I have consistently found that most people are clueless when it comes to buying a computer. Because of this, I think one of the classes you should teach is "Fundamentals of buying a computer". You should go over the basics, like what to look for in a computer, what brands to avoid, what brands to look for, the laptop/desktop option, the PC/Mac option, the building-from-parts option, etc. etc... The more you teach this class, the more feedback you will get from students about their purchasing experiences -- this will be great for you and your students.
When I bought a digital camera a couple years back that took AA batteries, I decided to go the rechargeable route... I purchased an Energizer battery charger, four Energizer rechargeables and four Ray-o-vac rechargeables...
The first thing I've learned is that the capacity of different brands of batteries can vary a lot -- the Energizer AA rechargeables are only 1200mAh (milliamp-hours), while the Ray-o-vacs are something like 1350mAh. A quick Google search shows rechargeable AA batteries can have capacities of 2000mAh nowadays. This can make a huge difference when you have a device that is power hungry.
The second thing I noticed is that the recharger I bought recharges only using a 15 hour (yes, hour) timer... So, if you plug in the battery charger, it will charge and charge for 15 hours -- I am absolutely sure there is something that charges faster than this. Anyway, the obvious lesson here is to find out how long the recharger takes to recharge before buying it... Learn from my mistakes, and you'll be set!:^)
You know, I've been wondering how a post could get a score of 3 without having a qualifier attached to it -- be it "funny", "insightful", or "interesting". I finally had the chance to find out with the parent posting, as someone moderated it as "Underrated"... Apparently this doesn't show up as a qualifier next to the score.
I was about to post a comment just like yours, as I'm wearing a pair of the EX71s right now.:^) They are great for motorcycling by the way (no, I'm not motorcycling this instant, but I do have the headphones in at work)... Anyway, when pulling a helmet over other earbud headphones, they fall right out. The EX71 earbuds stay put, and they sound great while riding. I can still hear horns and other loud noises outside the helmet, so I'm not sure if it would be considered illegal or not.
I think the assumption that these are contrictory is incorrect. OS was started by people scratching their itch. Scratching these itches and contributing the results benefits the community. Period.
I guess then I'm curious if Apple likes more to scratch their own itches, or scratch the backs of others in the community.:^) I'm primarily curious of asking the man who found the APSL at fault, even though he seems to like Apple as a company.
Indeed -- I don't question that the Konqueror and KJS contributions are two-way benefits. I guess I'm more curious about their open source contributions that seem somewhat self-serving. Namely, compiler optimizations for the CPUs they use, the Objective C compiler, Darwin kernel source, etc. etc...
Visiting Apple's Open Source pages, a number of projects seem to benefit everyone (X11 patches, Rendezvous, etc.), while others are what I would consider self-serving (Quicktime Streaming Server, WebCore, etc.), primarily because they only run on Mac OS X (as far as I know). I'm just curious what Bruce thinks about how helpful these contributions have been to the open source community.
Cool! I know that Apple has been contributing to GCC, but I always thought it had to do with compiler optimizations for the CPUs they used, as well as support for Objective C. While this can be useful for others, it seems to fit more under the "Apple benefits" category rather than "everyone benefits", considering how they are the largest consumer of these contributed technologies.
The precompiled headers contribution sounds like it would be quite the opposite -- that everyone would benefit from such a feature. I'm glad to hear that they are contributing these sorts of features!
OK, now for the update... For anyone who is curious, using a stock 2.6.0 when trying to boot a USB device doesn't work (at least on my system). Here is a document that explains the reasons why -- there isn't enough delay before INIT starts to load. The solution is to add a patch to the kernel that continually retries loading, at one second intervals.
With regard to Apple and their adoption of open source, do you think that their contributions to open source projects have been generally one-way (i.e. only Apple benefits) or two-way (everyone benefits)? Do you think they should be more open, or are you happy with how they currently contribute to open source projects?
A while back there was a story on Slashdot about a $1M prize to the first group who could design a robot to autonomously travel from LA to Las Vegas... From the sounds of it, this might be a good candidate for the challenge!
I've been hoping that 2.6 allows me to boot off from my external USB/Firewire hard drive. The 2.4 series kernels (at least on my PC) won't recognize the drive until after INIT loads, which means that I can't have the root filesystem on the USB drive. I've heard that 2.5/2.6 fixes this, so right now I am in the middle of compiling the kernel for testing this out. If anyone else is curious about if this works or not, please reply to this post, and I'll reply back when I am finished testing things out. My end hope is to have a bootable CD that I can bring along with the enclosure, which would kickstart the Linux installation on the drive.
One more interesting thing to note about 2.6 -- when configuring the kernel, it doesn't disable ACPI power management when you disable the master power management setting. The first go-around with the kernel resulted in tons of ACPI error messages on boot-up.
Check out the announcement for Hardster... Just one week ago this was considered humor, now it is being proposed as a real idea. Coincidence? I think not.:^)
The last I heard, Disney owned Miramax -- does that mean that titles like Clerks and Pulp Fiction will be released? Don't get me wrong -- I like both movies, but I'm not sure that Disney would want people to associate them with movies that use the word "fuck" more than the word "the"...:^)
Can't we, in a manner similar to those films where people break into an animal testing facility and let out all the monkeys, go to the SCO building(s) and similarly release the monkeys from there?
