One could also buy a Flash based MP3 player for little more than what a pure reader would cost. If you make sure that the reader acts as a detachable hard drive you get both a Flash reader and portable music. Some MP3 players are pretty small, too - my first one was merely 7/5/1.5 cm big.
The MP3 player-as-a-Flash-reader might have a downside, though: Some players have a standard mini-USB jack, which is fine and makes buying extra cables (if you don't want to constantly plug/unplug your main cable from your main PC) easy. OTOH, my current player has a strange nonstandard jack, which makes buying additional cables much harder.
Ahh, The Incredible Machine... That's a game you can learn with. Actually, my Production Informatics* professor is thinking about replacing some of the stuff he's currently teaching with TIM. Students will get tasks which they'll have to do using TIM, which is supposed to give them some insight into machine layout and production flow.
* I don't know if the translation is correct; it's about stuff like product development, CNC/PLC programming and Lego Mindstorms. Essentially the part of CS that controls real-world machines used to produce stuff. And we get to play with Lego.
It's because of the GPL. Article 305 states that whenever a GPL'd piece of software is released RMS will magically appear and remove all duplicate menu entries.
FreeDroid http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/
Actually there are two games: A clone of the classic game ParaDroid and FreeDroidRPG, which is kind of like a ParaDroid/Diablo mix.
Note: Don't download FreeDroidRPG 0.9.12, it's utterly obsolete. The CVS version works much better and version 0.9.13 is expected to come out soon.
As any cynic can tell you, certain First World countries are good examples for why good government can come from a well-informed population but doesn't necessarily have to.
Just because the children have access to information about the French Revolution/Voltaire/Guerilla warfare doesn't mean that within two decades a war-ridden country will become stable.
Of course it might help. It might also be turned into a rapid propaganda distribution mechanism. We won't find out if we don't try it and as I do think that it's always good to have (access to) knowledge I think that the $100 laptop and an Internet connection are things that will probably improve people's conditions in poor countries.
Of course, even well-informed starving people will follow everyone who promises them work and food, even if they'll have to subscribe to his weird ideology which mainly consists of "all are evil, kill them".
Hmm, with less than 3% males I'd think that our civilization as we know it might not last very long... Our civilization is dying, Slashdot confirms it?
Over here in Bremen, Germany, we are waiting for our old Sun boxen (SunBlade 100s) to be decommissioned and replaced with what's running in the next room: P4s running Fedora Core 2. Not Dells, though - as far as I can tell Dell isn't nearly as dominant in Germany as it is in the States; it's far more common to see people buy their crappy PCs from large store chains, mostly discount supermarkets. Dell does some TV advertising, though.
BTW, does Dell use custom-built or obscure hardware in their boxen? I know some people with supermarket PCs who don't use Linux because the accelerated NVidia driver doesn't support their Geforce 6610 XL card.
how to tell if visitor to your website is a man:
if(browser_type == "Firefox/1.0.2 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US;"){
visitor="man";
} else{
visitor="woman";
}
I have my Firefox set to de-DE, does that mean I'm female?
Cheap motherboards are criminally unstable, and many people who go to AMD do so to shave money off their system, leading them to buy substandard motherboards.
Cheap motherboards tend to be unstable, but they don't necessarily are. I'm using a first-version ECS K7S5A which I bought back when DDR RAM was something new and exciting (it even has two slots for SDRAM, one of the reasons why I bought it). The K7S5A was one of the cheapest mainboards around when I bought it and it has been running for 4+ years now. And while I've seen expensive mainboards horribly misbehave (e.g. producing errors with RAM that doesn't pass Memtest in the expensive box but does so without errors in my box) my cheap little mobo works just fine.
Cheap mainborads have a higher chance of being crap, but there are a few very reliable cheap mainboards around. If you don't need GigE and 8.1 channel AC'97 sound a cheap board with a good track record might be a better choice than an expensive one that doesn't work if you don't actively cool the Northbridge.
It has? Every time I have reinstalled Windows/installed it on top of a previously installed one I had a horrible mix of old and new stuff. If the Windows installer has such an option then I've never seen it in 40+ sessions with The World's Funniest Remaining Time Estimate.
