Legal issues aside, if you aren't going to release the sources to your
driver, please don't bother releasing Linux sources at all.
Oops--that didn't make much sense. What I meant was:
Legal issues aside, if you aren't going to release the sources to your driver,
please don't bother releasing Linux drivers at all.
good to know about--but it's accepting defeat
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You should know about design patterns. They simply are a clear statement of object-oriented techniques that programmers have known about for decades. Think of it as a grammar and hanbook of style for programming languages.
But design patterns also show fundamental flaws in the object-oriented languages: design patterns are abstractions for which object oriented languages have no support. While object oriented languages have support for data structures and encapsulation in the form of type checking and access specifiers, when it comes to design patterns, you have to put them in by hand, document them by hand, and make sure they are working correctly by hand. Design patters are to object oriented languages like nested loops and data structures are to assembly language: you can implement them, but the language isn't going to help. The problem is that object-oriented languages really build abstractions out of individual classes and that individual classes are the units of abstraction and encapsulation, while design patterns require abstraction and type checking at the level of groups of classes. Attempts at supporting design patterns explicitly in object oriented languages so far also have been unsatisfactory as far as I'm concerned.
Legal issues aside, if you aren't going to release the sources to your driver, please don't bother releasing Linux sources at all. I buy Linux-compatible hardware because it won't end up getting outdated when a new version of the OS is released and because I can actually fix it when it misbehaves. By shipping binary-only drivers, your company is only taking up market share that could be occupied by companies that are willing to ship sources.
Or is there a serious technical reason that this product is inferior?
Nobody knows yet. An XML-based forms handling system has to be better than the garbage Microsoft is shipping right now with Microsoft Word. However, there are still plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to (1) screw up technically, and (2) make the stuff proprietary ("Your XML checks in, but it never checks out.").
a replacement for Microsoft Word forms
on
Microsoft takes on PDF
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
XDocs seems to be mostly about forms. Many businesses already use forms in Microsoft Word format; XDocs, being XML based, has to be better than that dreadful format.
Adobe tried to make PDF widely used for that purpose but failed. And that's quite fortunate: PDF's page oriented format isn't all that hot for on-line forms either.
That's 22 supermarkets per square mile, or 8 supermarkets per square Km.
Well, gosh, some people may have had to walk 10 or 20 minutes or walked
to a neighborhood store instead of a supermarket. But, yes, the density
of stores in European towns seems, in general, much higher. Unfortunately,
large shopping malls and supermarkets have started to creep in.
You also neglect the issue of hauling the supermarket shopping home. I
guess the load wouldn't be bad if you're shopping for 1 or 2 people and make
a trip every 2 or 3 days, but the load is unmanageable on foot if you're
shopping for 3 or 4 people
There are several solutions. Yes, one is to go shopping more frequently
(you get fresher produce as well). Some people use a folding grocery
cart. Some people go by car every now and then for big items but still
do most of their shopping on foot. The point is: you aren't forced
to use the car--you have options.
I currently live in a small ( 75,000 pop towns. I rather enjoy my quality
of life, what am I missing?
Well, there are all different kinds of small towns, and different things
make different people happy. Here we were talking about transportation.
How much time do you spend in the car? How often do you use your
car? How long does it take you to get to the airport?
Overall, chances are good that you spend much more time driving and traveling
and have much less selection in terms of good food, cultural events, and
recreational activities in your town than many comparable small towns in
Europe.
One last thing, please don't judge the rest of the USA by how CA does
things
What a silly comment. I'm not an outsider "judging" the US, this
is my home. And among the many places in the US I have lived and seen,
I think California is one of the nicer places. It's just that I know
that many nuisances and problems that others take for granted would be avoidable
if we changed our approach to urban planning and transportation.
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but
which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the
cost/reward linkage is not a direct one.
Indeed, it is. And my point is that roads and other car-related
infrastructure do not benefit the general economy relative to other choices
that we have, and that it would be possible to finance them through "normal
capitalist means". Hence, they aren't a "public good".
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars
because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
I'm not "assuming" anything. I have lived in places where public transportation
works. Transportation in the US just sucks in comparison, and it really decreases
quality of life greatly.
Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office,
etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each
way to the grocery store.
Who cares about "locally"? The question is: is it walkable or reachable
by public transportation, and it isn't. Working in high-tech, there
are almost no places in the US where I could move to and walk to work and
do shopping on foot.
people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred
floors high.
