/agree for the most part. When I am downloading a file from random website, the bottleneck is usually them, not me, on my 3mbit cable. But a lot of stuff I do crushes my 256kbit upload. For example, the World of Warcraft beta was distributed via Bittorrent, and most of us can't get decent speed downloads because 90% of the peers are stuck at 16 or 32kb/sec. If people had more upload bandwidth across the line then we would have a much easier time. I like to host files for my friends to download off my home server, but it's unpleasant to move anything of significant size at 32 kb/sec.
This article is part of the LWN Grumpy Editor series. The conventional wisdom is that, once Linux reaches a true, user-friendly paradise state, there will be no need for any command line work at all. Your editor, however, is a heavy command line user, and has been since, well, since he was able to get away from punch cards. Some sorts of tasks are best done in a graphical, pointer-oriented mode. But others are, truly, best done with the command line. The pure expressive power of a command-oriented interface has yet to be matched in the graphical world - at least, for a wide variety of tasks.
Once upon a time, an ADM-3A terminal looked like a very nice interface. Those days have passed, however; [xterm] for many of the years since, the definitive terminal emulator has been xterm, which was packaged with the original X11R1 release. xterm was, for its time, a marvel of configurability, with a nice set of menus for controlling its behavior, setting fonts, and providing that all-important access to the "reset" function for when it gets stuck in the VT100 graphics mode.
There is one other xterm feature which has never been matched anywhere: no other terminal emulator comes with its own Tektronix 4014 storage tube emulator mode built in. Your editor who, along with many co-workers, had sunburned his face working with real storage-tube terminals appreciated this mode at the time. It has been a while, however, since your editor (or just about anybody else) has had to run software which expects to talk to such a terminal; even so, every xterm still has a Tektronix terminal lurking within it.
In general, little has happened with xterm over the years, with the exception of the addition of color support. For the most part, development in terminal emulators has happened elsewhere. Your editor has finally decided that it is time to take a look around, and, perhaps, move beyond the venerable xterm.
But first: a word on color in terminal emulators; this is a subject on which your editor can get truly grumpy. Many developers have jumped into adding color support to terminal-oriented applications with little regard for basic human factors and usability. A usable terminal should not look like the Las Vegas strip at night. Color usage, to be effective, must be subtle and carefully thought out. In particular:
* Users must be given obvious and easy control over color usage. Different people have very different combinations of monitors, background colors, limitations in color perception, and general preferences. There is no single choice of colors that will work for any substantial portion of the user community.
* The basic nature of the human visual system is that it separates objects based on intensity differences, not color differences. If you are designing colors for a white-background display, every color you use must be, with few exceptions, a low-intensity color. Hot pink on white may look snazzy, but people will have to work hard to read it.
* Dark blue should never be used for anything somebody is expected to read. Short wavelength colors tend to focus just in front of the retina, and will thus always be a little bit blurry.
Color xterm thus fails on all counts. The colors can be configured via the X resource database, but it is not straightforward. The default colors are on the garish side, and they are too bright.
[rxvt screenshot] For years, the default replacement for xterm was rxvt. This terminal emulator is, for all practical purposes, a version of xterm with a lot of the extra stuff (such as the Tektronix mode) stripped out. It does live up to its promise of being smaller, taking just over half the virtual memory required by xterm. rxvt, however, suffers from a lack of maintenance (last release was November, 2001, with a development version showing a release in March, 2003), poor default colors, and no menus for run-time configuration. This terminal emulator has been dropped from a num
Actually, I used it for several years (my programming formative years, from age 8 up to 14 or so -- I'm 18 now). I think it was good for me. It was a surprisingly good learning language. I also won a competition with it -- the Boston Computer Society, some ridiculously long time ago, in the Educational category, probably around age 10. Although I think me and some other guy were the only ones in that category. The year before that, I entered a QBasic program and came in second.
I wrote a program in VB similar to Stickies on the Mac, but I lost the source to it. It was pretty good if I may say so myself -- it had a searching feature which would display all the notes by default, but you could start typing and it would make ones which did not contain the text disappear.
I give VB a lot of credit for teaching me the concepts of object orientation, too. Admittedly, it was not full-featured OO, but it had controls, etc., all with different properties which were encapsulated into the one object. So I was used to the concept of addressing things using dot notation from the very beginning.
