseeable future in which one less compromise need be made, because there *are* appropriate video formats (small example, but still) that will be mature enough.
Slashdot Mirror
The following comment is neither deep nor original, but ...
:)
Waterjets are cool.
When I was small (too small to remember, but I've been back to the place), I lived in a house with central vacuum. Central vacuums always puzzle me; Sure, it's a bit lighter than carrying around a complete vac, but it seems to introduce fiddly bits in places (like walls) where trouble could become Trouble when something goes wrong, and introduces a much longer tube along which suction must be maintained.
However, waterjets are another story. Central waterjets would rock
Dremel? What's that, the 20th century? Forget about keeping a loaded pistol around for burglars, save that for the range and the black helicopters -- just have your water pressure set to "maim."
I'd like to see a Blofeld-type villain set up his elaborate death trap so the protagonist would be (if not rescued / escapes) sliced in pieces by a waterjet
timothy
Depends what you think the 'norm' is... I considered the closed source development model to be the 'norm', which ESR decries."
;)
;) Two true anagrams, IMO.
Well, he both descries (perceives) and decries the norm (of closed source development) while extolling open source development
The S is a good variable at any rate
timothy
or maybe it's not ... but 1 out of 10 fingers surveyed preferred to introduce that particular typo.
timothy
H. Seldon himself could not have come up with a better way** to improve Linux GUIs than the rivalry (mostly friendly) among the various approaches to Linux GUIs. (And though there are other Free Software desktops, I'm going to ignore them for part of this comment ;))
... )
... mostly a "so what?" since most apps I use don't care one way or the other ;)
KDE's approach looks a lot like Windows, is very well integrated down to having a "burn data cd" (with k3b) option in a menu reachable with a mouse click on any file. Neat. (I'm typing on a KDE desktop right now, appreciating how much more I like KDE now than I did a few years ago.) (Knoppix comes with KDE, this machine's installation was from the Knoppix HDD install script
GNOME is IMO slightly slicker graphically, and -- in ways that are not easy to pin down -- a little more user friendly. No accounting for taste (and I certainly have questionable taste), but I happen to like a lot of GNOME apps more than their KDE equivalents
The Seldonmost part of the KDE/GNOME "battle" (in which actual developers mostly get along well, share beers in pubs when they're not coding) is that their [conspiratorially arranged?] back-and-forth wrt feature lists and ease of use distracts people from, for instance:
- enlightenment
- blackbox (old) / fluxbox / etc.
- icewm
- and windowmaker / afterstep
The point being, KDE and GNOME may be the most complete / comprehensive approaches to Free Software desktops, but they're far from alone. Fluxbox and Afterstep in particular I like for defaulting to extremely clean desktops, making apps easy to get to through menus available with a mouseclick from anywhere. We're not all in the same gang, because we're not in gangs, gong long a gong a gong a long long fee phi pho fee phum.
Whenever people talk about "standardizing" as if this was an obvious good thing, I wonder if they feel the way to end illiteracy is to settle on one accepted book as The Standard, and making sure people know *that* book. Architecture, too, would be a lot less confusing if we didn't have all these different *types* of housing or approaches to engineering large buildings -- let's just settle on the right one, dammit!
Having only one choice in a given context might make sense -- but it depends on the context.The owner of Amalgamated Consolidated Products, Inc.* is free to declare that Windows 3.1 is the only acceptable desktop standard for his company's employees while they're at work: Fine. Dumb, or maybe it's smart for that company, but fine. Likewise, if NASA decides its billions in tax dollars would contribute the most to the commonwealth if some of them went to creating a standard GNOME-based desktop and ignoring KDE, well, that might make sense in that context.
When I hear lots of 1st-person plural handwringing about how "we" ought to adopt a standard *anything* though, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I get a little defensive. 1st person plural is always annoying when someone seems to be speaking on my behalf but without my consent or agreement. What if I *like* the standard you don't? Think Low-flush toilets as a mandated standard. Think building codes that make inexpensive legal housing a legislated near-impossibility. Building codes, of course, are standards imposed for the good of all, and if you don't like it, you can stick it your ear, fill out this form in triplicate, and wait for the county inspector, who is currently on extended leave in Botswana. Citizen.
To the extent that actual programmers voluntarily combine their efforts, it's nice to see some convergence, even a lot of it. But there's no g
Actually, the two people whose mention of the R1's availability are listed in this story are simply the first two submitters who I saw that linked to it. Things don't always work that way (often submissions are unrunnable for some reason or another ... broken links, baffling content, etc, too many submissions on a given topic for us to use them all, etc.), but in this case it did.
