Do we really need "a" standard? What's wrong with the current proliferation of divx, mpeg-X, quicktime, avi codecs? People will just start using the ones that give them the quality/attributes they want, and the best performing codec will come out near the top.
Plus, the more codecs there are, the higher the chances that MPlayer will become "the" "standard" movie playing software, since it's probably one of the few that can play almost all of them!:P
Look into getting a PDA running Palm OS. If you invest in a keyboard or numeric keypad, it might even be pretty fast. You don't need anything particularly new, I'm pretty happy with my Visor Pro.
The calculator section of http://www.palmopensource.com/ has many decent graphing calculators (EasyCalc) and even HP48 emulators (Power48). I also remember seeing RPN calculators on other PalmOS software sites ( http://palmgear.com/ , http://www.freesoftwarepalm.com/ ). My only gripe is that I haven't found a good free spreadsheet program yet, other than something called "Abacus" that seems to have mostly disappeared off the net, and even that is pretty incomplete and inconvenient.
I haven't really seen any decent software for non-PalmOS PDAs, even the ones that run Linux:( . But I probably haven't looked hard enough, seeing as I haven't actually played with one. If there was a palmtop that could run Octave or Matlab or similar, that might be worthwhile, but I've yet to see something short of a tiny laptop with enough power for that kind of math package.
I got through college using an HP48GX, but I always missed the TI-85 that got me through high school. There were certain things on the TI that I never learned to do quickly on the HP... like creating formulas that I could plug and chug variables into, and being able to go back and edit my inputs. And the HP was just so slow... I don't think I used it to graph ever. The TI also had niftier solvers to find roots of equations and the like.
To its credit, the HP48's batteries last forever (though partly because I don't use it as much:P ) And I've also been able to find nifty programs to upload to it (but nothing compared to what you can get for a PDA or even some of the TIs.)
Instead of (the environmentalists) trying to prove that global warming is happening because of excess emissions and excessive fuel consumption,
we (the industrialists) should be trying to (1) adequately quantify the resources we consume and output byproducts we produce, and register it with a government agency, or something, and (2) prove that that quantifiable strain we're putting on the environment to sustain our production rate doesn't adversely affect the environment (both local and regional).
So instead of saying, "well, we can't limit our production rate because we don't understand our environmental impact, such as global warming", we should be saying "well, we shouldn't be increasing our production rate until we understand our environmental impact".
Thus the burden of proof on the environmental impact of development should be on those with something to gain, and not on all of us with something to lose.
Why is it up to the environmentalists to show that global warming is happening so that we might try to become more responsible about our energy utilization?
The burden of proof should fall on the businesses and enterprises to quantify how much environmental impact their new factory will produce. Then they can pay for all of the research.
Granted, this makes way for more biased research, but (1) there are ways around this (oversight committees, etc.) (2) the research gets done (3) we're not sticking our heads in the sand, building stuff that reaps resources from the environment, while waiting for some non-profit environmental research firm to finally proove that global warming is happening and you need to eliminate your excess C02 emissions 5 years ago or we'll sink under the sea in 2.
Well, these are my experiences with exactly the same problems. I'm not saying that these worked, but at least I got my degree and moved on with my life.
First off: be a masochist. Get depressed about your work ethic. It sorta works like Ryoga on Ranma 1/2 (but don't bother researching that anime if you don't already know that character). Always be ready to punish yourself, and that punishment is work.
If you're like me, the work you do do is very meticulous, and you'll rather not do something at all rather than do it poorly. For this, I take a two-stage approach: write out your solutions to homework assignments on scratch paper first, then type it up neatly. It works for essays, math proofs, etc. This will keep you from spending too much time on formatting / word choice early on, and you're probably a fast typist, so the second stage won't take too much time. Plus, you probably usually skip proofreading too (I find it revolting to review my work after it's "done", this kinda forces me to do at least one quick review pass when transcribing).
If you find lecture time boring, use it to work on your homework. You probably love to multitask anyway, so it may as well improve your attentiveness to the lecture, and it's more productive than falling asleep or zoninng off (which you claim to be a pro in already).
