to see that being blind is, indeed, a quite expensive proposition. JAWS, the screen-reading software mentioned by the submitter, costs US $895. Even the timed evaluation version is $39.95. This sucks; the software needed to access a computer when being blind costs as much as the computer itself, and i'm not even counting a braille keyboard or display.
" At the risk of sounding unsupportive of new technology..."
"I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad..."
Dude, no offense meant, but maybe you need to start actually looking at "new technology" before making "unsupportive" comments. I actually haven't seen an optical mouse requiring a particular mouse pad in well over 4 years.. "modern" ones work on almost any non-reflective surface.
if they had any clue about real-world users, they'd know they're absolutely unpredictable. A user's creativeness to mess things up never ceases to amaze.
My VTech VT1421 (touted as the smallest 900MHz cordless phone) uses a NiMH battery; while probably a far cry from a Li-Ion battery, it's certainly better than a NiCd. The phone's base includes a charger so you can have a spare charged battery there in the (unlikely) event the phone's battery dies (it lasts about a week without recharging) and you absolutely need to talk. A fancy plus is that, if the power goes out, the base draws power from the spare battery, so you can keep on using the phone.
Now, chances are the VT1421 is already discontinued, but do look into vtech's line; i guess if they used NiMH on the VT1421 a couple years ago, they're still using it on newer phones.
Power is an issue, as is processor heatup. In my tests, also looking for a low-power, not necessarily too fast home network server, I measured a loaded Athlon XP 2000+ system eating up 1.2 amps off a 127v AC circuit. A basic P5-133 system consumes 0.4 amps. That's about equivalent to keeping a 60w lightbulb on at all times. So keep that in mind..
there are those that only got their degrees for show, and basically just know their way around a very simple set of "recipes" and yes, software tools. These can be substituted by engineer-in-a-box 1.0.
Now, the kind of engineer that really does creative thinking to solve problems and is much more comfortable with actually building/programming stuff rather than just simulating/prototyping, will not go away, because a) it's much more fun! and b) this is the kind of people that will get everyone else out of trouble when engineeer-in-a-box 1.0 fails to run.
for me, it made more sense to get a US $ 200 PS2, rather than a US $250 graphics card for my computer, in order to be able to play GTA3.
Plus, since there's less hardware variation among consoles, support needs are greatly reduced.
Finally, the fact that games like Halo aren't yet available on the PC maybe has to do with exclusivity contracts; it's the Xbox's killer game and it'd hurt sales if it were available for the PC as well.
Re:Filesystems...
on
Tiny Boxen
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"but i dont think most/.'ers realize how many temp files Linux (and Operating Systems in general) create. "
So, just mount/tmp/ on a ram drive...
Actually, there are many projects, a lot of them aimed at diskless workstations, that do just that, and even symlink all other commonly changing files so that they actually reside on/tmp.
Dude, by now what I'm doing is having spamprobe filtering all my e-mail using Paul Graham's much mentioned bayesian techniques. There's even a way to have spamassassin cooperate with spamprobe, making a filter that I guess will be all but impenetrable for those pesky spams.
Someone pointed out that, by the point my filters get to "read" and categorize e-mail, the spammer's already used up my bandwidth and storage space. I don't care too much, as long as I don't have to see the spam myself. Also, this makes spammer's life a little harder. Maybe if we all had some sort of spam filter the spammers would realize they're not even getting that 0.1% response rate they want and finally go away or die. Cuz man, they can make all the laws they want, but someone will always break them. You don't leave your house's door open hoping the mere existence of laws will prevent people from coming in and stealing your stuff!
Seems like everyone jumped on the bandwagon and implemented a bayesian spam filter shortly after Graham's article hit the net. Best part is, theory or not, the damn thing actually works.
Paul's article lists a few of the bayesian spam filters, but here's a short list of the ones I've tried: Gary Arnold's bayespam is implemented in perl and geared towards qmail using maildir storage.
Brian Burton's spamprobe, written in C++, tries to remember already-seen messages, so that you can dump your spams/good mails on separate folders, have spamprobe learn from them, and delete them afterwards. Spamprobe remembers which ones it already processed, and won't reprocess a message if it's already seen it.
Eric Raymond's bogofilter is a typical ESR tool: concise, with a baroquely written man page, and quite simplistic, but does its job and does it well. ESR even uses some funny terms, like "spamicity", and "ham" (the opposite of spam). I don't like its dependency on the Judy libraries for dynamic arrays but what the heck.
