Yes, you can get a cheap as crap bike at Walmart for that price, but that's the bottom of the barrel bike from them. A sporting goods store is barely any better than a department store. I don't know what you consider a specialty bike store, but I'd expect that they carry Trek, Giant, and Raleigh. $850 is a mid level fitness Trek (FX 7.4 to be exact). Trek's only tandem is 1$200. Raleigh's is $930. Giant doesn't even have one. Heck, look here: http://www.mtbtandems.com/
My vote is for Python. My reasons are that it'[s very good for the rapid part. There's also tons of libraries to do darn near everything under the sun (see pypi.python.org). Finally, one thing in their mantra is that readability counts. This means that you can pick up your project several months later and know what it does... maybe even someone else's! Try doing this with Perl or Ruby, and it's much harder.
Python works quite well on the UNIX like systems, decently on Windows, has good command line helper libraries (argparse or optparse), and has several really good web frameworks. Heck, you can use IronPython or Jython and mix into your.NET or Java code!
The biggest weak point is probably full GUIs. It's not that there's not any good ones, there's just not a good default one. TkInter is built-in, but it's based on Tcl/Tk, the interface isn't very Pythonic, and the end result isn't great. WxPython is good for a basic GUIs, but adding custom widgets is hard. PyQt and PySidehas a more complete collection of widgets, but it again is tough to add new widgets. PyGTK has the large collection of widgets, and widgets can be written in Python and become first class widgets even in other languages. The new kid on the block is Kivy, which is kind of like QML for Python. Kivy defines very low level functionality that builds up widgets, but it makes it easy to combine them together to make a complete widget. This sounds like a lot of work, but it turns out to not be as bad as you'd expect.
Also, PyDev, PyCharm, and WingIDE are all pretty amazing IDEs for Python.
Finally, there's a good amount of jobs asking for Python, especially in big cities.
They have Python support too. It's called PyCharm, and it's a great IDE.
I have the following IDEs: WingIDE (pretty good... I'd love to support those guys more, but the big guns are starting to come into the market); PyDev (Eclipse-based... best free Python one available), which has gotten a lot better since I first used it and is good; and PyCharm, which is great for web development (especially Django).
Mind you, I tend to just use a text editor and command line to do most of it.
Have you looked at the JetBrains IDEs? PyCharm is amazing. IntelliJ IDEA has been the IDE I keep hearing people actually like for Java. I haven't tried the others, but if they are half as good as PyCharm, they're quite good.
Eclipse isn't actually too bad, except that it was over engineered into little components (the Java way). That just tends to leave it pretty slow.
Note: I do not work for JetBrains, just use PyCharm and have really liked it.
On the other hand, support for either is dead. Maemo 5 drops support for both. Hopefully the community continues some love, but we'll see what happens when the first Maemo 5 device comes out.
There is actually 1 thing missing in your spec list.
Touch screen: Resistive vs Capacitive with multitouch support. iPhone wins big.
I don't actually know it's resistive, but most other HTC stuff is. I use a XV6900 (HTC Vogue) running Android and love it, only thing I really would love would be a capacitive screen. Wouldn't consider an iPhone, but it is a huge selling point.
It used UMS (USB Mass Storage). The problem is that Syncropated queries HAL to determine if a drive is a DAP. In my case, the player was NOT considered a DAP. I modified the database that HAL uses to say it WAS a DAP, and it worked like a charm.
Seeing it appears you are using Ubuntu, I'll give you instructions for that.
Open a bug in Launchpad (http://launchpad.net). Place the name of the device and output from lsusb and lshw when the device is plugged in.
Most likely the device did not declare itself as a DAP (Digital Audio Player) in HAL. It's a simple configuration file change if you want to make it yourself as well.
I had to get a similar change in for my Samsung DAP.
I don't know about anyone else, but I was only allowed to cite ONE encyclopedia anyways until like 6th grade. Then it changed to NO encyclopedias.
Also, a reason to block Wikipedia isn't poor quality, it's explicit content. Don't believe me? Look up "vagina." On the other hand, the filtered versions that can be gotten on DVD WOULD be nice.
Have you tried Ubuntu and then http://ubuntuguide.org? I've gotten quite a few people to use Ubuntu for months w/ only a couple minute tutorial and little to no questions with Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Guide.
