I wouldn't say making copies is illegal. But I hadn't assumed that the "other alternatives" the original poster mentioned were making copies of legally-purchased ones.
...is that there are enough people out there who actually do buy from spam emails that don't even spell "valium" correctly.
Who are these people? Why do they do it? Who would trust an "online pharmacy" that has to mis-spell every word to get it into your mailbox? Don't they know that if nobody gave money to spammers, they'd eventually go away?
Do any of you know someone who actually buys from spam? Seriously, I'd like to know who these people are.
I once heard that music and movie companies preferred one-hit wonders, or blockbusters, that would bring in a big wad of cash immediately, instead of bands or movies that would have a moderate yet sustainable horde of followers.
It looks like maybe now they've figured out how to cash in on the long-term hordes of followers: Re-releases every few years. Haha, all you Star Wars and Blade Runner suckers!...I say, as I shuffle through Best of the Ramones, Ramones: All the Stuff (and more) volumes 1 and 2, Ramones Mania, Ramones: NYC 1978, etc...
Exactly. On top of that, the only people who have the time and desire to sit there and talk to unsolicited phone callers are insane.
How many people can you easily imagine telling unsolicited phone callers to piss off, or saying they just don't have time to talk to this unscheduled caller? A lot, I'm guessing. People who have nothing better to do or even weirder yet enjoy taking polls are not an accurate representation of the general population.
Where I work (in Germany) you start with 25 days of vacation per year (plus public holidays), and for every year that you work, you get one more day of vacation added to your yearly amount, with a limit at 30.
The first six months of your job is your trial period, where either you or the company can decide it's not working out at any time and end the working relationship without problems. (After that, there's quite a lengthy process for terminating employees, and employees must give at least three months' notice before quitting.) During that first six months, you can't take any vacation, of course.
Most public holidays occur on a certain day of the month. Last year quite a few fell on Saturdays or Sundays, so they didn't do anyone any good. Still, with 30 days of vacation I wasn't complaining.
Or hire one of the dancing monkey-suit people or a clown to sing a song about not being able to make the plane.
So, essentially, we've given up traditional telegrams and they can now only be delivered by dancing people in monkey suits. And the world becomes just a little bit awesomer.
I really like it. Quick overview is that it's great if you basically just want to use the internet (hey that's what they made it for) and don't expect it to do everything a PC can do.
Here is what I like about it:
1. I commute by train, so if I have a few minutes to wait I get a coffee in the cafe at the station and jump on somebody's open wireless network (the hotel next door, maybe?) and check my RSS feeds, do my email, browse the web, open up GAIM and chat, etc. When you've got a wifi connection (and since I live in an urban area, there's open wifi networks all over the city) it's a great.
2. Hook it to my stereo in the living room at home and stream internet stations or podcasts. I love doing this. I get Soma FM's "Drone Zone" going when I can't sleep. And this month is old-timey country month on Radio David Byrne!
4. Stream podcasts using the little built-in speaker. The little built-in speaker isn't great, but if you're listening to a podcast where it's just voice and not music, it's great. If I'm cooking in the kitchen I'll set it on the table and fire up a podcast.
5. Use the internet from bed, or the recliner. I admit it. I have no shame.
6. When there's no network connectivity, for instance when I'm on the train or in the middle of nowhere, it makes a great e-book reader using FBReader. Or if you've downloaded some music or podcasts and have some headphones, you can listen to those.
OK, now here are the things that so far I have disliked about it:
1. Handwriting recognition isn't that great, so I use the little virtual keyboard instead. You can see a longer post I wrote about the handwriting recognition here.
2. While the Opera browser that comes with it is great, it does seem to have some problems with pages with a lot of DHTML on them. For instance, if you start loading Gmail or Bloglines, and then switch to another window while they're loading, and then come back, you'll see they didn't load properly. For some reason when loading those pages, I need to keep that window in the foreground for them to properly load.
3. The Opera browser doesn't have a way to change the font size. If I'm reading a page where the font just shows up too small, I can't increate the font size, all I can do is use the ZOOM IN feature, which creates a horizontal scroll bar in the browser. This is actually rarely an issue, though, since the display is so crisp and easy to read.
