I understand that a USB mouse from another manufacturer works; my point is that if it's not standard, there's less of an incentive to write for it.
The problem is that you can't just replace the pointing device in a laptop with one that has more buttons - USB mice don't really cut it when you don't have a flat surface to put them on (although I suppose you could attach a USB trackball to the side with duct tape).
This is only the case if you have many dissimilar ATMs. In a small country (New Zealand) with only a handful of major banks and no such thing as a "private ATM" (EFTPOS is hugely popular, though) most people use their own bank's ATMs because they're cheaper... and they're all the same. It'd be harder to put cards in one with a skimmer on (at least for my bank) so I'd notice pretty quickly that there was something odd.
Of course, many people will probably just assume it's a new model of ATM. Sigh.
That's a major problem most P2P software ignores: if you have a traffic volume cap, and *pay* per MB for traffic over that, then you *must* have some way to put a hard limit on the software's usage, to avoid nasty surprises. I care about this because I have a 1GB cap:-(
Of course, all the developers of such software seem to have massive unrestricted connections, so they don't encounter the end-of-month bills you can get if you leave bittorrent on overnight.
Much work has been done on delivering some sort of programming environment via a browser for early CS teaching purposes - one of the students in my honours year develped a system called JavanOwl which allowed users to type simple Java programs into a textbox, and used Aspect Oriented Programming to produce an animated GIF showing the program's runtime state over time.
Fax machines use compression. And compressed 1-bit black-and-white fax images are a lot smaller than colour JPEGs, for the typical fax (which is a page of text).
If you want to develop and distribute closed source apps, why don't you do it on Windows?
Because I'm no great fan of Windows - I like the unix development environment too much.
In case you didn't notice, the Linux culture values freedom.
Er. Who do you mean by "the Linux culture", and what do you mean by "freedom"? Do you mean the freedom to use closed-source software in kernel development?
There's no such thing as "unlimited bandwith". Although there are crappy hosting companies which don't specify a limit, but say you can't use the service to the detriment of other users - i.e. don't get slashdotted and overload their servers/link/etc.
I don't have a problem with your sharing my beliefs.
I was referring to the comment you quoted, which referred to adherents of presumably judaeo-christian religions as those who "suffer from mental illness in believing in 2000-year old fairy tales and fictional omnipotent characters". Utterance of such statements by someone who was trying to get elected by any but the most fiercely atheist constituency would likely be political suicide: it's not just disagreeing with people's beliefs, it's saying that they're insane because they do.
This is all very well if you're within the US, as most online shops with cheap electronics are, but if you're not, "Free shipping!" is usually a sign that the people offering it won't ship internationally. And when they do, the charges are usually rather large (>US$30) for most interesting items.
I once heard a statistic that some large proportion of online "shopping baskets" were abandoned at checkout. But they didn't say how many were abandoned at discovering the country field only allowed you to select somewhere within North America:-(
The Windows Media stream (which works with MPlayer) is fine for me: the webcams are pretty terrible, though, even in Wellington on TelstraSaturnClearParadiseNetlinkEtc cable, four hops away from the citylink webcam box.
Ha! If you'd come to VUW (the university on a hillside overlooking the wellington CBD) earlier this year, you'd have been able to hear Milton Ngan from Weta talking about it.
Yet another excuse to plug Interface, the VUW Computer Club, which ran that event (or more accurately, took it over from the CS department): if you're a CS student at VUW, you really should become a member.
The hype being unbearable? How about the bus timetables being unbearable? Courtenay place / Willis St / etc are on major bus routes; now they have to go around that area of town.
I had to go to a meeting in a building overlooking Courtenay Place earlier this morning: there was some poor girl standing down there with the job of making sure people didn't walk on the red carpet:-)
It's interesting to note (on a site supposedly containing "News for Nerds", anyway) the preparations CityLink have made to avoid running up a massive internet traffic bill with traffic to their webcams: they're using anycast to distribute content from the server nearest the viewer (thus reducing load on NZ's less than amazingly cheap undersea cables).
