Microsoft isn't "leaving millions of users of Word 97 without a fix." The fix is to upgrade your five-year-old copy of Word, get all the "great" features Microsoft has included since 97,
Except that to run Word XP, you will also have to get a new machine that runs at at least 300 Mhz with at least 256 Meg of RAM, and of course that will mean also getting a new operating system, coincidentally made by guess who.
MS is a monopoly and unilaterally decides which products it will continue to support. As of today, Office 97 is still listed as supported, therefore MS is on the hook for patching a major security flaw in their still supported product.
If they refuse to support the products that they say they do, then there is no reason anyone should ever buy a new product from them.
Except in cases where the instruction printed on the ballots themselves are wrong, such as the case in a northern FL country in 2000 where the ballots says vote on every page, but page 2 was an additional 5 prez/vp choices and if you voted "on every single page" you would have spoiled your ballot.
Too bad over 20,000 people in Duval County followed the instructions invalidating what looked to be a sufficient number of Gore votes to have easliy won him the election.
For those who don't live near an Imax theatre, might I suggest this as an alternative buy the DVD, then sit two feet from the TV while you play it wearing headphones. If that isn't realistic enough, then invite a couple of teenage fan boys over to talk during the movie.
Then again, who can really complain about a 40' tall Natalie Portman?
I could download the film, then just connect it to the TV and watch like that.
Or attach it to your VCR and tape it!
Analog will always defeat any digital copy protection, you just won't get a digital quality copy. But 700Mb/movie you're not getting DVD quality to begin with.
Near me is a $.99 DVD rental machine. I could rent the Harry Potter DVD (which has been pointed out isn't macrovision protected), buy a blank VHS tape, bring both home, copy the DVD to VHS (while watching it if I so desire), and return the DVD to the rental machine in about the same amount of time it would take me to download this over my 640kbs DSL line.
And I would end up with a pretty good quality VHS copy of the movie for only $2 instead of $3.99.
While I admire Warner for giving this a try, I can't but feel a little bit skeptical of the fact that the announcement came just a week after AOL Time Warner announced that they had teamed up with broadband provider Covad for their AOL service - might this be more of a way to build a user base for that service instead of get more people to pay to see the movie?
NPR Covering Blogging on PI Right Now
on
Essential Blogging
·
· Score: 2
Go to NPR's Public Interest website to listen live or to the archive in couple hour (they provide ram, wmv, and mp3 streams.)
Here's the description of today's show:
For years, Web loggers, or "bloggers," have used the Internet to express their viewpoint or document their lives. A Tech Tuesday look at how blogging has influenced the national debate since September 11th.
David Gallagher, freelance journalist specializing in Internet and technology news
John Foley, Executive Editor, InformationWeek
Eric Olsen, editor of BlogCritics.org; and editor of Blog Nation, an upcoming book that will compile the very best blogs from the aftermath of September 11th
This means that except for public arcades the following are illegal:
4) Windows and most Linux distributions
5) MS Excel 97
6) MS Word 97
7) MS Excel 2000
While it will be very simple to come out with new Linux distro's that are game-free, MS will not be able to quickly patch all of the Easter Eggs in its products as likely most MS managers don't know where in the code the Easter eggs have been written. (of course we have to remember that in Greece, Easter Eggs appear a week later that every else).
This law could do wonders for OSS, maybe the community shouldn't fight it?
in fact, there's no straight-forward way to disable popup ads
Well I don't know how you define "straight forward" but this seemed to work for me (I'm running NS7 now on Win2k)
From the Edit ==> Preferences menu click on Advanced, then click on Scripts & Plugins. Uncheck Open a link in a new window (requires retarting Netscape) in the Allow webpages to: section.
Restart Netscape.
I then tested this on Mapquest, which I had just tried previously and gotten a pop-up. This time I got no pop-up.
Of course there are many ways to get page to launch pop-ups and I don't know that this addresses all of them, and of course YMMV.
I'm amazed that there is so much interest in live bait vending machines. Take a look at the counter
I don't know what it read yesterday, but when I read it about 11:00 AM eastern time today it was still under 10,000 and now its approaching 20,000. I wouldn't be surprised if it was under 5,000 before the slashdotting began. Given that it has been over a year, and that it was probably mentioned on at least on Blog prior to this, don't be fooled into thinkning the number of hits represents the number of potential Liva Bait vending machine operators out there.
