If the bug can only result in a freeze, then that is better than a bug which can result in data corruption. Freezes are bad, but at least you know something is wrong. Data corruption is BAD. If, for instance, the bug caused, say, div instructions to occasionally be off by a little bit, it could cause any calculations done on the chip to be suspect.
Come on people! Ask Slashdot should be for questions which are hard to find answers for on the net. I typed: "Dvorak QWERTY keyboard comparison" into Google and got about 30 relevant hits right away.
Ask Slashdot: Has anyone seen where I left my glasses?
I want my phone number to follow me for life, too. Having to change all of your personal contact information just because you move is a bogus hack.
The fact that my phone number indicates where I live is silly, since someone who's phoning me doesn't really care where I am physically. In fact, since I only have a cel phone, I'm often not even in my area code.
Right now there's a proposal before the CRTC (Canadian equivalent of the FCC) to allow cel phone users to keep their numbers when they switch companies. It's probably not going to go through because of the technical issues involved, but it would be really cool if it did.
I want to have one email address, one domain name and one phone number for the rest of my life.
(Having one postal address would be cool, too. Some sort of meta address which is mapped to your physical address by the post office.)
It does seem somewhat odd that they'd name a model after a nerve gas. Especially since 3Com seems to have been so sensitive about potentially offensive names in the past. Apparently there was no Palm IV because 4 is an unlucky number in Japan. (Can anyone confirm this?)
I suppose they're not the first to use the name, though. There is VxWorks.
This story ahs been floating around the net for a long time (about 6 or 7 years?):
Linda Branagan is an expert on daemons. She has a T-shirt that sports the daemon in tennis shoes that appears on the cover of the 4.3BSD manuals and The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System by S. Leffler, M. McKusick, M. Karels, J. Quarterman, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA 1989.
She tells the following story about wearing the 4.3BSD daemon T-shirt:
Last week I walked into a local ``home style cookin' restaurant/watering hole'' in Texas to pick up a take-out order. I spoke briefly to the waitress behind the counter, who told me my order would be done in a few minutes.
So, while I was busy gazing at the farm implements hanging on the walls, I was approached by two ``natives.'' These guys might just be the original Texas rednecks.
``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''
Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded. ``Are you a Satanist?'' Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party. ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.'' ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.
I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''
I was this close to slapping one of them and causing a scene--then I stopped and noticed the shirt I happened to be wearing that day. Sure enough, it had a picture of a small, devilish-looking creature that has for some time now been associated with a certain operating system. In this particular representation, the creature was wearing sneakers.
They continued: ``See, ma'am, we don't exactly appreciate it when people show off pictures of the devil. Especially when he's lookin' so friendly.''
These idiots sounded terrifyingly serious.
Me: ``Oh, well, see, this isn't really the devil, it's just, well, it's sort of a mascot.''
Native: ``And what kind of football team has the devil as a mascot?'' Me: ``Oh, it's not a team. It's an operating--uh, a kind of computer.''
I figured that an ATM machine was about as much technology as these guys could handle, and I knew that if I so much as uttered the word ``UNIX'' I would only make things worse.
Native: ``Where does this satanical computer come from?''
Me: ``California. And there's nothing satanical about it really.''
Somewhere along the line here, the waitress noticed my predicament--but these guys probably outweighed her by 600 pounds, so all she did was look at me sympathetically and run off into the kitchen.
Native: ``Ma'am, I think you're lying. And we'd appreciate it if you'd leave the premises now.''
Fortunately, the waitress returned that very instant with my order, and they agreed that it would be okay for me to actually pay for my food before I left. While I was at the cash register, they amused themselves by talking to each other.
Native #1: ``Do you think the police know about these devil computers?''
Native #2: ``If they come from California, then the FBI oughta know about 'em.''
They escorted me to the door. I tried one last time:
``You're really blowing this all out of proportion. A lot of people use this `kind of computers.' Universities, researchers, businesses. They're actually very useful.''
Big, big, big mistake. I should have guessed at what came next.
Native: ``Does the government use these devil computers?''
Me: ``Yes.''
Another big boo-boo.
Native: ``And does the government pay for 'em? With our tax dollars?''
I decided that it was time to jump ship.
