Sadly not. To be honest, I can't believe how excited everyone is getting about the female pronouns. The man has an academic background, and such stylistic quirks have been the norm in many fields at least since I was at university 15 years ago. Personally, I'm with Strunk and White on this one, and stick to male pronouns (and in French, my working language, there is no option anyway), but I hardly notice (s)he or alternating he/she anymore. It certainly annoys me a lot less than Terry Pratchet style main clause impaired sentences!
Anyway, as far as I can see, the world's first programmer was allegedly a woman, and the real weaker sex has been trying to catch up ever since...
Just downloaded it, only skimmed the contents so far, but he seems to be trying to cover a load of stuff that isn't directly related to programming, and, in addition, is highly context-specific. For example, do all programmers have a team for which they have any responsibility? Do they all get involved in the quoting process? I wonder whether a couple of pages on how to negotiate a contract is worse than nothing at all...
Only if you don't read EULAs, and don't think about the future.
I have no fears on that score. Like any extorsion racket, it is in MS's interests not to kill off their victims (or hurt them so much that they decide to fight back), so, whatever the EULA might allow in a/.er's paranoid mind, it just ain't gonna happen. (And my business is 99% Linux anyway, so I don't care too much if I'm wrong on this...)
Most software isn't internationalised
But if, as you more or less say yourself, the MS apps are, and the products I can buy in the country where I live are, who cares whether I could buy a Czech version of some obscure program in a supermarket in Equador?
Do you think MS writes those drivers?
No, I'll give you that one, wrong discussion...
Mandrake
It might be better in language terms, but the version I tried was extremely bad in many other ways. I'm going back a couple of years here. SUSE was better than RH language-wise, and, in general, I liked it a lot, but I just got fed up with having to fix every program I wanted to run because none of the files were in the normal (ie RH) place.
Office lock-in
Glad you mentioned that, because office software is another really bad thing with Linux. Star Office/Open Office are great office suites for people who don't need an office suite. I get to try MS Office users on Star Office in my cybercafe most days, and they all end up wanting to chew their arms off, and that is before we mention 'features' like locking the entire system up big time if you try to save a file directly onto a floppy disc (this bug has been around for at least a year, survived from SO 5.2 to OO 1, and also happens on a laptop with a different distro). Thing is, geeks are not usually Office power users...
My two euro-cents on the matter say that the fact that there is always more than one answer to everything is actually a barrier to more widespread acceptance of Linux. I'm with RH8 on this one:-)
The first problem with the open source "model" is that there isn't one
I agree with the sentence, but maybe not with the thought behind it. The multiplicity of OSS models does a lot of people's heads in. At least with the commercial model it is very simple (you may be being ripped off, but at least you can put that into your spreadsheet)...
It is possible that open source software will reduce the number of programmers employed in writing software.
That isn't my concern, if I have a 'concern' on this matter. My projection into the future goes more like this:
You can start a project on your s/h PC in your dorm, and, if it's a great idea, it may get a lot of interest. When it gets too big for one dorm room, you can network. But if you want to produce a piece of software with the breadth of, say, Windows XP, the 'doing it for love or donated equipment' model just won't do it.
IMHO, the current state of Linux/GNU (or whatever it is I have on my Redhat CD) illustrates this fairly well. The kernel is state of the art. And a lot of big companies are putting a lot of $$$ into keeping it that way, because, on a purely commercial basis, it is cheaper to do this than to keep developing and supporting bespoke OSs, especially for minority platforms. Some of the geeky applications are pretty whizzy too, because they catch the imagination of the dorm-room developers.
On the other hand, the less 'sexy' bits are often pretty bad. I use Redhat in French, except that half the applications still come up in American English. In linguistic terms, Windows runs away with the ball. Why? Because translating page after page of someone else's text prompts is not what sets your average geek's imagination on fire. Then there are drivers. Or not. I bought a Polaroid digital camera over a year ago, plugs and plays with Windows, still waiting for it to work with a standard Linux distro. The last 2 versions of RH claimed to support it: v8 has a driver, but only via the USB port, which is funny since that model never had a USB connector. What's the problem here? Producing drivers for umpteem million products is grunt work, and unless some geek somewhere happens to have my camera,it just ain't going to happen.
