IBM is doing some things right, but they have more to go. Take IBM ClearCase as an example. It is a source control program and their dynamic view has a Linux kernel module. The part they are doing right is, it's GPL. But it's an out of tree source, so they are supporting up to 2.6.18 while 2.6.27 is almost out. Their support note says they will evaluate and support the Enterprise distributions of Red Hat and SUSE just don't expect it to work on a newer kernel (it doesn't). Their installer looks for the specific (two) distributions they support and aborts if it doesn't recognize the distribution. Like if you install it on Fedora Core 3 instead of RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. Hopefully with this Canonical/Ubuntu partnership they will try a little harder to keep up to date and not force you to run specific distributions.
They also document that a Linux ClearCase client can't use a dynamic view to access a vob hosted on windows. That is correct, unless you realize that the kernel mvfs module's source is GPL and you have it. I have a patch http://david.fries.net/thoughts/IBM_ClearCase_mvfs_patch.phpthat adds a for loop to change \ to / (imagine that, windows returning a backslash for path separators), and it then works. So much for all the effort they put into documenting and educating users that it doesn't work.
I thought robocode would be a good tool for learning programming. Then I showed it to my cousins that were pretty young at the time and found out just how young someone can be and still get something about of it. I mean when you can program, move forward, turn right, and shoot when someone is in front of you without even introducing the concept of variables, you can start them pretty young. The program is even good for some advanced AI learning. I hear they were more entertained by that program than a little robot thing that had a small built in LCD programming screen, it was too limiting.
This talk about VIA being open in comparison to Intel is funny, considering Intel has provided opensource Linux drivers for their hardware for years.
Have they? I always thought it was their publically available hardware specifications that allowed anyone to write drivers. It's just when they got into the graphics chip business that they lacked documentation and had to then provide drivers. Now Intel is releasing the source to the graphics drivers, and providing the graphic chipset documentation, a great example for others to follow.
If the host goes offline, then the connection is de facto closed anyway. I'd think saving the connection would be the rare exception rather than the rule.
But some of my TCP connections are important. For example I currently have a week long ssh connection to a remote computer editing some Linux kernel source files. If either system were hibernating at night the TCP keepalive would surely close it on one system by morning, and the other system would find out when it resumed and its keepalive hit. Hibernate is a good idea, just reasons like this prevent me from using it at night to save power, and accessing my computers from remote.
Short duration hibernation is extremely useful. I've swapped out CPU fans or other such power chord changes. If you are fast enough, that is within a few minutes, all the connections will still be there when it removes (with Linux at least).
Under XP on my laptop, hibernate also forces the network adapter into the disconnected state which has the effect of severing all network connections
I bet it is the same thing if you unplug your ethernet chord for a second. I wonder who thought that was a good idea? You might get by with the argument that, if it was a dhcp assigned ip address, renew the lease when it is reconnected, but that doesn't require dropping the current connections. That or all your connections would drop each time you renew your lease. Why drop the connections for a transient outage? If you unplug the ethernet switch from the next upstream switch it is the same no packets flow state, so why would they treat it any different?
Linux, unplug the network chord and packets don't flow, plug it back in and they can. Leave it unplugged long enough and connections will time out, but why would you want them killed any sooner?
What TCP protocol are you using where this is an issue?
Most any TCP connection that isn't a short HTTP web page, or any long duration statefull connection. ssh, scp, X connections, irc, big file transfers, SQL connections to name a few.
Then again as you said Windows XP drops all connections. That's not just TCP, that's UDP as well. So then all the programs using stateless UDP sockets will find socket errors on send or receive. Some programs that means restart the program every time it hibernates, suspends, ethernet cable gets disconnected, ethernet switch looses power. I knew there were a few reasons I prefer Linux.
$32.50 for the USB 1-wire DS2490 seemed a bit much for me to buy multiple. I just have to conclude that the scale of operations just isn't there yet. There are drivers in the Linux kernel tree for this device, they just need some improvement. The are currently a bit of a CPU hog when they don't need to be. I submitted two trivial bug fix patches yesterday and I'm working on more to address the CPU hog issues.
