Putaro wrote: > > Apple actually built a prototype Mac (System 7) tablet back in the mid-90's. >
I remember a company that took a PowerBook (3400, mebbe? ISTR this being in about 1995 or 1996-ish), and diconnected the LCD+lid, removed the keyboard, and attached the (now touch-sensitive) display where the keys has been.
It was supposed to be for handicapped kids, IIRC, and they'd thrown a copy of Netscape on it. A web page using an imagemap laid over an picture of, for example, a house, would let them first learn about and then presumably control parts of the house.
(The prototype unit I saw, which cleverly retained its ADB & VGA ports for use as a "regular" laptop was i think for dog & pony shows put on for investors or some such.)
Neat-o, and I never heard of it again.:7(
I worked at a high-profile architecture firm, one of the oldest continually-operating shops in the country, which people were fighting to get into. The architects as a group were smart and hard-working.
I removed the Zip drives & floppy drives so people couldn't walk out with the data files. Why? Because they represented so many hours of work: the specs were the output of skilled engineers, the drawings had taken many, many hours to produce, and the databases of correspondence could be mined for best practices by lazy competitors -- and there were certainly other things to be gleaned from our files.
Were we storm troopers for doing this? By no means: our archivist was happy to share our old stuff (going back 125+ years) but ongoing projects were just that, ongoing. And probably the real reason is that the software tools -- CAD programs, home-grown project management databases, etc. -- we had at work were very expensive and pretty mature: anyone in their field would *love* to have free use of them.
Even though our architects were very excited to work there, and had a policy of "no personal use" of the sysytems, I still had to fish out one of their own Zip disks from the empty drive bays every few days. You know, right behind where they'd peeled off or slit through where I'd "only" put clear packing tape and a sign reading "NO ZIP DRIVE, NO FLOPPY DRIVE." *snort*
charon69 wrote: > > As such, a DSL modem just modulates the data to correspond to > frequencies higher than anything that you can say or hear and > puts it on the same line as your voice traffic. >
Higher frequencies, like only dogs and jazz musicians can hear, or like only Monster Cables can carry? Wow, science really *is* cool stuff.
> > No. He read 0day warez as "Oday Juarez." >
I am helpess in the grip of the obligatory WKRP In Cincinnati quote:
Johnny: Les, correct me if I'm wrong, but have you developed a recent fondness for alliteration?
Les: Well, I'm trying to find a style, Johnny. All good newsmen nowadays have to have a style in order to stand out from the crowd.
Johnny: But Les, you've always had a real style of your own. How many newsmen called Chi Chi Rodrigues "Chiy-Chiy Rodwagwayz"? And what is it you call those little Mexican dogs?
Did those guys show off for the photograher, or were they really that fearless? Construction worker bravado, or Depression-era nihilism? I mean, WTF does this guy do when his hat blows off?
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/hi nex/empire/hanging.html
ErichTheWebGuy pinted out the useful URL http://weather.gov/data/current_obs/seek.php
I checked it out, and was immediately outraged to notice an ethnic bias here: my adopted home, the smallest state in the Union, is listed in the pop-up menu as "Rhoda Island" (though maybe it's just creeping Nick-At-Nite-ism and not an ethnic slur).
Whatevah....
Get back to your keyboard, Stephenson: I've almost finished "System of the World" and I'll need another thousand-page rock of cross-genre crack in about 120 days from you!
This answer reminded me of the "Jesus vs. Spider Man" USENET post which I rediscovered saved on an old jaz disk last weekend, and which I am pleased to find is still online:
http://www.sadinoff.com/fun/quotes/xvy.txt (Or look for rec.arts.comics.xbooks on May 11, 1995 in Google groups.)
sqlrob asked, "But does the iPod come with any music?"
Well, my iMac from a couple of years ago came loaded with OS 10.1.something and lots of stuff in the "iTunes Sampler" folder within the OS 9 Applications folder -- but when I bought a new G4 powerBook this summer, nothing.
