Not so every distro -- for instance, I believe that SuSE is a single-station license for certain components, even though the bulk of the software is GPL.
Mandrake, though (and as I understand it, Red Hat, perhaps not the Starship Enterprise edition) are all GPL: you can burn copies to hand out on the street. If you're selling them, Red Hat doesn't want you to call them "Red Hat" or even come close, but that's an aside;). The sofware itself is nice and Free. Now, you may only have bought *support* for one desktop, but that's another matter.
Now it would be *nice* to buy boxes for every copy of mandrake, especially if it would help the company survive, and in many corporate settings, that would probably relieve a nervous twitch in whoever used to take care of Microsoft licensing certificates.
a) it's great to see the various specialized summits and meetings that have happened in the last few years especially (distro-based, or "Desktop Linux" or kernel summit, or...) -- it's impressive that the various subsystems are independently good enough (and independent enough, if that makes sense) that improving one system does not (usually) kill the others.
b) Speaking of Linux sound, a nice thing: the other day, I compressed some music (passengermusic.com is the band's site, though no music is on the site) for a musician I know, because I'd like to convince him to post some music in ogg vorbis format on the band's website.
Usually, I have used grip to do such compression (nice interface, easy), but this time I wanted to try a wider range of qualities without going in an changing grip's preferences several times, so I started up oggenc instead.
Compressed at q6, the sound was predictably good, and my tin ears on my low-end equipment could not tell from the original. Sadly, same is true at 3. Probably most of the other available integers, too.
For kicks (and since this is for web use, and since most people are still on dialup, and since long downloads are a pain in the tuchus...), I tried q -1, and am shocked at how good it is! I ended up with a compression ratio of about 35-to-1 (350-some MB total WAV files; approx. 10MB squashed to -1) and sound that in non-critical listening environments would be jes' fine, thanks. I should try compressing to q -1 and making it *mono* first, too.
"The inherent difficulties of [economics] would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, Physics, mathematics or medicine -- the special pleading of selfish interests.*...
In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences....
* Yes, "special" and "selfish" in that order;)
In the interest of spawning interest, I will not name the work from which I drew these quotations (probably someone will recognize it and name the book; I hope so, anyhow), but it is one I've heard mentioned for many years and finally picked up my own copy a few days ago. Seemed very appropriate to the subject at hand, and I hope that Molyneaux is roundly and soundly criticized for the shortsightedness and arrogance of what he's asking. It is, after all, what a lot of other industries have sought -- and in many cases obtained -- and they deserve the same drubbing, whether their ploys were successful or not.
I'm all for people buying games, on their own time and their own dollar. Asking the government to subsidize less-successful makers isn't likely to benefit the world of games, at least not without exacting disproportionate harm to the market overall.
*******'s work could have used this as an example if it were being written today of just how ludicrous and harmful this sort of pleading really is.
... but the West Disk Exchange is far inferior to the big one in what used to be C. Walker's grocery. Plus, it's next to a great used book store (Book Eddy).
26th street (now Dean Keaton, or however that's spelled) is a big hill, for instance. But compared to Knoxville, No;)
(I remember wondering where the "Hill Country" was.)
However, that *is* another good comparison -- both Knoxville and Austin are *relatively* hilly, compared to the vast bulk of the rest of their respective states.
I'm not sure which is worse: do you want your orange brighter and more eye-pokin', or browner and more rustlike?
UTK has a nicer campus, IMO, for matters of simple geography -- Knoxville has *hills*! Architecturally, though, UTA wins by a nose. (Whether or not you're a fan of the UTA campus "Master Plan," it's really not much of a going concern any more -- sprawl has taken care of that.)
Culturally, more similar than people like to admit, but Austin is simply a bigger, hipper city. In fact, Knoxville and Austin have a lot in common -- somewhat liberal by comparison to the rest of the state, high student population, comparitively green...
Even if an OLED screen could be as thin as the one pictured, I would not begrudge the designers an extra inch of thickness if if made the display much more robust... things get dropped / twisted / untentionally torqued, etc.
I'd like a display that could be dropped a bit and still work happily:)
"Nothing new here, just application and enhancement.."
Cotton shirts are nothing new compared to piled-on filthy animal skins, too, just application and enhancement.:)
The classic use of fire beacons is described by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, who relates how news of the fall of Troy was conveyed to Clytemnestra in her palace at Mycenae in Greece, about 1084 b.c. by a chain of a dozen or more fires lighted on mountain tops.
Europe is keeping the robot drivers hushed up, fear of labor unions.
