I've lived in places that are at both ends of the spectrum. During high school I lived in suburban Houston, in a 'master-planned community' (a.k.a bunch of big houses in a cow field, with a golf course and country club) about 30 miles from downtown Houston. I had a job downtown at one point and spent a couple hours a day commuting. Now I live in Vancouver which is mentioned in the article as a poster-child for compact urban development. Here I commute to work on my bicycle (about 40 minutes a day of riding), walk to get groceries (maybe another 10-20 minutes of excercise), and since I don't spent two hours a day in my car I often have time to do other activities. Certainly I have a much healthier lifestyle here than I could have in Houston.
The problem with Vancouver is affordability. You simply can't buy a place to live in Vancouver for less than $200,000 -- that's pretty much the entry-level price for a 1 bedroom 600 square foot condo here right now. If you compare it to what you can buy for the same price in a suburban Texas community, the difference is phenomenal. Other pedestrian friendly areas like Manhattan and San Francisco have similar affordability crises. So, is that the price of living a healthy lifestyle? That's the way I view it. It's a trade-off between dollars and square feet on the one side, health and free time on the other. I'm willing to pay vastly more to live in Vancouver because I enjoy the lifestyle here and I can afford it. But many of the people who would want to live in a dense area like this simply don't have the option because it's not affordable.
Slightly off topic, but I often wonder what will happen after we run out of oil and people no longer have the choice of driving such great distances to live way out in the burbs. Will everyone flock to centres like Vancouver and Manhattan that are set up better for car-free living? Will more sprawling cities like Atlanta and Houston somehow reinvent themselves to form tighter urban centres? Could they? Would huge metropolises die out and turn into a smaller number of mini-cities, as businesses start popping up in suburbs closer to peoples comes? Will people be healthier?
actually, not true.
I learned to type Dvorak a few years ago, so I usually don't look at the keys... because they are all marked in QWERTY and don't say the real names of the letters anyhow. The only way I know how to type is starting with my hands in the home position.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work too well for when I'm using the mouse and then I have to press a combination like "Ctrl-X". In that case, I haven't started with my hands in the right place so I have idea where X is. Over time I've just learned to remember that the key that says "B" is the one I need to press when I do "Ctrl-X".
I would *Love* having one of these LCD keyboards so I could have software Dvorak keycaps without having to buy a true Dvorak keyboard that would scare away my wife or anyone else that sits down at the computer.
I'm not excited yet either. I grabbed it, and then it kept telling me I needed to download more and more huge installers from Microsoft! While I was initially impressed with the small size of the IronPython zip file, I was a little disappointed when I typed in "ipy" and it told me I needed to go and get a newer version of the.NET framework. Then, I tried to run some of the demos and realized that all of the interesting ones actually require the "pre-release" 3.0 version of the.NET framework.
Sounds interesting, but it's just a few too many headaches for me to find out if it actually is interesting.
At some point, pretty much everyone who wants an iPod gets one, and by now that's pretty much done (anyone hear any recent "I want an iPod" whines from anyone?).
Acually, yeah.. I still want one but I haven't gotten one. Even though I've got a good income and I'm a techno-nerd (I work as a software developer for a game company), I still can't bring myself to shell out $300 for a toy like this. Now, $100-$150 would work for me.
The point is, I don't think the market is anywhere near saturated. I think the problem is that the price point for iPods has not really come down since they came out. Instead of the price coming down, they keep adding on more and more features that I don't need, like color screens and video, that keep them around the same exorbitant price.
There are lots of other Mp3 players in my price range. In fact I already own a 512 MB flash player that I bought a few years ago. I'd really like to upgrade to something that would hold my entire music collection (so, something with more than 20 GB of storage), so what I'm really waiting for is something with that kind of capacity that's not too much more than $100.