The user turnstyle wants to know where us theiving iPodder get our music. Here goes: 1. From P2P? None: I have a rich, full life, and can't spend all my scarce spare time downloading crummy rips of junk. Plus, I don't want some "black box" P2P client on my iMac: I take care of the little guy. 2. Digital tracks purchased online? One I bought from iTMS with a promotional code, and two or three iTMS freebies (all of which but one suck, and I think the one might suck, too). 3. Shareable sources? None. 4. Rips of my own CDs? All of it. Wait, all but... 5. Rips from other peoples' CDs? Well, I borrowed a 2-CD set of Gregorian chant from the library 'cause I have always wondered what they sound like. And I've been borrowing some Toots & the Maytals CDs lately looking for a particular version of "Pressure Drop" that I heard on the radio last month. But other than that, pretty much all my own stuff.
I have a third-generation, 15GB iPod stuffed full of music, and regularly rotate the content to bring fresh stuff on.
pHatidic says that BC is a "2nd rate catholic school," but I think (s)he is talking out of ignorance.
I transferred across town from Tufts to Boston College because the girls were better looking.
I did all my major-related coursework my first year or two in Slummerville, and then took "distribution" courses at B.C., plus some electives in my major. I got a comparable academic experience at each place, but there just are much prettier girls at B.C. -- and no one moans about not getting in to Hahvahd.
I married a B.C. girl, and I'm a very happy man.:7)
(One should capitalize "Catholic" when mentioning the religion, as the lower-case word "catholic" has another specific meaning. Anyway, Boston College is more accurately called a Jesuit school.)
Obligitory admission: I have a 3rd-gen. iPod, and it only leaves my belt when...geeze, pretty much never.
kitzilla wrote: > > If Duke thinks Mr. Undergrad is going to be listening to > Professor Flatulent's geology lecture while out jogging instead > of paging through their Audioslave tracks, they've got > another thing coming. >
Now, sprouts, when I was in college at dear ol' Tufts some years ago, I took two music classes, "Blues" and "Jazz." They were great, great fun, but the professor also expected that we'd go to the Music Libraty and listen to great stacks of crummy casetts tapes.
There were only a few copies of the sets of tapes, and a lecture hall full of kids who putatively would be fighting over them. Granted, none of us ever went, and we all missed the stuff the first time it was played as we snoozed through those warm afternoon lectures in the soft warm theater seats, but that's no reason for the professor not to have sufficient quantities of the music availble.
Had I been able to get MP3s of these tunes over the [non-existent in 1991] campus network, I would have been far more likely to listen to them than makgin a trip to the music library...and if I could have also grabbed iTunes playlists that were organized by lecture or semester, and played them on an iPod, I would've aced those classes. (Instead, I gracefully accepted a "C" for each of them, and they counted as pure electives when I transferred across town the following year.)
[And I think that the phrase is "you've got another think coming" and not "another thing": c.f. http://www.english-usage.com/faq.html#fxyouhav And yes, yes, I was an English major, thanks.]
Much of Sun's support has sucked since, oh, early March or April. I'm told they outsourced Silver-level calls then to...God knows where. India? Australia? Way out west of London? It's always different when I call.
While I know that an E10 will have been on a Gold or Platinum contract, I can't be the only person whose Silver support was so badly hosed that a near-by SSE was called in to pour a little oil on the water. (In my case, the guy stood up from the guts of someone's else's E15k to fix my crappy ol' 420R, the guts of which had been smashed by an earlier FE. And it still doesn't work right, five months and seven cases later. Grrr...)
I think there's still ripples from this going out.
clintp wrote: > > The skin grew back, and I've got a rather odd fingerprint there now. >
I took off a "plate" of flesh from the end of my left thumb while slicing potatoes two Thanksgivings ago. Not only do I now have a puckered blank in the center of my thumbprint, but some touch-sensitive controls (like my iPod's!) ignore the thumb.
On a more positive note, I am no longer asked to help prepare food when visiting my in-laws' house.
abulaifa wrote: > > There are lots of tools that provide this sort of > thing for a Unix box, both free and commercial. >
I agree, remote admin tools are pretty thick on the ground. However, using VNC as the connection is kinda neat. (Or has anyone done this before?)