OS X's installer makes it pretty hard to miss the option.
Another important license (at least as far as I'm concerned) is zlib, as that's about as close to public domain as you can get in Germany. German copyright law doesn't allow you to abandon your ownership of a work; if you have written it you have the copyright, period. (No, we don't have unlimited copyright; in Germany the copyright times out after 70 years, no matter how long the author lives.)
Occasionally I organize programming contests in a small forum. Of course all entries have to be delivered as publically-accessible sourcecode and most users would agree that by submitting them they implicitly put their code in the public domain. Since you can't do that over here I've started to put a link to opensource.org/licenses/zlib.php up with the rules, in case people want to legally release their code.
I wonder if she'll tear out your electricity meter because it "looks ugly". Seriously, a utility device like a router is pretty much the last thing where design matters - and if she doesn't like it you could hide the router in a closet or a room that isn't commonly used. We have our router in the same room as our gas/elec meters and the ISDN/DSL equipment. There's no need for the thing to be easily accessible and no one cares if it looks like ass.
Another way of getting rid of neighbors in your LAN would be encryption with a string of random characters as the password. AFAIK they shouldn't be able to connect without providing the right password - and I doubt that they'd areally try to bruteforce their way into your network.
We have a cheaper solution for that. Our router tends to have problems with the buffer; especially filesharing apps with large upload/connection limits tend to cause overflows, which cause the router to go down, which causes someone to walk to the other end of the house to power-cycle it.
It's a simple deterrent scheme: Either you run filesharing with low upload and connection limits or you have to power-cycle the damn router every two-or-so hours. It works even better when the only people who are (constantly) running filesharing apps are also the only ones who'd ever play online...
Well, BSODs are pretty much a thing of the past, at least unless you have a defective hardware.
Or flaky drivers. I still remember switching from Win2k to WinXP. Creative didn't have any XP drivers but they told everyone that the 2k ones were compatible. They were... mostly. Actually they caused my Windows to turn into a wild, exciting Bluescreen-o-rama every once in a while.
Once Creative released the first drivers that were actually made to be XP-compatible everything was fine again, but with the old driver XP felt less like an NT than like an improved version of 95c.
So Bill Gates will become a real world Iron Man. Great. I can already see Steve Ballmer as his sidekick, easily identified by his characteristic war cry: "JUSTICE JUSTICE JUSTICE JUSTICE...!"
HUMoR obviously has to be a compound of Hydrogen, Uranium, Molybdenum and a yet unknown element which has the R as it's symbol. It might be easier to use HUMoRh, althoughRhodium isn't a good substitute for "R".
Replacing our mysterious "R" element with Rhodium might result in a damaged sense of HUMoR (a "sense of HUMoRh"), the most common symptom of which is the tendency to moderate HUMoRous posts down using "Overrated".
Perhaps including more Rhodium in the jokes might make them appeal to people with a sense of HUMoRh.
In Germany we have a similar system called "GeldKarte" ("MoneyCard"). You go to your bank, insert the card (which actually is a chip on your normal bank card) into a charger, put money on it and then use your freshly charged GeldKarte to pay at any store that supports ist. Yes, at all three of them.
Okay, most supermarkets* here accept the GK, but I've never seen anyone actually use it.
* Note: Most German supermarkets are to American ones what a VW Beetle is to a Monster Truck.
1.) Make lots of 1$ coins
2.) Declare 1$ bills to lose their value N months from now
3.) See people rush to the stores to exchange old money for new one
4.) ???
5.) Insert ", ???, Prifot" joke
Worked quite well when Europe switched over to the Euro, except for 4.) and 5.) - we screwed up there.
Slashdot Mirror
One could also buy a Flash based MP3 player for little more than what a pure reader would cost. If you make sure that the reader acts as a detachable hard drive you get both a Flash reader and portable music. Some MP3 players are pretty small, too - my first one was merely 7/5/1.5 cm big.