I have the ds18b20 sensors. Once I get the drivers up to snuff I intend to put some temperature sensors around the house (just one outside), and control the furnace and A/C with the data. Sure, I could get a digital thermostate, but this is more fun and I intend to get a running total of the cost to heat and cool. Once I get that all working I'll put some additional insulation in the attic. I want to know just how much it saves me.
Any suggestions for controlling the furnace with a computer? I've thought about putting together some relays and a parallel port, but I thought I would first see what was available.
The problem I have with hibernate (other than not being able to access the computer from remote without having some wake-on-lan access), is existing TCP connections. Unless both systems go into hibernation and come out at the same time, one is MIA and you can easily loose the connection.
A laptop which is 0.2 inches thinner than the next-thinnest laptop
Apple's home page "The world's thinnest notebook. MacBook Air."
design 0.76 inch... 3.0 pounds
My Toshiba Portege 3015CT lists "Under 3 lbs. & Approx. 3/4" thin". Apple's marketing department must not bother researching competitors have produced in the last.
I agree with the need for headtracking. We have five head mounted dipslays with the eMagin's 800x600 displays in them with a 3degree of freedom head tracker. I'm so used to a 3D virtual head tracked scene in them, that if the tracker is disabled or something is on the screen that doesn't move with head motion, it really feels weird and uncomfortable. Games and immersive programs could use the head tracker and the full screen. For everything else it could emulate a fixed monitor. Look away and it moves off the side of the display.
It would be even better if it was higher resolution, bigger field of view, and had controllable see through. Then you could plant the virtual screen in real world coordinates.
I don't think the immaturity of VR in the 90s will really delay its adoption once it becomes ready. Unfortunately simulator sickness is still a very big unsolved problem.
Kind of like car sickness? I would think a lot more people would be car sick if they had waited for a car ride until they were an adult, and had an eight hour drive down a narrow hilly road. We've been riding in cars since we were born, most people get use to it. Some don't, but for the most part it is just another daily activity.
As for simulator sickness, ease into it, and have some high quality software and hardware. If you turn your head 20 degrees and the visual output displays a 30 degree rotation a fourth of a second later, you will probably get most people sick. I've made up those numbers, but the problems are real. The more exact the video output matches what your head does the better you are.
Could someone 50 years ago guess about computers today? Star Trek was guessing about computers a couple of hundred years in the future, but our current computers are already pretty close to their mark.
We are just missing voice and intelligence which were big parts of the computers on Star Trek. Sure there are programs for Text to Speech and Speech to text, but it isn't widely used and it still needs to be improved. Sure that would let you talk to your computer and the computer to respond by voice, but the most important part is still missing. Until we get some good AI, our computers have a long way to go before we reach the Star Trek computers. Even the Star Trek characters made fun of the lack of intelligence in the ship's computers.
There was an episode in Voyager where the Doctor we alone on Voyager that hi-lighted that fact. The ships computer would go as far as understanding what you said and respond or carry out the action, but if it ran into a problem it wouldn't do much to think its way out. Then again the Doctor was a computer so maybe we should strive for his level of intelligence. He not only thought, reasoned, responded, acted, but got annoyed at the ship computer's inability to learn. That would be a tall order for a computer.
Other way around. It would be more like having a new huge gas tax and gas stations protesting by turning off the pumps for a day. Sure a lot of people would plan ahead, but what of the truckers, people on vacation, or people returning rental cars? I wonder if something like that could take down the telephone network with people complaining.
You are right about getting a lot of people to not buy gas for a day. Gas stations would notice, look at the other gas station across the road, and figure they will have a busy day tomorrow.
I hope there is something better out there because I tried the silicone spray and it didn't help. The newly cleaned plastic just doesn't press as easy as it does before. Any other suggestions?
