I think it would be nice if you could just throw 2+ gigs of RAM in one of these things, and disable the swap space, so as not to tax your harddrive. This is probably one of the major culprits for writing lots of data the the hard drive. If you get rid of that, you'd probably greatly increase the life of the drive. Also, with 2 Gigs of RAM, most people would have absolutely no need for swap space.
The reason that Dvorak hasn't caught on is because out of all the computer users, there's only X% who are even interested in typing speed. Then out of them, there's only Y% who have heard of Dvorak. Then out of them, there's only Z% who feel it's worth the effort to learn another layout just to add 10% to their typing speed. So, X% * Y% * Z% is a very small number. Add to that the fact that you can' just forsake QWERTY because you'll probably use other people's computers, and carrying around an extra keyboard or changing their keyboard layout isn't really the most convenient thing to do. So, with all that, it's no wonder that most people don't want to switch. Qwerty is fast enough for most people who are even interested in speed, and the trouble of switching to Dvorak an maintaining 2 key layouts in your brain is just too much trouble.
Surprising that nobody has mentioned the Frog Pad yet. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like it would be quite good for a pda or other such portable device.
Due to scratches and all other factors, I've found you don't usually get more than 10 rewrites on a CD-RW. Maybe if you're really careful you could probably get 100. Maybe under lab conditions in a clean room, it's possible to get 1000 rewrites. I think consumers should really call false advertising on that number. I don't really think it's possible under normal use of a CD-RW to get anywhere close to 1000 rewrites. It's off by at least a factor of 10.
You forgot durability. I've thrown Minidiscs across the room and left them on my desk, underneath a pile of papers for months, and still had no problems reading them. You could probably take a piece of sandpaper to a Minidisc and have no problems reading it, maybe even using an orbital sander. Because they actually come in a protective enclosure, they are many times more durable than CDs. That is the one true advantage of Minidisc over CD. I would gladly take a little bit if extra thickness in my disks if I knew it meant I wouldn't have to worry about scratching them so much. I wish that they had really thought this through when the start with CDs. Now all the media we buy is on very fragile disc, that seem to have major problems with durability. I know they used to have CD caddies, but they were optional, and removable, and not really part of the actual CD, so most CDs didn't come with one, and almost no CD drives used CDs in caddies. Anyway, that ends my rant.
Also, if you do live in the US, and you do want DVD on your Linux box, you could just buy Mandriva which comes with LinDVD to watch your DVDs legally. Sure it's not open source software, but it seems to me that if you're really that worried about the legal issues, and actually want to watch DVDs on your computer (as opposed to your home theatre), then there are options available to you.
Personally, I think Nintendo did the right thing with not putting a CDROM on the N64. CDROM slowed everything down. The first time I saw that "Loading...." message on a playstation, I almost lost it. Nintendo stuck with the older technology because they felt it would offer a better gaming experience, and it did. Granted, they didn't win over the people who didn't really think it through, and just wanted shiny full motion video and CD quality sound in their video games. I think those are the things that take away a lot from games, because they cost a lot of money to produce, and don't really add much playability to the game. As for the GC losing out last generation, well, they sold very close to as many units as the XBox, and made a ton more money doing it. You can say that MS has to lose money to break into the market, but it's their second generation, and they are still losing tons of money on their console offering. The Wii is obviously very popular, and while it isn't for everybody, I think that it offers a lot of what people have been looking for. Maybe not what the hardcore gamers have been looking for, but what a lot of other people have been looking for. If you don't like it, that's fine. There's a lot of hardcore photography enthusiasts who don't like the little point and shoot cameras, and feel that they are really bad products. But they are providing something that many people find useful and easy to use. As for online play, well, it would be nice, but it's not anything that I feel is really missing from most of the games I play. If I wanted online games, I'd stick with a PC, because that's where the best online games have always been. Where the PC was 7-8 years ago is where the console is finally catching up to.