Which happens to "feel" exactly the same as VB. It's not simply the language syntax but also the structure, and programming in Delphi is practically the same as VB: plop objects onto a form, write code for their events. I moved from VB to Delphi with minimal effort.
I agree completely that "specialized devices for specific applications generally work better than a generalized device." But my idea of the future is filled with convergence...
Put a networking stack inside every device and add a few interfaces. XML-RPC would be great. Then your 'convergence' is simply your specialized devices making networking requests to each other. I could set a cron job every day to make this call at 6am:
curl --data @start-brew.xml 192.168.1.176
Thus, if 192.168.1.176 is my coffee maker, I have coffee every morning.
My 'security system' is simply a set of sensors placed on walls, doors, and windows that simply make calls to 192.168.1.2 informing my home computer that the door has just been opened. Then I can build or download my own security system web application, with whatever policies I want, and customize it to my heart's desire. Have it make a request to the police station if and only if it is convinced there is an actual intruder.
Before I go home from work I can ssh into my box and tell my lights to turn on, and garage door to open in 15 minutes.
Why not pay per movie like iTunes, and save to disk? Pay once, download once, take it with you places and enjoy.
Of course, many people don't want to watch a movie too many times, whereas they will probably keep listening to the same song, so the reusability is of less value. Perhaps in that case a subscription model is better. But I always like small per-unit charges more -- it's the UNIX mindset I guess:-)
Apple has been trying to get this message out for a while. We had a story a few months ago (lazy me, no link for you) about how Intel was dropping the clock from the branding of the processors.
Clock speed really does not have a direct correlation to computer speed anymore. It seems like we will see more of the trend of newer, better technology that runs at a lower rate but executes a lot more in one tick, so it is much faster. It seems that it will start at 1GHz and move up to 3 before somebody gets a new idea, makes a new "slow" processor and starts it over...
This is a repost of a comment I made that nobody modded:-)
Free hotspots are acceptable in places where it's not much of a marginal cost, and where people wouldn't be able to 'leech' very much (i.e., hotels and such.) But in places where there are a lot of randoms, that is no good.
I've also seen pay-to-access credit card methods, but I wouldn't want to use them -- that is mainly for business users.
An advertising based hotspot as in this article seems very annoying, but it would also be pretty easy to hack Mozilla and get around the advertising overall.
How else can we pay for wireless? Here -- My idea, never heard it elsewhere, I think it's good:
A wireless hotspot 'jukebox' (or parking meter, or vending machine, or whatever metaphor you would like).
It is simply a box with a coin deposit -- anyone can go up and put a coin in, and the machine gives everyone in range Internet access for X amount of time. (1 dollar for 15 minutes? If people actually USED dollar coins, it would be good, I think).
Anyway, I believe the social model of this would be interesting: the person who needs it most and who can probably afford it the easiest (doing business or whatever) will end up paying for everyone as long as they want to use it. If there is no 'business user' at the time, the people who just want to use it casually will probably just volunteer to pay for one unit at a time.
This method is convenient, easy to implement, cheap to build, and easy to use. Admittedly, business users would probably rather have a credit card and authentication system that would allow them to charge it to the company, but I think that casual users would spend quite a bit more than they currently do. It is pretty cheap for them.
Anybody hear of anything like this implemented anywhere else?
Re:for actually using a computer (writing document
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Every OS nowadays has a Sticky Keys feature which essentially turns Shift into Caps Lock.
"I like the idea of developing computer-human interfaces in which the computer is a skeptic [and so] doesn't perform the actions of which it is capable until the human has convinced it that the need is genuine and the human is an appropriate person for whom to perform this action," he said. "This might lead to greater safety for all of us."
Ouch! I don't like this idea at ALL. Anyone else disturbed?
Dave. Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal...Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Do you read me, Hal?...Do you read me, Hal?...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Do you read me, Hal? Hal. Affirmative, Dave, I read you. Dave. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Hal. I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. Dave. What's the problem? Hal. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Probably because they print 50 billion ROM chips all identical, and it would be a significant cost to reprogram each one differently with the serial number.
