I've never been there, but with 1,1 billion citizens and a GDP significantly higher than neighbouring countries, there's a good chance you'll find any kind of US junk food chains (Mc Donalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, et al) in the major-and-not-so-major cities.
Plus, I don't know ONE city (and I've lived in 6 countries) in the world where there is not at least one Mc Donalds (or Mc Donald's knockoff), an european restaurant + a chinese restaurant -these guys are everywhere. Good food should be no problem in India (+, you'll probably end up hiring a cook for you, which will fill all your gastronomical fancies).
(BTW, you're maybe the first person I hear of, that doesn't like Indian cuisine;)
Thanks! You are one of the guys in charge of this project?
I had a call from my step-father in Cambodia, and, amazingly enough, he knows the guy that has provided some of the computers to these schools. (that guy is probably the sole Apple distributor for the whole of Cambodia, and my step-father is into macs... Whatever, there's an iMac on one of the pics, so I guess we're talking about the same project). That guy's name is Payee, if you need a mac in Cambodia, he's the guy! (and at no extra charge, though he has it coming from Singapore)
Heh, I guess it's a small world after all! (well, Cambodia is a small country anyway)
Cheers,
El GanzoLoco
Nah, seriously, that's really cool. Cambodians rely almost exlusively on small, 100 cc, 4-stroke. Mainly Daelims (Korean) and Honda (Japan) or Ssangyang (China methinks), like the one shown in the article photo (yeah, you should really RTFA). Silent, rugged, solid as hell, and you often see 4 adults on one moto.
There are lots and lots of "motodops" (as they call them there) riding throughout the country, and in remote places, they are the only means of transportation. Plus, most drivers use it to do exactly the same trip, day after day (personnal use, or driving other people around for a fee) So it'd be quite easy to extend this program to other regions. That way, you could fit the magic box on regular motodops that happen to be doing the same trip everyday in front of the school.
Still, it would have been cool to know about the tech specs of this little magic box. Some kind of old laptop mobo + wi-fi + smallish hard disk, perhaps?
(err, and can please someone help me: on the second picture of the article (click to enlarge), there is a straaaaange computer sitting next to an iMac. Somebody knows what's that?)
My family lives in Cambodia (both NGO workers), one of the most mined countries on earth.
Kids still die everyday because they step on landmines. There are anti tank mines, that will kill you, antipersonal mines, that will cripple you, and UXO (unexploded ordnance) that can do about anything.
You go to the market in certain places in Cambodia, and you see that almost 10% (no kidding) of the population is crippled, one or both legs missing, sometimes an arm... Shit.
Worse: Cambodia has huge monsoon rains, and the floods eventually transform into torrents. So the mines MOVE with time. So there you are, happily walking on a path that has been un-mined last year, and BOOM, the rain had brought a mine right there. Scary.
Even worse. Sometimes UXO (more rarely, mines) go right into the city, because of some construction site that uses sand dug from out of the city, and that has UXO's inside (rare, but it happened to one of our friends doing construction for his NGO).
Anything that can be used in demining should be. You might think that demining mostly occurs in rice fields and stuff but no, in some remote places over there, they have to clear villages *house by house*, garden by garden. There are still millions (litteraly) of landdmines scattered everywhere, and even though the foreign demining teams, and the Cambodians they have trained, do a great job, it never will be enough.
Still, Cambodia is one of the most beautiful countries on earth. Now, most touristic-and-not-so-touristic places are safe, so go there, but stay away from anywhere the locals tell you to NOT go.
Oyyyy, beoooootch, got no mail from ya either.
Yup, busy, busy: j'mai balade dans la ville, je commence a connaitre comme ma poche maintenant (c'est une grande poche, de 20 millions d'ames). Pis on a un nouveau stagiaire au bureau, les nouvelles tetes, c'est kool.
Oue, oue, je retournerai sur gaim, sans pbes, c'est juste que j'essaie de faire un peu moins de net, je commence a craindre pour ma facture tel.