Good god... no wonder he didn't put the live demo up. It looks terrible! The pictures are all over the place. Doggy's head got chopped off by the side of my browser window. The fade-out didn't even work on Opera, so I had to run it on IE to see if it looked any better. One rule of the "Burns Effect" should be "never show them where the picture ends" -- but on this demo you are constantly looking at the corners of picture with two thirds of the screen being black because it's off the edge of the picture. And the zooming looks like crap because of the poor interpolation method. And the animation is not smooth at all. So, nice try, but this is a pretty poor implementation.
I wonder how many of these poor implementation things are due to limitations of AJAX, versus just plain poor implementation.
I've personally found the "GMail Drive" (http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) quite useful for sending files to myself between work and home. Effectively this program just provides a nice filesystem-like interface for emailing a file to yourself using GMail.
There seem to be a lot of naysayers and negativity towards the idea of an online file system, and I wonder whether it is really warranted.
To those who say that an online file system is "worthless" because bandwidth is too low, or because of privacy issues, I ask you if you have ever emailed yourself a file so that you could pick it up somewhere else. The argument that I am making here is that if you are using a mail server as a file server, then you already using an online file system.
Sure, no online file system is going to have the bandwidth of a local hard drive. That's why you don't email yourself 700 MB mpeg movie files. Does that mean it's worthless to ever be able to email yourself a file? I don't think so. There are lots of files that are small enough to send over email yet big enough to contain interesting information. By extension, there are lots of files that are small enough to store on an online file system and still be useful.
Sure, no online file system is going to ever be able to guarantee complete security. That's why you don't email your tax documents and your credit card number to yourself. Does that mean it's worthless to be able email yourself files? Not at all. It just means that you always have to take into account the possibility that your information may get into the wrong hands. This is true for any file system. If instead of storing your files on an online file system you bring a USB key around everywhere you go, you still have to think about what will happen if you leave it in the wrong place and someone else finds it. Just ask the guys selling the USB keys in the bazaar in Afghanistan about that. So, if you can trust the security of your email provider for certain kinds of information, should you not be able to trust the security of on online filesystem provider?
In my opinion, it's a good thing that services like this are being offered, just as it is a good thing that there are free web mail services. But anytime you leave your data with someone else, you need to ask yourself how much you trust them to take care of it, and you need to balance the convenience of easy access against the risk of the data falling into the wrong hands.
Is a Microsoft online file service trustworthy enough to store your data on? Judging by their past security record on Hotmail, I would say don't put too much trust in them. You also have consider that they are a likely target for hackers just because they are a big target. But I would have no qualms about storing, say, photos from my vacation on a hotmail account... or, by extension, on an online file system that was connected to my Hotmail account. So, my point is that even a not-so-trustworthy MSN Live Drive from Microsoft is not worthless.
I normally think of the FSF as being a more or less benevolent group, but it makes them look pretty draconian if they are saying "thou shalt not run proprietary drivers". There's nothing "Free" about that. Who are they to say what software I can and cannot run on my computer?
I'm not an expert on GPL, but my understanding of the GPL was that it was all about keeping open source software 100% open source, and not letting developers mix in closed-source with the open source into a single final product. It's not about forbidding the end user from running closed-source software on open-source operating systems. So to me there seems to be a couple of core questions in this debate:
1. Is a video driver a part of the operating system, or is it a separate piece of software that is run on top of the operating system?
- In my mind, it's a separate piece of software, not an integral part. I don't need an nVidia driver to run Linux.
2. Do the drivers ship as part of the overall Linux package?
- If so, I could see how this might violate the GPL since you are distributing non-free software with GPL software. However, if the drivers are something that ship with the video card instead, or something that users go and download off the net, then I think they are fair game.
If the video drivers are neither a part of the operating system or something that ships with the operating system, then I don't see how it violates the GPL to run them.
I have been using Dvorak for several years now and find it much more comfortable than Qwerty. I really notice that there is less awkward hand-stretching in Dvorak, although I can't say I'm necessarily a lot faster now that I use Dvorak.
