I read the blurb on the main page, and then
thought I might just write that I've been
using the ink pens with liquid ink at work,
and I fliped over the pen on my home desk,
'Pilot Precise Rolling Ball V5 Extra Fine,'
and it is the same one this guy is talking about.
The ones at work seem better, but I don't
remember what kind they are.
I can't say anything about the price though,
it has been a long time since I bought them
at home, and I just stop by the secretary
at work for more.
You can always get the squeezy grips to put
on a pen. I've been happy with the pens are theyare.
Good points
not much presure needed
very sharp consistent lines (compared to non liquid lines)
black, red, blue, green, and like vim I like
the brigher colors
tradeoffs
can't think while the pen is on the paper,
you will soak through to the next layer
they bleed more if you get the paper wet
don't ever crack one open
they always seem to have a lid, which takes
two hands
Quick answer, it is faster but no I don't
recommend it for most Linux systems.
I'm using it on my laptop,
but not my other systems.
There are bound to be other ill effects
of programs that expect the file access times
to be updated. I've been running my laptop
like this for years, but then I don't do e-mail
on it, or many other demanding programs.
Mail on Unix has three states, no mail, read mail,
and new mail. Some programs bash and others
will periodically look at your mail file to see
which state it is in. No mail is easy, zero
sized file, or no file. The other two are more
trickey. There is the access time and
modification time of the file. Writing to a
file updates the modification time, reading
from a file updates the access time. If the
modification time is later there is mail
that hasn't been read yet, if the access time
is later you've already read the mail.
So, if you tell the computer not to update
the atime your computer will tell you that you
have new mail every time a program checks
even if you've read it.
I think the noatime option came about because
of the usenet news servers and the vast quantity
of files that were continually being read, so
they were in memory, but everytime they were
read the atime needed to be updated and something
needed to be written to disk.
That's why you use a VCR. That way you don't
even have to be around when the show is on, and
you can watch it in 3/4 the time it took them
to broadcast. That's if you find the whole
thing interesting enought to watch. Some shows
you just want to see how it ends, stop, ff, play.
Couldn't be easier.
If you can stand it, add "noatime" to/etc/fstab
for your Linux partitions. You will always
have 'new mail' mail instead of just 'mail', but
if things are just reading from the drive, the
drive can actually spin down instead of having
to write just to say what it read.
Re:PowerPC Linux users had compiled boot 'scripts'
on
Booting Linux Faster
·
· Score: 1
My biggest complaint of the latest RedHat 9
is how many times it causes the monitor to
loose sink on bootup. It seems like it is
five or six times. Why does it have to change
the default fonts and what ever other reason
it does. YOu can't see what is going on
in boot because your monitor is off half the
time and when it gets done it clears the
screen.
Then when you login it sets the console
to unicode blanking the screen yet again, so you
have to wait before you can see anything. It does
something that causes the screen to resync
everytime you switch between the virtual consoles,
so you can't hardly use those.
I did get out and look and it was brighter than
I expected. There are only a few stars visible
in the middle of the sky (St. Louis area), and
none around Mars, but Mars definately outshone
the background.
It didn't seem red at all to me though.
I don't mind all the lights when I'm out for
a late night walk, but I sure would like to see
the starts once and a while.
We should come out with one day of the month
when all outdoor lights are required to be off
for three hours in the middle of the night. That
way we wouldn't have to schedule power outages
to see stars and people might just be more
interested in the space program.
It seems to me that the only economical way to
do it is to use as much of the local material
as they can, and ship what they can't (Uranium,
comes to mind). After all Mars is rockey
(concrete), red (iron), or is it red because
of rust (Fe2O3 and CO2 from the air, gives
you metal and water).
For what? If it ends up supporting even
just the six engineers (and wives if they already
have had children see the comments about
radiation), I would say it is worth it. It
proves that someone can get people to the
red planet and we can survive there. People
are bound to go back. Of course that didn't
happen for the moon.
Um, what an I thinking, we can't let those
Russians beat US to Mars. Call up NASA and
tell them the space race is on again! O,
and tell them to chuck the shuttle and start
again.
Come on now, the article was talking about building
the power plant, not shipping the electricity!
That makes one thing though. How long were
people without power in New York? If they
only have one power plant on Mars, and it stops,
How long are you going to be able to hold your
breath until it starts going again?
I live almost 7 miles away from my parents and
mailed a letter by the US Postal Service box
at my apartment complex on a Monday. That Monday
was a holiday. If I had wanted to I could have
walked to their house in under three hours, or
drove it in about 15 minutes. But I put 37 cents
on the letter.
It has been postmarked on Tuesday, the day
after I mailed it, but they didn't receive it
until the following Monday. An entire week after
I mailed it. Why it would take that long to get
there I have no clue.
Maybe there is a lesson to be learned. Being lazy isn't always
the fastest way to get something done.