On the other hand, I think it was a typo -- so I fixed / updated.
timothy
light sources vs. display styles (mostly offtopic)
on
Thin, Flat LEDs
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· Score: 1
I'm happy to hear that EL dash lighting is becoming more commmon. I've been car shopping a little bit lately (not as the buyer, just along for the ride), and am impressed that a lot of cars now have much better display systems than they used to.
However, I disagree on the digital v. analog displays -- analog displays have IMO certain advantages that no digital display can top, though (as another commenter pointed out) they can sometimes come close... by simulating analog displays.
When it comes to "inability to comprehend numbers compared to pointy things," in a well designed analog display, the pointy things are conveying part of the information, and the dial itself is conveying some more, with its shape, differing coloration, integrated idiot lights, etc. (And I think that typical modern speed guages and tachometers are actually pretty well designed. Not perfect, but not bad.) It's sometimes useful to be able to tell at one glance where *in a range* a particular measurement falls -- oil temperature, engine speed, battery charge, remaining fuel, etc... just like a map with a marked location is more useful than raw coordinates, generally.
There may one day be a great dashboard style that overcomes my objections by infallably offering guages and warnings that do an efficient job of conveying information, allow folks to redesign their display to their own tastes, etc, but I think that's a long way off (decades).
And (also as mentioned by another commenter) a physical, analog odometer is useful (though that's certainly something which could be mostly worked around, say with a button to activate the odometer display even with the engine off...) My car doesn't even have a tachometer, never mind one with a useful display, and I would not trade my analog odometer for one;)
I don't mind certain displays being highly computerized (like that always-on GPS overview of location which my car... also lacks), but I like most of the basics (fuel, speed, tach, engine temp, oil pressure) being analog -- and mostly being round:) Have you ever driven a Caddy (surely some others, too) with the speed shown on a humongous horizontal bar that underlies the whole dashboard? It's *sort* of neat, but robs space from other things.
No, not at all. Just grab a screwdriver, and take out the dash yourself. Easy as pie, though there are usually lots of screws, and sometimes several interlocking pieces. I did it for one of my old cars, and the bulbs were cheap.
OK, it's true -- I have not even looked into the difficulty of replacing them myself, and I should. I've been assured by people smarter than me that this is something best left to professionals with little tiny fingers, not my own blunt pokers. Your comment has inspired me to at least figure out how to do it myself.
In my car (which I bought used 60 thousand miles ago), the dash lights started out dim and have gotten dimmer. There's still a certain quantity of light (one way I can tell I'm driving my car and not my dad's). I'm not sure how many bulbs are back there, but I steadfastly maintain that incandescents are a bad idea for dashlights. Now, they beat candles, captive fireflies, dung lamps, or quantities of radium, but for localized moderate lighting, I really would prefer LEDs. I have recieved pointed complaints lately from a frequent and desired passenger about the lack of dashlights, the sketchiness of my clipped-on flashlight, &cetera, so it's time to fix regardless of the grumbling I have about the nature of the fix. Horse and buggy time.
Gooseneck or clip-on lights are really the only way to get enough reading light without spilling too much light everywhere else. And you can get gooseneck lights that plug into the cigarette lighter
Yes; so far though I have not found any gooseneck lamps for the cigarette lighter which use LEDs. Maybe they exist, but when I've been in auto parts stores looking, the question has always drawn shrugs and blank looks. I used to have a plug-in little rechargeable flashlight, but incandescent, with the usual wilted-yellow light circle, poor battery & bulb life, and so on. I recommend an LED headlamp (mine is made by everready or energizer, forget which) in the glove compartment, since in a real flashlight-needing emergency, it might be very important to have both hands free.
What I'd basically like for interior lighting is the ability to flip a switch and have the equivalent of real room-style light levels. Dimness is fine when driving, but there have been times when it would have been nice to be able to turn on a *real* (bright, blazing) overhead light, not a wimp photon-pinching dome light that tends to call attention to its very dimness by sitting there faintly aglow.
Flat LEDs (heck, current LEDs would be fine, really, but flatter would be better in a space-starved environment like a car) are what I want in a couple specific places in my car:
1) dashboard lights. Mine dashlights died a long time ago, and I'm using a clip-on LED flashlight to illuminate my speedometer etc. This is clunky and ugly in a way that many kids find themselves yelling at their dads for inflicting on the world, but a) dashwork is expensive and b) no joke, my LED flashlight clipped on an airvent does a *much better job* than the dashlights ever did. Granted, it's a cheap car, but still. Dashlights are lousy in most cars, though they've gotten better. But -- and I'm serious about this -- dashlights should NOT be incandescent bulbs any more. They should be LEDs, OLEDs, or some other basically permanent light source. Silly to have such a vital piece of equipment be something as outdated as an incandescent bulb, *and* be so difficult to replace (in most cars).