To answer the original poster's question, I don't find it too hard to go back to typing Qwerty when I'm visiting someone else's computer. I definitely feel a bit clumsy, but I'm not sure whether I actually feel clumsier than I used to feel when I typed Qwerty full time, or just clumsy relative to how smooth I am used to feeling now on the Dvorak.
Even now that I use the dvorak, I definitely experience some hand strain from time to time. I've pinpointed the main source of this strain -- my left hand gets sore because it tends to be the one that does all of the two-key combinations. I always use the left shift key, so whenever I'm typing a capitol letter on the left side of the keyboard, it involves pressing two things with the same left hand. I think this hand-shape is pretty unnatural, and it seems to stress the the muscles on the top-outside of my arm and hand quite a bit (the ones that pull the pinky down to the shift key)
A few weeks ago I was thinking about this, and wondering if there was some solution to this. The best idea I could come up with is to use a foot pedal for doing Shift, alt, and ctrl. As though Dvorak was not geeky enough, this would surely be an uber-geeky setup. But I imagine once you got used to using a foot pedal for shift, it would probably feel really good on the hands.
I did a bunch of searching on the net, and there are a few ergo-companies that sell pedals designed with this in mind, but the prices are outrageous -- 150 bucks and up, for 3 switches connected to a USB cable!
If anyone else has any bright ideas for getting around the stress of shift-alt-ctrl combos, I'd love to hear it. Probably training myself to always use opposite hands for the letter and the modifier key would work, but it might be a tough habit to break!
Another way that it's different from handwritten lecture notes: You can take a quick glance at your lecture notes and decide which ones you want to study. However, finding the right spot in the lecture where he goes over the stuff you're interested in could take a lot of time, scrubbing back and forth through the audio.
When I took university courses, I found that the lecturers usually spent 90% of the time babbling, and only 10% of the time saying things that were relevant and worth writing down. So, handwritten notes are a concise summary of your own understanding of the crux of what the lecturer is saying.
College lectures are usually boring enough to put half the class to sleep the first time they hear them. How many people are actually going to want to hear the lecture a second time over?
It might seem cool the first time you see a shiny new sky car zipping over top of your house. Lets fast-forward 40 years into the future.
The second generation of sky-cars are out on the market, and the first generation are nearing the end of their lifespan. Finally, the average citizen can afford to go out to the used sky-car lot and pick up an old beater. Now, you've got some guy who barely has the cash to buy the thing in the first place, let alone pay for gas, maintenence and insurance.
He's flying over your house with the tank on empty, and he doesn't have the insurance to pay for the damage when he breaks down and crashes into your house. Doesn't seem quite as cool anymore. It's bound to happen.
The satellite images are lots of fun to look at, but after I get over the initial "type in the address of everyone I know so I can see what the top of their house looks like" phase, I find that they are not useful for much.
Just try printing out one of these satellite images on your black and white printer and then try to use it to drive to someplace you want to go that you've never been before.
In my opinion, if google wants to have the best map site, they should stop focusing on how cool it is to play with online and try to make maps that are **useful when you print them out and try to use them to get somewhere**.
Here's what I can't understand: when you press the "print" button on any of the mapping websites I've been to, you get a crappy low-res bitmap that's hardly legible when you print it out. It's obvious that the maps are stored in a vector-based format on the server end. When I press 'print', why don't they send it to me in vector-based form (e.g., a PDF file), so that it looks clear when I print it out? Now that would be something useful. Nevermind the satellite photos.
Does anyone know a way to enable/disable cleartype on a per-monitor basis? I'm working on a dual monitor setup where one is a CRT and one is an LCD, and I'd like to be able to use ClearType on the LCD screen only.
I tried downloading the powertoys, but the installer didn't work for me. Does it have per-monitor options, or am I pretty much stuck with one setting for my two monitors?
I believe in bicycles as an alternative form of transportation (healthy, convenient, and good excercise). I appluad this company for what they are doing, making these bikes available to the public, and it seems like they are providing a good service for a reasonable price. I wish that we would see that type of thing in North America. So it angers me that these hackers are undermining a company that is trying to do something positive. If they want to hack something, they should find a big evil profit-mongering corporation to hack from!