Join some extracurricular activities (design projects, professional societies, etc.) These will give you the extra pressure you need to do well on your core curriculum, and tend to have more "soft" deadlines, so you can allow them to slip before more important things go. Plus, these opportunities are among the only things that make your college experience different from self-instruction from textbooks. Take advantage of them, you'll likely never have a chance to participate in projects like them ever again. They also provide invaluable fodder for interview questions in the future.
If you start to falter, seriously consider taking a leave of absence and join the workforce for a semester or a year. Unfortunately, I waited until I had pretty much blown an entire semester (GPA: 0.5 ) before I gave this a thought. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me (the experience, not being on academic probation). It was a real confidence builder, and focusing my mind on real problems really helped me understand why some school subjects were important when I returned. Plus, once you start making your own money and paying your way through life yourself, you'll finally appreciate the ~$100 per lecture hour that you're really spending.
Finally, get a supportive girlfriend or wife. This might be hard to find, but I was lucky. Parents can put only a certain type of pressure on you.
At Cornell, the machine would just wipe its hard disk and reimage over the network after the last user walked out. I can't believe this isn't a standard feature for public terminals by now...
Hmm, the last space simulator I played was the Space Shuttle for the Atari. It basically consisted of three phases of "keeping the ball centered within the tolerance crosshairs" for takeoff, docking, and reentry. Ah, those were the days...
Speaking of which, are there any 3D space combat simulator games that use real physics? (as opposed to Wing Commander physics) I've played with Vendetta and a few other things, but they're all more like piloting a submarine than a spacecraft. Granted, it could be pretty boring if everyone just kept whipping past each other at 100km/s, but I'm sure there's some way to offset that...
Is there a "postscript server" application for Windows that would convert a windows-only printer into a network postscript printer? It seems like it would be a good idea to get *nix support for some printers by just hooking up an old desktop or laptop running Windows and treating the whole mess as a postscript printer.
We have a Lexmark X83, and this would allow even the vendor-supplied sound effects to work ("printing started/complete!" "black ink cartridge low").
This seems so simple, but I've searched the web over and haven't found something to do this. We also have a MacOS X box with Lexmark X83 drivers, and I'm kinda surprised that MacOS X doesn't have some kind of "printer sharing" either. Any pointers?
The small keyboard shouldn't be a problem: Just stick on a USB twiddler. Chording keyboards can be much faster than full keyboards. And perhaps someday you'll never need to use a normal keyboard again - just use your personally-customized portable keyboard and point at the computer you want to type to.
Google has been making inroads on deploying in corporate intranets. Boeing's search engine just switched to Google last year.
MS could quite possibly create a search service integrated with the rest of its intranet backend stuff and sell it to IT managers as "easier to deploy and maintain than a beowulf cluster". And they can throw in a bunch of "features".
But unless a search engine like this already exists somewhere and Microsoft can just buy it, tweak it, and market it, they probably won't get very far. I've been becoming increasingly pessimistic as to whether a large corporation can get through enough corporate red tape for any novel R&D done at all.
As for usability, let's just say that the two things that give me the most grief at work are Microsoft's CIFS servers and Outlook. I lose more time waiting for things, or trying to recover things that were lost or misfiled or corrupted, or trying to dig through Outlook's atrocious lack of threading (both decent mail threading and multithreading)... but it's hard to turn that into a number that IT managers can gawk at.
Companies in the US are pretty heavily restricted by export control laws (ITAR / EAR). This means they get into a lot of trouble (big fines / jail time) for "exporting" technology to foreign entities. What constitutes a foreign entity? Lots of people:
First and foremost are your foreign customers, clients, and even collaborators. If your product/ technology is covered under the EAR (enforced by the Dept of Commerce), you need to schedule about 3-6 months for an export license before engaging in any "technology transfer" (be it merchandise, technical specs, detailed descriptions/pictures, even manuals). In the software industry, I'll leave it up to you to guess what that kind of bureaucratic holdup can mean to your release cycle if you don't get started on it in time. Worse yet, if your technology can be used for military purposes, it may be covered under the ITAR (enforced by the Dept of Defence / State Dept) and may not be exportable at all. This includes things like strong encryption. Ironically, in this time of "heightened" security, it's very difficult for US companies to develop secure, strongly encrypted applications and still sell to a global market without providing some kind of workaround.