Housing prices in modern cities prove you wrong: the prices of condominiums
in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston show that those places are highly
desirable places to live. The same is true for places like downtown
Los Gatos and Palo Alto. People like to live in communities where they
can walk places and use public transportation. Also, there is nothing
"tiny" about condominiums.
But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of
making something economically efficient
But it's not a choice: in the US, I effectively don't have the choice not
to use a car. There is little usable public transportation, schedules
suck, and many important places, you can't get to other than by car. And
if I gave up my car, I would still be forced to subsidize driving-related
costs with more money annually than I spend on my car. Furthermore,
many of the direct costs of owning a car are fixed: once you buy it, you
might as well use it becaues the incremental cost is small compared to the
sunk costs. That is what keeps the automobile around.
If people paid for the actual cost of driving on a per-use basis, just like
they do for public transportation, and if a decent system of public transporation
were deployed in the US so that we actually had a choice, few people would
use cars on a regular basis because it just doesn't make sense. Give
people the choice and they will take it.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno.
Well, I do, because I have actually lived in places where public transportation
works, and let me tell you, it's great. A good system of public transportation
together with good urban planning doesn't mean communism, it doesn't mean
that you never drive, it doesn't mean living in tiny boxes, it just means
that most people can do most things without being forced to use a car on
a regular basis.
Then how do you suggest people that live in small towns get to work and
shop if they do not have a personal automobile/roads? Mass transist does
not work in a small town.
I don't know whether you have lived in a small town. I have, in Europe.
It took three minutes to walk to the supermarket, five minutes to walk
to work, and three minutes to walk to the train station (which would take
me directly to the airport and pretty much anywhere else). For short
distance trips, I'd use a bicycle or the bus (fast and on-time).
The quality of life there was unmatched by anything I have found in the Bay
Area (where I live now), even though I made a fraction then of what I make
now. The sad thing is that most Americans don't realize how poor the
quality of life in America actually is. (In case you are wondering why I didn't stay there--it's because my friends, family, and job are here.)
And some of those 'corrupt' politicians dismantled public transportation
because it was/is a very large sinkhole for tax dollars.
Cars are a much bigger "sinkhole" for tax dollars than public transportation.
Even disregarding all the infrastructure costs, health costs and lost
productivity from cars alone are enormous and dwarf anything spent on public transportation.
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers
want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving
related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers
pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction,
health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses.
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without
a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the
post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
You can leave whenever you want
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel
times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
and you can go wherever you want.
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because
there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45
minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather
have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in
the car.
The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic
benefits.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the
movement of goods and services more efficient.
Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy
sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like.
"Massive" relative to what? Compared to the automobile, all those
subsidies are negligible. Hell, just the indirect health costs resulting
from use of the automobile probably dwarf everything we spend on all those
alternatives combined.
Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the
only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies,
direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread.
Furthermore, people have no choice anymore: many parts of the country
have been built and set up that people can't do without a car anymore. And
people are forced to bear a lot of the costs of driving whether they own
a car themselves or not. It's not surprising that everybody has a car
under those conditions. I do as well--I could not afford not to. But
you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or
economically efficient.
Completely and utterly impossible. The vacuum must be contiguous, because
capsules or pods or whatever must move at high speeds through the structure.
It would not be possible to build the system with isolated sections of tube.
Come on, those problems have standard engineering problems. You can
have doors between sections that are normally closed and open when a train
approaches.
And as for the rest, a vacuum-filled container represents a great deal
of potential energy.
Lots of things we deal with in daily life contain enormous amounts of
energy. An SUV traveling on the highway contains a lot of kinetic energy.
A truck driving along a mountain road contains a lot of potential energy,
and if it falls on you, you are dead. An airplane contains lots of
potential, kinetic, and chemical energy. We can deal with those things.
As for personal rapid whatever you said, it suffers from exactly the same problem as all other rail-based transportation: there will always be many more destinations than there are stations. For the majority of the population, such a system would be an inconvenience at best.
And cars aren't an "inconvenience"? If you haven't noticed, in many metropolitan areas, you can't park anywhere near your destination. Going into downtown NYC, DC, or SF by car, I usually end up spending at least 30 minutes on parking and walking downtown. Driving there, traffic moves at an average 10-15mph. Cars are already a major inconvenience.