If that's the case, then it seems to make sense if everyone just has a central DC transformer in their house.
These days, everyone probably owns about 10-20 DC transformers already (every time you buy a phone, answering machine, recharger, computer speakers, or just about any small piece of digital electronics you get one). It's kind of wasteful that we have so many of these things kicking around all the time; why not just have a central one for the entire household?
Never mind 3D displays. How about just putting a standard digital output on the back of the thing, or even an analog output that you can hook up to a computer monitor. This could be in addition to the TV output, so those who wanted to use the console on their TV at a blurry 640x480 could do so, but anyone who owns a computer monitor can get a clearer picture if they want to.
I'm betting the overlap between people who own game consoles and people who own computer monitors is pretty big. It would be cool if game consoles gave people the option plug their monitor into the back.
Granted, sitting at your computer desk playing on your console is not quite the same as sitting on the sofa in front of the big screen playing games with some friends and some beers. But I think there are times I would trade the comfort of TV for the high resolution of a monitor.
Re:Syntax checking as you write the code
on
Eclipse in Action
·
· Score: 1
I have checked it out. It appeared to be what I wanted, but it just didn't work as well as advertised. It reported errors that weren't really errors, and failed to report some errors that were there. In other words, there were a lot of false positives and false negatives in the error checking.
In contrast to this, the implementations of on-the-fly syntax checking that I have used in Java were usually spot-on. If there was nothing underlined on my screen, that meant that it would compile without any problems. And rarely did the compiler report problems that were not underlined by the checker.
I think whole tomato is doing a decent job, I just get the feeling that this sort of thing is a whole lot harder to implement on C++ than it is in Java, because of the relative simplicity and modularity of Java.
Syntax checking as you write the code
on
Eclipse in Action
·
· Score: 3, Informative
One of the most impressive features that I have seen in Eclipse, and a couple of other Java IDEs (CodeGuide for instance) is the ability to parse the code as you are typing it, and report all compiler errors to you (by underlining the problems in red), before you actually do a full compile.
To me, this feature seems revolutionary. I after discovering it, I had a hard time going back to coding C++ where no such tools exist (to my knowledge). I am always surprised that not many Java programmers seem to know or care about this kind of on-the-fly syntax checking. Coding is much more fun when you can be aware of your mistakes the moment you make them, rather than having to go back and fix them all after you've already forgotten what you were thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lived in places that are at both ends of the spectrum. During high school I lived in suburban Houston, in a 'master-planned community' (a.k.a bunch of big houses in a cow field, with a golf course and country club) about 30 miles from downtown Houston. I had a job downtown at one point and spent a couple hours a day commuting. Now I live in Vancouver which is mentioned in the article as a poster-child for compact urban development. Here I commute to work on my bicycle (about 40 minutes a day of riding), walk to get groceries (maybe another 10-20 minutes of excercise), and since I don't spent two hours a day in my car I often have time to do other activities. Certainly I have a much healthier lifestyle here than I could have in Houston.
The problem with Vancouver is affordability. You simply can't buy a place to live in Vancouver for less than $200,000 -- that's pretty much the entry-level price for a 1 bedroom 600 square foot condo here right now. If you compare it to what you can buy for the same price in a suburban Texas community, the difference is phenomenal. Other pedestrian friendly areas like Manhattan and San Francisco have similar affordability crises. So, is that the price of living a healthy lifestyle? That's the way I view it. It's a trade-off between dollars and square feet on the one side, health and free time on the other. I'm willing to pay vastly more to live in Vancouver because I enjoy the lifestyle here and I can afford it. But many of the people who would want to live in a dense area like this simply don't have the option because it's not affordable.
