Well, the 100/200lx clamshell is from 1993... 1993. Yeah, its 640x240, but its from 1993. A lot of modern clamshells are still 640x240. I think that is kind of sad, really.
The Zaurus is 640x480 and its a convertable clamshell/handheld. You really have to see the screen to believe how clear and sharp it is. I have not seen a comparable screen in terms of sharpness and vivid colors on any handheld.
I couldn't find a link comparing it to an ipaq, but I did pictures comparing it to an Axim. It is shorter than the axim, but about 5mm thicker. The 200lx might not fit in your pocket, but the C860 certainly should. Here
The agenda VR3 has a 240x160 display. Don't know about you, but I'd rather not browse the web on that. AT ALL. 8mb of ram and 66mhz doesn't really cut the cheese.
Psions look neat, but 6.7 inches by 3.5 inches x 1 inch is a touch too chunky for me (its about the size of the 100/200LX I think). I could live with it, I think, but its only 190 mhz. At least the screen is 7.7 inches diagonal.
The C860 is only 4.75 inches x 3.25 x.92 inches. Quite ready for my pocket.
I am a clamshell nut. I must have a clamshell design, and I've been very unhappy with the US PDA market for a long, long time. Is it just me, or do PDA product lines improve at a snail's pace?
Why do I think that? I got an HP100LX about late 1993. For those who don't know, it is a 80186 DOS based palmtop. It came with a great suite of PIM software, and could do some sort of quasi-multitasking with near-dos applications. No backlight, one PCMCIA slot, ran what seemed like forever (30-40 hours+) on two AA batteries. 640x240 resolution.
By about 1998, it disintegrated. I looked for another good PDA, but found nothing. I tried the WinCE based HP 320LX, but it was a piece of garbage. I opted to just buy another 100LX.
Finally, replaced my 2nd 100LX with a Zaurus C860, but not before trying several of PalmOS and WinCE 2.0/2000/2003 handhelds. Yeah, but the C860 is only available in japan. (Technically you can find it in the states.) It runs Linux, though, so slashdot folks should be all over that. WiFi is great, it has CF and SD (SDIO soon). The 640x480 display is stunning brilliant. Oh, and its clamshell/handheld convertable. Running a linux dos emulator on it lets me run all the old apps I ran on the 100LX (including Derive), at a good speed. Battery life is about 7 hours of continuous use with judicious use of WiFi, which is not bad.
I'm not impressed, at all, with this ipaq model. 640x480? I was halfway there a *decade* ago. 640x480 has been out on handheld PCs for at least 3 years now, though maybe not in the US. The processor speed is nice, but I just have to have a clamshell.
I think the C860 is ideal for grad and undergrad college students because of the scientific apps on linux, wifi, clamshell and other reasons I've outlined. I don't want just another toy PDA or PIM system. A PamOS 3.0 device will do basic PIM stuff quite handily. There are some seriously killer linux math apps (similar to mathematica) that run quite well on the C860, too. I just don't think this ipaq is a good geek's PDA because of the native OS and other reasons I've outlined.
I want to see a new PDA here in the US that I can be as excited about as I was the 200LX and and the C860.
Capslock is great for the model M addict!
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Is Caps Lock Dead?
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There's just something magical about the Model M. It doesn't have a windows/meta key... but that is what capslock is for! Just remap it to be the windows key and TA DA. Capslock-R for Run! and so on..
I much prefer this to the windows key between control and alt anyway.. its too easy to hit in games and too much of a pain to disable every time you run a game. Capslock is just the right spot for it.:)
What sort of setups do the admins out there have for blocking this stuff? Anything at the gateway or proxy level??
For a long time, I have been using a lot of off-the-shelf scripts and utilities hacked together as an anti-spyware, anti-virus proxy. Anyone out there doing the same care to comment?
For web stuff, I use squid to block a lot of stuff that is usually spyware. It pretty much kills any software that auto-installs (except for java webstart). Usually not to big of a deal-- the business calls the help desk and we walk them through a manual install of flash or whatever it is they need. For very common spyware, we let it infect one test machine then redirect traffic through the proxy to those sites. Ideally, we block the file name or active x control with squid. It isn't a perfect solution though...
For email, I am using p3scan, a pop3 proxy, and a couple simple scripts to rename all untrusted attachments to something else. We also have a nice script that strips out all non-image, non-formatting related html in email. The email soltion seems much more elegant and nice than the web solution-- anyone know of any setups better/similar that cut gator & other companies off at the knees like this??
In practice, this is has reduced our crapware-related helpdesk calls at least 10 fold.