PRT is superior in both of those areas to cars, while addressing the problems of traditional transit systems: deployment costs, space requirements, coverage in the suburbs, frequent stops, and limited schedules.
All transportation systems suffer from problems. The ones PRT suffers from are different from those of cars or rail. As a result, PRT looks like a more cost-effective and convenient tradeoff than either cars or rail.
Read the hundred or so comments criticizing this idea on the grounds of practicality (that much vacuum is effectively impossible) and safety (that much vacuum is effectively a giant bomb).
(From someone who lives on a little rock floating around in a big vacuum, that statement sounds pretty funny.)
Seriously, such a system would be constructed in self-contained sections; if one fails, nothing particularly serious would happen.
The US did something worse: they subsidized inefficient transportation in the form of the personal automobile and the required infrastructure to support it. Politicians that must be considered corrupt dismantled public transportation around the country. The result have been urban sprawl and the breakdown of social networks, some of the longest commute times in the world, poor air quality, an unnecessary dependence on foreign oil, and enormous expenses for oil and cars.
A hologram is a very specific form of 3D display, based on coherent light. Eye tracking, lenticular arrays, various forms of projection onto rapidly moving screens, and other kinds of 3D displays are not holograms.
Most of these technologies are also based on old ideas and have also been around for years; it's just that the ability of computers and displays is finally catching up with the needs of such displays.
Overall, it is hard to see, though, why people really care that much about not wearing glasses. LCD shutter glasses or head mounted displays are getting small and less expensive. Instead of having some bulky contraption take up space, wouldn't you rather have something small you can take anywhere?
The DRX-500UL will give you the same specs in an external drive, with both USB2 and FireWire interfaces (you may be able to get the same by sticking a DRU-500A into an enclosure).
With an external drive, you don't have to buy a new one with every new machine, you can move it between machines, you can put it in a more convenient location than the main CPU, and when DVDs become obsolete (as they will sooner or later), you can keep the drive around for a few more years without keeping a whole, obsolete computer.
I don't see anything interesting in the screen shots. There are still huge, confusing menus and hundreds of icons scattered illogically around the screen--just like Windows XP.
Check the PRT web sites. Some PRT concepts involve personally owned cars/cabins. However, I see mostly disadvantages with that. An I certainly wouldn't want anything maintained by Joe Somebody to travel at 300mph+ in the same tube as me.
Evacuated tube transports have been in science fiction since the 1960's, if not earlier. They look like they may be a good idea, but it seems unlikely to me that the airlines are going to let this happen; like Hollywood, they like to protect their market, society be damned.
Note that for local transportation, the problem isn't speed but coverage. I can't realistically take public transportation to work because it would take me far too long to get to the nearest station and because trains take far too long to get to the destination (because of a lot of stops).
For local transportation, another concept makes more sense to me: Personal Rapid Transit [1], [2]. Personal Rapid Transit consists of small passenger cabins (1-3 people) that you call to the nearest station and take to the station nearest to your destination, almost like a taxi or chauffeur. And unlike evacuated tube transports, they do not require a lot of digging or construction.
And, politically, personal rapid transit seems more promising in the short term: it's something that can be done at the local level.
Bluetooth security may not be perfect, but it's a whole lot better than this. Bluetooth devices are paired and can encrypt their communications. Furthermore, setting up Bluetooth security is much simpler than setting up 802.11b security, and many devices will simply not work unless the end user does. If all wireless keyboards switched to a proper Bluetooth implementation, security would be a whole lot better than with these random RF hacks.
The attitude companies have towards security is appalling. Wireless keyboards have to use strong cryptography or credit card numbers and personal information are being broadcast across the neighborhood. 256 channels isn't going to fix it.
Re:Only if it's the same size disk
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 2
This is true, but if the target is larger you're still OK.
Not necessarily: if the drive geometries differ, you may well be in trouble.
Re:Wipe every free block for great compression
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 2
use a program that creates thousands of 1 MB files filled with a repeating pattern
"cat/dev/zero > junk; rm junk" will do the trick (if you don't believe me, try it).
use rsync or multicast rsync
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 2
Netpipes with tar is OK in a pinch, but for ghosting rsync is probably the better solution all around. With rsync, you can already get a multicast server and don't have to "write your own".
