Ok, remind me never to submit news stories while dead tired. You tend to miss quite a few things (like making sure the bloody headline is completely wrong; what I meant to say was "Microsoft joins the OpenID *Fray*").
Nice getting pwned by Slashdot. I love you too guys!
What the...
You, sir, have just made the impossible. The smallest subnet one can have is/30. That leaves two bits or four addresses, one for router, one for broadcast, one for network name and one for your computer. Would you kindly explain how that would fit in two addresses?
Gonna make a shameless plug for the Excito Bubba Two here.
Two NICs, draws extremely little power, is small and has no moving parts, and acts as a mail/web/NAS/whatever out of the box. Would get one myself if I wasn't on this shitty HSDPA connection right now (well, it's not *that* bad, really, but you definitely can't route stuff through it).
I wonder how this fares in comparision to Open Pandora and similar devices. The only extra thing I could wish for with regards to the Pandora is some sort of 3G data connection so I wouldn't be tied down to WiFi for wireless connection, but, since the pandora has specific slots for soldering on your own mods I possibly could add it myself.
The idea of crossing a gameboy with a cellphone isn't exactly new, but so far noone has been making a serious attempt at it (N-Gage was more or less doomed from the beginning due to it's crappy input methods and other stupid design decisions). Will be interesting to see what happens next...
The Jingle specs are being finished up but it seems like some people like dragging their feet about it. As soon as they hit draft I suspect we'll see an explosion of various Jingle branches, but it'll take atleast another 6 months to get there. The situation sucks but I'm
There are some XMPP clients out there that supports both voice and video. GTalk supports voice for instance. However there are currently no standard way to do it, which kinda sucks.
Thing is, there's this newfangled stream technology for XMPP called Jingle that has been in the pipeline for atleast two-three years now. It's in last call and has been for ages. Once that standard go draft, clients will implement it about a year after that. But Jingle is taking so long I'm beginning to suspect Duke Nukem Forever will beat it to the release date...
"Oh bull, if they can afford the computer they could have afforded to get the OEM preload instead of the pirate version from the neighborhood screwdriver shop. Or if they built it themselves then they damned sure could have sprung for an OEM copy when they bought the other bits."
You know, I'm so tired of this argument. The problem isn't that Windows is expensive - It's fairly inexpensive in comparison. The problem is, the Windows ecoosystem has a lot of other proprietary software which charge a premium and try to squeeze out every last penny from their customers.
Take Adobe. They wouldn't survive if there weren't for the piracy. The only reason CS3 costs as much as it does, is because the alternatives sucks (Photoshop still offers the best pipeline compared to the other tools, After Effects is virtually untouchable, and there is no real alternative to Premier Pro either - the list goes on). Each of these programs cost atleast $500. So, yes, you can get a decent computer. That's $1000. Add CS3 ($1700) and Windows Vista Ultimate ($300), and you have to shell out $3000 - The cost is increased threefold. If it was a $500 computer sold at a bargain price it's increased five-fold. I could buy two more computers with those money if it were all free (as in beer).
I'm not a bitter little hamster - People obviously like shelling out for Adobe else they'd be out of business - but, when the price of a computer totals three to five times what it's worth... You start looking for alternatives.
In such a setup, it's not uncommon to have the workstation cache documents locally since most people's entire work directory (or the "current projects" as opposed to "archived") is only around 100-150 MB or so, and there's still things you can do locally - There's always things to do, and if the parts requiring online access can't be done, the offline access can. So while the work will be hampered, it still won't be completely off limits the way losing your entire app catalog is.
Sorry, but I'm still extremely unconvinced about portable apps. The risks are just too great right now.
That's true, but there's another side to it; imagine a company with 500 employees. Each employee has their own workstation. Now imagine 1% of those are down constantly. That means five employees will, at any given moment, not be able to perform any work. That's an annoyance, but if a workstation is down for on average 1 hour, then it's still ok.
Now, the important thing to remember here; It's never the same five employees suffering from downtime, and the company as a whole still keeps doing what it does best; earn money. But with a centralised, hosted app, the *entire company* will be down during those three hours of downtime. Might as well give everyone a free day off.
Hosted apps aren't going to fly until this very basic problem is solved. 'Nuff said.
P2P does not use "much more" unneccessary bandwidth. What it DOES do is, at worst, a slight overhead (in the case of bittorrent) of maybe 10% maximum, and even that's only for very small files with lots of unstable hosts. In reality the overhead is typicly 0.1% or even smaller.
