Flash Javascript Adblock (the smallest pipe of any of my computers, this should be #1 priority) Finer control over volume of alerts Time based silent mode for some alerts Better icon management Hierarchical icon paradigm (over 15,000 apps and I can only have 148 of them currently)
I have a couple 2gig cards and a Canon G7 camera. I thought I'd never fill those up. Then I went on vacation for two weeks in the strikingly beautiful Western Ireland region and without even trying hard I filled two of them up. I'm heading to Scotland this summer, and I'm going loaded for bear with dozens of gig of storage, like money or education, you can't have enough.
Back on topic, This card is a solution to a non-problem.
I'm a HUGE fan of the waterfield bags. The laptop sleeve remains the laptop when it's going through the xray machine at the airport. And honsetly the level of protection, organization, and convenience offered by a Waterfield mambo combo is just what a nearly $3K laptop and accessories needs.
Certainly a couple hundred dollar bag is overkill for an eePC, but less than %10 for protection of your computer seems reasonable to me.
There's also the aversion to the bland freebie Dell cases that drives me to look for damn near anything else to carry my laptop in. Frankly, I'd rather carry my laptop inside bloated roadkill than the crappy dell case I sometimes carry a work laptop in.
You can see the screen glowing through the black plastic slightly. He should have painted the inside of the lid in that area to prevent the bleed-through.
Not sure how useful or if it's even an improvement, but based on the bleed-through, he's not quite finished yet.
As an owner of an iPhone I am frustrated with what I can't have. What I do have is pretty darn sweet, but things like adblock won't ever come to my phone. And that's where it's needed most, where my bandwidth to the phone and inside the phone is the smallest. So in that regard I'm really rooting for android, but I can't help but draw parallels with Linux on the desktop.
Sure, we all know how great linux is for certain tasks, but it has missed that spark that makes it catch on in a big way outside IT infrastructures and embedded systems.
So that three years prediciton is sounds a lot like "the year of the linux on the desktop"
Actually prior to the latest version of handbrake, it was the only sane way to do it. The "queue" in handbrake was a memory resident thing, so if you queued up a bunch of stuff, and handbrake crashed (which it does from time to time), you have to re-queue your items including all the "clicky-clicky" of various settings. Then sent it off running again.
Building a short scripts with a single handbrake transcode command per line allowed handbrake to work in the background in a robust way that also allowed the user to stop the process and more easily start it up again.
I've played a lot of FPS' up to Unreal2004, and some are clearly better than others. There's the obvious map features, like size vs. player number, overall layout, wall design with hiding places, etc. And that's not even counting the artistic side of texture mapping and making it look interesting.
But the player dynamics, and weapon characteristics combine to subtly change the intensity/speed of the game. For example the archaic Marathon was very slow due to show shot speed comparatively weak weapons. Quake III has much stronger weapons making distances seem shorter due to the killing power.
Unreal has a great balance, of player speed, map size and weapon strength/diversity that makes it consistently fun to play. It also has reasonably good AI for the bots. This balance seems to be elusive in FPS, as there are so few who really get it right, and you can see that in the communities they spawn.
I hope these OSS projects can match the balance of a great FPS even if they don't have the deep pockets or manpower to spend on visually stunning maps.
You caught me. I was a verizon wireless guy for years until I couldn't take the phones anymore and went for AT&T to get a jesus phone. Here in the bland midwest, my AT&T coverage is actually every bit as good as Verizon. But when I head into the eastern mountains or the southwest, Verizon kicks butt. But there's enough areas I go that have no coverage whatsoever (or coverage that is so spotty that it should not be called coverage), that I thought the off-the-cuff comment was needed.
The verizon map isn't solid red, and there's a lot of white areas where I go:
I helped the local Humane Society get their records modernized using Animal Shelter Manager (http://sheltermanager.sourceforge.net/home.php). The sysadmin there was feeling a bit out of his depth with setting up the SQL database and such. It was easy work, and made a real tangible difference. I love these sort of freebies too, where there is a task with a clear end.
1) I installed the software. 2) Installed and configured the mySQL on their little server. 3) Got the tables setup 4) Trained the sysadmin on what I'd done and how to maintain/backup the system 5) Got the software installed on the desktops with his help 6) Backed out of the picture 7) No Profit
Sheldon
don't ask a spark-E
on
The Zen of SOA
·
· Score: 1, Informative
The giant schools are not the place where the best educations come from. Sure they often have the biggest research budgets and thus are in the news the most. Smaller schools with smaller class sizes are where it's at from a value for dollar spent standpoint.
