Bringin' up all sorts of memories. Thanks for the ANALOG link, with the site being/.'d and me in the mood for nostalgia I was a bit limited.
Begin nostalgic ramble...
Grew up on Ataris. First had an 8-bit (Atari64 if I recall), then graduated to an ST when I went to high school. I wrote many many papers on that thing (the ST, the Atari64 had a word processor, but man was that a clunky interface). The Degas painter program was a great distraction. My dad was a musician/hobbiest and he had a Roland MT-32 (the original) and a MIDI keyboard, the Atari's had the MIDI thing down pat. Had (I think) a 16 track MIDI recording system at home. Really fun, even for someone (like me) who didn't have a clue about music. Also, some games (like Pirates) supported the MIDI format and damn they sounded good:)
Had a bit of programing experience on both. I remember learning some BASIC on the 8-bit. My forays were pretty limited though. I figured out POKE and PEEK and GOTO but for some reason, never really got the idea of why subroutines were useful. Even so, the player missle graphics business was cool, a trivial amount of work and even an eight year old could figure out how to get character A to shoot at character B and to get some interaction with the joystick. Can't remember any of my programming since then being so easy or fun. Beat the pants off of programming in VB or later in UNIX, though those were always for work not play so I guess it's not a fair comparison.
The ST was really cool for what you could do with sounds and programming. The ability to just pick a wave form, a frequency and a few other parameters was really cool. To get a neat little beat going took a one line command. Wish those things had had more of a chance to evolve. The furthest along I ever saw one was (years later) some sort of laptop (with a woman's name if I recall - Alice?) that these guys brought to my highschool to make some sort of pitch for a sound media training school. One guy prattled on for a while. In the mean time the other ripped bits off of half a dozen CD's and mixed them into a song, in about 25 minutes. Keep in mind Intel 386DX's were a big deal then, CD roms were a new idea for PC's. The end result was technically impressive though I disagreed with his music tastes:)
Still remember the EA slot car simulator, that was a cool game. To be honest I'm not sure which computer it was on, I think the 8-bit, but I'm not sure. I remember it being on a 5.25" disk so it was probably the 8-bit. Did a Google search for it... Racing Destruction Set. That's it... Yeah! The only link I can find for it though is being slashdoted (www.atarimagazines.com)... Yeah for google caches. Really, I can't think of any other racing game before or since that allowed you to build your own tracks (sooo trivially) and to customize aspects of the track such as ramps, friction and GRAVITY. And mines too! How cool was that. Placed right and a slow moving vehicle would just bounce up and down getting progressively more damaged.
Someone made this point in another post, but I have to agree... Open source is the closest thing we've got to the spirit of what these old programing magazines were. Face it, any time a publisher could print out the code and people would enter programs manually, that's beyond tweaking someone else's program... It's high time all OS's shipped with programming languages again. I'm not a Mac user but it sounds like Macs have been doing this for a while (is Carbon/Cocoa in the default install?). If so, good for them! Am I crazy or has Microsoft dropped even the lameass QBasic from their default install (as of like years ago).
Check the STIx fonts page (second link in the article I think). This is being started by a consortium of publishers. The list of publishers on board is at least a good start. Especially true when you consider how many journals a few of them put out. AIP, ACS, AMS, IEEE, APS and Elsevier. That really covers a huge number of papers which would be trying to publish 'inordinately complex mathematical models.' Yes there are other publishers, but this could rapidly become a standard as people get fed up with (as mentioned in their FAQ) the 'dreaded missing symbol square box.'
6 channel ATA-100 raid 0+1/0/1/3/5 ain't much more. You can get one from Promise for about $250, w/out memory though (one cheap DIMM). Seems to me things only get really expensive if you care about hotswap capabilities, which the average hobbist probably doesn't need. And 6 disks begins to get expensive, even at today's prices. 'course 3 way striped and fully mirrored does sound pretty nice.
On a related note. This is a PCI card. What's the bandwidth for PCI? If this were all RAID 0, would 6 fold striped ATA-100 out pace the bandwidth of a 32bit-33MHz PCI slot?
Re:Aren't APPS the real issue?
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Agreed. Applications are the reason this hasn't really made it on the desktop. However, server grade applications that are good (equal to or arguably better than comercial ones) are the reason Linux etc. are making it in the midrange server field. High end servers are probably just a matter of time and acceptance (when you spend $$$ for a big server the cost of the OS starts to seem insignificant).
For the desktop arena, things are improving but they won't however be 'there' for quite a while. I think if people just want to use office to write a letter to grandma and get on the web, OSS provides plenty of solutions. If the desktop is meant to work... well, I've started and deleted a rant about this maybe three times now. I'll summarize instead. Tools for software development abound in OSS, but I write a lot and there are two pieces of software that I need on my desktop.
Illustrator. The parent mentioned Adobe above and I can only assume Illustrator is why (the GIMP is getting really good). I will have to stick with Windows or Mac until there's an OSS compatible alternative. Either homegrown or Adobe releases a version for GNU/Linux and/or BSD. OS X may actually help with that, who knows. Adobe hasn't ever really tried all that hard to do anything about copy protection, but I will pretty gladly pay $$ for their expensive but not particularily overpriced software. I want an alternative, but given the bar that they set, it will be a long time before there's a free solution. the GIMP is a good model, it proves Adobe quality programs are possible in OSS, but that program has been a long time coming.