And the lack of development on the non-sexy bits of Linux/GNU is, IMHO, one of the main obstacles to its widespread adoption on the desktop. So I don't think we are looking at less programmers, I just think that the OSS/Commercial split is reaching dynamic equilibrium, and that the balance will not shift further towards OSS unless or until we find a sane way of financing the dull bits of infrastructure development.
Re:Better place sto donate
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
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· Score: 2, Informative
Donate to the opensource programmers today and children of tomorrow won't have to throw their educational dollars away on constant computer upgrades and expensive commercial programs.
It's a nice idea but, as you say:
I've been an out-of-work programmer and it's great to spend some of that free time giving back to the community but it's hard when you can't pay rent let alone buy the hardware you need to test so and so feature against.
Which is surely a good summary of the problem with the open source model. It relies on someone paying the programmers for the love of open source. Now there may be enough university departments and software manual publishers to feed the likes of Larry Wall, which is great, but I can't see this model ever scaling to the point where it 'employs' anything like the number of people currently working on commercial coding projects. You need some way to collect the money, on the basis of what work is the most useful. And the conventional way to do this is called a company in a free market.
Cf science, which started off as a hobby of the upper classes, was then patronised by the upper classes, and is now mainly funded either by business or the public sector.
I like KDE. It helps me to earn a living. I already pay for it, in the sense that I buy boxed distros. I wouldn't be averse to paying more, so that some of the money went to the people doing the coding. But I doubt if my French accountant would let me pay the programmers in hardware...
It is because it is impossible for solid state electronics, no matter how tweaked, sampled and modified, to duplicate the odd harmonics the come by nature out of the plasma in a hot vacuum tube.
The 'natural' sound of the electric guitar was a quirk of the technology that was around at the time. And a lot of people hated it, compared to the 'natural' sound of acoustic instruments, most of which had only been around in their current compromised scale form for a few hundred years. When the compromised scale was introduced, in order to make transposition and keyboard instruments possible, I'm sure the purists said that the compromise was just that, and that nothing that would ever replace a flute that only plays in E flat.
If Gibson had gone digital from day one, people would be posting about how now analogue system, however tweaked, can never reproduce the clean precision of digital. Or something. And in 30 years' time, when someone comes up with another way of doing music, all the digital 'purists' will bang on about how nothing can approach the 'natural' beauty of a DX-7...
You ear get used to whatever sounds you feed it within reason. If you don't believe me, try listening to some Indian music, for example. To a Western ear, it is all out of tune, before we get on to the melodic component, but half a billion Indians would disagree...
In an unexpected development, Napster have opened for business again sporting a wide range of copyright-expired music. College dorms will soon be rocking to the strains of Frank Sinatra, Paul Robeson and the Beatles. "We are looking forward to releasing Bat Out Of Hell" in a decade or so", said a spokesman, who asked not to be named.
Has anyone found anything anywhere that explains their methodology? I chased most of the links last time, and there were no clues. What are they counting? The materials used in the factory itself? Including the workers? The mining of the raw materials? Their transport?
Also, does anyone have a clue how these figures compare with anything else, ie how much water is used to make, say, a hammer, measuring the same way?
And finally, do the figures vary across the world? For example, America-based companies generally use several times as much water as their counterparts in Europe. Is this true of chip manufacture too?
In other words, is there any substance behind this 'news', or is it just journalese?
OK, thanks for the information. But while the movie-length tapes may have appeared before VHS had taken a lead, the fact that they weren't available from day one may well have encouraged manufacturers to opt for VHS: I would expect the time between the decision and the appearance of the machines in the shops to be at least 6 months, probably nearer 12.
First impressions are hard to shake. I still meet people who don't think that Linux works with a mouse... the only company I can think of that gets three bites at the cherry is Microsoft, eg with Windows, but then they already had a stranglehold on the PC OS market. Sony didn't have that advantage in the VCR market.
By comparison, Philips famously chose the storage capacity of their CD to fit the longest common piece of classical music around, and it wiped the competition out. It wasn't the best solution in many ways, but it would record any symphony out there, from day one.
I would have thought that the storage capacity was quite an important technological criterion for a storage medium. If the technology is for home recording, and the tape it too short to record what a lot of people what to record, ie full-length films, isn't that a bit of a drawback? I have to say that I'd rather see all of a film at less than perfect quality than all but the last 20 minutes of a film at wonderful quality.
but then simply states that, despite all of its advantages, VHS is still better because it's more popular.