Any idea how many or which ports/services you need to have open on a remote UNIX (i.e., Solaris) client to run, say a shell script this way?
sqlkitten wrote: > > How important your kids are to you is absolutely irrelevant here. >
No kids yet, eh?:7) > > They are not important to anyone else - yet you expect other > people to act as if they are. That's not reasonable. >
Actually, if you don't do your job you can "just" get fired -- but if the gov't. finds out you're neglecting your kids, they can get put into foster homes and you can go to jail.
So, you know, kids _are_ more important.
Since those CD-ROM drives in the fruit iMacs are, uh, ROM, maybe you could get some cheapie USB keys in 16 or 32 MB. The iMacs in question have USB ports on their side panel and on either end of the keyboard.
I always gound myself when I get out of the car to avoid explosions and to get that inevitable nasty static shock over with as soon as possible -- and I use something less sensitive than my fingers to do so.
When I get out of my car, I make sure that the back of my leg hits the metal door frame, since a shock to my calf (through my pants leg) is less painful. If I forget to do that, I use a bent knuckle to tap the door since it too is less sensitive than my fingers.
I often tap a knuckle on the door when I approach my car, since I've gotten xapped that way, too.
homer_ca averred: > > It's actually not that hard to find a T-mobile hotspot. > There's a Starbucks practically on every block. >
And so I used to think, until I started working in Providence, RI. The third Charbuck's in town just opened. I wonder if there aren't other cities that also lack those chains which are assumed by folks in The Big Cities to be ubiquitous.
We had an NBC show named after us, there was a great show trial a couple of years ago (the mayor, Buddy Cianci) which you may have heard about, and we have gondolas on the downtown waterfront [which I hear have been rehabed since those teenagers set 'em on fire last year] -- but only three franchise coffee shops (and eleventy-zillion donut places that sell coffee which smells better than it tastes).
There's a nifty art-freak hangout here called AS220 that offers free web browsing on a Linux box but for-pay wireless while you smoke & sip coffee & pose; there's a lame coffee place called Brewed Awakenings which makes good joe but charges an arm and a leg to use their wireless; and I doubt that the otherwise-outstanding White Electric Coffee offers wireless.
My point seems to be that franchises may not have penetrated every community, but local "free-lance" businesses that fill the same niche may offer the same connectivity...or they may not (c.f., White Electric).
AC pointed out that fears of bladder cancer due to saccharine have been discounted, but that it has been "'certified to cause cancer in the state of California'." I am relived [har!] to hear about the bladder thing, and since I don't have a California, I think I'll go back to drinking sugary soda pop.
I have a friend who used to put a saccharine tablet into each Diet Coke before he drank it. Yikes.
> > Of course, being a French asteroid, we can be sure that it would never hit us > on account of the enevitable asteroid strike. >
Haven't you ever been to Paris? If there's one thing the French _can_ do, it's strikes, right when they're most disruptive!
Wister285 suggested: > > They might also want to consider changing the server software. > OpenBiblio looks like a pretty nice system. >
They probably can't, as the software is frequently run by a whole consortium of libraries.
Here in Rhode Island, the group is called CLAN and they share the same centralized Dynix system for catalogs & requests. If my library in Cumberland got a Free Software Bee in their bonnet, they'd need to cut themselves out of that whole system, and deny any ILL requests, inbound and outbound. I just can't see that happening.
Now, I use the CLAN catalog weekly or daily by visiting the www.cumberlandlibrary.org web site and starting a search. It's *exactly* the same interface on an XP Pro system at work, on the crummy WIn 2000 (or whatever) beige boxes in the library proper, or my OS X iMac at home. And when a request comes in to the local branch, it dials my phone number and leaves me a message!
The nice older lady who runs the circulation desk grouses to me about it, oh, once or twice a year when it's down for maintenance -- and yet they can continue checking books in & out locally (they just can't check on requests pending at other librarues).
So you raise a good point, but many libraries aren't islands.
Slashdot Mirror
Putaro wrote: :7(
>
> Apple actually built a prototype Mac (System 7) tablet back in the mid-90's.
>
I remember a company that took a PowerBook (3400, mebbe? ISTR this being in about 1995 or 1996-ish), and diconnected the LCD+lid, removed the keyboard, and attached the (now touch-sensitive) display where the keys has been.
