The difference is that tape is a linear format, with a handfull of songs, and is very mechanical. So big mechanical buttons are practically required, and also there are only a handful of possible functions, and there's no way to search for songs or categorize or anything. mp3 players typically have more features (but require you to look at them) because they are non-linear, and they have lots of songs, and potentially lots of extra things that can be done once you're holding a computer in your hand.
So since we CAN sort and categorize music, and we HAVE to be able to search or something, an mp3 player usually provides something more than just basic cd-player controls. And bigger, more physically present buttons would just take up too much space when most mp3-players are trying to become so small you can fit it in your nose (painlessly).
As for blind people, I expect they will be constrained, like they are now, with other electronic devices, to a few brands that make larger devices or blind-friendly devices. My mother-in-law is nearly blind, and the tape deck she uses for books-on-tape is huge, I'm sure in no small part due to the fact that blind people have to feel their way around it. A tiny device with a handful of tiny, non-descript buttons would not be that helpful.
I think blind people will be (sadly) marginalized until we can cure blindness, a la Geordi La Forge on Star Trek.
I was actually talking to a Rogers cable rep lately (the cable internet provider in Toronto, Ontario: it was formerly Rogers @home). I mentioned that I was having terrible latency problems, and he basically said that people who complain about latency are abusing the service in some way, or else they wouldn't care.
The thing is, even good parents can't stop their children from buying stuff in stores. That's why we have a drinking age; it helps parents stop their children from drinking until they're ready. Same with restricted movies: it helps parents censor what their kids see until the kids are ready. Nobody stops parents from showing kids restricted movies; that would indeed be too much interference. Similarly, nobody will stop parents from buying games for kids if they think their kids are old enough to handle it. Having a law like this in fact puts the parenting sqarely into the hands of the parents: parents will no longer be able to complain "I don't know where he learned that... oh, he played violent games? I didn't know." Now, parents will have to be aware of what their kids are doing.
The thing about raising kids properly is that it doesn't happen just by osmosis or whatever. Parents should censor certain things from their children; a game like GTA or Manhunt, where the player does things that many find morally obscene, would not be good for children. "Good parenting" doesn't "prevent kids from being influenced" by the game; good parenting is preventing children from getting rewarded (by the game) for doing things that are morally objectionable. Once your kid has been properly raised, to understand right and wrong, and internalize the morals you wish to impose, then your kid will be ready to play a game such as this. But until that time, you HAVE to censor such a game, or else the kid WILL be influenced by it. It's up to the parent to decide when the kid is ready, not the video game store. So that's why we need such a law. Society routinely protects children from things they are not ready for. We have child-labour laws. We have laws preventing kids from buying cigarettes or liquor. Did you know that (in Ontario) it's legal to give your children wine at dinner? Even though they can't drink wine in any other circumstance? As a parent, you need to know if your children will be able to drink responsibly; if they can't, you shouldn't give them the wine. That's parenting.
Anyway, as to whether or not the government should be in the business of enforcing morals, the problem is that it's nearly impossible for parents to totally protect their kids from the "evils" of society. In many cases, the government is able to impose some rules that help protect children without infringing on adults rights and privileges. Why SHOULDN'T the government help out in that case?
Re:Still for sale though
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Just buy the cheap dvd players from asian countries that don't care for licenses and rules and stuff like that. I bought a $60 CDN dvd player and it is region free and lets me fast-forward almost anything. I can't always chapter-skip certain things but I can hit the 'play 2x faster' or '8x faster' button.
You need to read "Guns, Germs and Steel" to put your views about farming into perspective. Farming technology was way more advanced in the rest of the world; that's the primary reason why it was the Europeans who were able to build up superior armies and population centers (more people = more disease). The book explains lots of theories about why the Europeans has such large advantages (like horses, for example) while the Natives had none (no pack animals, no wheels, etc).
You have the exact opposite experience I had: I found WP for windows nearly unusable until version 8, and I've loved 8 and 9. Version 6.1 was much better than 5.2 for windows, but still extraordinarly bloated and buggy. There were tons of problems with it: it didn't work in certain colour modes, it did wierd things to the title-bar, it would crash (bringing down the whole windows 3.1 system)... version 7 was no better; it was basically the same thing but windows 95 based. I had to support it for customers and they had tons of weird problems, but mainly it would lock up a lot. It wasn't until version 8 came out, and had a couple service packs, that it finally achieved perfection.