Allez beotch, bonne bourre, et vas pas nous choper la grippe aviaire gnieheheheheheheheheheheh
Even though Inferno 4th Edition includes Mac OS X as a host system, it has issues on Panther. It is simplest to run it within Linux within Virtual PC within Mac OS X. Heh!
... It depends who uses powerpoint. I'm in a school where most of our work has to be presented to the rest of the class, in 10 / 20 minutes usually. Most people still don't use Powerpoint (a Good Thing (tm) I think, forces us to actually listen to our classmates instead of just looking at the pretty pictures).
There is one particular jerk (that I can't stand by the way) who insists on doing ALL his presentations on powerpoint, even the 3-minutes summaries. Shitloads of text, colors, graphs, quotes, transitions, etc... At the end of the show, you are still wondering what was the point. (+ his laptop seems to be misconfigured, and each time he has to fight for 10 minutes to get the damn projector to work. Hilarious)
But one of my teachers used only Powerpoint slides, all year long; he couldn't make himself clearer, and those presentations were excellent.
The USER is to blame, not the software. Still, because powerpoint presentations still have the "new-cool-wow-shiny" factor playing in their favor, some teachers are impressed by mediocre presentations, giving marks way above what they should be. ( Why, yes, that's why I'm getting an iBook + Keynote for next year;-) )
Same here, I work at a newspaper: all computers are Mac LC III's... (there is a G4 for server though, and a G3 for Photoshop / InDesign work) Appletalk network on Ethertalk... Works great!!
Actually, Steve Jobs himself said that Apple doesn't make a dime per song with ITMS.
My belief is that he knows that he's lying, at least by omission, when he says so. Maybe in order to fool the competitors into thinking "hey, Apple doesn't make money out of the store, they just cash on the iPods, so we need to make our own (failed) iPods to cash ourselves".
iTunes is what, three monthes old on the P.C.... and is unavailable outside the U.S. There is good reason to believe that 2004 will see the iTMS go "global" (at least Europe and Japan, and then is when we'll start to realize the true potential of the iTMS.
I think we should understand Job's statement as "Apple doesn't make a dime per song with ITMS... yet "
I never tried the Nokia Ngage, so I trust you on this point.
My little brother has a GBA Special Edition, this little thingy is amazing... I had never gone beyond the original Game Boy, so when I saw him play Colin Mc Rae Rally in full 3D, I couldn't believe it at first;)
But Nokia has something the others don't: they understand the economics of the mobile phone industry, and maybe with version 2.0 of the NGage they will also have been able to take into account the gripes of the gamers... Wait and see...
I also believe that eventually, all these devices will also have the option to plug these kind of video glasses (looking less cheesy, though;) ), perhaps wirelessly...
No, that was my second paragraph: while you are tilting the device, say, 45 degrees left, the *image* on the screen "counterrotates" 45 degrees right, so you still see it upright/horizontal without tilting your head... (granted that would require quite a lot of processing / battery)I'd like to make a sketch but I only have MS Paint, soo...
And if I want a ball maze, I can buy one for a few pence! Yeah, but you don't get the 99 levels + the hidden bonuses;)
That "motion control" feature seems quite cool (i RTFA'd)... I can see a lot of games that could make use of this feature.
First example that comes to mind: these little car racing games you find on lots of mobile phones now (or on the GBA, colinMc Rae Rally & such...). One could use the phone itself as a car wheel, tilt it left to turn left, tilt it right to turn right, pull it towards you to brake, push it away from you to accelerate... (Would be cool for flight sims too)
The phone could even "counter-rotate" the image to compensate for the tilting: picture still upright even when you've tilted the device 90 degrees to make a turn. (I'm not sure if I'm being clear enough on this point) You could also make a simulation of these wood & plastic games, where you had to navigate a metallic ball through a maze, by just tilting the device...
Since games are apparently becoming the next big thing for mobile phones (that, and polyphonic ringtones:( ), myOrigo could have a point there (licence technology to Nokia nGage?)
Remember in 5 years, when myorigo will have outplaced Nintendo & Sony thanks to these features: you heard it here first!;)
Did you read the article? Motion control / mirroring only are activated when you have your finger on that particular touch-sensitive button. Release button, motion control deactivates...
