This is the easiest way I know to type accented characters on a US keyboard. The version of emacs that gets installed by default on recent Ubuntu versions does not have support for this, but I found that switching to a minor revision older (through synaptic) brings it back.
Pick up a copy of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. This book can change a great many things. It is a psychology text, and very well referenced. You can get a used copy for less than $5 U.S.
Basically, one of the current theories in psych is that humans have different types of intelligence, and they are sufficiently independant that an individual may have any combination of abilities in the categories. Emotional intelligence is what provides empathy, social skills, self control, motivation, discipline, and other useful traits.
The book covers anatomy, social psych, methods to apply this knowledge, studies showing the results of those applications, and more.
In short, I recommend this book to everyone I know sooner or later.
Actually, you should check out Bound if you want to see another Wachowski flick. Excellent movie, and no CGI. You can see how they try to push film into doing "anime style" stuff before they had big budgets. I think they pulled it off very nicely.
When I was in high school, I wrote an article for the school newspaper about this topic. I attended a magnet school for science and math and got interested in how we compared to everybody else. Most of my research came from government studies which showed math skills lacking in the US at comparable ages and such, so that was the tone I took: US schools suck and everybody else is better.
Then I got an interesting reply to my article, which we printed in the next issue. A former math teacher at my school moved to Japan to teach English (Japan had been one of my highest praised systems). He told me that the cultures are completely different. Students in that country are expected to memorize incredible amounts of knowledge, including arithmetic and languages, but, as he put it, "they aren't taught how to think." What he meant by this is that creative problem solving skills are not stressed. The focus tends to be "memorize all you can to pass the next set of entrance exams and that's it".
Later, during my junior year at Rice University, I had a Japanese roommate and got to talk about these issues. He *loved* school in America, and the difference in culture was part of it. He did not advance in his studies as much as he would have in Japan because of language barriers (I explained his Discrete Mathematics notes to him after every lecture because the prof spoke too quickly for him).
Of course, all of this is the "typical" case, and as always, there are exceptions to the rules. But is is interesting to point out the number of American inventions vs. foreign inventions. RCA invented LCDs and decided they weren't useful, then Japanese investors bought the technology and ran with it. Lasers were invented here and we started making bombs with them, Sony went and made CDs. Plastics research was DOW, internal combustion was engineered into assembly lines at Ford, the whole field of nanotech research was started with the discovery of the Carbon-60 atom (BuckyBall) at Rice, transistors, integrated circuits, a lot of core technology in the past and for the future has been American.
Yes, the US has many underfunded schools in urban areas, large numbers of people drop out and cannot function at the "basic" levels in reading or arithmetic. Other countries may have lower percentages in those categories, but it's obvious that at some point, the US system corrects itself to get a university system which bekons students from all over the world. American schools are the standard.
Automatics aren't always worse. I saw an episode of Car and Driver which put the "special projects" teams of GM vs. Ford. They built whatever badass racecar they could squeeze into a camaro and mustang body, and then raced them. The mustang had an automatic transmission. They decided to gun for the 0-60 points and less on the handling round-the-track points. Engaging that clutch manually kills you every time. Even F1 doesn't use standard transmission anymore, just the paddles. Driver retains full control, but he lets the machine do what it does best. Kinda like linux, no?
Disclaimer: I haven't tested out the software yet.
I've recently had some discussions about the direction this stuff is going. There are different opinions on whether all the ideas are good or bad, but they all share at least one thing: They add many layers of complexity to greatly improve the *functionality* in the interface. That's really the only way apps can talk to each other the way it's promised.
I can't help but wonder, though, how is this going to run on my 133 MHz pentium? Mozilla milestones are awfully slow on my machine, and I've got a fast hard drive, lots of ram, and a T1 to the internet. Just upgrade you say. That's fine, I am getting a new machine soon anyway, but what will happen with Crusoe-based laptops or anything else which trades performance for battery-life? Will those technologies be prevented from using the new applications? Will the advancements promised in Gnome 2.0/Eazel/Nautilus and forward be confined to 1GHz Athlons or other devices conforming to Moore's Law, or can they be made to work on lower power and smaller machines?
QoS schemes always include paying for higher quality service. In general, QoS schemes assume that Network-To-Network Interfaces (NNI's) will respect the priority of packets, and simply expect financial compensation for that privilege. You're upstream provider will have to pay more for routing higher quality traffic out to the internet, and he'll pass that bill on to you. So in the end, you are the one regulating priority.
I haven't looked at the IPv6 specs in a while, and when I did last I wasn't really paying attention to that specific point, but every method I studied back in my networks class assumed priority was respected in exchange for cash.
I get motion sicknes from Quake style games, but I've noticed that I can play flight sims (remember Terminal Velocity?) and racing games for hours with no problems. Descent was kinda in between for me: it would make me sick after 30-60 minutes, but Quake is 20 seconds.