Whoa! This is cool. I'm a college student and I might have prior art on this one. In 1999, 2000 I developed a 6 legged walker that had 2.4ghz video back to one desktop computer, and a 2400 baud serial link back to another. The robot had tilt, temp, range, IR, hall-effect etc. sensors on board, and the 2400 baud link went to another computer that was the real brains.. the video processing happened on one and the electronics on the other. All wireless. It was a mobile, wireless sensor platform for students to experiment on, etc. Before that, I was modifying RF remote controls to transmit information... I wonder if this patent has a bounty . . ......... bwa!
actually, each input is analog. I have muxed one of them before to get 8-bits of input. The RCX isn't bad, once you put J2ME on it, or something decent. Here is a page where someone did the same thing with 6 inputs: http://members.axion.net/~rduff/rcxinput.html
The ink has many chemicals in it, many that don't want to stick together. The lighter elements in the ink tend to evaporate, turning the ink into a thick sludge. The sludge, as you can imagine, has a hard time passing through the nozzles of the print head. This has always has been issue since at least 1996, when we got our first high-end inkjet printers. At that time, you could expect the shelf life of the cart. to be about 6-10 months. In fact, back in those days, stores would occasionally sell you old stock, and there were no date codes printed on the ink carts. You were SOL if you got an "old stock" cart, because HP said it was too old. At least now HP will warrany ANY non-empty ink cart that has a date stamp before the expiry date on the cart.
Think about it-- faster evaporation times on paper mean the ink doesn't soak the paper as much. You can get brigher brights, darker darks, etc. These chemicals in the ink don't magically want to evaporate only once they hit the paper. They always want to evaporate. Remember the $800 inkjet from not so long ago that had a halogen heater? It was to speed up the chemical reaction.
I could understand if the date codes started inching closer and closer-- to like just a month or two weeks. (Keep the ink in the freezer next to the t-bones, anyone? yeah, right)
I don't believe the ink has been engineered to have a shelf-life. It may be that they're in no hurry to improve their shelf-life, but it is nothing new. The date code is to help prevent customers from getting old stock. There may be better alternatives to this kind ink out now, but they're building on their ink research from 10 years ago.. which means it is probably also the cheapest technology. So if you want to claim that for the last decade, HP has been plotting this scheme to get more ink dollars out of people, we'd better put on our tinfoil hats.
Actually, as far as XP is concerned, you DO have the right to reverse engineer, decompile, modify, etc. I note you don't mention distribution... You AGREE not reverse engineer, decompile, etc. though, because of how software is licensed. If you start distributing patches (in patch form) for Windows XP to make it better/faster/stronger, is that illegal too?? No. Breech of contract? Maybe. But when you're buying a box, you aren't making a contract. When you buy the box, do you own the design? No. Can you use it for whatever you wish? Yes. Hardware is not licensed to you. Software is, though, because of its nature. Technically, the software in the bios is licensed to you, but its under "default" legal terms as on XBOX powerup, you don't have to agree to waive any of your rights.
When you say things like that, it starts down a slippery slope.
If I modify windows dlls to make pancakes instead of display a gui, is that a jailable? What if instead I build a video card where windows thinks its drawing stuff, but instead its makin waffles on the model 3? If I modify the bios in my car to have a better fuel/oxygen intake ratio? is _that_ jailable, too? You seem to be saying so. I'm just saying it isn't as easy to draw the legal line as you imply.
Licensing can be a double edged sword. Courts have shown that Licenses are inalienable rights to works.* So... if you're buying one of these things on the condition that you own an X-Box, you are ALREADY licnesed for the use of it. Since you ALREADY have the unmodified bios in your XBOX, and you can only use one at a time, he isn't technically changing anything about the nature of who has what code.
*By inalienable, I mean outside forces can't destroy your license [fire, theft, etc]. I think the specific case was an office building burned down taking the paper license with it, but the company still had proof they bought it. Some company wanted them to re-license the software, but the courts ruled they didn't have to because it was a right-of use, largely intellectual work in nature.
Anyone want to comment on using strong encryption to prevent evidence gathering? There are a few projects out there that let you have very, very strong encryption for your OS of choice. Anyone got any articles on this?? Is there some reason these can't be used? Does the 5th amendment apply to giving up your decryption keys? Inquiring minds want to know!
It seems to me observing what goes in through the network cable is circumstantial if you have no actual files on the computer. At least, no useable files. Why doesn't everyone use ridiculously strong encyption? I mean enforcing copyright is one thing, but this is overboard.
A lot of people are pointing the old debates about the US's prosperity to the heavy industrial and later automobile industries moving off shore to what is going on now. I see the point, but it is more complex now than it has ever been. Consider:
When we move parts of industry off shore, its because we've gone on to "bigger and better" things. When we perfect automated manufacturing, we can move it offshore and concern ourselves instead with R&D and/or innovative design. Our country's greatest minds turn away from the practical (in a field) and turn toward efficiency, new technologies, and new ideas that ultimately lead to a complete social change. After the car, consumer goods like Televisions, VCRs, Computers, and now what?
We might just be in a transitionary period just now-- but we need to move on to "bigger and better" things that can drive the economy. What I mean by that is the point at which an item becomes a commodity here, it usually isn't growing in revenue or market penetration anymore, which has been our basis for economic growth. Maybe it'll come working on hydrogen technology-- or protein sequencing (for our own food production)-- or whatever, but it does scare me to see our real "thinking" jobs (what has become the basis for our bread and butter industies since before 1900) are moving out of our hands. Our culture is getting odd... American scientific people just don't seem to be as radical, unorthodox and brilliant as they seem to have been in the past. It seems to me that that in first world nations, especially the US, the people should have a chance to truly excel as human beings, all working toward a brilliant, thoughtful and happy society.