They've got servers in Wellington and Auckland, plugged into both of the (CityLink-run) peering exchanges there, and they've got a box in the US advertising the same prefix (202.7.4.0/24) - so if you're in NZ, and your ISP isn't crap, you'll get the local servers: everyone else will get the box(es?) in the US.
Anycast is also used for other stuff: the F (IIRC) DNS root server is anycasted for redundancy, and one of the IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanisms uses anycast to locate a nearby hop-on point to the IPv6 network.
Window-based SCADA systems such as iFIX (which I notice has justs been bought by GE) often support OPC. But SCADA - Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition - is just a generic term like "Spreadsheet". SCADA systems have existed since before Windows came around, and there are at least some (not sure how many, as I haven't done any work with them since early 2001) such as RealFlex which run under other operating systems like QNX; there are also still quite a few DOS-based packages out there.
I have an R520m; it's a reasonable size but only ~10mm thin (I have friends who claim it's a "thin brick"). Fully charged, mine claims over 2 1/2 hours of talk time, 160hrs standby (and that's pessimistic estimate when I pull it out of the charger). It has bluetooth, IrDA and GPRS packet data, if you feel like using them, excellent sound quality and amazingly good reception. Oh, and it's tri-band, and I picked mine up online for NZ$250 (~US$120?) a year ago.
The major problem with WAP is that it was originally built starting with the premise that cellphones are crap and can't do anything. This is now changing: IIRC, WAP 2.0 is based on XHTML and CSS, and modern phones have more memory, larger, more battery-hungry colour screens and faster processors to display more visually-rich WAP-based interfaces.
Unfortunately, I don't have one of those phones:-(
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I'd rather read a single book in two or three days and really take it in :-)
But that's just me. And I have a lot of dead time (hour's walk home from Uni) to read in.
This is only the case if you have many dissimilar ATMs. In a small country (New Zealand) with only a handful of major banks and no such thing as a "private ATM" (EFTPOS is hugely popular, though) most people use their own bank's ATMs because they're cheaper... and they're all the same. It'd be harder to put cards in one with a skimmer on (at least for my bank) so I'd notice pretty quickly that there was something odd.
Of course, many people will probably just assume it's a new model of ATM. Sigh.
That's a major problem most P2P software ignores: if you have a traffic volume cap, and *pay* per MB for traffic over that, then you *must* have some way to put a hard limit on the software's usage, to avoid nasty surprises. I care about this because I have a 1GB cap :-(
Of course, all the developers of such software seem to have massive unrestricted connections, so they don't encounter the end-of-month bills you can get if you leave bittorrent on overnight.
These are central banks. Not the sort that deals with mutual funds - the sort that issue banknotes.
...how did it improve? Firmware update? Curious R520m-owning minds want to know :-)
Much work has been done on delivering some sort of programming environment via a browser for early CS teaching purposes - one of the students in my honours year develped a system called JavanOwl which allowed users to type simple Java programs into a textbox, and used Aspect Oriented Programming to produce an animated GIF showing the program's runtime state over time.
Your list's order speaks volumes: look at the sequence of movie suckage
1st movie: rocks
2nd movie: rocks
3rd movie: sort-of rocks
4th movie: sucks
5th movie: sucks
George lost the plot during ROTJ, and there's no hope for the future.
Fax machines use compression. And compressed 1-bit black-and-white fax images are a lot smaller than colour JPEGs, for the typical fax (which is a page of text).
Because I'm no great fan of Windows - I like the unix development environment too much.
Er. Who do you mean by "the Linux culture", and what do you mean by "freedom"? Do you mean the freedom to use closed-source software in kernel development?
Lucky bastard.
There's no such thing as "unlimited bandwith". Although there are crappy hosting companies which don't specify a limit, but say you can't use the service to the detriment of other users - i.e. don't get slashdotted and overload their servers/link/etc.
I don't have a problem with your sharing my beliefs.