2) Domelight. Same deal -- domelights are generally lame anyhow, sort of like lighting a candle... three feet overhead. I would much prefer several LED clusters (with diffusers) as my dome light.
3) Overhead reading lights. (For your navigator, lights that don't blind the driver.) Bright LEDs with a shade so they can't be aimed at the driver's face accidentally. (Breakable shade, so you *could* aim them intentionally when you're kidnapped for ransom and are being driven away in your own car... I guess.)
4) Map light -- Think of the LED "stalk" lights for notebook computers. A thin gooseneck with an integral LED for pointing at your book / map / sketchpad (not for the driver).
Bring on the flat LEDs, and send some to the car maker's *design teams* please.
He suggested that title and pointed out the strip from which the reference is drawn; I prefer Dilbert and Boondocks, myself.
It's not that C&H was *bad* -- I just thought it was awfully cloying, and I respect the artist for stopping when he obviously could have cranked it out for years ala Peanuts, Spiderman, Prince Valiant, etc.
Schik proposed the following USPO-mess fix: "Every patent that is filed for is posted on slashdot. If nobody says "I was doing this back in...", then they get the patent."
Maybe it shouldn't be *quite* that simple, but this sounds like a great idea to me, actually, at least as a way to *block* patents. Whether silence is consent, well, I hope not;)
Issues of exactly what should be patentable aside, let's say that there are certain things for which patent protection is a reasonable thing. (Since I believe that to be true, despite a lot of objections to the current system.) The patent process *should* be fully open, and allow public comments from, if not Day One, at least (for instance) Day 30, so no one could spot an application, immediately duplicate it, and claim it as prior art. That is, a sort of idea escrow.
A slash-style threaded discussion would actually be a great way to let non-Patent Examiner types comment on submitted applications, and there could be a good trade in the patent-lawyer trade sifting through new applications and looking for prior art in order to notify likely prior artistes;) [That is, to offer them a chance to get together with the patent applicants, in order that they might work something out, if something looks likely patentable in the end anyhow.]
Actually, when I look at these screenshots, I think "Phew, I'm glad that I have OpenOffice and other things to type with!"
Now, Office has a lot of Big Complicated Features which may be interesting and useful to you if your office / job has evolved to rely on them. I don't use office-suite progams much, and when I do I don't usually have anything too exotic in the way of combining features. I do find that I can paste in sections of spreadsheet, graphics and such into OpenOffice pretty well though.
OpenOffice does have a big problem to me, though, which is that fonts are usually ugly, reminds me or the way Word (3? 4? whatver version is was) looked on my old toaster Mac. This is not, strictly speaking , OO.org's fault, since ugly fonts are the result of complicated interactions among a lot of things in the system... on a system that's been tweaked to look nice, this becomes not-a-problem.
It has some other problems too (annoying default behavior wrt to autocompletion of words, lists, etc), but these are in Word and most other Word Processors, too. On the whole, I'd much rather write a letter in OpenOffice, and have:)
Upshot: these screenshots don't inspire envy the way I thought they might when I opened them.
True, the fidelity is less than a wired connection ought to be, but the convenience is pretty amazing. Bingo: it's a car player:)
These things were a pain when most car radios were analog, but with modern head units, you can lock on pretty well. The Neuros unit with a flash reader as well as the hard drive "backpack" looks fun, though I have not yet had a chance to use one. My car stereo does have a line-in, so I can compare the two...
However, the thing I see being a barrier to widespread acceptance of mini-CD players is that a lot of people have CD-Rs already packed with their converted files... I have about 50 of my CDs ripped to Ogg files, all stored on (standard size) CDs now. Re-ripping, or even just file aggregation and resorting, would be a real pain, but one I'd consider if someone actually would come out with an ogg-capable miniplayer... particularly for things I want (like radio broadcasts and audio books) 200MB is quite a bit;)
the iRiver is what I'm waiting for. Slim, decent battery life, plays CD-R/RWs... when that plays ogg, I want one for my car. Heck, that would be incentive enough to upgrade my terrible speakers!:)
Flash media is nice, hard drives can hold quite a bit at a time, etc, but now that CD burning is (given the context of regular computers users) more of a standard item than a luxury, I'd much rather have my audio stuff on CDs. Portable, replaceable, etc. Could be that flash media will one day be cheap enough that I stop caring that way, but for now, I could put several weeks worth of Car Talk on one CD, and *not* have to erase it when I wanted to put on the next several weeks.