The interesting point about the Wii, is that I find that it's the only one that actually offers anything new. The PS3 has new hardware, which makes the games look better, but that's not anything that hasn't really been done before. The games look better. This doesn't really make them any more interesting, the only thing it seems to do is make the games more expensive. The XBox 360 does the same. It has improved online play over previous models, but that's just an improvement, nothing that We haven't seen before. And anybody who knows anything knows that if you want really good online play, you go with a PC, where they were way ahead of the xbox 360 7-8 years ago. The Wii offers a completely new control scheme, and a completely new way of interacting with the system. It also offers the virtual console, which while i'm sure that everyone here says they should have offered that years ago, they were the first ones to bring it to market. So, while it may not have the newest hardware, or the snazziest graphics, it is fun, and has a good selection of games, and is easy enough to use that everybody wants to get one.
How so? If YOU look at the sales charts, you'll see that the XBox 360 is very close to being outsold by the Wii. I'm guessing by September that the Wii will be well ahead of the xbox360, and that by the end of the Christmas season, the XBox will be left in their dust. Seems to me like Nintendo has the right way to run your business, which is providing and entertaining product that almost everybody can afford and that is actually reliable. Also, having it work right out of the box is a nice plus. Having to buy a game on top of the system for XBox360 and PS3 makes them even less appealing.
Oh, I'm not saying that there isn't a problem with the password manager. What I am saying, is that if there wasn't a password manager, sites that allow users to post arbitrary javascript on the site would still have problems with users passwords being stolen. So, while the password manager probably needs to be fixed, the sites that allow users to post javascript are an even bigger threat, as they allow passwords to be stolen, as well as many other exploits.
Which outlines the whole strength of having a password manager. You can have a different password for each website. Without a password manager, it's hard to do this because there are so many sites that require passwords. For my password management, I use passwordsafe, because it lets me manage all my passwords, not just ones for websites, and I can put it on a usb memory stick, and carry all my passwords with me.
This brings up another thought. If the websites in question allow users to post javascript, and there happens to be a login section on that page, then couldn't the user posting the script add an onchange or onkeypress event to the username and password fields to capture the username and password, and then forward the information to their server by creating an img element, and having the username and password passed as GET variables appended to the URL of the img src, which is in fact just a php page that stores the username and password in a database. Seems to me that any site that allows people to post executable javascript is just asking for trouble.
I can't for the life of me understand why this type of stuff doesn't exist. If you can pull down images, video, and all that other stuff and display it inline, then surely you should be able to do the same with HTML content. There's been a lot of kludges made in Javascript and the use of iFrames and other wonderful things, but personally, I think that client side includes has been the most glaring omission. The only problem that I could think of, is whether or not the urls from the href,src, and others should be relative to the original document, or the location from which they are being pulled.
If the standard is "do whatever IE does" then how would Firefox ever actually be able to implement that standard. There is no published documents on how IE functions, so how is Firefox supposed to keep up with that. If Firefox emulated IE 6 perfectly, and then MS released IE7 and completely changed the markup (like they do all the time with their doc format), then Firefox would have to go through a lot of work, trying to figure out what MS was doing. the W3C standards exist because people want to use operating systems other than windows to access the web. They exist because they want to be able to rely on other vendors to provide a web browser that works. If anything I would blame MS for holding everyone back, when we could be creating beautiful webpages very easily, but instead it ends up taking twice as long because we have to deal with all the quirks in IE. Even if no other browsers existed, it would still take this long, because there is no documentation or definition of what IE will do with any give HTML or CSS code.
That's because XML expects that all attributes are properly encoded. There's a method behind their madness. It's not like they just said "hey, lets see how we can screw up links in XHTML." No, they took XML, which already didn't allow & or many other characters in attributes without encoding and stuck to that standard. XML was standardized years before we decided to use it for webpage markup, it's not like they could just go ahead and change it.
My entire collection is in MP3, and none of it is illegal. It is either ripped off CDs that I own, or purchased from eMusic. Before anybody asks me why I don't rip to ogg, or flac, well, all my music players (ipod, DVD player) play mp3 so anything else doesn't work well for me. Just because somebody has MP3 files, don't assume they are illegal. That's the kind of thinking I would expect from the RIAA.
This is what I thought too. I think it would be kind of weird if the same species evolved in 2 different places. What are the odds of that happening? Say you have Homo Erectus in Asia and Africa. What are the odds that both would eventually evolve into homosapiens. It seems completely logical and non-surprising that humans originated in a single spot.
