This brings up an interesting point -- anybody know of a site that lists laptop models that can run with the lid closed?
Are there really any that won't? I've used linux on four different laptops - an ancient Toshiba, a slightly newer Compaq, a Dell Inspiron made five years ago, and a Sony Vaio I bought this year. All of them would run with the lid closed, given the right BIOS setting. Getting into the BIOS is not always obvious, but that's another story...
"I have also been retained by the Department of Justice in its investigation of the INSLAW matter. In 1992 (and later in 1995) my task in that engagement was to investigate alleged copyright theft and subsequent cover-up by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the United States Customs Service, and the Defense Intelligence Agency."
So Professor Davis can not only tell us that there is no SCO code in linux, but he should also be able to tell us how much crack the SCO weasels had to smoke before formulating their outrageous claims.
In one episode, the Simpson's house is right next to the nuke plant. Homer, after driving all the way to work, ends up parking right next to his house.
Just another example of the weird geography of Springfield (it must exist in a higher-dimensional space).
Star Trek is living the old Dylan Thomas poem "Do not go gently into that good night..." Unfortunately, Trek's raging makes for very bad TV.
I watched the original Star Trek (TOS) as a kid, and I was captivated and stimulated by the series of new and amazing things it revealed: scientific wonders, new forms of life, alien cultures, and above all the feeling of adventure "out there" among the stars.
Trek TNG followed this formula pretty well, although it became too immersed in "technology" plots - how many variations on the holodeck plot can they expect us to endure?
DS9's theme was more political, exploring the various relations between the Federation, the Bajorans, and the Cardassians - and, to a lesser extent, the Klingons and the Ferengi. This variation on the theme seemed to bore a lot of people, but it seemed to me it produced some of the best writing of all the Trek series.
Voyager was where I seriously began to lose interest. The "journey home" theme - a kind futuristic retelling of the Odyssey was a good foundation to build on, but the series never seemed to take advantage of its potential. You know that a Trek series is failing at its primary mission when the producers feel the need to add cheesecake like Seven just to prop up its ratings.
Enterprise? They've lost me and I can't even bring myself to watch it. Don't even know its regular time slot. For my sci-fi fix I now turn to Stargate *, and reruns of Farscape, DS9, and Babylon 5. Oh, and I have great hopes for Battlestar Galactica - the human race fighting for its survival is a hugely compelling theme, and from the looks of the premier, the SciFi channel wants to do it right.
Yes, Star Trek needs to be put to sleep, or at least into a deep coma. I don't even have to RTFA to tell you my opinion on this.
A recent post by Dan Wallach to the RISKS digest describes how Dan managed to fly from Houston to Chicago, visit Fermilab, and fly back to Houston without having to show a photo id.
From the article: Ericsson is pulling the plug on its technology licensing unit, the wholly-owned subsidiary which invented Bluetooth wireless technology and became the driving force behind the company's Bluetooth initiative.... Ericsson also won't pursue new chip customers for Bluetooth technology licensing.
So was Ericsson, as the inventor of Bluetooth, the only licensing authority, or has it granted/sold that authority to others?
What's likely is that the author is jumping to conclusions. The first thing you do (well, maybe the second or third) before designing for production is to build a prototype. That seems likely. Whether you and I see a video- and wifi-capable iPod is a prediction best made with chicken bones or dice.
Most people who just saw the movie didn't care for it.
I loved the book, and sorta-kinda like the movie - well, except for Jodie's sappy, sobby "They should have sent a poet" scene. Talk about chewing the scenery!
If I saw the movie before I had read the book, I probably wouldn't care for it. I'm probably just reading into it things I know about the book.
Contact is a great book to read a second and third time. On my first read, I thought it was a decent book with a good plot. On my second read, I caught all sorts of subtle foreshadowing I hadn't seen the first time, and I realized what a finely crafted story it is.
If they only sue approx 700 people a month and the net population is growing at a faster rate then can they physically keep up with the explosion of P2P and file sharing?
That depends on how many people are deterred by the lawsuits. I'm not sure about the rate of growth or use of the P2P services, but I'd guess that if filing one lawsuit deters 100,000 people, then they probably can keep up with the rate of growth. If it's 1,000 then maybe. If (as is probably the case) it's fewer than 10, then they would seem to be fighting a losing battle.
