Have you ever met RMS? Do you know him? Then shutup and stop stooping to a 3rd grade level of name calling. He may be a little bit different than everybody else, but he's given the world a lot. Don't judge a person by hearsay.
This keyboard is really great' I have one, and the best part about it is that I don't have to reach far away to use the mouse or the cursor keys. I can hit the cursors keys with my thumb, or can use pointer by moving just near the spacebar. It's really cool. I feel much more comfortable going for the touch pad then having to reach for a mouse. Sorry that it didn't work out so well for you.
Yes, it works with linux. It's just a normal keyboard and touchpad (with adapters to work as either PS/2 or old school). There are some features of the touchpad available in Windows that don't work in Linux, but for just basic pointing, it's all the same. This keyboard is really great, by the way. I have one, and the best part about it is that I don't have to reach far away to use the mouse or the cursor keys. I can hit the cursors keys with my thumb, or can use pointer by moving just near the spacebar. It's really cool.
You should probably do a little more research on your information before you start verbally attacking these developers.
Look at the interview with Kevin Lawton at Linux.com, a page on the freeMWare home page. In one of the questions Lawton specifically says that freeMWare has almost nothing to do with VMWare, short of the name. It's something completely different.
In fact, as for your "great commercial idea," he also explains in the interview that they have been tossing the idea of freeMWare for a long time. So, you're slandering some developers that are getting around to something that they have been thinking about already. Just because a company is ahead of them in development doesn't mean that they are "ripping" that company off.
Your attitude is the same ignorant one that a lot of people seem to have about the GNU/OSS world.
The resolution on this thing is 320 x 240. Have you ever scene Windows at 320 x 240? I have. When you're playing Quake at that resolution (Cyrix PR200, it's the only playable resolution), and the computer needs to be rebooted, it loads up into that resolution. Let me tell you, it's cumersome.
The start menu takes up about 1/4 of the screen. Icons are huge. Nothing is useable.
When you have a screen that small, you need to be very effecient with screen space. Windows is not effecient at all. Among other things, this is one reason why Windows does not work well for a small screen. Look at Windows CE devices for a good example.
If the Chinese plan to track stealth planes by looking at radio and televesion waves, couldn't the U.S. purposely alter those signals to make it appear as though there were stealh bombers all over the place?
Or perhpas, could the U.S. put a transmitter in orbit and flood the air waves over China with bogus signals that have bogus torbulences that show bogus stealths.
It seem that this type of technology would be easy to counteract.
I just thought I would mention this since we've been having such a strange winter so far. Here in Phoenix Arizona, it's November 17, and we're still hitting 90 degrees outside. I think mother nature is confused or something. I'm still sweating as I walk between classes during the day.
The Upside to that is, of course, that I don't have to worry about it being cold outside. I don't even need a jacket at night yet!
Yes, that's the problem. It is the standard, and that's why I have to use it in my physics course. I just wanted to get it out that Office is not, in fact, a good product, and that people use it only because of lock-in.
That's why the DOJ as a remedy needs to force MS to open their File Formats, amongst other things.
I disagree with your statement that MS Office is so a fantastic, regardless of who makes it. I'll go down the list and explain why:
Word is not that great. In fact, I don't find it useful at all. Granted, I use it for very few things, but every time I do, I feel like I banging my head against a wall.
Clippy, as you mentioned, is terribly annoying and pops up at the most inopportune of times. Because of him, I don't ever want to go into the help. Some help system that is!
Words formatting is terrible. I'm not sure if this is a problem with word processors in general or just Word, but its terrible at formatting things. If you want a table to look a certain way, you have to jump through 10 different hoops to get it close. Sometimes, you can't get it at all what you want. It's formatting simply cannot hold a candle to something like LaTeX/TeX.
Its autoformating is counterproductive. My roommate, for instance, had to write a technical paper on the software project he is currently working on. One of the objects they use is called JSat. Of course, having two capitalized letters in a row, the Nazi-grammar checker in Word decides to rewrite it as Jsat. Very Annoying. As another example, at a meeting for this same software project that I attended, a team member was editing the agenda and typed "-------" to make a psuedo-horizontal line. Word automatically turned this into a long, horizontal line (one you might find in HTML). At first, he thought this was great. But then when he didn't want it anymore, he tried to delete it. Unfortunately, Word wouldn't let him even select the darn thing, let alone delete it. He still hasn't figured that one out, and our agenda still has a silly, useless line.
