Well, what if you want a temporary, portable dwelling? Looking at the picture it seems something like this would work really well for something like Burning Man, if only they could get the price down to a couple hundred dollars.
Or, for a more practical example, the Peace Corps. Good for people working there, or maybe they could build these things for people who live in REAL cardboard boxes. Given the construction materials, it seems like they would be really easy to mass produce, which would lower the cost enormously. Plus you could make the components out of recycled materials, and when they wear out, recycle them again.
I'm pretty sure if we had massive solar panels all over the place, that'd effect the temperature by taking sunlight that would have heated the ground and diverting it.
That would be a good thing actually, as long as we put them in the cities. All the concrete, tar, and asphalt on roads and buildings captures a tremendous amount of heat. Putting solar panels up might counteract some of the climate changes that huge heat-producing cities have made.
I don't know how strong Duke's music program is, but I just finished an undergraduate music program and an iPod would have been extremely useful. They had iTunes in the library, but being able to have all the required listening at my fingertips would have been great. Some kids brought laptops with CD burners and just copied from the university library. Copyright is pretty much a hindrance in an educational setting anyway. So many teachers just photocopied stuff from the books and handed it out.
Also, iPods are really just portable hard drives, so non-audio content could be stored too, but it wouldn't be as accessible. I think that's really where Apple is trying to go eventually: a personal wireless portable storage device, but they can't get it slick and easy enough to be feasable yet.
One of the things that I love about free software is that there are hardly any ads. On Windows and Mac, it seems like every program tries to sell itself, or its parent company, to you. Some apps are even crippled and keep bugging you to buy an upgrade or whatever.
On my computer, things are very functional. There are no app splash screens, and programs have descriptive titles like "Music Player" or "Web Browser". They don't push themselves in your face, they just seem to say "Oh, you want to do this? Here ya go." It makes the computer much more pleasant to use.
Well, if you were using Mozilla you could grab mozex. You can make it open up a terminal window with vim when you edit a textbox. When you save it gets plopped back in the textbox. It's not exactly seamless, but it sure makes webmail and stuff a lot nicer to use.
Indeed, this is the whole point of wiki. "Wikiwiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian, so wiki markup is a quick, easy way to mark up your text. Wikipedia's MediaWiki software has a very powerful wiki syntax that has tables, lists, headings, images, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
A while back, a user who had acess to a bunch of U.S. census data decided to upload it to Wikipedia. This is cool, since there is now a Wikipedia article for every town in the U.S.! There are a LOT of those articles, though, so the Random Page function tends to land on them pretty often.
Opening a random Wikipedia page on startup is still a cool idea. What you might do is write a little PHP script that checks if the title of the article has a comma in it. Most normal articles don't, and most of the city articles have names like "Kneebone, Alabama" so if the page title has a comma you could just have it request another random page.
I have been learning Lilypond lately to typeset a complex piano score (Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody#2). One of the things that struck me is that is that writing Lilypond code is a lot like writing XHTML, except the syntax is different. The syntax lets you group your score into smaller chunks pretty much any way you like. Lilypond uses Scheme (via GUILE) similar you would use CSS to define and alter the default layout. Since Scheme is a programming language, you can also use it to generate content like you would with JavaScript, PHP, etc.
It seems that
Chris Cannam, the interviewer in the article, is one of the principal authors of Rosegarden,
a free sequencer and music notation editor that runs on Linux. It can output to both Lilypond and MusicXML, among other formats.
Seriously. This movie was horrible, and long. Near the end of the film, one of the characters said "I'm sorry" and someone in the theater shouted back, "Not as sorry as this movie!"
With a bit of polish, Mozilla composer could be a good word processor. It generates XML (xhtml), and it's available for a bunch of platforms. Plus it comes with a web browser and an email client. That's most of an office suite right there. Most non-technical users don't use spreadsheets, databases, or presentation programs anyway. They want word processing, web, email.