There whas a bit more to his argument than that:
VHS offered a bigger choice of hardware at lower cost, the tapes were cheaper and more easily available, there were a lot more movies to rent, and so on.
Those sound like three quite important arguments to me, unless money is no object, you like buying hardware from a de facto monopoly, hunting for media is your idea of fun and you don't actually want to watch movies, just admire the spec.
A bit further on, he points out another specific flaw in Sony's market research:
Sony got one simple decision wrong. It chose to make smaller, neater tapes that lasted for an hour, whereas the VHS manufacturers used basically the same technology with a bulkier tape that lasted two hours.
Now I don't know a lot about the details, but would it have been that hard for Sony to provide essentially the same technology with a larger box and a longer tape? As the article continues:
Their spouses/children/grandparents and everybody else would quickly have told them the truth. "We're going out tonight and I want to record a movie. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid of it."
And that's the basis problem with the general population who decide which products succeed by their purchasing decisions: they see technology as a means to an end, not as something to admire for its intrinsic cleverness.
Err, is this what people climb Everest for?
on
How High is Your AP?
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· Score: 5, Funny
You have survived the cold, the wind, the yetis, you are exhausted but exhilarated as you pull yourself over the final ledge and collapse onto the summit, and then you notice an urgent beeping in your pocket. In your rush to extract your PDA with frost-bitten fingers, you overbalance and fall backwards. As you plummet towards certain death, you just have time to read that you can get herbal viagra at an unbeatable price...
If the spam operation is illegal, the authorities can close down the money contact point.
So the spammers couldn't run an e-commerce site on one of their servers and take payments by credit card? Also, note that the money lost in currency conversion etc becomes negligable once you get over a few thousand dollars. Plenty of people choose to put money in Swiss bank accounts despite the costs involved. Probably including quite a few spammers...
A virtual keyboard is all about shortcuts...no one is proposing they be used for anything more than convenience. If you need to work for 8 hours, you'll need an actual keyboard.
Yes, I think that's what the last paragraph of my original posting said:-)
We might do what you suggest for 30 seconds, but doing it for 8 hours could be a rather different proposition.
In particular, holding your hands in space for long periods is very hard work: in fact, it's a fairly common form of low grade torture. So you would need some kind of wrist support at the very least.
When you are loosening up, you are not trying to hit ctrl-alt-shift-% (regex replace in emacs on a French keyboard) for example. Carefree finger wiggling is different to trying to hit a particular point in space, let alone trying to hit four of them at once. Come to think of it, co-ordinating simultaneous keypresses without tactile feedback sounds like a nightmare to me.
There's a fairly basic physiological difference between gross motor movements and controlled ones. Like I say, I don't know how the long term effects of these keyboards would compare with a traditional keyboard, but they are certainly going to put different strains on your hands.
These projected, virtual keyboards have little to do with drumming, touching hard or soft surfaces, typing in shadows or accounting for tactile feedback...they have everything to do with motion, however.
But you still have conservation of momentum. If you start your finger moving to trip the sensor, I can only see three options as to what happens next:
Your finger stops because it hits a hard surface, which is likely to get painful after a while
Your finger stops because you use muscular control to stop it, which is going to place different strains on your hands (don't ask me whether it's better or worse than a standard keyboard)
Your finger chops straight through the table, which gets you a part in a Kung Fu movie
Excluding the third option, the other two sound like they are going to be a pain, literally. But surely the point is that these keyboards are designed for occasional use, not for 8 hour a day typing? I can't imagine that typing up War and Peace on most PDAs would be that great either, but then that's not what most people use them for.
I'm trying to get my head around the 'self-luminous' bit. So you can't switch them off? What happens when you shut the lid of your portable and put it in its sack for the night? Does it keep the case warm? If these screens are going to be readable in the same conditions as a newspaper, they are going to need to kick out several watts.
Also, I can think of several options for where the power comes from, and none of them fill me with confidence. It could be radioactive, it could be organic (ie your screen is going to gradually eat itself, or do you pour glucose solution into the VGA socket?)...
Is anyone getting anywhere with passive displays, ie systems which work by reflection not emission, and therefore don't need illuminating at all?
It is certainly not ESA's stated aim to be develop technology incompatible with NASA, that is just wrong.