I recently saw the first one of these other than in a Hotel (btw, I like the ones in the hotels, since it means the hotel has a VCR - which means I can rent a video anywhere or bring one from home and watch it in the hotel rather than paying the hotel video rental machine's exorbitant fee or hotel pay per view fee).
Anyway, the one I have seen is located in the parking lot of a McDonalds on US 1 about a mile north of the University of Maryland campus. There is no Blockbuster or other major video chain nearby and though there is local chain store, it charges $4 for most rentals. This machine rents DVDs only and they are $.99 / night. I haven't used it yet so I don't know how it works. My biggest question is how does it verify you are returning the actual disc you borrowed. I guess you could print a barcode directly onto the label side of the DVD disc - or possibly build-in a DVD reader that actually reads enough of the disc to verify its authenticity, but otherwise I would expect some people (especially poor College students) to return old CD's instead of the DVD they rented.
I imagine this is the reason the DVD & VHS rental machines haven't caught on well here (yet), it isn't a problem with popularity among customers, but in needing a human to verify the identity of the renter and the authenticity of the returned video. These are easy at a hotel, not so easy at a totally automated sidewalk vending machine.
FYI - there is a site that keeps track of vending machines selling unexpected items here. Among the more unusual listed items are: raw steak, insurance, hot french fries, and pot.The one I think the US is most seriously lacking is Beer vending machines. I saw one selling cans of Budvar in the Prague airport and thought we could have really used one of those in my fraternity.
Please mod up parent. (Note that the link contains about 100 additional pages scanned at fairly high resolution, but of low quality photos. It also appears that the server is either very or has already been slashdotted.)
By the way I have figured it out. Voynich ManuScript is abbreviated VMS and so clearly isn't meant to be decipherable by humans and is therefore an obvious hoax.
but I suppose you could sell either bananas or gold, whichever had a better proffit margin.
More likely since the banana fruit is just a small percentage of the 'tree's biomass, you would sell the bananas, then harvest the gold from the rest of the tree by burning it and extracting the gold from the ash. Commercial banana 'trees' only produce one harvest and then are cut down anyway. If you then processed the banana fruit by canning or drying, you could also recover any gold in the peels and stem as well.
I also know they use plants to extract toxic waste from abandoned industrial sites. The linked article says that alfafa, poplar trees and mustard plants are used for this. The process is called phytoremediation.
What I'd like to see? Mission Impossible StarTrek style, ditch the ship and whip out all the cool gadgets to spy on bad guys
If you remember the episode Assignment Earth in TOS where they go back to the go abck to what was then the present (the mid 1960's) and there is guy named Gary Seven with a black cat, as well as his secretary played by Teri Garr, and the guy has to avert an explosion during an Apollo launch. My understanding is that this episode was filmed as pilot for a potential spin-off right along the line of the show you would like to see.
City on the Edge of Forever with Joan Collins set in the Depression has a similar plot only it was Spock that had to ensure that history wasn't interfered with. Same with the 2-part episode of Voyager where they travel back to 1990's San Francisco. And it's used again in the DS9 episode where they go back to the Trouble with Tribbles episode of TOS (included the great Worf line where he declines to explain why the Klingons have no bumps on the foreheads).
Really it is a common theme and it would make a good series. Of course, there was no way to do it if Scott Bakula was the lead, because the series concept would be too similar to Quantum Leap.
The growing sexual tension between T'Pal [sic] and the Archer is kind of interesting, though often overdone.
I think you must mean Trip (Commander Charles Tucker III) the Chief Engineer. I can't recall more than one or two scenes all season where there was any sexual tension between Captain Archer and T'pol. The infamous decontamination scene was between T'pol and Trip, for example.
Yes, believe it or not, there is a research lab whose entire focus is the ebony elixir of life. The site has lots of interesting information such as information on caffiene (FYI a 10 oz cup of drip coffee has nearly three times the caffiene of a 2 oz shot of expresso); The health benefits of coffee; and, a Coffee FAQ.