The MP3 player-as-a-Flash-reader might have a downside, though: Some players have a standard mini-USB jack, which is fine and makes buying extra cables (if you don't want to constantly plug/unplug your main cable from your main PC) easy. OTOH, my current player has a strange nonstandard jack, which makes buying additional cables much harder.
Most notebooks have USB jacks, but ones with flash readers are pretty rare.
Ahh, The Incredible Machine... That's a game you can learn with. Actually, my Production Informatics* professor is thinking about replacing some of the stuff he's currently teaching with TIM. Students will get tasks which they'll have to do using TIM, which is supposed to give them some insight into machine layout and production flow.
* I don't know if the translation is correct; it's about stuff like product development, CNC/PLC programming and Lego Mindstorms. Essentially the part of CS that controls real-world machines used to produce stuff. And we get to play with Lego.
You don't want the little bastard to spend the next thirty years in your basement playing EverCrack, do you?
Or even worse, wasting the entire day on techie-related Internet discussion boards... wait a second.
It's because of the GPL. Article 305 states that whenever a GPL'd piece of software is released RMS will magically appear and remove all duplicate menu entries.
FreeDroid http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/
Actually there are two games: A clone of the classic game ParaDroid and FreeDroidRPG, which is kind of like a ParaDroid/Diablo mix.
Note: Don't download FreeDroidRPG 0.9.12, it's utterly obsolete. The CVS version works much better and version 0.9.13 is expected to come out soon.
I haven't read the docs for dosbox but how well does it handle sound? Does it map everything to directsound or something of that nature?
Under Linux it doesn't. Under Windows it should.
As any cynic can tell you, certain First World countries are good examples for why good government can come from a well-informed population but doesn't necessarily have to.
Just because the children have access to information about the French Revolution/Voltaire/Guerilla warfare doesn't mean that within two decades a war-ridden country will become stable.
Of course it might help. It might also be turned into a rapid propaganda distribution mechanism. We won't find out if we don't try it and as I do think that it's always good to have (access to) knowledge I think that the $100 laptop and an Internet connection are things that will probably improve people's conditions in poor countries.
Of course, even well-informed starving people will follow everyone who promises them work and food, even if they'll have to subscribe to his weird ideology which mainly consists of "all are evil, kill them".
Hmm, with less than 3% males I'd think that our civilization as we know it might not last very long... Our civilization is dying, Slashdot confirms it?
Over here in Bremen, Germany, we are waiting for our old Sun boxen (SunBlade 100s) to be decommissioned and replaced with what's running in the next room: P4s running Fedora Core 2. Not Dells, though - as far as I can tell Dell isn't nearly as dominant in Germany as it is in the States; it's far more common to see people buy their crappy PCs from large store chains, mostly discount supermarkets. Dell does some TV advertising, though.
BTW, does Dell use custom-built or obscure hardware in their boxen? I know some people with supermarket PCs who don't use Linux because the accelerated NVidia driver doesn't support their Geforce 6610 XL card.
how to tell if visitor to your website is a man: if(browser_type == "Firefox/1.0.2 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US;"){ visitor="man"; } else{ visitor="woman"; }
I have my Firefox set to de-DE, does that mean I'm female?
I wonder if they'll give away free evil bundled with the OS. :)
;)
They do, it's called Internet Explorer.
Cheap motherboards are criminally unstable, and many people who go to AMD do so to shave money off their system, leading them to buy substandard motherboards.
Cheap motherboards tend to be unstable, but they don't necessarily are. I'm using a first-version ECS K7S5A which I bought back when DDR RAM was something new and exciting (it even has two slots for SDRAM, one of the reasons why I bought it). The K7S5A was one of the cheapest mainboards around when I bought it and it has been running for 4+ years now. And while I've seen expensive mainboards horribly misbehave (e.g. producing errors with RAM that doesn't pass Memtest in the expensive box but does so without errors in my box) my cheap little mobo works just fine.
Cheap mainborads have a higher chance of being crap, but there are a few very reliable cheap mainboards around. If you don't need GigE and 8.1 channel AC'97 sound a cheap board with a good track record might be a better choice than an expensive one that doesn't work if you don't actively cool the Northbridge.
