One idea that's been floating around in my head for years is that someone should get a supercomputer (or a big Beowulf cluster) and try to run their own sim-universe.
We're currently at the level where our fastest computers can just about do an simulation at the atomic level of two surfaces sliding against each other. Simulating even one star at a level that small is not anywhere close to feasible. To make a simulation possible you have to throw away most of the physical laws and put in rough approximations of large objects like stars.
To the driver, the firmware code is just data that is sent to the hardware device on startup. The hardware may see it as a program, but unless the hardware manufacturer has GPL'd his firmware and patents, the GPL does not apply.
Imagine I have a two processor system. I take a piece of free software and a piece of proprietary software. I ship both pieces together, and when the free software piece starts up it claims one processor and sends the proprietary piece off to be executed on the other processor. Does that comply with the GPL?
I'm sure I've seen a half-dozen of these at least. I think there may even be one shipped with X. (for the X clipboard, which is probably what you mean)
Ok, now I wasted a bit of time looking. I found two utilities. One, xsel, is described by the author as a quick hack. RedHat doesn't ship it, as far as I can tell. The other, wxcopy, comes with WindowMaker. I can't get wxcopy to work.
echo test | wxcopy
followed by either middle button or ctrl-V does nothing.
Oh, and.NET server will come with a clip executable, so you'll be able to use:
C:\> dir | clip
and then paste the results into notepad.
That's actually an excellent idea! It would let me paste from the command line without using the mouse. I'm all for it. Who is going to make a command that sends stdin to the gnome clipboard?
If you're in the second category and a car in front of you indicates for a right turn, pass him on the left. Just as a motorcycle would. If he passed you without leaving you plenty of room to get to the left of him, or if he failed to use his indicator, he deserves a ticket. Drivers can be taught to use indicators and allow some room for fast bikes.
By the way, around here it is fashionable to put bushes and trees between the road and the bike lane, so bikers feel really safe far away from the cars. This makes the bikes partially invisible to the drivers until just before an intersection. When I still biked I would be very nervous about cars turning right in those intersections -- now that I drive a car I am just as nervous, just from the opposite perspective. At least they have started cutting the bushes more aggressively lately.
Around here (Denmark) it seems that there are two distinct groups of people biking. One group is going rather slowly in general; they are prone to random wobbles and they generally try to keep as much distance to objects as possible. Bike lanes are great for that group, they are slow enough that it is easy for car drivers to spot them when turning.
The other group drives much faster and more reliably. Momentum is important to them, so they really do not like slowing down at intersections. It can be really hard for a car driver to see someone from that group in a bike lane, especially considering that it is not that unusual to see downhill speeds of more than 50km/h. It makes much more sense for that group to drive like motorcycles. That way they can also make left turns the proper way, instead of the strange stop-and-go thing that is necessary when you are in the bike lane.
Like it or not, people from the second group often get hit by cars that turn right. I do not know how much comfort it is for them at the hospital to know that they had the right of way, but I would suspect they would be more comfortable if they were not in the hospital in the first place. The reality is that for them, the bike lanes are more like death traps. No amount of legislation can change that.
The platters in modern SCSI drives are quite small. The 3 1/2 inch form factor is just for backwards compatibility. It is very hard to make large platters spin at 15k -- and that is also why most SCSI disks are still 36GB or less.
I bet that we will soon see 2 1/2 inch SCSI disks again. They make a lot of sense in blade servers and 1U servers, where laptop IDE drives now reign.
I believe the NVIDIA drivers borrow (read license) code from SGI for their OpenGL support, and it is against the SGI license for NVIDIA to opensource the drivers.
SGI has publically denied this. They encourage nVidia to open source their drivers, but nVidia has so far refused. I am tired of people blaming SGI, it is not their fault.
nVidia uses a source-available shim to insulate the proprietary, binary-only part from the changing kernel. People think that just because they type "make" and something happens, the source is all there. That is unfortunately not true.
I mentioned S/PDIF because I am considering the purchase of a Radeon All In Wonder, and the marketing materials say that the 8500DV includes Dolby AC3 output via the S/PDIF interface on the card. According to the marketing materials, it can be used to output sound when playing DVD's with the included software DVD player in Windows. There is no mention of using it to output any other kind of sound.