However, if I send you a file over, say, MSN it's more or less the exact same bandwidth figures passing to and from the two of us, as that of a server. So your claims are false.
Well, I for one is very hopeful for the future of the freerunner, but like you say right now it has too many kinks to be worth it for your average consumer. However, it'll be interesting to see where it stands in six months from now. Personally I don't think the Android platform will be half as good as the Freerunner in terms of developer freedom, but anything that opens up the cell phones is welcome IMO. But things are getting off-topic...
Slightly unfair, yes. The Freerunner is GSM only and has no camera but is otherwise identical or better than the iPhone in terms of hardware. In terms of software, yes it's not ready yet. But even the iPhone had quite a few omissions at release, and the fact that OpenMoko is completely open almost guarantees that as long as enough people are interested in it (and many are) then the glaring omissions will get fixed.
My point was, however, that even with the cheapest option in my country, the iPhone costs a total of *at least* 790 euros - vs the 425 euros I would have to pay if I were to go with a competing company and a (non-subsidized) phone. Paying 790 euros for something just to jailbreak it, when you can pay 425 euros for something that is already jailbroken, and offers roughly the same services... Sorry, but I'll take the Freerunner over iPhone in that case.
For me, the iPhone is waaaaaay too pricey. Here's a quick price comparision from the supplier in my country for the 8GB model and an 18 month contract. They support three different price ranges (prices listed include VAT):
No matter how anyone twist it, the iPhone 3G is one heck of an expensive phone since it doesn't come without a contract. So, buying one just to jailbreak it is out of the question for me.
Meanwhile, I can get by with a $300 (that's about 200 for us Europeans) Neo Freerunner running the OpenMoko development platform. 200 isn't exactly bad for a phone, and if I stick with my current provider I'll get by on around 150 / year. So, total price for 18 months would be 200 + 225 = 425, or half the price of the iPhone. Not saying that the iPhone isn't drool-worthy, but it's definitely not worth the price for me. 'nuff said.
I mostly agree with what you said, but I disagree on one point; The old NES/SNES games did *not* suck. They were primitive, to be sure. And some of them have horrible engrish ("Go find the triforce Link to save her!"). But, I still remember how much FUN I had with Super Mario Bros when I was a kid, and I've given my ten-year-old nephews a game like Super Mario World and they've had atleast as fun with it as I have.
Not saying that things were better back then - But, dissing a masterpiece like say, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Final Fantasy 6 just because it's OLD is like dissing Hamlet, or the Illiad, or a good old fairy tale just because it's old. It may be old, but it's still good games. 'Nuff said.
No, the value of the dollar *is* very tied to the oil, and world economics at large.
Almost all countries need oil. You control the oil, you're more or less controlling the world. How do you control the oil? You make damn sure that your currency is the one being used to buy and sell it. Why?
Because, if it's sold in your currency, everyone has to trade to your currency before they can buy oil. Now the US might refuse to sell dollars to your country. Your country can still buy it from other countries, of course, but this is quite expensive compared to buying from the U.S. directly. Meanwhile the US will make a bundle on all the dollars it sells. High demand -> strong dollar and low inflation. Plus, since the US basicly sells all oil since it's traded in dollars, it gets access to extremely cheap oil. It's not exactly clean tactics, but it's not too bad - atleast everyone can get their oil without rattling around with weapons, so noone's too unhappy about it.
Now, what happens if the oil is being sold in Euros instead? Well, first off, all of a sudden the US can't control the oil anymore. Second, their access to cheap oil is much diminished. That's why you're starting to see high gas prices in the US - though still a far cry from what we have over here (around 7.60 USD per gallon in my country, but the gas is heavily taxed. How we survive? Cars that go 40+ miles/gallon FTW) - The US is simply being forced to pay full price for oil all of a sudden. And it hates it.
Therefore, I still think that the control of Oil and the switch to Euro was one of the biggest if not THE biggest reason for the Iraq war. Ultimately, however, that tactic failed. 'nuff said.
And yes, Bush is intelligent, I never said he wasn't. However, a person can be extremely smart, extremely intelligent, and still be a useful idiot. Push the right buttons, tell the right truths, and the most cynical person can do exactly what you want him to...