Instead, most people seem to worried about their jobs, the bottom line, profit margins (and therefor their family and others they care for) or what I'd call "day to day" concerns. This is a different set (in the movie set sense) than third world nations-- but are their day to day concerns about survivial really that different from the corporate culture you can read about in other posts here?
If I had installed redhat binaries (cuz I'm lazy like that... and some of my computers are very slow) of mplayer way back when, I would not be using mplayer. At all. Its a kind of rock and hard place situation, really. I can relate to both sides of the issue-- just trying to prevent a GPL jihad from starting. When I went to look for binaries, I found on their website something like "please do not distribute binaries. This is because compilers, libraries, etc vary from system to system and we're doing naughty, naughty things in order for you to be able to execute windows libraries with this code. it is quite beta right now, and we had loads of problems when binary versions of mplayer were popping up here and there. thanks."
It is unfortunate, the wording in their license, but perhaps you should benchmark and profile i386 binaries vs. -O2 -march (whatever)binaries. It really makes a world of difference...
Honestly. I've been an mPlayer user for ages. In the past, the mPlayer people did not like for you to distribute binaries because it was difficult, if not impossible, to build binaries that would perform well on most x86 arcitectures. (So the story goes...) and they tried it (redhat, I think, was first) and got tons of flames and support requests on the mailing list beacuse the binary packages were flaky. It is part their code, lack of a good install script, and some other stuff, but they had a valid point. Especially when you link to external windows libraries and things like that-- it seemd to get real flaky if you had precompiled binaries (at least on redhat) though I'm told some crafty package maintaners have got it down-pat pretty good now. In the early days the mplayer authors didn't want to get a rep that their software was bad or flaky. The software was great... yeah the installer could have used some work, but...
So befoe you flame them about a GPL, try to understand their (at least historical) reasons for asking this.
I had an interesting thought the other day. Hang with me for a moment...
If I hear a song on the radio, and I record it. That is okay. If I record something off the TV antenna, that is also ok.
Now consider companies like Clear Channel, whose only goal is to cover every square inch of the US's surface area with the same radio stations. Theoretically, 88.9 in Podunk, USA, is the same as 88.9 in San Francisco, Tacoma, Buffalo, etc. Now, I'm wandering around, going to work, etc. being bombarded with these radio stations, and these television broadcasts, so, if I were recording everything broadcast to me, I'd probably have copies of all the latest music and some popular television programs. Now suppose, through corporate machinery, prettymuch the same opportunity were available to each and every American Citizen. What copyright gripe could the media companies have?
I realize the nature of copyright is such that I cannot redistribute works that are copyrighted. I can't find it on findlaw, but it seems like someone was caught selling stuff that had been broadcast (the superbowl, I think) that he had recorded. If memory serves, the ruling was something like new audiences were being created for the copyrighted work, audiences the original copyright holder was entitled to. But what if at every corner of the US you can pick up Clear Channel?
Better yet--what if I start a TiVo type service. We make you sign lots of paper work and we verify where you live. We have a computer program and a schedule of all content on broadcasts you can receive. Our computer records it, and lets you download it from our website. I'd expect the FBI to haul me away and lock up the key--but I don't think it is (or should be) illegal. What exactly has happened here? The people we're serving have a right to the content, we've just automated the time-shift of when that content is delivered to them. We'll even include the commercials, though for single songs people might want, this won't work as a lot of radio stations have moved their commercials to about once per hour or once per half-hour.
As far as quality goes, I wonder if Sattelite radio is obscured behind some sort of "terms of service" agreement that you agree to listen in exchange for not recording at all.
ahh.. I see. I think, after doing a bit of research, I get all the energy but I'm left with two photons from my reaction, anyway. But if gravity were not instant, how could things orbit one another? in my minds eye, I see the earth pulling on the moon.. and the moon pulling on earth, but the moon is falling past the earth. If the speed of gravity weren't instant, it is hard to imagine circular or elliptical orbits..
... What if the sun were converted to energy instead?.. Since we can create anti-protons and anti-electrons now... Would it be possible to create some relatively equal small pockets of matter and anti-matter and have them combine to test this? A third party could observe the gravitational effects.. Can this not be used to measure gravity?? The matter would become energy.. and energy doesn't create gravity.. so.....
I am a college student and part time computer consultant. We all know how that goes. The thing is, I've helped many clients upgrade their QuickBooks, Quicken and other Intuit products over the past several months. Let me relate to you only one of them:
Client has Quickbooks 6.0. It must be about 4 years old, or so. It is cumbersome and annoying to update the Tax table/rate codes. They use it for payroll, accounts recievable, accounts payable. Though it is a family business, it is broken into several files for manage-ability. (Legally) They have several companies set up-- and some companies are seasonal. (e.g. Yard work). From what I understand, there are federal and state tax advantages, if you have several small companies that work together. Anyway, there are about 3 employees that manage the books for 15 or so company files.