EndNote
Somebody please come up with an alternative integrated into one of the OSS word processors. I'm to the point where I'm learning to program for the sake of doing this myself. However, I'm just getting started, I'll be a while. The program isn't hard. It takes formatted info from the web (the formats are open) or if you're unlucky, the user, and puts it into a really lightweight database. Then it talks to the word processing software/uses a few filters and gets rid of the most tedious part of paper writing in existence. A clever solution, but not a conceptually difficult piece software to write and certainly not worth what they charge for it. They charge a similar amount to what illustrator goes for, !?!. What stuns me (STUNS ME) is that there really isn't a good alternative, even for pay for windows! There are a few alternatives, but they don't seem to support the websearching of things like PubMed and automated import of information. Most folks I know keep track of 100's -1000's of references and if you think they're going to type more than a few of them in you're wrong. The free alternative, the reference thingy in OpenOffice (unless I missed something) requires you to manually enter all your information!
Which brings me to a suggestion. I've looked and it doesn't seem either OO or Kword (some one check AbiWord for me) have this. What the OSS word processors need is to forget the MS model. How about a model which allows an arbitrary number of lists of arbitrary tags or pointers. This would allow the automation of lots of things. Automated figure pointers, automated TOC (yes I realize that exists), automated equation numbering, automated table numbering and most importantly automated references. It could be extended too if pointers could address files. Thus you could have automatic figure updating and could break a document up so that more than one person could edit it at a time. With a generic list formalism in place it seems that plugins for this sort of thing should be developed pretty quickly. "But that'll make it too hard to use!" Probably not, the tagging will be stuffed into the menus by default and there will be plugins which formalize a few common tags (ie. rferencing) will succeed if they're easy to use. Or add a 'training wheels' layer that hides most of it.
Of course, maybe I missed something. If good solutions to the above are out there, let me know.
The interesting aspect of this is that not all major labels are doing this at the same time, and BMG is only going part way with it. It's conceivable that BMG europe with get the reputation of producing "CD's" that don't "work" and their sales will plummet. As long as say Capitol (I think they're a fully separate entity) doesn't do the same, perhaps BMG's sales will fall sharply and the sales of other big labels will only come down a bit (through consumer confusion). The result would be that BMG got financially punished and if they tried to claim that it was all P2P then it would sound pretty silly, given that the other makers weren't seeing dramatically changed numbers and P2P should affect the big labels uniformly. As long as BMG is the only one doing this, and as long as they stay regional with it, it will blow up in their faces
Would be a bit like Moby's blaming P2P for why his recent album didn't sell as well as Play. Your old product was better than your new product, therefore don't complain when the inferior product doesn't sell as well.
I've done this with an artist who has pretty limited releases of their live albums. They had a rather humorous note in the cover of a few about how they would _personally_ come over and kick your ass if you copied the disk without paying them directly. Given that finding a copy in a store was pretty much impossible, I liked the artist and album, and they were only asking for $5 and gave an address, I did. Talk about a grass roots business model.
It's really sad that this is only the second post or so -as far as I can tell- that actually points out that you didn't have to read the article to pick that it was satire, because it says it in the summary! For get all the RTFA comments, just read the summary...
For one fleeting moment I thought someone was doing that seriously. The screenshots page says enough, freakin' hilarious. Ideally there'd be some way to install that so it launched unsuspectingly on some poor coworker.
Hmmmm.... what's this extra window...
"Are you sure you want to move left?"
WTF!? yes I'm sure... [Much time passes]AH!... that should close it...
"Are you sure you don't want to close the Vigor asistant?"
Yes I'm sure I want to close it... huh! -finally notices the laughing in the background-
Somewhat offtopic but I was under the impression that many of the European telco's were going through similar revelations regarding the inadaquacies of their particular business models. The difference is that the telco's are now competing with the wireless companies. Given the reduced cost to enter the market, this changes things quite a bit. I've heard it specifically mentioned regarding Italy and Greece. In particular it is usually cheaper to make a call on a cell phone than on a land line, which obviously makes cell phones rather popular.
What I'm wondering about is if C&W is going through this in the UK as well (several friends of mine have complained about the cost of calls there) and are basically trying to get out of markets that have significant cellular customers and get a strangle hold on areas that don't have wide cellular use yet. The popularity of VoIP probably caught them offguard. Not sure about the degree of cell use in Panama, though it sounds like it is an option, though one C&W controls as well. >:(
Here's hoping this doesn't actually have any effect on these services outside of Panama... I've become pretty dependent on them for keeping in touch with people (eg. wife) when they are traveling abroad. Why the local phone company even offers phone cards at the rates they charge these days is beyond me.
Can't tell if you understood me the first time, I was a bit lame on the specifics. The -nopcmcia was for Knoppix. Here's from their readme (ftp://source.rfc822.org/pub/mirror/knoppix/KNOPPI X-FAQ-EN.txt)
"Q: Auto configuration doesn't work on my computer, or the computer hangs
at boot. What should I do?
A: It might work if portions of the auto configuration are skipped. This
can be specified with "knoppix noscsi" or "knoppix nopcmcia". If the
problem can be identified -> please send the exact error message and when
possible a proposed solution using the web form at
http://www.knopper.net/kontakt/! Sometimes the output of
"lspci ; lspci -n" is very helpful, especially if the problem involves
incorrectly identified graphics cards."
As far as what laptop I'll be using, its an old (P1) Vaio. Here's hoping its easy. Mostly I just want an environment where I can goof around with learning programming without having to worry about screwing over my desktop (with a partially completed thesis on it). As a result my standard are pretty low (sound is optional for example).
I've found the Linux on Laptops helpful (at least in convincing me to try it).
http://www.linux-laptop.net/dell.html
They also have a bunch of case studies of installs on various laptops... one for me... eight for you. The third one in particular meight be helpful. Someone installing Debian, having trouble with pcmcia. No talk of installing a pcmcia wireless card though (6th one talks about a wireless card, but it was internal and trouble free to install). Good luck.
"I tried my trusty Libranet 2.7 but it hangs every time on pcmcia while booting and never completes booting."
