So for God's sake Timothy, and the sake of all those employed individuals operating on EST, please go to bed!
So, taking this to its logical conclusion, nobody should ever post an item at slashdot, as there are people in nearly every timezone visiting this site:) Me, I'm quite used to look for updates at four in the morning, but then I never have to get up early...
Vim, of course! I was an emacs junkie for several years before I got tired of LISP and om-my-god-I-need-fourteen-fingers-for-this-command style editing. As for features, there really is nothing I miss in vim compared to emacs.
Cool though the multi-head capabilities are, you have to wonder who will use it[...]
I'd love to have that; imagine having my usual comfortable bearded, long-haired head with glasses and all at work, then attach a Mel Gibson lookalike unit when going out for the night! Toothache? No problem! Just rent a spare head from your dentist while your own unit is in for repairs! Ahhh, the future is truly ours!
Once upon a time, there was a very clear separation between the public and the private (consider for example that politicians and other leaders could have a private life that would never be accepted today). With the 'new journalism' and the popularity of the net, this boundary has all but dissappeared. As the piece says, Alan Greenspan can't say anything, ever, without worrying about what the reaction would be would investors and analysts get hold of the remark.
Taking this trend just one step further, we would all have to guard our speech in all but the most private circumstances. Even all of us nobodies posting here on slashdot should exercise caution so our remarks won't come back to bite us in twenty years time, when we all are rich and powerful (yeah, right...) or simply when applying for a job.
People considering a tattoo are often asked to think long and hard about whether they will still like it ten or twenty years later. Comments on slashdot or mailinglists have the same kind of permanence, and can be potentially far more embarrassing than a heart-and-dagger on your shoulder.
Isn't it time for the slashdot crew to write a statistical analysis of the reading frequency of the slashdot stories about the slashdot effect papers? If everybody keeps this up, we'll have a new academic subdiscipline in no time! "slashdot science", maybe, or "statistical geekology". If we get the terms 'postmodern' or 'cultural imperialism' into the title as well, we'll be rolling in grant money...
Not only is there a benefit in fast-moving news for its own sake, but due to the quick turnaround in this forum, the retraction can show up within a day, instead of being buried and forgotten in some magazine issue two months later when everyone has forgotten the original piece. It's not like traditional print media has a stellar record on truthfulness and substantiation...
Re:Some linux progs do make sense on palm
on
Linux on Palm
·
· Score: 1
Just tell me *WHY* do you want a keyboard for a palm?
I've had my palm for a year and a half now, and I love it. The small size and nifty apps have really made a difference. At times (like when travelling), I do, however, want to be able to write larger pieces of text (notetaking during sessions, working on a paper in flight, that kind of thing), and using graffiti is just too much work once you move beyond a few sentences. At the same time, I hate the idea of having to tote around a laptop just to write some text. A psion would fit perfectly here, but I find it too big for everyday use (won't fit my pockets). Having the ability to bring along a small keyboard during travels (esp. one as small as that new one) would mean I still only have to bring the palm with me.
If the keyboard is big enough to be used comfortably for an editor that requires a lot of keystrokes, why don't you just carry a laptop?
That's exactly why I'd want vi; most command are single alphanumeric keystrokes or a sequence of two or three keys -- no need for metakeys, no need for arrows and no need for extended keys.
Re:Some linux progs do make sense on palm
on
Linux on Palm
·
· Score: 1
Just tell me *WHY* do you want a keyboard for a palm?
I've had my palm for a year and a half now, and I love it. The small size and nifty apps have really made a difference. At times (like when travelling), I do, however, want to be able to write larger pieces of text (notetaking during sessions, working on a paper in flight, that kind of thing), and using graffiti is just too much work once you move beyond a few sentences. At the same time, I hate the idea of having to tote around a laptop just to write some text. A psion would fit perfectly here, but I find it too big for everyday use (won't fit my pockets). Having the ability to bring along a small keyboard during travels (esp. one as small as that new one) would mean I still only have to bring the palm with me.
Some linux progs do make sense on palm
on
Linux on Palm
·
· Score: 1
I've been looking high and low for a VI editor for my palm, but to no avail. "vi on a pen computer? You're out of your mind!", I hear several people cry. Well, add a keyboard to the palm (and I really want the one posted a few days ago), and suddenly vi makes a lot of sense; no need for a lot of special keys or trying to wrap your fingers around metakey combinations on a cramped keyboard. All it takes is a basic alphanumeric keyboard, escape, shift and ctrl.
