I'd rather be able to see more text(with decent font detail) than more colors.
More resolution is always nice, but the colour screen has it's own potential to improve plain text output, if it uses some sort of sub-pixel font rendering.
The move to 65K colors seems kind of dumb to me at this point in time.
It has nothing to do with being able to see all of the colors "at one time".
16 bit colour is worth having because it means your applications don't have to worry about working with only 256 colours at one time. They can simply work with the global 16 bit palette, and everything is much easier. So, if you display a photograph, you don't have to dither or quantize the image, or steal colors from other areas of the screen.
16 bit is probably the upper useful bound on portables though. The jump from 16 to 24 bit is often hard to distinguish even on a high quality desktop monitor.
(BTW, Is the IIIc a paletted 8 bit display a la VGA, or do you simply have a fixed set of 256 colours?)
Yup, Yggrasil was my introduction to Linux. It was the leading edge in "friendly" Linux distros at the time. It's par for the course now, but I remember my jaw hitting the floor when I just stuck the floppy and the cd in my patched-together-odds-'n-ends PC, and it gracefully detected and supported all my hardware. Plug and play indeed.
I didn't spring for the massive compendium of paper documentation that was sold alongside it though...
However, when some Nazi-related idea or symbol is used simply to illustrate a point rather than to attack the opposition, why should it be declared invalid?
Fair enough, but there was nothing particularly appropriate about a Mein Kampf analogy there. There were dozens of simple examples that might have been used instead of the Nazi overkill.
Either way, I wasn't trying to invalidate FascDot's insightful comment -- I was going for funny, and that is how it has thankfully been moderated.
2) Only people who read the site see the poll. Imagine if they put a poll about "best skin color" at the end of "Mein Kampf"--do you think "black" would win?
Moderation is a MUCH more difficult thing to apply to search engines than it might initially appear.
You don't want the search to return the "best" sites! That's not the point. You want the search to return the most appropriate sites.
If I search for "redhat reviews", I'll get both "redhat.com" and "joe's linux distro reviews" on GeoCities.
Now, redhat is obviously going to have been historically rated higher than Joe's site, because it gets more traffic and is probably on the whole a much more useful and informative site. More people will have been happy with redhat.com as a search result than they have been with Joe's.
So should redhat.com be at the top of the list, and Joe's site at the bottom? No! Because if I happen to be looking for an objective review, I don't care what redhat has to say -- I want to know what Joe thinks about the relative merits of redhat and debian. Redhat.com is NOT an appropriate site for a "redhat reviews" search even though it matches the terms and is a highly ranked site.
So search results must be a function of both the site and the search terms, and moderation has to be based on this. This is a very nasty can of worms, because interpreting what the user wanted when he typed in the search is subjective. Doing a simple moderation on the intersection of the search terms and the desired result probably isn't feasible either, since freeform searches aren't discrete enough, there are too many possible ways to phrase the search for distro reviews. Determining what he wants and returning the best results based on previous moderation amounts to full blown natural language parsing and artificial intelligence.
hardware MP3 support (whatever real benefit it brings) is one of the selling points on a certain variation of Creative's SBLive card... Maybe this has something to do with it...
Er, yeah, but ever heard of Creative's Nomad line of portable MP3 players? The most popular players out there? I suspect that's a bigger concern for them.
H2G gave birth to what is referred to as the most difficult puzzle ever: the babel fish.
Hardly. The Babel fish puzzle walks you through, step by step. You have to do many things to solve it, but there's plenty of feedback on the sequence you have to follow.
The really difficult puzzles are those where there's simply no hope of logically inferring what you should do. This happens just a bit later in HHGTTG, with a puzzle involving fluff and not tea and several other things. I got to this point, couldn't solve it, and checked a hint book. I then uninstalled the game, realizing that it would be just another game requiring you to try every permutation of verb and noun (or in this case verb noun noun verb noun verb) to solve a puzzle. Several years later I uninstalled the highly acclaimed Sam 'N Max for the same reason.
The much-hated Myst is a great example of a game where being smart actually paid off. I rolled through Myst in something like 20 hours. There were several DIFFICULT puzzles, but if you paid attention and thought it through, there was an intelligent solution to every puzzle.
...The only things visible would be the ignition, the shifter, the steering wheel, the pedals, and the speedometer. The fuel gauge, the temperature gauge, the stereo, A/C controls, cruise control, etc. are all hidden behind panels that must be opened first before they can be used.
This is a good analogy -- but I can put a different spin on it. All of the above items should certainly be visible to the driver -- because ALL drivers are concerned with these displays and options. (With the exception of the temperature gage -- which nowadays is often no longer a gage but is simply a warning light when temperature is not ideal.)