Oops -- HTML quoting wrong
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 2
This should have been: (2) use gzip, as in "gzip </dev/hda | nc -l -p 5030" and "nc server 5030 | gunzip >/dev/hda".
Slashdot Mirror
Legal issues aside, if you aren't going to release the sources to your driver, please don't bother releasing Linux sources at all.
Oops--that didn't make much sense. What I meant was:
Legal issues aside, if you aren't going to release the sources to your driver, please don't bother releasing Linux drivers at all.
But design patterns also show fundamental flaws in the object-oriented languages: design patterns are abstractions for which object oriented languages have no support. While object oriented languages have support for data structures and encapsulation in the form of type checking and access specifiers, when it comes to design patterns, you have to put them in by hand, document them by hand, and make sure they are working correctly by hand. Design patters are to object oriented languages like nested loops and data structures are to assembly language: you can implement them, but the language isn't going to help. The problem is that object-oriented languages really build abstractions out of individual classes and that individual classes are the units of abstraction and encapsulation, while design patterns require abstraction and type checking at the level of groups of classes. Attempts at supporting design patterns explicitly in object oriented languages so far also have been unsatisfactory as far as I'm concerned.
Legal issues aside, if you aren't going to release the sources to your driver, please don't bother releasing Linux sources at all. I buy Linux-compatible hardware because it won't end up getting outdated when a new version of the OS is released and because I can actually fix it when it misbehaves. By shipping binary-only drivers, your company is only taking up market share that could be occupied by companies that are willing to ship sources.
Nobody knows yet. An XML-based forms handling system has to be better than the garbage Microsoft is shipping right now with Microsoft Word. However, there are still plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to (1) screw up technically, and (2) make the stuff proprietary ("Your XML checks in, but it never checks out.").
Adobe tried to make PDF widely used for that purpose but failed. And that's quite fortunate: PDF's page oriented format isn't all that hot for on-line forms either.
I actually have lived and traveled all over the US. I just happen to think that the Bay Area is still one of the nicer places.
I just don't know what to say about the intellectual capacity of someone who judges the quality of life in the US by looking at the Bay area.
Perhaps you should just stop jumping to conclusions.
That's 22 supermarkets per square mile, or 8 supermarkets per square Km.
Well, gosh, some people may have had to walk 10 or 20 minutes or walked to a neighborhood store instead of a supermarket. But, yes, the density of stores in European towns seems, in general, much higher. Unfortunately, large shopping malls and supermarkets have started to creep in.
You also neglect the issue of hauling the supermarket shopping home. I guess the load wouldn't be bad if you're shopping for 1 or 2 people and make a trip every 2 or 3 days, but the load is unmanageable on foot if you're shopping for 3 or 4 people
There are several solutions. Yes, one is to go shopping more frequently (you get fresher produce as well). Some people use a folding grocery cart. Some people go by car every now and then for big items but still do most of their shopping on foot. The point is: you aren't forced to use the car--you have options.
I currently live in a small ( 75,000 pop towns. I rather enjoy my quality of life, what am I missing?
Well, there are all different kinds of small towns, and different things make different people happy. Here we were talking about transportation. How much time do you spend in the car? How often do you use your car? How long does it take you to get to the airport?
Overall, chances are good that you spend much more time driving and traveling and have much less selection in terms of good food, cultural events, and recreational activities in your town than many comparable small towns in Europe.
One last thing, please don't judge the rest of the USA by how CA does things
What a silly comment. I'm not an outsider "judging" the US, this is my home. And among the many places in the US I have lived and seen, I think California is one of the nicer places. It's just that I know that many nuisances and problems that others take for granted would be avoidable if we changed our approach to urban planning and transportation.
No, a "public good" is a thing which benefits the general economy but which is impossible to finance through normal capitalist means because the cost/reward linkage is not a direct one.
Indeed, it is. And my point is that roads and other car-related infrastructure do not benefit the general economy relative to other choices that we have, and that it would be possible to finance them through "normal capitalist means". Hence, they aren't a "public good".
Transportation is a bitch of a problem. Assuming that poeple rely on cars because of some sort of Detroit conspiracy is extremely simple minded.
I'm not "assuming" anything. I have lived in places where public transportation works. Transportation in the US just sucks in comparison, and it really decreases quality of life greatly.
Most people do most of their grocery shopping, dry cleaning, post office, etc. erands locally--you're a fool if you are driving an hour and a half each way to the grocery store.