Even if you don't use Mandrake, you've probably benefited from the work they've put into "making the Linux desktop user friendly."
(That's a category I'm in right now: I don't currently have any systems running Mandrake, but for about three years running -- until about a month ago -- I did.)
- Mandrake concentrates on ease of install. Not that everyone's intuition is actually the same, goes the past-the-nipple argument, but Hey, Mandrake 6 did a lot better job with *my* intuition (and hardware) than did any of the contemporaries I can remember putting on.
- Automount. Yes, it's come and gone strangely (back now?), but Automount is a very good thing. Try explaining to a Mac user the procedure of mounting a CD drive, or a simple %$#@ USB memory key thing.
- Mandrake (afaik) was the first and so far only Linux distro to be sold as a standalone product in Walmart, and I bought several versions there (as the king of Swamp Castle says "... just to show 'em!"). Software specifics aside, this is another good reason to be grateful to Mandrake, whether you use their distro or not. Lindows was *not* the first Walmart-associated Linux:) [And I could be wrong -- perhaps they also had Red Hat, dunno.]
Mandrake started to fade off my systems when I discovered how nice Red Hat 8 is, and then when I used Knoppix to convert some machines to Debian. (And since I need to reduce the number of machines floating around here, there are fewer computers with which I care to purely experiment.) However, I plan to try the 9.1 release candidate to see where it falls.
"Opensource foreign language material, now this is a great idea! Even if the first efforts were along the lines of "How to Swear Like a Sailor in [insert language]".
Sure! That would be a fine way to start:)
I know that computers aren't free, etc etc blah blah blah, but there are enough college and high school students out there who should be willing for their own amusement if not edification to exchange knowledge on how to say "I love your eyes" and other cheesy pickup lines in their own language in exchange for learning it in a few others. If it gets from there to Hamlet, fine, but there should be (and I strongly presume there really *is* but I have not found it yet) an open phrasebook!
Rather than complicated, multi-part dramas (though those would be nice, too), what I would like to find is a collection of audiobooks in the same style as Project Gutenberg. That is, a competent reader, clearly recorded, reading works with unambiguous copyright clearance.
I've recorded myself reading a few snippets from books on Project Gutenberg, and will spare anyone else from every listening to the results, so I can rule myself out as "a competent reader" for such a project, but there are a lot of folks with better voices.
(Ditto language learning materials! I'd like to be able to practice German, or learn some Spanish, by popping a CD of compressed files into a car player as I drive place to place. Eventually, those compressed files would be Ogg, but for now, I'd settle for MP3;))
Grandparent: The main reason to buy a new cpu is to do something you COULDN'T do before.
Parent: I disagree. The main reason to buy a new cpu is to do things FASTER.
It's a floorwax *and* a dessert topping!:)
Sometimes adding the element of time completely transforms what you could otherwise call "the same thing."
"Ripping CDs to my favorite compressed format at greater than realtime" *is* a different thing than "Ripping my CDs to my favorite compressed format really, really slowly."
Graphics likewise... if a drawing program is so slow it's unpleasant to use, then chaning "only" the speed of its operation is a big, big deal.
Hadn't realized that was part of the BSE, thanks for pointing that out.
Of the wireless routers I've got, one of them (Linksys) has external antenna jacks; the lack of them is one of the only things I dislike about the SMC I'm on right now, though I have never actually attached an external antenna -- I'd still like to be able to if the opportunity comes up;)
The BSE is just about the same price as I paid for a messier package of [SMC wireless AP / 3-port switch / DHCP box (with a serial port) + external 56k modem (to attach to the serial port)] However, that 3-port hub has come in very handy; if I had the BSE, I'd have to have an external switch anyhow. A tossup:)
timothy
Big jumping point from b to g ...
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WiFi Woes With .11g
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I have a wired + wireless router (one of the many little ones that Walmart / CompUSA / your local Lucky Dragon sell), and it's great, works with very little coaxing.
However, it also offers throughput on both the wired and unwired sides which is far greater than the bandwidth of my cable modem. For person-to-person communication (IRCing with your tenant in the basement, or even using VoIP if you're into that sort of thing) or moderate file exchanging, 11b is *plenty* until you get pretty far apart.
How often do you do large file transfers wirelessly so that you'd get a big benefit out of 11g? For some people that answer is going to be "All the time, thank you!" but for most residential wireless users, I think the answer is going to be "Large file transfers...?"
Are there really compelling advantages to.11g which would make it worth buying -- for household use, that is -- over a ridiculously cheap 801.11b router? I guess at a frathouse (or a co-op), it would make more sense...