Eh, I'm not exactly making this up. Fact is, Iraq was already selling oil in Euros and fact is that there's no denying that the US dollar is tied very deeply with the OPEC countries and oil. Now add two and two together, and it does look like a clever ploy to keep the US dollar steady, and thus protect the economic empire of the US. It's more than a plausible theory. Of course, it could also be that the Bush administration is simply woefully incompetent, which isn't exactly a better alternative, but eh. Whatever.
And yes, I'm more or less of the opinion that president Bush is nothing but a mere puppet. I do not dispute that he's the president; but he's nothing but a "useful idiot" (no offense to Bush personally, but he *isn't* a strong leader). If he isn't a puppet, then the man is much, much smarter than most realise.
And for the record; I'm not any more anti-US than most European people, and I admire some things about the great land in the west, but I think Bush has been the biggest mistake the country has ever done in a long time, and I really *do* hope that the US starts realising that it isn't alone in this world, something it seems to forget all too often. Else the consequences of it's ignorance will lead to yet another great nation falling apart...
Saddam was about to start selling his oil in Euros. Not dollars. That's more or less a direct blow to the US economic empire. Of all the crazy conspiracy theories I've heard, my bet is that the Iraq war was simply a very inefficient way of trying to protect the US economy, nothing else.
The only one who can tell for certain, however, is Bush and the people that control him.
I think you're wrong for the same reason people didn't stop paying when the VCR or the tape recorder came out.
Are there cheapskates that refuse to pay? Of course. But, as long as you produce a good product, you will have a large following. Simple as that.
It's time for manufacturers to tell Microsoft "Look, we do this on our terms. If you want to cooperate on our terms, fine. If not, then take your fucking ball and go home!"
Seriously, there's a great alternative out there. Microsoft is, for the first time in a very long time, in a position not as the big bully, but as the kid trying to get popular. Let's see how they manage to cope with this...
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, remind me never to submit news stories while dead tired. You tend to miss quite a few things (like making sure the bloody headline is completely wrong; what I meant to say was "Microsoft joins the OpenID *Fray*").
Nice getting pwned by Slashdot. I love you too guys!
What the... You, sir, have just made the impossible. The smallest subnet one can have is /30. That leaves two bits or four addresses, one for router, one for broadcast, one for network name and one for your computer. Would you kindly explain how that would fit in two addresses?
Gonna make a shameless plug for the Excito Bubba Two here. Two NICs, draws extremely little power, is small and has no moving parts, and acts as a mail/web/NAS/whatever out of the box. Would get one myself if I wasn't on this shitty HSDPA connection right now (well, it's not *that* bad, really, but you definitely can't route stuff through it).
Does anyone actually jailbreak DSes except a small minority that wants to run emulators or similar?
I wonder how this fares in comparision to Open Pandora and similar devices. The only extra thing I could wish for with regards to the Pandora is some sort of 3G data connection so I wouldn't be tied down to WiFi for wireless connection, but, since the pandora has specific slots for soldering on your own mods I possibly could add it myself.
The idea of crossing a gameboy with a cellphone isn't exactly new, but so far noone has been making a serious attempt at it (N-Gage was more or less doomed from the beginning due to it's crappy input methods and other stupid design decisions). Will be interesting to see what happens next...
... I'm confident that the situation will be resolved soon. In other news, touchpad clicking really must die. >_
The Jingle specs are being finished up but it seems like some people like dragging their feet about it. As soon as they hit draft I suspect we'll see an explosion of various Jingle branches, but it'll take atleast another 6 months to get there. The situation sucks but I'm
There are some XMPP clients out there that supports both voice and video. GTalk supports voice for instance. However there are currently no standard way to do it, which kinda sucks.
Thing is, there's this newfangled stream technology for XMPP called Jingle that has been in the pipeline for atleast two-three years now. It's in last call and has been for ages. Once that standard go draft, clients will implement it about a year after that. But Jingle is taking so long I'm beginning to suspect Duke Nukem Forever will beat it to the release date...
"Oh bull, if they can afford the computer they could have afforded to get the OEM preload instead of the pirate version from the neighborhood screwdriver shop. Or if they built it themselves then they damned sure could have sprung for an OEM copy when they bought the other bits."
You know, I'm so tired of this argument. The problem isn't that Windows is expensive - It's fairly inexpensive in comparison. The problem is, the Windows ecoosystem has a lot of other proprietary software which charge a premium and try to squeeze out every last penny from their customers.