Wi-Fi out of the box is of course insecure. It can be made secure with a number of different methods (WEP not being one of them, heh, but there is WPA and other things). I believe one of the best features of Wi-Fi is its ease of setup and use -- if you have an open AP, anyone who comes over to your house can just use it with no or almost no configuration. It's incredibly easy and convenient.
What's the drawback? Anyone in your neighborhood has access to your local network. But it's unlikely that someone who wanted to h4x0r you would drive up your street and sit in front of your house. It is of course possible, and depends on your neighborhood. If you're the type who locks the house even when you're at home, then definitely get a security protocol. If, like me, you leave the garage door open and doors unlocked, then securing your Wi-Fi isn't something I would worry about.
So this is no surprise, but neither (in my opinion) is it a big deal.
My MOM (who is a geek, but she's a mom nonetheless) was able to hdinstall knoppix on a laptop. It worked great.
I'm always impressed with autodetection and autoconfiguration of hardware. Knoppix does this great out of the CD.
Boot knoppix, insert orinoco-cs wireless PCMCIA card... see 5 messages on console: recognized type of card, probed module for it, added interface, brought interface up, got IP address from DHCP. And then everything just worked. Awesomeness.
It's hard to disagree with these principles -- they make a lot of sense from a user's perspective.
How can this declaration be effective?
For one thing, it's a big company setting the standard. I can see companies priding themselves on qualifying for the "Google Software Principles" and people refusing to buy software that doesn't qualify -- because a big company said so, it has a lot more weight (in the minds of many).
It also helps clear things up for the non-technical user who may or may not think of that kind of thing. I don't know, somebody may try to get a law passed that requires this or something like it. Writing some principles down is a way of highlighting some of the most important points to lawmakers and the like.
I'd like to point out the distinction between P2P's "possible misuse" and that of RFID -- trust. For security, you should minimize the amount of trust or faith you have to apply in any situation. For RFIDs, you have to trust that every single other person you meet isn't bouncing radio waves off your person and collecting data about you. There's no such trust involved in using a P2P network. So they're not analogous at all.
As of radar detectors, they are legal nearly everywhere (http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/radar4.html ). So are lockpicks - I know people who own some, and I don't consider it anything special. (Massachusetts law is on http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/QuasiLegal/Loc kpicking/appendixB.html )
They're not being tested on their knowledge of Java. They changed from C++ because C++ sucks various reproductive appendages of various mammals with varying descriptors relating to size, shape, and color. For learning, that is. I won't argue that it's useful for production because of its speed.
Anyway, the students are not being tested on their knowledge of Java. They're being tested on actual computer scientific concepts, such as the object-oriented design model, inheritance and polymorphism included, as well as algorithmic design concepts such as big-oh notation and all that. I took it last year in C++ (and got a 5) -- I'm assuming I could ace it again, even though I have never written a java application in my life, simply because it does not test you on Java.
The reason they changed is pretty obvious -- C++ has header files and awkward inheritance and so forth. With a more object-oriented language, you learn more about data structures and less about 'virtual'. You also get interfaces in Java, which is a much better implementation (pun only sort of intended) of multiple inheritance.
Free hotspots are acceptable in places where it's not much of a marginal cost, and where people wouldn't be able to 'leech' very much (i.e., hotels and such.) But in places where there are a lot of randoms, that is no good.
I've also seen pay-to-access credit card methods, but I wouldn't want to use them -- that is mainly for business users.
An advertising based hotspot as in this article seems very annoying, but it would also be pretty easy to hack Mozilla and get around the advertising overall.
How else can we pay for wireless? Here -- My idea, never heard it elsewhere, I think it's good:
A wireless hotspot 'jukebox' (or parking meter, or vending machine, or whatever metaphor you would like).
It is simply a box with a coin deposit -- anyone can go up and put a coin in, and the machine gives everyone in range Internet access for X amount of time. (1 dollar for 15 minutes? If people actually USED dollar coins, it would be good, I think).
Anyway, I believe the social model of this would be interesting: the person who needs it most and who can probably afford it the easiest (doing business or whatever) will end up paying for everyone as long as they want to use it. If there is no 'business user' at the time, the people who just want to use it casually will probably just volunteer to pay for one unit at a time.
