A more profound question is the following. What is the point of amateur radio when the Internet has connected most of the globe?
I bought a scanner a few months back and I've been listening to the HAMs, and I will tell you what the point of it all is: Antennas.
HAMs love antennas. They ALWAYS talk about their antennas at some point. Usually, they start off talking about the weather or something innocuous as such. Always, the conversation turns to their station and their equipment, and usually that means they talk about their antenna.
They love tuning their antennas, and making new antennas out of wire, and tuning them, or attempting to tune them. These guys LOVE their antennas. It's amazing how much they can talk about antennas.
I'm sure there are some interesting/practical uses for Morse, but is it something that everyone who's going to be using the HAM bands needs to know? It'd be one thing if there was bandwidth set aside for morse-only, but why should people be burdened with archaic knowledge if they're never going to use it? It seems to me that these requirements are more an impediment to the hobby than anything else.
Hello, I am a lawyer representing a 419 scammer that was recently placed under arrest for his alleged actions. My client has a substantial amount of cash in Nigeria and needs your help to move the money out of the country before his trial. We are prepared to give you 10% of the $30 Million US Dollars that my client has stashed away in his various safety deposit boxes. All you have to do is give us your bank's routing number and account information, and we will contact you shortly. Thank you for your assistance,
When will OS makers nut up, get off the Hippie bandwagon and start calling the Trash 'Trash' again instead of 'Recycling'? We all understand the importance of our planet, but this isn't a friggin' recycling bin. You don't pull files out of the Recycling bin to repurpose.
Actually, Palm OS devices are either 320x320 or 320x480. Considerably higher resolution than a Pocket PC's 320x240.
Actually, I have a Dell Axim X50v, one of the four PPC's that have a 480x640 screen. They might as well all have 240x420 screens, though. None of the software supports it, except to add high res textures to the background. The OS treats the larger screen in much the same way as a Palm Hi-Res device treats a 160x160 screen.
It might as well be 240x320 though, because its way slower than the QVGA screens because the OS doesn't utilize the badass graphics co-processor in any of the VGA devices. Since you have to deal with 4 times the pixels, you get almost a quarter of the performance.
I think the PDA is dying. I like them. I just don't think the average joe wants to spend $500-$600 for a high-end PDA, when a low-end laptop costs as much. I think that the PDA-Phone is the future of the PDA, and MAYBE, the Life Manager (i.e. Hard drive with a general purpose file viewer stapled to the top).
That is until the Longhorn tablets come out, anyways. Then we will have PDA's that can do what laptops do.
he good news for you is that Dell is offering an upgrade for the Axim X50v owners to get WM2005.
Yeah, I've been thinking of ditching the Axim, but instead I'm going to hang on to it until the new OS comes out.
I am going back to the LD for day to day use, though.
The reviewer has a very selective memory when it comes to the what is supported and what isn't. He talks about the 3D capabilities of the PPC, which are in fact NONE, the same as the average Palm, but slams Palm because you have to use a special API to write accelerated 3D programs for the Zodiac (which uses an ATI Imageon processor, and some other setup for 3D acceleration), THE SAME WAY YOU HAVE TO WITH PPC.
Pocket PC wins here; Palsm are just recently getting capability that Pocket PCs have had for awhile. Therefore, there's a lot more advanced games for Pocket PC.
Read my tirade against MS and their lack of support for real DirectX that I posted earlier. MS has crap support for 3D, even when you're using the PPC with the most awesome graphics chip ever to be placed in a PDA, ever (the Intel 2700G on my Dell Axim X50v). I get lousy lousy gameplay (well gameplay that's not up to the standards of the 16 meg card I have) on most games, because there is no native support in the OS for the chip.
I remember when I used a Palm, this was extremely quirky. Does Palm OS execute programs directly from their location on the SD card yet?
Define quirky. I've never had a problem installing apps or using them from an SD card. Ever. And I've used them from the beginning. This is FUD.
Not really. A lot of the SD hardware out there is designed for Pocket PC and only has drivers for it.
Palm OS supports the SD standard. Period. Quit with the FUD. What some Palm devices don't support is SDIO, which is the modified standard that allows what appears to be a SD slot to be used as a peripheral interface.