Matthew Walker's BayesSpam plugin for Squirrelmail provides squirrelmail users with bayesian spam filtering capabilities, no longer restricting use of the technique to those with access to procmail/mailfilter systems.
A lot of people seem to have missed these two quotes from the article:
"Along with Hollywood and the recording industry, we have become increasingly concerned about the level of copyright infringement inherent in the free peer-to-peer file swapping services,"
and
"Private Media claims to own the largest library of adult-oriented content in the world, with global copyrights to the content."
Assuming they stick to charging users for access to their network and making sure only their content gets "shared", it doesn't look like they'll be shut down by the RIAA, MPAA or sued into the ground for trading content without the adequate rights. Plus, it's not like the MPAA would be too concerned by porn flicks being traded on the service...
Keaton might not have been the best choice for Batman, but the producers quickly remedied their mistake by casting a couple of even-worse actors for the role, Val Kilmer and George Clooney both sucked really bad as Batman. While I'm at it, I think the series also went to hell when they took Tim Burton off; Schumacher's visual style is completely opposite to the great, dark atmosphere Burton had created on the first two films.
Dude, when you have powerful enemies, you need powerful allies. AMD went head-to-head with Intel, not a particularly small or nice company, they needed (need) support from a company like Microsoft to succeed.
Also, Microsoft has realized for a long time being dependent on Intel is bad news; they've been trying to find options for quite a long time. I still remembr the folks at Intel weren't very happy when Microsoft demoed an early version of Windows NT (back in the early 90's) using a non-intel platform (can't remember if it was MIPS or Alpha). Being able to show Intel that they're not *that* badly needed would probably be good for Bill's boys.
Apparently then the AMD-Microsoft relationship is mutually beneficial for them.
Kudos to the egyptians, now they only need to keep their telecom company state-owned; nasty things happen when you privatize those companies without adequate governmental regulation; witness what happened to the telecom companies in Mexico, Chile and perhaps other countries in south/latin america. They turned, overnight, into greedy monopolies which can't be stopped (here in Mexico, Telmex is running their competition, even the giants like Worldcom-backed Avantel and AT&T, into the ground via dumping and other monopolic practices); and the quality of service hasn't really improved. i'll stop ranting now:)
"leveling up" appeals to a certain segment of the RPG community. Yet there are others who prefer emphasizing role-playing, and for whom gaining experience and levels isn't that important. Finally, there are also plenty of games whose main selling point is being "level-less"; character advancement is accomplished through other means, usually gaining distributable ability points according to actions during the game.
It's a popular myth, but I'm inclined to believe Arthur C. Clarke's statement that he didn't do it on purpose, didn't realize he'd done it until after the movie was out, and that he would have changed the name had he realized the relationship with the IBM name.
Maybe you've already tried mon, but except for the "learning" part, it's pretty smart about when to send an alert and when to keep it to itself (according to what you've defined in the config file), plus it has a nice interface for acknowledging and disabling watches, and can be interfaced to just about anything; I bet all your little scripts can be integrated into mon's monitor/alert system with little work. Right now, mon alerts me when servers stop responding, when the router's interfaces are down, or when there's a power failure. All the alerts are sent by e-mail , however, it also pages me if the power fails AND if it's earlier than 11 PM (don't want it to wake me up).
Also, since the config file is pretty easy and can use M4 to define time periods and addresses to send alerts to, I guess it wouldn't be so hard to write some kind of thingy to update M4 definitions according to its own observations of what you give a damn (or not) about.
You're completely entitled to do things the way you prefer. That doesn't negate the fact that Opera was perhaps the earliest browser to let you open several web pages under the same main window.
"If you want to talk about stuff that Opera has pioneered, start with tabbed browsing."
Early opera versions didn't have "tabs", they were just "windows" you could switch to via the "window" menu. The feature got refined over the years and ended up at what it is now, which is closer to what could be called "tabbed browsing".
I think we're drowning in semantics here, the point is that one of the first things that distinguished Opera from other browsers was that you could have several pages open under the same top-level window. And this was 6 or 7 years ago; Opera does have some history behind it, you know:)
the Linux Terminal Server Project provides superb tools and software to set up a remote display server, you run all apps on the server and do the display on terminals. It works awesomely well, will ease and centralize your administration, and will work with old systems as terminals. If you have a competent admin, setting up guest accounts should be a breeze with this. You also need a competent admin because the server is a single point of failure and has to be kept well-fed and in working order.
"Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference. I think we're better off improving the features (like removing pop-up adds, etc...) than to try to squeak out another.01seconds to render the pictures on a screen."
Featuritis is what brought us bloated, slow browsers such as IE and Mozilla, while I'm an avid Mozilla user, it's comparatively slow and resource-intensive.
Opera has ALWAYS strived for performance , correct HTML, and truly useful features. Opera pioneered the MDI browser concept, as well as accessibility features such as full keyboard browsing, configurable page zoom and many others.
Best of all, they've ALWAYS done this without adding bloat to the browser. It's always been lean and mean, ever since the 1.x versions (I helped with some language translations so I know about this firsthand).
Keep in mind that many places still have aging 486 or P5 systems with little ram or hard disk to spare. On systems where Mozilla or IE won't even download due to lack of disk space, Opera installs and runs completely flawlessly, and absolutely flies when compared to the two leading browsers.
Technically enforcing the "no phones" rule is similar to putting speed bumps to stop speeders on the road. Sure it takes care of the problem, but the real cause, which is people's inability to RESPECT other people's rights (to cross the street without worrying about getting run over, or to enjoy a movie or play without some jackass yapping on the phone next to you) doesn't get taken care of. And as usual, it sucks that the innocent should also be dragged into a more uncomfortable existance because of those who can't RESPECT.
1- upgrading costs money, most people don't understand the benefits enough to want to spend money on it. (i.e. people so used to Win98 crashing every 2 hours, they just can't comprehend there's a way to stop that).
2- A lot of people can't afford a PC powerful enough for WinXP or Win2k. I, for one, sure can't:)
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I want my car to have something like solid snake's stealth camo. *whine*
to see that being blind is, indeed, a quite expensive proposition. JAWS, the screen-reading software mentioned by the submitter, costs US $895. Even the timed evaluation version is $39.95. This sucks; the software needed to access a computer when being blind costs as much as the computer itself, and i'm not even counting a braille keyboard or display.
" At the risk of sounding unsupportive of new technology..."
"I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad..."
Dude, no offense meant, but maybe you need to start actually looking at "new technology" before making "unsupportive" comments. I actually haven't seen an optical mouse requiring a particular mouse pad in well over 4 years.. "modern" ones work on almost any non-reflective surface.
if they had any clue about real-world users, they'd know they're absolutely unpredictable. A user's creativeness to mess things up never ceases to amaze.
My VTech VT1421 (touted as the smallest 900MHz cordless phone) uses a NiMH battery; while probably a far cry from a Li-Ion battery, it's certainly better than a NiCd. The phone's base includes a charger so you can have a spare charged battery there in the (unlikely) event the phone's battery dies (it lasts about a week without recharging) and you absolutely need to talk. A fancy plus is that, if the power goes out, the base draws power from the spare battery, so you can keep on using the phone.
Now, chances are the VT1421 is already discontinued, but do look into vtech's line; i guess if they used NiMH on the VT1421 a couple years ago, they're still using it on newer phones.
Power is an issue, as is processor heatup. In my tests, also looking for a low-power, not necessarily too fast home network server, I measured a loaded Athlon XP 2000+ system eating up 1.2 amps off a 127v AC circuit. A basic P5-133 system consumes 0.4 amps. That's about equivalent to keeping a 60w lightbulb on at all times. So keep that in mind..
there are those that only got their degrees for show, and basically just know their way around a very simple set of "recipes" and yes, software tools. These can be substituted by engineer-in-a-box 1.0.
Now, the kind of engineer that really does creative thinking to solve problems and is much more comfortable with actually building/programming stuff rather than just simulating/prototyping, will not go away, because a) it's much more fun! and b) this is the kind of people that will get everyone else out of trouble when engineeer-in-a-box 1.0 fails to run.
Well, he was also an idiot in Mad City. And who-knows-what in Battlefield Earth, based on the works of R.L. Hubbard, scientology's father.
for me, it made more sense to get a US $ 200 PS2, rather than a US $250 graphics card for my computer, in order to be able to play GTA3.
Plus, since there's less hardware variation among consoles, support needs are greatly reduced.