In fact I used ISBN.nu to do Internet-wide search of online book stores, and they only list the Amazon special order as far as availability. Even Amazon Canada (User Friendly being a Canadian strip) doesn't have it in their database.
killing most open flames from water heaters and furnaces would prevent a lot of fires.
I'd agree but only if this was done in response to real emergencies. You have to remember that the gas for pilot lights is flowing all the time - unless the valve has been manually shut off. So if you shut it off up stream, then turned it back on again the pilots would be out but the gas would start flowing again. Eventually this gas would build up and and could be ignited by any spark.
So either you would need to retrofit all gas appliances to have electric pilots, or you'd better be sure everyone has had a chance to shut off the own manual gas valves prior to the gas mains being turned back on.
Actually, if you think of it as 30 seconds of additional warning, I think it would be useful.
Most of the damage caused by an earthquake isn't caused instaneously in the first second of the event. Rather as structures are shaken they eventually crumble, break loose, etc. Having an additional 30 seconds would allow more time for people to get to door jams or outside or just away from book shelves etc.
And maybe there wouldn't be enough time shut gas lines off prior to the quake, but a button could be pushed (or signal sent automaticlly by the early warning system) that would automatically shut off the gas in 2 minutes, unless the instruction is rescinded. While that method might not eliminate all gas explosions caused by the quake, at least the resulting fires would not be fed by additional gas. Also, fireman would have an additional 30 seconds to suit up to fight the fires and be that much more ready to respond when/if they find out a fire/explosion has resulted from the quake.
For people in skyscrapers, the 30 seconds would at least be sufficient for the elevator to stop at the next floor, so it doesn't get caught in between floors. And it would increase the likelihood that subways could either get to the next station or not a leave they are already at.
It's a full Internet Suite with PPP dialer, graphical Browser, email, MP3 player, etc. You may find you'll want to keep FreeDOS on a small partition after all.
turns up several cassette sized MP3 players, including the RomeMP3 player. And there is another one on the market (perhaps only in Asia?) the MP WOW Both the RomeMP3 and the MP WOW are aparently originally from Korea.
being able to control it through standard FF/RW/Play controls on the tape deck. Don't forget (as the clueless article of author noted) "Even the tone controls work" too. (How did this make it past the editor? Obviously the tone controls work since they are manipulating the analog audio stream that has already left the player)
what is the advantage to having "Aaa.txt" exist in the same directory as "AAA.txt"
Because the file name Aaa.txt is "0x41 0x61 0x61 0x2e 0x74 0x78 0x74" in hexadecimal which is not the same as "0x41 0x41 0x41 0x2e 0x74 0x78 0x74" the hexadecimal equivalent of "AAA.txt".
When you get down to the core operation of the kernel, it shouldn't be burdened with having to do conversions of 0x41 to 0x61. If some one writing an application wants to make that distinction, that's fine (and could easily be incorporated into programming libraries), but it shouldn't be the job of the OS.
On my Mac, if I type "Letter.txt" or "lETTEr.TxT", it is preserved and displayed in this manner. But if I want to find this file and I look for "letter.txt", the computer isn't going to tell me there isn't any. In this circumstance the OS doesn't have to enter into the equation. Since what you are referring to is the search program, which is distinct from the OS. A search program could easily be programmed to default to being case insensitive (as the search in Windows is) and only discriminate on case when selected by the user.
Or if I try to name one file "letter.txt" and another "letter.TXT", it won't let me put them in the same directory.
Again, this could be addressed in the interface rather than the OS. Remember that with 32 bit Windows systems all files have three names, their long file name, their case sensitive long file name and the DOS (8.3) file name. As far as the OS is concerned you could get by with just one of these, the rest are just interface enhancements (I think that the OS in fact does this ignoring two of the name forms and using the third as the basis for locating files on the physical drive - the actual work of the OS.)
So really the question is could a *nix SHELL be created that is case insensitive, and could *nix file utilities be set to be case insensitive by default. And the answer to both of these questions is YES and YES, and the source code is out there should there be someone with sufficient interest and skill. You wouldn't the OS itself (i.e. the kernel) to be case insensitive as it would only remove capabilities and slow it down.