The Equation Editor really stinks. Maybe I'm just spoiled at knowing TeX, but trying to get Word to display mathematical formulas correctly is the biggest pain in the arse I have ever had to deal with. Anybody who thinks their equation editor doesn't suck is crazy.
Word crashes, especially when you try and print. Both my roommate and I have had this happen several times (him more than me). What's worse is that it doesn't just take down Word, it takes down the whole system!
In short, Word stinks because it goes way overboard and tries to do everything for you. This eventually makes very simple things very difficult. It's also very unstable.
Excel - Excel is great for very simple graphs and data plots, I'll give you that. But if you want to do anything even remotely complicated, and it stinks.
Curve fits. It only does a few types of curve fits, not including sinusoidal ones. Also, it only does exponential ones under certain conditions. If you don't give the data to it in just the right way, it'll choke.
Copying Data. To copy values (just their numbers, not their formulas), requires my to click on "paste special" every time I want to use it. With several regions of data I want to do this with, such a process becomes very time consuming.
It crashes, especially when you try and save. We use Excel heavily in Physics (that's why I find it annoying). Too many times to count, we do 15 minutes of work and then go to save our work and Kaboom! GPF! Excel crashes, and we loose all of our work. When doing a lab, this isn't just data we have to re-type. This is data we have re-do in the lab. This type of thing is very very annoying.
PowerPoint Sucks. I've never actually used, and never plan to. My opinion of PowerPoint stems solely from all of the terrible slide shows I have had to sit through. I have one CSE class that is taught using only PowerPoint. It's the most boring, useless, impersonal way that I imagine for someone to make a presentation.
Animations do not help me learn. Sliding frames do not help me learn. Different colored text does not help me learn. Sounds do not help me learn. Being able to ask the professor/presnter questions does help me learn. PowerPoint combines all of the problems that TV and Videos have as a presentation tool, but without any of the advantages. It makes the presentation distant and impersonal without having the flexibility and quality a video can provide.
Outlook is insecure and requires you to keep it open. If you want something to constantly check your mail (i.e. Biff), you have to leave Outlook open at all times; that's a major memory hog. Secondly, as proven by all of the recent virii, it's terribly insecure. Plus, all if it's calandering/tasking is pretty useless as far as I can tell.
All the other products are jokes. Access might be good for keeping a address database, but that's about it. Frontpage is the second worst HTML producer I have seen (right behind Word). PictureIt! or whatever is obviously not a serious graphics package.
Am I forgetting anything? Basically, I'm sick of people whining about Linux not having Office, when every experience I have had with Office has been terrible unpleasant.
Anyone else realize why Office is not a good product? Or do you guys want to refute me and convince me that it's actually pretty good? Please, give me your input.
I don't know where you go to school, but here at ASU I sat in on a lecture by some microscope designer/physicist. He brought in an Atomic Force microscope and explained how it worked.
It was the size of a soda can. Basically, the whole thing is a little needle on a little spring with a little sensor. That's it. Now, you might have to hook it up to a big computer to crunch through incoming data, but that actual microscope is very small.
I started filling out the questions, but then stopped when I realized how long it was. I mean sheesh, does the thing give you an anal probe? I wants to know all of my personal information plus everything I know about computers, everything I do for work, and everything about my computer.
How do they decide if you're "qualified"? Does someone actually read it or do they run it through a bot?
Oh come on. You're really just spewing a bunch of anti-AMD FUD. It's really pathetic.
The CPU market for Intel is not really that threatened by AMD. Even if the Athlon is better by all accounts, Intel wont loose enough market share to really hurt them.
Now, I don't know much about how sales are going for either AMD or Intel at the moment but I'm guessing that Neither Do You. What magic ball are you looking in that could tell you that Intel won't be hurt at all? Do you have any evidence (as in numbers) to back up this claim?
AMD generally cannot fill orders At one time, this was true, but it is not anymore. All of AMD's demand problems are a thing of the past. When their Dresden fab comes online, it will be even less of a problem.
, does not have a trusted brand name,
Trusted by who? The general consumer? Well, according to you later on, they don't seem to care at all. The power user? I think they would care less about brand name and more about the fact that the Athlon is fastest x86 chip around. OEMs? I would claim that the relationship AMD as with OEMs has only improved over the past few years as they consistently produce fast and inexpensive chips.
and unlike Intel is not a standard choice (or the standard) for resellers.
Who cares about standard choice? An AMD chip/motherboard is going to work just the same as an Intel chip/motherboard. The only thing that might make a difference is optimizations, and I've seen a lot more support for 3Dnow then for Intel's SSE.