Who cares about "locally"? The question is: is it walkable or reachable by public transportation, and it isn't. Working in high-tech, there are almost no places in the US where I could move to and walk to work and do shopping on foot.
people don't want to live in tiny little fishbowl cages stacked a hundred floors high.
Housing prices in modern cities prove you wrong: the prices of condominiums in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston show that those places are highly desirable places to live. The same is true for places like downtown Los Gatos and Palo Alto. People like to live in communities where they can walk places and use public transportation. Also, there is nothing "tiny" about condominiums.
But I can't see eliminating choices from people's lives in the name of making something economically efficient
But it's not a choice: in the US, I effectively don't have the choice not to use a car. There is little usable public transportation, schedules suck, and many important places, you can't get to other than by car. And if I gave up my car, I would still be forced to subsidize driving-related costs with more money annually than I spend on my car. Furthermore, many of the direct costs of owning a car are fixed: once you buy it, you might as well use it becaues the incremental cost is small compared to the sunk costs. That is what keeps the automobile around.
If people paid for the actual cost of driving on a per-use basis, just like they do for public transportation, and if a decent system of public transporation were deployed in the US so that we actually had a choice, few people would use cars on a regular basis because it just doesn't make sense. Give people the choice and they will take it.
Is it a good way to live? I dunno.
Well, I do, because I have actually lived in places where public transportation works, and let me tell you, it's great. A good system of public transportation together with good urban planning doesn't mean communism, it doesn't mean that you never drive, it doesn't mean living in tiny boxes, it just means that most people can do most things without being forced to use a car on a regular basis.
Then how do you suggest people that live in small towns get to work and shop if they do not have a personal automobile/roads? Mass transist does not work in a small town.
I don't know whether you have lived in a small town. I have, in Europe. It took three minutes to walk to the supermarket, five minutes to walk to work, and three minutes to walk to the train station (which would take me directly to the airport and pretty much anywhere else). For short distance trips, I'd use a bicycle or the bus (fast and on-time).
The quality of life there was unmatched by anything I have found in the Bay Area (where I live now), even though I made a fraction then of what I make now. The sad thing is that most Americans don't realize how poor the quality of life in America actually is. (In case you are wondering why I didn't stay there--it's because my friends, family, and job are here.)
And some of those 'corrupt' politicians dismantled public transportation because it was/is a very large sinkhole for tax dollars.
Cars are a much bigger "sinkhole" for tax dollars than public transportation. Even disregarding all the infrastructure costs, health costs and lost productivity from cars alone are enormous and dwarf anything spent on public transportation.
Roads are generally referred to as a public good.
But they are not a "public good", they are something that only drivers want and need, yet everybody effectively has to pay for roads and other driving related costs. If we wanted to, it would be easy to make only drivers pay for driving-related costs: pay for large chunks of road construction, health care, military, and the legal system out of gasoline taxes.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses.
Sadly, a lot of areas of the US are built in a way that you can't do without a car anymore. I cannot afford to live an area where I can walk to the post office or to a store. But that's not an "advantage".
You can leave whenever you want
Too bad that you can't arrive whenever you want, however, since travel times by car have become unpredictable in many places.
and you can go wherever you want.
Not really. There are plenty of places I can't easily go by car because there is no parking. And what's the point anyway? I spend 45 minutes in the car to go from one parking lot to another. I'd much rather have the goods and services I need around locally and spend less time in the car.
The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic benefits.
The same is true for public transportation: it creates jobs and makes the movement of goods and services more efficient.Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like.
"Massive" relative to what? Compared to the automobile, all those subsidies are negligible. Hell, just the indirect health costs resulting from use of the automobile probably dwarf everything we spend on all those alternatives combined.
Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.
I didn't say it was "the only reason". But without massive subsidies, direct and indirect, the personal automobile wouldn't have become widespread. Furthermore, people have no choice anymore: many parts of the country have been built and set up that people can't do without a car anymore. And people are forced to bear a lot of the costs of driving whether they own a car themselves or not. It's not surprising that everybody has a car under those conditions. I do as well--I could not afford not to. But you are fooling yourself if you think that that is a good way to live or economically efficient.
Completely and utterly impossible. The vacuum must be contiguous, because capsules or pods or whatever must move at high speeds through the structure. It would not be possible to build the system with isolated sections of tube.