My biggest class was intro psych and it was 75 folks. My Hydrodynamic instability was four students and the professor. Just try to hide when you haven't prepared with only three other peeps to hide behind.
Given that USB is PIO and not DMA, the faster the bus runs the more processor intervention is needed. Given how cheap and fast our processors are, that's not a huge deal, but it's not like a DMA based transfer just got faster, it means that the processor is going to be more busy too.
PR-write or not, it will be a PITA just like USB2.0 until it's built in and common.
You left out "insanely zealous fan base willing to pay twice as much for a shorter laundry list and more vendor lockdown than half a dozen competitors".
By that logic, Apple has a zealous fan base that consist of like 75% of the MP3 owners. However only like 10% of the computer market (if you are being very conservative), so does that mean that these huge droves of apple fanbois are abstaining from buying an apple computer?
I'd argue that you've got about as many hardcore mac fanbois on the iPod as you do in the computer market that will buy anything apple sells, that should be in the single digit percentages overall. The rest of the 75% dominance of the iPod is from an actual good design that outshines the other mp3 players.
The iPhone is no different, there is a small percentage that buys it because it's from Cupertino, the rest of them are buying it because it eclipses all other smart phones out there for them.
Adblock pro - Lexus Edition: This new edition will block all incoming ads to the audio system, and it prevents the heated seats from turning of prematurely.
Make is not a hardcore magazine that delves deeply into a few areas like "Glass Audio" or "Speaker Builder" tried to do (and sort-of failed at). But rather a liberal arts type of approach where you get a basic understanding of a wide range of topics.
The above mentioned (and beat to death) PID example is a good illustration of this. Another 12 pages could have been consumed with a cursory introduction to PID control, but they used that space for another project.
They have a target audience and I suspect are doing quite well hitting that target. But my projects tend to be a bit deeper and more involved than I see on the pages of Make. Shameless plugging: Electrostatic Loudspeakers with active crossover built from scratch. Allegro based stepper driver built from scratch. Etc (http://quadesl.com).
I let my subscription lapse because it was too fluffy. No I don't want to litter LED thowies everywhere. No I already made 2 liter bottle water rockets in jr high school. They have too many of these sort of projects and not enough hard hitting "worthy" projects like these:
Good point. Win9X was a steaming turd which we all suffered through. And ironically MacOS (in all it's later forms) was also a steaming turd. Multitasking?! Multitasking?! That's advanced stuff, how about a disk driver that was interrupt safe so that you could, you know, do stuff while writing to disk. Man you've got to walk before you can run.
I used to write fortran code in absoft fortran 77 on a Mac during grad school. It was such a great machine for avoiding RSI. I'd do some sort of bone-headed array index error and rather than have my program crash immediately and let me fix it, the whole machine would go down and I'd be able to get up, stretch and get a cup of coffee and maybe drop some kids off at the pool while the machine rebooted. Apple had my back even in those days. No Carpel Tunnel for me.
I have a razor mouse that I like the texture of and the button feel and placement (plus it isn't sprinkled with superfluous extra buttons). The first ting I did was open that bastard up and remove the blue LED's. It's a mouse, not a runway light, and stop pulsing at me.
Microsoft doesn't often do things right... but their mice and other human interface devices are superb.
I second that! I've been a microsoft mouse user for a long time, they are hard to beat. People used to see my beige Mac with a microsoft mouse on it and look at it in a lost and confused manner like a dog when you move it's food bowl.
For me it takes forever to get used to, those trackmen(?) are horrible, I have helped a few people who have them and I am useless. I'm coming to the sad realization that I'm old, and my thumbs are only used to grip things and to wrap around my member. I get totally pwned at console games that require me to use my thumbs on those satanic little joysticks. I can easily hold my own with a mouse and WASD though.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash
Javascript
Adblock (the smallest pipe of any of my computers, this should be #1 priority)
Finer control over volume of alerts
Time based silent mode for some alerts
Better icon management
Hierarchical icon paradigm (over 15,000 apps and I can only have 148 of them currently)
The list is huge
Sheldon
I have a couple 2gig cards and a Canon G7 camera. I thought I'd never fill those up. Then I went on vacation for two weeks in the strikingly beautiful Western Ireland region and without even trying hard I filled two of them up. I'm heading to Scotland this summer, and I'm going loaded for bear with dozens of gig of storage, like money or education, you can't have enough.
Back on topic, This card is a solution to a non-problem.
Sheldon
I'm a HUGE fan of the waterfield bags. The laptop sleeve remains the laptop when it's going through the xray machine at the airport. And honsetly the level of protection, organization, and convenience offered by a Waterfield mambo combo is just what a nearly $3K laptop and accessories needs.
