I'm sorry, but the Treo *sucks* as a media player, and that D-Pad is the main reason *why* it sucks.
It sounds good enough, pTunes handles all the right formats... But it's a bear to control. It's like driving an ice cream truck by gesturing emphatically.
This could be an iPod Mini killer, but it needs a better UI.
Do you know if that's backwards compatible with the pre-MX wireless receivers?
I've got an older Cordless Freedom set at home, and it would be nice to replace the mouse with something with more buttons, although I won't give up my non-split, minimal fancy-buttons Logitech Cordless Keyboard for anything these days. (My girlfriend would kill me if I went back to my old M-series keyboard, sadly.)
Also, the Bluetooth mouse does suck for gaming. For everything else, though, it's fine. I think Bluetooth's just a little slow. It's the best mouse I'll ever use with my Powerbook, though, since I just need a fresh pair of AA's every so often, and it pairs almost automatically with the built-in Bluetooth module.
You unseat the chip, weave a bent paperclip around the pins, and reseat the chip. providing a loop for a key ring without excessive damage or hassle.
I had a 486 keychain thanks to this method for quite some time. It works even better if you're willing to epoxy the whole thing together, but that's not as much fun for some reason.
Do you forget your wallet? Your house keys? Do you need contacts of glasses? If so, do you forget those?
Does a paraplegic forget his wheelchair? Do hearing aid users forget batteries?
I'm sure that anyone who gets this implant will be VERY careful not leave it behind. Also, I'm sure that since it's medical equipment, the option will exist to run off of fairly standard batteries. It's not like you can't find hearing aid batteries in the local drugstore, why not retinal implant batteries?
If only it were that simple. I can use less A/C. Then you can use less A/C. I can talk a few friends into using less A/C.
Then we can all look down the street to that shiny new office building, kept at 20C or lower, and realize that our efforts have barely made a dent.
However, this system uses 25% less energy. Where was that energy coming from? Fission, which heats water in order to power a turbine? Coal, which heats water in order to power a turbine *and* blackens the sky? Hydroelectric, which is also decidedly *not* a free lunch, as it converts the kinetic energy of flowing water into electricity?
Instead of going through the long and energy-intensive practice of creating electricity in order to cool a building a heat the surrounding air, why not just cart away the heat down the water pipes, and give the consumers water that's only slightly warmer?
Sure, we don't *need* so much cooling, but it's there, and we aren't about to get the entire continent to stop taking advantage of it. If we're using less energy, the environmental impact of taking water from the bottom of the lake instead of the top will probably be negated since we're adding a lot less heat to the outdoors.
I was specifying what would happen *without* the so-called unnecessary encryption. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I still think that while it's a nice little nod to the record companies, it's also just a Damned Good Idea. If I want to run Pirate WiFi Radio, I'll run it. I'm happy to have Apple lock that down the rest of the time.:)
It's there to protect Apple from the Idiot Problem.
That's the problem in which some idiot sets up an open WLAN and starts sending songs to the AirPort Express.
While the idiot does this, his neighbor, the resourceful hacker, sniffs out the Ethernet frames, pulls down a stream of Apple Lossless Format audio, and saves it to his disk. Now he, and anyone else with technical expertise in range, will have any audio sent to the unit, including music purchased that the iTunes Music Store.
No loss, no fuss, and as long as you don't re-encode it, you've got audio just as good as what Apple's selling, although it's a bit larger.
The encryption isn't to protect the owner of the music or the hardware. It's there to keep you from inadvertently broadcasting music to anyone else. If you want to make a CD of iTunes Music Store tracks and copy that CD a few million times, they can't stop you. That's your choice. They're just limiting the distribution of this content in a way that only shares your music with the parties and devices of *your* choosing.