Slashdot Mirror
Not so every distro -- for instance, I believe that SuSE is a single-station license for certain components, even though the bulk of the software is GPL.
Mandrake, though (and as I understand it, Red Hat, perhaps not the Starship Enterprise edition) are all GPL: you can burn copies to hand out on the street. If you're selling them, Red Hat doesn't want you to call them "Red Hat" or even come close, but that's an aside;). The sofware itself is nice and Free. Now, you may only have bought *support* for one desktop, but that's another matter.
Now it would be *nice* to buy boxes for every copy of mandrake, especially if it would help the company survive, and in many corporate settings, that would probably relieve a nervous twitch in whoever used to take care of Microsoft licensing certificates.
timothy
a) it's great to see the various specialized summits and meetings that have happened in the last few years especially (distro-based, or "Desktop Linux" or kernel summit, or ...) -- it's impressive that the various subsystems are independently good enough (and independent enough, if that makes sense) that improving one system does not (usually) kill the others.
...), I tried q -1, and am shocked at how good it is! I ended up with a compression ratio of about 35-to-1 (350-some MB total WAV files; approx. 10MB squashed to -1) and sound that in non-critical listening environments would be jes' fine, thanks. I should try compressing to q -1 and making it *mono* first, too.
b) Speaking of Linux sound, a nice thing: the other day, I compressed some music (passengermusic.com is the band's site, though no music is on the site) for a musician I know, because I'd like to convince him to post some music in ogg vorbis format on the band's website.
Usually, I have used grip to do such compression (nice interface, easy), but this time I wanted to try a wider range of qualities without going in an changing grip's preferences several times, so I started up oggenc instead.
Compressed at q6, the sound was predictably good, and my tin ears on my low-end equipment could not tell from the original. Sadly, same is true at 3. Probably most of the other available integers, too.
For kicks (and since this is for web use, and since most people are still on dialup, and since long downloads are a pain in the tuchus
timothy
* Yes, "special" and "selfish" in that order
In the interest of spawning interest, I will not name the work from which I drew these quotations (probably someone will recognize it and name the book; I hope so, anyhow), but it is one I've heard mentioned for many years and finally picked up my own copy a few days ago. Seemed very appropriate to the subject at hand, and I hope that Molyneaux is roundly and soundly criticized for the shortsightedness and arrogance of what he's asking. It is, after all, what a lot of other industries have sought -- and in many cases obtained -- and they deserve the same drubbing, whether their ploys were successful or not.
I'm all for people buying games, on their own time and their own dollar. Asking the government to subsidize less-successful makers isn't likely to benefit the world of games, at least not without exacting disproportionate harm to the market overall.
*******'s work could have used this as an example if it were being written today of just how ludicrous and harmful this sort of pleading really is.
timothy
p.s. Unless he's joking, in which case, Bravo!
... but the West Disk Exchange is far inferior to the big one in what used to be C. Walker's grocery. Plus, it's next to a great used book store (Book Eddy).
timothy
Cas Walker's old location on Chapman Highway is now Disc Exchange ;)
That doesn't actually invalidate your point though. Just funning a bit.
timothy
26th street (now Dean Keaton, or however that's spelled) is a big hill, for instance. But compared to Knoxville, No ;)
(I remember wondering where the "Hill Country" was.)
However, that *is* another good comparison -- both Knoxville and Austin are *relatively* hilly, compared to the vast bulk of the rest of their respective states.
timothy
I'm not sure which is worse: do you want your orange brighter and more eye-pokin', or browner and more rustlike?
...
UTK has a nicer campus, IMO, for matters of simple geography -- Knoxville has *hills*! Architecturally, though, UTA wins by a nose. (Whether or not you're a fan of the UTA campus "Master Plan," it's really not much of a going concern any more -- sprawl has taken care of that.)
Culturally, more similar than people like to admit, but Austin is simply a bigger, hipper city. In fact, Knoxville and Austin have a lot in common -- somewhat liberal by comparison to the rest of the state, high student population, comparitively green
timothy
Even if an OLED screen could be as thin as the one pictured, I would not begrudge the designers an extra inch of thickness if if made the display much more robust ... things get dropped / twisted / untentionally torqued, etc.
:)
I'd like a display that could be dropped a bit and still work happily
timothy
Cotton shirts are nothing new compared to piled-on filthy animal skins, too, just application and enhancement.
(http://www-class.unl.edu/advt498/readings/commun
Europe is keeping the robot drivers hushed up, fear of labor unions.