Certainly a couple hundred dollar bag is overkill for an eePC, but less than %10 for protection of your computer seems reasonable to me.
There's also the aversion to the bland freebie Dell cases that drives me to look for damn near anything else to carry my laptop in. Frankly, I'd rather carry my laptop inside bloated roadkill than the crappy dell case I sometimes carry a work laptop in.
Sheldon
You can see the screen glowing through the black plastic slightly. He should have painted the inside of the lid in that area to prevent the bleed-through.
Not sure how useful or if it's even an improvement, but based on the bleed-through, he's not quite finished yet.
Sheldon
As an owner of an iPhone I am frustrated with what I can't have. What I do have is pretty darn sweet, but things like adblock won't ever come to my phone. And that's where it's needed most, where my bandwidth to the phone and inside the phone is the smallest. So in that regard I'm really rooting for android, but I can't help but draw parallels with Linux on the desktop.
Sure, we all know how great linux is for certain tasks, but it has missed that spark that makes it catch on in a big way outside IT infrastructures and embedded systems.
So that three years prediciton is sounds a lot like "the year of the linux on the desktop"
Sheldon
Actually prior to the latest version of handbrake, it was the only sane way to do it. The "queue" in handbrake was a memory resident thing, so if you queued up a bunch of stuff, and handbrake crashed (which it does from time to time), you have to re-queue your items including all the "clicky-clicky" of various settings. Then sent it off running again.
Building a short scripts with a single handbrake transcode command per line allowed handbrake to work in the background in a robust way that also allowed the user to stop the process and more easily start it up again.
Sheldon
"...politicians, and Hollywood stars" Those types will suck the juices out of those poor helpless mosquitoes.
Dear god, won't somebody think of the mosquitoes?!
Sheldon
The old and tired bumper sticker sums it up nicely:
"The more people I meet, the more I like my dog"
My dogs and cat are members of the family. I'd throw my neighbor's sprogs under a train to save my dog.
But with so many animals in shelters, it seems a bit odd to clone one (other than to say you can). Go give a new one a good home.
Sheldon
I've played a lot of FPS' up to Unreal2004, and some are clearly better than others. There's the obvious map features, like size vs. player number, overall layout, wall design with hiding places, etc. And that's not even counting the artistic side of texture mapping and making it look interesting.
But the player dynamics, and weapon characteristics combine to subtly change the intensity/speed of the game. For example the archaic Marathon was very slow due to show shot speed comparatively weak weapons. Quake III has much stronger weapons making distances seem shorter due to the killing power.
Unreal has a great balance, of player speed, map size and weapon strength/diversity that makes it consistently fun to play. It also has reasonably good AI for the bots. This balance seems to be elusive in FPS, as there are so few who really get it right, and you can see that in the communities they spawn.
I hope these OSS projects can match the balance of a great FPS even if they don't have the deep pockets or manpower to spend on visually stunning maps.
Sheldon
You caught me. I was a verizon wireless guy for years until I couldn't take the phones anymore and went for AT&T to get a jesus phone. Here in the bland midwest, my AT&T coverage is actually every bit as good as Verizon. But when I head into the eastern mountains or the southwest, Verizon kicks butt. But there's enough areas I go that have no coverage whatsoever (or coverage that is so spotty that it should not be called coverage), that I thought the off-the-cuff comment was needed.
The verizon map isn't solid red, and there's a lot of white areas where I go:
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/CoverageLocatorController
Sheldon
Hell, I'd be happy to just get cell phone COVERAGE in a lot of the US.
Sheldon
I helped the local Humane Society get their records modernized using Animal Shelter Manager (http://sheltermanager.sourceforge.net/home.php). The sysadmin there was feeling a bit out of his depth with setting up the SQL database and such. It was easy work, and made a real tangible difference. I love these sort of freebies too, where there is a task with a clear end.
1) I installed the software.
2) Installed and configured the mySQL on their little server.
3) Got the tables setup
4) Trained the sysadmin on what I'd done and how to maintain/backup the system
5) Got the software installed on the desktops with his help
6) Backed out of the picture
7) No Profit
Sheldon
SOA == Safe Operating Area
Don't toast those MOSFETs
Sheldon
The giant schools are not the place where the best educations come from. Sure they often have the biggest research budgets and thus are in the news the most. Smaller schools with smaller class sizes are where it's at from a value for dollar spent standpoint.
My biggest class was intro psych and it was 75 folks. My Hydrodynamic instability was four students and the professor. Just try to hide when you haven't prepared with only three other peeps to hide behind.