When I was in university residence (1999-200), my roommate convinced his parents to get him a $4000 on the assumption that he couldn't play games on it (he was quite a game nut) when all along he had intentions of running games on it. Anyway, we ended up playing a lot of Quake 2 and NFS2, not because we couldn't get Quake 3, or NFS 4, but because there was a lot of people in residence who couldn't run those games. It was more fun to have an 8 player game of Quake 2, then to spend the time to find 2 other people to play Quake 3 with. So, while the kids probably won't be able to play the latest and greatest games on that computer, they can waste plenty of time playing older games, that don't even require half the power that computer has.
Which is the mistake they made with XP. There's a lot of people who don't want to upgrade to Vista because XP is good enough, and Vista doesn't offer any positive features that make it worth the cost of upgrading. I think we'd be in a lot better position if MS had taken the money they spent on Vista, and spent it on fixing the remaining bugs in XP, as well as adding a couple things like DX10 for XP, which are only available with Vista.
Why not just use this fuel as a replacement for all things, even cars? If you grow a really big algae patch, or a bunch of localize ones, then you could probably solve the world's fuel problems. Just have to wonder what the effects of all this algae would be on the environment.
So basically you're saying what I said. For stuff that's just used within your house, definitely a home server makes sense. But for stuff that others are going to be accessing from outside your house, shared hosting can get rid of a lot of issues. Even using your home server as a staging area for the stuff you put up on you shared hosting account is a good idea. So, I'm not saying that nobody should be running a home server, just that I don't see the usefulness of using it as a machine that the whole world, or a bunch of people outside your house, are supposed to access.
I've never got why people want to run a webserver on their home computer over a cheap cable/dsl connection. I tried it for a while but between the cost of the extra computer, the cost of the extra electricity, the trouble of setting up all the server software on my own, and the trouble of dealing with changing IPs, and all the other wonderful cable ISP network oddities, I found it easier to just pay a cheap monthly fee for a shared hosting account. It's nice to run a home server for some things, but if it's going to be used by a lot of people, and accessible from outside your home, then It's way easier to just pay for hosting. That's my opinion anyway.
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I think it would be nice if you could just throw 2+ gigs of RAM in one of these things, and disable the swap space, so as not to tax your harddrive. This is probably one of the major culprits for writing lots of data the the hard drive. If you get rid of that, you'd probably greatly increase the life of the drive. Also, with 2 Gigs of RAM, most people would have absolutely no need for swap space.
The reason that Dvorak hasn't caught on is because out of all the computer users, there's only X% who are even interested in typing speed. Then out of them, there's only Y% who have heard of Dvorak. Then out of them, there's only Z% who feel it's worth the effort to learn another layout just to add 10% to their typing speed. So, X% * Y% * Z% is a very small number. Add to that the fact that you can' just forsake QWERTY because you'll probably use other people's computers, and carrying around an extra keyboard or changing their keyboard layout isn't really the most convenient thing to do. So, with all that, it's no wonder that most people don't want to switch. Qwerty is fast enough for most people who are even interested in speed, and the trouble of switching to Dvorak an maintaining 2 key layouts in your brain is just too much trouble.
Surprising that nobody has mentioned the Frog Pad yet. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like it would be quite good for a pda or other such portable device.
Due to scratches and all other factors, I've found you don't usually get more than 10 rewrites on a CD-RW. Maybe if you're really careful you could probably get 100. Maybe under lab conditions in a clean room, it's possible to get 1000 rewrites. I think consumers should really call false advertising on that number. I don't really think it's possible under normal use of a CD-RW to get anywhere close to 1000 rewrites. It's off by at least a factor of 10.
You forgot durability. I've thrown Minidiscs across the room and left them on my desk, underneath a pile of papers for months, and still had no problems reading them. You could probably take a piece of sandpaper to a Minidisc and have no problems reading it, maybe even using an orbital sander. Because they actually come in a protective enclosure, they are many times more durable than CDs. That is the one true advantage of Minidisc over CD. I would gladly take a little bit if extra thickness in my disks if I knew it meant I wouldn't have to worry about scratching them so much. I wish that they had really thought this through when the start with CDs. Now all the media we buy is on very fragile disc, that seem to have major problems with durability. I know they used to have CD caddies, but they were optional, and removable, and not really part of the actual CD, so most CDs didn't come with one, and almost no CD drives used CDs in caddies. Anyway, that ends my rant.