Come on, those problems have standard engineering problems. You can have doors between sections that are normally closed and open when a train approaches.
And as for the rest, a vacuum-filled container represents a great deal of potential energy.
Lots of things we deal with in daily life contain enormous amounts of energy. An SUV traveling on the highway contains a lot of kinetic energy. A truck driving along a mountain road contains a lot of potential energy, and if it falls on you, you are dead. An airplane contains lots of potential, kinetic, and chemical energy. We can deal with those things.
And cars aren't an "inconvenience"? If you haven't noticed, in many metropolitan areas, you can't park anywhere near your destination. Going into downtown NYC, DC, or SF by car, I usually end up spending at least 30 minutes on parking and walking downtown. Driving there, traffic moves at an average 10-15mph. Cars are already a major inconvenience.
PRT is superior in both of those areas to cars, while addressing the problems of traditional transit systems: deployment costs, space requirements, coverage in the suburbs, frequent stops, and limited schedules.
All transportation systems suffer from problems. The ones PRT suffers from are different from those of cars or rail. As a result, PRT looks like a more cost-effective and convenient tradeoff than either cars or rail.
Read the hundred or so comments criticizing this idea on the grounds of practicality (that much vacuum is effectively impossible) and safety (that much vacuum is effectively a giant bomb).
(From someone who lives on a little rock floating around in a big vacuum, that statement sounds pretty funny.)
Seriously, such a system would be constructed in self-contained sections; if one fails, nothing particularly serious would happen.
The US did something worse: they subsidized inefficient transportation in the form of the personal automobile and the required infrastructure to support it. Politicians that must be considered corrupt dismantled public transportation around the country. The result have been urban sprawl and the breakdown of social networks, some of the longest commute times in the world, poor air quality, an unnecessary dependence on foreign oil, and enormous expenses for oil and cars.
Most of these technologies are also based on old ideas and have also been around for years; it's just that the ability of computers and displays is finally catching up with the needs of such displays.
Overall, it is hard to see, though, why people really care that much about not wearing glasses. LCD shutter glasses or head mounted displays are getting small and less expensive. Instead of having some bulky contraption take up space, wouldn't you rather have something small you can take anywhere?
With an external drive, you don't have to buy a new one with every new machine, you can move it between machines, you can put it in a more convenient location than the main CPU, and when DVDs become obsolete (as they will sooner or later), you can keep the drive around for a few more years without keeping a whole, obsolete computer.
I don't see anything interesting in the screen shots. There are still huge, confusing menus and hundreds of icons scattered illogically around the screen--just like Windows XP.
Check the PRT web sites. Some PRT concepts involve personally owned cars/cabins. However, I see mostly disadvantages with that. An I certainly wouldn't want anything maintained by Joe Somebody to travel at 300mph+ in the same tube as me.
Note that for local transportation, the problem isn't speed but coverage. I can't realistically take public transportation to work because it would take me far too long to get to the nearest station and because trains take far too long to get to the destination (because of a lot of stops).
For local transportation, another concept makes more sense to me: Personal Rapid Transit [1], [2]. Personal Rapid Transit consists of small passenger cabins (1-3 people) that you call to the nearest station and take to the station nearest to your destination, almost like a taxi or chauffeur. And unlike evacuated tube transports, they do not require a lot of digging or construction.
And, politically, personal rapid transit seems more promising in the short term: it's something that can be done at the local level.
Bluetooth security may not be perfect, but it's a whole lot better than this. Bluetooth devices are paired and can encrypt their communications. Furthermore, setting up Bluetooth security is much simpler than setting up 802.11b security, and many devices will simply not work unless the end user does. If all wireless keyboards switched to a proper Bluetooth implementation, security would be a whole lot better than with these random RF hacks.
The attitude companies have towards security is appalling. Wireless keyboards have to use strong cryptography or credit card numbers and personal information are being broadcast across the neighborhood. 256 channels isn't going to fix it.
Not necessarily: if the drive geometries differ, you may well be in trouble.
"cat /dev/zero > junk; rm junk" will do the trick (if you don't believe me, try it).
Netpipes with tar is OK in a pinch, but for ghosting rsync is probably the better solution all around. With rsync, you can already get a multicast server and don't have to "write your own".
This should have been: (2) use gzip, as in "gzip < /dev/hda | nc -l -p 5030" and "nc server 5030 | gunzip > /dev/hda".