I'd also guess that the "discouragement rate" was the highest with the first round of lawsuits, and is diminishing steadily each time.
An APOD picture I like better was posted June 23 - of the Venus transit of the Sun. The higher resolution version, at 1500 by 1500, makes the best desktop pic, although it will need a little work in the GIMP or PhotoShop to make it fit your desktop's aspect ratio.
Until you need to do a search by date, and discover that Gmail's date search relies on the upload date (not really the header date) and entirely ignores the message content dates. Your search returns an empty result because Gmail thinks all your mail was sent on Fri, Aug 20, 2004.
I like the idea of having all my mail - ever - indexed, searchable, available through the Internet, without having to manage the infrastructure myself. I have a setup similar to what you describe. I ssh into my site. Redirect an IMAP and SMTP port, and voila - I can read my mail from anywhere. I'm experimenting with the idea of Google Mail as an alternative that I don't have to manage myself.
My e-mail, too, is irreplaceable. I regard it as among the most precious of my data. I would never trust Gmail to be my only copy of anything, for a variety of reasons. But it would be nice to upload my old e-mail to it, mirror my new e-mail to it (or vice-versa), and have a nice searchable backup that I can get to from anywhere.
Doing this within 3d of 12/5/02 turned up fourteen messages that were sent in that range.
Wait. You mean Google's date search is working for uploaded mail? Didn't work for me last time I tried it. Hmm... if the date search does work, then I can probably live with the wrong dates displayed on the indexes.
Well, see, you can search your email. Using Google. And we all know that Google r0x0rz. So even if the SMTP timestamp is wrong, you can enter "march 1996" in your search, and pull up any messages that include that were sent then.
But that's a text search, not a date search. It's a kludge, and it may not catch every message. It's been a long time since I looked at the RFC, but I seem to remember that there are different ways a timestamp can be legally formatted in a message header. Constructing a search to match all of them would be mind-numbing and error-prone.
Even worse than that, with text matching, it's very hard to say something like "find all messages within 2 days of March 10, 1996" - if I wanted to narrow the search in my first example.
In addition to the search problems, the Gmail indexes, like Inbox, will show all my mail as having arrived at the day of its uploading. Not helpful to see 10,000 messages all marked with the same date.
I should have been more specific. Gmail does show the correct Date: header when you look at the message, but when you look at an index like Inbox, the dates listed there are the upload date, not the Date: of the message. The date by which Gmail "knows" the message is the date of arrival, not the date given in the Date: header.
And it's been mentioned before, but I still think the Gmail Loader is still a handy utility.
Does the Gmail Loader still have the limitation that the date that appears on any uploaded e-mail in Gmail is the date of its upload, not the date of its original sending? If not (and I don't see how it could, as that problem must lie on the Gmail side), then it's hardly worth using. What's the point of uploading twelve years of e-mail to Gmail if you can't tell it "Show me all mail from March of 1996" and get the right answer?
Importing mail from past archives is a big item on my wish list for Gmail. The Gmail Loader is a huge step in that direction, but until Google fixes the date problem, it doesn't do me any good.
I beg to differ. Gmail's UI is geared towards low volumes of email. If, like me, you receive thousands of emails a week, a number of major problems rear their heads.
You are right that Gmail is not perfect. Since getting my account some weeks ago, I've been keeping a list of needed improvements - everything from outright bugs (I can tell you how to make it say "displaying items 101-100 of 100") to wish-list items like importing address books, or even importing whole e-mail archives with the correct dates. I have nearly forty such items on my list.
Despite all its warts, though, I agree with the first poster that Gmail is a huge improvement over Hotmail and other free webmail sites. I've Hotmail, Yahoo, Excite, and a half-dozen smaller providers. None is nearly as good as Gmail. That doesn't mean I want Gmail to stop where it is. Although its javascript-intensive design works fine on Mozilla, I would also like to see a plain HTML interface. Hell, I'd also love to see an IMAP interface, but I don't see that happening. But even as is now, Gmail is better than any free webmail provider I've used.
I have my account subscribed to LKML and a dozen other high-traffic linux-related lists, some of them with similar names. I don't have much trouble keeping the messages correctly tagged, although I have to admit I look at only a small percentage of them. On occasion, I do see some messages that Gmail can't parse correctly for some odd reason probably related to bad MIME-encodings.
