Okay, I'll bite; what sort of voice interfaces are available for Linux? This could be a way cool way to drive your computer...
I still prefer a CLI for many things and deal with the GUI because it seems unavoidable. But a long time ago (when I bought my Atari ST, actually) I started wondering why the different interfaces were assumed to be mutually exclusive. My Atari (and the Mac and the Amiga) seemed to based on the idea that, once you have a GUI interface, you couldn't possibly need to use a command line. (Hmm, all were closed architecture too...) Now we're speculating on a voice activated interface (VAI?) and I'm still wondering if that would end up being the only way to manipulate your machine...
So here's an idea for an "intuitive" interface. First, it would feature a "whatever you're comfortable with" interface. I.e. a command is a command is a command, whether you type it in, click on it, or state it out loud (with some properly thought out command objects for the first two, subsequent advancements in voice recognition could easily be added for the latter later). Second, it would "learn" the skill level and preferences of the user(s); either starting at a kindergarden level and building up as a particular user "progresses", or set by the user (though not directly or there would be all sorts of people thinking, "well, I'm and advanced user..."; perhaps as a first-time use pop quiz).
On an application level, AutoCAD (v14 and earlier at least) does the first one; one can point and click and drag and drop, or key in everything from the command box. I haven't found much of anything that deliberately does the second. (I.e. an "advanced" user will quickly toggle all the "don't show this annoying pop-up message again" flags as they come up, making an application kinda recognize one's skill level...)
Brutal honest time here; I've used little on Linux aside from X and the command line. Is there anything vaguely like this already?
UCITA supporters argue that the measure gives predictability and uniformity to software licenses.
UCITA lets 'em uniformly and predictably say, "It's our software, and you're lucky we even let you touch the box!" No other industry has this kind of "protection"; how is it that legislators are taking this seriously in the first place?
On the bright side, this really should end up drawing some more public attention to open vs. closed source arguments...
Maybe if Newsweek or Time or one of those other weekly news rags smelled blood in the water, they could write something that draws the ire of the end user community... Hmm, I feel a letter-to-the-editor coming on...
IANAE but; Since when does a global currency require a global government? The two can be related, but don't necessarily have to be. Before Uncle Sam got involved, individual banks issued currency (backed, in theory, by material wealth such as gold). While the result was a bit chaotic (enough so to give the government the option of taking over and issuing currency backed by wishful thinking), the same sort of thing could happen again. Imagine if a couple of the bigger (global) financial institutions were to start issuing currency (or coinage?) with an agreement with other such banks to accept their currency/coinage. Printing surplus money (i.e. without something to back it up) would blow their credibility and credit rating (unlike government-based treasuries), and economics would be based on a true "bartering" system rather than the intangible "value" of a piece of green paper...
Back when I was learning to drive my Apple ][+, one of the Apple-oriented magazines (can't remember which one) ran a regular contest called "one-liners" where the object was to write the most clever Apple BASIC program possible in the 256 byte clause limit. Part of me wants to whine, "5K!?! When I was your age...", but mostly, I think this is pretty cool and (if the one-liner contest was any indicator) there should be some pretty clever designs; I'm looking forward to seeing the results...
"Windows already comes installed, people don't think about that," he said. "Now that we are beginning to see more and more systems with Linux pre-installed, I think it will lose that reputation."
Most PC "users" are not of a technical bent and running Win9x may not be the best option, but it is the easiest. I think a lot of people use Win9x (and AOL and such), simply because it's the path of least resistance...
Hmmm. Our disaster recorvery exercise got pulled for this weekend, so I don't have to work; maybe it's time to try out that SuSE 6.2 budle I inherited two months ago...
Obviously, Amazon wants to set new records for losing money. Previous steady drains will be dwarfed when they finally piss off the largest chunk of their customer base. They'll set new records for hemorrhaging cash. And, if past performance is any indicator, their stock will skyrocket as a result.
Who knows, in a few months they may end up buying M$...
That sums it up nicely; at the shop I've been working for the last three years, we cycle our LPARs about once a month as a precaution, but we've only had two crashes on our "production" (read: highest traffic) MVS system in that time frame. No crashes on our secondary production system (where users were switched to transparently during the primary's crashes), no crashes on the VM system and none on the development MVS system. On the other hand, I'm counting myself lucky that I've had my NT (Nice Try) running for nearly a week...
