I get a robocall from "Card Services" every few days. They never phone when I'm at home, so I can't tell
them what I think of them. I also get robocalls offering me a new home security system, and
vacations to various locations.
I've tried a few times, but the bureaucracy was such that I gave up.
A noble idea, but I wonder if it's really viable. I've seen other online knowledge systems degenerate
in to bad jokes, full of disinformation. Yahoo Answers is positively scary, with an oppressive "moderation"
system to boot. It would be a shame if Wikipedia went the same way.
All of these technologies, with the possible exception of AI, basically worked, and did what they were
supposed to do.
The catch was they didn't do it well enough, they were too expensive (financially or otherwise)
to deploy, or the problem they solved wasn't worth solving.
I still remember seeing the mind-boggling array of supposedly-necessary CASE
tools that people
used on their VAXen when I worked at DEC. I could never figure out how people
could actually afford to use them, nor did I ever find any applications people had
actually created with them.
The problem "solved" by thin clients was better solved in other ways. I remember telling
potential customers how cool it was to boot an obsolete PC off a floppy then run
diskless over the network, when the real answer was to junk the PC and buy a new one.
AI is another matter entirely. We have expert systems and other goodies, but
fully-blown AI just never happened. Will it ever happen? Probably. When? Your guess is
as good as mine. It certainly hasn't happened yet.
An older version of Slackware will serve you well. Make a boot and root floppy, boot them, install. My very
first Linux box was comparable to yours, though it was a desktop, and it
ran Slackware '96 (aka Slackware 3.1) beautifully.
Cruft is a minor consideration. If all you want is a box that boots to a command prompt, Slackware makes it easy.
I view it as a construction set for making Linux boxes, instead of a pre-packaged Linux box in a can.
No matter what you do, you are going to have to find some way of getting the distro off the CD. Slackware's
network install may be what you need.
Good quality? No ads? Reasonable price? Uncut? Where do I sign?
I just can't see the Beeb redistributing imports like the excellent
Spiral, the English
title for Engrenages. Most of this stuff
ends up on DVD (I bought Spiral on DVD from Australia, complete with
SBS's Aussie subtitles), but not always.
Not having pedals or a steering column to deal with in a crash
gives the engineers lots of scope to make
cars safer. I'll be following this with interest.
The control layout we have in cars today wasn't finalized until after WW2. Prior to that, many cars
had the accelerator in the middle, with the clutch and brake on either side. Some cars had
unique setups - ever driven a Model T?
Even today, there are two "standards" for minor controls
on right hand drive cars. British RHD cars have the turning signals on the left of the steering column. Japanese
and Australian RHD cars have the turning signals on the right. I drive a Mitsubishi L300 Delica, so I'm
used to reaching with my right hand for the turning signals.
While it had a steering wheel, the GM Hy-Wire concept was drive by wire as well. Some Citroen models were
effectively drive by wire (e.g. the SM), with no mechanical connection between the steering wheel and road wheels
unless the engine or
power steering failed.
I had a similar experience a few years ago. I flew from Vancouver to Melbourne via Honolulu, leaving Friday night and arriving Sunday morning. The return was Sydney to Vancouver, leaving Sydney Monday morning at 9, arriving in Honolulu Sunday night, then arriving in Vancouver Monday morning at 9:30. I found myself musing on what the plural of "Monday 22 April" might be.
I managed to snooze a bit on the flight to Melbourne, so I didn't crash until supper time. I was even awake enough to ask the taxi driver from Tullamarine how hook turns worked.
My main day-to-day computer at home is a Mac. Macs are cool.:-)
I have a PC at home. It runs Linux. Slackware, of course. If you can't do it with Slackware, you don't need to do it.
There is an XP partition on it, but I don't remember the last time I actually booted it.
I also have two old Sun boxes at home, an Ultra 5 (which runs Linux) and a Netra T1 (which runs Solaris). Do these enhance my nerd cred?
I hadn't seen either I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners in decades, so I looked up some
clips on YouTube
and had a look. The result? Not funny. Not funny at all. The prototypes of every
sitcom since (a dead, worthless genre, IMHO), plus a healthy portion of nasty dated stereotypes. No thank you!
Not only was Monty Python funny, it changed what we consider funny. It changed what we laugh it.