What I want is to send out sound from other sources, such as compressed sound files or even games. I am not sure why that would not be reliable, if it works at all.
WinWiFi would just be ADC/DACs behind... an antenna.
If that was true, then the ADC would need to sample at 5GHz to capture the 2.5GHz signal at all. I have severe doubts about the ability of current processors to handle that. Not to mention that you have to transmit a 5GHz signal sampled at say 8 bit precision across a bus to the processor. A mere 5GB/s. PCI-X peaks at about 1GB/s, and I do not expect that to be available in notebooks anytime soon.
Hardware would have to handle at least the modulation and demodulation.
However, it is a good [back]ronym, and even it's misinterpreted form is useful.
There is nothing misinterpreted about/usr meaning user directories. That is how it was meant to be. After it got misappropriated and the users were forced into exile, some fled to/users, some to/home, and some to even stranger places. Now people are rewriting history saying that this exodus never happened, and that usr is short for "Unix System Resources".
/usr/bin are binaries for users;/usr/lib are the corresponding libraries, and so on.
What are cp, cut, sed, sort, ls if not "binaries for users"?
Some enterprising system administrators have gone that extra step and liberated/usr to a network share, not including myself. The idea is that/{bin,etc,lib} are supposed to be enough of a Unix system to get/usr off the network anyway.
/usr (in the new, twisted sense) on a network share was quite popular at one time. It saves disk space but requires clients that both have local storage and a fast reliable net connection. Very few do it anymore. Two yells of "I do it!" will not convince me otherwise./usr in the old sense is perfectly fine on a network share, of course.
Unix System Resources is a backronym
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
/usr was where the user files were kept, way back when. Then one day, someone ran out of space on their root disk... The solution was to create a user called "bin", give it a home directory/usr/bin, and put the less important binaries there.
These days when disks are enormous and logical volume management ensures that you can just add whatever space is necessary where it is needed, we should get rid of/usr. The only argument that still works in favour of/usr is making it a network drive. The people who do that will have to customize a bit when the rest of us drop/usr. I am sure they will hate me, both of them.
Mandatory Access Control in HP Secure OS Software for Linux can solve the problem. Part of it is proprietary, but then again, so is the VM in IBM zSeries (S/390). The kernel modifications and kernel modules are licensed under the GPL, so you are not stuck with a binary kernel module that breaks if you breathe too hard near it. </BLATANT PLUG>
It has multiple virtual desk tops (accessable by key commands. Does gnome/sawfish do that? How? I couldn't figure it out...)
I use Sawfish. I've turned the Windows key into Super with my own keymap. I have 12 workspaces, and I've bound Super-F1 to Activate Workspace 1, Super-F2 to Activate Workspace 2, and so on. To send windows to different workspaces I just make them sticky, shift workspace, then make them unsticky. For that purpose I bound Super-S to Make Window Sticky and Super-A to Make Window Unsticky.
I have some window toggling commands as well, but in most cases I keep only one window open per workspace. 1024x768 is not enough for two windows of decent size side by side, and I am not going to hide windows behind each other.
Using an external mouse with a laptop defeats the purpose of the laptop for me. I don't necessarily have a hard flat surface somewhere near. So even though I gaped in total admiration when I saw a TiBook, the mouse thing makes it useless. Incidentally, the pictures on the Apple website don't do justice to it at all. It is so impressive in reality.
Why don't all those brilliant designers at Apple come up with a design that works with three buttons? Hint: just put three sensors underneath the single button, so you can tell where the user pressed. Make all three buttons do the same thing by default. That way the beautiful design isn't compromised and stupid users will never know. Chording won't work, but I never do that anyway.
So you're saying that 5-bit means I can pick from only 5 values? Hint: I can pick from 32 values. 6 bits give me 64 values. I can throw half of them away by setting the LSB to zero, then I'm back to 32 values.
