RMS complaining that one of the evils of the world that should be fought is religious fundamentalisim? Heee Heee...
RMS is the strongest religous fundamentalist I have ever had the pleasure of hearing speak, and anyone who does not see the dogma in his open source philosophies has not thought them through(IMHO).
I have plenty of respect for RMS, though I don't agree with much of what he has to say. I have plenty of respect for C.S. Lewis also. They are both religious fundamentalists, with different belief systems.
I would love to join the ACLU, but not until they stop their bigoted prejudices against people of faith. If a validictorian senior wanted to quote Nietzce in her speech, the ACLU would be defending her to the death. If she wants to quote the New Testament, they would have her for dinner. I believe she should have the right to quote either.
Anyway, Christian Dogma, or Open Source Dogma, I don't see much difference in methods, and I think both should be afforded the same constitutional protections.
As a side note, when RMS spoke in Cincinnati, he spoke at the beginning of his speach spoke of how women are unfairly repressed both professionally and by the institution of marriage. Half way through the speach, when he was handing out M&M's to the audience, when he got to an attractive woman he made her eat them out of his hand if she wanted them, while everyone else got to grab them from the bag. The whole thing made me feel very uncomfortable, I can't imagine how she felt.
This kind of behaviour would get you fired under existing sexual harrasment guidelines in any US company. Apparently, his personal behavior is currently at a lower standard the US legislated laws. RMS is welcome to do whatever he wants in his public speaches, but I am just as allowed to call him on it in public forums.
These are just my opinions based on first hand experience. Feel free to post your own opinions based on YOUR first hand experience. I am not looking for a flame war, believe it or not.
That's why God made Palm Pilots (and TealDoc). Read anywhere, anytime, and even is backlit so you can read in bed without bothering your spouse. Easier to handle then a book as well (one hand grip, one thumbclick to scroll).
Also great for those fast food restraunts, where you don't have to figure out how you are going to hold your book open with your tray without having it flop all over the place everytime you pick up your biggie diet coke!
I remember one of my first printers... the old Gorilla Bannana, which was an 8 wire dot matrix printer where each wire was actually that... a wire, that went out into a seperate magnetic coil. They were all seperated by a quarter inch or so, and you could watch them move while it worked.
Slow, noisy, and primitive looking... it was probably less advanced then the unit Babbage designed hundreds of years before...
Never mind moderators... Once you post to an article you have moderated, the moderation gets "undone". How about that!
So, sorry for another offtopic post, but if other moderators have the same problem I had, just post to the topic, and your moderation will be undone.
Hopefully, I don't get a karma penalty for posting to a topic I moderated (which I would not have done except to correct an error), but if I do, I guess that is better then the alternative of unfairly moderating a comment down.
So anyway, everyone can ignore my previous posts except the original poster (who still deserves an apology) and microsft (who should still change the binding of the scroll mouse), and perhaps the odd moderator that made the same error I did, and wants to correct it (just post to the article you incorrectly moderated).
I was moderating, and this idiot microsoft scroll mouse bumped this to offtopic while I was scrolling down. There is no verification before moderation, so the parent of this post got bumped to offtopic, which is not at all what I intended to do.
Other moderators, else, please moderate this back up.
Poster, please accept my humble apologies.
Scroll mice owners, carefull, if you happen to drag the mouse pointer over a drop down box while scrolling down (not hard to do), the value in the box will be silently changed.
Slashdot architects... could you give a "verify" screen before committing the moderation activities?
Microsoft... the scroll mouse is like a decent idea with a flakey implementation. Can't you just bind the thing to the main window scroll bars? That is really the main place it is usefull, as a drop down dialog selector it probably creates 10 errors for every proper action I use it for.
Everyone else... sorry for being offtopic, I am just trying to correct my mistake...
If you read the article, it appears (to me anyway) that the possession of the cracking tools was not the issue. They are being prosecuted for the use of cracking tools to steal accounts and passwords, the possession of these stolen accounts, and use of this information to manipulate email accounts that did not belong to them at a company that had fired them.
Just because someone has cracking tools does not make them a criminal. However, just because someone has cracking tools, they are not automatically some kind of hero either. They might just be a petty criminal.
Funny, the slashdot article headline and the actual story seem to communicate completely different stories to me... Either the poster / editor know something about the case that is not in the cited news article, the poster / editor did not read the article very closely before publishing, or the poster / editor have some kind of alternate an agenda here.
Of course a 4th possiblity is that *I* misunderstood something. This would not be the first time:)
A rough analogy here is the position of the NRA relative to firearms. They will fight like crazy to protect your right to own and possess them, up until the point where you have used them in commission of a crime. They then fight like crazy to see that you DON'T have any right to possess them (for example Project Exile and the three strikes laws), and in fact work pretty hard to see that you spend a LONG time in jail for it.
(we should take this to email, sounds like we are thinking along the same lines)...
I think you should shuffle things around to maximize your strengths, and minimize your weaknesses. Server parts are dirt cheap and readily available. Laptop parts are expensive and hard to find.
What about playing the MP3's back from the server, instead of the laptop. To do this, you would have to do one of two things, and create a web interface to your MP3 player software.
1) Run a shielded 2 wire audio feed from your server sound card to your stereo. Might be hard, might be easy. As long as you have heating ducts, it is always possible:)
2) Buy a homebuild kit (or prebuilt kit if you can find one) that will broadcast FM stereo, hook it up to your server soundcard, and use this as another wireless channel. Audio quality will suffer some (you will go from near CD quality to FM quality), but it should still be pretty decent sounding. This way, your walkman, stereo, and car (when in the driveway) all can recieve and amplify the MP3's you are playing. Debco electronics (and probably about a gazillion other companies) has a kit for this (www.debco.com) for about $30. I have not tried it, so I have no idea what the sound quality is.
3) You could also do both, and get the best of both worlds. This is what I will likely do (as my server is about 15 vertical feet from my stereo).
If I could only get an IEEE 802.11 compact flash or serial adapter for my TRG Pro palm pilot, then we could REALLY have a sweet setup!
Bill Kilgallon anyone with an interest, feel free to email to bill at kilgallonfamily dot com and we can hash through some configuration pro's and cons.
I ordered a Webgear Aviaitor kit last week (backordered from buy.com). As near as I can figure, for around $150 this kit gives you two PCMCIA cards AND two ISA adapters that can be used with these PCMCIA cards to put them in a desktop. They run at 2MByte (not MBit) per second. Extra cards for new "nodes" run around $75 each.
This is much slower then the cards announced here, but you can do an awfull lot with 2MB per second, and this $150 price will be darn hard to beat.
My current plan is to take an old 486 laptop with only 8MB ram and small hard drive and install a Linux configuration that includes only kernal, networking, and an X server.
The window manager (Gnome/Enlightenment) and all my applications will then run on my server in the basement, with the display pointed to the laptop. As a side note, this type of configuration is supported by default by Linux, but is at best a terrible kludge with winXX.
This will make the laptop a thin client that can sit on the kitchen table, or roam around the house, but with the full power of my server at my fingertips.
The big drawback will be the 640x480 resolution of the older laptop system, but I can work with that. The 8Mb on the laptop will likely just barely enough to handle managing the display and networking code.