This method is convenient, easy to implement, cheap to build, and easy to use. Admittedly, business users would probably rather have a credit card and authentication system that would allow them to charge it to the company, but I think that casual users would spend quite a bit more than they currently do. It is pretty cheap for them.
Anybody hear of anything like this implemented anywhere else? (If not, you heard it here first!:-) )
I enjoy the challenge, I enjoy variety and I like learning new things, new interfaces, etc. However, I get greater satisfaction from making it so that other people don't have to if they don't want to.
There will always be people who want to do their own thing and this is fine. I will probably be one of these people. But it is better to standardize everything first, so that everyone doesn't have to go through it.
I was JUST using Office Word 2003 (for the first time) in the office and I was thoroughly unimpressed with it.
I started the program and noticed, hey, there are some very ugly blue toolbars on by default. I wanted to turn these off, so I went to the Help and discovered that (as far as I can tell) you no longer have help on the hard drive, you have it on some website somewhere. The 'help' search box searches a website. This is much slower and doesn't get me that nice index I'm used to. It's very unhappy. So about 2 minutes into the MS help I gave up and went to Google.
I spent 5 minutes Googling and I can't figure out how to change their theme back to the normal Windows theme that is present in every other app. So I decided to ignore it and go on.
Okay, so I'm working on an outline document. I had created my original outline in Notepad (with two spaces, four spaces, etc, before each line to do the hierarchy) -- I wanted to use Word for the font sizes so I could actually read it during my presentation. So I pasted the Notepad in and got each line as a heading 1 in the outline. While I didn't relish the thought of setting the level of each one separately, I didn't really expect that it would 'just work'.
The bug I quickly discovered was that, for whatever reason, you had to actually press enter on a new line before the thing would indent properly. That is, clicking on a line and hitting the "demote" button didn't DO anything. I had to delete the newline at the beginning of the line, for each line, and replace it manually. THEN you could indent it properly.
So I guessed the hotkeys for Promote and Demote (shift-tab and tab). But I couldn't guess it for Demote to Body Text, which I also needed a lot. Mousing over the icon got me the name. Right-clicking got me the 'customize your toolbars' menu(a list of toolbars with checkboxes, and a Customize item at the bottom). Okay, Customize (although this is not really what I wanted to do). I flipped the tabs and didn't find it, so I left the menu. Tried the help again, searched for 'hotkeys' and didn't get anything. I looked in Customize again, dug a little deeper. Indeed, there IS a Keyboard button; it's not on the tabs, but it doesn't deserve a tab by itself (or something). I have no clue.
I assumed the list of menus here corresponded with the toolbars I could select (this is not actually true, but I didn't know this). I looked around and didn't see an Outline one. So I clicked on 'All Commands' and scrolled down to the DemoteToBodyText item. Clicked on it. No hotkey is listed. Okay, I'll assign one... how about shift-tab? Click in the assign shortcut area, hit shift-tab, and the focus leaves and goes to the previous text field on the form. I remember that shift-tab is already assigned anyway, so I try ctrl-shift-tab. The focus does not move but it does not capture my shortcut!
I click on the item above DemoteToBodyText, which is DemoteList. Its description is 'demotes the selection one level,' so I assume it is the demote command I used with Tab. BUT NO SHORTCUT IS LISTED!
I give up and finish working on my document. The last thing I notice is that you can't demote something to body text at a certain level -- at any point, the body text has to be below the level of the last header item. You can't do this:
- Level 1 Header
- Body Text Under Level 1
- Level 2 Header
- Body Text Under Level 1
It instead comes out as this:
- Level 1 Header
- Body Text Under Level 1
- Level 2 Header
- Body Text Under Level 2 (sadness!)
There is no way to coerce it to put the second body text one level up.
This experience with Office Word 2003 led me to great sadness, much like the military. I haven't used OOO's outline features, but I'm just going to assume they do it better, because that was AWFUL.
Slashdot Mirror
/agree for the most part. When I am downloading a file from random website, the bottleneck is usually them, not me, on my 3mbit cable. But a lot of stuff I do crushes my 256kbit upload. For example, the World of Warcraft beta was distributed via Bittorrent, and most of us can't get decent speed downloads because 90% of the peers are stuck at 16 or 32kb/sec. If people had more upload bandwidth across the line then we would have a much easier time. I like to host files for my friends to download off my home server, but it's unpleasant to move anything of significant size at 32 kb/sec.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators
This article is part of the LWN Grumpy Editor series.