There are loads more driver adjustable features on a car though: fuel mixture, engine timing, suspension travel and stiffness, steering sensitivity, idle RPM, turbo boost pressure, etc., etc. Should all of these have dashboard controls? They could. Many race cars to have dashboard controls for some of these.
But in a modern passenger car they're hidden from the driver, because not ALL drivers need them, and their presence will only clutter the interface and confuse the novice driver.
If it's capable of running as a separate unit, then what the heck is the reason for designing it as a Handspring module at all? Editing playlists? Or is the Visor just a very expensive power source? Pretty weak functionality to be paying $100 more than a "conventional" MP3 player for.
They've just found a way to duct-tape a Nomad to a Visor. They've created an MP3 player that is at once more expensive, far larger (with the Visor, after all), and less convenient than a dedicated player.
What would have been impressive, would have been creating a "smart" DSP/NVRAM card that used the Visor's CPU and connectivity to cut costs on the MP3 player extension. Bingo, you get a big 64M chunk of memory to keep all kinds of data in, and a DSP that all sorts of applications could make use of. The MP3 player would be just be the included killer app.
Who's the guy interviewing Larry? I wanted to stuff a sock in his mouth after the fourth time he interrupted Larry to stuff in some meaningless babble.
Just let him talk! Larry's the smart guy, not you. Obviously.
Can anyone here relate an instance of outsourcing that worked well?
As a team developer, I have a rough time imagining how this could ever really be feasible. It's hard enough if you have an in-house developer that doesn't communicate enough! Does it usually take the form of having some CVS-kinda codebase that everyone has access to?
I'm curious what sort of projects have had good luck with outsourcing.
You <B>must be smart</B> if you're going to choose to forego formal education when it's available to you. Only if you're really bright are you going to be able to succeed without the degree. If you're smart you'll be able to progress regardless, because you'll be able to prove your worth through performance instead of degrees. If you're mediocre, then taking that HTML design job at 18 is going to be a mistake, because you'll be doing it forever. With a degree, an average person can at least progress to a managerial level. (No obvious Dilbert jokes please...)
It'd probably make sense to start worrying about ventilation on these cards, not just dissipation. Special ductwork to expel the heated air through the external edge of the card should be workable. There's not much area there though, maybe use an extra card 'slot' for an exhuast port?
At any rate, this is a real problem for this product. While the extra heat might be acceptable in a normal system, this product is targeted straight at the diehards who WILL have an overclocked machine. They're not going to be happy with a card that buys them more fillrate but costs them 20% in potential CPU clock rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Zero Knowledge has a commercial product called Freedom that provides several different anonymized internet services.
What the heck are you talking about? The longest "word" is 65 characters. What are you using, a cellphone?
Would you be content an ISP employee viewing this perfectly well encrypted message as it passes through their servers?
More resolution is always nice, but the colour screen has it's own potential to improve plain text output, if it uses some sort of sub-pixel font rendering.
It has nothing to do with being able to see all of the colors "at one time".
16 bit colour is worth having because it means your applications don't have to worry about working with only 256 colours at one time. They can simply work with the global 16 bit palette, and everything is much easier. So, if you display a photograph, you don't have to dither or quantize the image, or steal colors from other areas of the screen.
16 bit is probably the upper useful bound on portables though. The jump from 16 to 24 bit is often hard to distinguish even on a high quality desktop monitor.
(BTW, Is the IIIc a paletted 8 bit display a la VGA, or do you simply have a fixed set of 256 colours?)
I didn't spring for the massive compendium of paper documentation that was sold alongside it though...
Also Perl Poetry magnets.
Fair enough, but there was nothing particularly appropriate about a Mein Kampf analogy there. There were dozens of simple examples that might have been used instead of the Nazi overkill.
Either way, I wasn't trying to invalidate FascDot's insightful comment -- I was going for funny, and that is how it has thankfully been moderated.
Godwin's Law invoked. You lose.
How much time of a professional crypto expert's time would that buy in the real world? A week if they're feeling charitable.
The people behind the SDMI collective spend $10K on lunch. The prize money is more an insult to the value of cryptographic analysis than anything.
Heh. Have a look at the "Summoner Geeks" movie, a modern interpretation of the sketch.
The theatrical trailer puts it closer to the mark -- the plane crashes as he's returning on a FedEx flight from Moscow.
Hence the funniest Radio Shack commercial ever.
"Woudja look at da size of dat mouse!? Its so big you should call it a RAT!"
"In no time at all mister, you will be surfin' da weeb."
Just make sure that Tom Hanks isn't the delivery guy.
You don't want the search to return the "best" sites! That's not the point. You want the search to return the most appropriate sites.
If I search for "redhat reviews", I'll get both "redhat.com" and "joe's linux distro reviews" on GeoCities.
