BSG explores ideas of how we define God, and who is eligible for religeon, and stuff that Star Trek wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
Star Trek would touch that. But Enterprise wouldn't. The Original Series was all about touch that kind of stuff- with a one-foot ruler no less. And with dealing with the consequences.
I do agree that reading sci-fi is 10x better than watching it. There is so little worth watching in the so-called sci-fi genre; TOS, TNG, to some extent DS9. Babylon 5 is one of the exceptions, it's done so that it's almost as good as some big book series. I've not seen the newBSG, so I can't speak to that... But space opera doesn't have to be slander used against shows like Voyager and DS9- there are a lot of good, respectable, thoughful (non-pulp) space opera books and book series in the realm of readable sci-fi...
Having used VMWare a lot, under both Linux (running Windows) and Windows (running Linux), I can't say there's any chance in hell I'd want to use it for either gaming within XP, or video editing on Linux.
They can also use extensions with more than 3-letters. They already use the extension.sitx for some type of StuffIt file. And then there's.torrent, and plenty of others... But yeah, MIME is better anyway.
But Aladdin (which seems to now be called Allume): please don't use the SIF file extension. It's already taken. It's used for the Smalltalk Interchange File format, which part of the ANSI Smalltalk standard- ANSI NCITS 319-1998. If anyone else thinks they should find a new extension, please feel free to join me in emailing them at:
Jennifer Watson (PR) jwatson@allume.com
Matthew Covington (Product manager) mcovington@allume.com
But not always. I've used plenty of apps that require a double click, having different options available in a context menu than in the regular menus. Mind you, you can still bring up a context menu with the little context menu button on a windows keyboard, but I've also used apps where you couldn't tab-navigate to the item to use the context button. It's mostly moot since everyone on windows has a right mouse button, but working with kiosks, etc and other situations where I only have one button have led me to occasionally curse poorly designed windows apps...
You can't edit the robots.txt file on one of these cams. They are running an embedded web server, not something you can just FTP and edited copy too. Perhaps Axis/Panasonic should provide a robots.txt file in ROM by default that would avoid this in the future? Or allow firmware updates for those who want it?
We have a few password protected Axis cams in the University library where I work. I helped set them up and maintain the server. The server is running on the cams itself.
While I too am impressed with your troll-fu, I feel obliged to point out that NFL cheerleaders are usually very much of age. Just FYI, most NFL cheerleaders are pretty good looking, so it isn't all that whacky or wild for him to be fantasizing about them. Unless you're some puritan and think that you should never masturbate, whether the woman in your mind is your wife or some cheerleader. YOU WILL GO BLIND!
The http/cgi server is running on the camera. It's am embedded HTTP server that exists only to serve up images from the camera. There's no apache/IIS proxying between watcher and camera.
I like the way the Axim looks, and price is ok I guess, but I just hate WinCE. It's mostly personal preference - I grew up on PalmOS, but I just can't learn to love Wince
To each his own. I like some aspects of POS, but when it comes down to it, I can't use it. I have a Clie NX70V (which has recently started to suck, only turning on at random intervals) and liked Palm OS, as long as I didn't ask much of it. It works great for reading ebooks and having my schedule, but not much else. Though Picsel Viewer is pretty awesome, and increased the usefulness quite a bit... But once I started to think of it as more than an expensive ebook reader and datebook I got frustrated, because POS couldn't keep up. But a lot of people don't want or need what I do.
Also, WinCE != Pocket PC/Windows Mobile. I don't really like Pocket PC in a number of ways, though I do like vanilla Windows CE, which is a lot more flexible. I am a minority- for me, my PDA is my computer, not just an addressbook. At home, I use my PDA as my main machine. I just got the Axim but I've not made the transition to it yet (I'll prolly get a bluetooth keyboard, or at least a USB adapter + usb kb first). As a general purpose computer, POS simply doesn't cut it for me.
I certainly don't love WinCE, but I use it. I use it because it's the only option available to me. My first PDAs were Newtons, and the Newton OS will forever be my preferred OS. The power of having a multitasking OS, like you get with WinCE and Linux, but the refinement of UI and ease of use as Palm OS. It was the best of both worlds. But since my poor Newton 2100 was getting old I had to move on.
Nope, it wasn't the drivers. If you ever have the chance to hop onto #zaurus on irc.freenode.net you'll find a lot of folks with similar experience. The card works great- for a while. And then it stops. The primary place I was using this card was on a Linux-based Zaurus C760. Drivers suck worse on Linux PDAs than on CE, but there were drivers and they worked. On my first card, it stopped working after a month. At the time, I had not only a Zaurus but a Dell Axim X5 Basic to test with and got the exact same problem on both with that card. Returned and got a new card. Card was fine for two weeks, then the same problems happened again. Eventually got a third card that lasted for almost two motnhs, but at that point I couldn't return it. At that point I bought a different card- an Ambicom CF wifi- which worked great in both my CE and Linux PDAs and never had any problems whatsoever.