The conventional wisdom is that, once Linux reaches a true, user-friendly paradise state, there will be no need for any command line work at all. Your editor, however, is a heavy command line user, and has been since, well, since he was able to get away from punch cards. Some sorts of tasks are best done in a graphical, pointer-oriented mode. But others are, truly, best done with the command line. The pure expressive power of a command-oriented interface has yet to be matched in the graphical world - at least, for a wide variety of tasks.
Once upon a time, an ADM-3A terminal looked like a very nice interface. Those days have passed, however; [xterm] for many of the years since, the definitive terminal emulator has been xterm, which was packaged with the original X11R1 release. xterm was, for its time, a marvel of configurability, with a nice set of menus for controlling its behavior, setting fonts, and providing that all-important access to the "reset" function for when it gets stuck in the VT100 graphics mode.
There is one other xterm feature which has never been matched anywhere: no other terminal emulator comes with its own Tektronix 4014 storage tube emulator mode built in. Your editor who, along with many co-workers, had sunburned his face working with real storage-tube terminals appreciated this mode at the time. It has been a while, however, since your editor (or just about anybody else) has had to run software which expects to talk to such a terminal; even so, every xterm still has a Tektronix terminal lurking within it.
In general, little has happened with xterm over the years, with the exception of the addition of color support. For the most part, development in terminal emulators has happened elsewhere. Your editor has finally decided that it is time to take a look around, and, perhaps, move beyond the venerable xterm.
But first: a word on color in terminal emulators; this is a subject on which your editor can get truly grumpy. Many developers have jumped into adding color support to terminal-oriented applications with little regard for basic human factors and usability. A usable terminal should not look like the Las Vegas strip at night. Color usage, to be effective, must be subtle and carefully thought out. In particular:
* Users must be given obvious and easy control over color usage. Different people have very different combinations of monitors, background colors, limitations in color perception, and general preferences. There is no single choice of colors that will work for any substantial portion of the user community.
* The basic nature of the human visual system is that it separates objects based on intensity differences, not color differences. If you are designing colors for a white-background display, every color you use must be, with few exceptions, a low-intensity color. Hot pink on white may look snazzy, but people will have to work hard to read it.
* Dark blue should never be used for anything somebody is expected to read. Short wavelength colors tend to focus just in front of the retina, and will thus always be a little bit blurry.
Color xterm thus fails on all counts. The colors can be configured via the X resource database, but it is not straightforward. The default colors are on the garish side, and they are too bright.
[rxvt screenshot] For years, the default replacement for xterm was rxvt. This terminal emulator is, for all practical purposes, a version of xterm with a lot of the extra stuff (such as the Tektronix mode) stripped out. It does live up to its promise of being smaller, taking just over half the virtual memory required by xterm. rxvt, however, suffers from a lack of maintenance (last release was November, 2001, with a development version showing a release in March, 2003), poor default colors, and no menus for run-time configuration. This terminal emulator has been dropped from a num
Actually, I used it for several years (my programming formative years, from age 8 up to 14 or so -- I'm 18 now). I think it was good for me. It was a surprisingly good learning language. I also won a competition with it -- the Boston Computer Society, some ridiculously long time ago, in the Educational category, probably around age 10. Although I think me and some other guy were the only ones in that category. The year before that, I entered a QBasic program and came in second.
I wrote a program in VB similar to Stickies on the Mac, but I lost the source to it. It was pretty good if I may say so myself -- it had a searching feature which would display all the notes by default, but you could start typing and it would make ones which did not contain the text disappear.
I give VB a lot of credit for teaching me the concepts of object orientation, too. Admittedly, it was not full-featured OO, but it had controls, etc., all with different properties which were encapsulated into the one object. So I was used to the concept of addressing things using dot notation from the very beginning.
Which happens to "feel" exactly the same as VB. It's not simply the language syntax but also the structure, and programming in Delphi is practically the same as VB: plop objects onto a form, write code for their events. I moved from VB to Delphi with minimal effort.
