So this story has been tagged "olpcbetter" but why? The olpc has 1GB flash while the eee has 2GB, 4GB or 8GB. The olpc has 256MB ram while the eee has either 512MB or 1GB. The olpc has a 433MHz Geode LX while the eee has a 630 - 900 MHz Celeron. The olpc is about 1.5kg while the eee is under 1kg. Finally the olpc is 242mm × 228mm × 32mm while the eee is 225mm x 164mm x 21.5mm~35 mm. So the eee is smaller, faster, lighter and has more memory (both ram and flash).
So just how is the olpc better? You might argue that the "dual-mode" screen, or the mesh mode networking and the external antenna, makes the olpc more appealing to you, but unless you are in the olpc target market I can't imagine many would really prefer the olpc over the eee?
The "flamebait" tag seems far more appropriate for this "story"!
Have you seen the eee power supply and compared it to a laptop power supply? Have you seen the extra batteries (including a 6 cell 7800 mAh which should provide 4.5hrs or more)? That large extra battery and the power supply together would be about the size/weight of a normal laptop power supply and carrying those around with you should give you at least 7 hours continuous battery life between charges. New asus eee accessories
A quick check of two sites for retail stores here in Ireland put the price at 52.50 (including 21% vat as people here always go on about sales taxes) which is about US$77, just about double the quoted US price.
Or maybe most people just don't want to pay the true cost of their phone so the service providers have to find some way to make sure they can still make a profit! The fact is right now the market is completely dominated by the carriers so that all major manufacturers have a lot more interest in making certain the carriers want their phones then the end user does.
If this wasn't the case we would have seen dual carrier enabled phones a long time ago, not just add-ons to let you switch from carrier to carrier but the ability to have two active carriers simultaneously (i.e. make a call on either while still accepting calls/call-waiting on both). How many people do you know carrying 2 phones who would happily spend the extra to no longer have the work phone and the personal phone? Any manufacturer building such a device though would probably never find their phones subsidised on any network and hence lose out on the vast majority of the market.
The device scanned a 240-million pixel image using 13 light spectrums, including ultra-violet and infrared.
The resulting ultra-high resolution photograph of 150,000 dots per inch
150,000 dpi is a lot! As best I can tell the Mona Lisa is about 30 * 21 inches or 630 square inches which at 150,000 dpi would yield a 14.175 terapixel image, just 60,000 times the claimed 240 megapixels! 240 million pixels would be only 617 dpi! I suppose the other possibilities include his "camera" was taking 150dpi, 240 million pixel images in which case he must have taken about 59,000 shots to produce a full 150,000 dpi image of the picture. I guess this is conceivable taking a shot every 0.1 inches?
KDE's klik://... (... klik:// requires a kio-slave)
Firstly klik isn't KDE's though it did start out dependant on some kde features. The initial k in the name reflects the knoppix roots, which reflects Klaus Knoppers name rather then the desktop environment he happened to also choose! I sometimes wonder what difference it would have made to klik's adoption if it's name hadn't started with either a k or a g!
Secondly you don't need a kio-slave to use klik, you can use it from the command line if you want or via any browser which can be convinced to pass the name from a klik:/foo "uri" to the klik client. Installing the standard klik client will usually set you up so you can use a mozilla based browser to "install" applications from the klik site. Support for running the resulting file again is merely a case of what the standard installer automatically configures (I think just gnome/kde/xdg.desktops at present). Configuring or adding support for other environments should be trivial as again it only needs to supply the desired filename to a program.
One of the benefits of klik in this context (though not one I care much about myself) is the ability to "package" other installers and without having to distribute any non-redistributable files, so klik can provide a wrapper to even run things like google* apps or realplayer without any risk to your base package managed system (though as a corrollory with limited integration into that system). There's even been repeated discussion of getting klik to provide windows applications via wine (some people have their own custom apps built like this including multiple IE versions or even Office with Crossover).
Note the above isn't meant to imply that klik is perfect (klik2 should offer some significant advances and hopefully see klik getting packaged in more distros) but there are still plenty of use cases where it is the best answer e.g. no-root/read-only/portable software "installs".