It seems to be a quite interesting device... But they say it's "slightly bigger than the P800", so that's a no-no for me:)
"In short, HTAs pack all the power of Microsoft Internet Explorer" Woooo-hoooooooooo! At last I can harness da powa of da Intanat Explowa! w00t! (how I will harness all that powa to my customized Trabant though, I still don't know)
.... "protocol support"... Muahahahahaha!
"the strict security model [...] of the browser." Muahahahahahhahahahahahahah!
Ah, those good guys at Microsoft, they're always around when you need a good laugh:)
And even without going to such great lenghts, we could ban 2-stroke engines found in all european motorcycles and scooters, and replace them with 4-stroke equivalents.
Last summer I went in Cambodia (next to Thailand, if you're wondering) and they have cheap, little, 100cc, 4 stroke scooters that hardly do any noise. The streets are filled with these scooters (70% scooters, 30% cars), and they are virtually silent. Most operate as taxis, (you can put 3 persons max: the driver, two customers; they have custom extended cushions for that); we were four, so we used two scooters; when traffic allowed, our drivers would drive one next to another, with a safe distance in between (1.5 / 2 meters minimum). My friends and I were able to speak to each other, without having to raise our voices, at 80 km/h!
Honda makes these kinds of scooters (can't find a link though), and so does Daelim, a Korean company (sorry, I can't link to the specific scooter model because of the Flash site, but the ones we used looked like the "CiTi Ace 110", only older.
With friends we guesstimated (i.e., "wildly pulled out a figure out of our asses") that one 2-stroke scooter crossing Paris from East to West in the middle of the night had good chances of waking as much as 20 000 people...
I really don't understand why we can't get these 4 stroke scooters when poor, third world, underdevelopped Cambodia can.
One question about thunderbird 0.4, that I haven't been able to anwser by reading the release notes: Is the Outbox repaired?? I downloaded 0.3 a week ago, used it ever since, love it, except that it's seemingly impossible to put the outgoing mail in the Outbox or (Unsent mail), and sending it when I connect (yes I'm still on dialup). Yes, I DID install the "Offline" extension, it's crap: -no "send later" button (I have to use "ctrl-shift-enter" -when asked to "send later" it puts the email in the "unsent messages", which is fine. But why, when the messages are sent, do they get transfered to my account's "Outbox" folder instead of in the "Sent messages" folder?
Is there any way to change that? I couldn't figure it out... I'm on dialup so there's no way I download the 0.4 version except if they have fixed the issue.
From the article: By connecting a cell phone to hidden explosives, and then calling that phone, one can detonate a bomb (the electrical charge that activates the ringer on the cell phone serves as the triggering signal)
Triggering bombs with cell phones? Funny, I had thought *exactly* about this some time ago. And yeah, I thought using the ringer's electrical input was the easiest way to go. With only one big question mark though: what happens if someone (wrong number) calls while I'm setting up the bomb?
To be more specific, I had thought about hiding a cell phone + a year's worth of battery (or maybe using a dynamo) + some grams of explosive in the frame of my bicycle: in case somebody stole it, I just had to call that number and the whole bike went BooM. I never did it and actually regretted it when some motherfucker stole my bike!!
Next step, figure out how to build a GPS/cell phone that passively stays in the bike's frame, and that gives me the coordinates by SMS when I call it. Can I script a Java phone to do that?:)
You can partition the drives from the OS X installer CD, but not without erasing everything (Some commercial software probably does that, try searching google)You still can plug the iBook to your own PC through ethernet to back everything up prior to partitionning.
As for your sister wanting to learn linux for *political* reasons: I've been myself confronted to a similar situation: that is, I'm currently abroad without my much beloved mac, so had to buy a PC, with windows on it. I loathe Microsoft, but I don't have access to anything else than dial-up, so I can't even download linux to give it a try! (+ I'm not sure I could manage to use linux without a bit of outside help). So I decided to find a middle ground: leave windows installed, and replace as much Microsoft software I could. Outlook got trashed for Thunderbird, Explorer for Firebird, MSN for GAIM, and so on...