It was supposed to be for handicapped kids, IIRC, and they'd thrown a copy of Netscape on it. A web page using an imagemap laid over an picture of, for example, a house, would let them first learn about and then presumably control parts of the house.
(The prototype unit I saw, which cleverly retained its ADB & VGA ports for use as a "regular" laptop was i think for dog & pony shows put on for investors or some such.)
Neat-o, and I never heard of it again.
Shouldn't the editors make a new section for dupes? We could all filter them out that much easier!
>
> Bring back the eMate plastic clamshell casing, stick a G4 in it, and sell it for $350.
>
*teenybopper squeal* Oh please oh please oh please!!
(Whoops, gotta go get a dry chair from the conference room. Be right back...)
I worked at a high-profile architecture firm, one of the oldest continually-operating shops in the country, which people were fighting to get into. The architects as a group were smart and hard-working.
I removed the Zip drives & floppy drives so people couldn't walk out with the data files. Why? Because they represented so many hours of work: the specs were the output of skilled engineers, the drawings had taken many, many hours to produce, and the databases of correspondence could be mined for best practices by lazy competitors -- and there were certainly other things to be gleaned from our files.
Were we storm troopers for doing this? By no means: our archivist was happy to share our old stuff (going back 125+ years) but ongoing projects were just that, ongoing. And probably the real reason is that the software tools -- CAD programs, home-grown project management databases, etc. -- we had at work were very expensive and pretty mature: anyone in their field would *love* to have free use of them.
Even though our architects were very excited to work there, and had a policy of "no personal use" of the sysytems, I still had to fish out one of their own Zip disks from the empty drive bays every few days. You know, right behind where they'd peeled off or slit through where I'd "only" put clear packing tape and a sign reading "NO ZIP DRIVE, NO FLOPPY DRIVE." *snort*
charon69 wrote:
>
> As such, a DSL modem just modulates the data to correspond to
> frequencies higher than anything that you can say or hear and
> puts it on the same line as your voice traffic.
>
Higher frequencies, like only dogs and jazz musicians can hear, or like only Monster Cables can carry? Wow, science really *is* cool stuff.
>
> No. He read 0day warez as "Oday Juarez."
>
I am helpess in the grip of the obligatory WKRP In Cincinnati quote:
Johnny: Les, correct me if I'm wrong, but have you developed a recent fondness for alliteration?
Les: Well, I'm trying to find a style, Johnny. All good newsmen nowadays have to have a style in order to stand out from the crowd.
Johnny: But Les, you've always had a real style of your own. How many newsmen called Chi Chi Rodrigues "Chiy-Chiy Rodwagwayz"? And what is it you call those little Mexican dogs?
Les: "Cheehooahooas"?
Johnny: That's style, Les!
Maybe I'm out of step with many folks here, but I get the Sunday paper for the coupons.
Oh, I glance at the news pages, too -- but only because weekends are for the kids and so I miss my morning visits to news.google.com.
Did those guys show off for the photograher, or were they really that fearless? Construction worker bravado, or Depression-era nihilism? I mean, WTF does this guy do when his hat blows off?i nex/empire/hanging.html
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/h
ErichTheWebGuy pinted out the useful URL http://weather.gov/data/current_obs/seek.php
I checked it out, and was immediately outraged to notice an ethnic bias here: my adopted home, the smallest state in the Union, is listed in the pop-up menu as "Rhoda Island" (though maybe it's just creeping Nick-At-Nite-ism and not an ethnic slur).
Whatevah....
Get back to your keyboard, Stephenson: I've almost finished "System of the World" and I'll need another thousand-page rock of cross-genre crack in about 120 days from you!
This answer reminded me of the "Jesus vs. Spider Man" USENET post which I rediscovered saved on an old jaz disk last weekend, and which I am pleased to find is still online:
http://www.sadinoff.com/fun/quotes/xvy.txt (Or look for rec.arts.comics.xbooks on May 11, 1995 in Google groups.)
sqlrob asked, "But does the iPod come with any music?"
Well, my iMac from a couple of years ago came loaded with OS 10.1.something and lots of stuff in the "iTunes Sampler" folder within the OS 9 Applications folder -- but when I bought a new G4 powerBook this summer, nothing.