I haven't tried putting it on a laptop yet (though I AM downloading for such a purpose). The readme I checked mentioned that there is a nopcmcia option (there's also a noscsi) for getting around some hangups when booting. I think this may be good news/bad new for you though. I'm guessing that this is a recurrent problem for some people and the best way to get around it is to diable the pcmcia. Which brings up the potential bad news... hope your wireless card wasn't pcmcia...
If it could be done, it would be a weapon of amazing destructive force... Wait that's the BOMB!
My guess is that the author actually tried to their research but got confused. As far as having the articles checked by the people the story is about... probably not... most interesting stories are about interesting people who might not have that much time.
Generally, I'm willing to cut some slack to the journalists on getting thing right. However, I'd say its reasonable to expect two things from a science reporter (especially one from a paper as large as the LA Times, where the article originated): (1) at least have a grounding in science and (2) the initiative to at least refer to say an undergraduate level text book. I mean sheesh, I imagine pretty much any undergraduate physics text would do a better job summarizing the way a laser works. I pulled mine out and it did a reasonable job in one paragraph. If you're really clueless in physics and chemistry though you might conclude that they are talking about using the conversion of particles into light. Afterall, the first (and often only) laser discussed is probably a He/Ne laser, which actually uses the collision of particles to prepare the Ne for emission. So maybe that's the origin of the confusion.
And speaking of fact checking, I can't tell, is E=mc sarcasm or a typo?
I have a bunch of friends in nucleic acids research and they get great pleasure (and annoyance) out of catching the ~50% of the NYT articles with an illustration of DNA that gets the helical twist wrong. Again, any intro bio book would clarify it, but if you don't know anything about biology or chemistry you're unlikely to realize that it is even important.
"If Intel announced that this new processor could degrade its performance when issues arose then I'd be interested. Overheating ? Turn off hyperthreading and drop the clock speed. Still got issues, move down to minimum speed and start a shutdown process."
I seem to recall that the P4 does this. Tom's Hardware had a rather entertaining demo on this some time ago. They ran some FPS in the background on the CPU for visual feedback of how it was perfoming, the physically removed the heatsink/fan from a P4 CPU and it slowed down! I found that rather impressive. Heat sink was reattached and it went back to regular speed. Tom's Hardware being what it is they were more interested in the Athlon's performance in such a test. This was memorable because, at the time, the Athlon's did little under such circumstances and with the sudden change in heat load they literally smoked as they fried.
The up shot of bringing that up is that while the P4 wasn't smart enough to say initiate a suspend to disk, a shutdown or any other more permanent solution, it was smart enough to throttle back a bit to reduce the heat problem. Between that and everyone complaining about fan noise these days, got me thinking that we're about to start seeing people underclock their computers.
With all the discussion of is this or isn't this a patent/lawsuit problem, it seems an important question is being missed. How did they make the (co)dec? The article itself doesn't mention it and short of digging into their dev site, I don't know how to figure that out. Anyone involved with the project care to share?
I can think of two very different ways to get at it. Try and dig the decoder out of MS code or give it a bunch of training files and tweak the decoder until it sounded right. (ouch that sounds like a painful project) If the latter, then I don't really see how there could be any sort of lawsuit issues, unless there's a EULA problem (can't use WMP in developing competing software or something). It's a bit reminiscent of the Samba approach. Also, without a encoder, (IANAL) you shouldn't run into problems even if the wma format itself is patented.
Wheel mounted audio controls... Seen that a few times, great idea. Wish I had that when I did get into an acident over such things.
"not allowed to transport passengers"
Strangely, I think they were actually trying to do this for teens in California. Not sure if it ever went though or not. I remember thinking at the time, that's an awful idea, thinking of a few of my friends who lived in the freakin' boonies and had to drive like an hour to get to high school. Needless to say they all carpooled (in CA, bah!), especially the little sibs who couldn't drive yet.
I think the blanket restriction of all drivers of a certain type may be a bad idea, but short of waiting until they get in an acident, I can't think of another way to deal with this. Of course, the most frightening drivers I can think of aren't anywhere near being teens and don't really stand out demographically. They'd have to get pulled over for driving while distracted. Any ideas on how to pick out hazardous people like this without having to wait for them to screw up or using inaccurate blanket demographic assumptions?
I guess innocent until proven guilty, but still. I've got a few friends who, even when they're focused on driving, should never be allowed on the road.
While I'm at it, another horror story. A friend in college once told me (bragged is more like it) that she could be drinking a soda and eat take out Chinese food all while driving, with chopsticks. Shiver...
Actually, here's the original question:
(Oh look, I'm reading!)
"Then you can start by telling us which PC vendors do this. You only get to include those with significant marketshare or a well trusted support organization."
Sounds an awful lot the original poster didn't think any major players did this. My point was not only that a major PC manufacturer does this but that arguably THE major PC manufacturer does this. The way I think about it, it makes sense for the major players in the PC market who provide service contracts to want Windows on their boxes, when fielding support calls you don't want to spend half your time trying to puzzle out what so and so did to their OS, you'd like homogeneity in the OS at least.
Apparently, I got you a bit miffed, but you should have read the original question in the first place.
"Or what about this? Some button you can press on the phone which says "hold on, I'm driving at the moment and looking for somewhere to pull over safely..." Perhaps that could be a button on the steering wheel or something."
Interesting idea. Some cars actually built carphones into the steering wheel for a while, but I think it was relatively unpopular because the car company got to pick your carrier. How about this as an actual use for Bluetooth instead of this silly wireless handsfree stuff. A little remote thingy that communicates with the cellphone and can be clipped/stuck somewhere (on or near the steering wheel for example). It could allow you to shunt the caller to a second or third voicemail message. Of course most people would want it allow you to answer calls too.