My point is, open source is cool and all, but I'm not sure it's good to have people give up on *usability* and ease of use just because the OS is GPL'd. (OS X is stil so much better than linux it makes no sense to trash it for linux) Mostly because this adds a somewhat disconforting "sect" aspect to the open source community. And being looked upon as a bunch of crazy fanatics is not so good (I'm a mac fan, I know what I'm talking about!!). And also because if she tries linux while it's still not easy enough for her (she's not a geek / nerd, you told), then she just might grow very frustrated with it, trash it, and never give it a shot ever again.
If you're not familiar with OS X, what's good about it is its versatility. If you want to use it as a grandma-OS, you can. Buy mac, open case, switch on, there you have it. (I like to tell my friends, "you can use Mac OS X when drunk.") But you can also use it as an excessively geeky OS if you want to. They give you a nice terminal app, and it's plain-vanilla open-sourced BSD behind. X-11 is installed by default in panther. Fink is the direct equivalent of apt-get, you can use it with or without a GUI... Makes installing the GIMP easy, among other things. Darwin Ports does the same kind of job. A *lot* of open-source software has been ported (mPlayer / mozilla apps / open office / etc...), too. You can also boot OS X without the Aqua interface ("evil" because non-GPL'd) and install gnome (said to be tricky). With that many open source tools & software, you're in open-source/UNIX-land alright, imho. And if you grow tired of it, you can still go back to plain OS X. If she wants to try linux, then she should, but I have a very hard time figuring how replacing OS X by a linux desktop would be better for her in the end. (the steep price of apple hardware being mostly justified by the OS).
My sister just got new iBook G4, and for some reason she wants to learn to use Linux
Okay, that's just my uninformed advice, but I *think* she'd be better off learning UNIX off OS X for starters...
I mean, she can get accustomed to the shell, the basic UNIX apps (emacs, ssh...) the UNIX file hierarchy (/usr/bin/etc, etc...), learn some scripting, run X11 applications, and I think you can even install gnome on top of Darwin (not sure why you'd want to do that though).
If it is really UNIX she wants to learn (and not linux in particular) then she has it right out of the box. If it's linux-linux, then start to show her how to use the terminal on OS X, which leaves you some weeks/months to choose the best distribution.:)
As for linux PPC distribs... what I can say is that I tried to install Debian PPC on a standard G4, and that it didn't work out, even though I got help from a linux veteran.) Yellow dog is said to be nice, and there's supposed to be a gentoo PPC port too (?). I once tried to install yellow dog PPC on a performa (Old World, requires some tinkering). Got halfway through install and at some point it just put garbled the screen and displayed a fun message: "Kill -34 complete, you can now reboot." No need to say it couldn't reboot anymore:))
There won't be any Armageddon unless Bush and his moronic supporters manage to create it. That's the scariest thing about the War on Arabs, it seems like a very blatant attempt to Immanentize the Eschaton.
Once I saw a really cool (and in-depth, this thing ran in five or 6 episodes IIRC) documentary about Bush Jr. and his team. Lots of ex-CIA / FBI agents were interviewed, all basically saying "Bush is under *heavy* influence of Christian extremists".
Which led me to think, verbatim, "awww, shit".
Some Economist (.uk) articles tended to confirm the stuff, and some very serious folks (and facts) are there to backup the theory. Now I can't possibly believe myself that the war in Iraq (for instance) was done on religious grounds (" i.e. immanentize the Eschaton") but still, this shit is damn creepy & it does scare the crap out of me!
He can't be *that* stupid, or can he?
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?
;)
I've never been there, but with 1,1 billion citizens and a GDP significantly higher than neighbouring countries, there's a good chance you'll find any kind of US junk food chains (Mc Donalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, et al) in the major-and-not-so-major cities.