I'm basing this on my recollection of the charter they had pinned up on the wall, the first point I think (but their website is down at the moment). Which doesn't mean they don't co-operate with NASA, but it does mean a tendency to reinvent the wheel for the sake of paying European companies to do so. That was exactly the case on the project I worked on: NASA had an off the shelf solution, so we had to think of another solution...
In these days of allegedly free trade, governments can't just throw money at their high tech companies to help them to develop new technology, so they fund them via groups such as NASA instead.
In Europe, it's even more explicit. The European Space Agency was created with the stated aim of producing technology that is not compatible with NASA. European nations contribute varying amounts, and the contracts are dished out according to how much money each country puts in. Thus the UK, which has a lot of aerospace know-how, never gets any big contracts, while the ESA has to dream up reasons to give contracts to countries that contribute loadsa money but don't have any useful skills. I worked on a UK pilot study for the ESA, and we knew that the main contract had to go to Austria or Norway, regardless of which country had the right companies. One of the contracts awarded to one Scandinavian country around that time was for research into computer-generated art...
Personally, I can live with this state of affairs. Governments are always going to find ways to subsidise their key industries, and I'd rather they did it by ordering Space Shuttles than by ordering ICBMs.
I'm currently working on a project that needs to run on a Windows network, and when I started I didn't have a Windows machine. I've done the whole thing in Perl/Tk, and, apart from a couple of small routines that switch slashes to backslashes in filenames, the whole thing, back end plus interface plus data files, is transparently portable.
Of course I could tie myself to a particular platform by using specific system commands or whatever, but sticking to the generic bit of perl (ie most of it) means that, for all intents and purposes, I can forget about OSs entirely.
The BBC Micro is actually a fairly good example of separating the language from the OS. They were on two different ROM chips. If you unplugged the BASIC ROM, it booted to a shell prompt. If you plugged in a Wordwise ROM instead, it booted into a WP. Or you could put in a FORTH ROM... BBC BASIC was an application like any other.
100 used ports is wrong though and I would be worried about this too. I only use two...
The destination ports behind the firewall were the 3 standard ones. It was the source ports that were all over the place. I tried blocking some of the dubious looking ones, and it found new servers on different ports as fast as I could block the old ones. The client's W98 machine kept falling over (maybe because he had too many connections for his OS?), which didn't help. He didn't have a clue what he was doing, I don't do Windows...
I don't pretend to know much about the gory details of how it works, but P2P has never struck me as the best way ever invented to ensure the integrity of your system.
Last week a client asked to bring his PC into the cybercafe to download some files using eDonkey. After a couple of days, my observations were that
It was going to take him another month to get a whole video of anything (cf 90 minutes for a whole Redhat CD over the same connection)
The only downloads that worked were XXX
His software opened 200 connections through my firewall, compared with about 20 for the rest of the cybercafe (our machines are thin clients, he was on a different subnet)
He was receiving from 100 or so different ports, some of which are also used by well-known worms and trojans
So I told him to take his eDonkey elsewhere... is there any way to know what you are really connected to with this sort of system?
Slashdot Mirror
:-)
Sadly not. To be honest, I can't believe how excited everyone is getting about the female pronouns. The man has an academic background, and such stylistic quirks have been the norm in many fields at least since I was at university 15 years ago. Personally, I'm with Strunk and White on this one, and stick to male pronouns (and in French, my working language, there is no option anyway), but I hardly notice (s)he or alternating he/she anymore. It certainly annoys me a lot less than Terry Pratchet style main clause impaired sentences!
Anyway, as far as I can see, the world's first programmer was allegedly a woman, and the real weaker sex has been trying to catch up ever since...
Just downloaded it, only skimmed the contents so far, but he seems to be trying to cover a load of stuff that isn't directly related to programming, and, in addition, is highly context-specific. For example, do all programmers have a team for which they have any responsibility? Do they all get involved in the quoting process? I wonder whether a couple of pages on how to negotiate a contract is worse than nothing at all...
Only if you don't read EULAs, and don't think about the future.
I have no fears on that score. Like any extorsion racket, it is in MS's interests not to kill off their victims (or hurt them so much that they decide to fight back), so, whatever the EULA might allow in a /.er's paranoid mind, it just ain't gonna happen. (And my business is 99% Linux anyway, so I don't care too much if I'm wrong on this...)
