As LCD monitors get bigger, the viewing angle problem gets more severe. I just got a ViewSonic 19" LCD with supposedly good "viewing angle" specs. The problem is that you normally sit within 2 feet of your monitor. At this distance, your eyes view the top of the screen at a very different angle than the bottom of the screen. With a large LCD like this, there is absolutely no way to view the screen without severe differences in color... the monitor is just too big and you are sitting too close to it. I find myself constantly adjusting the monitor, or raising and lowering my head to try and read things.
This is a problem I never noticed on my smaller (laptop) LCDs, simply because the monitor is much smaller.
Obviously this wouldn't be a problem for an LCD in your living room, where you view it from quite a distance. But large LCD monitors are a problem. (At least mine is!)
Er, yes? I mean, doesn't pretty much everybody, at some point, exchange documents with other firms?
Er, yes, but nothing irritates me more than companies that send me some kind of proprietary, closed-source, non-standard document like a MS WORD document. We exhange documents by making a PDF.
Ever since I started getting those threatening postcards from the Business Software Alliance, I have been determined to do whatever I can to get Microsoft out of my business. It has not been easy at all. In fact, I wonder if my extreme hatred for Microsoft has clouded my business judgment.
My work has not been all for naught. I have easily and painlessly jettisoned Microsoft from all of our critical Internet infrastructure. No more Microsoft http servers, smtp servers, file servers, etc. This is where open source excels. It does not make much business sense to use Microsoft for stuff like this.
Another huge open source success is the use of Postgresql instead of Oracle or SQL Server. It was easy to re-program our proprietary apps to use Postgres. We save a ton of money by never paying for an Oracle license. Unless you can't live without DB clustering or other advanced features, Postgres is the answer.
My efforts to get rid of our proprietary point of sale/order entry system have taken me down a long, complicated road, and I have decided that the best solution is developing a completely custom system. This has cost a ton of time and money, and in two years has still not resulted in a functioning alternative or the decomissioning of a single Microsoft server! One day, though, I swear it will pay dividends. My stubborness here has so far been a big can of worms. But who knows, even massive, expensive fiascos like The Big Dig can one day "go live" and everybody is grateful.
OpenOffice is a no-brainer, unless you need to exchange documents with other firms, or you need some of MS Office's advanced features. My employees initially revolted (they were just not used to it). But OO is surprisingly feature-rich, if not intuitive or robust. Of course, even though OO has been a GREAT success story, it is still deployed on Windows machines. However, I now have a migration path to Linux workstations.
I do not even have any desire or plans to get rid of all the Microsoft boxes. We will still use Quickbooks for the back end accounting. We will still do desktop publishing using BSA-approved software (although the GIMP has replaced Photoshop in our non-print work).
The one shining beacon of hope for me is that, even though I have not significantly reduced the number of Windows machines at my business, I have significantly increased the number of FreeBSD and Linux servers, and I have not ever upgraded my Windows NT 4.0 workstation licenses!
My advice is to use OSS whereever you can, and proprietary software whereever you must. Always make technology decisions that give you the option to migrate to OSS if the option presents itself.
There was NEVER 200 years of legal slavery in America. This country came into being in 1783.
First slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619. African slavery was legalized in Virgina and Maryland in the mid 1600s. Slavery is not abolished until 1865.
To equate "male" and "female" terminology with "master-slave" is absolutely ridiculous! "Male-female" does not have the kind of cultural baggage that "master-slave" has.
For millions of Americans, the "master-slave" relationship means one thing and one thing only: over 200 years of institutionalized, legal American slavery.
I'm sorry, even though it's codified by ANSI, and published in the dictionary, the term "master-slave" still directly derives from the American slavery experience, and is indeed inappropriate.
Computer scientists are not the most culturally sensitive people, and whoever came up with this term (I betcha it was a white guy) probably thought it was cute. But for millions, it is not at all "cute". Imagine if the "Trashcan" on your desktop were named "Auschwitz" by some clever computer scientist -- "Yah, you just draag ze files to zis Auscvitz ikon, and zhey dissapear!"
You probably also think it's perfectly fine to have sports teams named Redskins and Braves, and you are not at all bothered by the Cleveland Indians mascot, either! Well, believe it or not, some people are despondent over the existence of these team names and logos -- they're just such a minority that nobody in this country cares about them.
I, for one, am glad that LA county is taking a stand. I just wish they'd offered suggestions for a new term!
Chances are slim to none that a software company would allow it's "shredded" source code to be publicly released. What happens if the proprietary source is found to violate the GPL?