Adding a cheap and semi-legal low power FM broadcasting homebuilt kit to the sound card on the same server should allow me to set up a simple web based interface to play any of my MP3's and pick them up with a walkman, or any other stereo in the house.
Note that this solution is totally tweaked towards bang for the buck, not high performance (sound quality, bandwidth, etc).
However, it is dirt cheap (should be able to do the whole deal for less then $200), and all relies on proven, flexible, and established technology, and will likely be plenty "good enough". Support for the Webgear Aviatior cards is opensource (as far as I can tell), and is already a part of the kernel (as far as I can tell).
If anyone is interested in the nuts and bolts of this procedure once I get everything working, I will be happy to post detailed instructions and parts sources on my site. The kit is backordered, so it could show up tomorrow, or sometime next century.
I can think of three possible reasons, all cynical (my apologies). These are all oversimplifications, and are just ideas (with some obvious holes), but there may be a grain of truth here somewhere...
1) The Clinton/Gore whitehouse has been using this type of technique with great success. When you are caught red handed doing something bad, hide and fight for as long as possible, but just about the time your enemies are about to pin you down and hammer you for it, you completely flop your behavior and make a big public scene about it. You steal your enemies victory and make them look silly. A pre-announcement or pre-release of Office for Linux would make a ruling by Judge Jackson forcing Microsoft to release Office for Linux at best a non-event, and could set the stage nicely to villify the Justice department for harrassing such a "noble and generous company". Microsoft lackeys can then start trolling the media talking about a 3 year 30 million dollar investigation that is accomplishing nothing...
2) As long as they fail to include support for exchange (microsoft outlook) integration, then Joe Corporate User will STILL need a microsoft OS on their desktop. They lower the heat on themselves, and don't give up a thing (as the business user is their bread and butter). Microsoft has done an outstanding job of using email extensions to cement their positing with the corporate IS departments, and is doing the same thing with Active Server Pages. Having Office for Linux won't do squat for you if when you view a web page a Microsoft proprietary format DLL has to be merged into your operating system to use the page.
3) If they release a 90% working version of Office for Linux, it will continue to control the market, but will always make Linux a sorry second to Microsoft, as you would need a Microsoft OS to use (insert key feature here), and Linux support for that feature will somehow never appear. Again, the corporate user is locked into a Microsoft OS. This will "scratch the itch" of consumer demand just enough to keep Corel or others from developing real Office competitors, but never really bring a the same level of functionality to Linux that the competing Microsoft OS would offer.
Just some thoughts... Bill
Re:Good as far as it goes, but still useless
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Itsy Specs Updated
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Well, why don't you download the specs, the schematics, etc. and design it to use commonly available LCD screens yourself?
That is exactly my point. The obstacles are currently too high. I'm not saying others can't contribute, just that there are a couple of pretty substantial obstacles that prevent ME from doing so.
Like I said, Kudo's to them for opening it up, but "openness" is not the only thing that determines the success of an open source project. In addition to being "open", a project also be usefull, interesting, and modifiable. I could write a complete and perfect replacement for Microsoft Office for Linux and opensource it, but if it is written as a single 1,000,000 line main program in "obsfucated C", I should not expect developer support to come pouring in.
My apologies if it sounded like I was criticizing the project for opening up. I was just trying to state that if their goal is to develop an open community of loosly related developers, basing the hardware on a non-commercially available part is silly.
On the one hand, you disagree with Stallman in making a distinction between hardware and software IP, but on the other hand you refuse to apply the same successful formula to an Open Hardware project as you would to an Open Source project.
I knew I should have kept my mouth shut about that... everytime I mention Stallman I have gotten into firefights...:)
I was trying to make exactly the opposite argument. I do not see a distinction between a large subset of hardware IP and software IP, and don't see how a distinction could be made (where Stallman appeared to do so in a talk I heard him give two weeks ago).
Carefull with your terminology... Stallman is not "Open Source", he is "Free Software". There are some very important distinctions.
I am applying exactly the same standards, and therein lies my critic of the project. If the goal of "Opening" the hardware and software is to generate a spontaneous and dynamic community of developers, testers, and contributors, then the fact that this device requires a number of components that are not commercially available is the first and foremost obstacle to it's success.
I hear and accept your criticisim of my comments that I am just complaining about the status quo without doing anything about it.
What I meant to communicate was "Great job. Too bad the obstacles to my contribution to your project are prohibitively high, even though I find the project compelling and interesting. By the way, here are the two things, in case you are looking for ways to increase your community... ".
I am encouraged that others do not find the obstacles prohibitively high. When you get the sourcing problem for the display/touchscreen module solved, as well as come up with a cost effective source for (what I suspect is a) multilayer surface mount PC board, please post the information so more of us can contribute to what appears to be a very interesting project.
Bill
Good as far as it goes, but still useless
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Itsy Specs Updated
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Kudos to them for opening up the hardware and software designs (open in the "now I know what they did" sense but not the GNU sense, although Stallman himself insists on creating an arbitrary (and in my mind artificial) distinction between hardware IP and software IP, but I digress)...
Anyway, good for them for sharing, but they are using an LCD and touch screen that is unavailable commercially. What good is that?
If they were serious, they should redesign it to use an available module, or offer modules for sale from their site for a reasonable charge.
Although realistically, given what I suspect is a lot of surface mount components and very small trace widths, and probably multi-layer PC boards, I doubt many people will be throwing together one of these in their basement...
It would be nice if they offered an "unsupported" Itsy kit with all necessary parts, but I guess I can't complain about people giving me information.
..."I take pride in the fact that my bleeding-heart liberalism makes me hate what this guy's site is all about"...
Agreed. But please note for the record that I take pride in my knee-jerk religous right conservatisim that makes me hate it just as much as you do...
I won't judge all liberals by nutty earth first terrorists and the unabomber, please don't judge all conservatives by nutty klan members and clinic bombers.
That being said, this does present an interesting delimma for both sides. My only beef with the ACLU is that they tend to leap to the defense of groups that tweak the noses of conservative Christians, but do little or nothing to defend groups that tweak the noses of liberal Democrats. I think they are an important organization, and perform an important role protecting the constitution.
P.J. O'Rouke had a great response to eliminate this type of delimma (constitutionally protected free speech versus offensive things being said).
He described a delimma faced by the newspaper at his old college where those loonies that pretend the WWII holocoust never happened wanted to place an ad. At first, the editors said they could not publish it because it was a lie. Then, they decided they had to publish it because they otherwise would violate the groups first ammendment rights.
His solution was elegant (if not mathmatically rigorous). He said they should throw the thing away because it was a piece of SHI*.
The "perfect thing" would be a driver available now, written with completely open source, conforming to an established quality standard and open API, and actively funded and supported by the company.
Note that Nvidia has hit two out of three here. They are actively supporting the port, they are using a quality, open and standard API (openGL), and the thing will be demo'd within a month.
They should be encouraged to open the source completely, for their good and ours, but lets not complain too much about a vendor going out of their way to provide the Linux community with some new high quality options.
There are three reasons I keep win98 on my hard drive. I doubt I am alone in these motivations:
1) The lack of a complete and seemless solution to the "microsoft office" problem (the consulting company I work for effectively requires employees to have access to office and uses all sorts of goofy and poorly considered microsoft extensions).
2) Good game support. The 3d games require a lot of work go get going well under win9x, but they can be gotten to run well on pretty cheap hardware.
