For one of the better descriptions for a normal sighted person on what color-blindness is to most people, check out this page. Any time one of my friends starts pestering me about what this color, or that color, looks like, I send them here, it generally answers their questions.
And finally, for anyone that had their hopes up like me, it seems the friendly people at ColorMax were lying about what their glasses could do (iirc, they basically claimed to have a [very expensive] cure for colorblindness)
Since the article is archived, I guess I can't provide the direct link (or is that a bug?), but go to this quickie article and search for my user name in the document.
As others have mentioned, while searching for this, I ran across most of these quickie entries in past articles.
Wouldn't it be easy to do a quick search of the hyperlink you're posting about in past articles first? That's not 100% perfect, but it would probably stop a lot of the repeats going on around here.
They can't force people into a license if you're not using anything of nintendo's actually make the part/addon/rom
I seem to recall someone mentioning that the gameboy (maybe, it could have been another nintendo platform) actually required the first few bytes of the roms to all contain a bitmap of the nintendo logo. (perhaps it was just a text that said Nintendo, or somesuch)
Was there any truth to this? If so, it seems nintendo could get you on copyright violiation for making your own game without their permission (since you would need to use the bitmap/phrase without their permission).
is it feasable to create a virtual keyboard that you can type on
I don't see why not, much like CE devices do. I would imagine if this thing ever gets to market, at least one person will write a "keyboard window".
I've actually seen this done, I forgot what store it was, but the point of sale app was all controled via a touch screen, and anytime the sales person touched a text field (customer name, etc) half the screen would turn into a keyboard. Keep in mind with a touch screen you completly lose tactal feedback (and clicks out of speaker don't count) so typing will probably be more annoying than the handwriting recongintion.
How would you create a camera that small with commonly-available, inexpensive hardware?
Simple, use CompactFlash cards. These things are small, inexpensive, and made by quite a few people. And with a $10 convertor, they can be used as PCMCIA cards too.
And comparing the dimensions of compact flash cards and the memory stick it looks like the camera might need to be a little taller to user a compact flash card, but perhaps it could also be less wide (I actually have no clue how the memory stick plugs into the camera, maybe it just sticks out from it).
Compact Flash: 21.5mm x 50mm x 2.8mm Memory Stick: 36mm x 43mm x 3.3mm
Using compact flash seems to be the perfect answer, you could even go with a bit wider version and use the Type II slot to get the 1gb IBM microdrive.
Wait until you've found a few sites which catch your right mouse button click with some Javascript
Put the following (all one line) into a link. Put that link on your Links toolbar, and click it when you run across those pages, most of the time it'll disable the screwy right-click js code. (Warning, I'm no JS expert, there are probably better ways/less painful ways to do this, but this works for me)
what could possibly be bad about introducing computers to kids?
It serves no purpose and doesn't teach children anything?
Don't get me wrong, if your going to attempt to teach children something about computers, then, by all means, but a computer in each class room, and install Logo, or BASIC, or something.
But, don't do what was done to me. In the school district I grew up in, every grade (small schools too) had it's own computer room, which consisted of about 40 computers. So, once a week, we would join up with another class, and go to the computer room to learn.
This consisted mainly of three actives, in order of use:
Playing learning games. Absolutely useless. You learned how to play stupid games that were supposed to teach you grammar and math. Almost always the edutainment games seemed to be below our learning level. I can never once remembering a game that reinforced some just taught lesson. It seems to me that this was just done to give the teachers a break from teaching us.
Writing essays and such. Mildly useful, but still pointless. Perhaps if they had instructed us on how to use a word processor, it would have been good, but instead most students would hand write their essay, and edit it using pen and paper techniques. Then, in one shot, type it into the computer, and this was the preferred way, since it kept the children out of the teacher's hair (they often knew very little about how to actually use the word processing program)
Actual instruction on computers. I had one class (the only one ever offered to me) on programming. It was in Pascal, and this was only in high school. They should have done this more often.
Perhaps it's just a bad experience, and I had lazy teachers, but I don't think it's that abnormal. Computers were just used as gaming devices, in a bizarre attempt to ease parents concerns that we would be ready for the coming technology age.
All of my knowledge of programming (I took the final for the Pascal class the second week and didn't have to take the class) came from my self-teaching, by reading books and the like. So as a result, I tend to think I would have been better off (merely because my teachers would have been forced to teach me more) if our schools didn't have computers. And that coming from someone who makes his living as a "Software Engineer".
Or just get a SoundBlaster Live! card. Since the card is mostly software, one of the recording "inputs" that the windows drivers provide is What-U-Hear. Great for re-sampling MP3's, recording streaming-only media, etc.
You can encrypt stuff to hell and back again, but if I can hear it, or see it, then I can record it, there's just no way around that. Even things that are somewhat insightful, like macro-vision, can be gotten around.