On the other hand, I think it was a typo -- so I fixed / updated.
timothy
I'm happy to hear that EL dash lighting is becoming more commmon. I've been car shopping a little bit lately (not as the buyer, just along for the ride), and am impressed that a lot of cars now have much better display systems than they used to.
... by simulating analog displays.
... just like a map with a marked location is more useful than raw coordinates, generally.
...) My car doesn't even have a tachometer, never mind one with a useful display, and I would not trade my analog odometer for one ;)
... also lacks), but I like most of the basics (fuel, speed, tach, engine temp, oil pressure) being analog -- and mostly being round :) Have you ever driven a Caddy (surely some others, too) with the speed shown on a humongous horizontal bar that underlies the whole dashboard? It's *sort* of neat, but robs space from other things.
However, I disagree on the digital v. analog displays -- analog displays have IMO certain advantages that no digital display can top, though (as another commenter pointed out) they can sometimes come close
When it comes to "inability to comprehend numbers compared to pointy things," in a well designed analog display, the pointy things are conveying part of the information, and the dial itself is conveying some more, with its shape, differing coloration, integrated idiot lights, etc. (And I think that typical modern speed guages and tachometers are actually pretty well designed. Not perfect, but not bad.) It's sometimes useful to be able to tell at one glance where *in a range* a particular measurement falls -- oil temperature, engine speed, battery charge, remaining fuel, etc
There may one day be a great dashboard style that overcomes my objections by infallably offering guages and warnings that do an efficient job of conveying information, allow folks to redesign their display to their own tastes, etc, but I think that's a long way off (decades).
And (also as mentioned by another commenter) a physical, analog odometer is useful (though that's certainly something which could be mostly worked around, say with a button to activate the odometer display even with the engine off
I don't mind certain displays being highly computerized (like that always-on GPS overview of location which my car
timothy
a) dashwork is expensive
No, not at all. Just grab a screwdriver, and take out the dash yourself. Easy as pie, though there are usually lots of screws, and sometimes several interlocking pieces. I did it for one of my old cars, and the bulbs were cheap.
OK, it's true -- I have not even looked into the difficulty of replacing them myself, and I should. I've been assured by people smarter than me that this is something best left to professionals with little tiny fingers, not my own blunt pokers. Your comment has inspired me to at least figure out how to do it myself.
In my car (which I bought used 60 thousand miles ago), the dash lights started out dim and have gotten dimmer. There's still a certain quantity of light (one way I can tell I'm driving my car and not my dad's). I'm not sure how many bulbs are back there, but I steadfastly maintain that incandescents are a bad idea for dashlights. Now, they beat candles, captive fireflies, dung lamps, or quantities of radium, but for localized moderate lighting, I really would prefer LEDs. I have recieved pointed complaints lately from a frequent and desired passenger about the lack of dashlights, the sketchiness of my clipped-on flashlight, &cetera, so it's time to fix regardless of the grumbling I have about the nature of the fix. Horse and buggy time.
Gooseneck or clip-on lights are really the only way to get enough reading light without spilling too much light everywhere else. And you can get gooseneck lights that plug into the cigarette lighter
Yes; so far though I have not found any gooseneck lamps for the cigarette lighter which use LEDs. Maybe they exist, but when I've been in auto parts stores looking, the question has always drawn shrugs and blank looks. I used to have a plug-in little rechargeable flashlight, but incandescent, with the usual wilted-yellow light circle, poor battery & bulb life, and so on. I recommend an LED headlamp (mine is made by everready or energizer, forget which) in the glove compartment, since in a real flashlight-needing emergency, it might be very important to have both hands free.
What I'd basically like for interior lighting is the ability to flip a switch and have the equivalent of real room-style light levels. Dimness is fine when driving, but there have been times when it would have been nice to be able to turn on a *real* (bright, blazing) overhead light, not a wimp photon-pinching dome light that tends to call attention to its very dimness by sitting there faintly aglow.
timothy
OK, I'm presently a bit car-crazy ;)
... three feet overhead. I would much prefer several LED clusters (with diffusers) as my dome light.
... I guess.)
Flat LEDs (heck, current LEDs would be fine, really, but flatter would be better in a space-starved environment like a car) are what I want in a couple specific places in my car:
1) dashboard lights. Mine dashlights died a long time ago, and I'm using a clip-on LED flashlight to illuminate my speedometer etc. This is clunky and ugly in a way that many kids find themselves yelling at their dads for inflicting on the world, but a) dashwork is expensive and b) no joke, my LED flashlight clipped on an airvent does a *much better job* than the dashlights ever did. Granted, it's a cheap car, but still. Dashlights are lousy in most cars, though they've gotten better. But -- and I'm serious about this -- dashlights should NOT be incandescent bulbs any more. They should be LEDs, OLEDs, or some other basically permanent light source. Silly to have such a vital piece of equipment be something as outdated as an incandescent bulb, *and* be so difficult to replace (in most cars).