Proprietary (closed) source companies have a tremendous advantage over open source software when it comes to violating intellectual property. Who will ever know if they did it? A source code "comparator" eliminates that crucial advantage.
Learn to count, that's only one word, and a WORLD of pain as a first Programming language to learn!
Bollocks. Python is easy.
Furthermore, the most important thing for getting young programmers interested in programming is instant feedback. The reason so many kids found BASIC to be easy and fun is that it is an interpreted language. You can experiment on the 'command line', and get instant feedback. Python allows you to do this (as does Ruby, Perl, etc.)
I think it's a mistake to try and get kids to learn programming by using a compiled language like C or Java.
Plus, there's a really nice book on learning how to program that uses Python as the learning language.
The extremely low power consumption of the MiniITX boards makes them ideal for running my company's webserver. Compared to the Athlon servers they replaced, they consume a fraction of the power; they should run a lot longer off our large UPS next time there is a power outage.
Performance problems? The low cost has made it easy to purchase more computers, each running specialized tasks. The most mission critical computers get the biggest UPS.
Well, my business runs off a legacy point of sale application that has never been tested under Win2K. That's why I've never upgraded.
I am quite happy with the 6 or 7 years that NT has provided.
But moving to Windows2K is likely to only give me another 3 or 4 years of use. Then again, our old MS DOS application might not even run under Win2k, and the upgrade investment will be completely useless.
That's why my company is designing a new system based on Java, Python and CORBA that will run on any platform.
To be honest with you, we will probably not choose to deploy anything on Win2k or XP.
I suppose Microsoft doesn't care. They aren't getting any money from NT users anyway. They might as well all switch to Linux, which is what we'll end up doing.
You'd kind of think that Microsoft would prefer to at least keep us NT users happy and out of the Linux camp by supplying the critical security patches. But I suppose my company is not typical, in that we do see Linux as a viable desktop alternative to Windows, and we will make the switch wherever possible.
Or an upgrade to Win2K. After all, it's been out for, what, 4 years now?
So if NT4 is being EOLed 7 years from its release, that means that your new Win2K license is probably only going to last you a measly 3 years!
Not everybody purchases Microsoft operating systems at the beginning of their life cycle, and for them, the per-annum cost of a license is pretty high indeed.
I've been thinking along these lines for a while now. However, I couldn't stand to degrade either the sound quality of the music, or the integrity of the CD's programme. For example, if a track has a 7 second lead-in, I would like to preserve it if I listen to the entire sampled disc.
My solution is to rip the CD with cdrdao, store the image (bin file) and cue sheet, and script something with sox, for example:
dd if=data.bin bs=10 | play -V - -t cdr
The music server has a good audio card with a digital out, and that gets fed into a relatively expensive outboard DAC. You sacrifice nothing in terms of sound quality.
The biggest problem is exactly what you describe: the playback interface.
I'm thinking of turning this into a 3 component system. The server (with it's fans and loud hard drives) sits in my basement. A quiet single board computer with the sound card and no fan and no hard drive sits on my audio rack. A third computer, possibly a PalmOS computer running wireless Ethernet, sits on my coffee table and awaits my commands.
In other words, there's a fair amount of custom programming. I'd like it to be at least as good as my CD player, offering random seek (fast forward and rewind!) capabilities.
The software/web servers included with these cameras are, by and large, useless for security purposes unless you plan on watching the video stream 24x7. I use motion, an incredibly simple but useful Linux motion detection program with my Axis 2100, and then periodically review the.mpeg files it generates. I don't know if any other net cameras are supported.
In three months, I have already used motion and my Axis 2100 to capture images of TWO people attempting to burgle my office during my business's regular operating hours. Although capturing images of these people is mostly useless (as the police don't really care), it has helped me to reevaluate the threat and change our security policies.
I wish I could download one MONSTEROUS file instead of 32,000 smaller pieces. It is geared towards people on 28.8 K modems.. not T1 lines.
Nonsense. The Usenet isn't "geared" toward anything. The reason the posts are broken up like that is because many news servers filter out posts over a certain size.
Additionally, certain archival technology (RAR, PAR) is really tailor-made for the Usenet's limitations. Posting 52 RAR files (themselves broken up into hundreds of uuencoded or yEnced files) and a few parity volumes means that consumers only need to successfully reassemble, say, 90% of the RAR files.
Nobody will argue that the Usenet is an efficient way of many-to-one binary distribution. Far from it. I was just arguing that it's a lot safer that P2P, especially for consumers. And I would think that would make it more dangerous than P2P in the eyes of the MPAA.