Me: ``No. Nope. Not at all. Your tax dollars never entered the picture at all. I promise. No sir, not a penny. Our good Christian congressmen would never let something like that happen. Nope. Never. Bye.''
Edited and converted to HTML by Dan Bornstein, danfuzz@milk.com.
You don't know the difference between running a lemonade stand (working) and gambling??? The former depends on hard work, good business sense and a bit of luck. The latter is just luck. Teaching children the value of hard work is a good thing(tm).
Because the gambler in this case is 9 years old. If the target audience were older I'd have no problem with this. Encouraging kids to gamble is just plain wrong.
I shouldn't have said worthless. What I meant was inexpensive. The cards cost Nintendo almost nothing to produce, so the profit margin is quite impressive.
Re: you comparison to Malibu Barbie. There is a bit of a difference. Every Malibu Barbie package contains exactly the same items. No matter how many of them you buy, you'll never find the rare hermaphroditic Barbie doll. So there's no element of gambling involved.
I'm an adult, and I'm responsible for my own behaviour. But you can't apply the same standard to a 9 year old. The point of the lawsuit is that this is a gambling product specifically targeted at children.
That's the whole basis of gambling, actually. The gambler's debt keeps increasing, so they become more and more desperate for the big win. The casino/Nintendo encourages it by ensuring that there are enough mid value prizes awarded to keep the gambler's hopes alive of recovering their investment.
Parental supervision is probably the best answer to this problem, but that doesn't mean that what Nintendo's doing isn't wrong, too.
It's one thing to lure adults into gambling, but kids deserve protection from this. Nintendo has an entire staff of child psychologists -- their business depends on knowing what children like. They know exactly how to manipulate kids into spending all their money on worthless pieces of cardboard. That's just not right.
I thought it was pretty weird that at one point in his chat he confused her with another 13 yr old girl who was also an FBI agent!! Just how many agents does the FBI have masquerading as horny teenagers? All of them?
Just planting a flag does NOT make the land your territory if you've already signed a treaty agreeing not to claim it. The USA made just such a commitment when they signed the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Who owns Antarctica? It's the same thing. The Antarctic Treaty guarantees that no country will claim it.
There's a good summary of the Outer Space Treaty at wisc.edu
He's not the only one. Check out BME for an example. If you do a search for "barcode tattoo" on google you get 76 hits.
It's a stupid idea anyway. A subdermal microship (like those used for pets or small children (no kidding!)) is much more effective, since it's less obtrusive and can hold way more data.
WinCE makes me sick, not because it's Microsoft, not because it's Windows, and not because it isn't PalmOS. It's because it's a bloated, buggy, non-fault-tolerant OS that has no place in the embedded OS market.
Um, PalmOS isn't really fault tolerant either. There's no MMU, so there's only minimal memory protection. It's also cooperative (as opposed to preemptive), so if my app gets stuck in a loop nothing else has a chance to run.
The only similarity between Palm and Mac is their popularity - fans of the Palm, much like the Mac, tend to stick to their machines because those machines work _beautifully_, _for them_.
You've never programmed for PalmOS, have you? It's very similar to the old 68k Macs. They're running the same processor, neither has a proper loader-linker, the 'file' format for apps is similar, the memory model is very similar, and I think that the Macs used the same trap interface for APIs that PalmOS uses.
Sorry for being nitpicky, but this is something that really bugs me.
- books are copyrighted, not patented. - inventions are patented. - software is copyrighted, although the algorithms used may be patented. - names are trademarked, not copyrighted or patented.
- the source code for linux is widely available, Win2k is proprietary - Linux is a common OS which many crackers understand well, Win2k is still in a (somewhat) restricted beta - Microsoft probably has a crew of programmers watching the box around the clock to see if someone's getting close and patch the holes before they get it (OK, maybe I'm being paranoid:)
Curiously, this is a different photo of Alan than the one which was printed in the hard copy version of the paper. In that one he was wearing an official looking RedHat red hat.
Although I agree that this is a bogus patent (it should have never been awarded -- much too general), you didn't read the article. They applied for the patent in 1995 before digital players were in production. You can't patent the CD player now, since it's easy for anyone to show prior art.