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Well, what if you want a temporary, portable dwelling? Looking at the picture it seems something like this would work really well for something like Burning Man, if only they could get the price down to a couple hundred dollars.
Or, for a more practical example, the Peace Corps. Good for people working there, or maybe they could build these things for people who live in REAL cardboard boxes. Given the construction materials, it seems like they would be really easy to mass produce, which would lower the cost enormously. Plus you could make the components out of recycled materials, and when they wear out, recycle them again.
That would be a good thing actually, as long as we put them in the cities. All the concrete, tar, and asphalt on roads and buildings captures a tremendous amount of heat. Putting solar panels up might counteract some of the climate changes that huge heat-producing cities have made.
I don't know how strong Duke's music program is, but I just finished an undergraduate music program and an iPod would have been extremely useful. They had iTunes in the library, but being able to have all the required listening at my fingertips would have been great. Some kids brought laptops with CD burners and just copied from the university library. Copyright is pretty much a hindrance in an educational setting anyway. So many teachers just photocopied stuff from the books and handed it out.
Also, iPods are really just portable hard drives, so non-audio content could be stored too, but it wouldn't be as accessible. I think that's really where Apple is trying to go eventually: a personal wireless portable storage device, but they can't get it slick and easy enough to be feasable yet.
One of the things that I love about free software is that there are hardly any ads. On Windows and Mac, it seems like every program tries to sell itself, or its parent company, to you. Some apps are even crippled and keep bugging you to buy an upgrade or whatever.
On my computer, things are very functional. There are no app splash screens, and programs have descriptive titles like "Music Player" or "Web Browser". They don't push themselves in your face, they just seem to say "Oh, you want to do this? Here ya go." It makes the computer much more pleasant to use.
Well, if you were using Mozilla you could grab mozex. You can make it open up a terminal window with vim when you edit a textbox. When you save it gets plopped back in the textbox. It's not exactly seamless, but it sure makes webmail and stuff a lot nicer to use.
FYI, here is the list of speakers, with a short description of each person.
Indeed, this is the whole point of wiki. "Wikiwiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian, so wiki markup is a quick, easy way to mark up your text. Wikipedia's MediaWiki software has a very powerful wiki syntax that has tables, lists, headings, images, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
A while back, a user who had acess to a bunch of U.S. census data decided to upload it to Wikipedia. This is cool, since there is now a Wikipedia article for every town in the U.S.! There are a LOT of those articles, though, so the Random Page function tends to land on them pretty often.
Opening a random Wikipedia page on startup is still a cool idea. What you might do is write a little PHP script that checks if the title of the article has a comma in it. Most normal articles don't, and most of the city articles have names like "Kneebone, Alabama" so if the page title has a comma you could just have it request another random page.
I have been learning Lilypond lately to typeset a complex piano score (Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody#2). One of the things that struck me is that is that writing Lilypond code is a lot like writing XHTML, except the syntax is different. The syntax lets you group your score into smaller chunks pretty much any way you like. Lilypond uses Scheme (via GUILE) similar you would use CSS to define and alter the default layout. Since Scheme is a programming language, you can also use it to generate content like you would with JavaScript, PHP, etc. It seems that
Chris Cannam, the interviewer in the article, is one of the principal authors of Rosegarden, a free sequencer and music notation editor that runs on Linux. It can output to both Lilypond and MusicXML, among other formats.
Seriously. This movie was horrible, and long. Near the end of the film, one of the characters said "I'm sorry" and someone in the theater shouted back, "Not as sorry as this movie!"
I haven't used it but it seems like Nagios is what you want. It's GPL and is supposedly very powerful.
With a bit of polish, Mozilla composer could be a good word processor. It generates XML (xhtml), and it's available for a bunch of platforms. Plus it comes with a web browser and an email client. That's most of an office suite right there. Most non-technical users don't use spreadsheets, databases, or presentation programs anyway. They want word processing, web, email.