Slightly off topic, but I often wonder what will happen after we run out of oil and people no longer have the choice of driving such great distances to live way out in the burbs. Will everyone flock to centres like Vancouver and Manhattan that are set up better for car-free living? Will more sprawling cities like Atlanta and Houston somehow reinvent themselves to form tighter urban centres? Could they? Would huge metropolises die out and turn into a smaller number of mini-cities, as businesses start popping up in suburbs closer to peoples comes? Will people be healthier?
actually, not true. I learned to type Dvorak a few years ago, so I usually don't look at the keys... because they are all marked in QWERTY and don't say the real names of the letters anyhow. The only way I know how to type is starting with my hands in the home position. Unfortunately, this doesn't work too well for when I'm using the mouse and then I have to press a combination like "Ctrl-X". In that case, I haven't started with my hands in the right place so I have idea where X is. Over time I've just learned to remember that the key that says "B" is the one I need to press when I do "Ctrl-X". I would *Love* having one of these LCD keyboards so I could have software Dvorak keycaps without having to buy a true Dvorak keyboard that would scare away my wife or anyone else that sits down at the computer.
I'm not excited yet either. I grabbed it, and then it kept telling me I needed to download more and more huge installers from Microsoft! While I was initially impressed with the small size of the IronPython zip file, I was a little disappointed when I typed in "ipy" and it told me I needed to go and get a newer version of the .NET framework. Then, I tried to run some of the demos and realized that all of the interesting ones actually require the "pre-release" 3.0 version of the .NET framework.
Sounds interesting, but it's just a few too many headaches for me to find out if it actually is interesting.
The point is, I don't think the market is anywhere near saturated. I think the problem is that the price point for iPods has not really come down since they came out. Instead of the price coming down, they keep adding on more and more features that I don't need, like color screens and video, that keep them around the same exorbitant price.
There are lots of other Mp3 players in my price range. In fact I already own a 512 MB flash player that I bought a few years ago. I'd really like to upgrade to something that would hold my entire music collection (so, something with more than 20 GB of storage), so what I'm really waiting for is something with that kind of capacity that's not too much more than $100.
Good god... no wonder he didn't put the live demo up. It looks terrible! The pictures are all over the place. Doggy's head got chopped off by the side of my browser window. The fade-out didn't even work on Opera, so I had to run it on IE to see if it looked any better. One rule of the "Burns Effect" should be "never show them where the picture ends" -- but on this demo you are constantly looking at the corners of picture with two thirds of the screen being black because it's off the edge of the picture. And the zooming looks like crap because of the poor interpolation method. And the animation is not smooth at all. So, nice try, but this is a pretty poor implementation.
I wonder how many of these poor implementation things are due to limitations of AJAX, versus just plain poor implementation.
I've personally found the "GMail Drive" (http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) quite useful for sending files to myself between work and home. Effectively this program just provides a nice filesystem-like interface for emailing a file to yourself using GMail.
There seem to be a lot of naysayers and negativity towards the idea of an online file system, and I wonder whether it is really warranted.
To those who say that an online file system is "worthless" because bandwidth is too low, or because of privacy issues, I ask you if you have ever emailed yourself a file so that you could pick it up somewhere else. The argument that I am making here is that if you are using a mail server as a file server, then you already using an online file system.
Sure, no online file system is going to have the bandwidth of a local hard drive. That's why you don't email yourself 700 MB mpeg movie files. Does that mean it's worthless to ever be able to email yourself a file? I don't think so. There are lots of files that are small enough to send over email yet big enough to contain interesting information. By extension, there are lots of files that are small enough to store on an online file system and still be useful.
Sure, no online file system is going to ever be able to guarantee complete security. That's why you don't email your tax documents and your credit card number to yourself. Does that mean it's worthless to be able email yourself files? Not at all. It just means that you always have to take into account the possibility that your information may get into the wrong hands. This is true for any file system. If instead of storing your files on an online file system you bring a USB key around everywhere you go, you still have to think about what will happen if you leave it in the wrong place and someone else finds it. Just ask the guys selling the USB keys in the bazaar in Afghanistan about that. So, if you can trust the security of your email provider for certain kinds of information, should you not be able to trust the security of on online filesystem provider?