[blockquote]The only reason its windows only at the moment is because some of the content is NOT produced by the BBC (some shows are credited 'produced by xxxx for BBC'), and these production companies insisted on DRM for their shows[/blockquote]
Does this mean that if you can get the codec (without the drm capabilities) working on a player on another platform with firefox you can view all the iplayer video produced BY the BBC? Or have they just DRM'd everything and the above line is just the excuse?
Re:PocketPC is better than Palm - well, until now
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 1
The Palm LifeDrive has a "Drive Mode" program which allows you to access the hard drive and sd-card as a standard usb mass storage device from another machine.
Hackndev has been working on Linux ports for many of the current Palm models for quite a while now. Unfortunately some things (like Wifi) are virtually impossible to get working but a wide number of models have the core hardware working. The biggest issue now actually seems to be creating the applications/environment which is suited for the Palm inputs.
Is the ongoing threat of far right political parties in Europe (the BNP, Le Pen, etc) the reason why Europe's socialist governments sink so much money into subsidizing their rail systems, whereas the United States has no need, and therefore couldn't care a whit about poor Amtrak?
From the wikipedia article mentioned in the parent:
Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. . . . As you know, there is also [Motion Picture Association of America president] Jack Valenti's proposal for the term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.
Modded funny?
Surely this is the most insightful, informative AND interesting comment in slashdot history (ok, maybe this beauty from CmdrTaco)?
No pretense of freedom of expression for Lawyers in the U.S.A. I guess, I guess you could try and sue someone?
Why can I either buy an English OR French version of OSX on a new Apple from apple.ie then? Are you saying this is purely about the default configuration?
Linus said it himself: Software is like Sex, best when it's Free!
The proliferation of distro's insures that whatever your perversion there's bound to be a fsck buddy, or maybe more, for you out there.
I have a friend who flew back from New Zealand to Ireland via Los Angeles early last year. They were returning from 18 months in Australia/New Zealand and did not have a machine readable passport (they weren't even available when they left Ireland). The result? One night spent in L/A after being forced through immigration who then made them, and a small handful of others without machine readable passports, stand round for a few hours at a desk with an (aparently) incredibly ignorant and dismissive staff (with the plane waiting to continue) until they sorted out all the other passengers. I believe my friend managed to maintain their cool through the process until they were the last person left to clear (another passenger it seems was doing a perfectly good job ranting about it and providing the floor-show). The plane took off, very late, about 2 minutes before they told them they were allowed to continue on their journey. No other flight was available until 24 hours later as another flight had been canceled.
I think everyone is grossly underestimating. For example last years Major League Baseball games alone would rack up around 400 days worth of _good_ content. Also most large regions (well I don't know about the US) have multiple stations that produce a few hours of their own content daily outside of news (from deeper investigative pieces to documentaries to chat shows to reviews) most of which I would be quite certain would not feature in imdb and the like.In fact about the only overestimation I think I have see yet is your inclusion of footage on the cutting room floor, home movies and other ureleased video footage. While anyone can say "all the video in the world" I think it is safe to say most won't plan on including everyone's first few minutes playing with a new camera, their footage from a birthday party let aloone the truely breathtaking amount of CCTV footage captured worldwide (the UK alone might currently record an estimated 1533 million days of CCTV footage per year (4.2 million cameras and counting) which puts the other figures in perspective).
I don't know of anyone who didn't say "but what was the story with the ending". The main problem of course is that they dropped the complete setup to the ending (the death of Saruman and then the end of his works in the Shire) from the very start of the films. I honestly think that given that decision the end of the trilogy should have been the fellowship spliting up to "go home".
The fscking phone itself should count as prior art! Perhaps, just perhaps (I'm not willing to go near it to find out) there is something in this patent which is new and non-obvious (from slashdot alone I'd say not but I know better then to believe anything on here). Odds are however that this is little more then a description of re-implementing a regular telephone with digital circuitry. For some reason the USPTO seems to think that doing $anything "on a computer" is patentable in of itself no matter how unpatentable $anything might be. Would they have accepted a patent for using a general purpose computer (with display, keyboard and/or mouse) as a calculator at some stage? Obviousness test... nope let the courts handle that?
Is there a simple image of the layout? If I'm being blind forgive me but with no flash installed (or getting into my ram even temporarily just for this) I'm not seeing anything. A confirmation gnash (or whatever it is called) will work might get me trying that though.
