I don't know about hospital software (although I bet a ton of it runs on Windows), but I do know of one instance of Windows leaving a Navy cruiser dead in the water. That's not exactly a good thing either.
Hmmm... Think about the combination of this and online dating sites! Especially if I could upload a target photo instead of sketching!... I think I have some old Cindy Crawford JPGs laying around here somewhere (*dream on*).
I used to work in the IT department of a managed care company in the early 90s, and seem to remember something about it actually being illegal to use the Social Security Number for any other purpose (than running Social Security and the IRS). Of course, we (and every else in healthcare) still used it as a primary numbering/identification scheme. Not sure if the illegality was true or not.
Your average Joe-computer-user will try it in his Windows PC using WMP and it won't work. So he returns it to Best Buy and (maybe) notes to himself to never to buy a DVD with the 'ProtectDisc' logo. Mark that as one lost and pissed customer.
Your average haxxor-d00d/bright-linux-guy/anyone-with-a-clue plays on on some other player that has been hacked up to deal with the non-standard UDF. It works fine.
Then his buddy, Joe, asks him for a copy since he had to return his 'defective' DVD. And while he's at it, he posts a torrent of it in case anyone else had the same problem.
So the studios end up pissing off and alienating their current customers who are unlikely to be pirating or copying the movie, while anyone who is already inclined to pirate/copy it still has the means and knowledge to do so (and now also has the motivation!). Really dumb.
This will work nicely for the very few tetrachromats among us, (http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a24199b1ef8.h tm). These are women who through genetic accident have an extra gene for color in the eye: "that woman's retinas would have four different types of photopigments: blue, red, green, and the slightly shifted green." They apparently have a much more finely tuned sense of color. Of course, there's probably only a few of them around, but hey, we're all about accessibility here!
Jeez, what an idiot. All he had to do to stay out of trouble was to split all the traffic off to the NSA so they could eavesdrop on it all. They'd have leaned on the FBI to keep him out of the lockup. Probably would've gotten a medal from W even...
10. Import lots more women, especially the ones that are obviously female;
11. Hurry up and move all real business out of San Francisco, so it can achieve its destiny of being a combination freakshow theme park and retirement community for rich old liberals;
12. Build some islands in the south part of the bay, kinda like what they're doing in Dubai; I mean the bay is useless down here;
13. Install giant heat lamps over the valley for the evenings when it gets kinda chilly;
14. Move a real baseball, basketball, or football team to San Jose;
15. Put the TGV or Japanese Bullet Train on Caltrain's route;
16. Put taquerias on every corner (no wait, we've already got that);
17. Make bragging about your startup a felony for anyone under the age of 30;
Things like Stanford, a culture that doesn't slam failing and encourages you to try again, and loads of available cash contribute a lot to making Silicon Valley a success.
But don't forget the very good quality of life in the Bay Area, and especially the South Bay / Peninsula. The climate is very good. It's pretty. There's a lot to do, culturally and outdoors. People want to live here. That helps in several ways:
Stanford and Berkeley grads want to stay
Other people want to move and live here
People will create opportunities for themselves to stay in the area
People will stay after they've failed and try again, instead of moving away
Rich, successful people want to stay; and then they invest close to home
Plopping a top research university and cash into Detroit won't necessarily duplicate SV there. Once people become slightly successful, they'll move away. That sets you back.
That being said, astronomical housing prices are probably dampening this argument a bit, but not much. We're all still here; just grumbling more about the prices.
Apparently it's easy for the dogs to sniff out *only* the pirate DVDs because those are the ones that haven't washed in months and smell like salt-tack and grog.
Unfortunately they haven't figured out how to train the dogs to avoid catching their noses on the hooks when they open the package...
I don't know if the PDP-8 and 11 qualify as microcomputers; I always thought they were minis, but they sure were great boxes.