Take Adobe. They wouldn't survive if there weren't for the piracy. The only reason CS3 costs as much as it does, is because the alternatives sucks (Photoshop still offers the best pipeline compared to the other tools, After Effects is virtually untouchable, and there is no real alternative to Premier Pro either - the list goes on). Each of these programs cost atleast $500. So, yes, you can get a decent computer. That's $1000. Add CS3 ($1700) and Windows Vista Ultimate ($300), and you have to shell out $3000 - The cost is increased threefold. If it was a $500 computer sold at a bargain price it's increased five-fold. I could buy two more computers with those money if it were all free (as in beer).
I'm not a bitter little hamster - People obviously like shelling out for Adobe else they'd be out of business - but, when the price of a computer totals three to five times what it's worth... You start looking for alternatives.
In such a setup, it's not uncommon to have the workstation cache documents locally since most people's entire work directory (or the "current projects" as opposed to "archived") is only around 100-150 MB or so, and there's still things you can do locally - There's always things to do, and if the parts requiring online access can't be done, the offline access can. So while the work will be hampered, it still won't be completely off limits the way losing your entire app catalog is.
Sorry, but I'm still extremely unconvinced about portable apps. The risks are just too great right now.
That's true, but there's another side to it; imagine a company with 500 employees. Each employee has their own workstation. Now imagine 1% of those are down constantly. That means five employees will, at any given moment, not be able to perform any work. That's an annoyance, but if a workstation is down for on average 1 hour, then it's still ok.
Now, the important thing to remember here; It's never the same five employees suffering from downtime, and the company as a whole still keeps doing what it does best; earn money. But with a centralised, hosted app, the *entire company* will be down during those three hours of downtime. Might as well give everyone a free day off.
Hosted apps aren't going to fly until this very basic problem is solved. 'Nuff said.
No.
P2P does not use "much more" unneccessary bandwidth. What it DOES do is, at worst, a slight overhead (in the case of bittorrent) of maybe 10% maximum, and even that's only for very small files with lots of unstable hosts. In reality the overhead is typicly 0.1% or even smaller.
However, if I send you a file over, say, MSN it's more or less the exact same bandwidth figures passing to and from the two of us, as that of a server. So your claims are false.
Well, I for one is very hopeful for the future of the freerunner, but like you say right now it has too many kinks to be worth it for your average consumer. However, it'll be interesting to see where it stands in six months from now. Personally I don't think the Android platform will be half as good as the Freerunner in terms of developer freedom, but anything that opens up the cell phones is welcome IMO. But things are getting off-topic...
Slightly unfair, yes. The Freerunner is GSM only and has no camera but is otherwise identical or better than the iPhone in terms of hardware. In terms of software, yes it's not ready yet. But even the iPhone had quite a few omissions at release, and the fact that OpenMoko is completely open almost guarantees that as long as enough people are interested in it (and many are) then the glaring omissions will get fixed.
My point was, however, that even with the cheapest option in my country, the iPhone costs a total of *at least* 790 euros - vs the 425 euros I would have to pay if I were to go with a competing company and a (non-subsidized) phone. Paying 790 euros for something just to jailbreak it, when you can pay 425 euros for something that is already jailbroken, and offers roughly the same services... Sorry, but I'll take the Freerunner over iPhone in that case.
And of course, slashdot ate all my Euro signs... -_-;; Oh well. All prices are in Euros unless otherwise specified.
For me, the iPhone is waaaaaay too pricey. Here's a quick price comparision from the supplier in my country for the 8GB model and an 18 month contract. They support three different price ranges (prices listed include VAT):
Cheap: 250 + 30*18 = 790 (around $1255 USD)
Normal: 190 + 49*18 = 1072 (around $1699 USD)
Deluxe: 140 + 86*18 = 1688 (around $2680 USD)
No matter how anyone twist it, the iPhone 3G is one heck of an expensive phone since it doesn't come without a contract. So, buying one just to jailbreak it is out of the question for me.
Meanwhile, I can get by with a $300 (that's about 200 for us Europeans) Neo Freerunner running the OpenMoko development platform. 200 isn't exactly bad for a phone, and if I stick with my current provider I'll get by on around 150 / year. So, total price for 18 months would be 200 + 225 = 425, or half the price of the iPhone. Not saying that the iPhone isn't drool-worthy, but it's definitely not worth the price for me. 'nuff said.