I agree completely that "specialized devices for specific applications generally work better than a generalized device." But my idea of the future is filled with convergence...
Put a networking stack inside every device and add a few interfaces. XML-RPC would be great. Then your 'convergence' is simply your specialized devices making networking requests to each other. I could set a cron job every day to make this call at 6am:
curl --data @start-brew.xml 192.168.1.176
Thus, if 192.168.1.176 is my coffee maker, I have coffee every morning.
My 'security system' is simply a set of sensors placed on walls, doors, and windows that simply make calls to 192.168.1.2 informing my home computer that the door has just been opened. Then I can build or download my own security system web application, with whatever policies I want, and customize it to my heart's desire. Have it make a request to the police station if and only if it is convinced there is an actual intruder.
Before I go home from work I can ssh into my box and tell my lights to turn on, and garage door to open in 15 minutes.
Why not pay per movie like iTunes, and save to disk? Pay once, download once, take it with you places and enjoy.
:-)
Of course, many people don't want to watch a movie too many times, whereas they will probably keep listening to the same song, so the reusability is of less value. Perhaps in that case a subscription model is better. But I always like small per-unit charges more -- it's the UNIX mindset I guess
You're ironically pretty terse too!
0 04/movie_specification". example/specifications/2003/color_specificatioN">
...c ode color:channel="r" color:max="255">231</color:colorcode>c olorcode color:channel="g" color:max="255">128</color:colorcode>c olorcode color:channel="b" color:max="255">37</color:colorcode>o r>m ovie:bodystream>
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<movie:movie xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:movie="http://site.example/specifications/2
xmlns:color="http://site
<movie:bodystream>
<movie:frame>
<movie:ar tefact movie:type="pixel">
<movie:colorset color:type="rgb">
<color:color>
<color:rgbcolor
<color:rgb
<color:rgb
</color:col
</movie:colorset>
</movie:artefact>
...
</
...
</movie:movie>
Apple has been trying to get this message out for a while. We had a story a few months ago (lazy me, no link for you) about how Intel was dropping the clock from the branding of the processors.
Clock speed really does not have a direct correlation to computer speed anymore. It seems like we will see more of the trend of newer, better technology that runs at a lower rate but executes a lot more in one tick, so it is much faster. It seems that it will start at 1GHz and move up to 3 before somebody gets a new idea, makes a new "slow" processor and starts it over...
This is a repost of a comment I made that nobody modded :-)
Free hotspots are acceptable in places where it's not much of a marginal cost, and where people wouldn't be able to 'leech' very much (i.e., hotels and such.) But in places where there are a lot of randoms, that is no good.
I've also seen pay-to-access credit card methods, but I wouldn't want to use them -- that is mainly for business users.
An advertising based hotspot as in this article seems very annoying, but it would also be pretty easy to hack Mozilla and get around the advertising overall.
How else can we pay for wireless? Here -- My idea, never heard it elsewhere, I think it's good:
A wireless hotspot 'jukebox' (or parking meter, or vending machine, or whatever metaphor you would like).
It is simply a box with a coin deposit -- anyone can go up and put a coin in, and the machine gives everyone in range Internet access for X amount of time. (1 dollar for 15 minutes? If people actually USED dollar coins, it would be good, I think).
Anyway, I believe the social model of this would be interesting: the person who needs it most and who can probably afford it the easiest (doing business or whatever) will end up paying for everyone as long as they want to use it. If there is no 'business user' at the time, the people who just want to use it casually will probably just volunteer to pay for one unit at a time.
This method is convenient, easy to implement, cheap to build, and easy to use. Admittedly, business users would probably rather have a credit card and authentication system that would allow them to charge it to the company, but I think that casual users would spend quite a bit more than they currently do. It is pretty cheap for them.
Anybody hear of anything like this implemented anywhere else?
Every OS nowadays has a Sticky Keys feature which essentially turns Shift into Caps Lock.
"I like the idea of developing computer-human interfaces in which the computer is a skeptic [and so] doesn't perform the actions of which it is capable until the human has convinced it that the need is genuine and the human is an appropriate person for whom to perform this action," he said. "This might lead to greater safety for all of us."