Plus, I don't know ONE city (and I've lived in 6 countries) in the world where there is not at least one Mc Donalds (or Mc Donald's knockoff), an european restaurant + a chinese restaurant -these guys are everywhere. Good food should be no problem in India (+, you'll probably end up hiring a cook for you, which will fill all your gastronomical fancies).
(BTW, you're maybe the first person I hear of, that doesn't like Indian cuisine
Thanks! You are one of the guys in charge of this project? I had a call from my step-father in Cambodia, and, amazingly enough, he knows the guy that has provided some of the computers to these schools. (that guy is probably the sole Apple distributor for the whole of Cambodia, and my step-father is into macs... Whatever, there's an iMac on one of the pics, so I guess we're talking about the same project). That guy's name is Payee, if you need a mac in Cambodia, he's the guy! (and at no extra charge, though he has it coming from Singapore) Heh, I guess it's a small world after all! (well, Cambodia is a small country anyway) Cheers, El GanzoLoco
... you insensitive clod!
Nah, seriously, that's really cool. Cambodians rely almost exlusively on small, 100 cc, 4-stroke. Mainly Daelims (Korean) and Honda (Japan) or Ssangyang (China methinks), like the one shown in the article photo (yeah, you should really RTFA). Silent, rugged, solid as hell, and you often see 4 adults on one moto.
There are lots and lots of "motodops" (as they call them there) riding throughout the country, and in remote places, they are the only means of transportation. Plus, most drivers use it to do exactly the same trip, day after day (personnal use, or driving other people around for a fee) So it'd be quite easy to extend this program to other regions. That way, you could fit the magic box on regular motodops that happen to be doing the same trip everyday in front of the school.
Still, it would have been cool to know about the tech specs of this little magic box. Some kind of old laptop mobo + wi-fi + smallish hard disk, perhaps?
(err, and can please someone help me: on the second picture of the article (click to enlarge), there is a straaaaange computer sitting next to an iMac. Somebody knows what's that?)
Heheh
Of course the link was supposed to send you here but it apparently tripped on a html landmine, thus becoming crippled.
My family lives in Cambodia (both NGO workers), one of the most mined countries on earth.
Kids still die everyday because they step on landmines. There are anti tank mines, that will kill you, antipersonal mines, that will cripple you, and UXO (unexploded ordnance) that can do about anything.
You go to the market in certain places in Cambodia, and you see that almost 10% (no kidding) of the population is crippled, one or both legs missing, sometimes an arm... Shit.
Worse: Cambodia has huge monsoon rains, and the floods eventually transform into torrents. So the mines MOVE with time. So there you are, happily walking on a path that has been un-mined last year, and BOOM, the rain had brought a mine right there. Scary.
Even worse. Sometimes UXO (more rarely, mines) go right into the city, because of some construction site that uses sand dug from out of the city, and that has UXO's inside (rare, but it happened to one of our friends doing construction for his NGO).
Anything that can be used in demining should be. You might think that demining mostly occurs in rice fields and stuff but no, in some remote places over there, they have to clear villages *house by house*, garden by garden. There are still millions (litteraly) of landdmines scattered everywhere, and even though the foreign demining teams, and the Cambodians they have trained, do a great job, it never will be enough.
Still, Cambodia is one of the most beautiful countries on earth. Now, most touristic-and-not-so-touristic places are safe, so go there, but stay away from anywhere the locals tell you to NOT go.
Oyyyy, beoooootch, got no mail from ya either. Yup, busy, busy: j'mai balade dans la ville, je commence a connaitre comme ma poche maintenant (c'est une grande poche, de 20 millions d'ames). Pis on a un nouveau stagiaire au bureau, les nouvelles tetes, c'est kool. Oue, oue, je retournerai sur gaim, sans pbes, c'est juste que j'essaie de faire un peu moins de net, je commence a craindre pour ma facture tel. Allez beotch, bonne bourre, et vas pas nous choper la grippe aviaire gnieheheheheheheheheheheh
No, no, no, Mr. Officer! These 55 marijuana crops in my backyard? They're not for smoking pot, I swear!