So the giant is loosing some money as those 'in the know' buy from its competitors. How many people are buying machines and don't know, or don't care?
Exactly! AMD chips cost less! People care about that. They know or can find out from a saleperson that an AMD chip will run just as fast or faster than an Intel one for cheaper. If they don't care about what chip they are, they'll go with AMD.
Intel's still the king, and that wont change on a dime.
So is Microsoft. Are you paying homage to them too?
Considering their exploits of the P6 architecture, they've spent all of their R&D on a new design, and hopefully a P7 design too.
The fact that they have dragged the P6 core this long is *not* an argument for Intel being a strong company. The fact that all of theirs chips are based on a 5-year old core is a *bad* thing for them. Recenct reports show that their P7 design was scrapped. Intel doesn't have any new technology coming in. AMD does.
Who the heck gave this guy a +3? This comment has no substance but bashes a good company that brings new technology to people at a reasonable price. Can you even imagine what the CPU world would be like with no AMD? We'd all be screwed.
I noticed you were posting on Slashdot, so I have a question for you:
Is there anyway to enter text? Can this thing be used with a stylus to write things down, similar to what a Palm does?
Also, what type of graphics engine does it use? How open is development for it?
Basically, I have always dreamt of a way to read something with a Pad of some sort, and be able to doodle comments on it. I would we sort of like reading a book and writing on it, only my information is stored digitally. I would alse like the ability to do homework on a little thing like this with a keyboard. Will it run emacs?
Thanks for your input. Sorry about the last one, I forgot to preview.
I noticed you were posting on Slashdot, so I have a question for you: Is there anyway to enter text? Can this thing be used with a stylus to write things down, similar to what a Palm does? Also, what type of graphics engine does it use? How open is development for it? Basically, I have always dreamt of a way to read something with a Pad of some sort, and be able to doodle comments on it. I would we sort of like reading a book and writing on it, only my information is stored digitally. I would alse like the ability to do homework on a little thing like this with a keyboard. Will it run emacs? Thanks for your input.
Ok, You really have to break your ideas into 2 categories:
Palm Computers The Palm devices only come in 1 basic form. It has a pretty small screen and uses a stylus for input. It's starts up fast of and works easy. It's great for quick notes, but not for a lot of writing. So think about what you want to do.
Browsing the Web. This isn't going to work. Checking a map or email or phone-number or address really quickly over the Internet through a Palm App, etc. is very handy, but not heavy duty browsing.
Email. With a Palm VII or a modem-equiped Palm, checking email can be great. Then again, so can checking your email with an alpha-numeric pager. Writing email beyond a quick response would be quite a pain, though.
Instant Messaging. Huh? You actually want to "talk" to someone with a stylus over a wireless network. That's really slow and really expensive.
Clam Computing I have no experience with these things, but I here they're not quite as easy or fun to use. Talk to people who have used both. But, I'll still try to give you my opinion.
Browsing. IE on a clam-top? A full browser on a screen that small. Methinks it would not be worth it.
Email. I don't know of anyway to use wireless WinCE. Have you seen something I haven't? I do try and keep up. If it's not wireless, then what's the point anyway?
Instant Messaging. Ok, this may get a little better than the Palm since you have keyboard, but it's still a little keyboard. "Talking" to someone would be very slow and difficult, and, once again, I don't see the point if it's not wireless.
Overall, I think you need to be more specific with your needs. If you want something to run around the house and browse with, no PDA is going to be very good. The FreePAD looks good for that.
If you want to check your email anywhere, anytime, and want to do very basic web-usage, then you should look into the Palm VII.
I would like to finish by saying that I have a Palm III and really love it. I can't do any wireless communications, but it is very usefull.
I don't know what your problem is people, but I completely agree with him. You may have your little disputes with ESR, but he is right this time, so quit making personal shots at him.
Internet Keyboard? What the heck is an Internet Keyboard?
Does it have a "back" button because I'm to lazy to push alt-left. Does it have "search button" because I'm to lazy to use the search button or a bookmare to my favorite search engine. Does it have a "Launch Browser" button because I'm too lazy to click on an Icon a set an F-Key to a shortcut?
What is the world coming to? In ten years are we going to have like 3,602-Key keyboards? Will they fit on our desks anymore? Why have new buttons replace buttons that already do these things?
What the heck is going on with colors on Slashdot. I went to the BSD article a few days ago, and it was all red. I go to this one, and the colors are maroon and gold.