There are still things that PCs can do much better than any mainframe implementation I've yet seen. (Like DW/370, a seriously ugly "word processor" for the mainframe; don't try this at home...) On the other hand, I still get a schadenfreude kind of kick watching our LAN people re-invent the wheel on issues of security, change control, network, inventory, etc. 'cause they think any solutions connected to the mainframe must be inately primitive and ineffective...;p
(Now if I can just get my VM sysadmin to allocate me some more disk space...)
Re:Boy you people like living dangerously
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A New DeCSS
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· Score: 1
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world... Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead
AFAIK Fox only released one tape of two episodes ("The Idea Men" and the episode where Chairface carves out CHA on the moon), but that's all I've seen and not since the second season ended...
Boris the Bear - Mid-80's character that started off slaughtering anything cute, then moved on to obvious Marvel and DC lampoons, but quickly became formulaic and dull.
Flaming Carrot - Bob Burden's waaaay off the wall super hero ("Yes, I'll play against you Mr. Death, but not chess. Bah, Fooey! My game is whiffleball!).
Cerebus the Aardvark - Started life as a blatant parody of Barry Windsor Smith's Conan...
Ninja High School - Originally this took shots at anime stuff, but it did eventually branched out to poke at comics too.
The Inferior Five - Older types might remember this mid-60's series (featured in DC's Showcase) that parodied a variety of then-current super-groups (including the X-Men).
Of course, the Tick is still high on my list... I hope they do this right. ("Ninjas. I Hate these guys.")
All right, I'll bite; what should I have used? I was doing (very) rough numbers and felt that two significant figures for g was pushing it. And I could have gone the whole gravatational constant times mass of Earth times mass of projectile over radius of Earth times radius of orbit, and even thrown in a terminal velocity calculation (even a teflon coating wouldn't eliminate air friction, just reduced it), but I was just looking for a ballpark figure and 9.81 m/s^2 is what I used in Physics I, II, III, Statics, Strengths, and Dynamics...
Yeah, I remember that. Cool book. But I was driving an Atari ST at the time and couldn't afford a Mac, or the hypercard, or the electronic form of the book. I especially like the idea of targeting the "brass" first to shorten the war... That and using the GAU-8A as a primary weapon; G.E. We bring good things to light.
"Throwing rocks" was an important part of the Lunar revolution in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the aliens in Niven and Pournelle's Footfall kicked off their invasion by dropping a not-quite-dinosaur-killer sized asteroid on Earth...
On a less fictional note, back in the 80's, there was a military project being debated called THOR which involved 10kg steel "needles" parked in orbit; when the time came, they would de-orbit and a minimalist guidance system would put them down on top of a tank or hardened bunker. Let's see; 10kg, call it 100km orbit, 9.8m/s^2, ~140s drop time, ~1400m/s on impact (little or no friction 'cause of their shape) restults in nearly 10mJ of kinetic energy colliding with your target. Ouch. Too bad the idea wasn't sexy or expensive enough for SDI...
Sad but true. M$ got where it is today by means of marketing; either good marketing on their part or bad (or absent) marketing on everyone elses part (IMHO mostly the latter). I tend to rant about Bill and company a lot, but that is mostly a matter of aesthetics; it still offends me deeply that Bill has made a system crash an acceptable occurence. (I've spent a decade and a half working on mainframes where a monthly system crash is considered a major problem; but I had to reboot my NT machine at work four times last week.)
Now my concern is that this is the future (especially with UCITA and other such daffy ideas being made official).
P.S. I hadn't caught it before, but your sig was good for a chuckle; thanks.
...no credible news/media organization is not going to report negative press about their parent company.
Whoa, define "credible" for me; check out this Brill's Content story about how ABC backed off of a damning story about their parent company Disney... (Not the only example that leaps to mind, but the most recent that I could find a link to in a hurry.)
His legacy will survive him though; F. Paul Wilson's "Repairman Jack" novels (The Tomb, Legacies, and the recently released in hardback Conspiracies) feature a supporting character named Abe who runs a NY sporting goods store called the Isher Sport Shop. The homage part is that Abe runs a clandestine gun shop out of the back and espouses on libertarian ideals while supplying "Jack" with weapons and tools for his work...