I recently got fed up with the crashing on the LifeDrive and ran through several PPC devices trying (unsuccessfully) to replace it. There's no doubt that the specs for the PPC devices are better than the Palm devices, but the WM is so frickin' horrid it evens the field out.
The reviewer is just plain wrong about his assertions that PPC is better with the memory than Palm. Its just plain not true. Search the PPC forums for the term "reset" and you'll find that a lot of PPC users reset their devices regularly, some claiming even 5-10 times per day, to reclaim memory lost to leaks on the system. I didn't believe it when I first got my device, but then I tried and I'll be damned if I hadn't lost 5 megs (of 40 megs, mind you) to memory leaks in less than a week.
There are some huge technical issues with WM, and there's an incentive for MS to NOT fix them. Some of the issues with the interface and the way the OS works have existed since WinCE 1.0 came out, and aren't going to be fixed any time soon. MS has a HUGE incentive not to fix PPC in that for the same price as a high-end PPC ($600) they could be gaining a sale of a full version of Windows XP on a laptop. They wouldn't want to do anything to discourage purchase of their primary cash cow.
The world of PPC isn't as unified as the reviewer might have you believe. The PPC that I ended up with (the Dell Axim X50v) has a badass graphics chip in it (the Intel 2700g, with 16megs of onboard memory;quite good for a VGA device), that isn't supported by the OS natively, or many developers, therefore the device gets lousy benchmarks and performs like crap on most games, even though its graphics co-processor blows everything else on the market out of the water.
There is no real DirectX for PPC. It would be great if there was, but there ain't. A lot of games still use the GDI interface to write to video ram, thereby bypassing the utility of the graphics co-processor. There is a subset of DirectX referred to as GAPI (or Games API), but that doesn't support the 2700G either. There's a hacked up version that does, though, so if you're willing to do a little fiddling, you can get decent performance from games that use that dll.
It floors me that MS has a beautiful API and HAL for just this issue (DirectX) and they don't bother putting it in all of their devices.
Fixtures are a big cost to retailers. I deal with a company that bought a used bookstore on eBay, just for the fixtures. This was not a small cost, and certainly the longboxes helped speed the acceptance of CDs into the existing distribution channels. Once the volume of CDs hit critical mass, the longboxes disappeared and the fixtures were update to acommodate the new form factor. Heck some retailers used those silly long plastic containers after the longboxes were gone, just to put off the cost of updating their fixtures.
Best Buy cashier harasses customer by asking for payment.
Wasn't Best Buy the place where they had a guy arrested because out of protest, he paid his bill with $2 bills and the cashier thought they were conterfeit?
To the cable company it isn't any different. Those bastards would charge a full monthly fee to everyone who walked in your house if they could get their addresses, on the suspicion that they might've seen the TV.
Didn't Randal L. Schwartz also get into trouble with a past employer?
Yeah, Intel. He was convicted of three felonies. He was running a password cracking program on their servers. He had cracked computers not only on Intel's machines, but on the machines of some of their partners, as well. He'd also installed some backdoor programs on several machines at Intel. It was really stupid of him to do all of this.
Gosh, it's amazing how the phrase "News for Nerds" has degraded.
Dvorak seems to benefit those with RSS
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
It seems to me that Dvorak benefits mostly people who have already developed RSS. There's plenty of evidence that Dvorak reduces the amount of movement that's required given the same text. The value of that reduction in movement is of dubious value to a person who doesn't have wrist issues.
True that. I've learned that when pride is the only thing people are competing over, things get vicious quickly. In Open Source projects the same thing happens.
In my business, I can compromise, and usually come to an agreement that satisfies both parties enough to quit squabbling. When pride is on the line, there's no compromising. All or nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
A more profound question is the following. What is the point of amateur radio when the Internet has connected most of the globe?
I bought a scanner a few months back and I've been listening to the HAMs, and I will tell you what the point of it all is: Antennas.
HAMs love antennas. They ALWAYS talk about their antennas at some point. Usually, they start off talking about the weather or something innocuous as such. Always, the conversation turns to their station and their equipment, and usually that means they talk about their antenna.
They love tuning their antennas, and making new antennas out of wire, and tuning them, or attempting to tune them. These guys LOVE their antennas. It's amazing how much they can talk about antennas.