Finally, the fact that games like Halo aren't yet available on the PC maybe has to do with exclusivity contracts; it's the Xbox's killer game and it'd hurt sales if it were available for the PC as well.
"but i dont think most /.'ers realize how many temp files Linux (and Operating Systems in general) create. "
/tmp/ on a ram drive...
/tmp.
So, just mount
Actually, there are many projects, a lot of them aimed at diskless workstations, that do just that, and even symlink all other commonly changing files so that they actually reside on
Dude, by now what I'm doing is having spamprobe filtering all my e-mail using Paul Graham's much mentioned bayesian techniques. There's even a way to have spamassassin cooperate with spamprobe, making a filter that I guess will be all but impenetrable for those pesky spams.
Someone pointed out that, by the point my filters get to "read" and categorize e-mail, the spammer's already used up my bandwidth and storage space. I don't care too much, as long as I don't have to see the spam myself. Also, this makes spammer's life a little harder. Maybe if we all had some sort of spam filter the spammers would realize they're not even getting that 0.1% response rate they want and finally go away or die. Cuz man, they can make all the laws they want, but someone will always break them. You don't leave your house's door open hoping the mere existence of laws will prevent people from coming in and stealing your stuff!
Paul's article lists a few of the bayesian spam filters, but here's a short list of the ones I've tried:
Gary Arnold's bayespam is implemented in perl and geared towards qmail using maildir storage.
Brian Burton's spamprobe, written in C++, tries to remember already-seen messages, so that you can dump your spams/good mails on separate folders, have spamprobe learn from them, and delete them afterwards. Spamprobe remembers which ones it already processed, and won't reprocess a message if it's already seen it.
Eric Raymond's bogofilter is a typical ESR tool: concise, with a baroquely written man page, and quite simplistic, but does its job and does it well. ESR even uses some funny terms, like "spamicity", and "ham" (the opposite of spam). I don't like its dependency on the Judy libraries for dynamic arrays but what the heck.
Matthew Walker's BayesSpam plugin for Squirrelmail provides squirrelmail users with bayesian spam filtering capabilities, no longer restricting use of the technique to those with access to procmail/mailfilter systems.
A lot of people seem to have missed these two quotes from the article:
"Along with Hollywood and the recording industry, we have become increasingly concerned about the level of copyright infringement inherent in the free peer-to-peer file swapping services,"
and
"Private Media claims to own the largest library of adult-oriented content in the world, with global copyrights to the content."
Assuming they stick to charging users for access to their network and making sure only their content gets "shared", it doesn't look like they'll be shut down by the RIAA, MPAA or sued into the ground for trading content without the adequate rights. Plus, it's not like the MPAA would be too concerned by porn flicks being traded on the service...
Keaton might not have been the best choice for Batman, but the producers quickly remedied their mistake by casting a couple of even-worse actors for the role, Val Kilmer and George Clooney both sucked really bad as Batman. While I'm at it, I think the series also went to hell when they took Tim Burton off; Schumacher's visual style is completely opposite to the great, dark atmosphere Burton had created on the first two films.
Dude, when you have powerful enemies, you need powerful allies. AMD went head-to-head with Intel, not a particularly small or nice company, they needed (need) support from a company like Microsoft to succeed.
Also, Microsoft has realized for a long time being dependent on Intel is bad news; they've been trying to find options for quite a long time. I still remembr the folks at Intel weren't very happy when Microsoft demoed an early version of Windows NT (back in the early 90's) using a non-intel platform (can't remember if it was MIPS or Alpha). Being able to show Intel that they're not *that* badly needed would probably be good for Bill's boys.
Apparently then the AMD-Microsoft relationship is mutually beneficial for them.
Kudos to the egyptians, now they only need to keep their telecom company state-owned; nasty things happen when you privatize those companies without adequate governmental regulation; witness what happened to the telecom companies in Mexico, Chile and perhaps other countries in south/latin america. They turned, overnight, into greedy monopolies which can't be stopped (here in Mexico, Telmex is running their competition, even the giants like Worldcom-backed Avantel and AT&T, into the ground via dumping and other monopolic practices); and the quality of service hasn't really improved. i'll stop ranting now :)
"leveling up" appeals to a certain segment of the RPG community. Yet there are others who prefer emphasizing role-playing, and for whom gaining experience and levels isn't that important. Finally, there are also plenty of games whose main selling point is being "level-less"; character advancement is accomplished through other means, usually gaining distributable ability points according to actions during the game.