In my opinion, it's a good thing that services like this are being offered, just as it is a good thing that there are free web mail services. But anytime you leave your data with someone else, you need to ask yourself how much you trust them to take care of it, and you need to balance the convenience of easy access against the risk of the data falling into the wrong hands.
Is a Microsoft online file service trustworthy enough to store your data on? Judging by their past security record on Hotmail, I would say don't put too much trust in them. You also have consider that they are a likely target for hackers just because they are a big target. But I would have no qualms about storing, say, photos from my vacation on a hotmail account... or, by extension, on an online file system that was connected to my Hotmail account. So, my point is that even a not-so-trustworthy MSN Live Drive from Microsoft is not worthless.
I normally think of the FSF as being a more or less benevolent group, but it makes them look pretty draconian if they are saying "thou shalt not run proprietary drivers". There's nothing "Free" about that. Who are they to say what software I can and cannot run on my computer?
I'm not an expert on GPL, but my understanding of the GPL was that it was all about keeping open source software 100% open source, and not letting developers mix in closed-source with the open source into a single final product. It's not about forbidding the end user from running closed-source software on open-source operating systems. So to me there seems to be a couple of core questions in this debate:
1. Is a video driver a part of the operating system, or is it a separate piece of software that is run on top of the operating system?
- In my mind, it's a separate piece of software, not an integral part. I don't need an nVidia driver to run Linux.
2. Do the drivers ship as part of the overall Linux package?
- If so, I could see how this might violate the GPL since you are distributing non-free software with GPL software. However, if the drivers are something that ship with the video card instead, or something that users go and download off the net, then I think they are fair game.
If the video drivers are neither a part of the operating system or something that ships with the operating system, then I don't see how it violates the GPL to run them.
I have been using Dvorak for several years now and find it much more comfortable than Qwerty. I really notice that there is less awkward hand-stretching in Dvorak, although I can't say I'm necessarily a lot faster now that I use Dvorak.
To answer the original poster's question, I don't find it too hard to go back to typing Qwerty when I'm visiting someone else's computer. I definitely feel a bit clumsy, but I'm not sure whether I actually feel clumsier than I used to feel when I typed Qwerty full time, or just clumsy relative to how smooth I am used to feeling now on the Dvorak.
Even now that I use the dvorak, I definitely experience some hand strain from time to time. I've pinpointed the main source of this strain -- my left hand gets sore because it tends to be the one that does all of the two-key combinations. I always use the left shift key, so whenever I'm typing a capitol letter on the left side of the keyboard, it involves pressing two things with the same left hand. I think this hand-shape is pretty unnatural, and it seems to stress the the muscles on the top-outside of my arm and hand quite a bit (the ones that pull the pinky down to the shift key)
A few weeks ago I was thinking about this, and wondering if there was some solution to this. The best idea I could come up with is to use a foot pedal for doing Shift, alt, and ctrl. As though Dvorak was not geeky enough, this would surely be an uber-geeky setup. But I imagine once you got used to using a foot pedal for shift, it would probably feel really good on the hands.
I did a bunch of searching on the net, and there are a few ergo-companies that sell pedals designed with this in mind, but the prices are outrageous -- 150 bucks and up, for 3 switches connected to a USB cable!
If anyone else has any bright ideas for getting around the stress of shift-alt-ctrl combos, I'd love to hear it. Probably training myself to always use opposite hands for the letter and the modifier key would work, but it might be a tough habit to break!
When I took university courses, I found that the lecturers usually spent 90% of the time babbling, and only 10% of the time saying things that were relevant and worth writing down. So, handwritten notes are a concise summary of your own understanding of the crux of what the lecturer is saying.
College lectures are usually boring enough to put half the class to sleep the first time they hear them. How many people are actually going to want to hear the lecture a second time over?
It might seem cool the first time you see a shiny new sky car zipping over top of your house. Lets fast-forward 40 years into the future.