4. Running the Nokia-distributed version of the operating system, there's no way that I can see to remove the icons for the Mail and News readers from the left-hand-side menu. I don't use them, I just use Gmail and Bloglines in the browser, so I don't want those two icons taking up space in my menu. (Apparently it's possible to install the Maemo operating system directly, instead of using the Nokia'd-up version, but I haven't tried this.)
5. No network file browsing! So if I'm in the living room, I can't browse the music on my desktop computer over the network and play them. I have gotten around this by installing SlimServer on the desktop computer and connecting the Audio Player in the Nokia to that, but this is sort of clunky. I'd rather just have SMB support in the nokia.
6. Videos have to be sort of low-quality to play smoothly, I think. At least, I've downloaded a couple of videos to it, and they were choppy. This isn't an issue of the display, I think, it's an issue of the processing power.
I have one also, and love it. I love being able to whip it out in the cafe in the train station each morning (I commute by train) and read my RSS feeds, check my email, get on GAIM and chat, or at home I hook it up to the stereo in my living room and stream internet radio stations.
Now I will attempt to take a crack at your questions.
1. How well does it (or do you think it would) function as a PDA? Does it have calendaring apps and stuff? How well does it sync that sort of data with a PC? What sort of software will it sync with?
Well, with the software that comes with it, it really doesn't. Nokia seems to by hyping this as "It's not a PDA and it's not a phone, it's for the internet!" But in reality, it's just a small hand-held computer running Linux, and the software that it comes with is bundled with the internet in mind.
But that doesn't mean that nobody will write Calendar and PIM software for in. (In fact, I know there is already one commercial one out there, which synchronizes with Outlook, and one open source one which I don't think does synchronization.) I would wager that decent Calendar and PIM software will show up for it, but there's no way to be sure.
2. I'm still a bit sketchy about what I need to connect to Penn State's Wi-Fi network, but I know that at the very least I will need *some* VPN client. (PSU has downloads for OS X, Linux, and Windows for a Cisco VPN client; I don't know much about VPNs, if clients are interoperable or anything like that, but it seems that at least whatever client comes with the Axim series will connect.) Does the 770 come with such a client?
OK, if the Linux VPN stuff from your university can be run from the command line as a normal user, then I would guess that it'd work. If it can run from the command line as root, it'll take some work (you need to do some trickery to put the 770 into "Development mode" before it'll let you switch to root), but I'd think then you could get that running. If it requires some kind of GUI login stuff, well, probably not.
3. From the Maemo tutorials, it looks like it uses some mix of a special API (the Hildon stuff) and GTK. How difficult is this to learn (I've done GUI programming with the Win32 APIs and have a very rudimentary knowledge of Qt, but almost no GTK knowledge) and how much knowledge is transferrable to making desktop GTK apps? Is it possible to use something like Qt on it?
I don't know how difficult it is to learn to develop for it, but it seems like GTK developers are having a lot of success getting their applications running on it without too much pain. GAIM, for instance, was ported to the 770 almost immediately after it was released. Using QT on it, I would seriously doubt that's possible.
4. How's the handwriting analysis? To compare, Windows Mobile gives you a virtual keyboard you can tap on the keys, an entry area that you use like the older Palms and special glyphs, and full screen recognition that tries to do it from your natural writing. It seems from the site that it has something like the first and last modes; is this accurate?
Same deal, you can get the little virtual keyboard you tap, or the handwriting analysis. You can train the handwriting analysis to recognize your handwriting. But I have one major complaint about this: When you go into the handwriting training screen, it'll show you the seven different ways it knows to write, for example, the letter A. And you are only allowed to add one new way to write "A" in your handwriting, and there's NO WAY TO DELETE the seven ways it already knows. This is quite frustrating if, for example, the way you write the number "1" is the same as what the device knows to be the letter "l". I seriously hope they change that in the future.
Also, when you are using handwriting recognition, it will try and auto-complete what you're writing. For example, if you want to write the word "example" and you've written the first two letters, it'll show you down at the bottom
If you think mobile phones are annoying now, wait 'til you have to sit in front of the dipshit watching Tupac videos at top volume (crappy mobile phone speaker quality of course) behind you on the train.