Mechanical keyboards typically fair better than membrane keyboards for the dishwasher. The Keytronics I through in and let dry for a few days ending up half working.
You did first take the membrane and electronics out right? I just put the plastic face and keys (they do a good job of staying together) in the dishwasher and have never had a problem.
I've had the same problem of the keys not sliding as well right after putting them through the dishwater. They eventually start working normally again. I only put the keys and plastic face through the dishwater, not the electronics, and I've never had a broken keyboard after a wash.
I had just put two keyboards through the dishwasher yesterday and I can tell the one will be sticking for a while. This time I'm going to try some lubricant once the plastic dries. I have some 'Gunk, heavy duty Silicone Spray lubricant' that lists plastic. I would normally worry about puttying lubricant like that on something I would be around so much, but the label lists toys, it can't be much of a problem. I'll try a cotton ball or q-tip and see which works best, I didn't want to spray the entire back.
I should get one of these. It would be great. I have this 486DX-133 playing ogg vorbis audio files and it isn't fast enough for the highest quality music. It does have a PCI USB 2.0 card in it, it would just be awesome having a 520MHz USB key doing the decoding. It would just be so backward nobody would believe me having the USB key being the CPU and the computer being storage and I/O. Goofy.
Why would NASA pick Second Life over Open Croquet? Do the math, they are trying to get the public to participate. Right now Second Life has 29,369 online. Ever been on a public island in Open Croquet? I haven't. But if you have found one, I'm interested.
Well what do you know, there is a public island! http://www.croquetcollaborative.org/
I had better luck connecting when I downloaded the client from their web site as well. I left a balloon with "slashdot.org" written on it. Now that I've found a public island I just need to run into someone. It might help if I didn't get all these UndefinedObject errors.
I'm still using up my 37 cent stamps with some 2 cent stamps. I'm getting so far behind in these rates that I'm wondering if I'll ever get my current stamps used up.
The postal service could advertise their rates a little better, USPS First-Class Mail Rates no mention of a rate increase, and with it saying 39 cents I was thinking that the slashdot story might just be a typo, but google news had stories on the rate change.
How about we just kill a bunch of trees, turn them into pulp and paper, then print out all the digital information uuencoded you want to save. I just hope you have an automatic sheet feeder on your high speed scanner. I expect the OCR software will be flawless when you go to scan the paper back in. Afterall we have paper that has lasted thousands of years.
It just leaves the question. How many gigabytes of data can you fit on a 500 sheet ream of paper?
Wood doesn't have to be used just for the natural look, it can be functional too. When we were replacing four LCD monitors with something higher resolution some of us decided that the old 1600x1200 displays didn't need to be wasted. The only thing is the one stand held all four monitors and we were splitting them up. So, we had to come up with our own stand.
I used a tree branch that was about three inches in diameter, cut a long piece to attach to the metal connector in the middle back and hold it at the right angle. Then I cut two cylinders from the same branch to rest the bottom of the monitor on, they were about two inches tall. I would have just rested the monitor on the desk, but the monitor buttons were on the bottom on the back of the monitor, and at least this way I can reach under it to get at them.
In my case it was functional, and it does look pretty good. It also didn't take any 1000 hours to build.
I pointed konqueror 3.5.5 at www.hrblock.com, the first page took a little while to load, but clicking on the online filing page seemed to get it in a loop. The page was always blank and the status line said how many images had downloaded and after 15 minutes and the count of images going over 1000 I decided I wasn't even going to see what the web page looked like.
In addition to that Stealth works effectively only if your receiver is colocated with the transmitter. It is easily defeated by decoupling them. There is a host of technical problems in doing this, but nothing that cannot be solved with enough software analysis of the reflected signal. It is only a matter of time until all "rogue" countries possess the relevant signal processing tech to do that.