Is it just me and my version of Netscape? Is Rob color blind? Is there some secret conspiracy to make me go crazy? What is going on?
Alright, Xenex, you have some good thoughts, but tone it down a little. Lay off the exclamation point for every sentence. Stop using all caps for words, and using the $ in Microsoft is really just getting old.
Please keep slashdot a nice place by posting your ideas (which were good) in a clear (started good), sane (not so good), and non-hostile manner. Everyone will love you for it, and you'll get better Karma guaranteed.
I'm thinking from a centralized home server/refigerator unit (hey, you can overclock like crazy!). If the house server is able to control everything in you house through the network, then it can also serve as a firewall. That way, all you have to worry about securing is that one server. All the appliances would still work without the server, but for that bonus network feature, you need the server.
Now, I understand the worry then would be that if someone got root on your machine, they could really mess stuff up. But why have all the appliances require their own passwords so that if you wanted to start your oven over the internet, you would need a special password. If you need to start your oven from the other end of the house, you wouldn't need such a password.
Sure, it may be more of a hassel to type in a password every time you want to start your oven or record a show, but that's a lot less of a hassle then what you currently have to do. Plus, if you didn't care about security, then you could turn it off. I guess my question is: if you have secure passwords for all of your appliances and you never send those unencrypted (ssh!), then what's the big problem?
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that story, and I've been interested in learning how to pick locks as well. Where did you learn how? Can you fill me in?
Anyway, here is a link to the product page.
Yes, it works with linux. It's just a normal keyboard and touchpad (with adapters to work as either PS/2 or old school). There are some features of the touchpad available in Windows that don't work in Linux, but for just basic pointing, it's all the same. This keyboard is really great, by the way. I have one, and the best part about it is that I don't have to reach far away to use the mouse or the cursor keys. I can hit the cursors keys with my thumb, or can use pointer by moving just near the spacebar. It's really cool.
Look at the interview with Kevin Lawton at Linux.com, a page on the freeMWare home page. In one of the questions Lawton specifically says that freeMWare has almost nothing to do with VMWare, short of the name. It's something completely different.
In fact, as for your "great commercial idea," he also explains in the interview that they have been tossing the idea of freeMWare for a long time. So, you're slandering some developers that are getting around to something that they have been thinking about already. Just because a company is ahead of them in development doesn't mean that they are "ripping" that company off.
Your attitude is the same ignorant one that a lot of people seem to have about the GNU/OSS world.
The start menu takes up about 1/4 of the screen. Icons are huge. Nothing is useable.
When you have a screen that small, you need to be very effecient with screen space. Windows is not effecient at all. Among other things, this is one reason why Windows does not work well for a small screen. Look at Windows CE devices for a good example.
If the Chinese plan to track stealth planes by looking at radio and televesion waves, couldn't the U.S. purposely alter those signals to make it appear as though there were stealh bombers all over the place?
Or perhpas, could the U.S. put a transmitter in orbit and flood the air waves over China with bogus signals that have bogus torbulences that show bogus stealths.
It seem that this type of technology would be easy to counteract.
The Upside to that is, of course, that I don't have to worry about it being cold outside. I don't even need a jacket at night yet!
That's why the DOJ as a remedy needs to force MS to open their File Formats, amongst other things.
- Word is not that great. In fact, I don't find it useful at all. Granted, I use it for very few things, but every time I do, I feel like I banging my head against a wall.
- Excel - Excel is great for very simple graphs and data plots, I'll give you that. But if you want to do anything even remotely complicated, and it stinks.
- Curve fits. It only does a few types of curve fits, not including sinusoidal ones. Also, it only does exponential ones under certain conditions. If you don't give the data to it in just the right way, it'll choke.
- Copying Data. To copy values (just their numbers, not their formulas), requires my to click on "paste special" every time I want to use it. With several regions of data I want to do this with, such a process becomes very time consuming.
- It crashes, especially when you try and save. We use Excel heavily in Physics (that's why I find it annoying). Too many times to count, we do 15 minutes of work and then go to save our work and Kaboom! GPF! Excel crashes, and we loose all of our work. When doing a lab, this isn't just data we have to re-type. This is data we have re-do in the lab. This type of thing is very very annoying.
- PowerPoint Sucks. I've never actually used, and never plan to. My opinion of PowerPoint stems solely from all of the terrible slide shows I have had to sit through. I have one CSE class that is taught using only PowerPoint. It's the most boring, useless, impersonal way that I imagine for someone to make a presentation.