If running linux is what it takes, then so be it...
For telephones, 2.4mbit is way overkill, of course; it is clearly aimed at notebooks, laptops and PDA:s. There is a major problem not mentioned in the relase, however, and that is that the available bandwith at any one location is limited. In some areas with very few users you'll be able to use a lot of that speed, but in heavily populated areas (like in cities) the system will eather have to divide its bandwith to all that want it (giving you nowhere near that speed) or let users use it on a first come-first serve basis, meaning a lot of frustrated users not being able to connect at all.
Here in sweden, the plan is to move over to HDTV as soon as practically possible. However, the box needed i rather expensive and not many channels are yet sending digitally. The consequence is of course that very few (like 500-600) people have bought boxes, which means the stations have not started to broadcast in this format. With a box you still do not get HDTV quality and you won't get any more channels than the regular programming; I for one will not pay a lot of money to get exactly the same (crappy) programming I already have.
Related to this is an effort to move to digital radio, but here the problem is even worse. While a lot of people own regular, cheap, receivers, the digital units are several times more expensive, and since FM radio sounds so good already, there is hardly any incentive to switch.
I do wonder if all that money could not be put to better use producing content that we viewers would actually want to see...
A neat idea would be to build a file manager out of the doom source; each room would be a directory (tastefully decorated according to its use), with corridors connecting them as per the directory tree. All the files would be things lying around and you could implement other equipment besides guns to operate on them. Processes would show up as monsters in their working directory. Their using files would of course also be represented by them using the file objects.
No more 'mv' -- just pick that file up, walk to another room and drop it there! You want to read a text file? Just invoke the 'ls' monster (possibly by walking down to/usr/bin and waking it up), give the file to it, and the contents will scroll across its belly (think teletubbies here).
Well, actually, the 16:9 format gives a much more immersing experience with less feeling that you are looking into a box; just look at a panoramic shot in a movie like Baled Runner and compare that with the tv-version and you'll see what I mean. And no, directors do make their movies to look their best on a movie screen (excepting those "made for tv" thingys or those destined from start to go on video only), and will not compromise ont that. In fact, some directors (like Woody Allen) seem to deliberately make it difficult to cut their movies down, by having a conversation with the characters in far in each edge of the screen and the like. Movies in general (even recent ones) do not look fine on a tv screen.
I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish, but one possible way to achieve interoperability for a system across architectures, languages and operating system is to use PVM. "PVM!" I hear you cry, "isn't that for math and physics nerds doing windtunnel simulations?" Well, yes, but actually, PVM is a fairly general communications and synchronisation toolkit that just happens to have evolved from the needs of scientific computing. PVM solves all the interoperability issues above, and tends to scale fairly well. The only(!) drawback is that it's not well suited for widely (in a geographical sense) distributed processing.
There are two great things about being able to grow tissue: first, it will alleviate the lack of organ (and tissue) donorship; no more looong waitinglists (during which some people die for a lack of an organ) and no black market for organs. Second, by growing tissue from your own cells, there is no problem with rejection -- it's your own cells.
The problem lies with all those conditions where the organ defect is due to gentical factors. If you have a bad heart due to a genetic disease, the newly grown heart will tend to be susceptible to the same disease that destroyed the old one. Thus, the cells used to make an organ must be genetically altered to remove the condition. The problem is that many genetically transmitted diseases are complex and we have no idea how to repair that damage.
Disclaimer: I'm certainly no expert, take this comment for what it is...
Postscript is owned by Adobe, and they charge a fairly hefty fee for every printer you ship with postscript installed. Thus, low- and mid-end printers can't use postscript as the fee would drive the price per unit too high.
I suppose printers could use ghostscript, but for the unwashed masses, being a "ghostscript printer" won't be a convincing selling point.
Well, for the "horribly odd numbers" problem, there is a simple answer. You start out thinking in inches and determine (for example) that a clearance of 0.001" is about right, and this then gets translated to the cumbersome 0.0254mm. Had you been thinking in metric, the clearance would have been 0.025mm (or even 0.03mm or 0.02mm), and the number mess would have appeared when translating to american units instead. The amreican unit system isn't more or less "natural" than the metric system -- things in nature do not tend to fall into simple increments of inches. It's just us fallible humans that like to appoximate things so it becomes convenient for ourselves.