P2P networks always seemed very a very promiscous and un-anonymous way to share legally-dubious files.
The alt.binaries.* heirarchy of the usenet, on the other hand, appears to contain about 99% copyrighted material. The people primarily at risk are those posting the copyrighted material. Most posters take some precautions: when I examine the headers it seems like they go through NNTP servers that offer anonymity and privacy, such as usenetserver.com. (They claim to keep posting logs for 48 hours as a way to controlling spammers... Of course if the MPAA came with a subpoena, they'd certainly have to turn them over to them.)
My perception is that downloaders of Usenet binaries are subject to considerably less risk, as there is no public log of NNTP downloads. While ISPs may log them, I can't imagine a judge granting the MPAA a subpoena for checking an ISPs download logs just to go fishing.
It is really astonishing how many terabytes get posted to alt.binaries.* per day.
By the way, I routinely stress-test my new hardware using alt.binaries.*. I don't really even know what the binaries are, I just pick a few files, and start trying to reassemble the pieces. This seems to crash my potential production servers faster than anything.
Do you think the MPAA will be knocking at my door?
Since a computer is as incapable of determining leagal use as the Thompson was incapable of determining legal use, the computer's ability to copy material is likely to suffer the same fate as the Thompson.
That's right ladies and gentlemen, the government is going to eliminate "computer's ability to copy material".
This, despite the fact that "material"==bits. Ones and zeros. A fundamental property of bits is that they are EASILY COPIED!
Any legal/technical challenge to 'the copying of bits' is going to suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union's attempt to REVERSE THE DIRECTION OF RIVERS
The Antec case came with 2 fans blowing out of the rear (in addition to the power supply fan) and none in the front. I attempted to remedy the air-getting-sucked-through-the-CD-devices problem by installing two additional fans in the front of the case (blowing inward). I have not noticed a significant improvement. Maybe I'll try disconnecting one of the rear fans to balance the air flow a little bit more.
Still, I have owned over a dozen cases, and currently maintain 7. The Antec is the only one that seems to have this problem. I believe it is due to the fact that all three rear exhaust fans are located at the top of the case, directly opposite the 5" drive bays. The front intake fans are located at the very bottom of the case, and it makes it impossible to get good cross-ventilation.
My final beef with this case is that it is quite difficult to remove the plastic face plate from the metal chassis (only one side of the plastic tabs is accessible).
Slashdot Mirror
As LCD monitors get bigger, the viewing angle problem gets more severe. I just got a ViewSonic 19" LCD with supposedly good "viewing angle" specs. The problem is that you normally sit within 2 feet of your monitor. At this distance, your eyes view the top of the screen at a very different angle than the bottom of the screen. With a large LCD like this, there is absolutely no way to view the screen without severe differences in color... the monitor is just too big and you are sitting too close to it. I find myself constantly adjusting the monitor, or raising and lowering my head to try and read things.
This is a problem I never noticed on my smaller (laptop) LCDs, simply because the monitor is much smaller.
Obviously this wouldn't be a problem for an LCD in your living room, where you view it from quite a distance. But large LCD monitors are a problem. (At least mine is!)
Er, yes, but nothing irritates me more than companies that send me some kind of proprietary, closed-source, non-standard document like a MS WORD document. We exhange documents by making a PDF.
Ever since I started getting those threatening postcards from the Business Software Alliance, I have been determined to do whatever I can to get Microsoft out of my business. It has not been easy at all. In fact, I wonder if my extreme hatred for Microsoft has clouded my business judgment.
My work has not been all for naught. I have easily and painlessly jettisoned Microsoft from all of our critical Internet infrastructure. No more Microsoft http servers, smtp servers, file servers, etc. This is where open source excels. It does not make much business sense to use Microsoft for stuff like this.
Another huge open source success is the use of Postgresql instead of Oracle or SQL Server. It was easy to re-program our proprietary apps to use Postgres. We save a ton of money by never paying for an Oracle license. Unless you can't live without DB clustering or other advanced features, Postgres is the answer.
My efforts to get rid of our proprietary point of sale/order entry system have taken me down a long, complicated road, and I have decided that the best solution is developing a completely custom system. This has cost a ton of time and money, and in two years has still not resulted in a functioning alternative or the decomissioning of a single Microsoft server! One day, though, I swear it will pay dividends. My stubborness here has so far been a big can of worms. But who knows, even massive, expensive fiascos like The Big Dig can one day "go live" and everybody is grateful.