Cut my teeth on a PDP-8/E (http://www.pdp8.net/) running ETOS (a 16-user timesharing OS) in 64KB of memory. It had a great, powerful, simple assembler language. I remember the day we got a 1MB hard disk -- wow what an upgrade from (small) mag-tapes and paper-tape!
The PDP-8 would be a good box to play with too. It's fairly simple inside (AFAIR); and not too large. You wouldn't need a hard disk to run it, especially not for an exhibit. Just use the small mag tapes.
Plus it will really look good in an exhibit, better than the later micros. It's got a good set of blinking lights on the front (and LED numbers too, depending on the model), which always looks more impressive in an exhibit. And you could set it up to spin the tape reels back and forth too, which looks good.
If you're really ambitious, there were some assembler programs that controlled CPU in a way that its electrical interference would play music over nearby radios. Now that would be a cool exhibit - blink lights and LEDs, tape drive moving back and forth, and music playing over an old transistor radio nearby!
Yup, after checking out their website, it appears that the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences exists solely for the purpose of running the Webby awards.
"Membership in The Academy is currently by invitation only and is limited to those individuals who have catalyzed great achievements on the Internet, demonstrated extraordinary talent in a traditional medium, or who possess in-depth knowledge of new media and comprehensive familiarity with a broad range of sites within a category."
So there's a buzzword filled load of crap that means: we invite our friends and people who we think are important.
I guess it's probably a good racket though. More credit to them for thinking of it and making it work. Just don't expect anyone to give a rat's ass about the awards.
Performance may be better in the long run with a microkernel. Sure, there is bound to be a performance penalty in message passing (and checking) with a modularized architecture. But since the developers would (hopefully) spend a lots less time tracking down bugs through a massive kernel, perhaps they could devote a lot more time to perfomance improvement work in the code? I have to imagine that kernels like Linux, OSX, and XP have lots of old, nightmare code that is horribly inefficient; the developers probably just haven't gotten around to improving it because they're too busy tracking down bugs and security breaches, or implementing drivers for the latest gadget.
Try wearing khaki pants, a white button down shirt, and a tie next time you shop at the supermarket. I used to have to wear that at work, and we'd often go to the Jewel supermarket deli counter for lunch. Usually I'd get mistaken for a store manager at least once per visit.
Eventually I stopped trying to tell little old ladies that I didn't work there. I had gotten to know the store well enough that it was easier to just tell them where their item was...
Apparently something similar happened with Teflon too. The engineers at Dupont spent a very long time trying to get it to adhere to various surfaces. Teflon is so non-sticky that it took them years to get it to stick to metal pots and pans. Finally they came up with techniques of multiple layering and various methods to bake it on. More at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_173.html
If it's that sticky, how do we ever get it out of the bottle?
On another note, this stuff would would really make the old glue-friend's-hand-to-forehead-or-other-body-part prank very painful...
Maybe a future, but more as a small UMPC
on
The Future of the PDA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think there is a market for PDAs, but not as they are currently configured.
Most of the current uses of a PDA will probably be ceded to smartphones (calendar, address book, tasklist, calculator, MP3 player, etc).
The one advantage that a PDA could have is that its form factor has traditionally been small enough to be truly portable and almost large enough that tasks that are next to impossible on phones' small screens (e.g., surfing the Web, using interactive applications) can actually be performed on them without too much user frustration.
Who really likes using the Internet on a phone? Does anyone think that tablet PCs are really that portable (without a laptop bag)?
Therefore I think there would be a market for PDAs with good sized screens and Wifi/cellular data connections. People would use them as an appliance to surf the Internet and for other applications that required more screen real estate than a phone has. The real killer machine would be about the size of a checkbook (so it fits in your pocket) and flips open to reveal two screens that fit up against each other almost seamlessly, thus doubling screen size.
I think UMPCs are too big, and smartphones too small to be truly portable yet usable Internet appliances. PDAs could fit that niche (thus blurring the distinction between them and UMPCs).
> What the fuck does pg_hba mean? I don't know what hba stands for.