Few other shows can claim to have redefined a genre, but Monty Python did just
that. Here's to 40 more years of silly walks, dead parrots and arguments!
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line
of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
The site does very little if you don't have Flash, BTW. Many pages don't even give you a
"You don't have Flash" message. You just get blank white pages. I make a point of not having Flash on
my main Linux box, just to see how this tool of the devil is poisoning the net.
Every mobile platform I've ever used gives applications read-only access to basic phone parameters. There is nothing new here. Knowing your
phone number, knowing battery status, knowing if you're in coverage - all useful information. What the developers are doing with it
in this case is highly questionable, but it's always there.
Actually manipulating the call progress from an application is a privileged operation, as it should be. I encountered this in a Brew application
where I wanted to examine the caller ID on incoming calls. I couldn't programmatically reject the call (privileged!), so I programmed the other end
to let the phone ring a couple of times then hang up.
This reminds me of a question my Dad used to rant about: why can't they make cars that will withstand
crashes? The answer, as I know know, is they can, but if the car doesn't absorb the energy of the impact, the occupants will.
I'd like to see an underside view of the wreck of the '59 Bel Air. I suspect the frame is bent like a parallelogram, and the front end sheet metal
that intruded in to the driver's compartment all broke off its mounts in the impact. No structure, no protection of any kind. The only question
for front seat passengers would be whether they went though the windshield or did a faceplant on the dash.
Some years ago I saw footage of a crash test of a 1929 Chevrolet under modern IIHS/NCAP conditions. It disintegrated on impact and was not
recognizable as a car afterwards. No,
I've never seen the video on line, anywhere.
Some form of handwriting is necessary, and always will be. I view this
as non-negotiable.
I don't care if it's any particular form, as long as it's readable by others. Mine is a "joined-together printing" style,
I abandoned traditional cursive writing in my teens, but what I write is readable and gets the job done. If
Cursive is dying, let it die. Carolingian Minuscule died centuries ago and nobody misses it.
The one thing I would change is the tendency to "illiterate" handwriting. You know the type. There
has to be a better way.
This has to be some legalistic crap. Anybody who has ever done so knows
that aerobic exercise feels good. If you're working too hard, you feel breathless. The
military have a good way to evaluate this, when they run and sing a cadence.
Somebody needs to tell the pinheads setting this policy that exercise and fitness are functions of sweat, not
of technology.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like this one bit.
This sound like an excellent way to raise children who are spoiled brats with zero social skills and even weirder
ideas than usual about their self-worth and place in society. With no structure in their life how are
they supposed to know how to attend class on time when they go to university?
Formal education plus home/parental enrichment is the way to go, IMNSHO. Once you have that structure, you can
go your own way. But you need that structure first.
A truly open source camera would publish its lens specifications,
curvatures, focal lengths, refractive indices. This one doesn't. So it is, in fact, partially closed.
Canon license the protocols, and some manufacturers have reverse-engineered them. But that's not my
idea of a truly open-source project.
The sky coverage is a compromise, but a good one, since it includes the very interesting
southern Milky Way. They should be able to do some amazing science with this thing!
How much of the year can they use this thing? Midnight sun and all that? The South Pole is astronomically dark for 6 weeks, then it's twilight or daylight the entire rest of the year.
I was expecting to see something from Xerox in there, considering that they invented so much
of present-day computing.
The IBM 360/91 was an interesting computer. It tried to re-order instructions for maximum performance.
It didn't do it very well. It was infamous for its "imprecise interrrupts".
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't do it with Slackware, it doesn't need doing.
:-)
...laura
I get a robocall from "Card Services" every few days. They never phone when I'm at home, so I can't tell them what I think of them. I also get robocalls offering me a new home security system, and vacations to various locations.
...laura
I'll answer that for you: No.
I've tried a few times, but the bureaucracy was such that I gave up.
A noble idea, but I wonder if it's really viable. I've seen other online knowledge systems degenerate in to bad jokes, full of disinformation. Yahoo Answers is positively scary, with an oppressive "moderation" system to boot. It would be a shame if Wikipedia went the same way.
...laura
I'm currently auditing my cable usage, with an eye to cutting back to what I actually watch. Which isn't much, as it turns out.