More importantly, "foreign entity" includes foreigners who work for your company, just about anyone on an H1B tech visa, etc. In my company, all of our foreigners have to be confined to an area free of technical information, and they need to be escorted anywhere else where they might be "exposed" to export controlled information. Anything they work on has to be cleared of export controlled information. Makes it kind of hard for them to contribute, since they're usually among our most technically skilled workers.
Much of the US's strength has traditionally come from brillant foreing immigrants. However, until they get their green card, their contributions to a US company are pretty limited.
So probably a combination between getting foreign workers and roadblocks against work for/with non-US countries is strongly encouraging companies, both US and otherwise, to do all of their technical development offshore. Again ironically, these export control laws that were supposedly designed to keep cutting-edge technology in the US is now the primary force that's moving technology development outside of US borders (well, second to the availability of cheap, highly skilled, highly educated labor, but these are evidently attached).
I've been tracking my finances with GnuCash since late 2000. Still a few annoyances... it takes entirely too long to import QIF files from my various financial institutions. As a result, I only update it every three to six months. But it's pretty good at helping you enter in transactions by hand.
I have to admit though, it took several tries and a basic college course in financial accounting (taught by a former employee of Anderson Consulting, no less:) to understand and get rull use out of it.
While I've found the graphing and reporting features of GnuCash to be indispensible once you get all that information properly inputted, I guess the main thing to realize is that it's just a tool: only your own knowledge of how finances work and your skill in using it will determine how much you can actually get out of it.
As for me, I still have yet to figure out how to use GnuCash's budgeting feature, so I can actually plan out ahead for a few months/years - probably the ultimate goal of financial tracking and analysis. Hopefully by then, the QIF import features will have improved enough so that the situation I'm tracking will be up to date instead of 3 months behind.
I just ordered an Ericsson R520m to use with T-mobile's US GSM/GPRS network. It had all the features I wanted (GPRS, IrDA, speakerphone, even bluetooth which I didn't care for but would probably be useful someday) and none of the features I didn't want (camera, color screen, etc.). Of course, the only way to get something like this is to order the international version (900, 1800, 1900Mhz). Unfortunately T-mobile doesn't sell this device here, so I couldn't get the subsidized price, but it's only $85 (!), amazing for something with that feature set.
I also looked at the Nokia 6310i, which has most of the same features, but costs 3x as much for some reason (probably because it has downloadable java applets that you also have to pay extra for). I would have prefered the Nokia because their excellent human interfaces work (my old Nokia 8290 was the only phone I've had (out of Ericssons, Motorolas, Visorphones, etc.) that I could use almost everything without having to jump to the manual)
I filed using TurboTax on the web this year. It was $20 for the Fed + $15 for the state. Even did it under Linux with Galeon. Other than letting them become privvy to my financial info, is there any drawback to using their web-based product as opposed to their shrink-wrapped software? I figure I'd have to buy their latest every tax year anyway, so what's the point of getting the shrink-wrapped stuff at all (other than you don't need to be connected to the internet the entire time you're filling out the forms)?
I think what will happen is that once wearable computing is a bit more widespread, you'll have people walking around with their own input devices (e.g. like a Twiddler) with keys customized to their personal usage patterns. Then they could just walk up to any computer around them, point their keyboards at it, and through [IR|Bluetooth|802.11b via ssh/x2x|technology of the year] transmit keyboard events & ASCII/UTF8 streams directly to that computer. It'll take some time to standardize on the interfaces and work out authentication & encryption, but it's about time some geeks started setting up terminals like this in their homes/cars/offices to start.
My wife reports that the supposedly reputable RTN interviewed experts that theorized that one of Columbia's missions was to obtain surveillance of Iraq that was supposed to give Colin Powell irrefutable proof to reveal to the internation community later that week that Iraq is indeed concealing weapons of mass destruction. However, instead he has had to report much more mundane footage from conventional surveillance sats. So one of the things the recovery teams are looking for is any of this data that could have survived.