Where are you going to put that extra hard drive? Unless you have something that will plug into their "unique hard drive peripheral upgrade connector" it sounds like you're screwed.
Why did they go with a wireless keyboard a a wireful mouse??? I've had a wireless logitech mouse since April and wouldn't give it up for anything. I no longer have to deal with mouse gravity! But I don't really care if my keyboards's tied to my computer.
A wireless mouse is much more useful than a wireless keyboard, IMHO.
Antifreeze would kind of affect the purity:) How about pure alcohol? I don't know what its freezing point is, but vodka stays liquid in a normal freezer.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure you're not talking about quantum computing? :)
Ask Slashdot: Has anyone seen where I left my glasses?
I want my phone number to follow me for life, too. Having to change all of your personal contact information just because you move is a bogus hack.
The fact that my phone number indicates where I live is silly, since someone who's phoning me doesn't really care where I am physically. In fact, since I only have a cel phone, I'm often not even in my area code.
Right now there's a proposal before the CRTC (Canadian equivalent of the FCC) to allow cel phone users to keep their numbers when they switch companies. It's probably not going to go through because of the technical issues involved, but it would be really cool if it did.
I want to have one email address, one domain name and one phone number for the rest of my life.
(Having one postal address would be cool, too. Some sort of meta address which is mapped to your physical address by the post office.)
/peter
It does seem somewhat odd that they'd name a model after a nerve gas. Especially since 3Com seems to have been so sensitive about potentially offensive names in the past. Apparently there was no Palm IV because 4 is an unlucky number in Japan. (Can anyone confirm this?)
/peter
I suppose they're not the first to use the name, though. There is VxWorks.
Linda Branagan is an expert on daemons. She has a T-shirt that sports the daemon in tennis shoes that appears on the cover of the 4.3BSD manuals and The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System by S. Leffler, M. McKusick, M. Karels, J. Quarterman, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA 1989.
She tells the following story about wearing the 4.3BSD daemon T-shirt:
Last week I walked into a local ``home style cookin' restaurant/watering hole'' in Texas to pick up a take-out order. I spoke briefly to the waitress behind the counter, who told me my order would be done in a few minutes.
So, while I was busy gazing at the farm implements hanging on the walls, I was approached by two ``natives.'' These guys might just be the original Texas rednecks.
I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
I was this close to slapping one of them and causing a scene--then I stopped and noticed the shirt I happened to be wearing that day. Sure enough, it had a picture of a small, devilish-looking creature that has for some time now been associated with a certain operating system. In this particular representation, the creature was wearing sneakers.
These idiots sounded terrifyingly serious.
I figured that an ATM machine was about as much technology as these guys could handle, and I knew that if I so much as uttered the word ``UNIX'' I would only make things worse.
Somewhere along the line here, the waitress noticed my predicament--but these guys probably outweighed her by 600 pounds, so all she did was look at me sympathetically and run off into the kitchen.
Fortunately, the waitress returned that very instant with my order, and they agreed that it would be okay for me to actually pay for my food before I left. While I was at the cash register, they amused themselves by talking to each other.
They escorted me to the door. I tried one last time:
Big, big, big mistake. I should have guessed at what came next.
Another big boo-boo.
I decided that it was time to jump ship.
Edited and converted to HTML by Dan Bornstein, danfuzz@milk.com.
You don't know the difference between running a lemonade stand (working) and gambling??? The former depends on hard work, good business sense and a bit of luck. The latter is just luck. Teaching children the value of hard work is a good thing(tm).
>Why could it possibly be wrong?
Because the gambler in this case is 9 years old. If the target audience were older I'd have no problem with this. Encouraging kids to gamble is just plain wrong.
I shouldn't have said worthless. What I meant was inexpensive. The cards cost Nintendo almost nothing to produce, so the profit margin is quite impressive.
Re: you comparison to Malibu Barbie. There is a bit of a difference. Every Malibu Barbie package contains exactly the same items. No matter how many of them you buy, you'll never find the rare hermaphroditic Barbie doll. So there's no element of gambling involved.
I'm an adult, and I'm responsible for my own behaviour. But you can't apply the same standard to a 9 year old. The point of the lawsuit is that this is a gambling product specifically targeted at children.