The problem is, choices tend to disappear. A couple of years ago, it was strictly your choice if you wanted to do your banking via the net instead of trudging down to the local branch in person. Today (at least here in sweden) it is gettaing clear that soon you will need to do it via a computer; paying bills over the counter is already more expensive than doing it over the net, and banks are closing their offices as fast as they are able to. In five to ten years time, there won't be a choice anymore; do banking over the net or don't do it at all.
The same thing is happening with email; today you have a choice whether to use it or not; soon you need it the same way you need a postal address today.
If we don't want to be tethered to our cellphones, pagers et.al., this is the time to make it clear, as when they are ubiqutous, it's too late.
I'm not personally against all this stuff, I have the whole kit - even though I tend to ignore it most of the time:).
No problem; as far as I know, there is no limit to the length of a domainname (OK, so maybe it's 1024 chars or something). Maybe we'll start seeing domains like
Well, we have had a 10mbit/s link at home through a microwave link for two years now. It usually works fine, but it is sensitive to rain and high winds; the rain absorbs some of the signal and winds will rock the antennae sufficiently to drop some packets (yes, they are very securely attached, but with a narrow beam...). It is also very sensitive to heavy snowfall. I can't imagine rain or snow being much of a problem in arizona, though...
Well, we have had a 10mbit/s link at home through a microwave link for two years now. It usually works fine, but it is sensitive to rain and high winds; the rain absorbs some of the signal and winds will rock the antennae sufficiently to drop some packets. It is also very sensitive to heavy snowfall. I can't imagine rain or snow being much of a problem in arizona, though...
I think the choice of mascots is actually a fairly good indicator of the basic difference between Linux and xxxBSD.
The BSD mascot is an in-joke, a play on the ubiquitous (sp?) demons in a UNIX system. For those who already are familiar with unix-like systems this is fairly obvious and somewhat amusing. By contrast, outsiders are likely to see the mascot in its original setting, as a mythological demon/devil. Insiders get it, outsiders are pushed away.
Tux the Penguin, on the other hand, needs no inside knowledge to appreciate, but is as accessible a symbol for the neophyte as for long-time users. It's not an in-joke.
This is of course a lot of symbolic baggage to overload these poor mascots with, but in a small way I do think this reflects a part of the culture of the respective systems.
Slashdot Mirror
So for God's sake Timothy, and the sake of all those employed individuals operating on EST, please go to bed!
:) Me, I'm quite used to look for updates at four in the morning, but then I never have to get up early...
So, taking this to its logical conclusion, nobody should ever post an item at slashdot, as there are people in nearly every timezone visiting this site
Vim, of course! I was an emacs junkie for several years before I got tired of LISP and om-my-god-I-need-fourteen-fingers-for-this-command style editing. As for features, there really is nothing I miss in vim compared to emacs.
Cool though the multi-head capabilities are, you have to wonder who will use it[...]
I'd love to have that; imagine having my usual comfortable bearded, long-haired head with glasses and all at work, then attach a Mel Gibson lookalike unit when going out for the night! Toothache? No problem! Just rent a spare head from your dentist while your own unit is in for repairs! Ahhh, the future is truly ours!
Sorry.
Once upon a time, there was a very clear separation between the public and the private (consider for example that politicians and other leaders could have a private life that would never be accepted today). With the 'new journalism' and the popularity of the net, this boundary has all but dissappeared. As the piece says, Alan Greenspan can't say anything, ever, without worrying about what the reaction would be would investors and analysts get hold of the remark.
Taking this trend just one step further, we would all have to guard our speech in all but the most private circumstances. Even all of us nobodies posting here on slashdot should exercise caution so our remarks won't come back to bite us in twenty years time, when we all are rich and powerful (yeah, right...) or simply when applying for a job.
People considering a tattoo are often asked to think long and hard about whether they will still like it ten or twenty years later. Comments on slashdot or mailinglists have the same kind of permanence, and can be potentially far more embarrassing than a heart-and-dagger on your shoulder.
Isn't it time for the slashdot crew to write a statistical analysis of the reading frequency of the slashdot stories about the slashdot effect papers? If everybody keeps this up, we'll have a new academic subdiscipline in no time! "slashdot science", maybe, or "statistical geekology". If we get the terms 'postmodern' or 'cultural imperialism' into the title as well, we'll be rolling in grant money...
Not only is there a benefit in fast-moving news for its own sake, but due to the quick turnaround in this forum, the retraction can show up within a day, instead of being buried and forgotten in some magazine issue two months later when everyone has forgotten the original piece. It's not like traditional print media has a stellar record on truthfulness and substantiation...