The second generation of sky-cars are out on the market, and the first generation are nearing the end of their lifespan. Finally, the average citizen can afford to go out to the used sky-car lot and pick up an old beater. Now, you've got some guy who barely has the cash to buy the thing in the first place, let alone pay for gas, maintenence and insurance.
He's flying over your house with the tank on empty, and he doesn't have the insurance to pay for the damage when he breaks down and crashes into your house. Doesn't seem quite as cool anymore. It's bound to happen.
Just try printing out one of these satellite images on your black and white printer and then try to use it to drive to someplace you want to go that you've never been before.
In my opinion, if google wants to have the best map site, they should stop focusing on how cool it is to play with online and try to make maps that are **useful when you print them out and try to use them to get somewhere**.
Here's what I can't understand: when you press the "print" button on any of the mapping websites I've been to, you get a crappy low-res bitmap that's hardly legible when you print it out. It's obvious that the maps are stored in a vector-based format on the server end. When I press 'print', why don't they send it to me in vector-based form (e.g., a PDF file), so that it looks clear when I print it out? Now that would be something useful. Nevermind the satellite photos.
Does anyone know a way to enable/disable cleartype on a per-monitor basis? I'm working on a dual monitor setup where one is a CRT and one is an LCD, and I'd like to be able to use ClearType on the LCD screen only.
I tried downloading the powertoys, but the installer didn't work for me. Does it have per-monitor options, or am I pretty much stuck with one setting for my two monitors?
I believe in bicycles as an alternative form of transportation (healthy, convenient, and good excercise). I appluad this company for what they are doing, making these bikes available to the public, and it seems like they are providing a good service for a reasonable price. I wish that we would see that type of thing in North America. So it angers me that these hackers are undermining a company that is trying to do something positive. If they want to hack something, they should find a big evil profit-mongering corporation to hack from!
If that's the case, then it seems to make sense if everyone just has a central DC transformer in their house. These days, everyone probably owns about 10-20 DC transformers already (every time you buy a phone, answering machine, recharger, computer speakers, or just about any small piece of digital electronics you get one). It's kind of wasteful that we have so many of these things kicking around all the time; why not just have a central one for the entire household?
Never mind 3D displays. How about just putting a standard digital output on the back of the thing, or even an analog output that you can hook up to a computer monitor. This could be in addition to the TV output, so those who wanted to use the console on their TV at a blurry 640x480 could do so, but anyone who owns a computer monitor can get a clearer picture if they want to.
I'm betting the overlap between people who own game consoles and people who own computer monitors is pretty big. It would be cool if game consoles gave people the option plug their monitor into the back.
Granted, sitting at your computer desk playing on your console is not quite the same as sitting on the sofa in front of the big screen playing games with some friends and some beers. But I think there are times I would trade the comfort of TV for the high resolution of a monitor.
I have checked it out. It appeared to be what I wanted, but it just didn't work as well as advertised. It reported errors that weren't really errors, and failed to report some errors that were there. In other words, there were a lot of false positives and false negatives in the error checking. In contrast to this, the implementations of on-the-fly syntax checking that I have used in Java were usually spot-on. If there was nothing underlined on my screen, that meant that it would compile without any problems. And rarely did the compiler report problems that were not underlined by the checker. I think whole tomato is doing a decent job, I just get the feeling that this sort of thing is a whole lot harder to implement on C++ than it is in Java, because of the relative simplicity and modularity of Java.
One of the most impressive features that I have seen in Eclipse, and a couple of other Java IDEs (CodeGuide for instance) is the ability to parse the code as you are typing it, and report all compiler errors to you (by underlining the problems in red), before you actually do a full compile.
To me, this feature seems revolutionary. I after discovering it, I had a hard time going back to coding C++ where no such tools exist (to my knowledge). I am always surprised that not many Java programmers seem to know or care about this kind of on-the-fly syntax checking. Coding is much more fun when you can be aware of your mistakes the moment you make them, rather than having to go back and fix them all after you've already forgotten what you were thinking.