Fortunately for Stealth today's fighters have the transmitter and receiver at the same place. Even if the ground SAMs could find and shoot at a Stealth aircraft, keeping the fighters and AWACS blind is going to be worth a ton.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM is doing some things right, but they have more to go. Take IBM ClearCase as an example. It is a source control program and their dynamic view has a Linux kernel module. The part they are doing right is, it's GPL. But it's an out of tree source, so they are supporting up to 2.6.18 while 2.6.27 is almost out. Their support note says they will evaluate and support the Enterprise distributions of Red Hat and SUSE just don't expect it to work on a newer kernel (it doesn't). Their installer looks for the specific (two) distributions they support and aborts if it doesn't recognize the distribution. Like if you install it on Fedora Core 3 instead of RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. Hopefully with this Canonical/Ubuntu partnership they will try a little harder to keep up to date and not force you to run specific distributions.
They also document that a Linux ClearCase client can't use a dynamic view to access a vob hosted on windows. That is correct, unless you realize that the kernel mvfs module's source is GPL and you have it. I have a patch http://david.fries.net/thoughts/IBM_ClearCase_mvfs_patch.phpthat adds a for loop to change \ to / (imagine that, windows returning a backslash for path separators), and it then works. So much for all the effort they put into documenting and educating users that it doesn't work.
I thought robocode would be a good tool for learning programming. Then I showed it to my cousins that were pretty young at the time and found out just how young someone can be and still get something about of it. I mean when you can program, move forward, turn right, and shoot when someone is in front of you without even introducing the concept of variables, you can start them pretty young. The program is even good for some advanced AI learning. I hear they were more entertained by that program than a little robot thing that had a small built in LCD programming screen, it was too limiting.
Have they? I always thought it was their publically available hardware specifications that allowed anyone to write drivers. It's just when they got into the graphics chip business that they lacked documentation and had to then provide drivers. Now Intel is releasing the source to the graphics drivers, and providing the graphic chipset documentation, a great example for others to follow.
Short duration hibernation is extremely useful. I've swapped out CPU fans or other such power chord changes. If you are fast enough, that is within a few minutes, all the connections will still be there when it removes (with Linux at least).
Linux, unplug the network chord and packets don't flow, plug it back in and they can. Leave it unplugged long enough and connections will time out, but why would you want them killed any sooner?
Most any TCP connection that isn't a short HTTP web page, or any long duration statefull connection. ssh, scp, X connections, irc, big file transfers, SQL connections to name a few.Then again as you said Windows XP drops all connections. That's not just TCP, that's UDP as well. So then all the programs using stateless UDP sockets will find socket errors on send or receive. Some programs that means restart the program every time it hibernates, suspends, ethernet cable gets disconnected, ethernet switch looses power. I knew there were a few reasons I prefer Linux.
I have the ds18b20 sensors. Once I get the drivers up to snuff I intend to put some temperature sensors around the house (just one outside), and control the furnace and A/C with the data. Sure, I could get a digital thermostate, but this is more fun and I intend to get a running total of the cost to heat and cool. Once I get that all working I'll put some additional insulation in the attic. I want to know just how much it saves me.
Any suggestions for controlling the furnace with a computer? I've thought about putting together some relays and a parallel port, but I thought I would first see what was available.
The problem I have with hibernate (other than not being able to access the computer from remote without having some wake-on-lan access), is existing TCP connections. Unless both systems go into hibernation and come out at the same time, one is MIA and you can easily loose the connection.
Apple's home page "The world's thinnest notebook. MacBook Air." design 0.76 inch ... 3.0 pounds
My Toshiba Portege 3015CT lists "Under 3 lbs. & Approx. 3/4" thin". Apple's marketing department must not bother researching competitors have produced in the last.
It would be even better if it was higher resolution, bigger field of view, and had controllable see through. Then you could plant the virtual screen in real world coordinates.
Kind of like car sickness? I would think a lot more people would be car sick if they had waited for a car ride until they were an adult, and had an eight hour drive down a narrow hilly road. We've been riding in cars since we were born, most people get use to it. Some don't, but for the most part it is just another daily activity.