:)
;) YMMV, and probably does.
;) !) , but I'm sure some people really believe the answer to that last one is Yes.
...)
Addressing the idea that this is an ad, the answer is pretty easy: Nope -- it's not.
[Second layer answer is, there are always going to be people who will actually be convinced by any such answer that the exact opposite is true, to which I can only shrug and think of other things. For nearly any Slashdot post, I guess you could come up with a theory that it was paid for by someone to promote commercial interests in some manner. One guy in this thread suggests -- jokingly -- that budgetlinuxcds was linked to by a competitor.]
So, thanks to adjacent submissions about the release, I linked to a bittorrent file and a company selling cheap ISOs by mail.
(I'd never heard of budgetlinuxcds before this post, but a quick google search convinced me they seemed legitimate; I *can* vouch that I've been a happy cheapbytes customer, though.)
If you have bandwidth and interest, the bittorent seems like a good idea; if you have only the interest part, maybe a mailed ISO makes sense. For a good part of yesterday, I was working from a slow dialup connection, and wasn't about to download 3 CDs worth of data
A lot of stories on Slashdot mention companies or their products, sometimes with links to particular ones. This is because we're interested in a particular technology or product, for good or ill.
(On the front page right now is a story that there are two new models of the Roomba automated vacuum cleaner. I realize there are people who sincerely believe that this means Roomba and Slashdot are plotting to promote Roomba in secret Dr. Strangelove black-and-white war-room sessions. Nope to that one, too.)
Is every mention of AMD an advertisement for AMD? Game reviews are often positive, and often link to merchants selling the games mentioned. [Conspiracy.] Should we replace every company or product name (and their URLS) with asterices? What if I'd linked to several ISO providers (adding in cheapbytes, say)? Should every link to commercial sites or mentioning available products in a positive light be stripped from submissions? These are supposed to be rhetorical questions (
I think if I *had* linked to cheapbytes, an instant conspiracy theory would pop up that Slashdot posts are really the manifestation of shadowy bidding wars among low-margin free software purveyors, who are using their vast gains to purchase evil patent portfolios from gnomes, take over the world, etc etc. (I have seen one episode of the animated show "Stripperella" -- it was about the world's cheapest criminal mastermind; he might want to get it on this at the ground floor
timothy
Anagram: "Eric Raymond" - "I decry a norm"
Or, Eric S. Raymong, "I descry a norm."
timothy
To respond to several at once, I'm just picking this one randomly :)
... an ad for what, exactly? What product do you mean?
;))
Re:Is the the slasdot version of text ads?
"It seems more like a product advertisement than anything else. May be this is an ad disguised as a story?"
Err
Seattle Wireless is an amateur group who are putting a lot of their own money and time into creating a complex network in the Seattle / Tacoma area, and (in this case) producing / distributing a show about wireless technologies *because they think they're cool.*
Personal Telco is trying to blanket Portland with free 802.11 access. Sounds like a fun, laudable idea to me.
I posted this because I admire what these groups are doing, and want to see similar things happen around the world. (And they are happening -- BAWAG, consume.net, etc etc.)
(If I could only persuade these groups to contribute a portion of their gigantic profits to slashdot... hmmm, idea quickly retracted as complete nonsense
timothy
sirius bbr wrote: "If I wrote the book, that'd be exactely what I want. If the book's outdated, it means it has brought all those problems to the attention, and that proper solutions were made. What more can you wish?"
;
A: A new edition of the Linux Annoyances book. I'm sure they can't fit them all in one book
timothy
Can't find the actual article I was seeking, but on a similar note, here is a less-popular view that says the reason Tucker failed is because the cars themselves were less good than promised, rather than because of evil machinations by competitors. (Though there may have been quite a bit of that, too ;))
Seattle Wireless folks are doing this because it's fun. Sure, this is an "advertisement" in the sense that this is a notice that brings public attention / publicity, but *not* in the sense that you seem to using that word, as in part of a for-profit marketing campaign. I think 100% of the profit from a run-for-fun-and-glory wireless network (with hardware, bandwidth and electricity) would still be a negative number, so I'm glad we're not getting kickbacks :) (Kickforwards? Simple kicks?)
I just think the the Mt. Baldi link in particular is an astounding DIY project.
timothy
oO0OoO0Oo:
;)
"We Are Familiar With Elephants By Virtue Of Their Size" -- that sounds like something that should be familiar, but isn't. Is this the basis of a mnemonic device? Did I spell the mn-word correctly? I wonder if there's an easily-remembered sentence with words whose first letters spell out the right version
timothy
Some do have such damned jacked ;)
... just don't like the big clunky-button transports -- I'm great at wrecking tapes with them.