So, while I like to see people stick it to Microsoft, I have to admit that Novel and Corel had some trouble making a decent product for a few years.
In my driver training course we actually had to drive down a (long, empty) parking lot and turn the car off while driving. The steering doesn't lock if the key isn't in the position where you can take it out; and every car I've ever driven won't let you take the key out (and hence lock the wheel) unless the car isn't in gear. Don't rememember what happens in a manual transmission though, been too long since I drove one.
It's funny you should mention the "Canadian" winter as being especially cold, considering that the winter is always much milder in Toronto than it is SOUTH of the lake in the US:)
Actually, there's video of the first plane hitting the tower. It's not great, but still quite good. Some tourist happened to catch it. He doesn't hold the cam steady, and he messes around with the zoom, but it's very clear what's happening, and that it's the first plane not the second.
From Dictionary.com: The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife.
Encarta's definition: legal relationship between spouses.
I'd have to say that the definition of a word has nothing to do with how the "liberals" "bend society". A word's meaning is what people believe it to be, not what a book says it is. When enough people use a word a certain way, that meaning sticks. It's annoying for a person like me who likes to be precise in language, but there it is. Language evolves.
In your example, Encarta doesn't specify gender in marriage. Perhaps this is a political bias of the author. Perhaps it is a conspiracy. Perhaps the author wanted the definition to be more general, in case the legal definition changed.
Which brings me to my point: In Law, you have to define words very precisely. Not only that, but the definition of the words shouldn't change, or else the law changes. This is where it matters the most: the LAW defines a marriage one way (heterosexual), or, more likely, doesn't define it at all, hence the problem. Governements need to address this, either defining marriage as heterosexual or defining it as generic. In non-legal aspects, the word "marriage" will mean whatever people want it to mean. If enough homosexuals are "married" and the general population refers to that union as "marriage", then guess what? The definition changes (to the Encarta version), irrespective of the government's view about what constitutes a marriage. It doesn't matter whether or not you are liberal, whether or not you support homosexual marriages. What matters is how people use the word.
GPL is as free as other code, such as BSD code. You can argue about which is MORE free, but basically it comes to a tradeoff: BSD trades away the freedom of the community for the freedom of the user, while GPL preserves the freedom of the community while restricting the freedom of the user.
With BSD code, the individual is free to do what he wants, including taking without "paying" (by releasing changes). With GPL code, the user is not free to do that, so the community benefits, in that their hard work is not absconded with.
So saying "The GPL isn't really free" is wrong, inasmuch as the BSD license isn't free either.
It IS a good analogy. The OP was claiming that just because something is 64 bits instead of 32 bits doesn't mean it's faster. Reading things from memory that used to be 32 bits, but are now 64 bits, will be slower. Tests have already shown that this is the case (it's been posted on/. in the past). Take pointers for example. Someone mentioned that pointers on AMD64 are 40 bits, but that's still bigger than 32 bits. So now pointers take more room in memory, which means more work to store/read them, and the cache can hold fewer of them. All of that means less speed, unless you compensate in other areas.
If your application needs more than 4GB of RAM, or needs 64-bit math, then it may be faster because it can do things in one step (1 64-bit add vs. 2 32-bit adds). But otherwise, there may be no benefit to the AMD-64 architecture.
Also, nothing in the AMD-64 architecture matches YOUR analogy of adding more symbols: it's still binary, and thus there are only two symbols. But you're right in principle: there are designs for trinary circuits that are faster than binary circuits. But these things are not mainstream.
I have the exact opposite view: if there is a busy signal, it means that I have to try again to call you, whereas with a hold system, I can wait in line to ensure that I get served before people who call after me. If I don't feel like holding, I can try calling later. And if there is a large call volume, such that every operator is always busy, and hold times are several minutes or more, callers getting a busy signal will be very frustrated as the process of getting through to someone will be essentially random.
A not-bad compromise is one where I can leave a message, and I get called back when it's my turn. However that kind of system can be abused so that callbacks happen rarely, and it doesn't scale well since the operators may always be busy with callers who wait.
Sure, there are metric translations, but considering that all my recipies are either old (i.e. before Canada went metric), or from the US (from magazines, websites, etc), it's no surprise that I cook using the old units. I'm certainly not alone in this; in fact everyone I know refers to food in imperial units: a teaspoon of sugar, or a burger having X calories.