Actually, that sounds a bit like I'm just looking for any good use of wireless technology. It'd probably be easier if you could trivially set which voicemail message people received from your phone (get in car, hit voicemail select button, scroll to the 'I'm in the car' message, put phone down and drive. That way you wouldn't face the temptation of answering the phone every time it rang.
Absolutely. I know someone who basically has no ability to concentrate on the road if you're talking to them. Figured this out once the hard way. No accident but when they ran the SECOND stop sign I decided that I should never mix talking and driving with them.
Also, pretty much anything can be a distraction. I once got into (my one) accident by looking down for like 0.5s to hit eject on my tapedeck. Traffic was doing like 15mi/hr but it came to a complete stop in that period of time. No one is proposing doing away with stereos in cars but basically anything that is a distraction is a hazard. Laws banning cell phones while driving are just trying to reduce the incidence of needless distraction. Given the way a lot of people drive (Do they even teach following distance in drivers ed. these days?) it really doesn't take much to cause an accident these days.
Or pull over slowly/at the next exit and call them back. Really, how many cell phones don't come with caller ID? No caller ID/blocked number, use voice mail. Like screening your calls at home, if they don't leave a message, was it really all that important to answer the phone in the first place? Probably not.
Actually the first one I checked falls into this category... DELL... Maybe you've heard of them?
True you can get servers from them with RedHat now but near as I can tell anything in their Dimensions line (aimed at home users) gives you the generous choice of Win XP Home, Pro, Home with Plus or Pro with Plus. Their workstation line also gives you the choice of Win 2000. Oooo...
That's what people are complaining about with the MS tax business. See for your self, choose any desktop or workstation line and try to configure it without windows... you can't!
Ironically, it's those without the 'significant marketshare' who will sell you a computer without charging you for windows. Fred's house o' parts will probably happily assemble you a computer sans OS no problemo.
Wonder if you could scan the paper in and print your own...
It's possible that the off-white colour is actually florescent or something and the pen might use a UV light source to track the movements.
I was thinking about that too. Yes it's highly annoying that they charge you so much and require special paper. I would guess that it is almost certainly some special ink, 0.01inch isn't that hard for scanners/printers these days.
The special paper has a cool side effect though. It's basically digitally signed paper. If someone sent you a document on this paper you could sign the document and simply send back the resulting coordinates and if they knew what bit of the map you were originally using (they sent it to you after all, this should be do-able), they could then map your signature back onto their electronic copy of the original document. As the coordinates are unique, the company might be able to provide a service, give a reference coordinate (say 0.5" in from the upper left hand corner), and ask what do these coordinates look like relative to the reference. Maybe the company will only give output if it falls within the same 8.5" x 11" tile as the original coordinate. Almost seems like a physical one time pad or something (no doubt I'm using that wrong but you get my idea). If it's photocopiable you lose the whole security bit and are left with a neat tool that probably isn't quite as good (good be defined by resolution) as just scanning in your notes on a flatbed scanner.
I didn't follow the link on the web site labeled security (feeling lazy), maybe they've thought this out already.
Then again, I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad
How long has it been since you actually saw one of those in operation? Been years since I saw one (last one also has a resolution of ~0.1 inches! Ick!). From the other comments it sounds like some companies held onto them a bit longer (with the requisite improvements in technology).
THAT would be neat; normal paper, normal ballpoint pen, and recorded to boot.
Hmm... No special paper, no special pen.
You could have an attachment to the pen, which would probably have a hard time adapting to different people's writing style unless it was REALLY close to writing surface. Also, different positioning on the pen might be tricky (totally different accelerations felt at different distances from your hand).
You could have some sort of means of tracking the position of the pen in a little area, ie. between a few positioning locators, but again resolution on the handwriting scale could be hard here. Or is that how the Palm systems work already?
Alternatively, you could have some sort of visual tracking system ($$$!). The easiest way I can come up with to get that to work would be to have it optically observe the ink you left behind. This is however really, really close to just being a glorfied realtime scanner. Why not just put your regular sheet of paper into a scanner when you're done with it maybe and save it at fax resolution. This has the advantage of existing, not costing too much and being very protable (ie. standard paper is easy to carry around).
A final idea, use a tablet input device! Maybe have a tablet with a somewhat reduced sensitivity so it ignores hand pressure but easily picks up the focused pressure of a pen head. Place a sheet of regular paper on the tablet (assuming they're about the same size) and viola, handwriting recording.
Well, there's small and then there's small. This is pretty much a peptide that has a structure. There are plenty of ~80aa protein domains and full proteins that would still be called small but are globular and can fold all by themselves. These would still be big on the in silico folding scale. Then, there are also really big proteins that are able to fold without help by charperones. Chaperones are a whole other level of complexity. yes it would be really cool to try to simulate their action as well but there's a long time to go before that happens, and a lot of interesting work to do before they need to be included (ie. the above discussed globular proteins, eg. HEW lysozyme, which has vast amounts of kinetic folding data on it, most without chaperones, but this sort of simulation with many, many trajectories still hasn't been done on it.
On the other hand, chaperones are actually really interesting to think about in this context. Some folks in the chaperone community might argue that the current method of in silico folding is actually a great way of modeling chaperone function. One model of chaperone function is that because they isolate a single folding protein into their internal cavity, they allow folding at infinite dilution (no other folding proteins nearby). Given that in silico folding studies pretty much always are done with only one protein molecule in the system, this is actually a reasonable approximation. Arguably, this is a great simulation of protein folding with chaperones, not in the cytosol (without them). But this is getting silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Rockin'
/.'d and me in the mood for nostalgia I was a bit limited.
:)
:)
Bringin' up all sorts of memories. Thanks for the ANALOG link, with the site being
Begin nostalgic ramble...