- Outlook is insecure and requires you to keep it open. If you want something to constantly check your mail (i.e. Biff), you have to leave Outlook open at all times; that's a major memory hog. Secondly, as proven by all of the recent virii, it's terribly insecure. Plus, all if it's calandering/tasking is pretty useless as far as I can tell.
- All the other products are jokes. Access might be good for keeping a address database, but that's about it. Frontpage is the second worst HTML producer I have seen (right behind Word). PictureIt! or whatever is obviously not a serious graphics package.
Am I forgetting anything? Basically, I'm sick of people whining about Linux not having Office, when every experience I have had with Office has been terrible unpleasant.- Clippy, as you mentioned, is terribly annoying and pops up at the most inopportune of times. Because of him, I don't ever want to go into the help. Some help system that is!
- Words formatting is terrible. I'm not sure if this is a problem with word processors in general or just Word, but its terrible at formatting things. If you want a table to look a certain way, you have to jump through 10 different hoops to get it close. Sometimes, you can't get it at all what you want. It's formatting simply cannot hold a candle to something like LaTeX/TeX.
- Its autoformating is counterproductive. My roommate, for instance, had to write a technical paper on the software project he is currently working on. One of the objects they use is called JSat. Of course, having two capitalized letters in a row, the Nazi-grammar checker in Word decides to rewrite it as Jsat. Very Annoying. As another example, at a meeting for this same software project that I attended, a team member was editing the agenda and typed "-------" to make a psuedo-horizontal line. Word automatically turned this into a long, horizontal line (one you might find in HTML). At first, he thought this was great. But then when he didn't want it anymore, he tried to delete it. Unfortunately, Word wouldn't let him even select the darn thing, let alone delete it. He still hasn't figured that one out, and our agenda still has a silly, useless line.
- The Equation Editor really stinks. Maybe I'm just spoiled at knowing TeX, but trying to get Word to display mathematical formulas correctly is the biggest pain in the arse I have ever had to deal with. Anybody who thinks their equation editor doesn't suck is crazy.
- Word crashes, especially when you try and print. Both my roommate and I have had this happen several times (him more than me). What's worse is that it doesn't just take down Word, it takes down the whole system!
In short, Word stinks because it goes way overboard and tries to do everything for you. This eventually makes very simple things very difficult. It's also very unstable.Animations do not help me learn. Sliding frames do not help me learn. Different colored text does not help me learn. Sounds do not help me learn. Being able to ask the professor/presnter questions does help me learn. PowerPoint combines all of the problems that TV and Videos have as a presentation tool, but without any of the advantages. It makes the presentation distant and impersonal without having the flexibility and quality a video can provide.
Anyone else realize why Office is not a good product? Or do you guys want to refute me and convince me that it's actually pretty good? Please, give me your input.
It was the size of a soda can. Basically, the whole thing is a little needle on a little spring with a little sensor. That's it. Now, you might have to hook it up to a big computer to crunch through incoming data, but that actual microscope is very small.
How do they decide if you're "qualified"? Does someone actually read it or do they run it through a bot?
The CPU market for Intel is not really that threatened by AMD. Even if the Athlon is better by all accounts, Intel wont loose enough market share to really hurt them.
Now, I don't know much about how sales are going for either AMD or Intel at the moment but I'm guessing that Neither Do You. What magic ball are you looking in that could tell you that Intel won't be hurt at all? Do you have any evidence (as in numbers) to back up this claim?
AMD generally cannot fill orders At one time, this was true, but it is not anymore. All of AMD's demand problems are a thing of the past. When their Dresden fab comes online, it will be even less of a problem.
, does not have a trusted brand name,
Trusted by who? The general consumer? Well, according to you later on, they don't seem to care at all. The power user? I think they would care less about brand name and more about the fact that the Athlon is fastest x86 chip around. OEMs? I would claim that the relationship AMD as with OEMs has only improved over the past few years as they consistently produce fast and inexpensive chips.
and unlike Intel is not a standard choice (or the standard) for resellers.
Who cares about standard choice? An AMD chip/motherboard is going to work just the same as an Intel chip/motherboard. The only thing that might make a difference is optimizations, and I've seen a lot more support for 3Dnow then for Intel's SSE.
So the giant is loosing some money as those 'in the know' buy from its competitors. How many people are buying machines and don't know, or don't care?
Exactly! AMD chips cost less! People care about that. They know or can find out from a saleperson that an AMD chip will run just as fast or faster than an Intel one for cheaper. If they don't care about what chip they are, they'll go with AMD.
Intel's still the king, and that wont change on a dime.