Slashdot Mirror
I have consistently found that most people are clueless when it comes to buying a computer. Because of this, I think one of the classes you should teach is "Fundamentals of buying a computer". You should go over the basics, like what to look for in a computer, what brands to avoid, what brands to look for, the laptop/desktop option, the PC/Mac option, the building-from-parts option, etc. etc... The more you teach this class, the more feedback you will get from students about their purchasing experiences -- this will be great for you and your students.
I always wondered why the Borg wanted to be escorted to sector 001 -- was it because they feared getting lost?
With all those links in the story, there has to be a goatse link in there somewhere... :^)
When I bought a digital camera a couple years back that took AA batteries, I decided to go the rechargeable route... I purchased an Energizer battery charger, four Energizer rechargeables and four Ray-o-vac rechargeables...
:^)
The first thing I've learned is that the capacity of different brands of batteries can vary a lot -- the Energizer AA rechargeables are only 1200mAh (milliamp-hours), while the Ray-o-vacs are something like 1350mAh. A quick Google search shows rechargeable AA batteries can have capacities of 2000mAh nowadays. This can make a huge difference when you have a device that is power hungry.
The second thing I noticed is that the recharger I bought recharges only using a 15 hour (yes, hour) timer... So, if you plug in the battery charger, it will charge and charge for 15 hours -- I am absolutely sure there is something that charges faster than this. Anyway, the obvious lesson here is to find out how long the recharger takes to recharge before buying it... Learn from my mistakes, and you'll be set!
You know, I've been wondering how a post could get a score of 3 without having a qualifier attached to it -- be it "funny", "insightful", or "interesting". I finally had the chance to find out with the parent posting, as someone moderated it as "Underrated"... Apparently this doesn't show up as a qualifier next to the score.
[Insert witty Vanilla Sky quotes here...]
I was about to post a comment just like yours, as I'm wearing a pair of the EX71s right now. :^) They are great for motorcycling by the way (no, I'm not motorcycling this instant, but I do have the headphones in at work)... Anyway, when pulling a helmet over other earbud headphones, they fall right out. The EX71 earbuds stay put, and they sound great while riding. I can still hear horns and other loud noises outside the helmet, so I'm not sure if it would be considered illegal or not.
Indeed -- I don't question that the Konqueror and KJS contributions are two-way benefits. I guess I'm more curious about their open source contributions that seem somewhat self-serving. Namely, compiler optimizations for the CPUs they use, the Objective C compiler, Darwin kernel source, etc. etc...
Visiting Apple's Open Source pages, a number of projects seem to benefit everyone (X11 patches, Rendezvous, etc.), while others are what I would consider self-serving (Quicktime Streaming Server, WebCore, etc.), primarily because they only run on Mac OS X (as far as I know). I'm just curious what Bruce thinks about how helpful these contributions have been to the open source community.
Cool! I know that Apple has been contributing to GCC, but I always thought it had to do with compiler optimizations for the CPUs they used, as well as support for Objective C. While this can be useful for others, it seems to fit more under the "Apple benefits" category rather than "everyone benefits", considering how they are the largest consumer of these contributed technologies.
The precompiled headers contribution sounds like it would be quite the opposite -- that everyone would benefit from such a feature. I'm glad to hear that they are contributing these sorts of features!
OK, now for the update... For anyone who is curious, using a stock 2.6.0 when trying to boot a USB device doesn't work (at least on my system). Here is a document that explains the reasons why -- there isn't enough delay before INIT starts to load. The solution is to add a patch to the kernel that continually retries loading, at one second intervals.
For us nostalgia buffs, it might be nice to post the URL to the old interview when you post the new interview answers.
I almost wrote the same exact words "OS X: Friend or foe?" as my comment, but decided against it... I think I like your questions better though.
With regard to Apple and their adoption of open source, do you think that their contributions to open source projects have been generally one-way (i.e. only Apple benefits) or two-way (everyone benefits)? Do you think they should be more open, or are you happy with how they currently contribute to open source projects?
It makes you a polyglot! :^)
Your link doesn't appear to work -- could you please resubmit it?
A while back there was a story on Slashdot about a $1M prize to the first group who could design a robot to autonomously travel from LA to Las Vegas... From the sounds of it, this might be a good candidate for the challenge!
I've been hoping that 2.6 allows me to boot off from my external USB/Firewire hard drive. The 2.4 series kernels (at least on my PC) won't recognize the drive until after INIT loads, which means that I can't have the root filesystem on the USB drive. I've heard that 2.5/2.6 fixes this, so right now I am in the middle of compiling the kernel for testing this out. If anyone else is curious about if this works or not, please reply to this post, and I'll reply back when I am finished testing things out. My end hope is to have a bootable CD that I can bring along with the enclosure, which would kickstart the Linux installation on the drive.
One more interesting thing to note about 2.6 -- when configuring the kernel, it doesn't disable ACPI power management when you disable the master power management setting. The first go-around with the kernel resulted in tons of ACPI error messages on boot-up.
Check out the announcement for Hardster... Just one week ago this was considered humor, now it is being proposed as a real idea. Coincidence? I think not. :^)
The last I heard, Disney owned Miramax -- does that mean that titles like Clerks and Pulp Fiction will be released? Don't get me wrong -- I like both movies, but I'm not sure that Disney would want people to associate them with movies that use the word "fuck" more than the word "the"... :^)
I wonder if they will have the 1959 animated short Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land?
Can't we, in a manner similar to those films where people break into an animal testing facility and let out all the monkeys, go to the SCO building(s) and similarly release the monkeys from there?