I would consider Canada part of the Commonwealth and we play baseball. Also, lots of things are still sold in imperial units; butter is sold by the pound, and lumber is sold by feet/inches. The reason is that we have to trade with the US, and it would cost too much to make two sizes of everything. And a lot of recipies come from the US, so they use imperial units. I'm a big supporter of the metric system but I cook with cups and teaspoons. And the paper in my printer is 8.5"x11", not A4.
I think the biggest hurdle you'll run into is that the Palm itself has a rather limited data model for things like address book entries, dates, etc. Sure, you can make a PIM that does way more, and you'll find lots out there, but none will be able to reliably sync all your data to the palm. If you only use the palm to READ the data, you might be ok, but if you enter data on your palm it might be incomplete when it gets shipped back to the PC. Also, if you edit data on the palm you might break the "links" that the PC software maintains.
Really what's needed is not just a better PIM on the desktop, but also a better PIM in the palm itself.
Just because transferring data to two cards is not easily parallelizable doesn't mean that rendering a scene is also not parallelizable.
First of all, most devices can access other devices and memory without the CPU being involved. This is what DMA and its ilk are for. Secondly, and I don't know if this is possible or not, but it's possible that two devices on a bus could both be written to at the same time, since they both are listening to the bus at all times.
Anyway, the realities of implementing a solution to a problem always step in to impose limits on things; adding a second CPU to your computer doesn't double your performance either, except in rare circumstances. But my argument still stands: having two GPUs working in parallel will be faster than one GPU. Your description of all that bus traffic is over-simplified anyway; the data to the video cards is different than the data from video-card A to video-card B, and is potentially smaller. Besides, saturating the bus only matters if the bus is your bottleneck in the first place.
I didn't read the article, but from what I understand the technology is somewhat more generic than the Voodoo SLI. If that's the case, then, eventually, as the technology matures, you'd be able to upgrade your two video cards to get better performance. Sure, the next generation of cards may be faster than two of today's cards. But two of the next generation's cards will be twice as fast as one. And eventually, maybe you'll be able to add as many video cards as you want, in order to make your system faster and faster. Video rendering is an inherently parallelizable problem, and if this was a generic parallelizer, it'd be worth the money.
Gold Rush, from Sierra, was a great game where you played a guy leaving his home in Brooklyn to go to California for the gold-rush in 1848. It was a great game that taught about lots of things in 1848. The game was not totally historically accurate, however it is the type of game where you still learn a lot and the inaccuracies can be easily explained. For example, in the game its your brother who discovers the gold; at the end of the game you and your brother strike it rich. In real life the man who is credited with discovering gold didn't find a second piece of gold. This kind of inaccuracy doesn't take away from learning about how people lived in the 1840s, or how they travelled west.
The major drawback of this game is that, like any other Sierra quest game, it takes hours to beat and the puzzles are usually not obvious. Good historical knowledge doesn't necessarily help you advance in the game. However, these deficiencies can be addressed if the game was re-done with "history-lesson" in mind. Student activities could include writing about how the game deviates from reality, and why they think that is.
However, I think that using games, even one as good as Gold Rush was, as an educational tool is inappropriate in most circumstances. Once in a while, it may be worthwhile, and games that educate as well as entertain are certainly good for a student's spare time, but I think a teacher should be able to keep children engaged in a history lesson without making them play games all day.
I find it crazy that people put the blame on the technology (GUIs make slow software!) when the blame should be on bad developers. Just because a button is on a screen doesn't mean there shouldn't be a hotkey for it. Just because the GUI lets new or stupid users be productive doesn't mean that the software can't also let advanced users do things quickly. And a TUI (as opposed to a CLI) is exactly the same as a GUI, except with a different back-end for the rendering. I mean, come on, all the metaphors are the same. You can't tell me that text-based menus and input boxes are somehow superior to graphical ones from a usability perspective. One poster wrote about using Screen to allow disconnecting and reconnecting sessions, so that he doesn't need to close his work and can access it from anywhere. Well, that is useful, but it will eventually happen with GUIs (It's already partly there, with things like VNC).