I drink 1 glass of soy milk or a cup of coffee at breakfast. Then maybe two 12-oz beers in the evening and sometimes a 12-oz glass of juice at bedtime.
That's it for maybe 9 days out of ten. not one drop of plain water, and at most 44 oz of other liquids (of which 32oz has diuretic properties). So either I'm getting the other needed 20 oz from the food I eat, or I guess I should have evaporated into nothing years ago.
Maybe when I'm sixty I'll discover that my kidney's have given out but I doubt it. Humans evolved on the plains of Africa, not a place known for having a half gallon of potable water for evey individual available every day. It was also much hotter than the typical North American living in air conditioned buildings is typically exposed to. Given that I expect that I will be fine.
Of course if I am going to be outside on a hot day I drink more fluids (even actual water on occasion) as I am going to sweat it out, but I don't sweat substantially in 70degF room typing at a keyboard.
My guess is the 8 glasses a day recommendation, if it was based on any kind of science, came about prior to the wide availability of AC, and when most people worked in jobs that required using muscles others than those that move their fingers, wrists and eyes.
But that is a stream only, not a downloadable file like he was looking for. (yes I know there are ways to capture streams, but I think he is looking for something easier.)
I had the same question. It would seem that this would be a viable application at least in densely populated areas with good WiFi saturation like NYC or SF.
You should be able to do it with existing hardware, such as multimedia equipped PDA.
Some of the drawbacks have been identified here as reasons why Rabbit couldn't compete with mobile telephony - such as receiving calls would be spotty unless you camped out at known hot spot. But if you worked in an office with a wifi network and had one at home most of the time you would have access most of the time anyway - but these are times when you already have access to the POTS telephone network as well.
The other drawback is that without 100% saturation you would be constantly plagued with dropped calls if you tried to walk or especially drive while on the phone.
For those reasons it would be hard to sell as a standalone service, but if billed with mobile Internet for your PDA which is already up and running, I can't see why people wouldn't pay say an extra $10/month to also get telephony if it meant throwing away the mobile phone and the $30-$40 month cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft isn't "leaving millions of users of Word 97 without a fix." The fix is to upgrade your five-year-old copy of Word, get all the "great" features Microsoft has included since 97,
Except that to run Word XP, you will also have to get a new machine that runs at at least 300 Mhz with at least 256 Meg of RAM, and of course that will mean also getting a new operating system, coincidentally made by guess who.
MS is a monopoly and unilaterally decides which products it will continue to support. As of today, Office 97 is still listed as supported, therefore MS is on the hook for patching a major security flaw in their still supported product.
If they refuse to support the products that they say they do, then there is no reason anyone should ever buy a new product from them.
Could a SlashDot editor please include this info as an update to the story?
I'd ask that it be modded up but its already maxed out.
Except in cases where the instruction printed on the ballots themselves are wrong, such as the case in a northern FL country in 2000 where the ballots says vote on every page, but page 2 was an additional 5 prez/vp choices and if you voted "on every single page" you would have spoiled your ballot.
Too bad over 20,000 people in Duval County followed the instructions invalidating what looked to be a sufficient number of Gore votes to have easliy won him the election.
I may not even give Blockbuster my $2.99 when it comes out for rent.
And that will only be 11 days later.
For those who don't live near an Imax theatre, might I suggest this as an alternative buy the DVD, then sit two feet from the TV while you play it wearing headphones. If that isn't realistic enough, then invite a couple of teenage fan boys over to talk during the movie.
Then again, who can really complain about a 40' tall Natalie Portman?
I could download the film, then just connect it to the TV and watch like that.
Or attach it to your VCR and tape it!
Analog will always defeat any digital copy protection, you just won't get a digital quality copy. But 700Mb/movie you're not getting DVD quality to begin with.
Near me is a $.99 DVD rental machine. I could rent the Harry Potter DVD (which has been pointed out isn't macrovision protected), buy a blank VHS tape, bring both home, copy the DVD to VHS (while watching it if I so desire), and return the DVD to the rental machine in about the same amount of time it would take me to download this over my 640kbs DSL line.
And I would end up with a pretty good quality VHS copy of the movie for only $2 instead of $3.99.