*They're a beowulf cluster, goddamit!*
Favorite quote from website:
Even though Inferno 4th Edition includes Mac OS X as a host system, it has issues on Panther. It is simplest to run it within Linux within Virtual PC within Mac OS X.
Heh!
The Euro soared to 2x the USD
Errr... No.
Please, please, plese, check your facts before posting.
Thanks.
She: You're going to give a presentation on why we're going to take away everyone's Macs and make them use Windows.
Ah, the bitch!
... It depends who uses powerpoint. I'm in a school where most of our work has to be presented to the rest of the class, in 10 / 20 minutes usually. Most people still don't use Powerpoint (a Good Thing (tm) I think, forces us to actually listen to our classmates instead of just looking at the pretty pictures).
;-) )
There is one particular jerk (that I can't stand by the way) who insists on doing ALL his presentations on powerpoint, even the 3-minutes summaries. Shitloads of text, colors, graphs, quotes, transitions, etc... At the end of the show, you are still wondering what was the point. (+ his laptop seems to be misconfigured, and each time he has to fight for 10 minutes to get the damn projector to work. Hilarious)
But one of my teachers used only Powerpoint slides, all year long; he couldn't make himself clearer, and those presentations were excellent.
The USER is to blame, not the software. Still, because powerpoint presentations still have the "new-cool-wow-shiny" factor playing in their favor, some teachers are impressed by mediocre presentations, giving marks way above what they should be. ( Why, yes, that's why I'm getting an iBook + Keynote for next year
Same here, I work at a newspaper: all computers are Mac LC III's ... (there is a G4 for server though, and a G3 for Photoshop / InDesign work)
Appletalk network on Ethertalk... Works great!!
Actually, Steve Jobs himself said that Apple doesn't make a dime per song with ITMS.
... and is unavailable outside the U.S. There is good reason to believe that 2004 will see the iTMS go "global" (at least Europe and Japan, and then is when we'll start to realize the true potential of the iTMS.
My belief is that he knows that he's lying, at least by omission, when he says so. Maybe in order to fool the competitors into thinking "hey, Apple doesn't make money out of the store, they just cash on the iPods, so we need to make our own (failed) iPods to cash ourselves".
iTunes is what, three monthes old on the P.C.
I think we should understand Job's statement as "Apple doesn't make a dime per song with ITMS... yet "
I never tried the Nokia Ngage, so I trust you on this point.
;)
;) ), perhaps wirelessly...
My little brother has a GBA Special Edition, this little thingy is amazing... I had never gone beyond the original Game Boy, so when I
saw him play Colin Mc Rae Rally in full 3D, I couldn't believe it at first
But Nokia has something the others don't: they understand the economics of the mobile phone industry, and maybe with version 2.0 of the NGage they will also have been able to take into account the gripes of the gamers... Wait and see...
I also believe that eventually, all these devices will also have the option to plug these kind of video glasses (looking less cheesy, though
But if you're tilting the device to drive the car
;)
No, that was my second paragraph: while you are tilting the device, say, 45 degrees left, the *image* on the screen "counterrotates" 45 degrees right, so you still see it upright/horizontal without tilting your head... (granted that would require quite a lot of processing / battery)I'd like to make a sketch but I only have MS Paint, soo...
And if I want a ball maze, I can buy one for a few pence!
Yeah, but you don't get the 99 levels + the hidden bonuses
That "motion control" feature seems quite cool (i RTFA'd)... I can see a lot of games that could make use of this feature.
:( ), myOrigo could have a point there (licence technology to Nokia nGage?)
;)
First example that comes to mind: these little car racing games you find on lots of mobile phones now (or on the GBA, colinMc Rae Rally & such...). One could use the phone itself as a car wheel, tilt it left to turn left, tilt it right to turn right, pull it towards you to brake, push it away from you to accelerate... (Would be cool for flight sims too)
The phone could even "counter-rotate" the image to compensate for the tilting: picture still upright even when you've tilted the device 90 degrees to make a turn. (I'm not sure if I'm being clear enough on this point)
You could also make a simulation of these wood & plastic games, where you had to navigate a metallic ball through a maze, by just tilting the device...