Ouch! I don't like this idea at ALL. Anyone else disturbed?
Dave. Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal...Open the pod bay doors, please, Hal...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Do you read me, Hal?...Do you read me, Hal?...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Hullo, Hal, do you read me?...Do you read me, Hal?
Hal. Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Dave. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
Hal. I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave. What's the problem?
Hal. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Probably because they print 50 billion ROM chips all identical, and it would be a significant cost to reprogram each one differently with the serial number.
Wi-Fi out of the box is of course insecure. It can be made secure with a number of different methods (WEP not being one of them, heh, but there is WPA and other things). I believe one of the best features of Wi-Fi is its ease of setup and use -- if you have an open AP, anyone who comes over to your house can just use it with no or almost no configuration. It's incredibly easy and convenient.
What's the drawback? Anyone in your neighborhood has access to your local network. But it's unlikely that someone who wanted to h4x0r you would drive up your street and sit in front of your house. It is of course possible, and depends on your neighborhood. If you're the type who locks the house even when you're at home, then definitely get a security protocol. If, like me, you leave the garage door open and doors unlocked, then securing your Wi-Fi isn't something I would worry about.
So this is no surprise, but neither (in my opinion) is it a big deal.
My MOM (who is a geek, but she's a mom nonetheless) was able to hdinstall knoppix on a laptop. It worked great.
I'm always impressed with autodetection and autoconfiguration of hardware. Knoppix does this great out of the CD.
Boot knoppix, insert orinoco-cs wireless PCMCIA card... see 5 messages on console: recognized type of card, probed module for it, added interface, brought interface up, got IP address from DHCP. And then everything just worked. Awesomeness.
I recommend it
Wow. That's pretty amazing. Good story.
It's hard to disagree with these principles -- they make a lot of sense from a user's perspective.
How can this declaration be effective?
For one thing, it's a big company setting the standard. I can see companies priding themselves on qualifying for the "Google Software Principles" and people refusing to buy software that doesn't qualify -- because a big company said so, it has a lot more weight (in the minds of many).
It also helps clear things up for the non-technical user who may or may not think of that kind of thing. I don't know, somebody may try to get a law passed that requires this or something like it. Writing some principles down is a way of highlighting some of the most important points to lawmakers and the like.
I'd like to point out the distinction between P2P's "possible misuse" and that of RFID -- trust. For security, you should minimize the amount of trust or faith you have to apply in any situation. For RFIDs, you have to trust that every single other person you meet isn't bouncing radio waves off your person and collecting data about you. There's no such trust involved in using a P2P network. So they're not analogous at all.
l ). So are lockpicks - I know people who own some, and I don't consider it anything special. (Massachusetts law is on http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/QuasiLegal/Loc kpicking/appendixB.html )
As of radar detectors, they are legal nearly everywhere (http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/radar4.htm
They're not being tested on their knowledge of Java. They changed from C++ because C++ sucks various reproductive appendages of various mammals with varying descriptors relating to size, shape, and color. For learning, that is. I won't argue that it's useful for production because of its speed.
Anyway, the students are not being tested on their knowledge of Java. They're being tested on actual computer scientific concepts, such as the object-oriented design model, inheritance and polymorphism included, as well as algorithmic design concepts such as big-oh notation and all that. I took it last year in C++ (and got a 5) -- I'm assuming I could ace it again, even though I have never written a java application in my life, simply because it does not test you on Java.
The reason they changed is pretty obvious -- C++ has header files and awkward inheritance and so forth. With a more object-oriented language, you learn more about data structures and less about 'virtual'. You also get interfaces in Java, which is a much better implementation (pun only sort of intended) of multiple inheritance.
Free hotspots are acceptable in places where it's not much of a marginal cost, and where people wouldn't be able to 'leech' very much (i.e., hotels and such.) But in places where there are a lot of randoms, that is no good.
:-) )
I've also seen pay-to-access credit card methods, but I wouldn't want to use them -- that is mainly for business users.
An advertising based hotspot as in this article seems very annoying, but it would also be pretty easy to hack Mozilla and get around the advertising overall.
How else can we pay for wireless? Here -- My idea, never heard it elsewhere, I think it's good:
A wireless hotspot 'jukebox' (or parking meter, or vending machine, or whatever metaphor you would like).