It would be helpful if Gmail would let us filter messages based on arbitrary headers like Delivered-To:, or the special X- tags that most good mailing-list software adds to messages.
Storage is only a factor until a certain degree - meaning that 2MB is nearly impossible to live off of, but beyond 1 GB you are just talking wasted space for most users.
You are right, but look at that fact another way: the vast majority of users can't begin to fill 1GB in the foreseeable future. (I got a gmail account some weeks ago, subscribed it to LKML, and every other high-traffic linux list I could find - and it's now at only 15%.) Once capacity gets beyond about 100MB, most users won't come anywhere near their limit in the next couple of years.
In fact, I'd bet that Google probably doesn't have enough disk space on hand for n users * 1 GB. They're probably under by (WAG) 90%. But that makes sense - why buy all the storage they're going to need right now if most if it is going to sit empty? With disk drives falling in price every day, it makes sense - especially at that scale - to purchase space only as it's needed.
Therefore, Google's 1GB limit doesn't really mean anything, except as a foil to those few radical cases who see free storage as a chance to mail their pr0n collection to themselves, thus achieving an offsite backup. For most users, the limit might as well be 2GB. Or 10GB. Or 100GB. Given that (a) most users can't use all their space and (b) Google's not buying drives for that empty space anyway, then the limit becomes just a marketing tactic... but a good one, considering how much attention it has gotten for gmail.
The guys over at Hotmail are just now figuring this out.
My guess: when gmail is finally opened to the public, it will at least match the free storage of any other service out there, if not exceeding the others. Maybe 2GB, maybe 5GB, but I expect to see more that 1GB.
Slashdot Mirror
Two sodium atoms are walking down the street. Suddenly one stops and looks around.
The other sodium atom says "What's the matter?"
The first sodium atom replies "I think I just lost an electron!"
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm positive."
This brings up an interesting point -- anybody know of a site that lists laptop models that can run with the lid closed?
Are there really any that won't? I've used linux on four different laptops - an ancient Toshiba, a slightly newer Compaq, a Dell Inspiron made five years ago, and a Sony Vaio I bought this year. All of them would run with the lid closed, given the right BIOS setting. Getting into the BIOS is not always obvious, but that's another story...
"I have also been retained by the Department of Justice in its investigation of the INSLAW matter. In 1992 (and later in 1995) my task in that engagement was to investigate alleged copyright theft and subsequent cover-up by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the United States Customs Service, and the Defense Intelligence Agency."
So Professor Davis can not only tell us that there is no SCO code in linux, but he should also be able to tell us how much crack the SCO weasels had to smoke before formulating their outrageous claims.
There is no such thing as "completely accurate". Maybe it was just definitively wrong.
There are at least two Simpsons driving games: Hit & Run and Road Rage. We have them both for the kids' gamecube, and they're a lot of fun.
In one episode, the Simpson's house is right next to the nuke plant. Homer, after driving all the way to work, ends up parking right next to his house.
Just another example of the weird geography of Springfield (it must exist in a higher-dimensional space).
Star Trek is living the old Dylan Thomas poem "Do not go gently into that good night..." Unfortunately, Trek's raging makes for very bad TV.
I watched the original Star Trek (TOS) as a kid, and I was captivated and stimulated by the series of new and amazing things it revealed: scientific wonders, new forms of life, alien cultures, and above all the feeling of adventure "out there" among the stars.
Trek TNG followed this formula pretty well, although it became too immersed in "technology" plots - how many variations on the holodeck plot can they expect us to endure?
DS9's theme was more political, exploring the various relations between the Federation, the Bajorans, and the Cardassians - and, to a lesser extent, the Klingons and the Ferengi. This variation on the theme seemed to bore a lot of people, but it seemed to me it produced some of the best writing of all the Trek series.
Voyager was where I seriously began to lose interest. The "journey home" theme - a kind futuristic retelling of the Odyssey was a good foundation to build on, but the series never seemed to take advantage of its potential. You know that a Trek series is failing at its primary mission when the producers feel the need to add cheesecake like Seven just to prop up its ratings.
Enterprise? They've lost me and I can't even bring myself to watch it. Don't even know its regular time slot. For my sci-fi fix I now turn to Stargate *, and reruns of Farscape, DS9, and Babylon 5. Oh, and I have great hopes for Battlestar Galactica - the human race fighting for its survival is a hugely compelling theme, and from the looks of the premier, the SciFi channel wants to do it right.