Since games are apparently becoming the next big thing for mobile phones (that, and polyphonic ringtones
Remember in 5 years, when myorigo will have outplaced Nintendo & Sony thanks to these features: you heard it here first!
Did you read the article? Motion control / mirroring only are activated when you have your finger on that particular touch-sensitive button. Release button, motion control deactivates...
:)
It seems to be a quite interesting device... But they say it's "slightly bigger than the P800", so that's a no-no for me
"In short, HTAs pack all the power of Microsoft Internet Explorer"
.... "protocol support" ...
:)
Woooo-hoooooooooo! At last I can harness da powa of da Intanat Explowa! w00t! (how I will harness all that powa to my customized Trabant though, I still don't know)
Muahahahahaha!
"the strict security model [...] of the browser."
Muahahahahahhahahahahahahah!
Ah, those good guys at Microsoft, they're always around when you need a good laugh
And even without going to such great lenghts, we could ban 2-stroke engines found in all european motorcycles and scooters, and replace them with 4-stroke equivalents.
Last summer I went in Cambodia (next to Thailand, if you're wondering) and they have cheap, little, 100cc, 4 stroke scooters that hardly do any noise. The streets are filled with these scooters (70% scooters, 30% cars), and they are virtually silent.
Most operate as taxis, (you can put 3 persons max: the driver, two customers; they have custom extended cushions for that); we were four, so we used two scooters; when traffic allowed, our drivers would drive one next to another, with a safe distance in between (1.5 / 2 meters minimum). My friends and I were able to speak to each other, without having to raise our voices, at 80 km/h!
Honda makes these kinds of scooters (can't find a link though), and so does Daelim, a Korean company (sorry, I can't link to the specific scooter model because of the Flash site, but the ones we used looked like the "CiTi Ace 110", only older.
With friends we guesstimated (i.e., "wildly pulled out a figure out of our asses") that one 2-stroke scooter crossing Paris from East to West in the middle of the night had good chances of waking as much as 20 000 people...
I really don't understand why we can't get these 4 stroke scooters when poor, third world, underdevelopped Cambodia can.
One question about thunderbird 0.4, that I haven't been able to anwser by reading the release notes:
Is the Outbox repaired?? I downloaded 0.3 a week ago, used it ever since, love it, except that it's seemingly impossible to put the outgoing mail in the Outbox or (Unsent mail), and sending it when I connect (yes I'm still on dialup). Yes, I DID install the "Offline" extension, it's crap:
-no "send later" button (I have to use "ctrl-shift-enter"
-when asked to "send later" it puts the email in the "unsent messages", which is fine. But why, when the messages are sent, do they get transfered to my account's "Outbox" folder instead of in the "Sent messages" folder?
Is there any way to change that? I couldn't figure it out... I'm on dialup so there's no way I download the 0.4 version except if they have fixed the issue.
Thanks!
From the article: By connecting a cell phone to hidden explosives, and then calling that phone, one can detonate a bomb (the electrical charge that activates the ringer on the cell phone serves as the triggering signal)
:)
Triggering bombs with cell phones? Funny, I had thought *exactly* about this some time ago. And yeah, I thought using the ringer's electrical input was the easiest way to go. With only one big question mark though: what happens if someone (wrong number) calls while I'm setting up the bomb?
To be more specific, I had thought about hiding a cell phone + a year's worth of battery (or maybe using a dynamo) + some grams of explosive in the frame of my bicycle: in case somebody stole it, I just had to call that number and the whole bike went BooM. I never did it and actually regretted it when some motherfucker stole my bike!!
Next step, figure out how to build a GPS/cell phone that passively stays in the bike's frame, and that gives me the coordinates by SMS when I call it. Can I script a Java phone to do that?
You can partition the drives from the OS X installer CD, but not without erasing everything (Some commercial software probably does that, try searching google)You still can plug the iBook to your own PC through ethernet to back everything up prior to partitionning.