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The difference is that tape is a linear format, with a handfull of songs, and is very mechanical. So big mechanical buttons are practically required, and also there are only a handful of possible functions, and there's no way to search for songs or categorize or anything. mp3 players typically have more features (but require you to look at them) because they are non-linear, and they have lots of songs, and potentially lots of extra things that can be done once you're holding a computer in your hand.
So since we CAN sort and categorize music, and we HAVE to be able to search or something, an mp3 player usually provides something more than just basic cd-player controls. And bigger, more physically present buttons would just take up too much space when most mp3-players are trying to become so small you can fit it in your nose (painlessly).
As for blind people, I expect they will be constrained, like they are now, with other electronic devices, to a few brands that make larger devices or blind-friendly devices. My mother-in-law is nearly blind, and the tape deck she uses for books-on-tape is huge, I'm sure in no small part due to the fact that blind people have to feel their way around it. A tiny device with a handful of tiny, non-descript buttons would not be that helpful.
I think blind people will be (sadly) marginalized until we can cure blindness, a la Geordi La Forge on Star Trek.
I'm actually trying out Primus ADSL right now; the ping times are better but my downloads seem a lot slower. So it seems I can't win.
I was actually talking to a Rogers cable rep lately (the cable internet provider in Toronto, Ontario: it was formerly Rogers @home). I mentioned that I was having terrible latency problems, and he basically said that people who complain about latency are abusing the service in some way, or else they wouldn't care.
The thing is, even good parents can't stop their children from buying stuff in stores. That's why we have a drinking age; it helps parents stop their children from drinking until they're ready. Same with restricted movies: it helps parents censor what their kids see until the kids are ready. Nobody stops parents from showing kids restricted movies; that would indeed be too much interference. Similarly, nobody will stop parents from buying games for kids if they think their kids are old enough to handle it. Having a law like this in fact puts the parenting sqarely into the hands of the parents: parents will no longer be able to complain "I don't know where he learned that... oh, he played violent games? I didn't know." Now, parents will have to be aware of what their kids are doing.
The thing about raising kids properly is that it doesn't happen just by osmosis or whatever. Parents should censor certain things from their children; a game like GTA or Manhunt, where the player does things that many find morally obscene, would not be good for children. "Good parenting" doesn't "prevent kids from being influenced" by the game; good parenting is preventing children from getting rewarded (by the game) for doing things that are morally objectionable.
Once your kid has been properly raised, to understand right and wrong, and internalize the morals you wish to impose, then your kid will be ready to play a game such as this. But until that time, you HAVE to censor such a game, or else the kid WILL be influenced by it. It's up to the parent to decide when the kid is ready, not the video game store. So that's why we need such a law.
Society routinely protects children from things they are not ready for. We have child-labour laws. We have laws preventing kids from buying cigarettes or liquor. Did you know that (in Ontario) it's legal to give your children wine at dinner? Even though they can't drink wine in any other circumstance? As a parent, you need to know if your children will be able to drink responsibly; if they can't, you shouldn't give them the wine. That's parenting.
Anyway, as to whether or not the government should be in the business of enforcing morals, the problem is that it's nearly impossible for parents to totally protect their kids from the "evils" of society. In many cases, the government is able to impose some rules that help protect children without infringing on adults rights and privileges. Why SHOULDN'T the government help out in that case?
Just buy the cheap dvd players from asian countries that don't care for licenses and rules and stuff like that. I bought a $60 CDN dvd player and it is region free and lets me fast-forward almost anything. I can't always chapter-skip certain things but I can hit the 'play 2x faster' or '8x faster' button.
You need to read "Guns, Germs and Steel" to put your views about farming into perspective. Farming technology was way more advanced in the rest of the world; that's the primary reason why it was the Europeans who were able to build up superior armies and population centers (more people = more disease). The book explains lots of theories about why the Europeans has such large advantages (like horses, for example) while the Natives had none (no pack animals, no wheels, etc).
You have the exact opposite experience I had: I found WP for windows nearly unusable until version 8, and I've loved 8 and 9. Version 6.1 was much better than 5.2 for windows, but still extraordinarly bloated and buggy. There were tons of problems with it: it didn't work in certain colour modes, it did wierd things to the title-bar, it would crash (bringing down the whole windows 3.1 system)... version 7 was no better; it was basically the same thing but windows 95 based. I had to support it for customers and they had tons of weird problems, but mainly it would lock up a lot. It wasn't until version 8 came out, and had a couple service packs, that it finally achieved perfection.