If the buyer didn't figure this out when they signed on the dotted line, then it sucks to be them
Nope, it sucks to the poor tech support rep that gets to explain the charges appearing on the idiot's credit card statement.
Background: I worked for an ISP as a lowly tech suport rep(no longer exists, they were bought out by CompuServe / AOL / Mindspring / Earthlink), and we had one of the first single disk setup for windows (maybe the first? can't remember) that a user could use to create their own ISP account, without help from the ISP.
I to this day am amazed at how many users failed to grasp that when they click okay, after entering their credit card agreement, and picking a monthly pricing plan, that they just might be charged, even if they don't understand what they just did!
Is it possible that this could mark the start of an age in which our desktop chips and our portables are inherently different?
I would suggest that this era has already begun. Take a look at the current (or at least the upcoming) crop of PDA's. Though there still not as powerful as laptops, and for many, still not functional enough to replace laptops, they do have more than enough power for many people, espically now that wireless internet access is becoming more and more a reality. I personally abandoned my compaq notebook a year or so ago for the joy of my PDA. And, as far as I know atleast, none of the mainstream PDAs use x86 processors.
Even if you don't consider the PDAs to have started this trend, the fact that we'll have both 64-bit and 32-bit, would hopefully lead to more and more portable programs (as in cross platform), and less 32-bit x86 specific code, which, imho, can only be a good thing.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong - I don't think there's any sort of JVM shipping with Windows 98 or 2000, you need to get and install one separately.
I think one may now be shipping with IE4+. On both my work machines (W2k, and NT4, both with IE5), I haven't installed any extra java goodies, yet I've had no problems running the Peanut Press java book maker program.
When a file is received as an attachment that matches the "executable" mask (that is, has the extension exe, vbs, bat, etc) the file is renamed by the addition of a ".unsafe" extension
When the whole ILOVEYOU fiasco started, this is exactly what I did. I threw together a small little Outlook filter that appends ".untrusted.txt" to all executable filenames (it also deletes email with the subjects of "ILOVEYOU", and "fwd: Joke", sight unseen.)
The vulnerability is from VBA, now if someone is able to write a VBA app which can scan your address book why wouldn't this app be able to select the "OK" button when windows asks the user if it's ok to access the addressbook?
Nope, that won't be possible, at least with only one script. Since whatever method that causes the dialog to appear won't return until the user picks an option, the script will be hung, unable to do anything, including searching for windows to click on.
You'd be amazed how many people change e-mail addresses in a year
Maybe this is silly, but did anyone think of changing slashdot itself so that when I logged in, it would ask me if I gave permission to use my comment? (assuming, of course, you wanted one of my comments)
For some strange reason, this seems like the natural answer to me, but given SlashCode's apparent sluggish changing, I'm not suprised it never happened.
The new natural handwriting recognition is supposed to be optional
I'm not sure, but it looks like the handwriting recognition is based on ParaGraph's CaliGrapher product. At least, from what I can tell, they use the exact same gestures, which leads me to beleive they're related (after all, how obvious is it what a "cut" gesture should look like?)
If this is the case, it should be damned good. I have this product on my E-105, and it functions amazingly well, I didn't have to learn a thing, teach it a thing, it just works
Just my opinion, but I'm a big fan of the cassiopeia device, and I'm hoping Casio decides to release an upgrade.
I do all of my bill paying online via PayTrust and have been very pleased. Most of my bills are setup to automatically pay themselves when PayTrust gets them, which means I almost never have to worry about it. I've only run into one problem, and one issue.
When I changed addresses for my auto-insurance (you have to have your bills snail mailed to a special PO box like address), my carrier decided that I had moved from Washington to California, and adjusted my rates accordingly. A quick phone call, and a slow explanation resolved that problem.
Otherwise, just keep in mind that you're billing address is now at the company that does your online billing (which they should give you), so when you purchase something online via your credit card, you now have to enter a different addy for the billing address.
Otherwise it's been great. Never had a problem with not having a paper copy of my information. And if I was one who really cared about archiving the information, PayTrust will sell me a CD with images of all my bills for the year once a year, which in my book sure beats keeping the bills in a box somewhere.
Many proprietors of copyright-enforcing closed formats refuse to release software decoders for platforms with open-source kernels, as it is possible to modify the kernel to capture audio to a file
Though I don't doubt what you say is true, I've got to ask; then why does my sound card let you do this? It's a reasonably popular sound card, by a large company (Create Labs, SB Live!). Among many other nifty features, the Windows drivers supports a sound recording source called "What-U-Hear"
As its name would imply, it lets me record whatever is coming out of the sound card. This is great, and I've used it to easily resample MP3's for CD burning, as well as recording streaming sound that I couldn't save directly. I've often wondered why Real, or even Microsoft, hasn't raised a hubbub over this feature.