:)
As for your sister wanting to learn linux for *political* reasons: I've been myself confronted to a similar situation: that is, I'm currently abroad without my much beloved mac, so had to buy a PC, with windows on it. I loathe Microsoft, but I don't have access to anything else than dial-up, so I can't even download linux to give it a try! (+ I'm not sure I could manage to use linux without a bit of outside help). So I decided to find a middle ground: leave windows installed, and replace as much Microsoft software I could. Outlook got trashed for Thunderbird, Explorer for Firebird, MSN for GAIM, and so on...
My point is, open source is cool and all, but I'm not sure it's good to have people give up on *usability* and ease of use just because the OS is GPL'd. (OS X is stil so much better than linux it makes no sense to trash it for linux) Mostly because this adds a somewhat disconforting "sect" aspect to the open source community. And being looked upon as a bunch of crazy fanatics is not so good (I'm a mac fan, I know what I'm talking about!!). And also because if she tries linux while it's still not easy enough for her (she's not a geek / nerd, you told), then she just might grow very frustrated with it, trash it, and never give it a shot ever again.
If you're not familiar with OS X, what's good about it is its versatility. If you want to use it as a grandma-OS, you can. Buy mac, open case, switch on, there you have it. (I like to tell my friends, "you can use Mac OS X when drunk.")
But you can also use it as an excessively geeky OS if you want to. They give you a nice terminal app, and it's plain-vanilla open-sourced BSD behind. X-11 is installed by default in panther. Fink is the direct equivalent of apt-get, you can use it with or without a GUI... Makes installing the GIMP easy, among other things. Darwin Ports does the same kind of job. A *lot* of open-source software has been ported (mPlayer / mozilla apps / open office / etc...), too.
You can also boot OS X without the Aqua interface ("evil" because non-GPL'd) and install gnome (said to be tricky). With that many open source tools & software, you're in open-source/UNIX-land alright, imho. And if you grow tired of it, you can still go back to plain OS X. If she wants to try linux, then she should, but I have a very hard time figuring how replacing OS X by a linux desktop would be better for her in the end. (the steep price of apple hardware being mostly justified by the OS).
Anyhow, I wish you -and her, mostly- good luck!
My sister just got new iBook G4, and for some reason she wants to learn to use Linux
/bin /etc, etc...), learn some scripting, run X11 applications, and I think you can even install gnome on top of Darwin (not sure why you'd want to do that though).
:)
:))
Okay, that's just my uninformed advice, but I *think* she'd be better off learning UNIX off OS X for starters...
I mean, she can get accustomed to the shell, the basic UNIX apps (emacs, ssh...) the UNIX file hierarchy (/usr
If it is really UNIX she wants to learn (and not linux in particular) then she has it right out of the box. If it's linux-linux, then start to show her how to use the terminal on OS X, which leaves you some weeks/months to choose the best distribution.
As for linux PPC distribs... what I can say is that I tried to install Debian PPC on a standard G4, and that it didn't work out, even though I got help from a linux veteran.) Yellow dog is said to be nice, and there's supposed to be a gentoo PPC port too (?).
I once tried to install yellow dog PPC on a performa (Old World, requires some tinkering). Got halfway through install and at some point it just put garbled the screen and displayed a fun message: "Kill -34 complete, you can now reboot." No need to say it couldn't reboot anymore
There won't be any Armageddon unless Bush and his moronic supporters manage to create it. That's the scariest thing about the War on Arabs, it seems like a very blatant attempt to Immanentize the Eschaton. Once I saw a really cool (and in-depth, this thing ran in five or 6 episodes IIRC) documentary about Bush Jr. and his team. Lots of ex-CIA / FBI agents were interviewed, all basically saying "Bush is under *heavy* influence of Christian extremists". Which led me to think, verbatim, "awww, shit". Some Economist (.uk) articles tended to confirm the stuff, and some very serious folks (and facts) are there to backup the theory. Now I can't possibly believe myself that the war in Iraq (for instance) was done on religious grounds (" i.e. immanentize the Eschaton") but still, this shit is damn creepy & it does scare the crap out of me! He can't be *that* stupid, or can he?