It was designed for typing words. In english. Common characters are easiest to reach. Uncommon ones (such as curly braces, brackets, other symbols used in programming) are the least convenient to reach.
If almost all of your typing is really programming, I doubt dvorak is what you want.
Wrong, the US is one of the few countries in the world that makes its citizens pay taxes even when they live abroad, even on money that they earned in another country.
(Granted, you can exclude up to $70,000 of that, so most americans abroad probably don't pay any taxes to the US, but they still have to file, report how much they made, report what the exchange rate was at the time they were paid, report exactly how many days they spent in the US during the tax year and whether or not they were there on business or pleasure.)
We can study how much they've evolved over DECADES. How they were "quite different."
Yes I remember how the world was populated by completely different animals decades ago. Remember how dogs only had three legs in the 1970s? And now they've evolved to have four?
Seriously, how much can any normal animal (bacteria and viruses and other things with very, very short lifespans excluded) have evolved that much over decades?
Finally the profs don't have to waste their time with that pesky work!
This reminds me of managers who feel annoyed, maybe even unfairly put upon, when their employees are taking up their valuable time asking them to make decisions or for guidance.
Isn't it the professor's _job_ to read the essays he makes his students write?
The idea of using the internet as an input for this sort of thing reminds me of Forum 3000, and the SOMADs they had that were supposedly based on the usenet posts of a single person, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say making copies is illegal. But I hadn't assumed that the "other alternatives" the original poster mentioned were making copies of legally-purchased ones.
Their making undesirable changes to the product is reason enough for you to steal it, as though you were entitled to it?
I thought it was all rounded corners, pastel colors, and Arial font... there's more?
...is that there are enough people out there who actually do buy from spam emails that don't even spell "valium" correctly.
Who are these people? Why do they do it? Who would trust an "online pharmacy" that has to mis-spell every word to get it into your mailbox? Don't they know that if nobody gave money to spammers, they'd eventually go away?
Do any of you know someone who actually buys from spam? Seriously, I'd like to know who these people are.
I once heard that music and movie companies preferred one-hit wonders, or blockbusters, that would bring in a big wad of cash immediately, instead of bands or movies that would have a moderate yet sustainable horde of followers.
...I say, as I shuffle through Best of the Ramones, Ramones: All the Stuff (and more) volumes 1 and 2, Ramones Mania, Ramones: NYC 1978, etc...
It looks like maybe now they've figured out how to cash in on the long-term hordes of followers: Re-releases every few years. Haha, all you Star Wars and Blade Runner suckers!
Nokia's been saying for some time now that the next release would have VOIP...
OK. And now we find out that it's.... GChat? No SIP? I get VOIP, but I can only use it with other users of GChat?
It wasn't an idle statment when Patrick Henry said Give me Liberty or give me Death!
It is better to live free than die a slave.
Then why hasn't every slave throughout history killed himself?
For just expressing an unpopular opinion?
Exactly. On top of that, the only people who have the time and desire to sit there and talk to unsolicited phone callers are insane.
How many people can you easily imagine telling unsolicited phone callers to piss off, or saying they just don't have time to talk to this unscheduled caller? A lot, I'm guessing. People who have nothing better to do or even weirder yet enjoy taking polls are not an accurate representation of the general population.
Where I work (in Germany) you start with 25 days of vacation per year (plus public holidays), and for every year that you work, you get one more day of vacation added to your yearly amount, with a limit at 30.
The first six months of your job is your trial period, where either you or the company can decide it's not working out at any time and end the working relationship without problems. (After that, there's quite a lengthy process for terminating employees, and employees must give at least three months' notice before quitting.) During that first six months, you can't take any vacation, of course.
Most public holidays occur on a certain day of the month. Last year quite a few fell on Saturdays or Sundays, so they didn't do anyone any good. Still, with 30 days of vacation I wasn't complaining.
Who wants a keyboard?
Honestly, are those tiny "thumb keyboards" any easier to use than tapping a virtual one with the stylus?