Yes, it's mostly to placate the music companies. What really throws me off is that people on Slashdot, a fairly security-savvy site, are complaining about *more* encryption. I certainly don't want some bozo capturing the audio I'm supposedly only broadcasting to my AirPort Express. If this makes it tougher for him to do so even after somehow cracking my WPA setup, then Apple's doing something *right.*
Ironically enough, the Series 1 TiVos were almost Linux-based Macs. PowerPC CPU, Linux kernel.
I agree, though. Not enough people want to run software on their PC which requires additional hardware to begin with.
The cost of the software, plus the tuner and extra disk you'd end up buying, just isn't worth it compared to the simplicity of a standalone unit.
Re:What, you want me to put wallpaper on my window
on
Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper
·
· Score: 1
What if you're next door to me, and I run a company where I can't rely on merely trusting my employees? What if you're not the one next to me, but some jackass running an open AP?
What if one of my employees is a jackass with a wifi card, a laptop, and a load of company data? Next thing you know, he's on the neighbor's wifi, and getting hacked wide open.
It's not about protecting my LAN, it's about protecting my data without filling the case with cement and burying the system at the bottom of the sea.
Re:What, you want me to put wallpaper on my window
on
Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper
·
· Score: 1
Ah, the old "Let the employees do whatever the hell they want with company gear" argument. I'm sure that's quite secure.
Re:What, you want me to put wallpaper on my window
on
Anti-Wi-Fi Wallpaper
·
· Score: 1, Informative
What if you don't use wifi, but also want to ensure that no one in your office can attach to a rogue AP?
I'm sure there are a number of uses for this which have little to do with securing one's own wireless LAN.
There's a fairly common assumption here, of course, and that's that the sysadmins have an internet connection to begin with.
What if he doesn't? What do you expect him to do then?
If the answer is "He ought to get his ass out of bed at 4am and get down to the datacenter to do his job," then you're a tyrant. A tyrant who is absolutely in the right. You don't expect him to have a connection 24/7, since he's not simply bouncing between home and work. That's fine. If you want him to have that DSL, yes, you should pay for it. If you just want him to do his job, regardless of his own setup, then you accept the risk of extended downtime (due to his commute,) and suck up the loss.
Of course, you arguably accept that no matter what until you pay for a private line to the office in full, since your employees can't be expected to work for you full time and guarantee 100% uptime on their personal DSL.
Phones are certainly a good middle ground. If the sysadmin can't get online, he'd better be able to let someone know so that expectations are kept realistic, and so that the manager can come up with some sort of contingency plan, even if it involves him at a net café, following orders over the phone from the admin.
(I've had to deal with system administration via telephone. Hellish, but it works.)
This guy got the free ride, which was reduced to broadband compensation (ISDN used to be expensive, you know,) and it's now being cut back to nothing.
I can understand the move to broadband compensation. It's faster than ISDN, people are going to move on to it anyway, so you're really paying less money for the same benefit.
However, you can't set that up, and then take it away. It's a withdrawal of benefits, and I wouldn't work for a company with that attitude.
For the record, I've worked at places where I was given a separate cell phone at the company expense, one where I was expected to absorb the cost of countless SMS pages, and now I'm at a place where they just reimburse me a little extra for right to page me. It's enough to offset the cost of messaging, which is good enough for me.
Expecting your employees to have DSL and a wireless device for your convenience without compensation is a recipe for disaster. If the employee offers such availability, that's fine. Otherwise, if you want it, shell out the cash. I invest my *time* into a job, not my money. Once that paycheck has cleared, it's my money to do with as I like. If I decide to drop back down to dialup and toss my cell phone, that's my choice. If they don't like it, they can make the offer to provide me with a cell phone and a DSL line.
Aside from the idiocy of a system limited to a wraparound in the year 2011, If we're risking an overlap beyond that, then we have proven our idiocy as a consumer culture.
31 countries. 31 Manufacturers. 31 Vehicle types. 31^5 Body style/Engine type/series/etc combinations per vehicle type. In one of 31 potential plants. Each with a run "limited" to 31^6 of this specific combination.