Also, if you do live in the US, and you do want DVD on your Linux box, you could just buy Mandriva which comes with LinDVD to watch your DVDs legally. Sure it's not open source software, but it seems to me that if you're really that worried about the legal issues, and actually want to watch DVDs on your computer (as opposed to your home theatre), then there are options available to you.
Which when you think of it, makes complete sense, because the Internet was invented for and by the military.
Personally, I think Nintendo did the right thing with not putting a CDROM on the N64. CDROM slowed everything down. The first time I saw that "Loading...." message on a playstation, I almost lost it. Nintendo stuck with the older technology because they felt it would offer a better gaming experience, and it did. Granted, they didn't win over the people who didn't really think it through, and just wanted shiny full motion video and CD quality sound in their video games. I think those are the things that take away a lot from games, because they cost a lot of money to produce, and don't really add much playability to the game. As for the GC losing out last generation, well, they sold very close to as many units as the XBox, and made a ton more money doing it. You can say that MS has to lose money to break into the market, but it's their second generation, and they are still losing tons of money on their console offering. The Wii is obviously very popular, and while it isn't for everybody, I think that it offers a lot of what people have been looking for. Maybe not what the hardcore gamers have been looking for, but what a lot of other people have been looking for. If you don't like it, that's fine. There's a lot of hardcore photography enthusiasts who don't like the little point and shoot cameras, and feel that they are really bad products. But they are providing something that many people find useful and easy to use. As for online play, well, it would be nice, but it's not anything that I feel is really missing from most of the games I play. If I wanted online games, I'd stick with a PC, because that's where the best online games have always been. Where the PC was 7-8 years ago is where the console is finally catching up to.
The interesting point about the Wii, is that I find that it's the only one that actually offers anything new. The PS3 has new hardware, which makes the games look better, but that's not anything that hasn't really been done before. The games look better. This doesn't really make them any more interesting, the only thing it seems to do is make the games more expensive. The XBox 360 does the same. It has improved online play over previous models, but that's just an improvement, nothing that We haven't seen before. And anybody who knows anything knows that if you want really good online play, you go with a PC, where they were way ahead of the xbox 360 7-8 years ago. The Wii offers a completely new control scheme, and a completely new way of interacting with the system. It also offers the virtual console, which while i'm sure that everyone here says they should have offered that years ago, they were the first ones to bring it to market. So, while it may not have the newest hardware, or the snazziest graphics, it is fun, and has a good selection of games, and is easy enough to use that everybody wants to get one.
How so? If YOU look at the sales charts, you'll see that the XBox 360 is very close to being outsold by the Wii. I'm guessing by September that the Wii will be well ahead of the xbox360, and that by the end of the Christmas season, the XBox will be left in their dust. Seems to me like Nintendo has the right way to run your business, which is providing and entertaining product that almost everybody can afford and that is actually reliable. Also, having it work right out of the box is a nice plus. Having to buy a game on top of the system for XBox360 and PS3 makes them even less appealing.
Oh, I'm not saying that there isn't a problem with the password manager. What I am saying, is that if there wasn't a password manager, sites that allow users to post arbitrary javascript on the site would still have problems with users passwords being stolen. So, while the password manager probably needs to be fixed, the sites that allow users to post javascript are an even bigger threat, as they allow passwords to be stolen, as well as many other exploits.
Which outlines the whole strength of having a password manager. You can have a different password for each website. Without a password manager, it's hard to do this because there are so many sites that require passwords. For my password management, I use passwordsafe, because it lets me manage all my passwords, not just ones for websites, and I can put it on a usb memory stick, and carry all my passwords with me.
This brings up another thought. If the websites in question allow users to post javascript, and there happens to be a login section on that page, then couldn't the user posting the script add an onchange or onkeypress event to the username and password fields to capture the username and password, and then forward the information to their server by creating an img element, and having the username and password passed as GET variables appended to the URL of the img src, which is in fact just a php page that stores the username and password in a database. Seems to me that any site that allows people to post executable javascript is just asking for trouble.