It's a popular myth, but I'm inclined to believe Arthur C. Clarke's statement that he didn't do it on purpose, didn't realize he'd done it until after the movie was out, and that he would have changed the name had he realized the relationship with the IBM name.
"Um, so what, Netscape is dead, use mozilla"
"yeah, big deal, it's based on Mozilla 1.0 when the Mozilla Organization just released 1.1, kudos to Netscape's already outdated browser".
Yes, but a lot of the time it's easier to:
1- have users download the familiar Netscape product instead of "that mozilla dinosaur thingy".
2- Introduce Netscape to organizations; at least it's a familiar name and brand for them.
I'm a rabid mozilla user, but still I'm pleased to see that Netscape is still alive, if maybe under AOL's life support infrastructure.
Maybe you've already tried mon, but except for the "learning" part, it's pretty smart about when to send an alert and when to keep it to itself (according to what you've defined in the config file), plus it has a nice interface for acknowledging and disabling watches, and can be interfaced to just about anything; I bet all your little scripts can be integrated into mon's monitor/alert system with little work. Right now, mon alerts me when servers stop responding, when the router's interfaces are down, or when there's a power failure. All the alerts are sent by e-mail , however, it also pages me if the power fails AND if it's earlier than 11 PM (don't want it to wake me up).
Also, since the config file is pretty easy and can use M4 to define time periods and addresses to send alerts to, I guess it wouldn't be so hard to write some kind of thingy to update M4 definitions according to its own observations of what you give a damn (or not) about.
"I detest MDI apps and refuse to use them."
:)
You're completely entitled to do things the way you prefer. That doesn't negate the fact that Opera was perhaps the earliest browser to let you open several web pages under the same main window.
"If you want to talk about stuff that Opera has pioneered, start with tabbed browsing."
Early opera versions didn't have "tabs", they were just "windows" you could switch to via the "window" menu. The feature got refined over the years and ended up at what it is now, which is closer to what could be called "tabbed browsing".
I think we're drowning in semantics here, the point is that one of the first things that distinguished Opera from other browsers was that you could have several pages open under the same top-level window. And this was 6 or 7 years ago; Opera does have some history behind it, you know
the Linux Terminal Server Project provides superb tools and software to set up a remote display server, you run all apps on the server and do the display on terminals. It works awesomely well, will ease and centralize your administration, and will work with old systems as terminals. If you have a competent admin, setting up guest accounts should be a breeze with this. You also need a competent admin because the server is a single point of failure and has to be kept well-fed and in working order.
"Between Opera, IE, and Mozilla, the speed difference is small enough for your average user not to know the difference. .01seconds to render the pictures on a screen."
I think we're better off improving the features (like removing pop-up adds, etc...) than to try to squeak out another
Featuritis is what brought us bloated, slow browsers such as IE and Mozilla, while I'm an avid Mozilla user, it's comparatively slow and resource-intensive.
Opera has ALWAYS strived for performance , correct HTML, and truly useful features. Opera pioneered the MDI browser concept, as well as accessibility features such as full keyboard browsing, configurable page zoom and many others.
Best of all, they've ALWAYS done this without adding bloat to the browser. It's always been lean and mean, ever since the 1.x versions (I helped with some language translations so I know about this firsthand).
Keep in mind that many places still have aging 486 or P5 systems with little ram or hard disk to spare. On systems where Mozilla or IE won't even download due to lack of disk space, Opera installs and runs completely flawlessly, and absolutely flies when compared to the two leading browsers.
Technically enforcing the "no phones" rule is similar to putting speed bumps to stop speeders on the road. Sure it takes care of the problem, but the real cause, which is people's inability to RESPECT other people's rights (to cross the street without worrying about getting run over, or to enjoy a movie or play without some jackass yapping on the phone next to you) doesn't get taken care of. And as usual, it sucks that the innocent should also be dragged into a more uncomfortable existance because of those who can't RESPECT.
1- upgrading costs money, most people don't understand the benefits enough to want to spend money on it. (i.e. people so used to Win98 crashing every 2 hours, they just can't comprehend there's a way to stop that).
:)
2- A lot of people can't afford a PC powerful enough for WinXP or Win2k. I, for one, sure can't