I consider it a bit unlikely, but thought it would be a nice thing to add to your conspiracy jar.
I dunno, I did the Sims Online playtest, and the gameplay was downright boring. It takes forever to build skills for your character (over an hour per point). And then you can supposedly do stuff for money. To their credit, they balance it so people get skills/money faster if they work in groups, encouraging chitchat, but that's about it. None of the more sophisticated entertainment business opportunities that they hint to on the website. Maybe some of that will pop up once people build up their properties and get bored sitting around together waiting for their skills/money to increase. But even then, there's only so much that can be done in the Sims engine, where you're pretty much limited to objects and activities that Maxis gives you.
It'd be nice if the Sims could have somehow stuck to being a very user friendly architecture program like it was originally intended... Oh well.
The website mentions the gatos project several times for support of this card.
My Radeon 7500 works great right now. I'm using the latest gatos drivers, and xawtv works great, and 3D acceleration is good enough to play RtCW and Tribes2 (albeit in pretty low res on my 1Ghz Duron). The only shortcoming is that XVideo mode won't let me use the framegrabber, though I think this is working in CVS versions of gatos at the moment... after that, we should be able to record as well as view TV inputs.
I had some instability earlier, but it turned out to be problems with my motherboard BIOS instead. Playing around with different BIOS releases seems to have fixed the problems.
Let me know if you need any help... it looks like the Radeon 7500 is a dead end though (but I wasn't about to pay twice as much for an 8500 AiW). Support from the gatos project has been superb!
Slashdot Mirror
Do we really need "a" standard? What's wrong with the current proliferation of divx, mpeg-X, quicktime, avi codecs? People will just start using the ones that give them the quality/attributes they want, and the best performing codec will come out near the top.
:P
Plus, the more codecs there are, the higher the chances that MPlayer will become "the" "standard" movie playing software, since it's probably one of the few that can play almost all of them!
Most apps can print to file as postscript. Then just run ps2pdf on it.
Look into getting a PDA running Palm OS. If you invest in a keyboard or numeric keypad, it might even be pretty fast. You don't need anything particularly new, I'm pretty happy with my Visor Pro.
:( . But I probably haven't looked hard enough, seeing as I haven't actually played with one. If there was a palmtop that could run Octave or Matlab or similar, that might be worthwhile, but I've yet to see something short of a tiny laptop with enough power for that kind of math package.
:P ) And I've also been able to find nifty programs to upload to it (but nothing compared to what you can get for a PDA or even some of the TIs.)
The calculator section of http://www.palmopensource.com/ has many decent graphing calculators (EasyCalc) and even HP48 emulators (Power48). I also remember seeing RPN calculators on other PalmOS software sites ( http://palmgear.com/ , http://www.freesoftwarepalm.com/ ). My only gripe is that I haven't found a good free spreadsheet program yet, other than something called "Abacus" that seems to have mostly disappeared off the net, and even that is pretty incomplete and inconvenient.
I haven't really seen any decent software for non-PalmOS PDAs, even the ones that run Linux
I got through college using an HP48GX, but I always missed the TI-85 that got me through high school. There were certain things on the TI that I never learned to do quickly on the HP... like creating formulas that I could plug and chug variables into, and being able to go back and edit my inputs. And the HP was just so slow... I don't think I used it to graph ever. The TI also had niftier solvers to find roots of equations and the like.
To its credit, the HP48's batteries last forever (though partly because I don't use it as much
Not that backwards...
Instead of (the environmentalists) trying to prove that global warming is happening because of excess emissions and excessive fuel consumption,
we (the industrialists) should be trying to (1) adequately quantify the resources we consume and output byproducts we produce, and register it with a government agency, or something, and (2) prove that that quantifiable strain we're putting on the environment to sustain our production rate doesn't adversely affect the environment (both local and regional).