CE is far from being where Win 3.11 was. Don't get me wrong, there are shitty drivers for some devices out there- but that's the case on every platform. I've never had any problems, but I always do research to make sure I'm getting something at least decent. The WCF12 was one out of only a few options that would work on both my Zaurus and Axim. Finding CF wifi cards that work on CE is easy, but the number of cards that work on the Zaurus is a lot smaller, so I had to limit my choices.
I was disappointed to find that this one is 320x240. There's apparently a comparable 4700 model with VGA, but it only has 64MB of RAM.
And it costs $650. I really wanted the hx4700 but couldn't rationalize it, not when I could get (and got today in the mail) the Dell Axim x50v for $375 after a 25% coupon. The Axim only has 64 MB of RAM too, but big deal- it has 128 MB of ROM and SD and CF slots. Slots I don't need for BT or wifi, since they're both built-in.
The Dell Axim X50v I just got has a VPN client, though I've not yet used it. It does has built-in wifi. To date, I've not had any issues with wifi on any WinCE or PPC device I've owned, including this Dell with its built-in wifi, a Orinoco WaveLAN card in a few devices (iPAQ 3650, Jornada 720), Compaq WL100 wifi card in an iPAQ 3650 and an Ambicom Wifi card on a Dell Axim X5 Basic and Sigmarion 3. Performance was quite good- using NetFront on the older devices or IE on WM2003 (when it finally improved) or vanilla WinCE 3.0 (where it doesn't suck) I get load times a little faster than on a desktop machine of comparable power running Firefox or IE.
I did have a ton of issues with a Linksys WCF12- nay, 3 of those cards- with a Linux-based Zaurus C760, but that was the fault of the cards, which are straight shite.
Wireless sniffing tends to be a covert/discrete operation. A phone bleeping as suggested in the grandparent post would hardly be discrete.
Your point was made very clearly. I just disagree with it. A phone beeping- in the speaker, like I said- is completely discrete. Maybe I didn't make my point well, or perhaps you just skimmed over what I wrote:
I don't think he was thinking of piping the sound out to a boombox carried around like a backpack... Probably more like using the little built-in speaker. You know, the Treo is a phone- and as such, it has a pretty normal phone-speaker. No one else would hear.
To clarify: 1. I don't tihnk anyone was talking about using the phone's ringer as the means of beeping. That is, no ringtones to convey your signal strength.
2. When you talk by someone talking on their cell phone- with or without a hands-free headset- do you hear the conversation very well? I don't know about you, but I don't. A third party not being able to hear the tones that are being played in the phone's builtin or hands-free headset speaker is precisely what makes it discrete.
Again, if you were talking about hooking the phone up to external speakers- a boombox, like I said- no, that would be quite the opposite of discrete. But used the regular way there's no reason it wouldn't be.
I agree fully that waving your PDA around like it's a tricorder looks a bit suspicious. But turning your head or looking up and down isn't going to home in on that signal. If you wanted to achieve the same thing, you'd have to turn, take a few steps (say, the length of an arm), note the effect... Or crouch (move your PDA down) or jump (move it up) all while stuck on your ear.
If your goal is not looking suspicious, why not just act a little more discrete when war-walking? I mean, you're not going to get the same effect as waving your arm in an arc to approximate the strength while using the Treo as a phone and simply looking up, down, left or right. There's no reason you couldn't get the same effect (mind you, a very small effect) by making discrete movements with the PDA. And, you'd probably get better reception without a big chunk of meat and bone blocking the signal.
Also, it's be a bit more discrete to have a PDA with built-in wifi. There are a million CE devices like this, and one Linux Zaurus SL-6000L. If you're trying to be sneaky, pointing your antenna'd Treo at someone's house prolly wouldn't cut it.
Use one of the many PDAs that can do this. You could use various VoIP software right now to get this. And no, before you gripe about having to sign up with Vonage or something, there are softwares that would let you do ip-to-ip stuff too, no server, just you and your pals.
Moral: You can buy some short-term profit, but screwing your customers is a bad strategy long-term.
Two issues with this:
1. Most companies only seem to think in the short- or medium-term. Not the long term. There are a lot of things that are bad for the long term that businesses do, but all that matters to your stockholders is your quarterly report.
2. Screwing your customers works in the long term if everyone else is doing it. Which is how things are now. Maybe if some wireless carrier starts practicing in a more constumer friendly (read: moral) way, maybe the others will have to follow suit or die. If only.
I don't think he was thinking of piping the sound out to a boombox carried around like a backpack... Probably more like using the little built-in speaker. You know, the Treo is a phone- and as such, it has a pretty normal phone-speaker. No one else would hear.