So, while I like to see people stick it to Microsoft, I have to admit that Novel and Corel had some trouble making a decent product for a few years.
Isn't Emacs over version 20? Did it have a version called 12.0?
In my driver training course we actually had to drive down a (long, empty) parking lot and turn the car off while driving. The steering doesn't lock if the key isn't in the position where you can take it out; and every car I've ever driven won't let you take the key out (and hence lock the wheel) unless the car isn't in gear.
Don't rememember what happens in a manual transmission though, been too long since I drove one.
From west to east, I believe.
It's funny you should mention the "Canadian" winter as being especially cold, considering that the winter is always much milder in Toronto than it is SOUTH of the lake in the US :)
Actually, there's video of the first plane hitting the tower. It's not great, but still quite good. Some tourist happened to catch it. He doesn't hold the cam steady, and he messes around with the zoom, but it's very clear what's happening, and that it's the first plane not the second.
From Dictionary.com: The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife.
Encarta's definition: legal relationship between spouses.
I'd have to say that the definition of a word has nothing to do with how the "liberals" "bend society". A word's meaning is what people believe it to be, not what a book says it is. When enough people use a word a certain way, that meaning sticks. It's annoying for a person like me who likes to be precise in language, but there it is. Language evolves.
In your example, Encarta doesn't specify gender in marriage. Perhaps this is a political bias of the author. Perhaps it is a conspiracy. Perhaps the author wanted the definition to be more general, in case the legal definition changed.
Which brings me to my point: In Law, you have to define words very precisely. Not only that, but the definition of the words shouldn't change, or else the law changes. This is where it matters the most: the LAW defines a marriage one way (heterosexual), or, more likely, doesn't define it at all, hence the problem. Governements need to address this, either defining marriage as heterosexual or defining it as generic. In non-legal aspects, the word "marriage" will mean whatever people want it to mean. If enough homosexuals are "married" and the general population refers to that union as "marriage", then guess what? The definition changes (to the Encarta version), irrespective of the government's view about what constitutes a marriage. It doesn't matter whether or not you are liberal, whether or not you support homosexual marriages. What matters is how people use the word.
GPL is as free as other code, such as BSD code. You can argue about which is MORE free, but basically it comes to a tradeoff: BSD trades away the freedom of the community for the freedom of the user, while GPL preserves the freedom of the community while restricting the freedom of the user.
With BSD code, the individual is free to do what he wants, including taking without "paying" (by releasing changes). With GPL code, the user is not free to do that, so the community benefits, in that their hard work is not absconded with.
So saying "The GPL isn't really free" is wrong, inasmuch as the BSD license isn't free either.
It IS a good analogy. The OP was claiming that just because something is 64 bits instead of 32 bits doesn't mean it's faster. Reading things from memory that used to be 32 bits, but are now 64 bits, will be slower. Tests have already shown that this is the case (it's been posted on /. in the past). Take pointers for example. Someone mentioned that pointers on AMD64 are 40 bits, but that's still bigger than 32 bits. So now pointers take more room in memory, which means more work to store/read them, and the cache can hold fewer of them. All of that means less speed, unless you compensate in other areas.
If your application needs more than 4GB of RAM, or needs 64-bit math, then it may be faster because it can do things in one step (1 64-bit add vs. 2 32-bit adds). But otherwise, there may be no benefit to the AMD-64 architecture.
Also, nothing in the AMD-64 architecture matches YOUR analogy of adding more symbols: it's still binary, and thus there are only two symbols. But you're right in principle: there are designs for trinary circuits that are faster than binary circuits. But these things are not mainstream.
I have the exact opposite view: if there is a busy signal, it means that I have to try again to call you, whereas with a hold system, I can wait in line to ensure that I get served before people who call after me. If I don't feel like holding, I can try calling later. And if there is a large call volume, such that every operator is always busy, and hold times are several minutes or more, callers getting a busy signal will be very frustrated as the process of getting through to someone will be essentially random.
A not-bad compromise is one where I can leave a message, and I get called back when it's my turn. However that kind of system can be abused so that callbacks happen rarely, and it doesn't scale well since the operators may always be busy with callers who wait.