It has? Every time I have reinstalled Windows/installed it on top of a previously installed one I had a horrible mix of old and new stuff. If the Windows installer has such an option then I've never seen it in 40+ sessions with The World's Funniest Remaining Time Estimate.
OS X's installer makes it pretty hard to miss the option.
Another important license (at least as far as I'm concerned) is zlib, as that's about as close to public domain as you can get in Germany. German copyright law doesn't allow you to abandon your ownership of a work; if you have written it you have the copyright, period. (No, we don't have unlimited copyright; in Germany the copyright times out after 70 years, no matter how long the author lives.)
Occasionally I organize programming contests in a small forum. Of course all entries have to be delivered as publically-accessible sourcecode and most users would agree that by submitting them they implicitly put their code in the public domain. Since you can't do that over here I've started to put a link to opensource.org/licenses/zlib.php up with the rules, in case people want to legally release their code.
They just don't make top secret data the way they used to...
I wonder if she'll tear out your electricity meter because it "looks ugly". Seriously, a utility device like a router is pretty much the last thing where design matters - and if she doesn't like it you could hide the router in a closet or a room that isn't commonly used. We have our router in the same room as our gas/elec meters and the ISDN/DSL equipment. There's no need for the thing to be easily accessible and no one cares if it looks like ass.
Another way of getting rid of neighbors in your LAN would be encryption with a string of random characters as the password. AFAIK they shouldn't be able to connect without providing the right password - and I doubt that they'd areally try to bruteforce their way into your network.
We have a cheaper solution for that. Our router tends to have problems with the buffer; especially filesharing apps with large upload/connection limits tend to cause overflows, which cause the router to go down, which causes someone to walk to the other end of the house to power-cycle it.
It's a simple deterrent scheme: Either you run filesharing with low upload and connection limits or you have to power-cycle the damn router every two-or-so hours. It works even better when the only people who are (constantly) running filesharing apps are also the only ones who'd ever play online...
Well, BSODs are pretty much a thing of the past, at least unless you have a defective hardware.
Or flaky drivers. I still remember switching from Win2k to WinXP. Creative didn't have any XP drivers but they told everyone that the 2k ones were compatible. They were... mostly. Actually they caused my Windows to turn into a wild, exciting Bluescreen-o-rama every once in a while.
Once Creative released the first drivers that were actually made to be XP-compatible everything was fine again, but with the old driver XP felt less like an NT than like an improved version of 95c.
"killall() and let god sort them out"
;)
That has to be the geekiest war cry I've ever seen. Someone should tell ThinkGeek to put it on a tee.
So Bill Gates will become a real world Iron Man. Great. I can already see Steve Ballmer as his sidekick, easily identified by his characteristic war cry: "JUSTICE JUSTICE JUSTICE JUSTICE...!"
HUMoR obviously has to be a compound of Hydrogen, Uranium, Molybdenum and a yet unknown element which has the R as it's symbol. It might be easier to use HUMoRh, althoughRhodium isn't a good substitute for "R".
Replacing our mysterious "R" element with Rhodium might result in a damaged sense of HUMoR (a "sense of HUMoRh"), the most common symptom of which is the tendency to moderate HUMoRous posts down using "Overrated".
Perhaps including more Rhodium in the jokes might make them appeal to people with a sense of HUMoRh.
In Germany we have a similar system called "GeldKarte" ("MoneyCard"). You go to your bank, insert the card (which actually is a chip on your normal bank card) into a charger, put money on it and then use your freshly charged GeldKarte to pay at any store that supports ist. Yes, at all three of them.
Okay, most supermarkets* here accept the GK, but I've never seen anyone actually use it.
* Note: Most German supermarkets are to American ones what a VW Beetle is to a Monster Truck.
6.) Use preview button to correct obvious spelling mistakes
1.) Make lots of 1$ coins
2.) Declare 1$ bills to lose their value N months from now
3.) See people rush to the stores to exchange old money for new one
4.) ???
5.) Insert ", ???, Prifot" joke
Worked quite well when Europe switched over to the Euro, except for 4.) and 5.) - we screwed up there.