The other thing I noticed is that playing/controlling the action has a lot to do with it. The same kind of thing is seen in automobiles. The driver never gets sick. Passengers are the only ones that suffer. I can play some games, but can't watch.
When I first saw the N64, I would watch people play Mario World and it would make me dizzy after 15 minutes. However, I watched people play Zelda: Ocarina of Time for weeks with no problems. People would come to my room in college after dinner, after lunch, middle of the night to play. It was a collective effort, and we all had a great time, and I never got sick.
What would legally prevent some wealthy designer from manufacturing a set-top DVD player using the information now available on the net? He or she could get around all the annoying constraints in the license agreement with DVD Consortium and thus could include a FireWire port, lose the region-coding support, allow Macrovision to be turned off, etc. This would not be a copier, and its primary purpose is very clearly to play DVD's, so what could the DMCA say about it?
What could the MPAA do about it? I don't own any DVD's, but with a player like this I'd get some. They can't tell me what player I can play my DVD's in since consumers don't license DVD disks, they own them.
A player like this could advertise itself as DVD compatible if "DVD" is trademarked (probably is) and I know that word of mouth would mark it for what it is even if it couldn't use the words "DVD".
Heck, I'd buy two of them if they were here today.
You have a great idea. Something like this should not be hard to get working on the software side. Ideas like this exist already in hardware.
I've set up VOIP solution for a customer using Clarent technology. Very effective boxes. We have one in each of their offices and a carrier-class (i.e., much bigger) unit at the telco switch. The boxes plug in to the keysystem at the customer site and all they have to do is dial a 7 to get an "internal" line (dial a "9" to get a local Bell line). The user dials a number and these boxes use their routing tables to decide which box they need to call. A user at location A wants to make a call in city B, and they have an office there, so all he has to do is dial a 7, area code, and the Clarent boxes place this call through the unit in city B. If the area code doesn't have a box in it, then it default-routes to the big box at the telco switch, onto the national Long Distance backbone, and they get discounted LD because they don't have to go through any Bell.
Now, Clarent has *expensive* boxes so that won't work well on small scales. Also, the routing information is stored in a central database which all the satellite units talk to. That brings up the single point-of-failure problem.
IANAL, but it seems like the legal issues are moot. Each node would be paying for local phone service, and paying for internet service. Do what you want with it. The only problem I see is countries which have government monopolies on phone networks. They often have anti-competitive laws in place but this would be an example of tech getting the jump on laws. I doubt any country actually has legislation outlawing anonymous VOIP distributed networks.
The hardware is the only thing left. Most real modems don't interface with sound cards in hardware, nor do they have a "clear channel" mode to let me stuff whatever audio I want on the line. At least, I've never seen one. Some of the weirder winmodems do use the sound card for the tone generator. Those are mostly on all-in-one integrated mobo's, and my intuition tells me they aren't *nix friendly. The hardware would also have to deal with international CO lines which have different tones and electrical characteristics. If anyone out there has an idea for the hardware problem, I'd be interested in working on or starting a GNU project for this. I'd love free international calls.
I agree that Excel is made more useful because of its macro-recording ability, but I always ended up using the recorder because I didn't know which object I needed to reference. I often limited myself to a small subset of the whole language (Activesheet, Cells, Range, etc.) anyway.
On the other hand, I found Matlab to be an *excellent* prototyping system. All the mathematical functions you could want, powerful graphing abilities, GUI wigets, and you can define your own functions and scripts, too. But because it's not integrated with the operating system, it just always feels safer. And lets be honest, Matlab crashing never took down any Sparcs when I used it. I've managed to kill a PC or two with Excel/VB.
I have seen a solution to this at WorldPilot. I've played around with this at work some. It does many Exchange-ish things including shared address books and shared folders, calendar, etc. It's web based, and open-sourced. It does have some finiky configuration required (we've only managed to get 85% of the features working in the afternoon we played with it), but it looks very promising.
Look at something that was posted here before. Surey not what you're looking for, but still really neat (they have good ideas).
Some of the other comments here mention building from scratch. That should provide the best results *if* you are a good carpenter. It takes a lot of skill to get something exactly right. And most people don't think of the subtle details which are the difference between a crappy desk and good ergo. A 3 degree decline here, 2 inches shorter there and you've got a completely different feel.
I'd expect to end up using the build-up for 2 weeks and then come up with 10 ideas to improve it, rework it, and repeat.
I tried something else back when I was in school that might be related to this. We had big Solaris servers which we could connect to using X-Servers for Windows (Micro X-Win 32 from StarNet, or Exceed, etc.) We'd get the login and all our apps would be piped to the client X-Server (including the window manager if desired).