Umm... this one is tough... If you'd RTFM, you'd see from the *2nd* sentence of the documentation section on the pg_hba.conf file, under the Client Authentication chapter:
I'll bet he's got a customized version of Clippy installed on his kid's computers, integrated into IE:
"I see that you are searching for AAC music files on Google. Would you like me to:
1. Tell your dad? 2. Redirect you to MSN Search? 3. Search eBay for a helmet to protect you from flying furniture? 4. Expose another IE security hole to the press to keep Dad at the office all night?"
Oh wait... That won't work; if his kids use Google and iPods, they're probably using Firefox too...
Sort of... not totally stand-alone in the traditional binary executable sense. You still need the Ruby interpreter.
But several tools (Ruby2EXE, ExeRb) allow you to bundle your program, libraries, and the Ruby interpreter into an executable that you can then distribute. I've used them in the past and they work well -- never had any users tell me they couldn't install the program.
There are various options available for a GUI. I've used wxRuby a lot. It's an interface to the WxWindows/WxWidgets toolkit. I think it works very well, and I really like it's auto-layout features using sizers, although the API is very C++-like.
Another toolkit that people use a bunch is fxruby, which interfaces with the Fox toolkit.
There are lots more GUIs. Take a look at the Ruby App Archive or lurk on the mailing lists to see what toolkits people are using (or just ask them).
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfat her anonymously published a series of letters in the Maryland Gazette in the 1770s arguing against the royal governor. Those letters helped galvanize public opinion in Maryland for independence and against England. I doubt the royal authorities would have let him go on had he signed his own name to them.
He later signed the Declaration of Independence, although he signed his name to that one. At that point, I suppose he figured the Contintental Army was protection enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah it's real hard to go to http://ubuntu.com/ right-click on the icon, and choose Save As... Could take at least 3 maybe 4 seconds.
Or I'll make it even easier for ya:
wget https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Official?action=A
I don't know about hospital software (although I bet a ton of it runs on Windows), but I do know of one instance of Windows leaving a Navy cruiser dead in the water. That's not exactly a good thing either.
either that or, knowing the audience, the most number of cool-looking dual AMD Opteron Linux boxes sketched out!
Hmmm... Think about the combination of this and online dating sites! Especially if I could upload a target photo instead of sketching! ... I think I have some old Cindy Crawford JPGs laying around here somewhere (*dream on*).
From the Social Security Administration:
How dumb is this idea?
Your average Joe-computer-user will try it in his Windows PC using WMP and it won't work. So he returns it to Best Buy and (maybe) notes to himself to never to buy a DVD with the 'ProtectDisc' logo. Mark that as one lost and pissed customer.
Your average haxxor-d00d/bright-linux-guy/anyone-with-a-clue plays on on some other player that has been hacked up to deal with the non-standard UDF. It works fine.
Then his buddy, Joe, asks him for a copy since he had to return his 'defective' DVD. And while he's at it, he posts a torrent of it in case anyone else had the same problem.
So the studios end up pissing off and alienating their current customers who are unlikely to be pirating or copying the movie, while anyone who is already inclined to pirate/copy it still has the means and knowledge to do so (and now also has the motivation!). Really dumb.
...the administration, but it is now just annoying how Jon Stewart consistently says the same things about them
Umm... Maybe that's because they're the ones making the most screwups?
again and again.
And because they don't ever learn from or admit their mistakes?
full disclosure: I used to vote Republican (I'm sorry, I really am)
This will work nicely for the very few tetrachromats among us, (http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a24199b1ef8.h tm). These are women who through genetic accident have an extra gene for color in the eye: "that woman's retinas would have four different types of photopigments: blue, red, green, and the slightly shifted green." They apparently have a much more finely tuned sense of color. Of course, there's probably only a few of them around, but hey, we're all about accessibility here!