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By the way, around here it is fashionable to put bushes and trees between the road and the bike lane, so bikers feel really safe far away from the cars. This makes the bikes partially invisible to the drivers until just before an intersection. When I still biked I would be very nervous about cars turning right in those intersections -- now that I drive a car I am just as nervous, just from the opposite perspective. At least they have started cutting the bushes more aggressively lately.
Around here (Denmark) it seems that there are two distinct groups of people biking. One group is going rather slowly in general; they are prone to random wobbles and they generally try to keep as much distance to objects as possible. Bike lanes are great for that group, they are slow enough that it is easy for car drivers to spot them when turning.
The other group drives much faster and more reliably. Momentum is important to them, so they really do not like slowing down at intersections. It can be really hard for a car driver to see someone from that group in a bike lane, especially considering that it is not that unusual to see downhill speeds of more than 50km/h. It makes much more sense for that group to drive like motorcycles. That way they can also make left turns the proper way, instead of the strange stop-and-go thing that is necessary when you are in the bike lane.
Like it or not, people from the second group often get hit by cars that turn right. I do not know how much comfort it is for them at the hospital to know that they had the right of way, but I would suspect they would be more comfortable if they were not in the hospital in the first place. The reality is that for them, the bike lanes are more like death traps. No amount of legislation can change that.
It does not seem that many manufacturers advertize the physical platter sizes, but Fujitsu is an expection: Fujitsu MAM15k RPM
The platters in modern SCSI drives are quite small. The 3 1/2 inch form factor is just for backwards compatibility. It is very hard to make large platters spin at 15k -- and that is also why most SCSI disks are still 36GB or less.
I bet that we will soon see 2 1/2 inch SCSI disks again. They make a lot of sense in blade servers and 1U servers, where laptop IDE drives now reign.
nVidia uses a source-available shim to insulate the proprietary, binary-only part from the changing kernel. People think that just because they type "make" and something happens, the source is all there. That is unfortunately not true.
What I want is to send out sound from other sources, such as compressed sound files or even games. I am not sure why that would not be reliable, if it works at all.
The AIW Radeon 8500 seems to have S/PDIF output for sound. Can that be used as a regular sound card? And does Linux support it?
M-x flame
Hardware would have to handle at least the modulation and demodulation.
/usr was where the user files were kept, way back when. Then one day, someone ran out of space on their root disk... The solution was to create a user called "bin", give it a home directory /usr/bin, and put the less important binaries there.
/usr. The only argument that still works in favour of /usr is making it a network drive. The people who do that will have to customize a bit when the rest of us drop /usr. I am sure they will hate me, both of them.
These days when disks are enormous and logical volume management ensures that you can just add whatever space is necessary where it is needed, we should get rid of
Mandatory Access Control in HP Secure OS Software for Linux can solve the problem. Part of it is proprietary, but then again, so is the VM in IBM zSeries (S/390). The kernel modifications and kernel modules are licensed under the GPL, so you are not stuck with a binary kernel module that breaks if you breathe too hard near it.
</BLATANT PLUG>
Place the perpetual motion machine on a sufficiently cold planet.
I use Sawfish. I've turned the Windows key into Super with my own keymap. I have 12 workspaces, and I've bound Super-F1 to Activate Workspace 1, Super-F2 to Activate Workspace 2, and so on. To send windows to different workspaces I just make them sticky, shift workspace, then make them unsticky. For that purpose I bound Super-S to Make Window Sticky and Super-A to Make Window Unsticky.
I have some window toggling commands as well, but in most cases I keep only one window open per workspace. 1024x768 is not enough for two windows of decent size side by side, and I am not going to hide windows behind each other.
However, I would not call it normal.
The numbers you should be using are x/32 and y/64. You have 32 and 64 possible values, respectively. I have no idea how you manage to destroy one.
Why don't all those brilliant designers at Apple come up with a design that works with three buttons? Hint: just put three sensors underneath the single button, so you can tell where the user pressed. Make all three buttons do the same thing by default. That way the beautiful design isn't compromised and stupid users will never know. Chording won't work, but I never do that anyway.
So you're saying that 5-bit means I can pick from only 5 values? Hint: I can pick from 32 values. 6 bits give me 64 values. I can throw half of them away by setting the LSB to zero, then I'm back to 32 values.