Either you can have the thumb keyboard there, or you can have a bigger screen. I'll take the screen.
Or hire one of the dancing monkey-suit people or a clown to sing a song about not being able to make the plane.
So, essentially, we've given up traditional telegrams and they can now only be delivered by dancing people in monkey suits. And the world becomes just a little bit awesomer.
Excellent! Thank you!
I know. I was being sarcastic.
I really like it. Quick overview is that it's great if you basically just want to use the internet (hey that's what they made it for) and don't expect it to do everything a PC can do.
Here is what I like about it:
1. I commute by train, so if I have a few minutes to wait I get a coffee in the cafe at the station and jump on somebody's open wireless network (the hotel next door, maybe?) and check my RSS feeds, do my email, browse the web, open up GAIM and chat, etc. When you've got a wifi connection (and since I live in an urban area, there's open wifi networks all over the city) it's a great.
2. Hook it to my stereo in the living room at home and stream internet stations or podcasts. I love doing this. I get Soma FM's "Drone Zone" going when I can't sleep. And this month is old-timey country month on Radio David Byrne!
4. Stream podcasts using the little built-in speaker. The little built-in speaker isn't great, but if you're listening to a podcast where it's just voice and not music, it's great. If I'm cooking in the kitchen I'll set it on the table and fire up a podcast.
5. Use the internet from bed, or the recliner. I admit it. I have no shame.
6. When there's no network connectivity, for instance when I'm on the train or in the middle of nowhere, it makes a great e-book reader using FBReader. Or if you've downloaded some music or podcasts and have some headphones, you can listen to those.
OK, now here are the things that so far I have disliked about it:
1. Handwriting recognition isn't that great, so I use the little virtual keyboard instead. You can see a longer post I wrote about the handwriting recognition here.
2. While the Opera browser that comes with it is great, it does seem to have some problems with pages with a lot of DHTML on them. For instance, if you start loading Gmail or Bloglines, and then switch to another window while they're loading, and then come back, you'll see they didn't load properly. For some reason when loading those pages, I need to keep that window in the foreground for them to properly load.
3. The Opera browser doesn't have a way to change the font size. If I'm reading a page where the font just shows up too small, I can't increate the font size, all I can do is use the ZOOM IN feature, which creates a horizontal scroll bar in the browser. This is actually rarely an issue, though, since the display is so crisp and easy to read.
4. Running the Nokia-distributed version of the operating system, there's no way that I can see to remove the icons for the Mail and News readers from the left-hand-side menu. I don't use them, I just use Gmail and Bloglines in the browser, so I don't want those two icons taking up space in my menu. (Apparently it's possible to install the Maemo operating system directly, instead of using the Nokia'd-up version, but I haven't tried this.)
5. No network file browsing! So if I'm in the living room, I can't browse the music on my desktop computer over the network and play them. I have gotten around this by installing SlimServer on the desktop computer and connecting the Audio Player in the Nokia to that, but this is sort of clunky. I'd rather just have SMB support in the nokia.
6. Videos have to be sort of low-quality to play smoothly, I think. At least, I've downloaded a couple of videos to it, and they were choppy. This isn't an issue of the display, I think, it's an issue of the processing power.
I have one also, and love it. I love being able to whip it out in the cafe in the train station each morning (I commute by train) and read my RSS feeds, check my email, get on GAIM and chat, or at home I hook it up to the stereo in my living room and stream internet radio stations.
Now I will attempt to take a crack at your questions.
1. How well does it (or do you think it would) function as a PDA? Does it have calendaring apps and stuff? How well does it sync that sort of data with a PC? What sort of software will it sync with?
Well, with the software that comes with it, it really doesn't. Nokia seems to by hyping this as "It's not a PDA and it's not a phone, it's for the internet!" But in reality, it's just a small hand-held computer running Linux, and the software that it comes with is bundled with the internet in mind.
But that doesn't mean that nobody will write Calendar and PIM software for in. (In fact, I know there is already one commercial one out there, which synchronizes with Outlook, and one open source one which I don't think does synchronization.) I would wager that decent Calendar and PIM software will show up for it, but there's no way to be sure.