... google, the random) that claims to deliver iirc 45 watts X 4 channels.
I spent a long time shopping for a car stereo, because I wanted a few things lamentably rare:
1) simple, understandable, clean-cut controls
2) logic-control tape deck (luckily now the other kind is rare, but 5 years ago, it was the other way around). Even though I rarely listen to tapes
3) Like you, an input jack.
I ended up finding an old Blaupunkt (model is "Reno," aka CM147 -- I think it came out in 1987, when it was standard equipment on Porsche 928s, it seems
Has an aux input built in, I use with a cable running out the (unused) ashtray, sometimes use my laptop as my music player.
timothy
What I'd like to see:
;) [Except for the choice of media, my Zaurus with its AA external battery back for power is nearly there ... ]
1) An available, no-futzing, no-fooling portable ogg player
2) that uses AA batteries (rechargables are now well worth it, and standard battery sizes are so much more convenient than a billion sculpted-to-fit li-ions)
3) that reads from CD / CD-R / CD-RW
4) and hopefully from DVD / DVD recordable formats as well
5) and even more hopefully, a slot for CF would be nice, or some amount (even 64 megs) of built-in flash
6) that costs less than buying a middlin' color PDA
timothy
"And speaking of bloat, it's interesting to note that the version of SimpleText that shipped with Mac OS 8 was bigger, in kBs, than the original MacWrite (which had more features). That's progress!"
;)
:)
Yes, I wish the original MacPrograms had been kept around and included, even if only as kitsch, but with appropriate updating to make them run on current systems
MacWrite really could take care of most of my word processing needs!
OTOH, now you can have a complete Linux system with more programs than you can shake a stick at for, what, $500 including an LCD monitor?
timothy
There's a ridiculous argument that comes up whenever someone (here, you & others working on Scribus) comes up with a program functionally similar to an existing favorite:
"FrobnitzPro is already here, and anything that's not Frobnitz compatible is doomed to failure!"
The world changes, happily.
Even if for certain things users find that Quark (or whichever application) really is better, that doesn't take away the value of Scribus. (Duh!)
Kids who learn DTP with Scribus won't all of a sudden freeze up when shown Quark, and professionals who use Quark in the office but don't want to shell out for a personal copy won't suddenly be afflicted with hives to use a free DTP program.
Thanks for scribus!
timothy
" the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market."
;)
... if it had been under a friendlier license, perhaps it would have led directly to a clean, fast word processor today ;)
OK, I am guilty of having some favorite / sentimental applications, but WriteNow was available on the NeXT, in fact I think the copyright even mentions NeXT. I think it was versions 3 and 4 that I used -- but I was using the Mac version. I only know that it was NeXT related because people have told me this
Too bad WriteNow went to the software afterlife
Reasons for my sentiment: Word crashed frequently, was slow to start -- WriteNow started up near-instantly, never crashed. Very nice UI, simple but not simplistic, did the things I needed to write papers in high school and part of college. Much cheaper than Word, too. Faster spell-checker. Less bloat.
OpenOffice is one of my favorite pieces of software (and projects), but I'd still like to see a quick, nimble thing like WriteNow for most writing tasks.
timothy
How much is left in that kitty? :)
...
This could simplify things, so they don't have to go through the whole Brewster's Million scene of finding new things to pay for
timothy
How plausible would a parallel article have been (a few years back), perhaps in Byte or Dr. Dobbs announcing that Amiga was ready for the masses?
:))
:) *That's* why suddenly there are complete systems that even many Windows diehards admit are either "good enough" or nearly there -- because it's not sudden at all.
(If someone can point to one, I'll take this back, but I don't *think* Amiga -- or BeOS, or a lot of others -- ever got past the Beautiful Swandive phase, no matter how nice they are, or how many people persist in not burying them
Bob Young's book about Red Hat's (so-far) success is titled "Under the Radar" -- seems like an apt phrase not just for Red Hat but more generally for the way Linux (or, to be fair, BSD) desktops have semi-suddenly become hip to heap praise on, much of it deserved.