While I admire Warner for giving this a try, I can't but feel a little bit skeptical of the fact that the announcement came just a week after AOL Time Warner announced that they had teamed up with broadband provider Covad for their AOL service - might this be more of a way to build a user base for that service instead of get more people to pay to see the movie?
Here's the description of today's show:
This means that except for public arcades the following are illegal:
4) Windows and most Linux distributions
5) MS Excel 97
6) MS Word 97
7) MS Excel 2000
While it will be very simple to come out with new Linux distro's that are game-free, MS will not be able to quickly patch all of the Easter Eggs in its products as likely most MS managers don't know where in the code the Easter eggs have been written. (of course we have to remember that in Greece, Easter Eggs appear a week later that every else).
This law could do wonders for OSS, maybe the community shouldn't fight it?
in fact, there's no straight-forward way to disable popup ads
Well I don't know how you define "straight forward" but this seemed to work for me (I'm running NS7 now on Win2k)
From the Edit ==> Preferences menu click on Advanced, then click on Scripts & Plugins. Un check Open a link in a new window (requires retarting Netscape) in the Allow webpages to: section.
Restart Netscape.
I then tested this on Mapquest, which I had just tried previously and gotten a pop-up. This time I got no pop-up.
Of course there are many ways to get page to launch pop-ups and I don't know that this addresses all of them, and of course YMMV.
I'm amazed that there is so much interest in live bait vending machines. Take a look at the counter
I don't know what it read yesterday, but when I read it about 11:00 AM eastern time today it was still under 10,000 and now its approaching 20,000. I wouldn't be surprised if it was under 5,000 before the slashdotting began. Given that it has been over a year, and that it was probably mentioned on at least on Blog prior to this, don't be fooled into thinkning the number of hits represents the number of potential Liva Bait vending machine operators out there.
I recently saw the first one of these other than in a Hotel (btw, I like the ones in the hotels, since it means the hotel has a VCR - which means I can rent a video anywhere or bring one from home and watch it in the hotel rather than paying the hotel video rental machine's exorbitant fee or hotel pay per view fee).
Anyway, the one I have seen is located in the parking lot of a McDonalds on US 1 about a mile north of the University of Maryland campus. There is no Blockbuster or other major video chain nearby and though there is local chain store, it charges $4 for most rentals. This machine rents DVDs only and they are $.99 / night. I haven't used it yet so I don't know how it works. My biggest question is how does it verify you are returning the actual disc you borrowed. I guess you could print a barcode directly onto the label side of the DVD disc - or possibly build-in a DVD reader that actually reads enough of the disc to verify its authenticity, but otherwise I would expect some people (especially poor College students) to return old CD's instead of the DVD they rented.
I imagine this is the reason the DVD & VHS rental machines haven't caught on well here (yet), it isn't a problem with popularity among customers, but in needing a human to verify the identity of the renter and the authenticity of the returned video. These are easy at a hotel, not so easy at a totally automated sidewalk vending machine.
FYI - there is a site that keeps track of vending machines selling unexpected items here. Among the more unusual listed items are: raw steak, insurance, hot french fries, and pot.The one I think the US is most seriously lacking is Beer vending machines. I saw one selling cans of Budvar in the Prague airport and thought we could have really used one of those in my fraternity.
Please mod up parent. (Note that the link contains about 100 additional pages scanned at fairly high resolution, but of low quality photos. It also appears that the server is either very or has already been slashdotted.)
By the way I have figured it out. Voynich ManuScript is abbreviated VMS and so clearly isn't meant to be decipherable by humans and is therefore an obvious hoax.
but I suppose you could sell either bananas or gold, whichever had a better proffit margin.
More likely since the banana fruit is just a small percentage of the 'tree's biomass, you would sell the bananas, then harvest the gold from the rest of the tree by burning it and extracting the gold from the ash. Commercial banana 'trees' only produce one harvest and then are cut down anyway. If you then processed the banana fruit by canning or drying, you could also recover any gold in the peels and stem as well.
I also know they use plants to extract toxic waste from abandoned industrial sites. The linked article says that alfafa, poplar trees and mustard plants are used for this. The process is called phytoremediation.