So instead of saying, "well, we can't limit our production rate because we don't understand our environmental impact, such as global warming", we should be saying "well, we shouldn't be increasing our production rate until we understand our environmental impact".
Thus the burden of proof on the environmental impact of development should be on those with something to gain, and not on all of us with something to lose.
Why is it up to the environmentalists to show that global warming is happening so that we might try to become more responsible about our energy utilization?
The burden of proof should fall on the businesses and enterprises to quantify how much environmental impact their new factory will produce. Then they can pay for all of the research.
Granted, this makes way for more biased research, but (1) there are ways around this (oversight committees, etc.) (2) the research gets done (3) we're not sticking our heads in the sand, building stuff that reaps resources from the environment, while waiting for some non-profit environmental research firm to finally proove that global warming is happening and you need to eliminate your excess C02 emissions 5 years ago or we'll sink under the sea in 2.
OK, you probably don't want to blow $100Gs on your first car, but hopefully the performance of this thing gives us something to look forward to.
Thwang....
/. userids... or something
Blessed are the prime
First off: be a masochist. Get depressed about your work ethic. It sorta works like Ryoga on Ranma 1/2 (but don't bother researching that anime if you don't already know that character). Always be ready to punish yourself, and that punishment is work. If you're like me, the work you do do is very meticulous, and you'll rather not do something at all rather than do it poorly. For this, I take a two-stage approach: write out your solutions to homework assignments on scratch paper first, then type it up neatly. It works for essays, math proofs, etc. This will keep you from spending too much time on formatting / word choice early on, and you're probably a fast typist, so the second stage won't take too much time. Plus, you probably usually skip proofreading too (I find it revolting to review my work after it's "done", this kinda forces me to do at least one quick review pass when transcribing).
If you find lecture time boring, use it to work on your homework. You probably love to multitask anyway, so it may as well improve your attentiveness to the lecture, and it's more productive than falling asleep or zoninng off (which you claim to be a pro in already).
Join some extracurricular activities (design projects, professional societies, etc.) These will give you the extra pressure you need to do well on your core curriculum, and tend to have more "soft" deadlines, so you can allow them to slip before more important things go. Plus, these opportunities are among the only things that make your college experience different from self-instruction from textbooks. Take advantage of them, you'll likely never have a chance to participate in projects like them ever again. They also provide invaluable fodder for interview questions in the future.
If you start to falter, seriously consider taking a leave of absence and join the workforce for a semester or a year. Unfortunately, I waited until I had pretty much blown an entire semester (GPA: 0.5 ) before I gave this a thought. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me (the experience, not being on academic probation). It was a real confidence builder, and focusing my mind on real problems really helped me understand why some school subjects were important when I returned. Plus, once you start making your own money and paying your way through life yourself, you'll finally appreciate the ~$100 per lecture hour that you're really spending.
Finally, get a supportive girlfriend or wife. This might be hard to find, but I was lucky. Parents can put only a certain type of pressure on you.
At Cornell, the machine would just wipe its hard disk and reimage over the network after the last user walked out. I can't believe this isn't a standard feature for public terminals by now...
Hmm, the last space simulator I played was the Space Shuttle for the Atari. It basically consisted of three phases of "keeping the ball centered within the tolerance crosshairs" for takeoff, docking, and reentry. Ah, those were the days...
Speaking of which, are there any 3D space combat simulator games that use real physics? (as opposed to Wing Commander physics) I've played with Vendetta and a few other things, but they're all more like piloting a submarine than a spacecraft. Granted, it could be pretty boring if everyone just kept whipping past each other at 100km/s, but I'm sure there's some way to offset that...
Is there a "postscript server" application for Windows that would convert a windows-only printer into a network postscript printer? It seems like it would be a good idea to get *nix support for some printers by just hooking up an old desktop or laptop running Windows and treating the whole mess as a postscript printer.
We have a Lexmark X83, and this would allow even the vendor-supplied sound effects to work ("printing started/complete!" "black ink cartridge low").
This seems so simple, but I've searched the web over and haven't found something to do this. We also have a MacOS X box with Lexmark X83 drivers, and I'm kinda surprised that MacOS X doesn't have some kind of "printer sharing" either. Any pointers?