Grew up on Ataris. First had an 8-bit (Atari64 if I recall), then graduated to an ST when I went to high school. I wrote many many papers on that thing (the ST, the Atari64 had a word processor, but man was that a clunky interface). The Degas painter program was a great distraction. My dad was a musician/hobbiest and he had a Roland MT-32 (the original) and a MIDI keyboard, the Atari's had the MIDI thing down pat. Had (I think) a 16 track MIDI recording system at home. Really fun, even for someone (like me) who didn't have a clue about music. Also, some games (like Pirates) supported the MIDI format and damn they sounded good
Had a bit of programing experience on both. I remember learning some BASIC on the 8-bit. My forays were pretty limited though. I figured out POKE and PEEK and GOTO but for some reason, never really got the idea of why subroutines were useful. Even so, the player missle graphics business was cool, a trivial amount of work and even an eight year old could figure out how to get character A to shoot at character B and to get some interaction with the joystick. Can't remember any of my programming since then being so easy or fun. Beat the pants off of programming in VB or later in UNIX, though those were always for work not play so I guess it's not a fair comparison.
The ST was really cool for what you could do with sounds and programming. The ability to just pick a wave form, a frequency and a few other parameters was really cool. To get a neat little beat going took a one line command. Wish those things had had more of a chance to evolve. The furthest along I ever saw one was (years later) some sort of laptop (with a woman's name if I recall - Alice?) that these guys brought to my highschool to make some sort of pitch for a sound media training school. One guy prattled on for a while. In the mean time the other ripped bits off of half a dozen CD's and mixed them into a song, in about 25 minutes. Keep in mind Intel 386DX's were a big deal then, CD roms were a new idea for PC's. The end result was technically impressive though I disagreed with his music tastes
Still remember the EA slot car simulator, that was a cool game. To be honest I'm not sure which computer it was on, I think the 8-bit, but I'm not sure. I remember it being on a 5.25" disk so it was probably the 8-bit. Did a Google search for it... Racing Destruction Set. That's it... Yeah! The only link I can find for it though is being slashdoted (www.atarimagazines.com)... Yeah for google caches. Really, I can't think of any other racing game before or since that allowed you to build your own tracks (sooo trivially) and to customize aspects of the track such as ramps, friction and GRAVITY. And mines too! How cool was that. Placed right and a slow moving vehicle would just bounce up and down getting progressively more damaged.
Someone made this point in another post, but I have to agree... Open source is the closest thing we've got to the spirit of what these old programing magazines were. Face it, any time a publisher could print out the code and people would enter programs manually, that's beyond tweaking someone else's program... It's high time all OS's shipped with programming languages again. I'm not a Mac user but it sounds like Macs have been doing this for a while (is Carbon/Cocoa in the default install?). If so, good for them! Am I crazy or has Microsoft dropped even the lameass QBasic from their default install (as of like years ago).
Okay that's enough....
Check the STIx fonts page (second link in the article I think). This is being started by a consortium of publishers. The list of publishers on board is at least a good start. Especially true when you consider how many journals a few of them put out. AIP, ACS, AMS, IEEE, APS and Elsevier. That really covers a huge number of papers which would be trying to publish 'inordinately complex mathematical models.' Yes there are other publishers, but this could rapidly become a standard as people get fed up with (as mentioned in their FAQ) the 'dreaded missing symbol square box.'
6 channel ATA-100 raid 0+1/0/1/3/5 ain't much more. You can get one from Promise for about $250, w/out memory though (one cheap DIMM). Seems to me things only get really expensive if you care about hotswap capabilities, which the average hobbist probably doesn't need. And 6 disks begins to get expensive, even at today's prices. 'course 3 way striped and fully mirrored does sound pretty nice.
PROMISE SUPERTRAK SX6000 ULTRA-ATA/100 6-CHANNEL RAID 5 CONTROLLER CARD NO MEMORY - needs 1 DIMM
On a related note. This is a PCI card. What's the bandwidth for PCI? If this were all RAID 0, would 6 fold striped ATA-100 out pace the bandwidth of a 32bit-33MHz PCI slot?
Agreed. Applications are the reason this hasn't really made it on the desktop. However, server grade applications that are good (equal to or arguably better than comercial ones) are the reason Linux etc. are making it in the midrange server field. High end servers are probably just a matter of time and acceptance (when you spend $$$ for a big server the cost of the OS starts to seem insignificant).
For the desktop arena, things are improving but they won't however be 'there' for quite a while. I think if people just want to use office to write a letter to grandma and get on the web, OSS provides plenty of solutions. If the desktop is meant to work... well, I've started and deleted a rant about this maybe three times now. I'll summarize instead. Tools for software development abound in OSS, but I write a lot and there are two pieces of software that I need on my desktop.
Illustrator.
The parent mentioned Adobe above and I can only assume Illustrator is why (the GIMP is getting really good). I will have to stick with Windows or Mac until there's an OSS compatible alternative. Either homegrown or Adobe releases a version for GNU/Linux and/or BSD. OS X may actually help with that, who knows. Adobe hasn't ever really tried all that hard to do anything about copy protection, but I will pretty gladly pay $$ for their expensive but not particularily overpriced software. I want an alternative, but given the bar that they set, it will be a long time before there's a free solution. the GIMP is a good model, it proves Adobe quality programs are possible in OSS, but that program has been a long time coming.