3) Support for fun and cheap commodity hardware. Like the $29 scanner I got at CompUSA, or a $99 640x480 digital camera, etc etc. These things are cheap, fun, and typically only include windows drivers, unless some brave soul cobbles together third party drivers.
If Nvidia does what they say they are doing in the press release, then they have gone a long way to removing one of three significant obstacles to eliminating expensive, mediocre, and hard to support software like windows from our desktops.
To answer your question about cancelling your Vx order and going for the TRG Pro... it depends. I am selling my IIIx and have a TRG Pro on order.
The Vx gives you the best form factor at half the thickness of the TRG Pro, if that matters to you (and it does not to me, I strap it to my hip in a nice Rhino Skin belt pack, so the thickness difference becomes nearly irrelevant).
The TRG Pro give you mind boggling expandability via compact flash cards.
Get the Palm Vx if: You are carrying it in a suit pocket (this is the only form factor that will not bulge or bag). You intend to never expand it or experiment with it. You don't currently or will not on the near future plan to own a digital camera or MP3 player that uses compact flash cards. You want to go out to your local TechieMart and pick it up this afternoon and you have money to burn.
Get the TRGPro if: You want future expansion capibility, especially if you have a digital camera or MP3 player that already uses compact flash (so you will have some laying around that can do double duty). You tend to experiment with software and hardware and like to be on the cutting edge. You want to carry a LOT of data around with you all the time.
As I said before, I ordered the TRGPro the day they announced it was shipping. It is compatible with the assorted cases, cables, clip on modems, and other odds and ends I have accumulated with the previous 4 generations of pilots I have owned (Pilot 512, Palm Professional, Palm III upgrade for Professional, Palm IIIx). These doodads would easily cost me over $100 to replace if I went for either the Visor Deluxe or the Vx, so the TRG Pro was the obvious choice.
I am also pretty sure I will upgrade my Apple Quicktake 200 to a better digital camera that uses compact flash sometime in the next year, and will likely pick up an MP3 player in the next two years that uses the same cards as well. This will allow me to have a collection of compact flash cards that I can move between devices as I see fit.
The only real advantage of the Vx is size, but for some people, that is the overriding concern. If you must have the small size (some people do, nothing wrong with that), get it. Even without the expansion, it will be a darn usefull little tool for your daily life.
If size is not your main concern, get the TRG Pro or the Handspring Visor. Both are nicely expandable, very hackable (in the old noble sense of the word), well priced, and extremely usefull.
I suspect the Apple will be a re-badged something or other since they are working directly with Palm... probably a IIIx style with 8 megs, clear case, and USB. It will be interesting to see if it includes any expansion capability (i.e. compact flash or springboard).
The latest version of the Palm OS will do this already (to both Mac and PC), and I believe a friend of mine did successfully synch his Palm to his apple laptop using IR.
Last I heard, he went back to a serial cradle, as his TV was polluting his living room with IR and he was having reliability and speed problems.
Ironically, the 90% figure I quoted was from a live interview on NPR on the Diane Rheems (sp?) show. I heard it during a media roundtable she was doing a couple of years ago. I might be able to track down the show and transcript, but it would be a non-trivial effort.
As I said in a different followup to this same thread, the ones you notice are the ones that impact you.
The point I was trying to make was that we should work to make the media more accurate and fair for ALL sides. Currently, reporters seem pretty lazy, and that is what was reflected in a mis-reporting done by NPR when it said things that any 14 year old with access to a search engine could have found out were false with only about 1 hours work.
I only brought up the other topics to make the point that this is a media wide problem impacting all sorts of issues, not just DVD cracking software. I did not mean it to turn into a flame war (although I don't understand why it was moderated as offtopic when it addressed both the original story, and the message it was a reply too... don't moderators read guidelines anymore?).
We should REALLY take this to email, it has little to do with the current thread.
I meant to communicate that what I feel is the problem with the current media is that they are by and large left leaning, and as such do an outstanding job of reporting on the liberal spins on issues, but are often confuse or misrepresent the conservative right side of the issues. I would have the same beef if the tables were turned, and 90% of all journalists were Christian conservatives. Failing to accurately report the news helps no one in the long run.
As a personal note, I don't think the "problem with everything" is the presence of liberal left voices in the media (which it seems you are accusing me of)... more power too them. The problem is the absence or marginalization of the voices from the right.
Obviously, the people that notice this are going to be the people whose interests are consistently and strongly misrepresented. Currently, I think that the media tends to be left leaning politically, uninformed about technology, and tends to reach conclusions based more on feelings and hopes then objective truths and measurable results. In the article about DVD's, we just saw the results of the technological illiteracy at NPR, they report the DVD press release nearly verbatim, even though it is at best a distortion of the real situation.
I am not sure how you got from there to me "blaming every problem on the left". There also seems to be an awful lot of bigoted stereotypes in your post. I am right leaning, I am a follower of Jesus, and I even spent some time as a pastor. I am also an experienced Unix programmer and author of GPL'd software, and a Linux advocate. I would never tell the poor to "fsck off", and (we agree again) I think a religion based government would be an absolute travesty. I think violence against doctors that perform abortions is abhorent (not to mention stupid, we agree again), as is the bombing of abortion clinics.
I think the right and left are equally interested in helping the poor, they just have different ways they think they can best do it. At least the right gives their OWN money to help the poor, while the left seems to want to give everyone elses.
I brought up the point about secular humanisim as a reflection of a state indoctrinated philosophy. Another topic we are agreed on is that government and religion should be kept seperate. I don't want the government teaching and indoctrinating my religion, but I don't want them indoctrinating any other religion either, be they the philosphies of Marx, Neitzcie, O'Hare, Ireland, or Freud. I don't want my government telling me there is a God, but I don't want them telling me there is NOT one either... it is not their role, and none of their business.
As far as your argument for abortion, the definition of "LEGAL" depends on which law you follow. I believe the constitutional injunction on depriving a person of life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness superceeds an activist supreme court ruling, but hey, that is just my opinion. I will lobby in defense of the constitution by purely legal means and the excercise of free speech as often as I can... it's the Americian way. Slavery was "legal", and was overturned in signigicant part by a movement of devout Christians (Quakers) that found it offensive.
That being said, I think the media butchers reporting of thoughtfull athiests such as yourself also, and seems unable to distuinguish them from Pagans. This bugs me as well. Libertarians are also consistently and grossly misrepresented, as is Islam, and many other groups. I am just as bothered to hear Athiests represented as Pagans, or followers of Islam confused with terrorists, as I am to hear Christians misrepresented as murderers, or conservatives misrepresented as not caring about the poor.
If you want I will be happy to discuss it more on email, but I am not interested in becoming a leftist Athiest, and I am sure you are not interested in becomming a conservative Christian, so I am not sure much is to be gained.
And I doubt anyone else has bothered to follow the thread:)
I promise not to blame the worlds problems on the liberal left, if you promise not to stereotype Conservatives and Christians as murdering bombing haters of the poor:)
Peace:) Bill Kilgallon killbill at one dot net
(and no, the killbill has nothing to do with either Clinton or Gates, it is a play on my first and last name...)
As usual, if a news story matches the personal beliefs and understandings of the reporter and producer, that side of the issue gets a complete and through analysis. The other side of the issue is generally at best confused and misrepresented, not so much because the reporter is trying to be biased, but because they just don't believe and understand alternative views.