Sure, there are metric translations, but considering that all my recipies are either old (i.e. before Canada went metric), or from the US (from magazines, websites, etc), it's no surprise that I cook using the old units. I'm certainly not alone in this; in fact everyone I know refers to food in imperial units: a teaspoon of sugar, or a burger having X calories.
I would consider Canada part of the Commonwealth and we play baseball. Also, lots of things are still sold in imperial units; butter is sold by the pound, and lumber is sold by feet/inches. The reason is that we have to trade with the US, and it would cost too much to make two sizes of everything. And a lot of recipies come from the US, so they use imperial units. I'm a big supporter of the metric system but I cook with cups and teaspoons. And the paper in my printer is 8.5"x11", not A4.
I think the biggest hurdle you'll run into is that the Palm itself has a rather limited data model for things like address book entries, dates, etc. Sure, you can make a PIM that does way more, and you'll find lots out there, but none will be able to reliably sync all your data to the palm. If you only use the palm to READ the data, you might be ok, but if you enter data on your palm it might be incomplete when it gets shipped back to the PC. Also, if you edit data on the palm you might break the "links" that the PC software maintains.
Really what's needed is not just a better PIM on the desktop, but also a better PIM in the palm itself.
Just because transferring data to two cards is not easily parallelizable doesn't mean that rendering a scene is also not parallelizable.
First of all, most devices can access other devices and memory without the CPU being involved. This is what DMA and its ilk are for. Secondly, and I don't know if this is possible or not, but it's possible that two devices on a bus could both be written to at the same time, since they both are listening to the bus at all times.
Anyway, the realities of implementing a solution to a problem always step in to impose limits on things; adding a second CPU to your computer doesn't double your performance either, except in rare circumstances. But my argument still stands: having two GPUs working in parallel will be faster than one GPU. Your description of all that bus traffic is over-simplified anyway; the data to the video cards is different than the data from video-card A to video-card B, and is potentially smaller. Besides, saturating the bus only matters if the bus is your bottleneck in the first place.
I didn't read the article, but from what I understand the technology is somewhat more generic than the Voodoo SLI. If that's the case, then, eventually, as the technology matures, you'd be able to upgrade your two video cards to get better performance. Sure, the next generation of cards may be faster than two of today's cards. But two of the next generation's cards will be twice as fast as one. And eventually, maybe you'll be able to add as many video cards as you want, in order to make your system faster and faster. Video rendering is an inherently parallelizable problem, and if this was a generic parallelizer, it'd be worth the money.
Gold Rush, from Sierra, was a great game where you played a guy leaving his home in Brooklyn to go to California for the gold-rush in 1848. It was a great game that taught about lots of things in 1848.
The game was not totally historically accurate, however it is the type of game where you still learn a lot and the inaccuracies can be easily explained. For example, in the game its your brother who discovers the gold; at the end of the game you and your brother strike it rich. In real life the man who is credited with discovering gold didn't find a second piece of gold. This kind of inaccuracy doesn't take away from learning about how people lived in the 1840s, or how they travelled west.
The major drawback of this game is that, like any other Sierra quest game, it takes hours to beat and the puzzles are usually not obvious. Good historical knowledge doesn't necessarily help you advance in the game. However, these deficiencies can be addressed if the game was re-done with "history-lesson" in mind. Student activities could include writing about how the game deviates from reality, and why they think that is.
However, I think that using games, even one as good as Gold Rush was, as an educational tool is inappropriate in most circumstances. Once in a while, it may be worthwhile, and games that educate as well as entertain are certainly good for a student's spare time, but I think a teacher should be able to keep children engaged in a history lesson without making them play games all day.
I just finished reading this book, and I second the recommendation. An excellent read.
I find it crazy that people put the blame on the technology (GUIs make slow software!) when the blame should be on bad developers. Just because a button is on a screen doesn't mean there shouldn't be a hotkey for it. Just because the GUI lets new or stupid users be productive doesn't mean that the software can't also let advanced users do things quickly. And a TUI (as opposed to a CLI) is exactly the same as a GUI, except with a different back-end for the rendering. I mean, come on, all the metaphors are the same. You can't tell me that text-based menus and input boxes are somehow superior to graphical ones from a usability perspective. One poster wrote about using Screen to allow disconnecting and reconnecting sessions, so that he doesn't need to close his work and can access it from anywhere. Well, that is useful, but it will eventually happen with GUIs (It's already partly there, with things like VNC).