Jeez, what an idiot. All he had to do to stay out of trouble was to split all the traffic off to the NSA so they could eavesdrop on it all. They'd have leaned on the FBI to keep him out of the lockup. Probably would've gotten a medal from W even...
If I decode this correctly, I guess you could say their claims have been 'compressed'. Get the picture?
Har har... yeah they're bad but hey it's Friday, cut me some slack. I gotta go decompress...
10. Import lots more women, especially the ones that are obviously female;
11. Hurry up and move all real business out of San Francisco, so it can achieve its destiny of being a combination freakshow theme park and retirement community for rich old liberals;
12. Build some islands in the south part of the bay, kinda like what they're doing in Dubai; I mean the bay is useless down here;
13. Install giant heat lamps over the valley for the evenings when it gets kinda chilly;
14. Move a real baseball, basketball, or football team to San Jose;
15. Put the TGV or Japanese Bullet Train on Caltrain's route;
16. Put taquerias on every corner (no wait, we've already got that);
17. Make bragging about your startup a felony for anyone under the age of 30;
18. Secede from JesusLand.
Things like Stanford, a culture that doesn't slam failing and encourages you to try again, and loads of available cash contribute a lot to making Silicon Valley a success.
But don't forget the very good quality of life in the Bay Area, and especially the South Bay / Peninsula. The climate is very good. It's pretty. There's a lot to do, culturally and outdoors. People want to live here. That helps in several ways:
Plopping a top research university and cash into Detroit won't necessarily duplicate SV there. Once people become slightly successful, they'll move away. That sets you back.
That being said, astronomical housing prices are probably dampening this argument a bit, but not much. We're all still here; just grumbling more about the prices.
Apparently it's easy for the dogs to sniff out *only* the pirate DVDs because those are the ones that haven't washed in months and smell like salt-tack and grog.
Unfortunately they haven't figured out how to train the dogs to avoid catching their noses on the hooks when they open the package...
I don't know if the PDP-8 and 11 qualify as microcomputers; I always thought they were minis, but they sure were great boxes.
Cut my teeth on a PDP-8/E (http://www.pdp8.net/) running ETOS (a 16-user timesharing OS) in 64KB of memory. It had a great, powerful, simple assembler language. I remember the day we got a 1MB hard disk -- wow what an upgrade from (small) mag-tapes and paper-tape!
The PDP-8 would be a good box to play with too. It's fairly simple inside (AFAIR); and not too large. You wouldn't need a hard disk to run it, especially not for an exhibit. Just use the small mag tapes.
Plus it will really look good in an exhibit, better than the later micros. It's got a good set of blinking lights on the front (and LED numbers too, depending on the model), which always looks more impressive in an exhibit. And you could set it up to spin the tape reels back and forth too, which looks good.
If you're really ambitious, there were some assembler programs that controlled CPU in a way that its electrical interference would play music over nearby radios. Now that would be a cool exhibit - blink lights and LEDs, tape drive moving back and forth, and music playing over an old transistor radio nearby!
Yup, after checking out their website, it appears that the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences exists solely for the purpose of running the Webby awards.
"Membership in The Academy is currently by invitation only and is limited to those individuals who have catalyzed great achievements on the Internet, demonstrated extraordinary talent in a traditional medium, or who possess in-depth knowledge of new media and comprehensive familiarity with a broad range of sites within a category."
So there's a buzzword filled load of crap that means: we invite our friends and people who we think are important.
I guess it's probably a good racket though. More credit to them for thinking of it and making it work. Just don't expect anyone to give a rat's ass about the awards.
Performance may be better in the long run with a microkernel. Sure, there is bound to be a performance penalty in message passing (and checking) with a modularized architecture. But since the developers would (hopefully) spend a lots less time tracking down bugs through a massive kernel, perhaps they could devote a lot more time to perfomance improvement work in the code? I have to imagine that kernels like Linux, OSX, and XP have lots of old, nightmare code that is horribly inefficient; the developers probably just haven't gotten around to improving it because they're too busy tracking down bugs and security breaches, or implementing drivers for the latest gadget.