As far as the font rendering. It turns out Microsoft doesn't actually render fonts correctly. Wifi is as easy for me as System->Administration->Networking (this is a menu structure), enter password (as this is not something a person w/o admin rights should be able to do), click on my wireless card from a list with pictures, click properties (or I could have double-clicked the wifi card), then choose the ESSID I wanted from a dropdown list or manually enter the ESSID I wanted, click Ok.... done. Sounds kinda long in words but it's just "open program, choose wireless card, choose ESSID, leave program"
As far as the IE thing, you can get IE to run w/ Wine quite easily. It's dead easy if you use CrossOver Office (www.codeweavers.com)
I know you said you don't want to switch away from RADMIN, but you should look into logmein.com. They have a great product. Yes, it's a java applet, but it honestly runs quickly and just seems to work.
xine is definitely *NOT* a legal DVD player. The only legal one currently is PowerDVD, which comes with TurboLinux ONLY. The only legal one that I know of that's coming out that consumers can buy is the one Fluendo (fluendo.com) is working on.
Better wireless support... Good noting ndiswrapper. Another thing to note is that it is a *BUG* if your wireless card doesn't autodetect on Ubuntu. That's a real commitment to hardware support.
The real issue with the ugly fonts comes from companies like Apple holding some very basic patents on font rendering. I don't know if anyone has looked into finding a way to legally be allowed to enable them, but it would be great.
I know my wife and I (along with most of our cousins) grew up on the Texas Instruments Speak 'N Spell, Speak 'N Math, Speak 'N Read.
So, I guess what I'm saying is don't think this is a new idea. Don't think this is a bad idea (as a lot of the people I know that used it rated top 5-10 percentile for IQ).
Also, you can potentially pick up the old Speak 'N... series for really cheap with the add-on modules. They are just as applicable now as they were then.
Honstly, this is *NOT* a bad thing. A portion of your bill goes towards the service you receive while a portion goes to cover the costs of maintaining the equipment that gets from your house to the telco/cable provider and out to everyone else while yet another portion goes to customer service.
Obviously, there would be no new cost to the telco/cable provider for having two signals over the same cable into your house (note I didn't say yo get two signals to your house as obviously there would need to be a multiplexer and other equipment).
Personally, I live in a region where the local phone company and the local cable company are in fact the same company. The cable system hasn't been updated since sometime in the late 80's or early 90's. There's no digital and no cable modem. There's also no plan as the company is a telephone company that happened to buy out a little company that provided both. Now I'm literally left with DSL from my telco or another telco (that still has to go through my local telco and is therefore quite expensive) or a T1 from my local telco. Boy, that's competition at its finest isn't it? A group is now starting to move in w/ wireless Internet, but the terrain is making it quite hard to get any customers. (Well, I can hope I guess.)
I'll give you a simple example of two lossless compressions.
"how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?" Replace "wood" with "!", "chuck" with "@", and " would " with "#". The sentence is now "how much !#a !@ @ if a !@#@ !?" That was pretty good.
You are standing 150,000 feet from a wall and move to 150,002 feet from the wall. You say you moved 2 feet further, which is a smaller number (and therefore takes less space).
Usually, compression is done by knowing a lot about the domain of the problem and being able to notice patterns over a large amount of data.
There are a couple other reasons they use vorbis. 1) Cross-platform/Single implementation. This is particularly true of UT as they support multiple platforms. 2) Royalty-free. Yup, game developers would definitely have to pay for MP3s to be put in their game
Let's just say he's the only guy in Congress to vote AGAINST the Patriot Act. From his website (russfeingold.org):
Senator Feingold supported 90% of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act, but too many provisions were deeply troubling. Certain provisions may infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens, while doing little protect our country against terrorists.
If he ever runs for President, he's got my vote.
I'll have to say BS on this. My suggestion is to borrow a second CRT and hook it up the same way. Most likely the lag will still be there.
I have no idea what OS as the video is down. My answer is to upgrade the video drivers and check for some stupid setting being messed up.
It's a simple solution that may not help if someone really wants to steal it (isn't much you can do about that other than locking it to something immobile... though that can just be cut in seconds if they have a bolt cutter).
Stuffbak plus some lockdown would probably be good. That way when they steal it and can't use it, they'll return it for the reward;)
OTOH, if you just leave it somewhere, Stuffbak alone does wonders.
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It's not going to be no maintenance This sounds fairly similar to the market GrandCare Systems (grandcare.com) was designed.
I'm unsure of the costs, but I'm sure they'd be happy to work it out with you.
Discloure: GrandCare was started by someone I went to high school with. Though it's still a cool product.