OpenOffice, AbiWord, KOffice, Mozilla, the various free programming languages, the various free desktop environments, (etc etc) have been evolving for years, and the Free software matrix is both complete and flexible enough that a Grand Unified Final Answer hasn't been necessary. Rough edges are still there, probably always will be, but they demonstrate how dynamic the whole process is. Every minor release of GCC shows this, in fact
timothy
Good question :)
1) For me (mechanically inept, tin ear), I think the Xbox works out as the best deal. $150 for processor, RAM, DVD drive, hard drive in a not-outrageously large case. I also spent $150 less-smart dollars on a mediocre LCD screen which (rather nifty, IMO) latches on the Xbox, making it chunkier but also now "complete." If I wanted to, I could watch movies on it, that is.
2) The screen is also my point number two. Some sort of interface is going to be necessary for any in-car computer. Small LCD screens are pricey, most a lot pricier than the clip-on one I bought. If I was more geniuslike, I would love a custom heads-up display attuned to my biorhthyms, with speech recognition etc, but alas.
3) Yes, it may not be everyone's cup of milk, but I like the idea of hardware designed for one purpose being used to do something else. ("Use the right hardware for the job!" I hear some compulsive types indignantly complain. Feh.)
I have a mini-ITX system which I (mostly) love, it's one of two main systems, and it would make a fine car computer, too. However, the kludgy invertor is already installed under my passenger seat, so that part's taken care of. Plus, I'd still need a screen somewhere, and the nice little 640x480 LCD screens are expensive, 800x600 even more so. Depending on your skill and what's already lying around, an Xbox might be a *stupid* car computer, but I'm hoping for me it's going to be slightly less stupid.
timothy
There's nothing wrong (morally or legally) with experimenting with hardware you own.
:)
:)) but it's very similar in price to adding a low-end CD player to my existing car stereo. And I like my head unit (which has a line-in), so I don't want to get rid of it.
:) The external switch would be if I ever decide to buy, rent or borrow an actual XBox game ;)
Note that this use (running a Linux distro) in particular has nothing to do with "stealing" as in running illegally copied games. I'm not going to debate whether playing illegally copied games should be called stealing, just pointing out that it's not part of running Linux on an Xbox
The reason I bought an Xbox (and am shopping* for a mod-chip) is to use it as a music box for my car. That may sound silly to you (and it may *be* silly to you
A modded Xbox can also play Ogg Vorbis files, which is the format to which I've been ripping my CD collection for portable use. (Yes, many car decks now will play MP3s, but I don't have more than a handful of those.)
timothy
* Can anyone recommend an easy (no-solder), inexpensive, external-switch equipped modchip preloaded with the Cromwell BIOS?
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030319 Debian/1.3-3 here ... I wonder if it's something that's changed between our versions of Mozilla, or (my guess) a Windows vs. Linux thing.
Thanks for the info.
timothy
For the curious: the link before fink was missing a slash. (http:/ rather than http://)
... (Konqueror? IE? Safari?)
Anyone who was seeing this as broken, I wonder which browser(s) this choked
Mozilla worked fine.
timothy
I admit, I'm a little bleary eyed at the moment, but I don't see any broken links here ...
...
Every link in the story seems to have its requisite http:// at the front
Can someone tell me which link isn't working?
Tim
Drat -- someone caught onto our scheme! I regret that our business arrangment has come to an end, because I was looking for more of your money to subsidize my continuing purchases of Korean memory products.
We both know that long-term, your largesse has one obvious effect, long-term: namely, that your money creates some great bargains for purchasers of specially-supported companies' products.
It was fun while it lasted, though. If you care to subsidize any other products, I hope you will especially consider paying for part of my next LCD panel; they're still more expensive than I would like, and it would be nice if you could chip in a few bucks.
Thanks in advance,
timothy
p.s. In regards to our prior correspondence: maybe I wasn't clear. No, I actually don't care to artificially prop up any domestic businesses to achieve some sort of artificial parity in price or export numbers. I'll consider it, but it seems pretty irrational, except on the part of the subsidized business.
"Unlike the Ogg Theora infrastructure, the VHS infrastructure is established. Equipment that can play Theora alpha 2 video is currently much more expensive than equipment that can play VHS video. This is a practical obstacle that the government has to overcome somehow."
;)Until the flying cars, sometimes we haveta use those ones with wheels ...
;)) without making me as upset as things that make inappropriate demands on The Public. Also, I'll acknowledge that VCRs are widespread, not a point for me to press harder that it deserves!
... hurt ...
Yes, the "would be" is a heavy "would be."
"Either that [PO Box], or videos used to train federal employees."
Fine point, but internal things -- like training videos -- might be stupid and wasteful (anyone who's visited a military installation knows what I mean
But there is a reasonably forseeable future in which one less compromise need be made, because there *are* appropriate video formats (small example, but still) that will be mature enough.
Fingers
timothy