I get the local news and Canadian stuff (e.g. Rick Mercer Report) over the air in HD.
I get BBC stuff over the internet with iPlayer.
I get Australian stuff on DVD from my favourite DVD place in Melbourne.
About the only thing I watch on cable is Mythbusters, and I'm sure I could come up with it online if I put my mind to it...
...laura
Jailbreak!
All of these technologies, with the possible exception of AI, basically worked, and did what they were supposed to do. The catch was they didn't do it well enough, they were too expensive (financially or otherwise) to deploy, or the problem they solved wasn't worth solving.
I still remember seeing the mind-boggling array of supposedly-necessary CASE tools that people used on their VAXen when I worked at DEC. I could never figure out how people could actually afford to use them, nor did I ever find any applications people had actually created with them.
The problem "solved" by thin clients was better solved in other ways. I remember telling potential customers how cool it was to boot an obsolete PC off a floppy then run diskless over the network, when the real answer was to junk the PC and buy a new one.
AI is another matter entirely. We have expert systems and other goodies, but fully-blown AI just never happened. Will it ever happen? Probably. When? Your guess is as good as mine. It certainly hasn't happened yet.
...laura
My Slackware '96 CD bit the dust a long time ago, but I still have the copy of Slackware 3.6 I did most of my thesis on.
...laura
An older version of Slackware will serve you well. Make a boot and root floppy, boot them, install. My very first Linux box was comparable to yours, though it was a desktop, and it ran Slackware '96 (aka Slackware 3.1) beautifully.
Cruft is a minor consideration. If all you want is a box that boots to a command prompt, Slackware makes it easy. I view it as a construction set for making Linux boxes, instead of a pre-packaged Linux box in a can.
No matter what you do, you are going to have to find some way of getting the distro off the CD. Slackware's network install may be what you need.
...laura
The only science here is bullshit.
They can't even get basic facts right. The so-called "alignment" is 6 degrees off, and happens twice a year.
The last rollover of a b'akt'un cycle was in 1618. Did anybody notice?
...laura
Good quality? No ads? Reasonable price? Uncut? Where do I sign?
I just can't see the Beeb redistributing imports like the excellent Spiral, the English title for Engrenages. Most of this stuff ends up on DVD (I bought Spiral on DVD from Australia, complete with SBS's Aussie subtitles), but not always.
...laura
Not having pedals or a steering column to deal with in a crash gives the engineers lots of scope to make cars safer. I'll be following this with interest.
The control layout we have in cars today wasn't finalized until after WW2. Prior to that, many cars had the accelerator in the middle, with the clutch and brake on either side. Some cars had unique setups - ever driven a Model T?
Even today, there are two "standards" for minor controls on right hand drive cars. British RHD cars have the turning signals on the left of the steering column. Japanese and Australian RHD cars have the turning signals on the right. I drive a Mitsubishi L300 Delica, so I'm used to reaching with my right hand for the turning signals.
While it had a steering wheel, the GM Hy-Wire concept was drive by wire as well. Some Citroen models were effectively drive by wire (e.g. the SM), with no mechanical connection between the steering wheel and road wheels unless the engine or power steering failed.
...laura
I had a similar experience a few years ago. I flew from Vancouver to Melbourne via Honolulu, leaving Friday night and arriving Sunday morning. The return was Sydney to Vancouver, leaving Sydney Monday morning at 9, arriving in Honolulu Sunday night, then arriving in Vancouver Monday morning at 9:30. I found myself musing on what the plural of "Monday 22 April" might be.
I managed to snooze a bit on the flight to Melbourne, so I didn't crash until supper time. I was even awake enough to ask the taxi driver from Tullamarine how hook turns worked.
...laura
My main day-to-day computer at home is a Mac. Macs are cool. :-)
I have a PC at home. It runs Linux. Slackware, of course. If you can't do it with Slackware, you don't need to do it. There is an XP partition on it, but I don't remember the last time I actually booted it.
I also have two old Sun boxes at home, an Ultra 5 (which runs Linux) and a Netra T1 (which runs Solaris). Do these enhance my nerd cred?
...laura
Well, it could have been worse. They could have gone with NTSC.
They did even better: they used SECAM, outrageous accent and all!