EndNote
Somebody please come up with an alternative integrated into one of the OSS word processors. I'm to the point where I'm learning to program for the sake of doing this myself. However, I'm just getting started, I'll be a while. The program isn't hard. It takes formatted info from the web (the formats are open) or if you're unlucky, the user, and puts it into a really lightweight database. Then it talks to the word processing software/uses a few filters and gets rid of the most tedious part of paper writing in existence. A clever solution, but not a conceptually difficult piece software to write and certainly not worth what they charge for it. They charge a similar amount to what illustrator goes for, !?!. What stuns me (STUNS ME) is that there really isn't a good alternative, even for pay for windows! There are a few alternatives, but they don't seem to support the websearching of things like PubMed and automated import of information. Most folks I know keep track of 100's -1000's of references and if you think they're going to type more than a few of them in you're wrong. The free alternative, the reference thingy in OpenOffice (unless I missed something) requires you to manually enter all your information!
Which brings me to a suggestion. I've looked and it doesn't seem either OO or Kword (some one check AbiWord for me) have this. What the OSS word processors need is to forget the MS model. How about a model which allows an arbitrary number of lists of arbitrary tags or pointers. This would allow the automation of lots of things. Automated figure pointers, automated TOC (yes I realize that exists), automated equation numbering, automated table numbering and most importantly automated references. It could be extended too if pointers could address files. Thus you could have automatic figure updating and could break a document up so that more than one person could edit it at a time. With a generic list formalism in place it seems that plugins for this sort of thing should be developed pretty quickly. "But that'll make it too hard to use!" Probably not, the tagging will be stuffed into the menus by default and there will be plugins which formalize a few common tags (ie. rferencing) will succeed if they're easy to use. Or add a 'training wheels' layer that hides most of it.
Of course, maybe I missed something. If good solutions to the above are out there, let me know.
The interesting aspect of this is that not all major labels are doing this at the same time, and BMG is only going part way with it. It's conceivable that BMG europe with get the reputation of producing "CD's" that don't "work" and their sales will plummet. As long as say Capitol (I think they're a fully separate entity) doesn't do the same, perhaps BMG's sales will fall sharply and the sales of other big labels will only come down a bit (through consumer confusion). The result would be that BMG got financially punished and if they tried to claim that it was all P2P then it would sound pretty silly, given that the other makers weren't seeing dramatically changed numbers and P2P should affect the big labels uniformly. As long as BMG is the only one doing this, and as long as they stay regional with it, it will blow up in their faces
Would be a bit like Moby's blaming P2P for why his recent album didn't sell as well as Play. Your old product was better than your new product, therefore don't complain when the inferior product doesn't sell as well.
I've done this with an artist who has pretty limited releases of their live albums. They had a rather humorous note in the cover of a few about how they would _personally_ come over and kick your ass if you copied the disk without paying them directly. Given that finding a copy in a store was pretty much impossible, I liked the artist and album, and they were only asking for $5 and gave an address, I did. Talk about a grass roots business model.
It's really sad that this is only the second post or so -as far as I can tell- that actually points out that you didn't have to read the article to pick that it was satire, because it says it in the summary! For get all the RTFA comments, just read the summary...
Still chuckling about the fact that you DIDN'T make up the alt.religion.emacs part
For one fleeting moment I thought someone was doing that seriously. The screenshots page says enough, freakin' hilarious. Ideally there'd be some way to install that so it launched unsuspectingly on some poor coworker.
Hmmmm.... what's this extra window...
"Are you sure you want to move left?"
WTF!? yes I'm sure... [Much time passes]AH!... that should close it...
"Are you sure you don't want to close the Vigor asistant?"
Yes I'm sure I want to close it... huh!
-finally notices the laughing in the background-
Somewhat offtopic but I was under the impression that many of the European telco's were going through similar revelations regarding the inadaquacies of their particular business models. The difference is that the telco's are now competing with the wireless companies. Given the reduced cost to enter the market, this changes things quite a bit. I've heard it specifically mentioned regarding Italy and Greece. In particular it is usually cheaper to make a call on a cell phone than on a land line, which obviously makes cell phones rather popular.
What I'm wondering about is if C&W is going through this in the UK as well (several friends of mine have complained about the cost of calls there) and are basically trying to get out of markets that have significant cellular customers and get a strangle hold on areas that don't have wide cellular use yet. The popularity of VoIP probably caught them offguard. Not sure about the degree of cell use in Panama, though it sounds like it is an option, though one C&W controls as well. >:(
Here's hoping this doesn't actually have any effect on these services outside of Panama... I've become pretty dependent on them for keeping in touch with people (eg. wife) when they are traveling abroad. Why the local phone company even offers phone cards at the rates they charge these days is beyond me.
Can't tell if you understood me the first time, I was a bit lame on the specifics. The -nopcmcia was for Knoppix. Here's from their readme (ftp://source.rfc822.org/pub/mirror/knoppix/KNOPPI X-FAQ-EN.txt)
"Q: Auto configuration doesn't work on my computer, or the computer hangs at boot. What should I do?
A: It might work if portions of the auto configuration are skipped. This can be specified with "knoppix noscsi" or "knoppix nopcmcia". If the problem can be identified -> please send the exact error message and when possible a proposed solution using the web form at http://www.knopper.net/kontakt/! Sometimes the output of "lspci ; lspci -n" is very helpful, especially if the problem involves incorrectly identified graphics cards."
As far as what laptop I'll be using, its an old (P1) Vaio. Here's hoping its easy. Mostly I just want an environment where I can goof around with learning programming without having to worry about screwing over my desktop (with a partially completed thesis on it). As a result my standard are pretty low (sound is optional for example).
I've found the Linux on Laptops helpful (at least in convincing me to try it).
http://www.linux-laptop.net/dell.html
They also have a bunch of case studies of installs on various laptops... one for me... eight for you. The third one in particular meight be helpful. Someone installing Debian, having trouble with pcmcia. No talk of installing a pcmcia wireless card though (6th one talks about a wireless card, but it was internal and trouble free to install). Good luck.
"I tried my trusty Libranet 2.7 but it hangs every time on pcmcia while booting and never completes booting."