In this case, the reporter and producers obviously lacked a clue, so the press release was basically recited as is.
Note that this is not an NPR problem per se, just about every media outlet (including slashdot) suffers the same problem. NPR just looks worse then most because their reporters tend to be SO far left in their personal views.
The reason this appears to be a media wide bias is that the vast majority of people working in the media today (something like 80-90%) are basically left leaning left brained, Democrat, secular humanists with a weak grasp of technology, which is much different (percentage wise anyway) from the population as a whole.
This same sort of unintentional understanding bias shows up all the time in gun control issues, religion issues, abortion issues, and politician issues, etc.
Don't believe me? Look back at the level of grief George Bush caught for his "no new taxes" backpedal verses the reporting that Bill Clinton got for being found guilty by a judge from his home state for obstruction of justice while in office.
Look at how the media treats first ammendment infringements (their sacred cow) versus second ammendment infringements. This is (IMHO) the most obvious case.
As I have said before, complexity is like a liquid, non-compressable. All those gimmicks would be fun toys, but my palm is forever attached to my hip because it stays out of my way and does what I need when I need it, not because it is the uber-geek-toy-kitchen-sink-device (although with my modem, a vt100 emulator, and a shell account I HAVE run emacs on a Palm Professional...).
If I want an MP3 player (which actually, come to think of it, I do) I will go pick up a diamond Rio, or similiar device. It is more portable, more durable, more flexible, and less expensive then adding all that capability to my PDA.
That being said, I just ordered a trg pro for $329, and this device includes an upgraded speaker (so the palm can finally dial for me) and a compact flash slot.
This means that you can now spend $600 to add a 340mb IBM microdrive to your palm pilot, if you were so inclined. On the less silly end of the spectrum, you can add a 32MB cf card for about $70, which is a more reasonable price point for a palm, and 32MB will store an AWFUL lot of palm data...
Actually, now that I think about it, the one thing I would like to be portable is the compact flash media. It would be nice to be able to swap these things between my laptop, digital camera, MP3 player, and TRGPro Palm OS device depending on my needs at the moment... (that is, once I can afford a laptop, digital camera, and mp3 player:)
The problem correctly identified by the CNN author is a problem with an organizational model for the label, not a problem with MP3's per se.
For some reason, CNN, and to some degree mp3.com, seem to think it is possible to create a great big label, represent tens of thousands of artists, and just sit back and watch everybody get rich. I don't understand why anyone is suprised when this does not work, but it represents a problem with current label paradigms and not a problem with MP3's.
What they are quickly discovering, and what slashdotters know intimately, is that without community, identity, and good old fashioned hard work, you are going nowhere.
What is the future of mp3? I think it will be a hybrid of sites like slashdot, complete with news, discussion, and moderation, that then point to particular label web sites. These web sites would have clear identities and missions... personalities.
For examples of labels with personalities, check out Blue Jordan Records and Paste Music . These are both labels that have a clear identity, and if you like some of the artists you have heard of, you will likely enjoy some of the other bands on the label that you have not heard of. The labels did a lot of work finding an identity, and brought together a community of like minded talents for people that share their tastes (sound like slashdot?).
Where MP3's will really fly is when these labels give the customer the kind of flexibility, low cost, and speed of delivery that online delivery of MP3's can provide. After buying one too many really BAD CD's for $15, I am getting pretty loathe to take any kind of gamble on an artist I don't know pretty well.
But online delivery of two tracks for a buck, for a band on a label that has given me three or four artists I really like, with songs that are getting great reviews from people with gobs of karma on www.slash^h^h^h^hmusicdot.org, that I can have playing on my desktop 5 minutes from now? Sure... take my credit card number. Heck, just give me the whole ten track package...
I hate to break it to you, but your tech support is not able to offer help for the windows version either.
I bought your game, when I had a borrowed CD in my hot little hands and a CD-Rom burner at my elbow, because I think piracy is wrong.
The result? Unreal crashed chronically. This same machine runs every other piece of software and many competing games and both Linux and win98 with NO PROBLEMS at all.
Call tech support. Toll call. 15 minutes of waiting and threading through voice menus. Tech gives me the "stop bothering me I don't want to solve your problem" answer of "download the newest drivers for all your hardware and reinstall".
No opportunity to get a call number and re-open the same call with the same tech if this does not work, you have to start over with another 15 minute phone pennance.
It continued to not work, and I waited. A few months later, I got a new video card, and tried again, and again updated all my drivers and the latest Unreal patches. Different errors (failed assertions).
Back to technical support. Another go-away answer... your video card is not on microsofts "official" list of supported hardware (most hardware is not). We will not support the game. Note that the Unreal requirements on the box I purchased said nothing about "officially supported hardware only". Fine. I chucked it again.
Finally, a few months later, more patches, and a brand new Nvidia TNT1 video card with 16 MB, one "officially" supported by windows. Continued crashing. Call tech support. More go away answers.
Finally I gave the *!%$ game to a friend who had a 3dfx card (for whom the game seems pretty solid). So much for buying software...
So I would recommend not buying ANYTHING with an Unreal engine, not because they do or don't have linux support, but because their software is ambitious but buggy, and their support model is insulting and useless.
If anything, it should be superior to the existing (newer) palms. The architecture of the two units are very close, and use the same motorola dragon ball processors.
The biggest hitter on the palms is the RS232 serial port during hotsync. Without hotsyncs, the average pilot could probably go two months on a single set of AAA's. With hotsyncs, probably about half that. The RS232 specification requires that the port not be parasitically powered, so those little batteries have to do all the work.
I am not sure what the specifications for USB (which the visor uses) indicate, but I bet they allow for parasitic power delivery for the interface of low power devices.
Regardless, power usage for any of the palm devices is not an issue. At worst, just go to Best Buy and buy a few sets of AAA NiMh and a charger, and you should go at least a week at a time, even with lots of backlight and constant syncing.
It is the windows CE devices with their hungry CPU's and color screens that have the battery problem.
But if you can send an anonymous post... then how can I hold you accountable for lies you spread about my product?
If every poster can be held accountable for their postings, what is to stop a tyrannical government from misusing the information to retaliate against me if I speak out against them?
It still smells mutually exclusive to me.
The really remarkable part seems to be that while the solutions do seem mutually exclusive, the United States constitution (as written, not as currently implemented) comes darn close to a complete solution.... closer then I would have thought possible.
Bill "resisting the temptation to go into a pro 2nd ammemndment rant" Kilgallon
I don't have the several hours of time available right now to work through a complete analysis, but I suspect that you could make a pretty good argument that all the problems cannot be solved simultaneously .
For example, how can you be accountable for your lies about a product, but at the same time anonymous enough to speak out against a totalitarian regime? One requires untraceability, one requires traceability.
I suspect you could answer each question pretty well, but that your answers would be mutually exclusive. How interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS complaining that one of the evils of the world that should be fought is religious fundamentalisim? Heee Heee...
RMS is the strongest religous fundamentalist I have ever had the pleasure of hearing speak, and anyone who does not see the dogma in his open source philosophies has not thought them through(IMHO).
I have plenty of respect for RMS, though I don't agree with much of what he has to say. I have plenty of respect for C.S. Lewis also. They are both religious fundamentalists, with different belief systems.