I mostly agree with what you said, but I disagree on one point; The old NES/SNES games did *not* suck. They were primitive, to be sure. And some of them have horrible engrish ("Go find the triforce Link to save her!"). But, I still remember how much FUN I had with Super Mario Bros when I was a kid, and I've given my ten-year-old nephews a game like Super Mario World and they've had atleast as fun with it as I have.
Not saying that things were better back then - But, dissing a masterpiece like say, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Final Fantasy 6 just because it's OLD is like dissing Hamlet, or the Illiad, or a good old fairy tale just because it's old. It may be old, but it's still good games. 'Nuff said.
No, the value of the dollar *is* very tied to the oil, and world economics at large.
Almost all countries need oil. You control the oil, you're more or less controlling the world. How do you control the oil? You make damn sure that your currency is the one being used to buy and sell it. Why?
Because, if it's sold in your currency, everyone has to trade to your currency before they can buy oil. Now the US might refuse to sell dollars to your country. Your country can still buy it from other countries, of course, but this is quite expensive compared to buying from the U.S. directly. Meanwhile the US will make a bundle on all the dollars it sells. High demand -> strong dollar and low inflation. Plus, since the US basicly sells all oil since it's traded in dollars, it gets access to extremely cheap oil. It's not exactly clean tactics, but it's not too bad - atleast everyone can get their oil without rattling around with weapons, so noone's too unhappy about it.
Now, what happens if the oil is being sold in Euros instead? Well, first off, all of a sudden the US can't control the oil anymore. Second, their access to cheap oil is much diminished. That's why you're starting to see high gas prices in the US - though still a far cry from what we have over here (around 7.60 USD per gallon in my country, but the gas is heavily taxed. How we survive? Cars that go 40+ miles/gallon FTW) - The US is simply being forced to pay full price for oil all of a sudden. And it hates it.
Therefore, I still think that the control of Oil and the switch to Euro was one of the biggest if not THE biggest reason for the Iraq war. Ultimately, however, that tactic failed. 'nuff said.
And yes, Bush is intelligent, I never said he wasn't. However, a person can be extremely smart, extremely intelligent, and still be a useful idiot. Push the right buttons, tell the right truths, and the most cynical person can do exactly what you want him to...
Eh, I'm not exactly making this up. Fact is, Iraq was already selling oil in Euros and fact is that there's no denying that the US dollar is tied very deeply with the OPEC countries and oil. Now add two and two together, and it does look like a clever ploy to keep the US dollar steady, and thus protect the economic empire of the US. It's more than a plausible theory. Of course, it could also be that the Bush administration is simply woefully incompetent, which isn't exactly a better alternative, but eh. Whatever.
And yes, I'm more or less of the opinion that president Bush is nothing but a mere puppet. I do not dispute that he's the president; but he's nothing but a "useful idiot" (no offense to Bush personally, but he *isn't* a strong leader). If he isn't a puppet, then the man is much, much smarter than most realise.
And for the record; I'm not any more anti-US than most European people, and I admire some things about the great land in the west, but I think Bush has been the biggest mistake the country has ever done in a long time, and I really *do* hope that the US starts realising that it isn't alone in this world, something it seems to forget all too often. Else the consequences of it's ignorance will lead to yet another great nation falling apart...
No, actually, there's one more thing here;
Saddam was about to start selling his oil in Euros. Not dollars. That's more or less a direct blow to the US economic empire. Of all the crazy conspiracy theories I've heard, my bet is that the Iraq war was simply a very inefficient way of trying to protect the US economy, nothing else.
The only one who can tell for certain, however, is Bush and the people that control him.
Didn't Loki Software port it?
So in other words it just killed the Kitten... Auth?
I think you're wrong for the same reason people didn't stop paying when the VCR or the tape recorder came out. Are there cheapskates that refuse to pay? Of course. But, as long as you produce a good product, you will have a large following. Simple as that.
If it's very sensitive data, I'd send it over on an inconspicious CD-ROM or DVD-ROM disk by reccommended express delivery.
If it's not quite that sensitive, encrypted VPN/SFTP do the trick.
It's time for manufacturers to tell Microsoft "Look, we do this on our terms. If you want to cooperate on our terms, fine. If not, then take your fucking ball and go home!"
Seriously, there's a great alternative out there. Microsoft is, for the first time in a very long time, in a position not as the big bully, but as the kid trying to get popular. Let's see how they manage to cope with this...