I ought to make a DTD for Morse Code. Much more practical than learning the real deal.
But why should it be required for amature radio operation?
So the HAMs can live out their war fantasies? What if a foreign power invades and uses radio jamming equipment? Who will warn the President?
Morse code is the radio equivalent of banging two rocks together.
Maybe they'll ease the "banging two rocks together" requirements as well! Technician Class, here I come!
I'm sure there are some interesting/practical uses for Morse, but is it something that everyone who's going to be using the HAM bands needs to know? It'd be one thing if there was bandwidth set aside for morse-only, but why should people be burdened with archaic knowledge if they're never going to use it? It seems to me that these requirements are more an impediment to the hobby than anything else.
Hello, I am a lawyer representing a 419 scammer that was recently placed under arrest for his alleged actions. My client has a substantial amount of cash in Nigeria and needs your help to move the money out of the country before his trial. We are prepared to give you 10% of the $30 Million US Dollars that my client has stashed away in his various safety deposit boxes. All you have to do is give us your bank's routing number and account information, and we will contact you shortly. Thank you for your assistance,
M. Buddha,
Legal Counselor
Lagos, Nigeria
I volunteer to take over.
:p
You and half the other goobs in Loopback.
When will OS makers nut up, get off the Hippie bandwagon and start calling the Trash 'Trash' again instead of 'Recycling'? We all understand the importance of our planet, but this isn't a friggin' recycling bin. You don't pull files out of the Recycling bin to repurpose.
Actually, Palm OS devices are either 320x320 or 320x480. Considerably higher resolution than a Pocket PC's 320x240.
Actually, I have a Dell Axim X50v, one of the four PPC's that have a 480x640 screen. They might as well all have 240x420 screens, though. None of the software supports it, except to add high res textures to the background. The OS treats the larger screen in much the same way as a Palm Hi-Res device treats a 160x160 screen.
It might as well be 240x320 though, because its way slower than the QVGA screens because the OS doesn't utilize the badass graphics co-processor in any of the VGA devices. Since you have to deal with 4 times the pixels, you get almost a quarter of the performance.
I think the PDA is dying. I like them. I just don't think the average joe wants to spend $500-$600 for a high-end PDA, when a low-end laptop costs as much. I think that the PDA-Phone is the future of the PDA, and MAYBE, the Life Manager (i.e. Hard drive with a general purpose file viewer stapled to the top).
That is until the Longhorn tablets come out, anyways. Then we will have PDA's that can do what laptops do.
he good news for you is that Dell is offering an upgrade for the Axim X50v owners to get WM2005.
Yeah, I've been thinking of ditching the Axim, but instead I'm going to hang on to it until the new OS comes out.
I am going back to the LD for day to day use, though.
The reviewer has a very selective memory when it comes to the what is supported and what isn't. He talks about the 3D capabilities of the PPC, which are in fact NONE, the same as the average Palm, but slams Palm because you have to use a special API to write accelerated 3D programs for the Zodiac (which uses an ATI Imageon processor, and some other setup for 3D acceleration), THE SAME WAY YOU HAVE TO WITH PPC.
This guy isn't being particularly objective.
Pocket PC wins here; Palsm are just recently getting capability that Pocket PCs have had for awhile. Therefore, there's a lot more advanced games for Pocket PC.
Read my tirade against MS and their lack of support for real DirectX that I posted earlier. MS has crap support for 3D, even when you're using the PPC with the most awesome graphics chip ever to be placed in a PDA, ever (the Intel 2700G on my Dell Axim X50v). I get lousy lousy gameplay (well gameplay that's not up to the standards of the 16 meg card I have) on most games, because there is no native support in the OS for the chip.
I remember when I used a Palm, this was extremely quirky. Does Palm OS execute programs directly from their location on the SD card yet?
Define quirky. I've never had a problem installing apps or using them from an SD card. Ever. And I've used them from the beginning. This is FUD.
Not really. A lot of the SD hardware out there is designed for Pocket PC and only has drivers for it.
Palm OS supports the SD standard. Period. Quit with the FUD. What some Palm devices don't support is SDIO, which is the modified standard that allows what appears to be a SD slot to be used as a peripheral interface.