If one plant is spewing out over 800 million of a specific SUV each year, there's clearly a level of mental retardation in our society that should have left us all resembling monkeys who have barely discovered fire.
Admittedly, some reallocation is in order here. The addressing system is slightly out of whack relative to the actual production output of any given plant. However, I have a solution if that can't be done:
Hey, manufacturers! Listen up! STOP MAKING SO MANY GODDAMNED CARS.
(That said, the problem is said to hit at the end of the decade, which is right on schedule, as many posters have noted.)
Actually, Peppercoin's been working on this for a long time, and called it 1.0. Now they've improved upon it, and called it 2.0. This isn't some Solaris/Mozilla level renumbering scheme, it's just that Peppercoin's older system didn't work as well. It basically resulted in the occasional lack of profits, as only 1% of the user's transactions were actually pushed ahead. When this happened, you'd get billed for the past 100 purchases. On the vendor side, it's a little bit worse. 1 out of every 100 sales would actually result in a payment of 100 times whatever that sticker price was. It accumulates the transactions to a high enough level to make credit card processing sensible, but the vendor stands a chance of losing some money in the wash. Statistically insignificant, perhaps, but try telling that to someone trying to make money.
They might have a bad idea, but jumping on it as though they haven't changed anything from their initial model is a bit uninformed, to say the least.
Driving down a highway for hours at a time is dull and monotonous. The rest stop is to get you to get out of the car, stretch, and focus on something other than the road.
If someone's too stupid to nap, WiFi isn't about to change a damned thing.
In a coldly Darwinian sense, nurses, firemen, and teachers contribute very little to mankind. They're helping those who would otherwise be culled from the gene pool at an earlier age. They'd die of some disease, or in a fire, or just end up in a dead end job without the ability to read, utterly forgotten about.
Not that I really agree with that, but it's entire possible to look at things from that perspective.
To contract, musicians, athletes, and actors give us something to strive for. Music and drama are, in a sense, a method of communication. Music especially may trigger emotions and physiological responses which foster better mental and emotional development. Athletes represent the pinnacle of physical perfection, giving us a baseline by which to judge ourselves.
I think that in certain ways, all of the types of people whom you've mentioned contribute to the development of mankind.
Re:But Virtual PC doesn't run on the G5 yet!
on
RIP G4 PowerMac
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Erm... if they needed to do Windows emulation for so long, wouldn't they already have a G4?
It's not like the G4s out there are suddenly going to forget how to run VPC, and by the time Apple runs out of G4 stock, the G5 version of VPC may very well be out.
Honestly, if MS can't be asked to sell a few more Windows licenses for a system they'll never port to, then there's something pretty silly going on. (Remember, for most VPC users, it's a way to run Windows. MS wins.)
It's not a CPU, it's a mainframe processor. I'm sure they're made to even *stricter* tolerances than a desktop chip. However, chips fail. It's inevitable. What they're doing here is engineering a radically more complex CPU (with the associated increase in cost) in order to make a CPU which will route around failure. Sound familiar?
If part of the CPU fails in a live system, and you can't afford any downtime, it's better that the system reroutes around the failed portion of the chip, and alerts the sysadmin. Either way, you're going to need to replace parts at some point. This just reduces the downtime between replacements.
Why don't you ask them for the source code to their GPL'ed components, then, and prove it?
"GPL" != "Immediately hackable"
They can lock the box itself down however they want, even using closed source tools if they'd like, so long as they provide the source for any GPL'ed components on request. Not that I like the Series 2 lockouts, but let's not muddle the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
So you can engrave it.
It comes in a stylish cardboard cube.
It holds music on a tiny hard drive.
It costs $250.
It's small.
It uses a D-Pad almost exactly like my Treo 600.
I'm sorry, but the Treo *sucks* as a media player, and that D-Pad is the main reason *why* it sucks.