2) Domelight. Same deal -- domelights are generally lame anyhow, sort of like lighting a candle
3) Overhead reading lights. (For your navigator, lights that don't blind the driver.) Bright LEDs with a shade so they can't be aimed at the driver's face accidentally. (Breakable shade, so you *could* aim them intentionally when you're kidnapped for ransom and are being driven away in your own car
4) Map light -- Think of the LED "stalk" lights for notebook computers. A thin gooseneck with an integral LED for pointing at your book / map / sketchpad (not for the driver).
Bring on the flat LEDs, and send some to the car maker's *design teams* please.
timothy
He suggested that title and pointed out the strip from which the reference is drawn; I prefer Dilbert and Boondocks, myself.
It's not that C&H was *bad* -- I just thought it was awfully cloying, and I respect the artist for stopping when he obviously could have cranked it out for years ala Peanuts, Spiderman, Prince Valiant, etc.
timothy
Schik proposed the following USPO-mess fix:
;)
;) [That is, to offer them a chance to get together with the patent applicants, in order that they might work something out, if something looks likely patentable in the end anyhow.]
"Every patent that is filed for is posted on slashdot. If nobody says "I was doing this back in...", then they get the patent."
Maybe it shouldn't be *quite* that simple, but this sounds like a great idea to me, actually, at least as a way to *block* patents. Whether silence is consent, well, I hope not
Issues of exactly what should be patentable aside, let's say that there are certain things for which patent protection is a reasonable thing. (Since I believe that to be true, despite a lot of objections to the current system.) The patent process *should* be fully open, and allow public comments from, if not Day One, at least (for instance) Day 30, so no one could spot an application, immediately duplicate it, and claim it as prior art. That is, a sort of idea escrow.
A slash-style threaded discussion would actually be a great way to let non-Patent Examiner types comment on submitted applications, and there could be a good trade in the patent-lawyer trade sifting through new applications and looking for prior art in order to notify likely prior artistes
timothy
Actually, when I look at these screenshots, I think "Phew, I'm glad that I have OpenOffice and other things to type with!"
... on a system that's been tweaked to look nice, this becomes not-a-problem.
:)
Now, Office has a lot of Big Complicated Features which may be interesting and useful to you if your office / job has evolved to rely on them. I don't use office-suite progams much, and when I do I don't usually have anything too exotic in the way of combining features. I do find that I can paste in sections of spreadsheet, graphics and such into OpenOffice pretty well though.
OpenOffice does have a big problem to me, though, which is that fonts are usually ugly, reminds me or the way Word (3? 4? whatver version is was) looked on my old toaster Mac. This is not, strictly speaking , OO.org's fault, since ugly fonts are the result of complicated interactions among a lot of things in the system
It has some other problems too (annoying default behavior wrt to autocompletion of words, lists, etc), but these are in Word and most other Word Processors, too. On the whole, I'd much rather write a letter in OpenOffice, and have
Upshot: these screenshots don't inspire envy the way I thought they might when I opened them.
timothy
True, the fidelity is less than a wired connection ought to be, but the convenience is pretty amazing. Bingo: it's a car player :)
...
These things were a pain when most car radios were analog, but with modern head units, you can lock on pretty well. The Neuros unit with a flash reader as well as the hard drive "backpack" looks fun, though I have not yet had a chance to use one. My car stereo does have a line-in, so I can compare the two
timothy
I like everything you just said ;)
... I have about 50 of my CDs ripped to Ogg files, all stored on (standard size) CDs now. Re-ripping, or even just file aggregation and resorting, would be a real pain, but one I'd consider if someone actually would come out with an ogg-capable miniplayer ... particularly for things I want (like radio broadcasts and audio books) 200MB is quite a bit ;)
However, the thing I see being a barrier to widespread acceptance of mini-CD players is that a lot of people have CD-Rs already packed with their converted files
timothy
the iRiver is what I'm waiting for. Slim, decent battery life, plays CD-R/RWs ... when that plays ogg, I want one for my car. Heck, that would be incentive enough to upgrade my terrible speakers! :)
Flash media is nice, hard drives can hold quite a bit at a time, etc, but now that CD burning is (given the context of regular computers users) more of a standard item than a luxury, I'd much rather have my audio stuff on CDs. Portable, replaceable, etc. Could be that flash media will one day be cheap enough that I stop caring that way, but for now, I could put several weeks worth of Car Talk on one CD, and *not* have to erase it when I wanted to put on the next several weeks.
timothy
Even if you don't use Mandrake, you've probably benefited from the work they've put into "making the Linux desktop user friendly."