Incremental linking allows you to re-link a project only inserting the changes that you've made.
Basically, instead of just linking the individual object files, it also puts a good deal of padding in the executable, that way when only a few object files have changed, it's able to place the new code into the executable without needed to re-link the entire project.
Of course, there's more to it than just that, but that's the basic gist of it.
This can dramatically speed things up on large projects, especially when you only need to make minor changes to a few files to test something, or attempt to fix a bug. Effectively the linker no longer needs to deal with the many object files that haven't changed, only the few that have changed since the last build.
Slashdot Mirror
The PC Card expansions for the iPaq isn't available yet, and I haven't heard when it will be.
And finally, for anyone that had their hopes up like me, it seems the friendly people at ColorMax were lying about what their glasses could do (iirc, they basically claimed to have a [very expensive] cure for colorblindness)
As others have mentioned, while searching for this, I ran across most of these quickie entries in past articles.
Wouldn't it be easy to do a quick search of the hyperlink you're posting about in past articles first? That's not 100% perfect, but it would probably stop a lot of the repeats going on around here.
I seem to recall someone mentioning that the gameboy (maybe, it could have been another nintendo platform) actually required the first few bytes of the roms to all contain a bitmap of the nintendo logo. (perhaps it was just a text that said Nintendo, or somesuch)
Was there any truth to this? If so, it seems nintendo could get you on copyright violiation for making your own game without their permission (since you would need to use the bitmap/phrase without their permission).
I don't see why not, much like CE devices do. I would imagine if this thing ever gets to market, at least one person will write a "keyboard window".
I've actually seen this done, I forgot what store it was, but the point of sale app was all controled via a touch screen, and anytime the sales person touched a text field (customer name, etc) half the screen would turn into a keyboard. Keep in mind with a touch screen you completly lose tactal feedback (and clicks out of speaker don't count) so typing will probably be more annoying than the handwriting recongintion.
Simple, use CompactFlash cards. These things are small, inexpensive, and made by quite a few people. And with a $10 convertor, they can be used as PCMCIA cards too.
And comparing the dimensions of compact flash cards and the memory stick it looks like the camera might need to be a little taller to user a compact flash card, but perhaps it could also be less wide (I actually have no clue how the memory stick plugs into the camera, maybe it just sticks out from it).
Compact Flash: 21.5mm x 50mm x 2.8mm
Memory Stick: 36mm x 43mm x 3.3mm
Using compact flash seems to be the perfect answer, you could even go with a bit wider version and use the Type II slot to get the 1gb IBM microdrive.
Put the following (all one line) into a link. Put that link on your Links toolbar, and click it when you run across those pages, most of the time it'll disable the screwy right-click js code. (Warning, I'm no JS expert, there are probably better ways/less painful ways to do this, but this works for me)
--
javascript:document.onmousedown="";document.onmous eup=""; window.onmousedown="";void(window.onmouseup="");
--
Problem solved.
And by the time you type that out on your cell phone, I'll have found me a real computer to view the page with.
Your computer randomly starts to play classical music
I don't know what's worse, that article, or the fact I find it fifty percent of the time while I'm doing normal searches for other information.
It serves no purpose and doesn't teach children anything?
Don't get me wrong, if your going to attempt to teach children something about computers, then, by all means, but a computer in each class room, and install Logo, or BASIC, or something.
But, don't do what was done to me. In the school district I grew up in, every grade (small schools too) had it's own computer room, which consisted of about 40 computers. So, once a week, we would join up with another class, and go to the computer room to learn.
This consisted mainly of three actives, in order of use:
- Playing learning games. Absolutely useless. You learned how to play stupid games that were supposed to teach you grammar and math. Almost always the edutainment games seemed to be below our learning level. I can never once remembering a game that reinforced some just taught lesson. It seems to me that this was just done to give the teachers a break from teaching us.
- Writing essays and such. Mildly useful, but still pointless. Perhaps if they had instructed us on how to use a word processor, it would have been good, but instead most students would hand write their essay, and edit it using pen and paper techniques. Then, in one shot, type it into the computer, and this was the preferred way, since it kept the children out of the teacher's hair (they often knew very little about how to actually use the word processing program)
- Actual instruction on computers. I had one class (the only one ever offered to me) on programming. It was in Pascal, and this was only in high school. They should have done this more often.
Perhaps it's just a bad experience, and I had lazy teachers, but I don't think it's that abnormal. Computers were just used as gaming devices, in a bizarre attempt to ease parents concerns that we would be ready for the coming technology age.All of my knowledge of programming (I took the final for the Pascal class the second week and didn't have to take the class) came from my self-teaching, by reading books and the like. So as a result, I tend to think I would have been better off (merely because my teachers would have been forced to teach me more) if our schools didn't have computers. And that coming from someone who makes his living as a "Software Engineer".