The small keyboard shouldn't be a problem:
Just stick on a USB twiddler. Chording keyboards can be much faster than full keyboards. And perhaps someday you'll never need to use a normal keyboard again - just use your personally-customized portable keyboard and point at the computer you want to type to.
Google has been making inroads on deploying in corporate intranets. Boeing's search engine just switched to Google last year.
MS could quite possibly create a search service integrated with the rest of its intranet backend stuff and sell it to IT managers as "easier to deploy and maintain than a beowulf cluster". And they can throw in a bunch of "features".
But unless a search engine like this already exists somewhere and Microsoft can just buy it, tweak it, and market it, they probably won't get very far. I've been becoming increasingly pessimistic as to whether a large corporation can get through enough corporate red tape for any novel R&D done at all.
As for usability, let's just say that the two things that give me the most grief at work are Microsoft's CIFS servers and Outlook. I lose more time waiting for things, or trying to recover things that were lost or misfiled or corrupted, or trying to dig through Outlook's atrocious lack of threading (both decent mail threading and multithreading)... but it's hard to turn that into a number that IT managers can gawk at.
Companies in the US are pretty heavily restricted by export control laws (ITAR / EAR). This means they get into a lot of trouble (big fines / jail time) for "exporting" technology to foreign entities. What constitutes a foreign entity? Lots of people:
First and foremost are your foreign customers, clients, and even collaborators. If your product/ technology is covered under the EAR (enforced by the Dept of Commerce), you need to schedule about 3-6 months for an export license before engaging in any "technology transfer" (be it merchandise, technical specs, detailed descriptions/pictures, even manuals). In the software industry, I'll leave it up to you to guess what that kind of bureaucratic holdup can mean to your release cycle if you don't get started on it in time. Worse yet, if your technology can be used for military purposes, it may be covered under the ITAR (enforced by the Dept of Defence / State Dept) and may not be exportable at all. This includes things like strong encryption. Ironically, in this time of "heightened" security, it's very difficult for US companies to develop secure, strongly encrypted applications and still sell to a global market without providing some kind of workaround.
More importantly, "foreign entity" includes foreigners who work for your company, just about anyone on an H1B tech visa, etc. In my company, all of our foreigners have to be confined to an area free of technical information, and they need to be escorted anywhere else where they might be "exposed" to export controlled information. Anything they work on has to be cleared of export controlled information. Makes it kind of hard for them to contribute, since they're usually among our most technically skilled workers.
Much of the US's strength has traditionally come from brillant foreing immigrants. However, until they get their green card, their contributions to a US company are pretty limited.
So probably a combination between getting foreign workers and roadblocks against work for/with non-US countries is strongly encouraging companies, both US and otherwise, to do all of their technical development offshore. Again ironically, these export control laws that were supposedly designed to keep cutting-edge technology in the US is now the primary force that's moving technology development outside of US borders (well, second to the availability of cheap, highly skilled, highly educated labor, but these are evidently attached).
I've been tracking my finances with GnuCash since late 2000. Still a few annoyances... it takes entirely too long to import QIF files from my various financial institutions. As a result, I only update it every three to six months. But it's pretty good at helping you enter in transactions by hand.
:) to understand and get rull use out of it.
I have to admit though, it took several tries and a basic college course in financial accounting (taught by a former employee of Anderson Consulting, no less
While I've found the graphing and reporting features of GnuCash to be indispensible once you get all that information properly inputted, I guess the main thing to realize is that it's just a tool: only your own knowledge of how finances work and your skill in using it will determine how much you can actually get out of it.
As for me, I still have yet to figure out how to use GnuCash's budgeting feature, so I can actually plan out ahead for a few months/years - probably the ultimate goal of financial tracking and analysis. Hopefully by then, the QIF import features will have improved enough so that the situation I'm tracking will be up to date instead of 3 months behind.