I would PAY to read those mails on the debian mailing list archives (and a lot to see the private ones)... though I imagine you could lose a few lifetimes trying to read every thread:-P Someone should propose a GR to take MS up on the deal, just to knock it down 100% (over even the option of more discussion).
I would suggest that IBM would be far more likely to make a significant donation to Debian and the FSF to ensure the long term future of those who truly believe in and demonstrate Free software and could quite certainly never be bought out of Microsoft for less then a controlling stake in Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
So this story has been tagged "olpcbetter" but why? The olpc has 1GB flash while the eee has 2GB, 4GB or 8GB. The olpc has 256MB ram while the eee has either 512MB or 1GB. The olpc has a 433MHz Geode LX while the eee has a 630 - 900 MHz Celeron. The olpc is about 1.5kg while the eee is under 1kg. Finally the olpc is 242mm × 228mm × 32mm while the eee is 225mm x 164mm x 21.5mm~35 mm. So the eee is smaller, faster, lighter and has more memory (both ram and flash).
So just how is the olpc better? You might argue that the "dual-mode" screen, or the mesh mode networking and the external antenna, makes the olpc more appealing to you, but unless you are in the olpc target market I can't imagine many would really prefer the olpc over the eee?
The "flamebait" tag seems far more appropriate for this "story"!
Have you seen the eee power supply and compared it to a laptop power supply? Have you seen the extra batteries (including a 6 cell 7800 mAh which should provide 4.5hrs or more)? That large extra battery and the power supply together would be about the size/weight of a normal laptop power supply and carrying those around with you should give you at least 7 hours continuous battery life between charges. New asus eee accessories
Check out eeeuser.com hacks & mods forum to find some more interesting "hacks" such as adding a touchscreen.
A quick check of two sites for retail stores here in Ireland put the price at 52.50 (including 21% vat as people here always go on about sales taxes) which is about US$77, just about double the quoted US price.
Not a problem, I've seen people running linux from partitions which the partition table thinks are ntfs when in fact they are formatted ext3.
Or maybe most people just don't want to pay the true cost of their phone so the service providers have to find some way to make sure they can still make a profit! The fact is right now the market is completely dominated by the carriers so that all major manufacturers have a lot more interest in making certain the carriers want their phones then the end user does.
If this wasn't the case we would have seen dual carrier enabled phones a long time ago, not just add-ons to let you switch from carrier to carrier but the ability to have two active carriers simultaneously (i.e. make a call on either while still accepting calls/call-waiting on both). How many people do you know carrying 2 phones who would happily spend the extra to no longer have the work phone and the personal phone? Any manufacturer building such a device though would probably never find their phones subsidised on any network and hence lose out on the vast majority of the market.
Firstly klik isn't KDE's though it did start out dependant on some kde features. The initial k in the name reflects the knoppix roots, which reflects Klaus Knoppers name rather then the desktop environment he happened to also choose! I sometimes wonder what difference it would have made to klik's adoption if it's name hadn't started with either a k or a g!
Secondly you don't need a kio-slave to use klik, you can use it from the command line if you want or via any browser which can be convinced to pass the name from a klik:/foo "uri" to the klik client. Installing the standard klik client will usually set you up so you can use a mozilla based browser to "install" applications from the klik site. Support for running the resulting file again is merely a case of what the standard installer automatically configures (I think just gnome/kde/xdg.desktops at present). Configuring or adding support for other environments should be trivial as again it only needs to supply the desired filename to a program.
One of the benefits of klik in this context (though not one I care much about myself) is the ability to "package" other installers and without having to distribute any non-redistributable files, so klik can provide a wrapper to even run things like google* apps or realplayer without any risk to your base package managed system (though as a corrollory with limited integration into that system). There's even been repeated discussion of getting klik to provide windows applications via wine (some people have their own custom apps built like this including multiple IE versions or even Office with Crossover).
Note the above isn't meant to imply that klik is perfect (klik2 should offer some significant advances and hopefully see klik getting packaged in more distros) but there are still plenty of use cases where it is the best answer e.g. no-root/read-only/portable software "installs".
[blockquote]The only reason its windows only at the moment is because some of the content is NOT produced by the BBC (some shows are credited 'produced by xxxx for BBC'), and these production companies insisted on DRM for their shows[/blockquote] Does this mean that if you can get the codec (without the drm capabilities) working on a player on another platform with firefox you can view all the iplayer video produced BY the BBC? Or have they just DRM'd everything and the above line is just the excuse?