What I'd like to see? Mission Impossible StarTrek style, ditch the ship and whip out all the cool gadgets to spy on bad guys
If you remember the episode Assignment Earth in TOS where they go back to the go abck to what was then the present (the mid 1960's) and there is guy named Gary Seven with a black cat, as well as his secretary played by Teri Garr, and the guy has to avert an explosion during an Apollo launch. My understanding is that this episode was filmed as pilot for a potential spin-off right along the line of the show you would like to see.
City on the Edge of Forever with Joan Collins set in the Depression has a similar plot only it was Spock that had to ensure that history wasn't interfered with. Same with the 2-part episode of Voyager where they travel back to 1990's San Francisco. And it's used again in the DS9 episode where they go back to the Trouble with Tribbles episode of TOS (included the great Worf line where he declines to explain why the Klingons have no bumps on the foreheads).
Really it is a common theme and it would make a good series. Of course, there was no way to do it if Scott Bakula was the lead, because the series concept would be too similar to Quantum Leap.
The growing sexual tension between T'Pal [sic] and the Archer is kind of interesting, though often overdone.
I think you must mean Trip (Commander Charles Tucker III) the Chief Engineer. I can't recall more than one or two scenes all season where there was any sexual tension between Captain Archer and T'pol. The infamous decontamination scene was between T'pol and Trip, for example.
A few years ago, I was researching the ACE "stack" (Asprin, Caffeine, and Ephedra).
You don't by any chance work for the The Coffee Science Information Centre, do you?
Yes, believe it or not, there is a research lab whose entire focus is the ebony elixir of life. The site has lots of interesting information such as information on caffiene (FYI a 10 oz cup of drip coffee has nearly three times the caffiene of a 2 oz shot of expresso); The health benefits of coffee; and, a Coffee FAQ.
Yeah its a special order item from Amazon too, though they do stock the original book and the sequals The Root of All Evil and Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell.
In fact I used ISBN.nu to do Internet-wide search of online book stores, and they only list the Amazon special order as far as availability. Even Amazon Canada (User Friendly being a Canadian strip) doesn't have it in their database.
killing most open flames from water heaters and furnaces would prevent a lot of fires.
I'd agree but only if this was done in response to real emergencies. You have to remember that the gas for pilot lights is flowing all the time - unless the valve has been manually shut off. So if you shut it off up stream, then turned it back on again the pilots would be out but the gas would start flowing again. Eventually this gas would build up and and could be ignited by any spark.
So either you would need to retrofit all gas appliances to have electric pilots, or you'd better be sure everyone has had a chance to shut off the own manual gas valves prior to the gas mains being turned back on.
Actually, if you think of it as 30 seconds of additional warning, I think it would be useful.
Most of the damage caused by an earthquake isn't caused instaneously in the first second of the event. Rather as structures are shaken they eventually crumble, break loose, etc. Having an additional 30 seconds would allow more time for people to get to door jams or outside or just away from book shelves etc.
And maybe there wouldn't be enough time shut gas lines off prior to the quake, but a button could be pushed (or signal sent automaticlly by the early warning system) that would automatically shut off the gas in 2 minutes, unless the instruction is rescinded. While that method might not eliminate all gas explosions caused by the quake, at least the resulting fires would not be fed by additional gas. Also, fireman would have an additional 30 seconds to suit up to fight the fires and be that much more ready to respond when/if they find out a fire/explosion has resulted from the quake.
For people in skyscrapers, the 30 seconds would at least be sufficient for the elevator to stop at the next floor, so it doesn't get caught in between floors. And it would increase the likelihood that subways could either get to the next station or not a leave they are already at.
FreeDOS gives the user just enough power to connect to a site where they can download the most recent ISO of their choice.
If that is your plan, you might want to download The Arachne Web Browser for DOS while your at it.
It's a full Internet Suite with PPP dialer, graphical Browser, email, MP3 player, etc. You may find you'll want to keep FreeDOS on a small partition after all.
turns up several cassette sized MP3 players, including the RomeMP3 player.
And there is another one on the market (perhaps only in Asia?) the MP WOW Both the RomeMP3 and the MP WOW are aparently originally from Korea.
being able to control it through standard FF/RW/Play controls on the tape deck.