OpenOffice is a no-brainer, unless you need to exchange documents with other firms, or you need some of MS Office's advanced features. My employees initially revolted (they were just not used to it). But OO is surprisingly feature-rich, if not intuitive or robust. Of course, even though OO has been a GREAT success story, it is still deployed on Windows machines. However, I now have a migration path to Linux workstations.
I do not even have any desire or plans to get rid of all the Microsoft boxes. We will still use Quickbooks for the back end accounting. We will still do desktop publishing using BSA-approved software (although the GIMP has replaced Photoshop in our non-print work).
The one shining beacon of hope for me is that, even though I have not significantly reduced the number of Windows machines at my business, I have significantly increased the number of FreeBSD and Linux servers, and I have not ever upgraded my Windows NT 4.0 workstation licenses!
My advice is to use OSS whereever you can, and proprietary software whereever you must. Always make technology decisions that give you the option to migrate to OSS if the option presents itself.
Then it makes plenty of sense to make the computer a remote-controlled slave terminal...
Watch your language, you culturally insensitive moron! You should call it a "remote-controlled secondary terminal" or a "bitch terminal" or something.
To equate "male" and "female" terminology with "master-slave" is absolutely ridiculous! "Male-female" does not have the kind of cultural baggage that "master-slave" has.
For millions of Americans, the "master-slave" relationship means one thing and one thing only: over 200 years of institutionalized, legal American slavery.
I'm sorry, even though it's codified by ANSI, and published in the dictionary, the term "master-slave" still directly derives from the American slavery experience, and is indeed inappropriate.
Computer scientists are not the most culturally sensitive people, and whoever came up with this term (I betcha it was a white guy) probably thought it was cute. But for millions, it is not at all "cute". Imagine if the "Trashcan" on your desktop were named "Auschwitz" by some clever computer scientist -- "Yah, you just draag ze files to zis Auscvitz ikon, and zhey dissapear!"
You probably also think it's perfectly fine to have sports teams named Redskins and Braves, and you are not at all bothered by the Cleveland Indians mascot, either! Well, believe it or not, some people are despondent over the existence of these team names and logos -- they're just such a minority that nobody in this country cares about them.
I, for one, am glad that LA county is taking a stand. I just wish they'd offered suggestions for a new term!
Is this the same Robert Bork??
Based on the fact he doesn't believe the settlement goes far enough, I can't imagine it is the same guy!
Chances are slim to none that a software company would allow it's "shredded" source code to be publicly released. What happens if the proprietary source is found to violate the GPL?
Proprietary (closed) source companies have a tremendous advantage over open source software when it comes to violating intellectual property. Who will ever know if they did it? A source code "comparator" eliminates that crucial advantage.
Bollocks. Python is easy.
Furthermore, the most important thing for getting young programmers interested in programming is instant feedback. The reason so many kids found BASIC to be easy and fun is that it is an interpreted language. You can experiment on the 'command line', and get instant feedback. Python allows you to do this (as does Ruby, Perl, etc.)
I think it's a mistake to try and get kids to learn programming by using a compiled language like C or Java.
Plus, there's a really nice book on learning how to program that uses Python as the learning language.
Python
The extremely low power consumption of the MiniITX boards makes them ideal for running my company's webserver. Compared to the Athlon servers they replaced, they consume a fraction of the power; they should run a lot longer off our large UPS next time there is a power outage.
Performance problems? The low cost has made it easy to purchase more computers, each running specialized tasks. The most mission critical computers get the biggest UPS.
Well, my business runs off a legacy point of sale application that has never been tested under Win2K. That's why I've never upgraded.
I am quite happy with the 6 or 7 years that NT has provided.
But moving to Windows2K is likely to only give me another 3 or 4 years of use. Then again, our old MS DOS application might not even run under Win2k, and the upgrade investment will be completely useless.
That's why my company is designing a new system based on Java, Python and CORBA that will run on any platform.
To be honest with you, we will probably not choose to deploy anything on Win2k or XP.
I suppose Microsoft doesn't care. They aren't getting any money from NT users anyway. They might as well all switch to Linux, which is what we'll end up doing.
You'd kind of think that Microsoft would prefer to at least keep us NT users happy and out of the Linux camp by supplying the critical security patches. But I suppose my company is not typical, in that we do see Linux as a viable desktop alternative to Windows, and we will make the switch wherever possible.
Some guy has been claiming that FreeBSD is dying for years. Apparantly, Kreskin is giving out bad advice!
Uh, maybe *your* DLT deck is flakey. I think 4 out of 5 failures is way worse than the norm...
I always test my tapes on another drive...