Try wearing khaki pants, a white button down shirt, and a tie next time you shop at the supermarket. I used to have to wear that at work, and we'd often go to the Jewel supermarket deli counter for lunch. Usually I'd get mistaken for a store manager at least once per visit.
Eventually I stopped trying to tell little old ladies that I didn't work there. I had gotten to know the store well enough that it was easier to just tell them where their item was...
Apparently something similar happened with Teflon too. The engineers at Dupont spent a very long time trying to get it to adhere to various surfaces. Teflon is so non-sticky that it took them years to get it to stick to metal pots and pans. Finally they came up with techniques of multiple layering and various methods to bake it on. More at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_173.html
If it's that sticky, how do we ever get it out of the bottle?
On another note, this stuff would would really make the old glue-friend's-hand-to-forehead-or-other-body-part prank very painful...
I think there is a market for PDAs, but not as they are currently configured.
Most of the current uses of a PDA will probably be ceded to smartphones (calendar, address book, tasklist, calculator, MP3 player, etc).
The one advantage that a PDA could have is that its form factor has traditionally been small enough to be truly portable and almost large enough that tasks that are next to impossible on phones' small screens (e.g., surfing the Web, using interactive applications) can actually be performed on them without too much user frustration.
Who really likes using the Internet on a phone? Does anyone think that tablet PCs are really that portable (without a laptop bag)?
Therefore I think there would be a market for PDAs with good sized screens and Wifi/cellular data connections. People would use them as an appliance to surf the Internet and for other applications that required more screen real estate than a phone has. The real killer machine would be about the size of a checkbook (so it fits in your pocket) and flips open to reveal two screens that fit up against each other almost seamlessly, thus doubling screen size.
I think UMPCs are too big, and smartphones too small to be truly portable yet usable Internet appliances. PDAs could fit that niche (thus blurring the distinction between them and UMPCs).
> What the fuck does pg_hba mean? I don't know what hba stands for.
Umm... this one is tough... If you'd RTFM, you'd see from the *2nd* sentence of the documentation section on the pg_hba.conf file, under the Client Authentication chapter:
"(HBA stands for host-based authentication.)"
I think even you can guess what the pg means.
I for one am absolutely shocked by the huge number of deaths in Japan caused by old Pong games and Stratocaster guitars!
Please won't somebody save the children!
I'll bet he's got a customized version of Clippy installed on his kid's computers, integrated into IE:
"I see that you are searching for AAC music files on Google. Would you like me to:
1. Tell your dad?
2. Redirect you to MSN Search?
3. Search eBay for a helmet to protect you from flying furniture?
4. Expose another IE security hole to the press to keep Dad at the office all night?"
Oh wait... That won't work; if his kids use Google and iPods, they're probably using Firefox too...
Sort of... not totally stand-alone in the traditional binary executable sense. You still need the Ruby interpreter.
But several tools (Ruby2EXE, ExeRb) allow you to bundle your program, libraries, and the Ruby interpreter into an executable that you can then distribute. I've used them in the past and they work well -- never had any users tell me they couldn't install the program.
There are various options available for a GUI. I've used wxRuby a lot. It's an interface to the WxWindows/WxWidgets toolkit. I think it works very well, and I really like it's auto-layout features using sizers, although the API is very C++-like.
Another toolkit that people use a bunch is fxruby, which interfaces with the Fox toolkit.
There are lots more GUIs. Take a look at the Ruby App Archive or lurk on the mailing lists to see what toolkits people are using (or just ask them).
They would be appalled.
t her anonymously published a series of letters in the Maryland Gazette in the 1770s arguing against the royal governor. Those letters helped galvanize public opinion in Maryland for independence and against England. I doubt the royal authorities would have let him go on had he signed his own name to them.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfa
He later signed the Declaration of Independence, although he signed his name to that one. At that point, I suppose he figured the Contintental Army was protection enough.