It is simply a box with a coin deposit -- anyone can go up and put a coin in, and the machine gives everyone in range Internet access for X amount of time. (1 dollar for 15 minutes? If people actually USED dollar coins, it would be good, I think).
Anyway, I believe the social model of this would be interesting: the person who needs it most and who can probably afford it the easiest (doing business or whatever) will end up paying for everyone as long as they want to use it. If there is no 'business user' at the time, the people who just want to use it casually will probably just volunteer to pay for one unit at a time.
This method is convenient, easy to implement, cheap to build, and easy to use. Admittedly, business users would probably rather have a credit card and authentication system that would allow them to charge it to the company, but I think that casual users would spend quite a bit more than they currently do. It is pretty cheap for them.
Anybody hear of anything like this implemented anywhere else? (If not, you heard it here first!
Tell her it hurts the Internet community at large if she is a spam relay. And it's not too hard to patch XP, so just DO it.
I enjoy the challenge, I enjoy variety and I like learning new things, new interfaces, etc. However, I get greater satisfaction from making it so that other people don't have to if they don't want to.
There will always be people who want to do their own thing and this is fine. I will probably be one of these people. But it is better to standardize everything first, so that everyone doesn't have to go through it.
I started the program and noticed, hey, there are some very ugly blue toolbars on by default. I wanted to turn these off, so I went to the Help and discovered that (as far as I can tell) you no longer have help on the hard drive, you have it on some website somewhere. The 'help' search box searches a website. This is much slower and doesn't get me that nice index I'm used to. It's very unhappy. So about 2 minutes into the MS help I gave up and went to Google.
I spent 5 minutes Googling and I can't figure out how to change their theme back to the normal Windows theme that is present in every other app. So I decided to ignore it and go on.
Okay, so I'm working on an outline document. I had created my original outline in Notepad (with two spaces, four spaces, etc, before each line to do the hierarchy) -- I wanted to use Word for the font sizes so I could actually read it during my presentation. So I pasted the Notepad in and got each line as a heading 1 in the outline. While I didn't relish the thought of setting the level of each one separately, I didn't really expect that it would 'just work'.
The bug I quickly discovered was that, for whatever reason, you had to actually press enter on a new line before the thing would indent properly. That is, clicking on a line and hitting the "demote" button didn't DO anything. I had to delete the newline at the beginning of the line, for each line, and replace it manually. THEN you could indent it properly.
So I guessed the hotkeys for Promote and Demote (shift-tab and tab). But I couldn't guess it for Demote to Body Text, which I also needed a lot. Mousing over the icon got me the name. Right-clicking got me the 'customize your toolbars' menu(a list of toolbars with checkboxes, and a Customize item at the bottom). Okay, Customize (although this is not really what I wanted to do). I flipped the tabs and didn't find it, so I left the menu. Tried the help again, searched for 'hotkeys' and didn't get anything. I looked in Customize again, dug a little deeper. Indeed, there IS a Keyboard button; it's not on the tabs, but it doesn't deserve a tab by itself (or something). I have no clue.
I assumed the list of menus here corresponded with the toolbars I could select (this is not actually true, but I didn't know this). I looked around and didn't see an Outline one. So I clicked on 'All Commands' and scrolled down to the DemoteToBodyText item. Clicked on it. No hotkey is listed. Okay, I'll assign one... how about shift-tab? Click in the assign shortcut area, hit shift-tab, and the focus leaves and goes to the previous text field on the form. I remember that shift-tab is already assigned anyway, so I try ctrl-shift-tab. The focus does not move but it does not capture my shortcut!
I click on the item above DemoteToBodyText, which is DemoteList. Its description is 'demotes the selection one level,' so I assume it is the demote command I used with Tab. BUT NO SHORTCUT IS LISTED!
I give up and finish working on my document. The last thing I notice is that you can't demote something to body text at a certain level -- at any point, the body text has to be below the level of the last header item. You can't do this:It instead comes out as this:There is no way to coerce it to put the second body text one level up.
This experience with Office Word 2003 led me to great sadness, much like the military. I haven't used OOO's outline features, but I'm just going to assume they do it better, because that was AWFUL.