I would love to join the ACLU, but not until they stop their bigoted prejudices against people of faith. If a validictorian senior wanted to quote Nietzce in her speech, the ACLU would be defending her to the death. If she wants to quote the New Testament, they would have her for dinner. I believe she should have the right to quote either.
Anyway, Christian Dogma, or Open Source Dogma, I don't see much difference in methods, and I think both should be afforded the same constitutional protections.
As a side note, when RMS spoke in Cincinnati, he spoke at the beginning of his speach spoke of how women are unfairly repressed both professionally and by the institution of marriage. Half way through the speach, when he was handing out M&M's to the audience, when he got to an attractive woman he made her eat them out of his hand if she wanted them, while everyone else got to grab them from the bag. The whole thing made me feel very uncomfortable, I can't imagine how she felt.
This kind of behaviour would get you fired under existing sexual harrasment guidelines in any US company. Apparently, his personal behavior is currently at a lower standard the US legislated laws. RMS is welcome to do whatever he wants in his public speaches, but I am just as allowed to call him on it in public forums.
These are just my opinions based on first hand experience. Feel free to post your own opinions based on YOUR first hand experience. I am not looking for a flame war, believe it or not.
Bill
That's why God made Palm Pilots (and TealDoc). Read anywhere, anytime, and even is backlit so you can read in bed without bothering your spouse. Easier to handle then a book as well (one hand grip, one thumbclick to scroll).
Also great for those fast food restraunts, where you don't have to figure out how you are going to hold your book open with your tray without having it flop all over the place everytime you pick up your biggie diet coke!
Bill
I remember one of my first printers... the old Gorilla Bannana, which was an 8 wire dot matrix printer where each wire was actually that... a wire, that went out into a seperate magnetic coil. They were all seperated by a quarter inch or so, and you could watch them move while it worked.
:)
Slow, noisy, and primitive looking... it was probably less advanced then the unit Babbage designed hundreds of years before...
Though it did have a parallel port
DOOOH!
Never mind moderators... Once you post to an article you have moderated, the moderation gets "undone". How about that!
So, sorry for another offtopic post, but if other moderators have the same problem I had, just post to the topic, and your moderation will be undone.
Hopefully, I don't get a karma penalty for posting to a topic I moderated (which I would not have done except to correct an error), but if I do, I guess that is better then the alternative of unfairly moderating a comment down.
So anyway, everyone can ignore my previous posts except the original poster (who still deserves an apology) and microsft (who should still change the binding of the scroll mouse), and perhaps the odd moderator that made the same error I did, and wants to correct it (just post to the article you incorrectly moderated).
Bill "Ooops" Kilgallon
Errr... my apologies.
I was moderating, and this idiot microsoft scroll mouse bumped this to offtopic while I was scrolling down. There is no verification before moderation, so the parent of this post got bumped to offtopic, which is not at all what I intended to do.
Other moderators, else, please moderate this back up.
Poster, please accept my humble apologies.
Scroll mice owners, carefull, if you happen to drag the mouse pointer over a drop down box while scrolling down (not hard to do), the value in the box will be silently changed.
Slashdot architects... could you give a "verify" screen before committing the moderation activities?
Microsoft... the scroll mouse is like a decent idea with a flakey implementation. Can't you just bind the thing to the main window scroll bars? That is really the main place it is usefull, as a drop down dialog selector it probably creates 10 errors for every proper action I use it for.
Everyone else... sorry for being offtopic, I am just trying to correct my mistake...
Bill "so much for my karma" Kilgallon
If you read the article, it appears (to me anyway) that the possession of the cracking tools was not the issue. They are being prosecuted for the use of cracking tools to steal accounts and passwords, the possession of these stolen accounts, and use of this information to manipulate email accounts that did not belong to them at a company that had fired them.
:)
Just because someone has cracking tools does not make them a criminal. However, just because someone has cracking tools, they are not automatically some kind of hero either. They might just be a petty criminal.
Funny, the slashdot article headline and the actual story seem to communicate completely different stories to me... Either the poster / editor know something about the case that is not in the cited news article, the poster / editor did not read the article very closely before publishing, or the poster / editor have some kind of alternate an agenda here.
Of course a 4th possiblity is that *I* misunderstood something. This would not be the first time
A rough analogy here is the position of the NRA relative to firearms. They will fight like crazy to protect your right to own and possess them, up until the point where you have used them in commission of a crime. They then fight like crazy to see that you DON'T have any right to possess them (for example Project Exile and the three strikes laws), and in fact work pretty hard to see that you spend a LONG time in jail for it.
Bill
(we should take this to email, sounds like we are thinking along the same lines)...
:)
I think you should shuffle things around to maximize your strengths, and minimize your weaknesses. Server parts are dirt cheap and readily available. Laptop parts are expensive and hard to find.
What about playing the MP3's back from the server, instead of the laptop. To do this, you would have to do one of two things, and create a web interface to your MP3 player software.
1) Run a shielded 2 wire audio feed from your server sound card to your stereo. Might be hard, might be easy. As long as you have heating ducts, it is always possible
2) Buy a homebuild kit (or prebuilt kit if you can find one) that will broadcast FM stereo, hook it up to your server soundcard, and use this as another wireless channel. Audio quality will suffer some (you will go from near CD quality to FM quality), but it should still be pretty decent sounding. This way, your walkman, stereo, and car (when in the driveway) all can recieve and amplify the MP3's you are playing. Debco electronics (and probably about a gazillion other companies) has a kit for this (www.debco.com) for about $30. I have not tried it, so I have no idea what the sound quality is.
3) You could also do both, and get the best of both worlds. This is what I will likely do (as my server is about 15 vertical feet from my stereo).
If I could only get an IEEE 802.11 compact flash or serial adapter for my TRG Pro palm pilot, then we could REALLY have a sweet setup!
Bill Kilgallon
anyone with an interest, feel free to email to bill at kilgallonfamily dot com and we can hash through some configuration pro's and cons.
I ordered a Webgear Aviaitor kit last week (backordered from buy.com). As near as I can figure, for around $150 this kit gives you two PCMCIA cards AND two ISA adapters that can be used with these PCMCIA cards to put them in a desktop. They run at 2MByte (not MBit) per second. Extra cards for new "nodes" run around $75 each.
This is much slower then the cards announced here, but you can do an awfull lot with 2MB per second, and this $150 price will be darn hard to beat.
My current plan is to take an old 486 laptop with only 8MB ram and small hard drive and install a Linux configuration that includes only kernal, networking, and an X server.
The window manager (Gnome/Enlightenment) and all my applications will then run on my server in the basement, with the display pointed to the laptop. As a side note, this type of configuration is supported by default by Linux, but is at best a terrible kludge with winXX.
This will make the laptop a thin client that can sit on the kitchen table, or roam around the house, but with the full power of my server at my fingertips.
The big drawback will be the 640x480 resolution of the older laptop system, but I can work with that. The 8Mb on the laptop will likely just barely enough to handle managing the display and networking code.
Adding a cheap and semi-legal low power FM broadcasting homebuilt kit to the sound card on the same server should allow me to set up a simple web based interface to play any of my MP3's and pick them up with a walkman, or any other stereo in the house.