I just ordered an Ericsson R520m to use with T-mobile's US GSM/GPRS network. It had all the features I wanted (GPRS, IrDA, speakerphone, even bluetooth which I didn't care for but would probably be useful someday) and none of the features I didn't want (camera, color screen, etc.). Of course, the only way to get something like this is to order the international version (900, 1800, 1900Mhz). Unfortunately T-mobile doesn't sell this device here, so I couldn't get the subsidized price, but it's only $85 (!), amazing for something with that feature set.
I also looked at the Nokia 6310i, which has most of the same features, but costs 3x as much for some reason (probably because it has downloadable java applets that you also have to pay extra for). I would have prefered the Nokia because their excellent human interfaces work (my old Nokia 8290 was the only phone I've had (out of Ericssons, Motorolas, Visorphones, etc.) that I could use almost everything without having to jump to the manual)
Oh, it's some graphics chipset related thingy. I seriously thought the acronym was for a global standard for Dance Dance Revolution...
I filed using TurboTax on the web this year. It was $20 for the Fed + $15 for the state. Even did it under Linux with Galeon. Other than letting them become privvy to my financial info, is there any drawback to using their web-based product as opposed to their shrink-wrapped software? I figure I'd have to buy their latest every tax year anyway, so what's the point of getting the shrink-wrapped stuff at all (other than you don't need to be connected to the internet the entire time you're filling out the forms)?
I think what will happen is that once wearable computing is a bit more widespread, you'll have people walking around with their own input devices (e.g. like a Twiddler) with keys customized to their personal usage patterns. Then they could just walk up to any computer around them, point their keyboards at it, and through [IR|Bluetooth|802.11b via ssh/x2x|technology of the year] transmit keyboard events & ASCII/UTF8 streams directly to that computer. It'll take some time to standardize on the interfaces and work out authentication & encryption, but it's about time some geeks started setting up terminals like this in their homes/cars/offices to start.
Hey, nothing's impossible... just highly improbable.
:)
Of course, that same logic applies to whether anyone would ever break their encryption
My wife reports that the supposedly reputable RTN interviewed experts that theorized that one of Columbia's missions was to obtain surveillance of Iraq that was supposed to give Colin Powell irrefutable proof to reveal to the internation community later that week that Iraq is indeed concealing weapons of mass destruction. However, instead he has had to report much more mundane footage from conventional surveillance sats. So one of the things the recovery teams are looking for is any of this data that could have survived.
I consider it a bit unlikely, but thought it would be a nice thing to add to your conspiracy jar.
I dunno, I did the Sims Online playtest, and the gameplay was downright boring. It takes forever to build skills for your character (over an hour per point). And then you can supposedly do stuff for money. To their credit, they balance it so people get skills/money faster if they work in groups, encouraging chitchat, but that's about it. None of the more sophisticated entertainment business opportunities that they hint to on the website. Maybe some of that will pop up once people build up their properties and get bored sitting around together waiting for their skills/money to increase. But even then, there's only so much that can be done in the Sims engine, where you're pretty much limited to objects and activities that Maxis gives you.
It'd be nice if the Sims could have somehow stuck to being a very user friendly architecture program like it was originally intended... Oh well.
Yeah, that's one of my fav T-shirts!
I think you got French & Italy mixed up in heaven, tho.
This story comes up with the ad for the new LoTR trailer advertisement, with the tagline: "Only in Theatres Dec 18th!"
:P )
You people who disabled ads don't know what you're missing (I "donated", I just didn't bother to turn the ads off
The website mentions the gatos project several times for support of this card.
My Radeon 7500 works great right now. I'm using the latest gatos drivers, and xawtv works great, and 3D acceleration is good enough to play RtCW and Tribes2 (albeit in pretty low res on my 1Ghz Duron). The only shortcoming is that XVideo mode won't let me use the framegrabber, though I think this is working in CVS versions of gatos at the moment... after that, we should be able to record as well as view TV inputs.
I had some instability earlier, but it turned out to be problems with my motherboard BIOS instead. Playing around with different BIOS releases seems to have fixed the problems.
Let me know if you need any help... it looks like the Radeon 7500 is a dead end though (but I wasn't about to pay twice as much for an 8500 AiW). Support from the gatos project has been superb!