Still waiting for Libreoffice for Android (which would be of use to me) and Ipad (which I guess other people would use).

The best Android app I've found for "office" stuff is Kingsoft Office but it can't work with Open Document files, just Microsoft formatted stuff. I wish I had one that would work with Open Document; it would be a lot more useful.

After many years of playing with computers, I have recently started learning to use vim, but one thing always drives me crazy.

I have never figured out how to insert one single character at the current cursor position. Replacing one character is easy (r) but how do I insert one? Example: somthing. What's the easiest way to get the missing e into that word?

This $100,000 gadget doesn't do continuous data transmission. It starts transmitting when something goes wrong, and that's it.

If something does go wrong and there's time for this thing to start transmitting, then wouldn't there also be time for the pilot (copilot, navigator, stewardess) to get on the radio and say "Hello, chaps on the ground. Something has gone wrong."

If it blows up in mid-air or something like that, you won't get anything more with this device than you get without it.

What do you gain for $100,000, then?

Don't knock an abacus! My abacus lives beside my main computer.

You really can't bet an abacus for doing binary arithmetic and bit shifting. I don't know about you, but I can't visualize that stuff well in my head so I either grab my abacus or start making slash marks on a piece of paper, and it's a lot more efficient and conducive to thinking when I do it with an abacus.

Actually, I would love to find a method for programming Android in C and interacting with the user through webkit. That way I could create an app entirely in C with a html/javascript frontend to interact with the user without having to horse around with Java to get a usable app.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do that yet. (If someone here knows how to do that, by all means sing out!)

The irony of mobile computing is how bloody difficult it is to write a simple C program to run on one of those things, even though Android is written in C.

I've been playing with computers since the mid-70's and one of the things that I did early on was learn to program in C.

One of the smartest things I've ever done; it's up there with my decision to start running Linux in the late 90's.

If you can program in C you can write a program that runs on pretty much everything that you'll come across that you might want to program.

Learn C if you want to learn a programming language that you can use for a very long time.

I like Android, got an Android phone and a couple of tablets, but the C NDK doesn't allow you to do things without having to jump through a bunch of Java hoops to get there. I would have more Android devices if it was easier to write a program on it in C.

["hip","hip"]

(Hip hip array!)

For other folks who are like me, and are wondering what this thing is, it's apparently an office suite like Openoffice, Libreoffice, etc.

I've never heard of it up to now, myself.

That exact same link is in the summary.

You were in such a hurry to get first post that you didn't read the summary.

No ccache?

Not really. The "free" images offered by MS from that URL expire after 90 days and you can't (apparently) retrieve your data from the images after they expire. That's what the write-up on their website says, anyway.

Do you want to have to set your whole test environment up all over again every 90 days? I'd rather spend my time doing something useful, but that's just me. Since I have no use for MS stuff, so it doesn't matter to me anyway.

My wife's (Medtronic) pacemaker can be checked, logs read, and reprogrammed by hanging a device that's about the size and shape of a computer mouse on her chest. That device is connected to a computer that the cardiac technician sits in front of to do his thing.

As far as I'm aware, the entire pacemaker is controlled by the technician's computer. There is no phyiscal penetration required at all.

You would think that cinema speakers (those big honkin' speakers that sit behind the screen at the movie theatre - mine are about about six feet tall but there are many larger than that) would be impervious to damage but some movies occasionally overdrive the speakers to a point that the drivers are damaged. The most recent one that I'm aware of is Paranormal Activity 2: The Marked Ones, where there was 7 seconds of high pitched buzzing on reel 4 that could destroy the speakers.

Here is an email from Paramount that describes the problem:

QUOTE:
Dear Projectionist,
Paramount has had reports of speaker damage from some theatres playing PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES. In several cases we have been able to research, the volume had been turned up to high levels at patronsâ(TM) requests.

We are currently working to get information on speaker/amplifier brand and model to see if any particular combination of hardware might be more susceptible to damage. At this time, most of the damaged speakers have been identified as JBL model 4632â(TM)s, but this is preliminary data.

We are also working on an audio patch which may lessen the potential for damage.

For the time being, please do not set your volume at a high level on this film.

Thank you for your cooperation.

END OF QUOTE
Technicolor sent out a new soundtrack for that movie without the 7 seconds of buzzing and as far as I know that solved the problem.

The point here is that even high-end cinema audio systems can be damaged by a poorly engineered soundtrack, so I'm not surprised to find that the speakers in a cheap laptop could be damaged the same way.