Trouble: When we upgraded from QB6.0 to QB2003, the "upgrade" did not count QB6.0 as valid. We were on hold for over 90 minutes, and finally got through to a rep, that told us we had to fax them a recipt for the QB2003 as well as a recipt for the QB6.0 from 4 years ago. (We had QB6.0 serial numbers, correspondence, etc, no good. The client had been a quicken gold support (or whatever) member for the past 4 years, up until about 6 months prior to the upgrade. They could find no trace of us in the system, and only a recipt for QB6.0 would do. They claimed they couldn't find us even though they'd mailed tax table updates a few months prior as well as a "you must upgrade to QB2002 right now because we no longer support 6.0" -- with QB2003 due out soon we decided to wait the 4 (or so) months to get the newest version. They were told QB6.0 would count for the QB2003 upgrade when they explicitly asked (at my instruction). Anyway, about 4 days later they were able to activate qb2003 with a replacement keycode, but only after faxing them both the recipts, cover of the manual and serial numbers. Did I mention we bought directly from the intuit website? As if that wasn't enough, a few days later they went to do payroll. It wouldn't let them until it went online and updated-- which it could not do because it could not verify subscription status. When done manually, after being on hold for 108 minutes, the rep said it was good for only one company file. My client would have to pay per-company. I think the "accountant edition" might side step this somehow, but it was difficult getting straight answers. We chatted with a rep on the website as well as phoned in months prior and went over the situation in detail. We ordered what they recommended. We've also discovered some features they had in QB6.0, though rudimentary, are pay-for in QB2003. It has been an extremely painful upgrade.
Though this client only had 4 QB computers, this was probably the most painful upgrade ever. The other experiences I've had with intuit proably aren't this bad, but they're not exactly great either.
Well, like everything, it has a double edge. Let me share:
In CS, these days, I see students all around me in what I call the "code monkey" phenomenon. Instead of trying to understand pointer arethmatic, b+ search trees, memory allocation, etc. They just tweak (their often bad) code and hit compile 87 times until something compiles. In the olden days, when we had to use timesharing and punchcards, it was an ordeal to convert your programs to something the machine could understand. This generally caused you to be extra special careful about what you were doing, and to think critically about what it is the computer was doing as it ran through your program. I don't see that anymore in CS students.. they just add +1 to this, or change around boolean operators.. which often introduces subtle bugs. Sad, really.
But on the other hands, students that have a clue can use the computer to do fancier, more clever things. I'd say there is a higher "upper limit" for what students can get out of increased ease of use out of their machines... but that also means we can have code monkeys running around that have no idea what they're writing.
Lets think for a moment.. My radio emits RF leftovers. "They" can pick up that information, process it, and then market to me based on that knowledge for money. Thank goodness. I can now passively sniff WiFi all day long. Or is this not a two way street?
My CRT emits RF. What happens when they can pick that up? Think thats far off?? Okay, what about WiFi? Can I write a program to sniff the 30-some odd WiFi hotspots in my neighborhood.. and based on their physical location and the data I gather, market too them? Why or why not??...
Think the analogy doesn't apply? What about the sattelite internet that uses sattelite downlink and landline uplink.. that is broadcasting to all of north america.. more than any single radio station.. This could set a dangerous precedent, no?
If I'm a white-box OEM I have to pay ~$65 for XP Home or ~$105 for XP Pro at _miniumum_. This is for a sticker only. No CD, Manual, nothing. Office SBE is ~$150 and office pro is ~$250. Lets say some random person wants a $650 PC, for general purposes and working at home. The Microsoft tax is 33% of the purchase price. I'd hardly call that giving away!!
Step into the wayback machine for a moment. It is early Fall 1992. I want a commodity PC. I'll have to spend about $2100 to get a reasonable system. Dos, Win3.1 for OEMs was less than $80. Office 4.0 (I think it was out then??) was about $85 for OEMs. This is about 7% of the purchase price of the PC.
Dell, et al, have had to fight with MS tooth and nail to get non-ms products on their machines. Dell has some sort of really sweet deal on windows-- about $40 for the cheap version. Suddenly, MS wants to charge Dell $139 for that copy of XP Home because Dell is bundling RedHat. Or MS wants the volume agreement to include _every_ PC produced by dell to be licensed for MS Operating systems.
And lets not even talk about some OEM copies of NT Server and 2000 Server-- Copies of windows that can not possibly be upgraded to more than 10 concurrent connections. You have to buy the "retail" version and your previous OEM version doesn't count toward upgrade. If by " pretty much Free" you mean "pretty much free" as in the same sense the local neighborhood crack dealer means "free", then, yes, I guess the oem copies of MS's stuff is "free".
Windows XP Pro runs very well on our 3 year old PIII 550/256 mb ram systems. They used to have Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. XP runs remarkably well on these PCs. 2000 was slightly slower than NT4, but more stable, so I don't completely agree with the your apparent assesment that a retail software purchases don't really do any good.
Visual Studio enables verbose error messages and a nifty debugger so you can inspect programs when things go awry. Sometimes, it generates messages so verbose, they don't fit on the screen. And you can't get rid of them. Like this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the 100/200lx clamshell is from 1993... 1993. Yeah, its 640x240, but its from 1993. A lot of modern clamshells are still 640x240. I think that is kind of sad, really.
.92 inches. Quite ready for my pocket.