Yes, you can get a cheap as crap bike at Walmart for that price, but that's the bottom of the barrel bike from them. A sporting goods store is barely any better than a department store. I don't know what you consider a specialty bike store, but I'd expect that they carry Trek, Giant, and Raleigh. $850 is a mid level fitness Trek (FX 7.4 to be exact). Trek's only tandem is 1$200. Raleigh's is $930. Giant doesn't even have one. Heck, look here: http://www.mtbtandems.com/
My vote is for Python. My reasons are that it'[s very good for the rapid part. There's also tons of libraries to do darn near everything under the sun (see pypi.python.org). Finally, one thing in their mantra is that readability counts. This means that you can pick up your project several months later and know what it does... maybe even someone else's! Try doing this with Perl or Ruby, and it's much harder.
Python works quite well on the UNIX like systems, decently on Windows, has good command line helper libraries (argparse or optparse), and has several really good web frameworks. Heck, you can use IronPython or Jython and mix into your .NET or Java code!
The biggest weak point is probably full GUIs. It's not that there's not any good ones, there's just not a good default one. TkInter is built-in, but it's based on Tcl/Tk, the interface isn't very Pythonic, and the end result isn't great. WxPython is good for a basic GUIs, but adding custom widgets is hard. PyQt and PySidehas a more complete collection of widgets, but it again is tough to add new widgets. PyGTK has the large collection of widgets, and widgets can be written in Python and become first class widgets even in other languages. The new kid on the block is Kivy, which is kind of like QML for Python. Kivy defines very low level functionality that builds up widgets, but it makes it easy to combine them together to make a complete widget. This sounds like a lot of work, but it turns out to not be as bad as you'd expect.
Also, PyDev, PyCharm, and WingIDE are all pretty amazing IDEs for Python.
Finally, there's a good amount of jobs asking for Python, especially in big cities.
They have Python support too. It's called PyCharm, and it's a great IDE.
I have the following IDEs: WingIDE (pretty good... I'd love to support those guys more, but the big guns are starting to come into the market); PyDev (Eclipse-based... best free Python one available), which has gotten a lot better since I first used it and is good; and PyCharm, which is great for web development (especially Django).
Mind you, I tend to just use a text editor and command line to do most of it.
Have you looked at the JetBrains IDEs? PyCharm is amazing. IntelliJ IDEA has been the IDE I keep hearing people actually like for Java. I haven't tried the others, but if they are half as good as PyCharm, they're quite good.
Eclipse isn't actually too bad, except that it was over engineered into little components (the Java way). That just tends to leave it pretty slow.
Note: I do not work for JetBrains, just use PyCharm and have really liked it.
On the other hand, support for either is dead. Maemo 5 drops support for both. Hopefully the community continues some love, but we'll see what happens when the first Maemo 5 device comes out.
There is actually 1 thing missing in your spec list.
Touch screen: Resistive vs Capacitive with multitouch support. iPhone wins big.
I don't actually know it's resistive, but most other HTC stuff is. I use a XV6900 (HTC Vogue) running Android and love it, only thing I really would love would be a capacitive screen. Wouldn't consider an iPhone, but it is a huge selling point.
As I said, I got it working.
It used UMS (USB Mass Storage). The problem is that Syncropated queries HAL to determine if a drive is a DAP. In my case, the player was NOT considered a DAP. I modified the database that HAL uses to say it WAS a DAP, and it worked like a charm.
Seeing it appears you are using Ubuntu, I'll give you instructions for that.
Open a bug in Launchpad (http://launchpad.net). Place the name of the device and output from lsusb and lshw when the device is plugged in.
Most likely the device did not declare itself as a DAP (Digital Audio Player) in HAL. It's a simple configuration file change if you want to make it yourself as well.
I had to get a similar change in for my Samsung DAP.
I don't know about anyone else, but I was only allowed to cite ONE encyclopedia anyways until like 6th grade. Then it changed to NO encyclopedias.
Also, a reason to block Wikipedia isn't poor quality, it's explicit content. Don't believe me? Look up "vagina." On the other hand, the filtered versions that can be gotten on DVD WOULD be nice.
Have you tried Ubuntu and then http://ubuntuguide.org? I've gotten quite a few people to use Ubuntu for months w/ only a couple minute tutorial and little to no questions with Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Guide.
As far as the font rendering. It turns out Microsoft doesn't actually render fonts correctly. Wifi is as easy for me as System->Administration->Networking (this is a menu structure), enter password (as this is not something a person w/o admin rights should be able to do), click on my wireless card from a list with pictures, click properties (or I could have double-clicked the wifi card), then choose the ESSID I wanted from a dropdown list or manually enter the ESSID I wanted, click Ok.... done. Sounds kinda long in words but it's just "open program, choose wireless card, choose ESSID, leave program"
As far as the IE thing, you can get IE to run w/ Wine quite easily. It's dead easy if you use CrossOver Office (www.codeweavers.com)
I know you said you don't want to switch away from RADMIN, but you should look into logmein.com. They have a great product. Yes, it's a java applet, but it honestly runs quickly and just seems to work.