It sounds good enough, pTunes handles all the right formats... But it's a bear to control. It's like driving an ice cream truck by gesturing emphatically.
This could be an iPod Mini killer, but it needs a better UI.
Do you know if that's backwards compatible with the pre-MX wireless receivers?
I've got an older Cordless Freedom set at home, and it would be nice to replace the mouse with something with more buttons, although I won't give up my non-split, minimal fancy-buttons Logitech Cordless Keyboard for anything these days. (My girlfriend would kill me if I went back to my old M-series keyboard, sadly.)
Also, the Bluetooth mouse does suck for gaming. For everything else, though, it's fine. I think Bluetooth's just a little slow. It's the best mouse I'll ever use with my Powerbook, though, since I just need a fresh pair of AA's every so often, and it pairs almost automatically with the built-in Bluetooth module.
The trick is to get the chip with the socket.
You unseat the chip, weave a bent paperclip around the pins, and reseat the chip. providing a loop for a key ring without excessive damage or hassle.
I had a 486 keychain thanks to this method for quite some time. It works even better if you're willing to epoxy the whole thing together, but that's not as much fun for some reason.
Do you forget your wallet? Your house keys? Do you need contacts of glasses? If so, do you forget those?
Does a paraplegic forget his wheelchair? Do hearing aid users forget batteries?
I'm sure that anyone who gets this implant will be VERY careful not leave it behind. Also, I'm sure that since it's medical equipment, the option will exist to run off of fairly standard batteries. It's not like you can't find hearing aid batteries in the local drugstore, why not retinal implant batteries?
If only it were that simple. I can use less A/C. Then you can use less A/C. I can talk a few friends into using less A/C.
Then we can all look down the street to that shiny new office building, kept at 20C or lower, and realize that our efforts have barely made a dent.
However, this system uses 25% less energy. Where was that energy coming from? Fission, which heats water in order to power a turbine? Coal, which heats water in order to power a turbine *and* blackens the sky? Hydroelectric, which is also decidedly *not* a free lunch, as it converts the kinetic energy of flowing water into electricity?
Instead of going through the long and energy-intensive practice of creating electricity in order to cool a building a heat the surrounding air, why not just cart away the heat down the water pipes, and give the consumers water that's only slightly warmer?
Sure, we don't *need* so much cooling, but it's there, and we aren't about to get the entire continent to stop taking advantage of it. If we're using less energy, the environmental impact of taking water from the bottom of the lake instead of the top will probably be negated since we're adding a lot less heat to the outdoors.
Worst movie *I* have ever seen.
I'm sure there's worse, but this one just hurt.
I was specifying what would happen *without* the so-called unnecessary encryption. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I still think that while it's a nice little nod to the record companies, it's also just a Damned Good Idea. If I want to run Pirate WiFi Radio, I'll run it. I'm happy to have Apple lock that down the rest of the time. :)
It's there to protect Apple from the Idiot Problem.
That's the problem in which some idiot sets up an open WLAN and starts sending songs to the AirPort Express.
While the idiot does this, his neighbor, the resourceful hacker, sniffs out the Ethernet frames, pulls down a stream of Apple Lossless Format audio, and saves it to his disk. Now he, and anyone else with technical expertise in range, will have any audio sent to the unit, including music purchased that the iTunes Music Store.
No loss, no fuss, and as long as you don't re-encode it, you've got audio just as good as what Apple's selling, although it's a bit larger.
The encryption isn't to protect the owner of the music or the hardware. It's there to keep you from inadvertently broadcasting music to anyone else. If you want to make a CD of iTunes Music Store tracks and copy that CD a few million times, they can't stop you. That's your choice. They're just limiting the distribution of this content in a way that only shares your music with the parties and devices of *your* choosing.