Don't forget (as the clueless article of author noted) "Even the tone controls work" too. (How did this make it past the editor? Obviously the tone controls work since they are manipulating the analog audio stream that has already left the player)
what is the advantage to having "Aaa.txt" exist in the same directory as "AAA.txt"
Because the file name Aaa.txt is "0x41 0x61 0x61 0x2e 0x74 0x78 0x74" in hexadecimal which is not the same as "0x41 0x41 0x41 0x2e 0x74 0x78 0x74" the hexadecimal equivalent of "AAA.txt".
When you get down to the core operation of the kernel, it shouldn't be burdened with having to do conversions of 0x41 to 0x61. If some one writing an application wants to make that distinction, that's fine (and could easily be incorporated into programming libraries), but it shouldn't be the job of the OS.
On my Mac, if I type "Letter.txt" or "lETTEr.TxT", it is preserved and displayed in this manner. But if I want to find this file and I look for "letter.txt", the computer isn't going to tell me there isn't any.
In this circumstance the OS doesn't have to enter into the equation. Since what you are referring to is the search program, which is distinct from the OS. A search program could easily be programmed to default to being case insensitive (as the search in Windows is) and only discriminate on case when selected by the user.
Or if I try to name one file "letter.txt" and another "letter.TXT", it won't let me put them in the same directory.
Again, this could be addressed in the interface rather than the OS. Remember that with 32 bit Windows systems all files have three names, their long file name, their case sensitive long file name and the DOS (8.3) file name. As far as the OS is concerned you could get by with just one of these, the rest are just interface enhancements (I think that the OS in fact does this ignoring two of the name forms and using the third as the basis for locating files on the physical drive - the actual work of the OS.)
So really the question is could a *nix SHELL be created that is case insensitive, and could *nix file utilities be set to be case insensitive by default. And the answer to both of these questions is YES and YES, and the source code is out there should there be someone with sufficient interest and skill. You wouldn't the OS itself (i.e. the kernel) to be case insensitive as it would only remove capabilities and slow it down.
I drink 1 glass of soy milk or a cup of coffee at breakfast. Then maybe two 12-oz beers in the evening and sometimes a 12-oz glass of juice at bedtime.
That's it for maybe 9 days out of ten. not one drop of plain water, and at most 44 oz of other liquids (of which 32oz has diuretic properties). So either I'm getting the other needed 20 oz from the food I eat, or I guess I should have evaporated into nothing years ago.
Maybe when I'm sixty I'll discover that my kidney's have given out but I doubt it. Humans evolved on the plains of Africa, not a place known for having a half gallon of potable water for evey individual available every day. It was also much hotter than the typical North American living in air conditioned buildings is typically exposed to. Given that I expect that I will be fine.
Of course if I am going to be outside on a hot day I drink more fluids (even actual water on occasion) as I am going to sweat it out, but I don't sweat substantially in 70degF room typing at a keyboard.
My guess is the 8 glasses a day recommendation, if it was based on any kind of science, came about prior to the wide availability of AC, and when most people worked in jobs that required using muscles others than those that move their fingers, wrists and eyes.
More specifically go to this link
But that is a stream only, not a downloadable file like he was looking for. (yes I know there are ways to capture streams, but I think he is looking for something easier.)
I had the same question. It would seem that this would be a viable application at least in densely populated areas with good WiFi saturation like NYC or SF.
You should be able to do it with existing hardware, such as multimedia equipped PDA.
Some of the drawbacks have been identified here as reasons why Rabbit couldn't compete with mobile telephony - such as receiving calls would be spotty unless you camped out at known hot spot. But if you worked in an office with a wifi network and had one at home most of the time you would have access most of the time anyway - but these are times when you already have access to the POTS telephone network as well.
The other drawback is that without 100% saturation you would be constantly plagued with dropped calls if you tried to walk or especially drive while on the phone.
For those reasons it would be hard to sell as a standalone service, but if billed with mobile Internet for your PDA which is already up and running, I can't see why people wouldn't pay say an extra $10/month to also get telephony if it meant throwing away the mobile phone and the $30-$40 month cost.