2. I'm still a bit sketchy about what I need to connect to Penn State's Wi-Fi network, but I know that at the very least I will need *some* VPN client. (PSU has downloads for OS X, Linux, and Windows for a Cisco VPN client; I don't know much about VPNs, if clients are interoperable or anything like that, but it seems that at least whatever client comes with the Axim series will connect.) Does the 770 come with such a client?
OK, if the Linux VPN stuff from your university can be run from the command line as a normal user, then I would guess that it'd work. If it can run from the command line as root, it'll take some work (you need to do some trickery to put the 770 into "Development mode" before it'll let you switch to root), but I'd think then you could get that running. If it requires some kind of GUI login stuff, well, probably not.
3. From the Maemo tutorials, it looks like it uses some mix of a special API (the Hildon stuff) and GTK. How difficult is this to learn (I've done GUI programming with the Win32 APIs and have a very rudimentary knowledge of Qt, but almost no GTK knowledge) and how much knowledge is transferrable to making desktop GTK apps? Is it possible to use something like Qt on it?
I don't know how difficult it is to learn to develop for it, but it seems like GTK developers are having a lot of success getting their applications running on it without too much pain. GAIM, for instance, was ported to the 770 almost immediately after it was released. Using QT on it, I would seriously doubt that's possible.
4. How's the handwriting analysis? To compare, Windows Mobile gives you a virtual keyboard you can tap on the keys, an entry area that you use like the older Palms and special glyphs, and full screen recognition that tries to do it from your natural writing. It seems from the site that it has something like the first and last modes; is this accurate?
Same deal, you can get the little virtual keyboard you tap, or the handwriting analysis. You can train the handwriting analysis to recognize your handwriting. But I have one major complaint about this: When you go into the handwriting training screen, it'll show you the seven different ways it knows to write, for example, the letter A. And you are only allowed to add one new way to write "A" in your handwriting, and there's NO WAY TO DELETE the seven ways it already knows. This is quite frustrating if, for example, the way you write the number "1" is the same as what the device knows to be the letter "l". I seriously hope they change that in the future.
Also, when you are using handwriting recognition, it will try and auto-complete what you're writing. For example, if you want to write the word "example" and you've written the first two letters, it'll show you down at the bottom
Wow, excellent point, it's a shame they implemented Flash 6 in hardware and it can never be upgraded now!
as long as you don't mind the bed still being warm when you check in
If you think mobile phones are annoying now, wait 'til you have to sit in front of the dipshit watching Tupac videos at top volume (crappy mobile phone speaker quality of course) behind you on the train.
Is already happening here (Germany).
It was designed for typing words. In english. Common characters are easiest to reach. Uncommon ones (such as curly braces, brackets, other symbols used in programming) are the least convenient to reach.
If almost all of your typing is really programming, I doubt dvorak is what you want.
Wrong, the US is one of the few countries in the world that makes its citizens pay taxes even when they live abroad, even on money that they earned in another country.
(Granted, you can exclude up to $70,000 of that, so most americans abroad probably don't pay any taxes to the US, but they still have to file, report how much they made, report what the exchange rate was at the time they were paid, report exactly how many days they spent in the US during the tax year and whether or not they were there on business or pleasure.)
Great now I have to listen to laugh tracks and sports announcers coming from other people's phones when I ride the train or bus.
We can study how much they've evolved over DECADES. How they were "quite different."
Yes I remember how the world was populated by completely different animals decades ago. Remember how dogs only had three legs in the 1970s? And now they've evolved to have four?
Seriously, how much can any normal animal (bacteria and viruses and other things with very, very short lifespans excluded) have evolved that much over decades?
Finally the profs don't have to waste their time with that pesky work!
This reminds me of managers who feel annoyed, maybe even unfairly put upon, when their employees are taking up their valuable time asking them to make decisions or for guidance.
Isn't it the professor's _job_ to read the essays he makes his students write?
The idea of using the internet as an input for this sort of thing reminds me of Forum 3000, and the SOMADs they had that were supposedly based on the usenet posts of a single person, etc.
that was a cool site.