Yes, Star Trek needs to be put to sleep, or at least into a deep coma. I don't even have to RTFA to tell you my opinion on this.
Oh that Kafka, he's a scary one.
Considering he's been dead for 80 years, I think it would be damned scary to have Franz Kafka knock on my door in the middle of the night!
A recent post by Dan Wallach to the RISKS digest describes how Dan managed to fly from Houston to Chicago, visit Fermilab, and fly back to Houston without having to show a photo id.
From the article: Ericsson is pulling the plug on its technology licensing unit, the wholly-owned subsidiary which invented Bluetooth wireless technology and became the driving force behind the company's Bluetooth initiative.... Ericsson also won't pursue new chip customers for Bluetooth technology licensing.
So was Ericsson, as the inventor of Bluetooth, the only licensing authority, or has it granted/sold that authority to others?
I think it's very likely that I'm confused ;)
<grin>
What's likely is that the author is jumping to conclusions. The first thing you do (well, maybe the second or third) before designing for production is to build a prototype. That seems likely. Whether you and I see a video- and wifi-capable iPod is a prediction best made with chicken bones or dice.
Why do hamsters need a night light? They're used to working in the dark because, guess what boys and girls, hamsters are nocturnal!
Most people who just saw the movie didn't care for it.
I loved the book, and sorta-kinda like the movie - well, except for Jodie's sappy, sobby "They should have sent a poet" scene. Talk about chewing the scenery!
If I saw the movie before I had read the book, I probably wouldn't care for it. I'm probably just reading into it things I know about the book.
Contact is a great book to read a second and third time. On my first read, I thought it was a decent book with a good plot. On my second read, I caught all sorts of subtle foreshadowing I hadn't seen the first time, and I realized what a finely crafted story it is.
If they only sue approx 700 people a month and the net population is growing at a faster rate then can they physically keep up with the explosion of P2P and file sharing?
That depends on how many people are deterred by the lawsuits. I'm not sure about the rate of growth or use of the P2P services, but I'd guess that if filing one lawsuit deters 100,000 people, then they probably can keep up with the rate of growth. If it's 1,000 then maybe. If (as is probably the case) it's fewer than 10, then they would seem to be fighting a losing battle.
I'd also guess that the "discouragement rate" was the highest with the first round of lawsuits, and is diminishing steadily each time.
Not only is it ugly, its not in any way shape or form a "photomosaic"
Indeed. It would be more appropriate to call it a collage.
An APOD picture I like better was posted June 23 - of the Venus transit of the Sun. The higher resolution version, at 1500 by 1500, makes the best desktop pic, although it will need a little work in the GIMP or PhotoShop to make it fit your desktop's aspect ratio.
Maybe we should just adopt Vernor Vinge's nickname "The Net of a Million Lies" and make it the official motto of the Internet.
An electric car? But 2014 will be the 50th anniversary of the Mustang! I'd rather have a gas-guzzling 300HP convertible pony car myself.
It works fine for me.
Until you need to do a search by date, and discover that Gmail's date search relies on the upload date (not really the header date) and entirely ignores the message content dates. Your search returns an empty result because Gmail thinks all your mail was sent on Fri, Aug 20, 2004.
I like the idea of having all my mail - ever - indexed, searchable, available through the Internet, without having to manage the infrastructure myself. I have a setup similar to what you describe. I ssh into my site. Redirect an IMAP and SMTP port, and voila - I can read my mail from anywhere. I'm experimenting with the idea of Google Mail as an alternative that I don't have to manage myself.
My e-mail, too, is irreplaceable. I regard it as among the most precious of my data. I would never trust Gmail to be my only copy of anything, for a variety of reasons. But it would be nice to upload my old e-mail to it, mirror my new e-mail to it (or vice-versa), and have a nice searchable backup that I can get to from anywhere.
Doing this within 3d of 12/5/02 turned up fourteen messages that were sent in that range.
Wait. You mean Google's date search is working for uploaded mail? Didn't work for me last time I tried it. Hmm... if the date search does work, then I can probably live with the wrong dates displayed on the indexes.
Well, see, you can search your email. Using Google. And we all know that Google r0x0rz. So even if the SMTP timestamp is wrong, you can enter "march 1996" in your search, and pull up any messages that include that were sent then.