I was referring to the comment you quoted, which referred to adherents of presumably judaeo-christian religions as those who "suffer from mental illness in believing in 2000-year old fairy tales and fictional omnipotent characters". Utterance of such statements by someone who was trying to get elected by any but the most fiercely atheist constituency would likely be political suicide: it's not just disagreeing with people's beliefs, it's saying that they're insane because they do.
I'd imagine that someone who rubbished the deeply held beliefs of a sizeable subset of the population would have some difficulty getting elected, too.
This is all very well if you're within the US, as most online shops with cheap electronics are, but if you're not, "Free shipping!" is usually a sign that the people offering it won't ship internationally. And when they do, the charges are usually rather large (>US$30) for most interesting items.
:-(
I once heard a statistic that some large proportion of online "shopping baskets" were abandoned at checkout. But they didn't say how many were abandoned at discovering the country field only allowed you to select somewhere within North America
The Windows Media stream (which works with MPlayer) is fine for me: the webcams are pretty terrible, though, even in Wellington on TelstraSaturnClearParadiseNetlinkEtc cable, four hops away from the citylink webcam box.
It works with MPlayer. That's how I'm watching it (too crowded in Courtenay place :-)
The video stream is only available within NZ, however, so if you're overseas you're stuck with the MJPG webcams.
Ha! If you'd come to VUW (the university on a hillside overlooking the wellington CBD) earlier this year, you'd have been able to hear Milton Ngan from Weta talking about it.
Yet another excuse to plug Interface, the VUW Computer Club, which ran that event (or more accurately, took it over from the CS department): if you're a CS student at VUW, you really should become a member.
The hype being unbearable? How about the bus timetables being unbearable? Courtenay place / Willis St / etc are on major bus routes; now they have to go around that area of town.
:-)
I had to go to a meeting in a building overlooking Courtenay Place earlier this morning: there was some poor girl standing down there with the job of making sure people didn't walk on the red carpet
It's interesting to note (on a site supposedly containing "News for Nerds", anyway) the preparations CityLink have made to avoid running up a massive internet traffic bill with traffic to their webcams: they're using anycast to distribute content from the server nearest the viewer (thus reducing load on NZ's less than amazingly cheap undersea cables).
They've got servers in Wellington and Auckland, plugged into both of the (CityLink-run) peering exchanges there, and they've got a box in the US advertising the same prefix (202.7.4.0/24) - so if you're in NZ, and your ISP isn't crap, you'll get the local servers: everyone else will get the box(es?) in the US.
There are more details here.
Anycast is also used for other stuff: the F (IIRC) DNS root server is anycasted for redundancy, and one of the IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanisms uses anycast to locate a nearby hop-on point to the IPv6 network.
Window-based SCADA systems such as iFIX (which I notice has justs been bought by GE) often support OPC. But SCADA - Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition - is just a generic term like "Spreadsheet". SCADA systems have existed since before Windows came around, and there are at least some (not sure how many, as I haven't done any work with them since early 2001) such as RealFlex which run under other operating systems like QNX; there are also still quite a few DOS-based packages out there.
Me Too! I was about to say that :-)
I have an R520m; it's a reasonable size but only ~10mm thin (I have friends who claim it's a "thin brick"). Fully charged, mine claims over 2 1/2 hours of talk time, 160hrs standby (and that's pessimistic estimate when I pull it out of the charger). It has bluetooth, IrDA and GPRS packet data, if you feel like using them, excellent sound quality and amazingly good reception. Oh, and it's tri-band, and I picked mine up online for NZ$250 (~US$120?) a year ago.
The major problem with WAP is that it was originally built starting with the premise that cellphones are crap and can't do anything. This is now changing: IIRC, WAP 2.0 is based on XHTML and CSS, and modern phones have more memory, larger, more battery-hungry colour screens and faster processors to display more visually-rich WAP-based interfaces.
:-(
Unfortunately, I don't have one of those phones
Physics notes... they're the ones that mention massless rods, ideal springs and point masses, right?
If you're blaming SI for the wonderful new kibi/mebi/gigglybyte thing, don't: they're the fault of the IEC and the USA's very own NIST.