The user turnstyle wants to know where us theiving iPodder get our music. Here goes:
1. From P2P? None: I have a rich, full life, and can't spend all my scarce spare time downloading crummy rips of junk. Plus, I don't want some "black box" P2P client on my iMac: I take care of the little guy.
2. Digital tracks purchased online? One I bought from iTMS with a promotional code, and two or three iTMS freebies (all of which but one suck, and I think the one might suck, too).
3. Shareable sources? None.
4. Rips of my own CDs? All of it. Wait, all but...
5. Rips from other peoples' CDs? Well, I borrowed a 2-CD set of Gregorian chant from the library 'cause I have always wondered what they sound like. And I've been borrowing some Toots & the Maytals CDs lately looking for a particular version of "Pressure Drop" that I heard on the radio last month. But other than that, pretty much all my own stuff.
I have a third-generation, 15GB iPod stuffed full of music, and regularly rotate the content to bring fresh stuff on.
pHatidic says that BC is a "2nd rate catholic school," but I think (s)he is talking out of ignorance. :7)
I transferred across town from Tufts to Boston College because the girls were better looking.
I did all my major-related coursework my first year or two in Slummerville, and then took "distribution" courses at B.C., plus some electives in my major. I got a comparable academic experience at each place, but there just are much prettier girls at B.C. -- and no one moans about not getting in to Hahvahd.
I married a B.C. girl, and I'm a very happy man.
(One should capitalize "Catholic" when mentioning the religion, as the lower-case word "catholic" has another specific meaning. Anyway, Boston College is more accurately called a Jesuit school.)
Obligitory admission: I have a 3rd-gen. iPod, and it only leaves my belt when...geeze, pretty much never.
kitzilla wrote:
>
> If Duke thinks Mr. Undergrad is going to be listening to
> Professor Flatulent's geology lecture while out jogging instead
> of paging through their Audioslave tracks, they've got
> another thing coming.
>
Now, sprouts, when I was in college at dear ol' Tufts some years ago, I took two music classes, "Blues" and "Jazz." They were great, great fun, but the professor also expected that we'd go to the Music Libraty and listen to great stacks of crummy casetts tapes.
There were only a few copies of the sets of tapes, and a lecture hall full of kids who putatively would be fighting over them. Granted, none of us ever went, and we all missed the stuff the first time it was played as we snoozed through those warm afternoon lectures in the soft warm theater seats, but that's no reason for the professor not to have sufficient quantities of the music availble.
Had I been able to get MP3s of these tunes over the [non-existent in 1991] campus network, I would have been far more likely to listen to them than makgin a trip to the music library...and if I could have also grabbed iTunes playlists that were organized by lecture or semester, and played them on an iPod, I would've aced those classes. (Instead, I gracefully accepted a "C" for each of them, and they counted as pure electives when I transferred across town the following year.)
[And I think that the phrase is "you've got another think coming" and not "another thing": c.f. http://www.english-usage.com/faq.html#fxyouhav And yes, yes, I was an English major, thanks.]
Much of Sun's support has sucked since, oh, early March or April. I'm told they outsourced Silver-level calls then to...God knows where. India? Australia? Way out west of London? It's always different when I call.
While I know that an E10 will have been on a Gold or Platinum contract, I can't be the only person whose Silver support was so badly hosed that a near-by SSE was called in to pour a little oil on the water. (In my case, the guy stood up from the guts of someone's else's E15k to fix my crappy ol' 420R, the guts of which had been smashed by an earlier FE. And it still doesn't work right, five months and seven cases later. Grrr...)
I think there's still ripples from this going out.
clintp wrote:
>
> The skin grew back, and I've got a rather odd fingerprint there now.
>
I took off a "plate" of flesh from the end of my left thumb while slicing potatoes two Thanksgivings ago. Not only do I now have a puckered blank in the center of my thumbprint, but some touch-sensitive controls (like my iPod's!) ignore the thumb.
On a more positive note, I am no longer asked to help prepare food when visiting my in-laws' house.
abulaifa wrote:
>
> There are lots of tools that provide this sort of
> thing for a Unix box, both free and commercial.