:) [And I could be wrong -- perhaps they also had Red Hat, dunno.]
(That's a category I'm in right now: I don't currently have any systems running Mandrake, but for about three years running -- until about a month ago -- I did.)
- Mandrake concentrates on ease of install. Not that everyone's intuition is actually the same, goes the past-the-nipple argument, but Hey, Mandrake 6 did a lot better job with *my* intuition (and hardware) than did any of the contemporaries I can remember putting on.
- Automount. Yes, it's come and gone strangely (back now?), but Automount is a very good thing. Try explaining to a Mac user the procedure of mounting a CD drive, or a simple %$#@ USB memory key thing.
- Mandrake (afaik) was the first and so far only Linux distro to be sold as a standalone product in Walmart, and I bought several versions there (as the king of Swamp Castle says "... just to show 'em!"). Software specifics aside, this is another good reason to be grateful to Mandrake, whether you use their distro or not. Lindows was *not* the first Walmart-associated Linux
Mandrake started to fade off my systems when I discovered how nice Red Hat 8 is, and then when I used Knoppix to convert some machines to Debian. (And since I need to reduce the number of machines floating around here, there are fewer computers with which I care to purely experiment.) However, I plan to try the 9.1 release candidate to see where it falls.
Cheers,
timothy
"Opensource foreign language material, now this is a great idea! Even if the first efforts were along the lines of "How to Swear Like a Sailor in [insert language]".
:)
Sure! That would be a fine way to start
I know that computers aren't free, etc etc blah blah blah, but there are enough college and high school students out there who should be willing for their own amusement if not edification to exchange knowledge on how to say "I love your eyes" and other cheesy pickup lines in their own language in exchange for learning it in a few others. If it gets from there to Hamlet, fine, but there should be (and I strongly presume there really *is* but I have not found it yet) an open phrasebook!
timothy
Rather than complicated, multi-part dramas (though those would be nice, too), what I would like to find is a collection of audiobooks in the same style as Project Gutenberg. That is, a competent reader, clearly recorded, reading works with unambiguous copyright clearance.
;))
I've recorded myself reading a few snippets from books on Project Gutenberg, and will spare anyone else from every listening to the results, so I can rule myself out as "a competent reader" for such a project, but there are a lot of folks with better voices.
(Ditto language learning materials! I'd like to be able to practice German, or learn some Spanish, by popping a CD of compressed files into a car player as I drive place to place. Eventually, those compressed files would be Ogg, but for now, I'd settle for MP3
timothy
Parent: I disagree. The main reason to buy a new cpu is to do things FASTER.
It's a floorwax *and* a dessert topping!
Sometimes adding the element of time completely transforms what you could otherwise call "the same thing."
"Ripping CDs to my favorite compressed format at greater than realtime" *is* a different thing than "Ripping my CDs to my favorite compressed format really, really slowly."
Graphics likewise
timothy
Hadn't realized that was part of the BSE, thanks for pointing that out.
;)
:)
Of the wireless routers I've got, one of them (Linksys) has external antenna jacks; the lack of them is one of the only things I dislike about the SMC I'm on right now, though I have never actually attached an external antenna -- I'd still like to be able to if the opportunity comes up
The BSE is just about the same price as I paid for a messier package of [SMC wireless AP / 3-port switch / DHCP box (with a serial port) + external 56k modem (to attach to the serial port)] However, that 3-port hub has come in very handy; if I had the BSE, I'd have to have an external switch anyhow. A tossup
timothy
I have a wired + wireless router (one of the many little ones that Walmart / CompUSA / your local Lucky Dragon sell), and it's great, works with very little coaxing.
...?"
.11g which would make it worth buying -- for household use, that is -- over a ridiculously cheap 801.11b router? I guess at a frathouse (or a co-op), it would make more sense ...
However, it also offers throughput on both the wired and unwired sides which is far greater than the bandwidth of my cable modem. For person-to-person communication (IRCing with your tenant in the basement, or even using VoIP if you're into that sort of thing) or moderate file exchanging, 11b is *plenty* until you get pretty far apart.
How often do you do large file transfers wirelessly so that you'd get a big benefit out of 11g? For some people that answer is going to be "All the time, thank you!" but for most residential wireless users, I think the answer is going to be "Large file transfers
Are there really compelling advantages to
timothy