Yes, it's mostly to placate the music companies. What really throws me off is that people on Slashdot, a fairly security-savvy site, are complaining about *more* encryption. I certainly don't want some bozo capturing the audio I'm supposedly only broadcasting to my AirPort Express. If this makes it tougher for him to do so even after somehow cracking my WPA setup, then Apple's doing something *right.*
Ironically enough, the Series 1 TiVos were almost Linux-based Macs. PowerPC CPU, Linux kernel.
I agree, though. Not enough people want to run software on their PC which requires additional hardware to begin with.
The cost of the software, plus the tuner and extra disk you'd end up buying, just isn't worth it compared to the simplicity of a standalone unit.
What if you're next door to me, and I run a company where I can't rely on merely trusting my employees? What if you're not the one next to me, but some jackass running an open AP?
What if one of my employees is a jackass with a wifi card, a laptop, and a load of company data? Next thing you know, he's on the neighbor's wifi, and getting hacked wide open.
It's not about protecting my LAN, it's about protecting my data without filling the case with cement and burying the system at the bottom of the sea.
Ah, the old "Let the employees do whatever the hell they want with company gear" argument. I'm sure that's quite secure.
What if you don't use wifi, but also want to ensure that no one in your office can attach to a rogue AP?
I'm sure there are a number of uses for this which have little to do with securing one's own wireless LAN.
Why bother? She's already tied up...
It's a Windows system. It runs XP. It may even be part of a Windows Domain.
Which key combination does Windows wait for to bring up the Domain Login Dialog?
Ctrl-Alt-Del.
I'd pity the person using this system when this switch breaks. Nice toy, but no easy way to log in. D'oh.
There's a fairly common assumption here, of course, and that's that the sysadmins have an internet connection to begin with.
What if he doesn't? What do you expect him to do then?
If the answer is "He ought to get his ass out of bed at 4am and get down to the datacenter to do his job," then you're a tyrant. A tyrant who is absolutely in the right. You don't expect him to have a connection 24/7, since he's not simply bouncing between home and work. That's fine. If you want him to have that DSL, yes, you should pay for it. If you just want him to do his job, regardless of his own setup, then you accept the risk of extended downtime (due to his commute,) and suck up the loss.
Of course, you arguably accept that no matter what until you pay for a private line to the office in full, since your employees can't be expected to work for you full time and guarantee 100% uptime on their personal DSL.
Phones are certainly a good middle ground. If the sysadmin can't get online, he'd better be able to let someone know so that expectations are kept realistic, and so that the manager can come up with some sort of contingency plan, even if it involves him at a net café, following orders over the phone from the admin.
(I've had to deal with system administration via telephone. Hellish, but it works.)
You walked in willing to do this.
This guy got the free ride, which was reduced to broadband compensation (ISDN used to be expensive, you know,) and it's now being cut back to nothing.
I can understand the move to broadband compensation. It's faster than ISDN, people are going to move on to it anyway, so you're really paying less money for the same benefit.
However, you can't set that up, and then take it away. It's a withdrawal of benefits, and I wouldn't work for a company with that attitude.
For the record, I've worked at places where I was given a separate cell phone at the company expense, one where I was expected to absorb the cost of countless SMS pages, and now I'm at a place where they just reimburse me a little extra for right to page me. It's enough to offset the cost of messaging, which is good enough for me.
Expecting your employees to have DSL and a wireless device for your convenience without compensation is a recipe for disaster. If the employee offers such availability, that's fine. Otherwise, if you want it, shell out the cash. I invest my *time* into a job, not my money. Once that paycheck has cleared, it's my money to do with as I like. If I decide to drop back down to dialup and toss my cell phone, that's my choice. If they don't like it, they can make the offer to provide me with a cell phone and a DSL line.
It's not. I'm posting from a 12" Powerbook, S/N UV312XXXXXX.
Which, oddly enough, places me in the "threatened" range, even though I don't even *have* an iBook.