The Zaurus is 640x480 and its a convertable clamshell/handheld. You really have to see the screen to believe how clear and sharp it is. I have not seen a comparable screen in terms of sharpness and vivid colors on any handheld.
I couldn't find a link comparing it to an ipaq, but I did pictures comparing it to an Axim. It is shorter than the axim, but about 5mm thicker. The 200lx might not fit in your pocket, but the C860 certainly should. Here
The agenda VR3 has a 240x160 display. Don't know about you, but I'd rather not browse the web on that. AT ALL. 8mb of ram and 66mhz doesn't really cut the cheese.
Psions look neat, but 6.7 inches by 3.5 inches x 1 inch is a touch too chunky for me (its about the size of the 100/200LX I think). I could live with it, I think, but its only 190 mhz. At least the screen is 7.7 inches diagonal.
The C860 is only 4.75 inches x 3.25 x
I am a clamshell nut. I must have a clamshell design, and I've been very unhappy with the US PDA market for a long, long time. Is it just me, or do PDA product lines improve at a snail's pace?
Why do I think that? I got an HP100LX about late 1993. For those who don't know, it is a 80186 DOS based palmtop. It came with a great suite of PIM software, and could do some sort of quasi-multitasking with near-dos applications. No backlight, one PCMCIA slot, ran what seemed like forever (30-40 hours+) on two AA batteries. 640x240 resolution.
By about 1998, it disintegrated. I looked for another good PDA, but found nothing. I tried the WinCE based HP 320LX, but it was a piece of garbage. I opted to just buy another 100LX.
Finally, replaced my 2nd 100LX with a Zaurus C860, but not before trying several of PalmOS and WinCE 2.0/2000/2003 handhelds. Yeah, but the C860 is only available in japan. (Technically you can find it in the states.) It runs Linux, though, so slashdot folks should be all over that. WiFi is great, it has CF and SD (SDIO soon). The 640x480 display is stunning brilliant. Oh, and its clamshell/handheld convertable. Running a linux dos emulator on it lets me run all the old apps I ran on the 100LX (including Derive), at a good speed. Battery life is about 7 hours of continuous use with judicious use of WiFi, which is not bad.
I'm not impressed, at all, with this ipaq model. 640x480? I was halfway there a *decade* ago. 640x480 has been out on handheld PCs for at least 3 years now, though maybe not in the US. The processor speed is nice, but I just have to have a clamshell.
I think the C860 is ideal for grad and undergrad college students because of the scientific apps on linux, wifi, clamshell and other reasons I've outlined. I don't want just another toy PDA or PIM system. A PamOS 3.0 device will do basic PIM stuff quite handily. There are some seriously killer linux math apps (similar to mathematica) that run quite well on the C860, too. I just don't think this ipaq is a good geek's PDA because of the native OS and other reasons I've outlined.
I want to see a new PDA here in the US that I can be as excited about as I was the 200LX and and the C860.
More about Zaurus C860
More info on the ancient 100/200lx I lament
There's just something magical about the Model M. It doesn't have a windows/meta key... but that is what capslock is for! Just remap it to be the windows key and TA DA. Capslock-R for Run! and so on..
:)
I much prefer this to the windows key between control and alt anyway.. its too easy to hit in games and too much of a pain to disable every time you run a game. Capslock is just the right spot for it.
What sort of setups do the admins out there have for blocking this stuff? Anything at the gateway or proxy level??
For a long time, I have been using a lot of off-the-shelf scripts and utilities hacked together as an anti-spyware, anti-virus proxy. Anyone out there doing the same care to comment?
For web stuff, I use squid to block a lot of stuff that is usually spyware. It pretty much kills any software that auto-installs (except for java webstart). Usually not to big of a deal-- the business calls the help desk and we walk them through a manual install of flash or whatever it is they need. For very common spyware, we let it infect one test machine then redirect traffic through the proxy to those sites. Ideally, we block the file name or active x control with squid. It isn't a perfect solution though...
For email, I am using p3scan, a pop3 proxy, and a couple simple scripts to rename all untrusted attachments to something else. We also have a nice script that strips out all non-image, non-formatting related html in email. The email soltion seems much more elegant and nice than the web solution-- anyone know of any setups better/similar that cut gator & other companies off at the knees like this??
In practice, this is has reduced our crapware-related helpdesk calls at least 10 fold.
Did anyone else notice the witty saying at the bottom right before the credits?
See you on another channel
hahahaha! That is really great. Hopefully this isn't the last we'll see of Futurama...
Whoa! This is cool. I'm a college student and I might have prior art on this one. In 1999, 2000 I developed a 6 legged walker that had 2.4ghz video back to one desktop computer, and a 2400 baud serial link back to another. The robot had tilt, temp, range, IR, hall-effect etc. sensors on board, and the 2400 baud link went to another computer that was the real brains.. the video processing happened on one and the electronics on the other. All wireless. It was a mobile, wireless sensor platform for students to experiment on, etc. Before that, I was modifying RF remote controls to transmit information... I wonder if this patent has a bounty . . . ... .. ... bwa!
actually, each input is analog. I have muxed one of them before to get 8-bits of input. The RCX isn't bad, once you put J2ME on it, or something decent. Here is a page where someone did the same thing with 6 inputs: http://members.axion.net/~rduff/rcxinput.html
Honestly-- the witch hunts!