I haven't tried putting it on a laptop yet (though I AM downloading for such a purpose). The readme I checked mentioned that there is a nopcmcia option (there's also a noscsi) for getting around some hangups when booting. I think this may be good news/bad new for you though. I'm guessing that this is a recurrent problem for some people and the best way to get around it is to diable the pcmcia. Which brings up the potential bad news... hope your wireless card wasn't pcmcia...
Yeah, I saw that too...
If it could be done, it would be a weapon of amazing destructive force... Wait that's the BOMB!
My guess is that the author actually tried to their research but got confused. As far as having the articles checked by the people the story is about... probably not... most interesting stories are about interesting people who might not have that much time.
Generally, I'm willing to cut some slack to the journalists on getting thing right. However, I'd say its reasonable to expect two things from a science reporter (especially one from a paper as large as the LA Times, where the article originated): (1) at least have a grounding in science and (2) the initiative to at least refer to say an undergraduate level text book. I mean sheesh, I imagine pretty much any undergraduate physics text would do a better job summarizing the way a laser works. I pulled mine out and it did a reasonable job in one paragraph. If you're really clueless in physics and chemistry though you might conclude that they are talking about using the conversion of particles into light. Afterall, the first (and often only) laser discussed is probably a He/Ne laser, which actually uses the collision of particles to prepare the Ne for emission. So maybe that's the origin of the confusion.
And speaking of fact checking, I can't tell, is E=mc sarcasm or a typo?
I have a bunch of friends in nucleic acids research and they get great pleasure (and annoyance) out of catching the ~50% of the NYT articles with an illustration of DNA that gets the helical twist wrong. Again, any intro bio book would clarify it, but if you don't know anything about biology or chemistry you're unlikely to realize that it is even important.
"If Intel announced that this new processor could degrade its performance when issues arose then I'd be interested. Overheating ? Turn off hyperthreading and drop the clock speed. Still got issues, move down to minimum speed and start a shutdown process."
I seem to recall that the P4 does this. Tom's Hardware had a rather entertaining demo on this some time ago. They ran some FPS in the background on the CPU for visual feedback of how it was perfoming, the physically removed the heatsink/fan from a P4 CPU and it slowed down! I found that rather impressive. Heat sink was reattached and it went back to regular speed. Tom's Hardware being what it is they were more interested in the Athlon's performance in such a test. This was memorable because, at the time, the Athlon's did little under such circumstances and with the sudden change in heat load they literally smoked as they fried.
The up shot of bringing that up is that while the P4 wasn't smart enough to say initiate a suspend to disk, a shutdown or any other more permanent solution, it was smart enough to throttle back a bit to reduce the heat problem. Between that and everyone complaining about fan noise these days, got me thinking that we're about to start seeing people underclock their computers.
With all the discussion of is this or isn't this a patent/lawsuit problem, it seems an important question is being missed. How did they make the (co)dec? The article itself doesn't mention it and short of digging into their dev site, I don't know how to figure that out. Anyone involved with the project care to share?
I can think of two very different ways to get at it. Try and dig the decoder out of MS code or give it a bunch of training files and tweak the decoder until it sounded right. (ouch that sounds like a painful project) If the latter, then I don't really see how there could be any sort of lawsuit issues, unless there's a EULA problem (can't use WMP in developing competing software or something). It's a bit reminiscent of the Samba approach. Also, without a encoder, (IANAL) you shouldn't run into problems even if the wma format itself is patented.
Wheel mounted audio controls... Seen that a few times, great idea. Wish I had that when I did get into an acident over such things.
"not allowed to transport passengers"
Strangely, I think they were actually trying to do this for teens in California. Not sure if it ever went though or not. I remember thinking at the time, that's an awful idea, thinking of a few of my friends who lived in the freakin' boonies and had to drive like an hour to get to high school. Needless to say they all carpooled (in CA, bah!), especially the little sibs who couldn't drive yet.
I think the blanket restriction of all drivers of a certain type may be a bad idea, but short of waiting until they get in an acident, I can't think of another way to deal with this. Of course, the most frightening drivers I can think of aren't anywhere near being teens and don't really stand out demographically. They'd have to get pulled over for driving while distracted. Any ideas on how to pick out hazardous people like this without having to wait for them to screw up or using inaccurate blanket demographic assumptions?
I guess innocent until proven guilty, but still. I've got a few friends who, even when they're focused on driving, should never be allowed on the road.
While I'm at it, another horror story. A friend in college once told me (bragged is more like it) that she could be drinking a soda and eat take out Chinese food all while driving, with chopsticks. Shiver...
Actually, here's the original question:
(Oh look, I'm reading!)
"Then you can start by telling us which PC vendors do this. You only get to include those with significant marketshare or a well trusted support organization."
Sounds an awful lot the original poster didn't think any major players did this. My point was not only that a major PC manufacturer does this but that arguably THE major PC manufacturer does this. The way I think about it, it makes sense for the major players in the PC market who provide service contracts to want Windows on their boxes, when fielding support calls you don't want to spend half your time trying to puzzle out what so and so did to their OS, you'd like homogeneity in the OS at least.
Apparently, I got you a bit miffed, but you should have read the original question in the first place.
Maybe you should follow your own advice...
"Or what about this? Some button you can press on the phone which says "hold on, I'm driving at the moment and looking for somewhere to pull over safely..." Perhaps that could be a button on the steering wheel or something."
Interesting idea. Some cars actually built carphones into the steering wheel for a while, but I think it was relatively unpopular because the car company got to pick your carrier. How about this as an actual use for Bluetooth instead of this silly wireless handsfree stuff. A little remote thingy that communicates with the cellphone and can be clipped/stuck somewhere (on or near the steering wheel for example). It could allow you to shunt the caller to a second or third voicemail message. Of course most people would want it allow you to answer calls too.