Most software isn't internationalised
But if, as you more or less say yourself, the MS apps are, and the products I can buy in the country where I live are, who cares whether I could buy a Czech version of some obscure program in a supermarket in Equador?
Do you think MS writes those drivers?
No, I'll give you that one, wrong discussion...
Mandrake
It might be better in language terms, but the version I tried was extremely bad in many other ways. I'm going back a couple of years here. SUSE was better than RH language-wise, and, in general, I liked it a lot, but I just got fed up with having to fix every program I wanted to run because none of the files were in the normal (ie RH) place.
Office lock-in
Glad you mentioned that, because office software is another really bad thing with Linux. Star Office/Open Office are great office suites for people who don't need an office suite. I get to try MS Office users on Star Office in my cybercafe most days, and they all end up wanting to chew their arms off, and that is before we mention 'features' like locking the entire system up big time if you try to save a file directly onto a floppy disc (this bug has been around for at least a year, survived from SO 5.2 to OO 1, and also happens on a laptop with a different distro). Thing is, geeks are not usually Office power users...
My two euro-cents on the matter say that the fact that there is always more than one answer to everything is actually a barrier to more widespread acceptance of Linux. I'm with RH8 on this one :-)
The first problem with the open source "model" is that there isn't one
I agree with the sentence, but maybe not with the thought behind it. The multiplicity of OSS models does a lot of people's heads in. At least with the commercial model it is very simple (you may be being ripped off, but at least you can put that into your spreadsheet)...
It is possible that open source software will reduce the number of programmers employed in writing software.
That isn't my concern, if I have a 'concern' on this matter. My projection into the future goes more like this:
You can start a project on your s/h PC in your dorm, and, if it's a great idea, it may get a lot of interest. When it gets too big for one dorm room, you can network. But if you want to produce a piece of software with the breadth of, say, Windows XP, the 'doing it for love or donated equipment' model just won't do it.
IMHO, the current state of Linux/GNU (or whatever it is I have on my Redhat CD) illustrates this fairly well. The kernel is state of the art. And a lot of big companies are putting a lot of $$$ into keeping it that way, because, on a purely commercial basis, it is cheaper to do this than to keep developing and supporting bespoke OSs, especially for minority platforms. Some of the geeky applications are pretty whizzy too, because they catch the imagination of the dorm-room developers.
On the other hand, the less 'sexy' bits are often pretty bad. I use Redhat in French, except that half the applications still come up in American English. In linguistic terms, Windows runs away with the ball. Why? Because translating page after page of someone else's text prompts is not what sets your average geek's imagination on fire. Then there are drivers. Or not. I bought a Polaroid digital camera over a year ago, plugs and plays with Windows, still waiting for it to work with a standard Linux distro. The last 2 versions of RH claimed to support it: v8 has a driver, but only via the USB port, which is funny since that model never had a USB connector. What's the problem here? Producing drivers for umpteem million products is grunt work, and unless some geek somewhere happens to have my camera,it just ain't going to happen.
And the lack of development on the non-sexy bits of Linux/GNU is, IMHO, one of the main obstacles to its widespread adoption on the desktop. So I don't think we are looking at less programmers, I just think that the OSS/Commercial split is reaching dynamic equilibrium, and that the balance will not shift further towards OSS unless or until we find a sane way of financing the dull bits of infrastructure development.
Donate to the opensource programmers today and children of tomorrow won't have to throw their educational dollars away on constant computer upgrades and expensive commercial programs.
It's a nice idea but, as you say:
I've been an out-of-work programmer and it's great to spend some of that free time giving back to the community but it's hard when you can't pay rent let alone buy the hardware you need to test so and so feature against.
Which is surely a good summary of the problem with the open source model. It relies on someone paying the programmers for the love of open source. Now there may be enough university departments and software manual publishers to feed the likes of Larry Wall, which is great, but I can't see this model ever scaling to the point where it 'employs' anything like the number of people currently working on commercial coding projects. You need some way to collect the money, on the basis of what work is the most useful. And the conventional way to do this is called a company in a free market.
Cf science, which started off as a hobby of the upper classes, was then patronised by the upper classes, and is now mainly funded either by business or the public sector.
I like KDE. It helps me to earn a living. I already pay for it, in the sense that I buy boxed distros. I wouldn't be averse to paying more, so that some of the money went to the people doing the coding. But I doubt if my French accountant would let me pay the programmers in hardware...