I could never get my linux box to to the same thing. X would start on my box instead of just pipeing the apps to the client. What needs to be configured to set it up? Someone told me it was a kernel patch that I needed but I never found anything like that. It was a slackware 3.5 box. I tried back when I was a newbie with no luck. Now I'm just "a busy" with no time.;) Any suggestions?
One of my back-burner projects at work is to get some magnetic buttons from www.deggy.com to work under linux. I've seen some MSAccess code which talks to their reader through serial interface. Shouldn't be that hard to do the same under linux, just need to find the time...
Slashdot Mirror
I heard they may use an enhanced version called Turbo Encabulator in next-generation CPUs.
More info here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4
M-x iso-accents-mode.
This is the easiest way I know to type accented characters on a US keyboard. The version of emacs that gets installed by default on recent Ubuntu versions does not have support for this, but I found that switching to a minor revision older (through synaptic) brings it back.
Pick up a copy of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. This book can change a great many things. It is a psychology text, and very well referenced. You can get a used copy for less than $5 U.S.
6 7/ qid=1078801742/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-4037538-89328 52
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/05533750
Basically, one of the current theories in psych is that humans have different types of intelligence, and they are sufficiently independant that an individual may have any combination of abilities in the categories. Emotional intelligence is what provides empathy, social skills, self control, motivation, discipline, and other useful traits.
The book covers anatomy, social psych, methods to apply this knowledge, studies showing the results of those applications, and more.
In short, I recommend this book to everyone I know sooner or later.
Plus, Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. Nuf said.
When I was in high school, I wrote an article for the school newspaper about this topic. I attended a magnet school for science and math and got interested in how we compared to everybody else. Most of my research came from government studies which showed math skills lacking in the US at comparable ages and such, so that was the tone I took: US schools suck and everybody else is better.
Then I got an interesting reply to my article, which we printed in the next issue. A former math teacher at my school moved to Japan to teach English (Japan had been one of my highest praised systems). He told me that the cultures are completely different. Students in that country are expected to memorize incredible amounts of knowledge, including arithmetic and languages, but, as he put it, "they aren't taught how to think." What he meant by this is that creative problem solving skills are not stressed. The focus tends to be "memorize all you can to pass the next set of entrance exams and that's it".
Later, during my junior year at Rice University, I had a Japanese roommate and got to talk about these issues. He *loved* school in America, and the difference in culture was part of it. He did not advance in his studies as much as he would have in Japan because of language barriers (I explained his Discrete Mathematics notes to him after every lecture because the prof spoke too quickly for him).
Of course, all of this is the "typical" case, and as always, there are exceptions to the rules. But is is interesting to point out the number of American inventions vs. foreign inventions. RCA invented LCDs and decided they weren't useful, then Japanese investors bought the technology and ran with it. Lasers were invented here and we started making bombs with them, Sony went and made CDs. Plastics research was DOW, internal combustion was engineered into assembly lines at Ford, the whole field of nanotech research was started with the discovery of the Carbon-60 atom (BuckyBall) at Rice, transistors, integrated circuits, a lot of core technology in the past and for the future has been American.
Yes, the US has many underfunded schools in urban areas, large numbers of people drop out and cannot function at the "basic" levels in reading or arithmetic. Other countries may have lower percentages in those categories, but it's obvious that at some point, the US system corrects itself to get a university system which bekons students from all over the world. American schools are the standard.
Automatics aren't always worse. I saw an episode of Car and Driver which put the "special projects" teams of GM vs. Ford. They built whatever badass racecar they could squeeze into a camaro and mustang body, and then raced them. The mustang had an automatic transmission. They decided to gun for the 0-60 points and less on the handling round-the-track points. Engaging that clutch manually kills you every time. Even F1 doesn't use standard transmission anymore, just the paddles. Driver retains full control, but he lets the machine do what it does best. Kinda like linux, no?
Disclaimer: I haven't tested out the software yet.
I've recently had some discussions about the direction this stuff is going. There are different opinions on whether all the ideas are good or bad, but they all share at least one thing: They add many layers of complexity to greatly improve the *functionality* in the interface. That's really the only way apps can talk to each other the way it's promised.
I can't help but wonder, though, how is this going to run on my 133 MHz pentium? Mozilla milestones are awfully slow on my machine, and I've got a fast hard drive, lots of ram, and a T1 to the internet. Just upgrade you say. That's fine, I am getting a new machine soon anyway, but what will happen with Crusoe-based laptops or anything else which trades performance for battery-life? Will those technologies be prevented from using the new applications? Will the advancements promised in Gnome 2.0/Eazel/Nautilus and forward be confined to 1GHz Athlons or other devices conforming to Moore's Law, or can they be made to work on lower power and smaller machines?
I haven't looked at the IPv6 specs in a while, and when I did last I wasn't really paying attention to that specific point, but every method I studied back in my networks class assumed priority was respected in exchange for cash.