I guess that's one more reason to run PostgreSQL, the superior opensource relational database. It certainly runs stable and fast under FreeBSD.
I've been thinking along these lines for a while now. However, I couldn't stand to degrade either the sound quality of the music, or the integrity of the CD's programme. For example, if a track has a 7 second lead-in, I would like to preserve it if I listen to the entire sampled disc.
My solution is to rip the CD with cdrdao, store the image (bin file) and cue sheet, and script something with sox, for example:
dd if=data.bin bs=10 | play -V - -t cdr
The music server has a good audio card with a digital out, and that gets fed into a relatively expensive outboard DAC. You sacrifice nothing in terms of sound quality.
The biggest problem is exactly what you describe: the playback interface.
I'm thinking of turning this into a 3 component system. The server (with it's fans and loud hard drives) sits in my basement. A quiet single board computer with the sound card and no fan and no hard drive sits on my audio rack. A third computer, possibly a PalmOS computer running wireless Ethernet, sits on my coffee table and awaits my commands.
In other words, there's a fair amount of custom programming. I'd like it to be at least as good as my CD player, offering random seek (fast forward and rewind!) capabilities.
tomRakewell
motion
The software/web servers included with these cameras are, by and large, useless for security purposes unless you plan on watching the video stream 24x7. I use motion, an incredibly simple but useful Linux motion detection program with my Axis 2100, and then periodically review the .mpeg files it generates. I don't know if any other net cameras are supported.
In three months, I have already used motion and my Axis 2100 to capture images of TWO people attempting to burgle my office during my business's regular operating hours. Although capturing images of these people is mostly useless (as the police don't really care), it has helped me to reevaluate the threat and change our security policies.
Install Mozilla.
Additionally, certain archival technology (RAR, PAR) is really tailor-made for the Usenet's limitations. Posting 52 RAR files (themselves broken up into hundreds of uuencoded or yEnced files) and a few parity volumes means that consumers only need to successfully reassemble, say, 90% of the RAR files.
Nobody will argue that the Usenet is an efficient way of many-to-one binary distribution. Far from it. I was just arguing that it's a lot safer that P2P, especially for consumers. And I would think that would make it more dangerous than P2P in the eyes of the MPAA.
P2P networks always seemed very a very promiscous and un-anonymous way to share legally-dubious files.
The alt.binaries.* heirarchy of the usenet, on the other hand, appears to contain about 99% copyrighted material. The people primarily at risk are those posting the copyrighted material. Most posters take some precautions: when I examine the headers it seems like they go through NNTP servers that offer anonymity and privacy, such as usenetserver.com. (They claim to keep posting logs for 48 hours as a way to controlling spammers... Of course if the MPAA came with a subpoena, they'd certainly have to turn them over to them.)
My perception is that downloaders of Usenet binaries are subject to considerably less risk, as there is no public log of NNTP downloads. While ISPs may log them, I can't imagine a judge granting the MPAA a subpoena for checking an ISPs download logs just to go fishing.
It is really astonishing how many terabytes get posted to alt.binaries.* per day.
By the way, I routinely stress-test my new hardware using alt.binaries.*. I don't really even know what the binaries are, I just pick a few files, and start trying to reassemble the pieces. This seems to crash my potential production servers faster than anything.
Do you think the MPAA will be knocking at my door?
-tomRakewell
This, despite the fact that "material"==bits. Ones and zeros. A fundamental property of bits is that they are EASILY COPIED!
Any legal/technical challenge to 'the copying of bits' is going to suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union's attempt to REVERSE THE DIRECTION OF RIVERS
This online homebrew company has a good selection, and they run their business off of FreeBSD. Perfect for the slashdot crowd.
If you're concerned about the smell, try making cider, wine or mead. Although there's nothing like a good homebrew!
The Antec case came with 2 fans blowing out of the rear (in addition to the power supply fan) and none in the front. I attempted to remedy the air-getting-sucked-through-the-CD-devices problem by installing two additional fans in the front of the case (blowing inward). I have not noticed a significant improvement. Maybe I'll try disconnecting one of the rear fans to balance the air flow a little bit more.
Still, I have owned over a dozen cases, and currently maintain 7. The Antec is the only one that seems to have this problem. I believe it is due to the fact that all three rear exhaust fans are located at the top of the case, directly opposite the 5" drive bays. The front intake fans are located at the very bottom of the case, and it makes it impossible to get good cross-ventilation.
My final beef with this case is that it is quite difficult to remove the plastic face plate from the metal chassis (only one side of the plastic tabs is accessible).