I've had my palm for a year and a half now, and I love it. The small size and nifty apps have really made a difference. At times (like when travelling), I do, however, want to be able to write larger pieces of text (notetaking during sessions, working on a paper in flight, that kind of thing), and using graffiti is just too much work once you move beyond a few sentences. At the same time, I hate the idea of having to tote around a laptop just to write some text. A psion would fit perfectly here, but I find it too big for everyday use (won't fit my pockets). Having the ability to bring along a small keyboard during travels (esp. one as small as that new one) would mean I still only have to bring the palm with me.
That's exactly why I'd want vi; most command are single alphanumeric keystrokes or a sequence of two or three keys -- no need for metakeys, no need for arrows and no need for extended keys.
Just tell me *WHY* do you want a keyboard for a palm?
I've had my palm for a year and a half now, and I love it. The small size and nifty apps have really made a difference. At times (like when travelling), I do, however, want to be able to write larger pieces of text (notetaking during sessions, working on a paper in flight, that kind of thing), and using graffiti is just too much work once you move beyond a few sentences. At the same time, I hate the idea of having to tote around a laptop just to write some text. A psion would fit perfectly here, but I find it too big for everyday use (won't fit my pockets). Having the ability to bring along a small keyboard during travels (esp. one as small as that new one) would mean I still only have to bring the palm with me.
I've been looking high and low for a VI editor for my palm, but to no avail. "vi on a pen computer? You're out of your mind!", I hear several people cry. Well, add a keyboard to the palm (and I really want the one posted a few days ago), and suddenly vi makes a lot of sense; no need for a lot of special keys or trying to wrap your fingers around metakey combinations on a cramped keyboard. All it takes is a basic alphanumeric keyboard, escape, shift and ctrl.
If running linux is what it takes, then so be it...
For telephones, 2.4mbit is way overkill, of course; it is clearly aimed at notebooks, laptops and PDA:s. There is a major problem not mentioned in the relase, however, and that is that the available bandwith at any one location is limited. In some areas with very few users you'll be able to use a lot of that speed, but in heavily populated areas (like in cities) the system will eather have to divide its bandwith to all that want it (giving you nowhere near that speed) or let users use it on a first come-first serve basis, meaning a lot of frustrated users not being able to connect at all.
Looks very windowish ..right down to the icons and toolbars.
It's the Qt toolkit that does it -- I don't know how or why, but for some reason Qt programs always seem to resemble windows for me...
Here in sweden, the plan is to move over to HDTV as soon as practically possible. However, the box needed i rather expensive and not many channels are yet sending digitally. The consequence is of course that very few (like 500-600) people have bought boxes, which means the stations have not started to broadcast in this format. With a box you still do not get HDTV quality and you won't get any more channels than the regular programming; I for one will not pay a lot of money to get exactly the same (crappy) programming I already have.
Related to this is an effort to move to digital radio, but here the problem is even worse. While a lot of people own regular, cheap, receivers, the digital units are several times more expensive, and since FM radio sounds so good already, there is hardly any incentive to switch.
I do wonder if all that money could not be put to better use producing content that we viewers would actually want to see...
A neat idea would be to build a file manager out of the doom source; each room would be a directory (tastefully decorated according to its use), with corridors connecting them as per the directory tree. All the files would be things lying around and you could implement other equipment besides guns to operate on them. Processes would show up as monsters in their working directory. Their using files would of course also be represented by them using the file objects.
/usr/bin and waking it up), give the file to it, and the contents will scroll across its belly (think teletubbies here).
No more 'mv' -- just pick that file up, walk to another room and drop it there! You want to read a text file? Just invoke the 'ls' monster (possibly by walking down to
Well, actually, the 16:9 format gives a much more immersing experience with less feeling that you are looking into a box; just look at a panoramic shot in a movie like Baled Runner and compare that with the tv-version and you'll see what I mean. And no, directors do make their movies to look their best on a movie screen (excepting those "made for tv" thingys or those destined from start to go on video only), and will not compromise ont that. In fact, some directors (like Woody Allen) seem to deliberately make it difficult to cut their movies down, by having a conversation with the characters in far in each edge of the screen and the like. Movies in general (even recent ones) do not look fine on a tv screen.
I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish, but one possible way to achieve interoperability for a system across architectures, languages and operating system is to use PVM. "PVM!" I hear you cry, "isn't that for math and physics nerds doing windtunnel simulations?" Well, yes, but actually, PVM is a fairly general communications and synchronisation toolkit that just happens to have evolved from the needs of scientific computing. PVM solves all the interoperability issues above, and tends to scale fairly well. The only(!) drawback is that it's not well suited for widely (in a geographical sense) distributed processing.