That's the whole basis of gambling, actually. The gambler's debt keeps increasing, so they become more and more desperate for the big win. The casino/Nintendo encourages it by ensuring that there are enough mid value prizes awarded to keep the gambler's hopes alive of recovering their investment.
Parental supervision is probably the best answer to this problem, but that doesn't mean that what Nintendo's doing isn't wrong, too.
It's one thing to lure adults into gambling, but kids deserve protection from this. Nintendo has an entire staff of child psychologists -- their business depends on knowing what children like. They know exactly how to manipulate kids into spending all their money on worthless pieces of cardboard. That's just not right.
I thought it was pretty weird that at one point in his chat he confused her with another 13 yr old girl who was also an FBI agent!! Just how many agents does the FBI have masquerading as horny teenagers? All of them?
Just planting a flag does NOT make the land your territory if you've already signed a treaty agreeing not to claim it. The USA made just such a commitment when they signed the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
/peter
Who owns Antarctica? It's the same thing. The Antarctic Treaty guarantees that no country will claim it.
There's a good summary of the Outer Space Treaty at wisc.edu
The full text of the treaty is available here
He's not the only one. Check out BME for an example. If you do a search for "barcode tattoo" on google you get 76 hits.
It's a stupid idea anyway. A subdermal microship (like those used for pets or small children (no kidding!)) is much more effective, since it's less obtrusive and can hold way more data.
WinCE makes me sick, not because it's Microsoft, not because it's Windows, and not because it isn't PalmOS. It's because it's a bloated, buggy, non-fault-tolerant OS that has no place in the embedded OS market.
/peter
Um, PalmOS isn't really fault tolerant either. There's no MMU, so there's only minimal memory protection. It's also cooperative (as opposed to preemptive), so if my app gets stuck in a loop nothing else has a chance to run.
The only similarity between Palm and Mac is their popularity - fans of the Palm, much like the Mac, tend to stick to their machines because those machines work _beautifully_, _for them_.
You've never programmed for PalmOS, have you? It's very similar to the old 68k Macs. They're running the same processor, neither has a proper loader-linker, the 'file' format for apps is similar, the memory model is very similar, and I think that the Macs used the same trap interface for APIs that PalmOS uses.
Sorry for being nitpicky, but this is something that really bugs me.
- books are copyrighted, not patented.
- inventions are patented.
- software is copyrighted, although the algorithms used may be patented.
- names are trademarked, not copyrighted or patented.
The laws for each of these are VERY different.
/peter
I'd say it's pretty fair:
:)
- the source code for linux is widely available, Win2k is proprietary
- Linux is a common OS which many crackers understand well, Win2k is still in a (somewhat) restricted beta
- Microsoft probably has a crew of programmers watching the box around the clock to see if someone's getting close and patch the holes before they get it (OK, maybe I'm being paranoid
/peter
Curiously, this is a different photo of Alan than the one which was printed in the hard copy version of the paper. In that one he was wearing an official looking RedHat red hat.
/peter
Although I agree that this is a bogus patent (it should have never been awarded -- much too general), you didn't read the article. They applied for the patent in 1995 before digital players were in production. You can't patent the CD player now, since it's easy for anyone to show prior art.
/peter
Uh, network speeds are always measured in bps (bits per second).
/peter
Where are you going to put that extra hard drive? Unless you have something that will plug into their "unique hard drive peripheral upgrade connector" it sounds like you're screwed.
/peter
The spec sheet claimed that the flat panel is XGA.
Isn't XGA limited to 1024x768?
That would kinda suck.
/peter
Why did they go with a wireless keyboard a a wireful mouse??? I've had a wireless logitech mouse since April and wouldn't give it up for anything. I no longer have to deal with mouse gravity! But I don't really care if my keyboards's tied to my computer.
A wireless mouse is much more useful than a wireless keyboard, IMHO.
/peter
Antifreeze would kind of affect the purity :)
How about pure alcohol? I don't know what
its freezing point is, but vodka stays liquid
in a normal freezer.
Ahh, a 200 proof vodka cooled computer!
peter
Have you got a copy of the original warranty or receipt? :)
peter