The other thing I noticed is that playing/controlling the action has a lot to do with it. The same kind of thing is seen in automobiles. The driver never gets sick. Passengers are the only ones that suffer. I can play some games, but can't watch.
When I first saw the N64, I would watch people play Mario World and it would make me dizzy after 15 minutes. However, I watched people play Zelda: Ocarina of Time for weeks with no problems. People would come to my room in college after dinner, after lunch, middle of the night to play. It was a collective effort, and we all had a great time, and I never got sick.
What could the MPAA do about it? I don't own any DVD's, but with a player like this I'd get some. They can't tell me what player I can play my DVD's in since consumers don't license DVD disks, they own them.
A player like this could advertise itself as DVD compatible if "DVD" is trademarked (probably is) and I know that word of mouth would mark it for what it is even if it couldn't use the words "DVD".
Heck, I'd buy two of them if they were here today.
I've set up VOIP solution for a customer using Clarent technology. Very effective boxes. We have one in each of their offices and a carrier-class (i.e., much bigger) unit at the telco switch. The boxes plug in to the keysystem at the customer site and all they have to do is dial a 7 to get an "internal" line (dial a "9" to get a local Bell line). The user dials a number and these boxes use their routing tables to decide which box they need to call. A user at location A wants to make a call in city B, and they have an office there, so all he has to do is dial a 7, area code, and the Clarent boxes place this call through the unit in city B. If the area code doesn't have a box in it, then it default-routes to the big box at the telco switch, onto the national Long Distance backbone, and they get discounted LD because they don't have to go through any Bell.
Now, Clarent has *expensive* boxes so that won't work well on small scales. Also, the routing information is stored in a central database which all the satellite units talk to. That brings up the single point-of-failure problem.
IANAL, but it seems like the legal issues are moot. Each node would be paying for local phone service, and paying for internet service. Do what you want with it. The only problem I see is countries which have government monopolies on phone networks. They often have anti-competitive laws in place but this would be an example of tech getting the jump on laws. I doubt any country actually has legislation outlawing anonymous VOIP distributed networks.
The hardware is the only thing left. Most real modems don't interface with sound cards in hardware, nor do they have a "clear channel" mode to let me stuff whatever audio I want on the line. At least, I've never seen one. Some of the weirder winmodems do use the sound card for the tone generator. Those are mostly on all-in-one integrated mobo's, and my intuition tells me they aren't *nix friendly. The hardware would also have to deal with international CO lines which have different tones and electrical characteristics. If anyone out there has an idea for the hardware problem, I'd be interested in working on or starting a GNU project for this. I'd love free international calls.
I agree that Excel is made more useful because of its macro-recording ability, but I always ended up using the recorder because I didn't know which object I needed to reference. I often limited myself to a small subset of the whole language (Activesheet, Cells, Range, etc.) anyway.
On the other hand, I found Matlab to be an *excellent* prototyping system. All the mathematical functions you could want, powerful graphing abilities, GUI wigets, and you can define your own functions and scripts, too. But because it's not integrated with the operating system, it just always feels safer. And lets be honest, Matlab crashing never took down any Sparcs when I used it. I've managed to kill a PC or two with Excel/VB.
I have seen a solution to this at WorldPilot. I've played around with this at work some. It does many Exchange-ish things including shared address books and shared folders, calendar, etc. It's web based, and open-sourced. It does have some finiky configuration required (we've only managed to get 85% of the features working in the afternoon we played with it), but it looks very promising.
Some of the other comments here mention building from scratch. That should provide the best results *if* you are a good carpenter. It takes a lot of skill to get something exactly right. And most people don't think of the subtle details which are the difference between a crappy desk and good ergo. A 3 degree decline here, 2 inches shorter there and you've got a completely different feel.
I'd expect to end up using the build-up for 2 weeks and then come up with 10 ideas to improve it, rework it, and repeat.
I tried something else back when I was in school that might be related to this. We had big Solaris servers which we could connect to using X-Servers for Windows (Micro X-Win 32 from StarNet, or Exceed, etc.) We'd get the login and all our apps would be piped to the client X-Server (including the window manager if desired).
;) Any suggestions?
I could never get my linux box to to the same thing. X would start on my box instead of just pipeing the apps to the client. What needs to be configured to set it up? Someone told me it was a kernel patch that I needed but I never found anything like that. It was a slackware 3.5 box. I tried back when I was a newbie with no luck. Now I'm just "a busy" with no time.
And to get paid for that! Is there an acronym for lauging-so-hard-it-hurts?
One of my back-burner projects at work is to get some magnetic buttons from www.deggy.com to work under linux. I've seen some MSAccess code which talks to their reader through serial interface. Shouldn't be that hard to do the same under linux, just need to find the time...