The Palm LifeDrive has a "Drive Mode" program which allows you to access the hard drive and sd-card as a standard usb mass storage device from another machine.
Hackndev has been working on Linux ports for many of the current Palm models for quite a while now. Unfortunately some things (like Wifi) are virtually impossible to get working but a wide number of models have the core hardware working. The biggest issue now actually seems to be creating the applications/environment which is suited for the Palm inputs.
Modded funny?
Surely this is the most insightful, informative AND interesting comment in slashdot history (ok, maybe this beauty from CmdrTaco)?
No pretense of freedom of expression for Lawyers in the U.S.A. I guess, I guess you could try and sue someone?
Why can I either buy an English OR French version of OSX on a new Apple from apple.ie then? Are you saying this is purely about the default configuration?
cdrtools frontend GPL burning for Windows.
Linus said it himself: Software is like Sex, best when it's Free!
The proliferation of distro's insures that whatever your perversion there's bound to be a fsck buddy, or maybe more, for you out there.
I have a friend who flew back from New Zealand to Ireland via Los Angeles early last year. They were returning from 18 months in Australia/New Zealand and did not have a machine readable passport (they weren't even available when they left Ireland). The result? One night spent in L/A after being forced through immigration who then made them, and a small handful of others without machine readable passports, stand round for a few hours at a desk with an (aparently) incredibly ignorant and dismissive staff (with the plane waiting to continue) until they sorted out all the other passengers. I believe my friend managed to maintain their cool through the process until they were the last person left to clear (another passenger it seems was doing a perfectly good job ranting about it and providing the floor-show). The plane took off, very late, about 2 minutes before they told them they were allowed to continue on their journey. No other flight was available until 24 hours later as another flight had been canceled.
I think everyone is grossly underestimating. For example last years Major League Baseball games alone would rack up around 400 days worth of _good_ content. Also most large regions (well I don't know about the US) have multiple stations that produce a few hours of their own content daily outside of news (from deeper investigative pieces to documentaries to chat shows to reviews) most of which I would be quite certain would not feature in imdb and the like .In fact about the only overestimation I think I have see yet is your inclusion of footage on the cutting room floor, home movies and other ureleased video footage. While anyone can say "all the video in the world" I think it is safe to say most won't plan on including everyone's first few minutes playing with a new camera, their footage from a birthday party let aloone the truely breathtaking amount of CCTV footage captured worldwide (the UK alone might currently record an estimated 1533 million days of CCTV footage per year (4.2 million cameras and counting) which puts the other figures in perspective).
I don't know of anyone who didn't say "but what was the story with the ending". The main problem of course is that they dropped the complete setup to the ending (the death of Saruman and then the end of his works in the Shire) from the very start of the films. I honestly think that given that decision the end of the trilogy should have been the fellowship spliting up to "go home".
The fscking phone itself should count as prior art! Perhaps, just perhaps (I'm not willing to go near it to find out) there is something in this patent which is new and non-obvious (from slashdot alone I'd say not but I know better then to believe anything on here). Odds are however that this is little more then a description of re-implementing a regular telephone with digital circuitry. For some reason the USPTO seems to think that doing $anything "on a computer" is patentable in of itself no matter how unpatentable $anything might be. Would they have accepted a patent for using a general purpose computer (with display, keyboard and/or mouse) as a calculator at some stage? Obviousness test ... nope let the courts handle that?
Is there a simple image of the layout? If I'm being blind forgive me but with no flash installed (or getting into my ram even temporarily just for this) I'm not seeing anything. A confirmation gnash (or whatever it is called) will work might get me trying that though.
I want to see the dang dmesg output from Yellow Dog (and maybe the an Xorg log) not photos of some chips :-P
I would PAY to read those mails on the debian mailing list archives (and a lot to see the private ones) ... though I imagine you could lose a few lifetimes trying to read every thread :-P Someone should propose a GR to take MS up on the deal, just to knock it down 100% (over even the option of more discussion).
I would suggest that IBM would be far more likely to make a significant donation to Debian and the FSF to ensure the long term future of those who truly believe in and demonstrate Free software and could quite certainly never be bought out of Microsoft for less then a controlling stake in Microsoft.