Too late, the evil corporations have invented something that will steal away all your business by placing a device in every home that prevents those electrochemical reactions from taking place; it's called tele-vision
Now, be fair; if nothing else, this story has a most amusing link to an article about copyrighting fire that shouldn't be missed... Besides, the writer managed to slam the CCA, DIVX and the new perishable DVDs all in a single article. That should count for something.
Slashdot Mirror
My company only gives PC's away to people with pointy hair... (So far, none of them have fallen for the etch-a-sketch trick, either.)
Okay, I'll bite; what sort of voice interfaces are available for Linux? This could be a way cool way to drive your computer...
I still prefer a CLI for many things and deal with the GUI because it seems unavoidable. But a long time ago (when I bought my Atari ST, actually) I started wondering why the different interfaces were assumed to be mutually exclusive. My Atari (and the Mac and the Amiga) seemed to based on the idea that, once you have a GUI interface, you couldn't possibly need to use a command line. (Hmm, all were closed architecture too...) Now we're speculating on a voice activated interface (VAI?) and I'm still wondering if that would end up being the only way to manipulate your machine...
So here's an idea for an "intuitive" interface. First, it would feature a "whatever you're comfortable with" interface. I.e. a command is a command is a command, whether you type it in, click on it, or state it out loud (with some properly thought out command objects for the first two, subsequent advancements in voice recognition could easily be added for the latter later). Second, it would "learn" the skill level and preferences of the user(s); either starting at a kindergarden level and building up as a particular user "progresses", or set by the user (though not directly or there would be all sorts of people thinking, "well, I'm and advanced user..."; perhaps as a first-time use pop quiz).
On an application level, AutoCAD (v14 and earlier at least) does the first one; one can point and click and drag and drop, or key in everything from the command box. I haven't found much of anything that deliberately does the second. (I.e. an "advanced" user will quickly toggle all the "don't show this annoying pop-up message again" flags as they come up, making an application kinda recognize one's skill level...)
Brutal honest time here; I've used little on Linux aside from X and the command line. Is there anything vaguely like this already?
UCITA lets 'em uniformly and predictably say, "It's our software, and you're lucky we even let you touch the box!" No other industry has this kind of "protection"; how is it that legislators are taking this seriously in the first place?
On the bright side, this really should end up drawing some more public attention to open vs. closed source arguments...
Maybe if Newsweek or Time or one of those other weekly news rags smelled blood in the water, they could write something that draws the ire of the end user community... Hmm, I feel a letter-to-the-editor coming on...
IANAE but; Since when does a global currency require a global government? The two can be related, but don't necessarily have to be. Before Uncle Sam got involved, individual banks issued currency (backed, in theory, by material wealth such as gold). While the result was a bit chaotic (enough so to give the government the option of taking over and issuing currency backed by wishful thinking), the same sort of thing could happen again. Imagine if a couple of the bigger (global) financial institutions were to start issuing currency (or coinage?) with an agreement with other such banks to accept their currency/coinage. Printing surplus money (i.e. without something to back it up) would blow their credibility and credit rating (unlike government-based treasuries), and economics would be based on a true "bartering" system rather than the intangible "value" of a piece of green paper...
Back when I was learning to drive my Apple ][+, one of the Apple-oriented magazines (can't remember which one) ran a regular contest called "one-liners" where the object was to write the most clever Apple BASIC program possible in the 256 byte clause limit. Part of me wants to whine, "5K!?! When I was your age...", but mostly, I think this is pretty cool and (if the one-liner contest was any indicator) there should be some pretty clever designs; I'm looking forward to seeing the results...
Most PC "users" are not of a technical bent and running Win9x may not be the best option, but it is the easiest. I think a lot of people use Win9x (and AOL and such), simply because it's the path of least resistance...
Hmmm. Our disaster recorvery exercise got pulled for this weekend, so I don't have to work; maybe it's time to try out that SuSE 6.2 budle I inherited two months ago...
Like I need a fourth PC running at home. Ack... ;p
Obviously, Amazon wants to set new records for losing money. Previous steady drains will be dwarfed when they finally piss off the largest chunk of their customer base. They'll set new records for hemorrhaging cash. And, if past performance is any indicator, their stock will skyrocket as a result.