I can't for the life of me understand why this type of stuff doesn't exist. If you can pull down images, video, and all that other stuff and display it inline, then surely you should be able to do the same with HTML content. There's been a lot of kludges made in Javascript and the use of iFrames and other wonderful things, but personally, I think that client side includes has been the most glaring omission. The only problem that I could think of, is whether or not the urls from the href,src, and others should be relative to the original document, or the location from which they are being pulled.
If the standard is "do whatever IE does" then how would Firefox ever actually be able to implement that standard. There is no published documents on how IE functions, so how is Firefox supposed to keep up with that. If Firefox emulated IE 6 perfectly, and then MS released IE7 and completely changed the markup (like they do all the time with their doc format), then Firefox would have to go through a lot of work, trying to figure out what MS was doing. the W3C standards exist because people want to use operating systems other than windows to access the web. They exist because they want to be able to rely on other vendors to provide a web browser that works. If anything I would blame MS for holding everyone back, when we could be creating beautiful webpages very easily, but instead it ends up taking twice as long because we have to deal with all the quirks in IE. Even if no other browsers existed, it would still take this long, because there is no documentation or definition of what IE will do with any give HTML or CSS code.
That's because XML expects that all attributes are properly encoded. There's a method behind their madness. It's not like they just said "hey, lets see how we can screw up links in XHTML." No, they took XML, which already didn't allow & or many other characters in attributes without encoding and stuck to that standard. XML was standardized years before we decided to use it for webpage markup, it's not like they could just go ahead and change it.
My entire collection is in MP3, and none of it is illegal. It is either ripped off CDs that I own, or purchased from eMusic. Before anybody asks me why I don't rip to ogg, or flac, well, all my music players (ipod, DVD player) play mp3 so anything else doesn't work well for me. Just because somebody has MP3 files, don't assume they are illegal. That's the kind of thinking I would expect from the RIAA.
This is what I thought too. I think it would be kind of weird if the same species evolved in 2 different places. What are the odds of that happening? Say you have Homo Erectus in Asia and Africa. What are the odds that both would eventually evolve into homosapiens. It seems completely logical and non-surprising that humans originated in a single spot.
When I was in university residence (1999-200), my roommate convinced his parents to get him a $4000 on the assumption that he couldn't play games on it (he was quite a game nut) when all along he had intentions of running games on it. Anyway, we ended up playing a lot of Quake 2 and NFS2, not because we couldn't get Quake 3, or NFS 4, but because there was a lot of people in residence who couldn't run those games. It was more fun to have an 8 player game of Quake 2, then to spend the time to find 2 other people to play Quake 3 with. So, while the kids probably won't be able to play the latest and greatest games on that computer, they can waste plenty of time playing older games, that don't even require half the power that computer has.
Someone set us up the bombe.
You mean Cryptonomicon wasn't real?
Looks like it's only the 3 gear model. If it was the four gear model, I surely would have purchased it :P.
Which is the mistake they made with XP. There's a lot of people who don't want to upgrade to Vista because XP is good enough, and Vista doesn't offer any positive features that make it worth the cost of upgrading. I think we'd be in a lot better position if MS had taken the money they spent on Vista, and spent it on fixing the remaining bugs in XP, as well as adding a couple things like DX10 for XP, which are only available with Vista.
Why not just use this fuel as a replacement for all things, even cars? If you grow a really big algae patch, or a bunch of localize ones, then you could probably solve the world's fuel problems. Just have to wonder what the effects of all this algae would be on the environment.
So basically you're saying what I said. For stuff that's just used within your house, definitely a home server makes sense. But for stuff that others are going to be accessing from outside your house, shared hosting can get rid of a lot of issues. Even using your home server as a staging area for the stuff you put up on you shared hosting account is a good idea. So, I'm not saying that nobody should be running a home server, just that I don't see the usefulness of using it as a machine that the whole world, or a bunch of people outside your house, are supposed to access.
I've never got why people want to run a webserver on their home computer over a cheap cable/dsl connection. I tried it for a while but between the cost of the extra computer, the cost of the extra electricity, the trouble of setting up all the server software on my own, and the trouble of dealing with changing IPs, and all the other wonderful cable ISP network oddities, I found it easier to just pay a cheap monthly fee for a shared hosting account. It's nice to run a home server for some things, but if it's going to be used by a lot of people, and accessible from outside your home, then It's way easier to just pay for hosting. That's my opinion anyway.