In 1998 the National Institute for Standards and Technology
(NIST) mandated that equipment must support
the ISO protocols (rather than TCP/IP) or demonstrate
how their systems could support them. It was
expected the commercial sector would adopt the
ISO standards. It didn't happen, computers were
shipped with ISO-compliant code, but people kept
using TCP/IP. The requirement was dropped in
1994.
It is definitely a good thing, but the US
isn't going to shift to IPv6 just because one
government department has decided to use it. It
will happen by people getting involved with IPv6.
Jump on the 6-bone today.
What is with all these companies and
bits per second anyway?
It isn't
like they can send 5 bits and and stop.
Sure it is a serial connection of 1 bit at
a time at the physical connection, but didn't
hear people talking about how wide scsi
could send 10 mega-short-integers per second.
Assuming short integers are 16 bits each.
No, they just said 20megabytes per second.
I think it is time for them to renumber everything
to use bytes per second (with kilo, mega, giga,
tera, as acceptible prefixes.)
The merits for adpoting of KiB, MiB,
and GiB as some Linux tools have adpoted
will be discussed at a future date.
Ranting Reference
I get cable. But that is because I'm in an
apartment and can't just put a big antenna
on top of the house. I tried an amplified
bunny ear antenna, but they could only pick
three channels and two had two much static
to be useful. Cable provides about 30 channels
for $14.41 a month. That is much more than
I wanted to pay for the 4 or so hours of tv I
watched a month before Star Trek Enterprise
finished their season.
I'm really just watching what I could get
over the airwaves for free if I could just get
the signals. That is what I want.
Re:Asounding Improvement!
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Two years with the mechanical catcher system,
(2 year, 16 per your, 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, 5 works, 200,000 for the machine)
2*16*40*52*5+200000=$532,800
two years for 8 workers
2*16*40*52*8=$532,480
After two years the owners reduce their costs by,
16*40*52*3 = $99,840 / year
That's odd, I thought for sure I included
the link, O-well,
TuxScreen,
but sorry they are all out according to the
web page,
Sold Out,
your best bet it to look around for someone who
wants to sell them. I have two, but I'm not looking
to sell them.
There are other Linux based phones out. One of
them is
SNOM.
It is a VoIP phone as opposed to the TuxScreen which
plugs in to the standard telephone jack. The
TuxScreen has a 640x480 color screen while the
SNOM has a tiny LCD window. One of
my friends found the SNOM phone while browsing the
web and I don't know anything more than what
the web page says.
How about a modification of GPL with a
'mechanisms of war' exclusion, so that
pacifists can contribute code and be
assured it can't be legally used to wage war.
It is quite common for Licenses to exclude
medical and or nuclear facilities. I assume it
could be done for other industries as well.
That being
said you aren't responsible for the actions of
others. If one of the uses for some code is
to blow something up, as long as the pacifist
didn't write it for that purpose they shouldn't
feel like they made the bomb.
Just by being
a productive citizen you are paying taxes
of which some goes to the military for making
bombs. Excluding war time use for software
seems about as smart as going on welfare so
pacifits cost the government
money rather than pay taxes to what makes bombs.
Besides, if we started putting exclusions in
our code on which groups can use or not use it
things could get pretty bad pretty soon. Maybe
couch potato war enthusiasts will start saying
their code could not be used by those releasing
anti-war encombered code.
I'm
sure a few people wouldn't mind adding, the
following code may not be used by Microsoft
corporation. They may just turn around and
say their os may not be booted on computers
that have run any open source software.
I think many people would agree that we
don't want to go down that route of restricting
licenses absurdly.
Tell that to the soldiers and the people they
protect who die because their weapons system
failed to function properly. The other side
won't just lay down their rifles if yours jams.
Very true! It's happened before it'll happen
again. Take the GPS unit that gave the soldier's
position instead of the enemy and had a bomb
dropped on them,
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0114/p03s01-usmi.htm l
call it user error, but maybe their system should
reject fire coordinates that are at the same
location as friendly troops.
Quite possibly, but since they won't be required to release the source since they will be using it in-house (thus the GPL won't be in effect), we don't know if the public source tree will see much/any of it.
Their customer is DOD right? That isn't exactly
an extension of Boeing (last I checked).
Slashdot Mirror
I can't say anything about the price though, it has been a long time since I bought them at home, and I just stop by the secretary at work for more.
You can always get the squeezy grips to put on a pen. I've been happy with the pens are theyare.
There are bound to be other ill effects of programs that expect the file access times to be updated. I've been running my laptop like this for years, but then I don't do e-mail on it, or many other demanding programs.
Mail on Unix has three states, no mail, read mail, and new mail. Some programs bash and others will periodically look at your mail file to see which state it is in. No mail is easy, zero sized file, or no file. The other two are more trickey. There is the access time and modification time of the file. Writing to a file updates the modification time, reading from a file updates the access time. If the modification time is later there is mail that hasn't been read yet, if the access time is later you've already read the mail.
So, if you tell the computer not to update the atime your computer will tell you that you have new mail every time a program checks even if you've read it.