But that's a text search, not a date search. It's a kludge, and it may not catch every message. It's been a long time since I looked at the RFC, but I seem to remember that there are different ways a timestamp can be legally formatted in a message header. Constructing a search to match all of them would be mind-numbing and error-prone.
Even worse than that, with text matching, it's very hard to say something like "find all messages within 2 days of March 10, 1996" - if I wanted to narrow the search in my first example.
In addition to the search problems, the Gmail indexes, like Inbox, will show all my mail as having arrived at the day of its uploading. Not helpful to see 10,000 messages all marked with the same date.
I should have been more specific. Gmail does show the correct Date: header when you look at the message, but when you look at an index like Inbox, the dates listed there are the upload date, not the Date: of the message. The date by which Gmail "knows" the message is the date of arrival, not the date given in the Date: header.
And it's been mentioned before, but I still think the Gmail Loader is still a handy utility.
Does the Gmail Loader still have the limitation that the date that appears on any uploaded e-mail in Gmail is the date of its upload, not the date of its original sending? If not (and I don't see how it could, as that problem must lie on the Gmail side), then it's hardly worth using. What's the point of uploading twelve years of e-mail to Gmail if you can't tell it "Show me all mail from March of 1996" and get the right answer?
Importing mail from past archives is a big item on my wish list for Gmail. The Gmail Loader is a huge step in that direction, but until Google fixes the date problem, it doesn't do me any good.
I beg to differ. Gmail's UI is geared towards low volumes of email. If, like me, you receive thousands of emails a week, a number of major problems rear their heads.
You are right that Gmail is not perfect. Since getting my account some weeks ago, I've been keeping a list of needed improvements - everything from outright bugs (I can tell you how to make it say "displaying items 101-100 of 100") to wish-list items like importing address books, or even importing whole e-mail archives with the correct dates. I have nearly forty such items on my list.
Despite all its warts, though, I agree with the first poster that Gmail is a huge improvement over Hotmail and other free webmail sites. I've Hotmail, Yahoo, Excite, and a half-dozen smaller providers. None is nearly as good as Gmail. That doesn't mean I want Gmail to stop where it is. Although its javascript-intensive design works fine on Mozilla, I would also like to see a plain HTML interface. Hell, I'd also love to see an IMAP interface, but I don't see that happening. But even as is now, Gmail is better than any free webmail provider I've used.
I have my account subscribed to LKML and a dozen other high-traffic linux-related lists, some of them with similar names. I don't have much trouble keeping the messages correctly tagged, although I have to admit I look at only a small percentage of them. On occasion, I do see some messages that Gmail can't parse correctly for some odd reason probably related to bad MIME-encodings.
It would be helpful if Gmail would let us filter messages based on arbitrary headers like Delivered-To:, or the special X- tags that most good mailing-list software adds to messages.
Storage is only a factor until a certain degree - meaning that 2MB is nearly impossible to live off of, but beyond 1 GB you are just talking wasted space for most users.
You are right, but look at that fact another way: the vast majority of users can't begin to fill 1GB in the foreseeable future. (I got a gmail account some weeks ago, subscribed it to LKML, and every other high-traffic linux list I could find - and it's now at only 15%.) Once capacity gets beyond about 100MB, most users won't come anywhere near their limit in the next couple of years.
In fact, I'd bet that Google probably doesn't have enough disk space on hand for n users * 1 GB. They're probably under by (WAG) 90%. But that makes sense - why buy all the storage they're going to need right now if most if it is going to sit empty? With disk drives falling in price every day, it makes sense - especially at that scale - to purchase space only as it's needed.
Therefore, Google's 1GB limit doesn't really mean anything, except as a foil to those few radical cases who see free storage as a chance to mail their pr0n collection to themselves, thus achieving an offsite backup. For most users, the limit might as well be 2GB. Or 10GB. Or 100GB. Given that (a) most users can't use all their space and (b) Google's not buying drives for that empty space anyway, then the limit becomes just a marketing tactic... but a good one, considering how much attention it has gotten for gmail.
The guys over at Hotmail are just now figuring this out.
My guess: when gmail is finally opened to the public, it will at least match the free storage of any other service out there, if not exceeding the others. Maybe 2GB, maybe 5GB, but I expect to see more that 1GB.