...laura
I hadn't seen either I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners in decades, so I looked up some clips on YouTube and had a look. The result? Not funny. Not funny at all. The prototypes of every sitcom since (a dead, worthless genre, IMHO), plus a healthy portion of nasty dated stereotypes. No thank you!
Not only was Monty Python funny, it changed what we consider funny. It changed what we laugh it. Few other shows can claim to have redefined a genre, but Monty Python did just that. Here's to 40 more years of silly walks, dead parrots and arguments!
...laura
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
The site does very little if you don't have Flash, BTW. Many pages don't even give you a "You don't have Flash" message. You just get blank white pages. I make a point of not having Flash on my main Linux box, just to see how this tool of the devil is poisoning the net.
...laura
Every mobile platform I've ever used gives applications read-only access to basic phone parameters. There is nothing new here. Knowing your phone number, knowing battery status, knowing if you're in coverage - all useful information. What the developers are doing with it in this case is highly questionable, but it's always there.
Actually manipulating the call progress from an application is a privileged operation, as it should be. I encountered this in a Brew application where I wanted to examine the caller ID on incoming calls. I couldn't programmatically reject the call (privileged!), so I programmed the other end to let the phone ring a couple of times then hang up.
...laura
This reminds me of a question my Dad used to rant about: why can't they make cars that will withstand crashes? The answer, as I know know, is they can, but if the car doesn't absorb the energy of the impact, the occupants will.
I'd like to see an underside view of the wreck of the '59 Bel Air. I suspect the frame is bent like a parallelogram, and the front end sheet metal that intruded in to the driver's compartment all broke off its mounts in the impact. No structure, no protection of any kind. The only question for front seat passengers would be whether they went though the windshield or did a faceplant on the dash.
Some years ago I saw footage of a crash test of a 1929 Chevrolet under modern IIHS/NCAP conditions. It disintegrated on impact and was not recognizable as a car afterwards. No, I've never seen the video on line, anywhere.
...laura
Some form of handwriting is necessary, and always will be. I view this as non-negotiable.
I don't care if it's any particular form, as long as it's readable by others. Mine is a "joined-together printing" style, I abandoned traditional cursive writing in my teens, but what I write is readable and gets the job done. If Cursive is dying, let it die. Carolingian Minuscule died centuries ago and nobody misses it.
The one thing I would change is the tendency to "illiterate" handwriting. You know the type. There has to be a better way.
...laura
Now I've heard everything.
This has to be some legalistic crap. Anybody who has ever done so knows that aerobic exercise feels good. If you're working too hard, you feel breathless. The military have a good way to evaluate this, when they run and sing a cadence.
Somebody needs to tell the pinheads setting this policy that exercise and fitness are functions of sweat, not of technology.
Tragic.
...laura who enjoys aerobic workouts
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like this one bit.
This sound like an excellent way to raise children who are spoiled brats with zero social skills and even weirder ideas than usual about their self-worth and place in society. With no structure in their life how are they supposed to know how to attend class on time when they go to university?
Formal education plus home/parental enrichment is the way to go, IMNSHO. Once you have that structure, you can go your own way. But you need that structure first.
...laura
It should be fairly easy to reverse engineer - Sigma and Tokina among others produce third-party lenses that mate with Canon/Nikon/etc DSLRs.
Not the protocols: the actual lenses themselves. The optical stuff.
Besides, I always thought the best lenses had M42x1 threads on them. :-)
...laura
A truly open source camera would publish its lens specifications, curvatures, focal lengths, refractive indices. This one doesn't. So it is, in fact, partially closed.
Canon license the protocols, and some manufacturers have reverse-engineered them. But that's not my idea of a truly open-source project.
...laura
The sky coverage is a compromise, but a good one, since it includes the very interesting southern Milky Way. They should be able to do some amazing science with this thing!
How much of the year can they use this thing? Midnight sun and all that? The South Pole is astronomically dark for 6 weeks, then it's twilight or daylight the entire rest of the year.
...laura
I was expecting to see something from Xerox in there, considering that they invented so much of present-day computing.
The IBM 360/91 was an interesting computer. It tried to re-order instructions for maximum performance. It didn't do it very well. It was infamous for its "imprecise interrrupts".
...laura