Note that this solution is totally tweaked towards bang for the buck, not high performance (sound quality, bandwidth, etc).
However, it is dirt cheap (should be able to do the whole deal for less then $200), and all relies on proven, flexible, and established technology, and will likely be plenty "good enough". Support for the Webgear Aviatior cards is opensource (as far as I can tell), and is already a part of the kernel (as far as I can tell).
If anyone is interested in the nuts and bolts of this procedure once I get everything working, I will be happy to post detailed instructions and parts sources on my site. The kit is backordered, so it could show up tomorrow, or sometime next century.
Bill Kilgallon
I can think of three possible reasons, all cynical (my apologies). These are all oversimplifications, and are just ideas (with some obvious holes), but there may be a grain of truth here somewhere...
1) The Clinton/Gore whitehouse has been using this type of technique with great success. When you are caught red handed doing something bad, hide and fight for as long as possible, but just about the time your enemies are about to pin you down and hammer you for it, you completely flop your behavior and make a big public scene about it. You steal your enemies victory and make them look silly. A pre-announcement or pre-release of Office for Linux would make a ruling by Judge Jackson forcing Microsoft to release Office for Linux at best a non-event, and could set the stage nicely to villify the Justice department for harrassing such a "noble and generous company". Microsoft lackeys can then start trolling the media talking about a 3 year 30 million dollar investigation that is accomplishing nothing...
2) As long as they fail to include support for exchange (microsoft outlook) integration, then Joe Corporate User will STILL need a microsoft OS on their desktop. They lower the heat on themselves, and don't give up a thing (as the business user is their bread and butter). Microsoft has done an outstanding job of using email extensions to cement their positing with the corporate IS departments, and is doing the same thing with Active Server Pages. Having Office for Linux won't do squat for you if when you view a web page a Microsoft proprietary format DLL has to be merged into your operating system to use the page.
3) If they release a 90% working version of Office for Linux, it will continue to control the market, but will always make Linux a sorry second to Microsoft, as you would need a Microsoft OS to use (insert key feature here), and Linux support for that feature will somehow never appear. Again, the corporate user is locked into a Microsoft OS. This will "scratch the itch" of consumer demand just enough to keep Corel or others from developing real Office competitors, but never really bring a the same level of functionality to Linux that the competing Microsoft OS would offer.
Just some thoughts...
Bill
Well, why don't you download the specs, the schematics, etc. and design it to use commonly available LCD screens yourself?
:)
That is exactly my point. The obstacles are currently too high. I'm not saying others can't contribute, just that there are a couple of pretty substantial obstacles that prevent ME from doing so.
Like I said, Kudo's to them for opening it up, but "openness" is not the only thing that determines the success of an open source project. In addition to being "open", a project also be usefull, interesting, and modifiable. I could write a complete and perfect replacement for Microsoft Office for Linux and opensource it, but if it is written as a single 1,000,000 line main program in "obsfucated C", I should not expect developer support to come pouring in.
My apologies if it sounded like I was criticizing the project for opening up. I was just trying to state that if their goal is to develop an open community of loosly related developers, basing the hardware on a non-commercially available part is silly.
On the one hand, you disagree with Stallman in making a distinction between hardware and software IP, but on the other hand you refuse to apply the same successful formula to an Open Hardware project as you would to an Open Source project.
I knew I should have kept my mouth shut about that... everytime I mention Stallman I have gotten into firefights...
I was trying to make exactly the opposite argument. I do not see a distinction between a large subset of hardware IP and software IP, and don't see how a distinction could be made (where Stallman appeared to do so in a talk I heard him give two weeks ago).
Carefull with your terminology... Stallman is not "Open Source", he is "Free Software". There are some very important distinctions.
I am applying exactly the same standards, and therein lies my critic of the project. If the goal of "Opening" the hardware and software is to generate a spontaneous and dynamic community of developers, testers, and contributors, then the fact that this device requires a number of components that are not commercially available is the first and foremost obstacle to it's success.
I hear and accept your criticisim of my comments that I am just complaining about the status quo without doing anything about it.
What I meant to communicate was "Great job. Too bad the obstacles to my contribution to your project are prohibitively high, even though I find the project compelling and interesting. By the way, here are the two things, in case you are looking for ways to increase your community... ".
I am encouraged that others do not find the obstacles prohibitively high. When you get the sourcing problem for the display/touchscreen module solved, as well as come up with a cost effective source for (what I suspect is a) multilayer surface mount PC board, please post the information so more of us can contribute to what appears to be a very interesting project.
Bill
Kudos to them for opening up the hardware and software designs (open in the "now I know what they did" sense but not the GNU sense, although Stallman himself insists on creating an arbitrary (and in my mind artificial) distinction between hardware IP and software IP, but I digress)...
Anyway, good for them for sharing, but they are using an LCD and touch screen that is unavailable commercially. What good is that?
If they were serious, they should redesign it to use an available module, or offer modules for sale from their site for a reasonable charge.
Although realistically, given what I suspect is a lot of surface mount components and very small trace widths, and probably multi-layer PC boards, I doubt many people will be throwing together one of these in their basement...
It would be nice if they offered an "unsupported" Itsy kit with all necessary parts, but I guess I can't complain about people giving me information.
Bill
..."I take pride in the fact that my bleeding-heart liberalism makes me hate what this guy's site is all about"...
Agreed. But please note for the record that I take pride in my knee-jerk religous right conservatisim that makes me hate it just as much as you do...
I won't judge all liberals by nutty earth first terrorists and the unabomber, please don't judge all conservatives by nutty klan members and clinic bombers.
That being said, this does present an interesting delimma for both sides. My only beef with the ACLU is that they tend to leap to the defense of groups that tweak the noses of conservative Christians, but do little or nothing to defend groups that tweak the noses of liberal Democrats. I think they are an important organization, and perform an important role protecting the constitution.
P.J. O'Rouke had a great response to eliminate this type of delimma (constitutionally protected free speech versus offensive things being said).
He described a delimma faced by the newspaper at his old college where those loonies that pretend the WWII holocoust never happened wanted to place an ad. At first, the editors said they could not publish it because it was a lie. Then, they decided they had to publish it because they otherwise would violate the groups first ammendment rights.
His solution was elegant (if not mathmatically rigorous). He said they should throw the thing away because it was a piece of SHI*.
Cant argue with that logic...
Note that Nvidia has hit two out of three here. They are actively supporting the port, they are using a quality, open and standard API (openGL), and the thing will be demo'd within a month.
They should be encouraged to open the source completely, for their good and ours, but lets not complain too much about a vendor going out of their way to provide the Linux community with some new high quality options.
There are three reasons I keep win98 on my hard drive. I doubt I am alone in these motivations:
1) The lack of a complete and seemless solution to the "microsoft office" problem (the consulting company I work for effectively requires employees to have access to office and uses all sorts of goofy and poorly considered microsoft extensions).
2) Good game support. The 3d games require a lot of work go get going well under win9x, but they can be gotten to run well on pretty cheap hardware.
3) Support for fun and cheap commodity hardware. Like the $29 scanner I got at CompUSA, or a $99 640x480 digital camera, etc etc. These things are cheap, fun, and typically only include windows drivers, unless some brave soul cobbles together third party drivers.
If Nvidia does what they say they are doing in the press release, then they have gone a long way to removing one of three significant obstacles to eliminating expensive, mediocre, and hard to support software like windows from our desktops.