>
I agree, remote admin tools are pretty thick on the ground. However, using VNC as the connection is kinda neat. (Or has anyone done this before?)
Any idea how many or which ports/services you need to have open on a remote UNIX (i.e., Solaris) client to run, say a shell script this way?
sqlkitten wrote: :7)
>
> How important your kids are to you is absolutely irrelevant here.
>
No kids yet, eh?
>
> They are not important to anyone else - yet you expect other
> people to act as if they are. That's not reasonable.
>
Actually, if you don't do your job you can "just" get fired -- but if the gov't. finds out you're neglecting your kids, they can get put into foster homes and you can go to jail.
So, you know, kids _are_ more important.
Since those CD-ROM drives in the fruit iMacs are, uh, ROM, maybe you could get some cheapie USB keys in 16 or 32 MB. The iMacs in question have USB ports on their side panel and on either end of the keyboard.
I always gound myself when I get out of the car to avoid explosions and to get that inevitable nasty static shock over with as soon as possible -- and I use something less sensitive than my fingers to do so.
When I get out of my car, I make sure that the back of my leg hits the metal door frame, since a shock to my calf (through my pants leg) is less painful. If I forget to do that, I use a bent knuckle to tap the door since it too is less sensitive than my fingers.
I often tap a knuckle on the door when I approach my car, since I've gotten xapped that way, too.
homer_ca averred:
>
> It's actually not that hard to find a T-mobile hotspot.
> There's a Starbucks practically on every block.
>
And so I used to think, until I started working in Providence, RI. The third Charbuck's in town just opened. I wonder if there aren't other cities that also lack those chains which are assumed by folks in The Big Cities to be ubiquitous.
We had an NBC show named after us, there was a great show trial a couple of years ago (the mayor, Buddy Cianci) which you may have heard about, and we have gondolas on the downtown waterfront [which I hear have been rehabed since those teenagers set 'em on fire last year] -- but only three franchise coffee shops (and eleventy-zillion donut places that sell coffee which smells better than it tastes).
There's a nifty art-freak hangout here called AS220 that offers free web browsing on a Linux box but for-pay wireless while you smoke & sip coffee & pose; there's a lame coffee place called Brewed Awakenings which makes good joe but charges an arm and a leg to use their wireless; and I doubt that the otherwise-outstanding White Electric Coffee offers wireless.
My point seems to be that franchises may not have penetrated every community, but local "free-lance" businesses that fill the same niche may offer the same connectivity...or they may not (c.f., White Electric).
AC pointed out that fears of bladder cancer due to saccharine have been discounted, but that it has been "'certified to cause cancer in the state of California'." I am relived [har!] to hear about the bladder thing, and since I don't have a California, I think I'll go back to drinking sugary soda pop.
I have a friend who used to put a saccharine tablet into each Diet Coke before he drank it. Yikes.
>
> Of course, being a French asteroid, we can be sure that it would never hit us
> on account of the enevitable asteroid strike.
>
Haven't you ever been to Paris? If there's one thing the French _can_ do, it's strikes, right when they're most disruptive!
Wister285 suggested:
>
> They might also want to consider changing the server software.
> OpenBiblio looks like a pretty nice system.
>
They probably can't, as the software is frequently run by a whole consortium of libraries.
Here in Rhode Island, the group is called CLAN and they share the same centralized Dynix system for catalogs & requests. If my library in Cumberland got a Free Software Bee in their bonnet, they'd need to cut themselves out of that whole system, and deny any ILL requests, inbound and outbound. I just can't see that happening.
Now, I use the CLAN catalog weekly or daily by visiting the www.cumberlandlibrary.org web site and starting a search. It's *exactly* the same interface on an XP Pro system at work, on the crummy WIn 2000 (or whatever) beige boxes in the library proper, or my OS X iMac at home. And when a request comes in to the local branch, it dials my phone number and leaves me a message!
The nice older lady who runs the circulation desk grouses to me about it, oh, once or twice a year when it's down for maintenance -- and yet they can continue checking books in & out locally (they just can't check on requests pending at other librarues).
So you raise a good point, but many libraries aren't islands.