Now, redhat is obviously going to have been historically rated higher than Joe's site, because it gets more traffic and is probably on the whole a much more useful and informative site. More people will have been happy with redhat.com as a search result than they have been with Joe's.
So should redhat.com be at the top of the list, and Joe's site at the bottom? No! Because if I happen to be looking for an objective review, I don't care what redhat has to say -- I want to know what Joe thinks about the relative merits of redhat and debian. Redhat.com is NOT an appropriate site for a "redhat reviews" search even though it matches the terms and is a highly ranked site.
So search results must be a function of both the site and the search terms, and moderation has to be based on this. This is a very nasty can of worms, because interpreting what the user wanted when he typed in the search is subjective. Doing a simple moderation on the intersection of the search terms and the desired result probably isn't feasible either, since freeform searches aren't discrete enough, there are too many possible ways to phrase the search for distro reviews. Determining what he wants and returning the best results based on previous moderation amounts to full blown natural language parsing and artificial intelligence.
That's a pretty lame way to end a comment that has explained some of the finer points of logic, and hopefully enlightened someone.
You can't even say that. :) The Diamond Rio is by, well, Diamond. (Who have recently been absorbed into S3)
Creative's players are the Nomads.
Er, yeah, but ever heard of Creative's Nomad line of portable MP3 players? The most popular players out there? I suspect that's a bigger concern for them.
Hardly. The Babel fish puzzle walks you through, step by step. You have to do many things to solve it, but there's plenty of feedback on the sequence you have to follow.
The really difficult puzzles are those where there's simply no hope of logically inferring what you should do. This happens just a bit later in HHGTTG, with a puzzle involving fluff and not tea and several other things. I got to this point, couldn't solve it, and checked a hint book. I then uninstalled the game, realizing that it would be just another game requiring you to try every permutation of verb and noun (or in this case verb noun noun verb noun verb) to solve a puzzle. Several years later I uninstalled the highly acclaimed Sam 'N Max for the same reason.
The much-hated Myst is a great example of a game where being smart actually paid off. I rolled through Myst in something like 20 hours. There were several DIFFICULT puzzles, but if you paid attention and thought it through, there was an intelligent solution to every puzzle.
This is a good analogy -- but I can put a different spin on it. All of the above items should certainly be visible to the driver -- because ALL drivers are concerned with these displays and options. (With the exception of the temperature gage -- which nowadays is often no longer a gage but is simply a warning light when temperature is not ideal.)
There are loads more driver adjustable features on a car though: fuel mixture, engine timing, suspension travel and stiffness, steering sensitivity, idle RPM, turbo boost pressure, etc., etc. Should all of these have dashboard controls? They could. Many race cars to have dashboard controls for some of these.
But in a modern passenger car they're hidden from the driver, because not ALL drivers need them, and their presence will only clutter the interface and confuse the novice driver.
If it's capable of running as a separate unit, then what the heck is the reason for designing it as a Handspring module at all? Editing playlists? Or is the Visor just a very expensive power source? Pretty weak functionality to be paying $100 more than a "conventional" MP3 player for.
They've just found a way to duct-tape a Nomad to a Visor. They've created an MP3 player that is at once more expensive, far larger (with the Visor, after all), and less convenient than a dedicated player.
What would have been impressive, would have been creating a "smart" DSP/NVRAM card that used the Visor's CPU and connectivity to cut costs on the MP3 player extension. Bingo, you get a big 64M chunk of memory to keep all kinds of data in, and a DSP that all sorts of applications could make use of. The MP3 player would be just be the included killer app.
Just let him talk! Larry's the smart guy, not you. Obviously.
As a team developer, I have a rough time imagining how this could ever really be feasible. It's hard enough if you have an in-house developer that doesn't communicate enough! Does it usually take the form of having some CVS-kinda codebase that everyone has access to?
I'm curious what sort of projects have had good luck with outsourcing.
You <B>must be smart</B> if you're going to choose to forego formal education when it's available to you. Only if you're really bright are you going to be able to succeed without the degree. If you're smart you'll be able to progress regardless, because you'll be able to prove your worth through performance instead of degrees. If you're mediocre, then taking that HTML design job at 18 is going to be a mistake, because you'll be doing it forever. With a degree, an average person can at least progress to a managerial level. (No obvious Dilbert jokes please...)
It'd probably make sense to start worrying about ventilation on these cards, not just dissipation. Special ductwork to expel the heated air through the external edge of the card should be workable. There's not much area there though, maybe use an extra card 'slot' for an exhuast port?
At any rate, this is a real problem for this product. While the extra heat might be acceptable in a normal system, this product is targeted straight at the diehards who WILL have an overclocked machine. They're not going to be happy with a card that buys them more fillrate but costs them 20% in potential CPU clock rate.