I must say that I agree nearly 75% with you.
Exchange/OpenExchange == right on
xine is definitely *NOT* a legal DVD player. The only legal one currently is PowerDVD, which comes with TurboLinux ONLY. The only legal one that I know of that's coming out that consumers can buy is the one Fluendo (fluendo.com) is working on.
Better wireless support... Good noting ndiswrapper. Another thing to note is that it is a *BUG* if your wireless card doesn't autodetect on Ubuntu. That's a real commitment to hardware support.
The real issue with the ugly fonts comes from companies like Apple holding some very basic patents on font rendering. I don't know if anyone has looked into finding a way to legally be allowed to enable them, but it would be great.
I know my wife and I (along with most of our cousins) grew up on the Texas Instruments Speak 'N Spell, Speak 'N Math, Speak 'N Read.
So, I guess what I'm saying is don't think this is a new idea. Don't think this is a bad idea (as a lot of the people I know that used it rated top 5-10 percentile for IQ).
Also, you can potentially pick up the old Speak 'N... series for really cheap with the add-on modules. They are just as applicable now as they were then.
Honstly, this is *NOT* a bad thing. A portion of your bill goes towards the service you receive while a portion goes to cover the costs of maintaining the equipment that gets from your house to the telco/cable provider and out to everyone else while yet another portion goes to customer service.
Obviously, there would be no new cost to the telco/cable provider for having two signals over the same cable into your house (note I didn't say yo get two signals to your house as obviously there would need to be a multiplexer and other equipment).
Personally, I live in a region where the local phone company and the local cable company are in fact the same company. The cable system hasn't been updated since sometime in the late 80's or early 90's. There's no digital and no cable modem. There's also no plan as the company is a telephone company that happened to buy out a little company that provided both. Now I'm literally left with DSL from my telco or another telco (that still has to go through my local telco and is therefore quite expensive) or a T1 from my local telco. Boy, that's competition at its finest isn't it? A group is now starting to move in w/ wireless Internet, but the terrain is making it quite hard to get any customers. (Well, I can hope I guess.)
Actually it's up to X.org now.
I'll give you a simple example of two lossless compressions. "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?" Replace "wood" with "!", "chuck" with "@", and " would " with "#". The sentence is now "how much !#a !@ @ if a !@#@ !?" That was pretty good. You are standing 150,000 feet from a wall and move to 150,002 feet from the wall. You say you moved 2 feet further, which is a smaller number (and therefore takes less space). Usually, compression is done by knowing a lot about the domain of the problem and being able to notice patterns over a large amount of data.
I would assume you don't consider Texas part of the south than. There are probably as many tech companies there as the Silicon Valley.
Also RedHat and Epic Megagames are in N.C. Tiberon (makers of Madden Football for EA) is in Florida. There's definitely some.
There are a couple other reasons they use vorbis.
1) Cross-platform/Single implementation. This is particularly true of UT as they support multiple platforms.
2) Royalty-free. Yup, game developers would definitely have to pay for MP3s to be put in their game
Let's just say he's the only guy in Congress to vote AGAINST the Patriot Act. From his website (russfeingold.org): Senator Feingold supported 90% of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act, but too many provisions were deeply troubling. Certain provisions may infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens, while doing little protect our country against terrorists. If he ever runs for President, he's got my vote.
I'll have to say BS on this. My suggestion is to borrow a second CRT and hook it up the same way. Most likely the lag will still be there. I have no idea what OS as the video is down. My answer is to upgrade the video drivers and check for some stupid setting being messed up.
It's a simple solution that may not help if someone really wants to steal it (isn't much you can do about that other than locking it to something immobile... though that can just be cut in seconds if they have a bolt cutter). Stuffbak plus some lockdown would probably be good. That way when they steal it and can't use it, they'll return it for the reward ;)
OTOH, if you just leave it somewhere, Stuffbak alone does wonders.
You need to look at his site and see his business model. It's currently released and costs $8 (at least for th Ogg Vorbis version).
After a couple years, he will release it to the public domain (or some other free license).
Something you may want to look at is MOL (maconlinux.org). It's for PPC, but it does demonstrate how to do virtual machines like you are discussing.
Don't forget that one good thing is also your ability to write a good driver for the client OS. That can yield huge speed increases on its own.
OmniGraffle doesn't come w/ OSX. It's either $70 or $120 (standard or professional).