Bill Kilgallon
To answer your question about cancelling your Vx order and going for the TRG Pro... it depends. I am selling my IIIx and have a TRG Pro on order.
The Vx gives you the best form factor at half the thickness of the TRG Pro, if that matters to you (and it does not to me, I strap it to my hip in a nice Rhino Skin belt pack, so the thickness difference becomes nearly irrelevant).
The TRG Pro give you mind boggling expandability via compact flash cards.
Get the Palm Vx if: You are carrying it in a suit pocket (this is the only form factor that will not bulge or bag). You intend to never expand it or experiment with it. You don't currently or will not on the near future plan to own a digital camera or MP3 player that uses compact flash cards. You want to go out to your local TechieMart and pick it up this afternoon and you have money to burn.
Get the TRGPro if: You want future expansion capibility, especially if you have a digital camera or MP3 player that already uses compact flash (so you will have some laying around that can do double duty). You tend to experiment with software and hardware and like to be on the cutting edge. You want to carry a LOT of data around with you all the time.
As I said before, I ordered the TRGPro the day they announced it was shipping. It is compatible with the assorted cases, cables, clip on modems, and other odds and ends I have accumulated with the previous 4 generations of pilots I have owned (Pilot 512, Palm Professional, Palm III upgrade for Professional, Palm IIIx). These doodads would easily cost me over $100 to replace if I went for either the Visor Deluxe or the Vx, so the TRG Pro was the obvious choice.
I am also pretty sure I will upgrade my Apple Quicktake 200 to a better digital camera that uses compact flash sometime in the next year, and will likely pick up an MP3 player in the next two years that uses the same cards as well. This will allow me to have a collection of compact flash cards that I can move between devices as I see fit.
The only real advantage of the Vx is size, but for some people, that is the overriding concern. If you must have the small size (some people do, nothing wrong with that), get it. Even without the expansion, it will be a darn usefull little tool for your daily life.
If size is not your main concern, get the TRG Pro or the Handspring Visor. Both are nicely expandable, very hackable (in the old noble sense of the word), well priced, and extremely usefull.
I suspect the Apple will be a re-badged something or other since they are working directly with Palm... probably a IIIx style with 8 megs, clear case, and USB. It will be interesting to see if it includes any expansion capability (i.e. compact flash or springboard).
Bill Kilgallon
The latest version of the Palm OS will do this already (to both Mac and PC), and I believe a friend of mine did successfully synch his Palm to his apple laptop using IR.
Last I heard, he went back to a serial cradle, as his TV was polluting his living room with IR and he was having reliability and speed problems.
Bill Kilgallon
Ironically, the 90% figure I quoted was from a live interview on NPR on the Diane Rheems (sp?) show. I heard it during a media roundtable she was doing a couple of years ago. I might be able to track down the show and transcript, but it would be a non-trivial effort.
:)" Kilgallon
As I said in a different followup to this same thread, the ones you notice are the ones that impact you.
The point I was trying to make was that we should work to make the media more accurate and fair for ALL sides. Currently, reporters seem pretty lazy, and that is what was reflected in a mis-reporting done by NPR when it said things that any 14 year old with access to a search engine could have found out were false with only about 1 hours work.
I only brought up the other topics to make the point that this is a media wide problem impacting all sorts of issues, not just DVD cracking software. I did not mean it to turn into a flame war (although I don't understand why it was moderated as offtopic when it addressed both the original story, and the message it was a reply too... don't moderators read guidelines anymore?).
Bill "Can't we all just get along
We should REALLY take this to email, it has little to do with the current thread.
:)
:)
:)
I meant to communicate that what I feel is the problem with the current media is that they are by and large left leaning, and as such do an outstanding job of reporting on the liberal spins on issues, but are often confuse or misrepresent the conservative right side of the issues. I would have the same beef if the tables were turned, and 90% of all journalists were Christian conservatives. Failing to accurately report the news helps no one in the long run.
As a personal note, I don't think the "problem with everything" is the presence of liberal left voices in the media (which it seems you are accusing me of)... more power too them. The problem is the absence or marginalization of the voices from the right.
Obviously, the people that notice this are going to be the people whose interests are consistently and strongly misrepresented. Currently, I think that the media tends to be left leaning politically, uninformed about technology, and tends to reach conclusions based more on feelings and hopes then objective truths and measurable results. In the article about DVD's, we just saw the results of the technological illiteracy at NPR, they report the DVD press release nearly verbatim, even though it is at best a distortion of the real situation.
I am not sure how you got from there to me "blaming every problem on the left". There also seems to be an awful lot of bigoted stereotypes in your post. I am right leaning, I am a follower of Jesus, and I even spent some time as a pastor. I am also an experienced Unix programmer and author of GPL'd software, and a Linux advocate. I would never tell the poor to "fsck off", and (we agree again) I think a religion based government would be an absolute travesty. I think violence against doctors that perform abortions is abhorent (not to mention stupid, we agree again), as is the bombing of abortion clinics.
I think the right and left are equally interested in helping the poor, they just have different ways they think they can best do it. At least the right gives their OWN money to help the poor, while the left seems to want to give everyone elses.
I brought up the point about secular humanisim as a reflection of a state indoctrinated philosophy. Another topic we are agreed on is that government and religion should be kept seperate. I don't want the government teaching and indoctrinating my religion, but I don't want them indoctrinating any other religion either, be they the philosphies of Marx, Neitzcie, O'Hare, Ireland, or Freud. I don't want my government telling me there is a God, but I don't want them telling me there is NOT one either... it is not their role, and none of their business.
As far as your argument for abortion, the definition of "LEGAL" depends on which law you follow. I believe the constitutional injunction on depriving a person of life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness superceeds an activist supreme court ruling, but hey, that is just my opinion. I will lobby in defense of the constitution by purely legal means and the excercise of free speech as often as I can... it's the Americian way. Slavery was "legal", and was overturned in signigicant part by a movement of devout Christians (Quakers) that found it offensive.
That being said, I think the media butchers reporting of thoughtfull athiests such as yourself also, and seems unable to distuinguish them from Pagans. This bugs me as well. Libertarians are also consistently and grossly misrepresented, as is Islam, and many other groups. I am just as bothered to hear Athiests represented as Pagans, or followers of Islam confused with terrorists, as I am to hear Christians misrepresented as murderers, or conservatives misrepresented as not caring about the poor.
If you want I will be happy to discuss it more on email, but I am not interested in becoming a leftist Athiest, and I am sure you are not interested in becomming a conservative Christian, so I am not sure much is to be gained.
And I doubt anyone else has bothered to follow the thread
I promise not to blame the worlds problems on the liberal left, if you promise not to stereotype Conservatives and Christians as murdering bombing haters of the poor
Peace
Bill Kilgallon
killbill at one dot net
(and no, the killbill has nothing to do with either Clinton or Gates, it is a play on my first and last name...)
Hey, go ahead and blame NPR. They blew it.
As usual, if a news story matches the personal beliefs and understandings of the reporter and producer, that side of the issue gets a complete and through analysis. The other side of the issue is generally at best confused and misrepresented, not so much because the reporter is trying to be biased, but because they just don't believe and understand alternative views.