You can encrypt stuff to hell and back again, but if I can hear it, or see it, then I can record it, there's just no way around that. Even things that are somewhat insightful, like macro-vision, can be gotten around.
Nope, it sucks to the poor tech support rep that gets to explain the charges appearing on the idiot's credit card statement.
Background: I worked for an ISP as a lowly tech suport rep(no longer exists, they were bought out by CompuServe / AOL / Mindspring / Earthlink), and we had one of the first single disk setup for windows (maybe the first? can't remember) that a user could use to create their own ISP account, without help from the ISP.
I to this day am amazed at how many users failed to grasp that when they click okay, after entering their credit card agreement, and picking a monthly pricing plan, that they just might be charged, even if they don't understand what they just did!
I would suggest that this era has already begun. Take a look at the current (or at least the upcoming) crop of PDA's. Though there still not as powerful as laptops, and for many, still not functional enough to replace laptops, they do have more than enough power for many people, espically now that wireless internet access is becoming more and more a reality. I personally abandoned my compaq notebook a year or so ago for the joy of my PDA. And, as far as I know atleast, none of the mainstream PDAs use x86 processors.
Even if you don't consider the PDAs to have started this trend, the fact that we'll have both 64-bit and 32-bit, would hopefully lead to more and more portable programs (as in cross platform), and less 32-bit x86 specific code, which, imho, can only be a good thing.
I think one may now be shipping with IE4+. On both my work machines (W2k, and NT4, both with IE5), I haven't installed any extra java goodies, yet I've had no problems running the Peanut Press java book maker program.
When the whole ILOVEYOU fiasco started, this is exactly what I did. I threw together a small little Outlook filter that appends ".untrusted.txt" to all executable filenames (it also deletes email with the subjects of "ILOVEYOU", and "fwd: Joke", sight unseen.)
It's worked quite well for me.
Nope, that won't be possible, at least with only one script. Since whatever method that causes the dialog to appear won't return until the user picks an option, the script will be hung, unable to do anything, including searching for windows to click on.
I run outlook in a largish corporation. If you want, I can give you a list of a few hundred people that click on strange attachments.
A Universal Networking Language for the Internet?
Maybe this is silly, but did anyone think of changing slashdot itself so that when I logged in, it would ask me if I gave permission to use my comment? (assuming, of course, you wanted one of my comments)
For some strange reason, this seems like the natural answer to me, but given SlashCode's apparent sluggish changing, I'm not suprised it never happened.
I'm not sure, but it looks like the handwriting recognition is based on ParaGraph's CaliGrapher product. At least, from what I can tell, they use the exact same gestures, which leads me to beleive they're related (after all, how obvious is it what a "cut" gesture should look like?)
If this is the case, it should be damned good. I have this product on my E-105, and it functions amazingly well, I didn't have to learn a thing, teach it a thing, it just works
Just my opinion, but I'm a big fan of the cassiopeia device, and I'm hoping Casio decides to release an upgrade.
And for those that want it, here's my quick and dirty PeanutPress version.
When I changed addresses for my auto-insurance (you have to have your bills snail mailed to a special PO box like address), my carrier decided that I had moved from Washington to California, and adjusted my rates accordingly. A quick phone call, and a slow explanation resolved that problem.
Otherwise, just keep in mind that you're billing address is now at the company that does your online billing (which they should give you), so when you purchase something online via your credit card, you now have to enter a different addy for the billing address.
Otherwise it's been great. Never had a problem with not having a paper copy of my information. And if I was one who really cared about archiving the information, PayTrust will sell me a CD with images of all my bills for the year once a year, which in my book sure beats keeping the bills in a box somewhere.
Though I don't doubt what you say is true, I've got to ask; then why does my sound card let you do this? It's a reasonably popular sound card, by a large company (Create Labs, SB Live!). Among many other nifty features, the Windows drivers supports a sound recording source called "What-U-Hear"
As its name would imply, it lets me record whatever is coming out of the sound card. This is great, and I've used it to easily resample MP3's for CD burning, as well as recording streaming sound that I couldn't save directly. I've often wondered why Real, or even Microsoft, hasn't raised a hubbub over this feature.
Anyone know if spammers are stripping off the stuff after the + symbol? I might have to get more creative.
Basically, instead of just linking the individual object files, it also puts a good deal of padding in the executable, that way when only a few object files have changed, it's able to place the new code into the executable without needed to re-link the entire project.
Of course, there's more to it than just that, but that's the basic gist of it.
This can dramatically speed things up on large projects, especially when you only need to make minor changes to a few files to test something, or attempt to fix a bug. Effectively the linker no longer needs to deal with the many object files that haven't changed, only the few that have changed since the last build.