It is because it is impossible for solid state electronics, no matter how tweaked, sampled and modified, to duplicate the odd harmonics the come by nature out of the plasma in a hot vacuum tube.
The 'natural' sound of the electric guitar was a quirk of the technology that was around at the time. And a lot of people hated it, compared to the 'natural' sound of acoustic instruments, most of which had only been around in their current compromised scale form for a few hundred years. When the compromised scale was introduced, in order to make transposition and keyboard instruments possible, I'm sure the purists said that the compromise was just that, and that nothing that would ever replace a flute that only plays in E flat.
If Gibson had gone digital from day one, people would be posting about how now analogue system, however tweaked, can never reproduce the clean precision of digital. Or something. And in 30 years' time, when someone comes up with another way of doing music, all the digital 'purists' will bang on about how nothing can approach the 'natural' beauty of a DX-7...
You ear get used to whatever sounds you feed it within reason. If you don't believe me, try listening to some Indian music, for example. To a Western ear, it is all out of tune, before we get on to the melodic component, but half a billion Indians would disagree...
In an unexpected development, Napster have opened for business again sporting a wide range of copyright-expired music. College dorms will soon be rocking to the strains of Frank Sinatra, Paul Robeson and the Beatles. "We are looking forward to releasing Bat Out Of Hell" in a decade or so", said a spokesman, who asked not to be named.
Has anyone found anything anywhere that explains their methodology? I chased most of the links last time, and there were no clues. What are they counting? The materials used in the factory itself? Including the workers? The mining of the raw materials? Their transport?
Also, does anyone have a clue how these figures compare with anything else, ie how much water is used to make, say, a hammer, measuring the same way?
And finally, do the figures vary across the world? For example, America-based companies generally use several times as much water as their counterparts in Europe. Is this true of chip manufacture too?
In other words, is there any substance behind this 'news', or is it just journalese?
OK, thanks for the information. But while the movie-length tapes may have appeared before VHS had taken a lead, the fact that they weren't available from day one may well have encouraged manufacturers to opt for VHS: I would expect the time between the decision and the appearance of the machines in the shops to be at least 6 months, probably nearer 12.
First impressions are hard to shake. I still meet people who don't think that Linux works with a mouse... the only company I can think of that gets three bites at the cherry is Microsoft, eg with Windows, but then they already had a stranglehold on the PC OS market. Sony didn't have that advantage in the VCR market.
By comparison, Philips famously chose the storage capacity of their CD to fit the longest common piece of classical music around, and it wiped the competition out. It wasn't the best solution in many ways, but it would record any symphony out there, from day one.
But none of those are technological reasons.
I would have thought that the storage capacity was quite an important technological criterion for a storage medium. If the technology is for home recording, and the tape it too short to record what a lot of people what to record, ie full-length films, isn't that a bit of a drawback? I have to say that I'd rather see all of a film at less than perfect quality than all but the last 20 minutes of a film at wonderful quality.
but then simply states that, despite all of its advantages, VHS is still better because it's more popular.
There whas a bit more to his argument than that:
Those sound like three quite important arguments to me, unless money is no object, you like buying hardware from a de facto monopoly, hunting for media is your idea of fun and you don't actually want to watch movies, just admire the spec.
A bit further on, he points out another specific flaw in Sony's market research:
Now I don't know a lot about the details, but would it have been that hard for Sony to provide essentially the same technology with a larger box and a longer tape? As the article continues:
And that's the basis problem with the general population who decide which products succeed by their purchasing decisions: they see technology as a means to an end, not as something to admire for its intrinsic cleverness.
You have survived the cold, the wind, the yetis, you are exhausted but exhilarated as you pull yourself over the final ledge and collapse onto the summit, and then you notice an urgent beeping in your pocket. In your rush to extract your PDA with frost-bitten fingers, you overbalance and fall backwards. As you plummet towards certain death, you just have time to read that you can get herbal viagra at an unbeatable price...
If the spam operation is illegal, the authorities can close down the money contact point.
So the spammers couldn't run an e-commerce site on one of their servers and take payments by credit card? Also, note that the money lost in currency conversion etc becomes negligable once you get over a few thousand dollars. Plenty of people choose to put money in Swiss bank accounts despite the costs involved. Probably including quite a few spammers...
A virtual keyboard is all about shortcuts...no one is proposing they be used for anything more than convenience. If you need to work for 8 hours, you'll need an actual keyboard.
