See my comments above on how to spoof a supported hp printer for your non-supported one. More information on the "print to any printer" thread found on http://forums.precentral.net/

I got around this by using my server and putting three option statements in net-snmp to spoof a "supported" hp printer and then redirecting printer communication to my non-hp printer instead. Took all of 5 minutes. I've got 5 WebOS devices in my house that are heavily used. Curse you HP!

Shades of the 80s! Canon Research created a great little c-like interpreted language called ici. It had all sorts of nifty lisp like features and had a nice API for native extensions. They expected to put it in all of their products (including printers) and even open-sourced it. Outside of a few external projects that I and others had, I don't think it went anywhere.

Set your mail server to relay through your ISP. Most dynamic addresses are blocked via RBLs anyway. Unless your ISP provides reverse DNS of your address a good percentage of your mail will not be delivered. I've been doing this way before they started blocking the ports.

And Apple would never stop you from putting your app on the App Store simply because it steps on their plans to control their platform, right?

I would think that you would find a better discusion on the mobiread forum, since this is a forum for serious ebook readers. Personally, I would never call a backlit screen useful for serious reading. It doesn't work well in brightly lighted areas (such as outdoors), and the flicker causes eyestrain and fatigue. Reflective technologies such as eInk can be read for hours (like a book). Touch screens do reduce the contrast ratio for these type of screens.

There were a lot of studies done a long time ago, and there are some very accurate psycho-visual computer models of the human visual system. I had the pleasure of working with the Jeff Lubin model when I worked at Sarnoff Corp, which won an Emmy Award back in 2000.

The 30 fps requirement is not a fixed point, but depends upon a lot of other factors, including viewing distance, field of view, and lighting conditions. The reason that film operates at 24 fps is because it is expected to be viewed in a darkened room. When film is trans-coded for TVs, they have to modify the gamma for a normally lighted viewing area or it will look bad. NTSC TVs are interlaced, displaying 60 fields per second, even though the frame rate is 30 frames per second.

Bottom line is that this article should include the environmental factors under which this point was made.

Which reminds me...

The RCA 1800 family had an interesting feature... Every instruction took 8 clock cycles (with a few extended ones that took 12). This means that it was easy to, not only figure out how long a routine would take to run, but write routines to take up a specified time.

In the RCA VIP (hobby) computer, the tape output was a frequency-shift keyed output that was driven by a software UART created by this technique. You could also program it to play music producing the appropriate frequency using a software timing loop. I wrote a few programs that did just the opposite... did frequency decomposition using the built-in zero-crossing detector for the tape interface (a poor man's spectrum analyzer).

It was pretty amazing what could be done it 8k bytes of memory. :)

Yes. The FCC required that any device connected to the POTS line could withstand a lightning strike that created a 10kV pulse down the line.

I developed a 300 baud modem for the (then) brand new RCA data terminal back around 1980. The trickiest part of this thing was that the filters had to be designed and made from discrete components.

The plant manager saw my design which had precision components and he had a fit. His instructions were, "Use the components we have in the stock room". He also saw the line transformer and he said, "This is the age of semiconductors, get rid of that transformer".

I spent weeks researching how to replace that transformer with a semiconductor device that wouldn't distort the signal, operate bilaterally (in and out), and withstand the the 10,000 volt pulse that the FCC required for testing. I finally found such a beast, so I gave the manager a choice... Use the 6 cent transformer, or replace it with a $40 semiconductor.

My complaints about using non-precision components fell on deaf ears, so I figured the only way to prove that this wouldn't work would be to build a prototype and show that it would fail. To my dismay the first prototype worked flawlessly. I was told to build 10 more for FCC testing but not a single one of these worked even though the frequency response curves were all on the mark. I finally discovered that the phase response was a mess. I finally convinced them to use precision components.

I don't work for Sun either, but I agree with many of your points. My homebrew NAS server has been running OpenSolaris since build 49 and ZFS has uncovered issues like a flaky sata cable, and an unstable power supply without losing a single bit of data. In some other systems with similar problems, I found silently corrupted data on drives with ntfs, xfs, and hfs+. I would not go to a non-zfs flle system without some kicking and screaming.

I don't know if OpenSolaris, EON, or NextentaOS is missing any of the features of FreeNAS, but I would think about these as a viable replacement. One advantage is that they will always have the bleeding edge zfs enhancements first, like the new deduplication feature.