Aside from the idiocy of a system limited to a wraparound in the year 2011, If we're risking an overlap beyond that, then we have proven our idiocy as a consumer culture.
31 countries.
31 Manufacturers.
31 Vehicle types.
31^5 Body style/Engine type/series/etc combinations per vehicle type.
In one of 31 potential plants. Each with a run "limited" to 31^6 of this specific combination.
If one plant is spewing out over 800 million of a specific SUV each year, there's clearly a level of mental retardation in our society that should have left us all resembling monkeys who have barely discovered fire.
Admittedly, some reallocation is in order here. The addressing system is slightly out of whack relative to the actual production output of any given plant. However, I have a solution if that can't be done:
Hey, manufacturers! Listen up! STOP MAKING SO MANY GODDAMNED CARS.
(That said, the problem is said to hit at the end of the decade, which is right on schedule, as many posters have noted.)
Actually, Peppercoin's been working on this for a long time, and called it 1.0. Now they've improved upon it, and called it 2.0. This isn't some Solaris/Mozilla level renumbering scheme, it's just that Peppercoin's older system didn't work as well. It basically resulted in the occasional lack of profits, as only 1% of the user's transactions were actually pushed ahead. When this happened, you'd get billed for the past 100 purchases. On the vendor side, it's a little bit worse. 1 out of every 100 sales would actually result in a payment of 100 times whatever that sticker price was. It accumulates the transactions to a high enough level to make credit card processing sensible, but the vendor stands a chance of losing some money in the wash. Statistically insignificant, perhaps, but try telling that to someone trying to make money.
They might have a bad idea, but jumping on it as though they haven't changed anything from their initial model is a bit uninformed, to say the least.
Not sleepy... bored.
Driving down a highway for hours at a time is dull and monotonous. The rest stop is to get you to get out of the car, stretch, and focus on something other than the road.
If someone's too stupid to nap, WiFi isn't about to change a damned thing.
I was arguing a point that I don't even agree with. I never said I was *good* at disagreeing with myself.
Can we just go home now?
In a coldly Darwinian sense, nurses, firemen, and teachers contribute very little to mankind. They're helping those who would otherwise be culled from the gene pool at an earlier age. They'd die of some disease, or in a fire, or just end up in a dead end job without the ability to read, utterly forgotten about.
Not that I really agree with that, but it's entire possible to look at things from that perspective.
To contract, musicians, athletes, and actors give us something to strive for. Music and drama are, in a sense, a method of communication. Music especially may trigger emotions and physiological responses which foster better mental and emotional development. Athletes represent the pinnacle of physical perfection, giving us a baseline by which to judge ourselves.
I think that in certain ways, all of the types of people whom you've mentioned contribute to the development of mankind.
Erm... if they needed to do Windows emulation for so long, wouldn't they already have a G4?
It's not like the G4s out there are suddenly going to forget how to run VPC, and by the time Apple runs out of G4 stock, the G5 version of VPC may very well be out.
Honestly, if MS can't be asked to sell a few more Windows licenses for a system they'll never port to, then there's something pretty silly going on. (Remember, for most VPC users, it's a way to run Windows. MS wins.)
It's not a CPU, it's a mainframe processor. I'm sure they're made to even *stricter* tolerances than a desktop chip. However, chips fail. It's inevitable. What they're doing here is engineering a radically more complex CPU (with the associated increase in cost) in order to make a CPU which will route around failure. Sound familiar?
If part of the CPU fails in a live system, and you can't afford any downtime, it's better that the system reroutes around the failed portion of the chip, and alerts the sysadmin. Either way, you're going to need to replace parts at some point. This just reduces the downtime between replacements.
Why don't you ask them for the source code to their GPL'ed components, then, and prove it?
"GPL" != "Immediately hackable"
They can lock the box itself down however they want, even using closed source tools if they'd like, so long as they provide the source for any GPL'ed components on request. Not that I like the Series 2 lockouts, but let's not muddle the issue.