Sheldon
Well played sir! Please pick any one free internet from the first row
Given that USB is PIO and not DMA, the faster the bus runs the more processor intervention is needed. Given how cheap and fast our processors are, that's not a huge deal, but it's not like a DMA based transfer just got faster, it means that the processor is going to be more busy too.
PR-write or not, it will be a PITA just like USB2.0 until it's built in and common.
Sheldon
You left out "insanely zealous fan base willing to pay twice as much for a shorter
laundry list and more vendor lockdown than half a dozen competitors".
By that logic, Apple has a zealous fan base that consist of like 75% of the MP3 owners. However only like 10% of the computer market (if you are being very conservative), so does that mean that these huge droves of apple fanbois are abstaining from buying an apple computer?
I'd argue that you've got about as many hardcore mac fanbois on the iPod as you do in the computer market that will buy anything apple sells, that should be in the single digit percentages overall. The rest of the 75% dominance of the iPod is from an actual good design that outshines the other mp3 players.
The iPhone is no different, there is a small percentage that buys it because it's from Cupertino, the rest of them are buying it because it eclipses all other smart phones out there for them.
Sheldon
Adblock pro - Lexus Edition: This new edition will block all incoming ads to the audio system, and it prevents the heated seats from turning of prematurely.
Sheldon
I'm #ff0000 #00ff00 colorbind you insensitive clod!
Sheldon
Make is not a hardcore magazine that delves deeply into a few areas like "Glass Audio" or "Speaker Builder" tried to do (and sort-of failed at). But rather a liberal arts type of approach where you get a basic understanding of a wide range of topics.
The above mentioned (and beat to death) PID example is a good illustration of this. Another 12 pages could have been consumed with a cursory introduction to PID control, but they used that space for another project.
They have a target audience and I suspect are doing quite well hitting that target. But my projects tend to be a bit deeper and more involved than I see on the pages of Make. Shameless plugging: Electrostatic Loudspeakers with active crossover built from scratch. Allegro based stepper driver built from scratch. Etc (http://quadesl.com).
I let my subscription lapse because it was too fluffy. No I don't want to litter LED thowies everywhere. No I already made 2 liter bottle water rockets in jr high school. They have too many of these sort of projects and not enough hard hitting "worthy" projects like these:
http://www.softservice.com.pl/corolla/avc/
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~willie/lvr.html
http://www.thebackshed.com/cnc/OtherMachines1.asp
http://www.bgsoflex.com/megasquirt.html
But that's just my preference, and I'm already a "Maker" I suppose. They just aren't quite my demographic.
Sheldon
Good point. Win9X was a steaming turd which we all suffered through. And ironically MacOS (in all it's later forms) was also a steaming turd. Multitasking?! Multitasking?! That's advanced stuff, how about a disk driver that was interrupt safe so that you could, you know, do stuff while writing to disk. Man you've got to walk before you can run.
I used to write fortran code in absoft fortran 77 on a Mac during grad school. It was such a great machine for avoiding RSI. I'd do some sort of bone-headed array index error and rather than have my program crash immediately and let me fix it, the whole machine would go down and I'd be able to get up, stretch and get a cup of coffee and maybe drop some kids off at the pool while the machine rebooted. Apple had my back even in those days. No Carpel Tunnel for me.
Sheldon
Apple has yet to create any form of enterprise level reliable software. Not a single one.
Well there's web-objects which back in the day served dynamic content from Disney, Dell etc.
It was one of the darlings of NeXT (a company ahead of it's time), and after NeXT was re-absorbed by Apple has languished and maybe superseded.
I have a razor mouse that I like the texture of and the button feel and placement (plus it isn't sprinkled with superfluous extra buttons). The first ting I did was open that bastard up and remove the blue LED's. It's a mouse, not a runway light, and stop pulsing at me.
Get off my lawn,
Sheldon
Microsoft doesn't often do things right... but their mice and other human interface devices are superb.
I second that! I've been a microsoft mouse user for a long time, they are hard to beat. People used to see my beige Mac with a microsoft mouse on it and look at it in a lost and confused manner like a dog when you move it's food bowl.
Sheldon
For me it takes forever to get used to, those trackmen(?) are horrible, I have helped a few people who have them and I am useless. I'm coming to the sad realization that I'm old, and my thumbs are only used to grip things and to wrap around my member. I get totally pwned at console games that require me to use my thumbs on those satanic little joysticks. I can easily hold my own with a mouse and WASD though.
Get off my lawn,
Sheldon