The ink has many chemicals in it, many that don't want to stick together. The lighter elements in the ink tend to evaporate, turning the ink into a thick sludge. The sludge, as you can imagine, has a hard time passing through the nozzles of the print head. This has always has been issue since at least 1996, when we got our first high-end inkjet printers. At that time, you could expect the shelf life of the cart. to be about 6-10 months. In fact, back in those days, stores would occasionally sell you old stock, and there were no date codes printed on the ink carts. You were SOL if you got an "old stock" cart, because HP said it was too old. At least now HP will warrany ANY non-empty ink cart that has a date stamp before the expiry date on the cart.
Think about it-- faster evaporation times on paper mean the ink doesn't soak the paper as much. You can get brigher brights, darker darks, etc. These chemicals in the ink don't magically want to evaporate only once they hit the paper. They always want to evaporate. Remember the $800 inkjet from not so long ago that had a halogen heater? It was to speed up the chemical reaction.
I could understand if the date codes started inching closer and closer-- to like just a month or two weeks. (Keep the ink in the freezer next to the t-bones, anyone? yeah, right)
I don't believe the ink has been engineered to have a shelf-life. It may be that they're in no hurry to improve their shelf-life, but it is nothing new. The date code is to help prevent customers from getting old stock. There may be better alternatives to this kind ink out now, but they're building on their ink research from 10 years ago.. which means it is probably also the cheapest technology. So if you want to claim that for the last decade, HP has been plotting this scheme to get more ink dollars out of people, we'd better put on our tinfoil hats.
Actually, as far as XP is concerned, you DO have the right to reverse engineer, decompile, modify, etc. I note you don't mention distribution ... You AGREE not reverse engineer, decompile, etc. though, because of how software is licensed. If you start distributing patches (in patch form) for Windows XP to make it better/faster/stronger, is that illegal too?? No. Breech of contract? Maybe. But when you're buying a box, you aren't making a contract. When you buy the box, do you own the design? No. Can you use it for whatever you wish? Yes. Hardware is not licensed to you. Software is, though, because of its nature. Technically, the software in the bios is licensed to you, but its under "default" legal terms as on XBOX powerup, you don't have to agree to waive any of your rights.
When you say things like that, it starts down a slippery slope.
If I modify windows dlls to make pancakes instead of display a gui, is that a jailable? What if instead I build a video card where windows thinks its drawing stuff, but instead its makin waffles on the model 3? If I modify the bios in my car to have a better fuel/oxygen intake ratio? is _that_ jailable, too? You seem to be saying so. I'm just saying it isn't as easy to draw the legal line as you imply.
Licensing can be a double edged sword. Courts have shown that Licenses are inalienable rights to works.* So... if you're buying one of these things on the condition that you own an X-Box, you are ALREADY licnesed for the use of it. Since you ALREADY have the unmodified bios in your XBOX, and you can only use one at a time, he isn't technically changing anything about the nature of who has what code.
*By inalienable, I mean outside forces can't destroy your license [fire, theft, etc]. I think the specific case was an office building burned down taking the paper license with it, but the company still had proof they bought it. Some company wanted them to re-license the software, but the courts ruled they didn't have to because it was a right-of use, largely intellectual work in nature.
Anyone want to comment on using strong encryption to prevent evidence gathering? There are a few projects out there that let you have very, very strong encryption for your OS of choice. Anyone got any articles on this?? Is there some reason these can't be used? Does the 5th amendment apply to giving up your decryption keys? Inquiring minds want to know!
It seems to me observing what goes in through the network cable is circumstantial if you have no actual files on the computer. At least, no useable files. Why doesn't everyone use ridiculously strong encyption? I mean enforcing copyright is one thing, but this is overboard.
A lot of people are pointing the old debates about the US's prosperity to the heavy industrial and later automobile industries moving off shore to what is going on now. I see the point, but it is more complex now than it has ever been. Consider:
When we move parts of industry off shore, its because we've gone on to "bigger and better" things. When we perfect automated manufacturing, we can move it offshore and concern ourselves instead with R&D and/or innovative design. Our country's greatest minds turn away from the practical (in a field) and turn toward efficiency, new technologies, and new ideas that ultimately lead to a complete social change. After the car, consumer goods like Televisions, VCRs, Computers, and now what?
We might just be in a transitionary period just now-- but we need to move on to "bigger and better" things that can drive the economy. What I mean by that is the point at which an item becomes a commodity here, it usually isn't growing in revenue or market penetration anymore, which has been our basis for economic growth. Maybe it'll come working on hydrogen technology-- or protein sequencing (for our own food production)-- or whatever, but it does scare me to see our real "thinking" jobs (what has become the basis for our bread and butter industies since before 1900) are moving out of our hands. Our culture is getting odd... American scientific people just don't seem to be as radical, unorthodox and brilliant as they seem to have been in the past. It seems to me that that in first world nations, especially the US, the people should have a chance to truly excel as human beings, all working toward a brilliant, thoughtful and happy society.