...and someone has to register a LINUX mib branch...
:-)
I agree, we really need some Men In Black of our own to compete with microsoft and unfriendly aliens
Slow afternoon...
There are two great things about being able to grow tissue: first, it will alleviate the lack of organ (and tissue) donorship; no more looong waitinglists (during which some people die for a lack of an organ) and no black market for organs. Second, by growing tissue from your own cells, there is no problem with rejection -- it's your own cells.
The problem lies with all those conditions where the organ defect is due to gentical factors. If you have a bad heart due to a genetic disease, the newly grown heart will tend to be susceptible to the same disease that destroyed the old one. Thus, the cells used to make an organ must be genetically altered to remove the condition. The problem is that many genetically transmitted diseases are complex and we have no idea how to repair that damage.
Disclaimer: I'm certainly no expert, take this comment for what it is...
Postscript is owned by Adobe, and they charge a fairly hefty fee for every printer you ship with postscript installed. Thus, low- and mid-end printers can't use postscript as the fee would drive the price per unit too high.
I suppose printers could use ghostscript, but for the unwashed masses, being a "ghostscript printer" won't be a convincing selling point.
Well, for the "horribly odd numbers" problem, there is a simple answer. You start out thinking in inches and determine (for example) that a clearance of 0.001" is about right, and this then gets translated to the cumbersome 0.0254mm. Had you been thinking in metric, the clearance would have been 0.025mm (or even 0.03mm or 0.02mm), and the number mess would have appeared when translating to american units instead. The amreican unit system isn't more or less "natural" than the metric system -- things in nature do not tend to fall into simple increments of inches. It's just us fallible humans that like to appoximate things so it becomes convenient for ourselves.
The problem is, choices tend to disappear. A couple of years ago, it was strictly your choice if you wanted to do your banking via the net instead of trudging down to the local branch in person. Today (at least here in sweden) it is gettaing clear that soon you will need to do it via a computer; paying bills over the counter is already more expensive than doing it over the net, and banks are closing their offices as fast as they are able to. In five to ten years time, there won't be a choice anymore; do banking over the net or don't do it at all.
:).
The same thing is happening with email; today you have a choice whether to use it or not; soon you need it the same way you need a postal address today.
If we don't want to be tethered to our cellphones, pagers et.al., this is the time to make it clear, as when they are ubiqutous, it's too late.
I'm not personally against all this stuff, I have the whole kit - even though I tend to ignore it most of the time
No problem; as far as I know, there is no limit to the length of a domainname (OK, so maybe it's 1024 chars or something). Maybe we'll start seeing domains like
o meoneelsetookit.com
www.theflowershopon54mainstreet.com
www.weputtheuinusedcars.com
www.ohmygodimanagedtoregisteradomainnamebefores
It would seem that a company marketing those little fiberglass geodome half-globes to cover your antenea would make a killing here...
Nope. It doesn't do anything for the rain or snow -- and actually, snow and ice piling up on the dome would worsen the situation.
Well, we have had a 10mbit/s link at home through a microwave link for two years now. It usually works fine, but it is sensitive to rain and high winds; the rain absorbs some of the signal and winds will rock the antennae sufficiently to drop some packets (yes, they are very securely attached, but with a narrow beam...). It is also very sensitive to heavy snowfall. I can't imagine rain or snow being much of a problem in arizona, though...
Well, we have had a 10mbit/s link at home through a microwave link for two years now. It usually works fine, but it is sensitive to rain and high winds; the rain absorbs some of the signal and winds will rock the antennae sufficiently to drop some packets. It is also very sensitive to heavy snowfall. I can't imagine rain or snow being much of a problem in arizona, though...
I think the choice of mascots is actually a fairly good indicator of the basic difference between Linux and xxxBSD.
The BSD mascot is an in-joke, a play on the ubiquitous (sp?) demons in a UNIX system. For those who already are familiar with unix-like systems this is fairly obvious and somewhat amusing. By contrast, outsiders are likely to see the mascot in its original setting, as a mythological demon/devil. Insiders get it, outsiders are pushed away.
Tux the Penguin, on the other hand, needs no inside knowledge to appreciate, but is as accessible a symbol for the neophyte as for long-time users. It's not an in-joke.
This is of course a lot of symbolic baggage to overload these poor mascots with, but in a small way I do think this reflects a part of the culture of the respective systems.