As for simulator sickness, ease into it, and have some high quality software and hardware. If you turn your head 20 degrees and the visual output displays a 30 degree rotation a fourth of a second later, you will probably get most people sick. I've made up those numbers, but the problems are real. The more exact the video output matches what your head does the better you are.
That might be a good idea until you get one of these messages.
Password expired, please change your name.
We are just missing voice and intelligence which were big parts of the computers on Star Trek. Sure there are programs for Text to Speech and Speech to text, but it isn't widely used and it still needs to be improved. Sure that would let you talk to your computer and the computer to respond by voice, but the most important part is still missing. Until we get some good AI, our computers have a long way to go before we reach the Star Trek computers. Even the Star Trek characters made fun of the lack of intelligence in the ship's computers. There was an episode in Voyager where the Doctor we alone on Voyager that hi-lighted that fact. The ships computer would go as far as understanding what you said and respond or carry out the action, but if it ran into a problem it wouldn't do much to think its way out. Then again the Doctor was a computer so maybe we should strive for his level of intelligence. He not only thought, reasoned, responded, acted, but got annoyed at the ship computer's inability to learn. That would be a tall order for a computer.
You are right about getting a lot of people to not buy gas for a day. Gas stations would notice, look at the other gas station across the road, and figure they will have a busy day tomorrow.
I hope there is something better out there because I tried the silicone spray and it didn't help. The newly cleaned plastic just doesn't press as easy as it does before. Any other suggestions?
You did first take the membrane and electronics out right? I just put the plastic face and keys (they do a good job of staying together) in the dishwasher and have never had a problem.
I had just put two keyboards through the dishwasher yesterday and I can tell the one will be sticking for a while. This time I'm going to try some lubricant once the plastic dries. I have some 'Gunk, heavy duty Silicone Spray lubricant' that lists plastic. I would normally worry about puttying lubricant like that on something I would be around so much, but the label lists toys, it can't be much of a problem. I'll try a cotton ball or q-tip and see which works best, I didn't want to spray the entire back.
I should get one of these. It would be great. I have this 486DX-133 playing ogg vorbis audio files and it isn't fast enough for the highest quality music. It does have a PCI USB 2.0 card in it, it would just be awesome having a 520MHz USB key doing the decoding. It would just be so backward nobody would believe me having the USB key being the CPU and the computer being storage and I/O. Goofy.
Well what do you know, there is a public island! http://www.croquetcollaborative.org/ I had better luck connecting when I downloaded the client from their web site as well. I left a balloon with "slashdot.org" written on it. Now that I've found a public island I just need to run into someone. It might help if I didn't get all these UndefinedObject errors.
The postal service could advertise their rates a little better, USPS First-Class Mail Rates no mention of a rate increase, and with it saying 39 cents I was thinking that the slashdot story might just be a typo, but google news had stories on the rate change.
It just leaves the question. How many gigabytes of data can you fit on a 500 sheet ream of paper?
I used a tree branch that was about three inches in diameter, cut a long piece to attach to the metal connector in the middle back and hold it at the right angle. Then I cut two cylinders from the same branch to rest the bottom of the monitor on, they were about two inches tall. I would have just rested the monitor on the desk, but the monitor buttons were on the bottom on the back of the monitor, and at least this way I can reach under it to get at them.
In my case it was functional, and it does look pretty good. It also didn't take any 1000 hours to build.
I pointed konqueror 3.5.5 at www.hrblock.com, the first page took a little while to load, but clicking on the online filing page seemed to get it in a loop. The page was always blank and the status line said how many images had downloaded and after 15 minutes and the count of images going over 1000 I decided I wasn't even going to see what the web page looked like.
I'll just stick to vim, it's a better vi than vi ever was. Multilevel undo alone makes it worth it.
Just go over the North Pole and stay just a little on the other side of the International Dateline. Probably save you some time too.