Instead, most people seem to worried about their jobs, the bottom line, profit margins (and therefor their family and others they care for) or what I'd call "day to day" concerns. This is a different set (in the movie set sense) than third world nations-- but are their day to day concerns about survivial really that different from the corporate culture you can read about in other posts here?
If I had installed redhat binaries (cuz I'm lazy like that... and some of my computers are very slow) of mplayer way back when, I would not be using mplayer. At all. Its a kind of rock and hard place situation, really. I can relate to both sides of the issue-- just trying to prevent a GPL jihad from starting. When I went to look for binaries, I found on their website something like "please do not distribute binaries. This is because compilers, libraries, etc vary from system to system and we're doing naughty, naughty things in order for you to be able to execute windows libraries with this code. it is quite beta right now, and we had loads of problems when binary versions of mplayer were popping up here and there. thanks."
It is unfortunate, the wording in their license, but perhaps you should benchmark and profile i386 binaries vs. -O2 -march (whatever)binaries. It really makes a world of difference...
Honestly. I've been an mPlayer user for ages. In the past, the mPlayer people did not like for you to distribute binaries because it was difficult, if not impossible, to build binaries that would perform well on most x86 arcitectures. (So the story goes...) and they tried it (redhat, I think, was first) and got tons of flames and support requests on the mailing list beacuse the binary packages were flaky. It is part their code, lack of a good install script, and some other stuff, but they had a valid point. Especially when you link to external windows libraries and things like that-- it seemd to get real flaky if you had precompiled binaries (at least on redhat) though I'm told some crafty package maintaners have got it down-pat pretty good now. In the early days the mplayer authors didn't want to get a rep that their software was bad or flaky. The software was great... yeah the installer could have used some work, but...
So befoe you flame them about a GPL, try to understand their (at least historical) reasons for asking this.
I had an interesting thought the other day. Hang with me for a moment...
If I hear a song on the radio, and I record it. That is okay. If I record something off the TV antenna, that is also ok.
Now consider companies like Clear Channel, whose only goal is to cover every square inch of the US's surface area with the same radio stations. Theoretically, 88.9 in Podunk, USA, is the same as 88.9 in San Francisco, Tacoma, Buffalo, etc. Now, I'm wandering around, going to work, etc. being bombarded with these radio stations, and these television broadcasts, so, if I were recording everything broadcast to me, I'd probably have copies of all the latest music and some popular television programs. Now suppose, through corporate machinery, prettymuch the same opportunity were available to each and every American Citizen. What copyright gripe could the media companies have?
I realize the nature of copyright is such that I cannot redistribute works that are copyrighted. I can't find it on findlaw, but it seems like someone was caught selling stuff that had been broadcast (the superbowl, I think) that he had recorded. If memory serves, the ruling was something like new audiences were being created for the copyrighted work, audiences the original copyright holder was entitled to. But what if at every corner of the US you can pick up Clear Channel?
Better yet--what if I start a TiVo type service. We make you sign lots of paper work and we verify where you live. We have a computer program and a schedule of all content on broadcasts you can receive. Our computer records it, and lets you download it from our website. I'd expect the FBI to haul me away and lock up the key--but I don't think it is (or should be) illegal. What exactly has happened here? The people we're serving have a right to the content, we've just automated the time-shift of when that content is delivered to them. We'll even include the commercials, though for single songs people might want, this won't work as a lot of radio stations have moved their commercials to about once per hour or once per half-hour.
As far as quality goes, I wonder if Sattelite radio is obscured behind some sort of "terms of service" agreement that you agree to listen in exchange for not recording at all.
ahh.. I see. I think, after doing a bit of research, I get all the energy but I'm left with two photons from my reaction, anyway. But if gravity were not instant, how could things orbit one another? in my minds eye, I see the earth pulling on the moon.. and the moon pulling on earth, but the moon is falling past the earth. If the speed of gravity weren't instant, it is hard to imagine circular or elliptical orbits..
... What if the sun were converted to energy instead? .. Since we can create anti-protons and anti-electrons now... Would it be possible to create some relatively equal small pockets of matter and anti-matter and have them combine to test this? A third party could observe the gravitational effects.. Can this not be used to measure gravity?? The matter would become energy .. and energy doesn't create gravity .. so .....
I am a college student and part time computer consultant. We all know how that goes. The thing is, I've helped many clients upgrade their QuickBooks, Quicken and other Intuit products over the past several months. Let me relate to you only one of them:
Client has Quickbooks 6.0. It must be about 4 years old, or so. It is cumbersome and annoying to update the Tax table/rate codes. They use it for payroll, accounts recievable, accounts payable. Though it is a family business, it is broken into several files for manage-ability. (Legally) They have several companies set up-- and some companies are seasonal. (e.g. Yard work). From what I understand, there are federal and state tax advantages, if you have several small companies that work together. Anyway, there are about 3 employees that manage the books for 15 or so company files.