I think the noatime option came about because of the usenet news servers and the vast quantity of files that were continually being read, so they were in memory, but everytime they were read the atime needed to be updated and something needed to be written to disk.
(Unless you wanted to play ~$10/month).
I just timed it, KDE took just over 35 seconds to start on my system. I use fvwm, it is hardder to time, but I got something like 2 seconds.
rm it.
If you can stand it, add "noatime" to /etc/fstab
for your Linux partitions. You will always
have 'new mail' mail instead of just 'mail', but
if things are just reading from the drive, the
drive can actually spin down instead of having
to write just to say what it read.
Then when you login it sets the console to unicode blanking the screen yet again, so you have to wait before you can see anything. It does something that causes the screen to resync everytime you switch between the virtual consoles, so you can't hardly use those.
I'm sure glad I use Debian at home.
It didn't seem red at all to me though.
I don't mind all the lights when I'm out for a late night walk, but I sure would like to see the starts once and a while.
We should come out with one day of the month when all outdoor lights are required to be off for three hours in the middle of the night. That way we wouldn't have to schedule power outages to see stars and people might just be more interested in the space program.
And the GPL license they were distributing Linux under earlier this year is?
For what? If it ends up supporting even just the six engineers (and wives if they already have had children see the comments about radiation), I would say it is worth it. It proves that someone can get people to the red planet and we can survive there. People are bound to go back. Of course that didn't happen for the moon.
Um, what an I thinking, we can't let those Russians beat US to Mars. Call up NASA and tell them the space race is on again! O, and tell them to chuck the shuttle and start again.
That makes one thing though. How long were people without power in New York? If they only have one power plant on Mars, and it stops, How long are you going to be able to hold your breath until it starts going again?
She reads Slashdot? What's her username? You can't be serious about slashdot without having one.
How can an image gallery with two images be slashdoted? This isn't a web cam, stop reloading they won't change every five minutes.
My grandmother had a heart attack and she was blaming the unhealthy food she ate as a kid. Less sweets, but much more cream and the like.
It has been postmarked on Tuesday, the day after I mailed it, but they didn't receive it until the following Monday. An entire week after I mailed it. Why it would take that long to get there I have no clue.
Maybe there is a lesson to be learned. Being lazy isn't always the fastest way to get something done.
Sorry.
It is definitely a good thing, but the US isn't going to shift to IPv6 just because one government department has decided to use it. It will happen by people getting involved with IPv6. Jump on the 6-bone today.
www.freenet6.net, it's free.
The merits for adpoting of KiB, MiB, and GiB as some Linux tools have adpoted will be discussed at a future date.
Ranting
Reference
I got cable when we were at war, I just didn't find much else of interest to watch after that.
I'm really just watching what I could get over the airwaves for free if I could just get the signals. That is what I want.
2*16*40*52*5+200000=$532,800
two years for 8 workers
2*16*40*52*8=$532,480
After two years the owners reduce their costs by,
16*40*52*3 = $99,840 / year
What chicken farm owner wouldn't go for it?
That's odd, I thought for sure I included the link, O-well, TuxScreen, but sorry they are all out according to the web page, Sold Out, your best bet it to look around for someone who wants to sell them. I have two, but I'm not looking to sell them.
There are other Linux based phones out. One of them is SNOM. It is a VoIP phone as opposed to the TuxScreen which plugs in to the standard telephone jack. The TuxScreen has a 640x480 color screen while the SNOM has a tiny LCD window. One of my friends found the SNOM phone while browsing the web and I don't know anything more than what the web page says.
I'm running 2.4.18 on my Telephone so I'm not so sure how long 2.2 will last in the embedded market either.
It is quite common for Licenses to exclude medical and or nuclear facilities. I assume it could be done for other industries as well. That being said you aren't responsible for the actions of others. If one of the uses for some code is to blow something up, as long as the pacifist didn't write it for that purpose they shouldn't feel like they made the bomb.
Just by being a productive citizen you are paying taxes of which some goes to the military for making bombs. Excluding war time use for software seems about as smart as going on welfare so pacifits cost the government money rather than pay taxes to what makes bombs.
Besides, if we started putting exclusions in our code on which groups can use or not use it things could get pretty bad pretty soon. Maybe couch potato war enthusiasts will start saying their code could not be used by those releasing anti-war encombered code. I'm sure a few people wouldn't mind adding, the following code may not be used by Microsoft corporation. They may just turn around and say their os may not be booted on computers that have run any open source software.
I think many people would agree that we don't want to go down that route of restricting licenses absurdly.
Very true! It's happened before it'll happen again. Take the GPS unit that gave the soldier's position instead of the enemy and had a bomb dropped on them, http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0114/p03s01-usmi.htm l
call it user error, but maybe their system should
reject fire coordinates that are at the same
location as friendly troops.
Their customer is DOD right? That isn't exactly an extension of Boeing (last I checked).