I recently got fed up with the crashing on the LifeDrive and ran through several PPC devices trying (unsuccessfully) to replace it. There's no doubt that the specs for the PPC devices are better than the Palm devices, but the WM is so frickin' horrid it evens the field out.
The reviewer is just plain wrong about his assertions that PPC is better with the memory than Palm. Its just plain not true. Search the PPC forums for the term "reset" and you'll find that a lot of PPC users reset their devices regularly, some claiming even 5-10 times per day, to reclaim memory lost to leaks on the system. I didn't believe it when I first got my device, but then I tried and I'll be damned if I hadn't lost 5 megs (of 40 megs, mind you) to memory leaks in less than a week.
There are some huge technical issues with WM, and there's an incentive for MS to NOT fix them. Some of the issues with the interface and the way the OS works have existed since WinCE 1.0 came out, and aren't going to be fixed any time soon. MS has a HUGE incentive not to fix PPC in that for the same price as a high-end PPC ($600) they could be gaining a sale of a full version of Windows XP on a laptop. They wouldn't want to do anything to discourage purchase of their primary cash cow.
The world of PPC isn't as unified as the reviewer might have you believe. The PPC that I ended up with (the Dell Axim X50v) has a badass graphics chip in it (the Intel 2700g, with 16megs of onboard memory;quite good for a VGA device), that isn't supported by the OS natively, or many developers, therefore the device gets lousy benchmarks and performs like crap on most games, even though its graphics co-processor blows everything else on the market out of the water.
There is no real DirectX for PPC. It would be great if there was, but there ain't. A lot of games still use the GDI interface to write to video ram, thereby bypassing the utility of the graphics co-processor. There is a subset of DirectX referred to as GAPI (or Games API), but that doesn't support the 2700G either. There's a hacked up version that does, though, so if you're willing to do a little fiddling, you can get decent performance from games that use that dll.
It floors me that MS has a beautiful API and HAL for just this issue (DirectX) and they don't bother putting it in all of their devices.
MS probably offered a nice rebate program. That's how they garner support for new product lines.
Fixtures are a big cost to retailers. I deal with a company that bought a used bookstore on eBay, just for the fixtures. This was not a small cost, and certainly the longboxes helped speed the acceptance of CDs into the existing distribution channels. Once the volume of CDs hit critical mass, the longboxes disappeared and the fixtures were update to acommodate the new form factor. Heck some retailers used those silly long plastic containers after the longboxes were gone, just to put off the cost of updating their fixtures.
Best Buy cashier harasses customer by asking for payment.
s ker08mar08,1,76004.column?coll=bal-local-columnist s&ctrack=1&cset=true
Wasn't Best Buy the place where they had a guy arrested because out of protest, he paid his bill with $2 bills and the cashier thought they were conterfeit?
Here's a link: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.ole
To the cable company it isn't any different. Those bastards would charge a full monthly fee to everyone who walked in your house if they could get their addresses, on the suspicion that they might've seen the TV.
Didn't Randal L. Schwartz also get into trouble with a past employer?
Yeah, Intel. He was convicted of three felonies. He was running a password cracking program on their servers. He had cracked computers not only on Intel's machines, but on the machines of some of their partners, as well. He'd also installed some backdoor programs on several machines at Intel. It was really stupid of him to do all of this.
Every time you block an ad, you make baby Jesus cry.
Please stop blocking ads, for Christ's sake.
You can set adblock to do just that. You have the option of merely hiding the images or not even downloading them.
Wow. Another case mod. How clever. Next.
Gosh, it's amazing how the phrase "News for Nerds" has degraded.
It seems to me that Dvorak benefits mostly people who have already developed RSS. There's plenty of evidence that Dvorak reduces the amount of movement that's required given the same text. The value of that reduction in movement is of dubious value to a person who doesn't have wrist issues.
It's not the manifesto that landed him in jail.
Obviously it's the fact that he typed it on a QWERTY keyboard that landed him in jail.
True that. I've learned that when pride is the only thing people are competing over, things get vicious quickly. In Open Source projects the same thing happens.
In my business, I can compromise, and usually come to an agreement that satisfies both parties enough to quit squabbling. When pride is on the line, there's no compromising. All or nothing.
America loves a moron and hates people who appear intelligent,
As evidenced by your Score of 2.