In this case, the reporter and producers obviously lacked a clue, so the press release was basically recited as is.
Note that this is not an NPR problem per se, just about every media outlet (including slashdot) suffers the same problem. NPR just looks worse then most because their reporters tend to be SO far left in their personal views.
The reason this appears to be a media wide bias is that the vast majority of people working in the media today (something like 80-90%) are basically left leaning left brained, Democrat, secular humanists with a weak grasp of technology, which is much different (percentage wise anyway) from the population as a whole.
This same sort of unintentional understanding bias shows up all the time in gun control issues, religion issues, abortion issues, and politician issues, etc.
Don't believe me? Look back at the level of grief George Bush caught for his "no new taxes" backpedal verses the reporting that Bill Clinton got for being found guilty by a judge from his home state for obstruction of justice while in office.
Look at how the media treats first ammendment infringements (their sacred cow) versus second ammendment infringements. This is (IMHO) the most obvious case.
The Handspring Visor uses the Palm OS, and has a built in USB interface.
Also a USB wire would be a lot lighter to lug around with my laptop
Further, with the latest release of the Palm OS, you can do an infra-red hotsync, so for any laptop with IR, you don't need any cable at all.
Also, there is already a software product that will use the infra-red port to print on most IR enabled printers.... it is pretty slick.
Bill Kilgallon
As I have said before, complexity is like a liquid, non-compressable. All those gimmicks would be fun toys, but my palm is forever attached to my hip because it stays out of my way and does what I need when I need it, not because it is the uber-geek-toy-kitchen-sink-device (although with my modem, a vt100 emulator, and a shell account I HAVE run emacs on a Palm Professional...).
:)
If I want an MP3 player (which actually, come to think of it, I do) I will go pick up a diamond Rio, or similiar device. It is more portable, more durable, more flexible, and less expensive then adding all that capability to my PDA.
That being said, I just ordered a trg pro for $329, and this device includes an upgraded speaker (so the palm can finally dial for me) and a compact flash slot.
This means that you can now spend $600 to add a 340mb IBM microdrive to your palm pilot, if you were so inclined. On the less silly end of the spectrum, you can add a 32MB cf card for about $70, which is a more reasonable price point for a palm, and 32MB will store an AWFUL lot of palm data...
Actually, now that I think about it, the one thing I would like to be portable is the compact flash media. It would be nice to be able to swap these things between my laptop, digital camera, MP3 player, and TRGPro Palm OS device depending on my needs at the moment... (that is, once I can afford a laptop, digital camera, and mp3 player
Bill Kilgallon
The problem correctly identified by the CNN author is a problem with an organizational model for the label, not a problem with MP3's per se.
For some reason, CNN, and to some degree mp3.com, seem to think it is possible to create a great big label, represent tens of thousands of artists, and just sit back and watch everybody get rich. I don't understand why anyone is suprised when this does not work, but it represents a problem with current label paradigms and not a problem with MP3's.
What they are quickly discovering, and what slashdotters know intimately, is that without community, identity, and good old fashioned hard work, you are going nowhere.
What is the future of mp3? I think it will be a hybrid of sites like slashdot, complete with news, discussion, and moderation, that then point to particular label web sites. These web sites would have clear identities and missions... personalities.
For examples of labels with personalities, check out Blue Jordan Records and Paste Music . These are both labels that have a clear identity, and if you like some of the artists you have heard of, you will likely enjoy some of the other bands on the label that you have not heard of. The labels did a lot of work finding an identity, and brought together a community of like minded talents for people that share their tastes (sound like slashdot?).
Where MP3's will really fly is when these labels give the customer the kind of flexibility, low cost, and speed of delivery that online delivery of MP3's can provide. After buying one too many really BAD CD's for $15, I am getting pretty loathe to take any kind of gamble on an artist I don't know pretty well.
But online delivery of two tracks for a buck, for a band on a label that has given me three or four artists I really like, with songs that are getting great reviews from people with gobs of karma on www.slash^h^h^h^hmusicdot.org, that I can have playing on my desktop 5 minutes from now? Sure... take my credit card number. Heck, just give me the whole ten track package...
Bill Kilgallon
I hate to break it to you, but your tech support is not able to offer help for the windows version either.
I bought your game, when I had a borrowed CD in my hot little hands and a CD-Rom burner at my elbow, because I think piracy is wrong.
The result? Unreal crashed chronically. This same machine runs every other piece of software and many competing games and both Linux and win98 with NO PROBLEMS at all.
Call tech support. Toll call. 15 minutes of waiting and threading through voice menus. Tech gives me the "stop bothering me I don't want to solve your problem" answer of "download the newest drivers for all your hardware and reinstall".
No opportunity to get a call number and re-open the same call with the same tech if this does not work, you have to start over with another 15 minute phone pennance.
It continued to not work, and I waited. A few months later, I got a new video card, and tried again, and again updated all my drivers and the latest Unreal patches. Different errors (failed assertions).
Back to technical support. Another go-away answer... your video card is not on microsofts "official" list of supported hardware (most hardware is not). We will not support the game. Note that the Unreal requirements on the box I purchased said nothing about "officially supported hardware only". Fine. I chucked it again.
Finally, a few months later, more patches, and a brand new Nvidia TNT1 video card with 16 MB, one "officially" supported by windows. Continued crashing. Call tech support. More go away answers.
Finally I gave the *!%$ game to a friend who had a 3dfx card (for whom the game seems pretty solid). So much for buying software...
So I would recommend not buying ANYTHING with an Unreal engine, not because they do or don't have linux support, but because their software is ambitious but buggy, and their support model is insulting and useless.
Bill "on a rant" Kilgallon
If anything, it should be superior to the existing (newer) palms. The architecture of the two units are very close, and use the same motorola dragon ball processors.
The biggest hitter on the palms is the RS232 serial port during hotsync. Without hotsyncs, the average pilot could probably go two months on a single set of AAA's. With hotsyncs, probably about half that. The RS232 specification requires that the port not be parasitically powered, so those little batteries have to do all the work.
I am not sure what the specifications for USB (which the visor uses) indicate, but I bet they allow for parasitic power delivery for the interface of low power devices.
Regardless, power usage for any of the palm devices is not an issue. At worst, just go to Best Buy and buy a few sets of AAA NiMh and a charger, and you should go at least a week at a time, even with lots of backlight and constant syncing.
It is the windows CE devices with their hungry CPU's and color screens that have the battery problem.
Bill
But if you can send an anonymous post... then how can I hold you accountable for lies you spread about my product?
If every poster can be held accountable for their postings, what is to stop a tyrannical government from misusing the information to retaliate against me if I speak out against them?
It still smells mutually exclusive to me.
The really remarkable part seems to be that while the solutions do seem mutually exclusive, the United States constitution (as written, not as currently implemented) comes darn close to a complete solution.... closer then I would have thought possible.
Bill "resisting the temptation to go into a pro 2nd ammemndment rant" Kilgallon
I don't have the several hours of time available right now to work through a complete analysis, but I suspect that you could make a pretty good argument that all the problems cannot be solved simultaneously .
For example, how can you be accountable for your lies about a product, but at the same time anonymous enough to speak out against a totalitarian regime? One requires untraceability, one requires traceability.
I suspect you could answer each question pretty well, but that your answers would be mutually exclusive. How interesting.
Bill Kilgallon