Trouble: When we upgraded from QB6.0 to QB2003, the "upgrade" did not count QB6.0 as valid. We were on hold for over 90 minutes, and finally got through to a rep, that told us we had to fax them a recipt for the QB2003 as well as a recipt for the QB6.0 from 4 years ago. (We had QB6.0 serial numbers, correspondence, etc, no good. The client had been a quicken gold support (or whatever) member for the past 4 years, up until about 6 months prior to the upgrade. They could find no trace of us in the system, and only a recipt for QB6.0 would do. They claimed they couldn't find us even though they'd mailed tax table updates a few months prior as well as a "you must upgrade to QB2002 right now because we no longer support 6.0" -- with QB2003 due out soon we decided to wait the 4 (or so) months to get the newest version. They were told QB6.0 would count for the QB2003 upgrade when they explicitly asked (at my instruction). Anyway, about 4 days later they were able to activate qb2003 with a replacement keycode, but only after faxing them both the recipts, cover of the manual and serial numbers. Did I mention we bought directly from the intuit website? As if that wasn't enough, a few days later they went to do payroll. It wouldn't let them until it went online and updated-- which it could not do because it could not verify subscription status. When done manually, after being on hold for 108 minutes, the rep said it was good for only one company file. My client would have to pay per-company. I think the "accountant edition" might side step this somehow, but it was difficult getting straight answers. We chatted with a rep on the website as well as phoned in months prior and went over the situation in detail. We ordered what they recommended. We've also discovered some features they had in QB6.0, though rudimentary, are pay-for in QB2003. It has been an extremely painful upgrade.
Though this client only had 4 QB computers, this was probably the most painful upgrade ever. The other experiences I've had with intuit proably aren't this bad, but they're not exactly great either.
I'm a level 5 vegan. I don't eat anything that casts a shadow.
Well, like everything, it has a double edge. Let me share: .. which often introduces subtle bugs. Sad, really.
In CS, these days, I see students all around me in what I call the "code monkey" phenomenon. Instead of trying to understand pointer arethmatic, b+ search trees, memory allocation, etc. They just tweak (their often bad) code and hit compile 87 times until something compiles. In the olden days, when we had to use timesharing and punchcards, it was an ordeal to convert your programs to something the machine could understand. This generally caused you to be extra special careful about what you were doing, and to think critically about what it is the computer was doing as it ran through your program. I don't see that anymore in CS students.. they just add +1 to this, or change around boolean operators
But on the other hands, students that have a clue can use the computer to do fancier, more clever things. I'd say there is a higher "upper limit" for what students can get out of increased ease of use out of their machines... but that also means we can have code monkeys running around that have no idea what they're writing.
Lets think for a moment.. My radio emits RF leftovers. "They" can pick up that information, process it, and then market to me based on that knowledge for money. Thank goodness. I can now passively sniff WiFi all day long. Or is this not a two way street?
...
My CRT emits RF. What happens when they can pick that up? Think thats far off?? Okay, what about WiFi? Can I write a program to sniff the 30-some odd WiFi hotspots in my neighborhood.. and based on their physical location and the data I gather, market too them? Why or why not??
Think the analogy doesn't apply? What about the sattelite internet that uses sattelite downlink and landline uplink.. that is broadcasting to all of north america.. more than any single radio station.. This could set a dangerous precedent, no?
...giving away... essentially free...
Umm.... No.
If I'm a white-box OEM I have to pay ~$65 for XP Home or ~$105 for XP Pro at _miniumum_. This is for a sticker only. No CD, Manual, nothing. Office SBE is ~$150 and office pro is ~$250. Lets say some random person wants a $650 PC, for general purposes and working at home. The Microsoft tax is 33% of the purchase price. I'd hardly call that giving away!!
Step into the wayback machine for a moment. It is early Fall 1992. I want a commodity PC. I'll have to spend about $2100 to get a reasonable system. Dos, Win3.1 for OEMs was less than $80. Office 4.0 (I think it was out then??) was about $85 for OEMs. This is about 7% of the purchase price of the PC.
Dell, et al, have had to fight with MS tooth and nail to get non-ms products on their machines. Dell has some sort of really sweet deal on windows-- about $40 for the cheap version. Suddenly, MS wants to charge Dell $139 for that copy of XP Home because Dell is bundling RedHat. Or MS wants the volume agreement to include _every_ PC produced by dell to be licensed for MS Operating systems.
And lets not even talk about some OEM copies of NT Server and 2000 Server-- Copies of windows that can not possibly be upgraded to more than 10 concurrent connections. You have to buy the "retail" version and your previous OEM version doesn't count toward upgrade. If by " pretty much Free" you mean "pretty much free" as in the same sense the local neighborhood crack dealer means "free", then, yes, I guess the oem copies of MS's stuff is "free".
Windows XP Pro runs very well on our 3 year old PIII 550/256 mb ram systems. They used to have Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. XP runs remarkably well on these PCs. 2000 was slightly slower than NT4, but more stable, so I don't completely agree with the your apparent assesment that a retail software purchases don't really do any good.
Visual Studio enables verbose error messages and a nifty debugger so you can inspect programs when things go awry. Sometimes, it generates messages so verbose, they don't fit on the screen. And you can't get rid of them. Like this one.
My favorite Windows Error.
Though now on NT/2000 these errors are logged in the handy-dany event logger.
This error is documented in MS's KB:
"Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on his own." Scary.