Yes, I think that's what the last paragraph of my original posting said :-)
I don't think it's quite that simple, because
There's a fairly basic physiological difference between gross motor movements and controlled ones. Like I say, I don't know how the long term effects of these keyboards would compare with a traditional keyboard, but they are certainly going to put different strains on your hands.
which might just upset the accountants...
Sorry, you've lost me. Are you saying that this is a bad thing?
These projected, virtual keyboards have little to do with drumming, touching hard or soft surfaces, typing in shadows or accounting for tactile feedback...they have everything to do with motion, however.
But you still have conservation of momentum. If you start your finger moving to trip the sensor, I can only see three options as to what happens next:
Excluding the third option, the other two sound like they are going to be a pain, literally. But surely the point is that these keyboards are designed for occasional use, not for 8 hour a day typing? I can't imagine that typing up War and Peace on most PDAs would be that great either, but then that's not what most people use them for.
I'm trying to get my head around the 'self-luminous' bit. So you can't switch them off? What happens when you shut the lid of your portable and put it in its sack for the night? Does it keep the case warm? If these screens are going to be readable in the same conditions as a newspaper, they are going to need to kick out several watts.
Also, I can think of several options for where the power comes from, and none of them fill me with confidence. It could be radioactive, it could be organic (ie your screen is going to gradually eat itself, or do you pour glucose solution into the VGA socket?)...
Is anyone getting anywhere with passive displays, ie systems which work by reflection not emission, and therefore don't need illuminating at all?
It is certainly not ESA's stated aim to be develop technology incompatible with NASA, that is just wrong.
I'm basing this on my recollection of the charter they had pinned up on the wall, the first point I think (but their website is down at the moment). Which doesn't mean they don't co-operate with NASA, but it does mean a tendency to reinvent the wheel for the sake of paying European companies to do so. That was exactly the case on the project I worked on: NASA had an off the shelf solution, so we had to think of another solution...
In these days of allegedly free trade, governments can't just throw money at their high tech companies to help them to develop new technology, so they fund them via groups such as NASA instead.
In Europe, it's even more explicit. The European Space Agency was created with the stated aim of producing technology that is not compatible with NASA. European nations contribute varying amounts, and the contracts are dished out according to how much money each country puts in. Thus the UK, which has a lot of aerospace know-how, never gets any big contracts, while the ESA has to dream up reasons to give contracts to countries that contribute loadsa money but don't have any useful skills. I worked on a UK pilot study for the ESA, and we knew that the main contract had to go to Austria or Norway, regardless of which country had the right companies. One of the contracts awarded to one Scandinavian country around that time was for research into computer-generated art...
Personally, I can live with this state of affairs. Governments are always going to find ways to subsidise their key industries, and I'd rather they did it by ordering Space Shuttles than by ordering ICBMs.
I'm currently working on a project that needs to run on a Windows network, and when I started I didn't have a Windows machine. I've done the whole thing in Perl/Tk, and, apart from a couple of small routines that switch slashes to backslashes in filenames, the whole thing, back end plus interface plus data files, is transparently portable.
Of course I could tie myself to a particular platform by using specific system commands or whatever, but sticking to the generic bit of perl (ie most of it) means that, for all intents and purposes, I can forget about OSs entirely.
The BBC Micro is actually a fairly good example of separating the language from the OS. They were on two different ROM chips. If you unplugged the BASIC ROM, it booted to a shell prompt. If you plugged in a Wordwise ROM instead, it booted into a WP. Or you could put in a FORTH ROM... BBC BASIC was an application like any other.
100 used ports is wrong though and I would be worried about this too. I only use two...
The destination ports behind the firewall were the 3 standard ones. It was the source ports that were all over the place. I tried blocking some of the dubious looking ones, and it found new servers on different ports as fast as I could block the old ones. The client's W98 machine kept falling over (maybe because he had too many connections for his OS?), which didn't help. He didn't have a clue what he was doing, I don't do Windows...
I don't pretend to know much about the gory details of how it works, but P2P has never struck me as the best way ever invented to ensure the integrity of your system.
Last week a client asked to bring his PC into the cybercafe to download some files using eDonkey. After a couple of days, my observations were that
So I told him to take his eDonkey elsewhere... is there any way to know what you are really connected to with this sort of system?