So is Microsoft. Are you paying homage to them too?
Considering their exploits of the P6 architecture, they've spent all of their R&D on a new design, and hopefully a P7 design too.
The fact that they have dragged the P6 core this long is *not* an argument for Intel being a strong company. The fact that all of theirs chips are based on a 5-year old core is a *bad* thing for them. Recenct reports show that their P7 design was scrapped. Intel doesn't have any new technology coming in. AMD does.
Who the heck gave this guy a +3? This comment has no substance but bashes a good company that brings new technology to people at a reasonable price. Can you even imagine what the CPU world would be like with no AMD? We'd all be screwed.
Is there anyway to enter text? Can this thing be used with a stylus to write things down, similar to what a Palm does?
Also, what type of graphics engine does it use? How open is development for it?
Basically, I have always dreamt of a way to read something with a Pad of some sort, and be able to doodle comments on it. I would we sort of like reading a book and writing on it, only my information is stored digitally. I would alse like the ability to do homework on a little thing like this with a keyboard. Will it run emacs?
Thanks for your input. Sorry about the last one, I forgot to preview.
I noticed you were posting on Slashdot, so I have a question for you: Is there anyway to enter text? Can this thing be used with a stylus to write things down, similar to what a Palm does? Also, what type of graphics engine does it use? How open is development for it? Basically, I have always dreamt of a way to read something with a Pad of some sort, and be able to doodle comments on it. I would we sort of like reading a book and writing on it, only my information is stored digitally. I would alse like the ability to do homework on a little thing like this with a keyboard. Will it run emacs? Thanks for your input.
The Palm devices only come in 1 basic form. It has a pretty small screen and uses a stylus for input. It's starts up fast of and works easy. It's great for quick notes, but not for a lot of writing. So think about what you want to do.
I have no experience with these things, but I here they're not quite as easy or fun to use. Talk to people who have used both. But, I'll still try to give you my opinion.
- Browsing. IE on a clam-top? A full browser on a screen that small. Methinks it would not be worth it.
- Email. I don't know of anyway to use wireless WinCE. Have you seen something I haven't? I do try and keep up. If it's not wireless, then what's the point anyway?
- Instant Messaging. Ok, this may get a little better than the Palm since you have keyboard, but it's still a little keyboard. "Talking" to someone would be very slow and difficult, and, once again, I don't see the point if it's not wireless.
Overall, I think you need to be more specific with your needs. If you want something to run around the house and browse with, no PDA is going to be very good. The FreePAD looks good for that.If you want to check your email anywhere, anytime, and want to do very basic web-usage, then you should look into the Palm VII.
I would like to finish by saying that I have a Palm III and really love it. I can't do any wireless communications, but it is very usefull.
I don't know what your problem is people, but I completely agree with him. You may have your little disputes with ESR, but he is right this time, so quit making personal shots at him.
Stick to real standards man!
Does it have a "back" button because I'm to lazy to push alt-left. Does it have "search button" because I'm to lazy to use the search button or a bookmare to my favorite search engine. Does it have a "Launch Browser" button because I'm too lazy to click on an Icon a set an F-Key to a shortcut?
What is the world coming to? In ten years are we going to have like 3,602-Key keyboards? Will they fit on our desks anymore? Why have new buttons replace buttons that already do these things?
Is it just me and my version of Netscape? Is Rob color blind? Is there some secret conspiracy to make me go crazy? What is going on?
Please keep slashdot a nice place by posting your ideas (which were good) in a clear (started good), sane (not so good), and non-hostile manner. Everyone will love you for it, and you'll get better Karma guaranteed.
I'm thinking from a centralized home server/refigerator unit (hey, you can overclock like crazy!). If the house server is able to control everything in you house through the network, then it can also serve as a firewall. That way, all you have to worry about securing is that one server. All the appliances would still work without the server, but for that bonus network feature, you need the server.
Now, I understand the worry then would be that if someone got root on your machine, they could really mess stuff up. But why have all the appliances require their own passwords so that if you wanted to start your oven over the internet, you would need a special password. If you need to start your oven from the other end of the house, you wouldn't need such a password.
Sure, it may be more of a hassel to type in a password every time you want to start your oven or record a show, but that's a lot less of a hassle then what you currently have to do. Plus, if you didn't care about security, then you could turn it off. I guess my question is: if you have secure passwords for all of your appliances and you never send those unencrypted (ssh!), then what's the big problem?
I just want to say that I'm pleased to see we're now linking to fatbrain and not Amazon.