Who knows, in a few months they may end up buying M$...
What happens if you make a Beowulf cluster of mainframes?
IBM calls it Sysplex.
The word you want is RELIABILITY.
That sums it up nicely; at the shop I've been working for the last three years, we cycle our LPARs about once a month as a precaution, but we've only had two crashes on our "production" (read: highest traffic) MVS system in that time frame. No crashes on our secondary production system (where users were switched to transparently during the primary's crashes), no crashes on the VM system and none on the development MVS system. On the other hand, I'm counting myself lucky that I've had my NT (Nice Try) running for nearly a week...
There are still things that PCs can do much better than any mainframe implementation I've yet seen. (Like DW/370, a seriously ugly "word processor" for the mainframe; don't try this at home...) On the other hand, I still get a schadenfreude kind of kick watching our LAN people re-invent the wheel on issues of security, change control, network, inventory, etc. 'cause they think any solutions connected to the mainframe must be inately primitive and ineffective... ;p
(Now if I can just get my VM sysadmin to allocate me some more disk space...)
Once M$ Marketing gets ahold of this, there will be 65,000+ enhancements for Windows 2001(TM).
AFAIK Fox only released one tape of two episodes ("The Idea Men" and the episode where Chairface carves out CHA on the moon), but that's all I've seen and not since the second season ended...
More parody comics:
Of course, the Tick is still high on my list... I hope they do this right. ("Ninjas. I Hate these guys.")
Bad guys always have an antidote. They're funny that way.
Speak for yourself; my money and time went into my Apple ][+ and my room-mates Atari 800...
All right, I'll bite; what should I have used? I was doing (very) rough numbers and felt that two significant figures for g was pushing it. And I could have gone the whole gravatational constant times mass of Earth times mass of projectile over radius of Earth times radius of orbit, and even thrown in a terminal velocity calculation (even a teflon coating wouldn't eliminate air friction, just reduced it), but I was just looking for a ballpark figure and 9.81 m/s^2 is what I used in Physics I, II, III, Statics, Strengths, and Dynamics...
Yeah, I remember that. Cool book. But I was driving an Atari ST at the time and couldn't afford a Mac, or the hypercard, or the electronic form of the book. I especially like the idea of targeting the "brass" first to shorten the war... That and using the GAU-8A as a primary weapon; G.E. We bring good things to light.
"Throwing rocks" was an important part of the Lunar revolution in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the aliens in Niven and Pournelle's Footfall kicked off their invasion by dropping a not-quite-dinosaur-killer sized asteroid on Earth...
On a less fictional note, back in the 80's, there was a military project being debated called THOR which involved 10kg steel "needles" parked in orbit; when the time came, they would de-orbit and a minimalist guidance system would put them down on top of a tank or hardened bunker. Let's see; 10kg, call it 100km orbit, 9.8m/s^2, ~140s drop time, ~1400m/s on impact (little or no friction 'cause of their shape) restults in nearly 10mJ of kinetic energy colliding with your target. Ouch. Too bad the idea wasn't sexy or expensive enough for SDI...
Sad but true. M$ got where it is today by means of marketing; either good marketing on their part or bad (or absent) marketing on everyone elses part (IMHO mostly the latter). I tend to rant about Bill and company a lot, but that is mostly a matter of aesthetics; it still offends me deeply that Bill has made a system crash an acceptable occurence. (I've spent a decade and a half working on mainframes where a monthly system crash is considered a major problem; but I had to reboot my NT machine at work four times last week.)
Now my concern is that this is the future (especially with UCITA and other such daffy ideas being made official).
P.S. I hadn't caught it before, but your sig was good for a chuckle; thanks.
Well, not Quake III, but I am upgrading so I can (among other things) play Ultima: Ascension...
(I know, I know, it's a nostalgia thing; I've been playing the Ultima series as they came out since Exodus, and the K6-2 233 just isn't cutting it...)
Whoa, define "credible" for me; check out this Brill's Content story about how ABC backed off of a damning story about their parent company Disney... (Not the only example that leaps to mind, but the most recent that I could find a link to in a hurry.)
Better yet, a team of Aibos(TM), pulling a sled...
.