Actually, that sounds a bit like I'm just looking for any good use of wireless technology. It'd probably be easier if you could trivially set which voicemail message people received from your phone (get in car, hit voicemail select button, scroll to the 'I'm in the car' message, put phone down and drive. That way you wouldn't face the temptation of answering the phone every time it rang.
Absolutely. I know someone who basically has no ability to concentrate on the road if you're talking to them. Figured this out once the hard way. No accident but when they ran the SECOND stop sign I decided that I should never mix talking and driving with them.
Also, pretty much anything can be a distraction. I once got into (my one) accident by looking down for like 0.5s to hit eject on my tapedeck. Traffic was doing like 15mi/hr but it came to a complete stop in that period of time. No one is proposing doing away with stereos in cars but basically anything that is a distraction is a hazard. Laws banning cell phones while driving are just trying to reduce the incidence of needless distraction. Given the way a lot of people drive (Do they even teach following distance in drivers ed. these days?) it really doesn't take much to cause an accident these days.
Or pull over slowly/at the next exit and call them back. Really, how many cell phones don't come with caller ID? No caller ID/blocked number, use voice mail. Like screening your calls at home, if they don't leave a message, was it really all that important to answer the phone in the first place? Probably not.
"That's strange, because my G4 Mac didn't come with Windows..."
Nor did it come from Dell...
Requiring marketshare ehh...
Boy you're making this hard...
Actually the first one I checked falls into this category... DELL... Maybe you've heard of them?
True you can get servers from them with RedHat now but near as I can tell anything in their Dimensions line (aimed at home users) gives you the generous choice of Win XP Home, Pro, Home with Plus or Pro with Plus. Their workstation line also gives you the choice of Win 2000. Oooo...
That's what people are complaining about with the MS tax business. See for your self, choose any desktop or workstation line and try to configure it without windows... you can't!
Ironically, it's those without the 'significant marketshare' who will sell you a computer without charging you for windows. Fred's house o' parts will probably happily assemble you a computer sans OS no problemo.
Wonder if you could scan the paper in and print your own...
It's possible that the off-white colour is actually florescent or something and the pen might use a UV light source to track the movements.
I was thinking about that too. Yes it's highly annoying that they charge you so much and require special paper. I would guess that it is almost certainly some special ink, 0.01inch isn't that hard for scanners/printers these days.
The special paper has a cool side effect though. It's basically digitally signed paper. If someone sent you a document on this paper you could sign the document and simply send back the resulting coordinates and if they knew what bit of the map you were originally using (they sent it to you after all, this should be do-able), they could then map your signature back onto their electronic copy of the original document. As the coordinates are unique, the company might be able to provide a service, give a reference coordinate (say 0.5" in from the upper left hand corner), and ask what do these coordinates look like relative to the reference. Maybe the company will only give output if it falls within the same 8.5" x 11" tile as the original coordinate. Almost seems like a physical one time pad or something (no doubt I'm using that wrong but you get my idea). If it's photocopiable you lose the whole security bit and are left with a neat tool that probably isn't quite as good (good be defined by resolution) as just scanning in your notes on a flatbed scanner.
I didn't follow the link on the web site labeled security (feeling lazy), maybe they've thought this out already.
Then again, I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad
How long has it been since you actually saw one of those in operation? Been years since I saw one (last one also has a resolution of ~0.1 inches! Ick!). From the other comments it sounds like some companies held onto them a bit longer (with the requisite improvements in technology).
THAT would be neat; normal paper, normal ballpoint pen, and recorded to boot.
Hmm... No special paper, no special pen.
You could have an attachment to the pen, which would probably have a hard time adapting to different people's writing style unless it was REALLY close to writing surface. Also, different positioning on the pen might be tricky (totally different accelerations felt at different distances from your hand).
You could have some sort of means of tracking the position of the pen in a little area, ie. between a few positioning locators, but again resolution on the handwriting scale could be hard here. Or is that how the Palm systems work already?
Alternatively, you could have some sort of visual tracking system ($$$!). The easiest way I can come up with to get that to work would be to have it optically observe the ink you left behind. This is however really, really close to just being a glorfied realtime scanner. Why not just put your regular sheet of paper into a scanner when you're done with it maybe and save it at fax resolution. This has the advantage of existing, not costing too much and being very protable (ie. standard paper is easy to carry around).
A final idea, use a tablet input device! Maybe have a tablet with a somewhat reduced sensitivity so it ignores hand pressure but easily picks up the focused pressure of a pen head. Place a sheet of regular paper on the tablet (assuming they're about the same size) and viola, handwriting recording.
Well, there's small and then there's small. This is pretty much a peptide that has a structure. There are plenty of ~80aa protein domains and full proteins that would still be called small but are globular and can fold all by themselves. These would still be big on the in silico folding scale. Then, there are also really big proteins that are able to fold without help by charperones. Chaperones are a whole other level of complexity. yes it would be really cool to try to simulate their action as well but there's a long time to go before that happens, and a lot of interesting work to do before they need to be included (ie. the above discussed globular proteins, eg. HEW lysozyme, which has vast amounts of kinetic folding data on it, most without chaperones, but this sort of simulation with many, many trajectories still hasn't been done on it.
On the other hand, chaperones are actually really interesting to think about in this context. Some folks in the chaperone community might argue that the current method of in silico folding is actually a great way of modeling chaperone function. One model of chaperone function is that because they isolate a single folding protein into their internal cavity, they allow folding at infinite dilution (no other folding proteins nearby). Given that in silico folding studies pretty much always are done with only one protein molecule in the system, this is actually a reasonable approximation. Arguably, this is a great simulation of protein folding with chaperones, not in the cytosol (without them). But this is getting silly.