Replace that with a field of poppies and a few cats and then we'll talk. I've no need for pitiful addictions like tobacco and caffeine. If you're going to stick me in a box for the rest of my life, I'm gunna do it with style.
I mean, they already have replaced the d-pad in favor of the analog stick. At least, in practice. The N64 and GC both have d-pads- but in most games in both cases you never even touch the d-pad.
How much physical RAM does Python require? Could its heap be squeezed onto something small like the GBA (32K RAM, comparatively unlimited ROM)?
The GBA has more RAM than that. It has 32 KB that is so-called "in-chip Work RAM", but according to these specs it also has 256 KB of on-chip work RAM. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I'm sure it can be worked with. After all, people have a gimped-out version of Linux (uClinux) running on the GBA, I'm sure a gimped out port of Pippy could work.
Pippy, you say? While you really couldn't run full-blown, real-deal Python, you could run Pippy, which is a much pared down version of Python for Palm OS. According to the Pippy README, "modern" POS devices have 256 KB of RAM. It may say 16 MB on the box, but that is storage, not heap. If it can be done on POS, it should be doable on the GBA. With the resources of the GBA, Lua would probably be a better fit, though.
It also would probably be possible to have a game pack that had more RAM, and then use it to extend the GBA's RAM, perhaps 8 MB. The GB can address 32 MB total. So, between RAM and storage, you could get a lot in a cart that the GBA could access.
Then... you right a hybrid multi-key/chording keyboard using the buttons on the GBA so you can program it on the device! Or, you could just do what's easier all around and buy a PDA. Even a cheap, older Pocket PC would do. I can run Python+Tkiner, Python+win32, Perl/Tk- not just CLI perl, but a GUI and all- on my old iPAQ 3650. It owns, even.
Slashdot Mirror
BSG explores ideas of how we define God, and who is eligible for religeon, and stuff that Star Trek wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
Star Trek would touch that. But Enterprise wouldn't. The Original Series was all about touch that kind of stuff- with a one-foot ruler no less. And with dealing with the consequences.
I do agree that reading sci-fi is 10x better than watching it. There is so little worth watching in the so-called sci-fi genre; TOS, TNG, to some extent DS9. Babylon 5 is one of the exceptions, it's done so that it's almost as good as some big book series. I've not seen the newBSG, so I can't speak to that... But space opera doesn't have to be slander used against shows like Voyager and DS9- there are a lot of good, respectable, thoughful (non-pulp) space opera books and book series in the realm of readable sci-fi...
hahah! good one!
:D
keep up the good work- your good humor has this nerd laughing.
Having used VMWare a lot, under both Linux (running Windows) and Windows (running Linux), I can't say there's any chance in hell I'd want to use it for either gaming within XP, or video editing on Linux.
I wouldn't say "from the start"- Sun only bought StarOffice when in the 5.2 days, around 2000. But still, they did pay for it and open source it.
They can also use extensions with more than 3-letters. They already use the extension .sitx for some type of StuffIt file. And then there's .torrent, and plenty of others... But yeah, MIME is better anyway.
Sounds good.
But Aladdin (which seems to now be called Allume): please don't use the SIF file extension. It's already taken. It's used for the Smalltalk Interchange File format, which part of the ANSI Smalltalk standard- ANSI NCITS 319-1998. If anyone else thinks they should find a new extension, please feel free to join me in emailing them at:
Jennifer Watson (PR)
jwatson@allume.com
Matthew Covington (Product manager)
mcovington@allume.com
But not always. I've used plenty of apps that require a double click, having different options available in a context menu than in the regular menus. Mind you, you can still bring up a context menu with the little context menu button on a windows keyboard, but I've also used apps where you couldn't tab-navigate to the item to use the context button. It's mostly moot since everyone on windows has a right mouse button, but working with kiosks, etc and other situations where I only have one button have led me to occasionally curse poorly designed windows apps...
You can't edit the robots.txt file on one of these cams. They are running an embedded web server, not something you can just FTP and edited copy too. Perhaps Axis/Panasonic should provide a robots.txt file in ROM by default that would avoid this in the future? Or allow firmware updates for those who want it?
We have a few password protected Axis cams in the University library where I work. I helped set them up and maintain the server. The server is running on the cams itself.
While I too am impressed with your troll-fu, I feel obliged to point out that NFL cheerleaders are usually very much of age. Just FYI, most NFL cheerleaders are pretty good looking, so it isn't all that whacky or wild for him to be fantasizing about them. Unless you're some puritan and think that you should never masturbate, whether the woman in your mind is your wife or some cheerleader. YOU WILL GO BLIND!
The http/cgi server is running on the camera. It's am embedded HTTP server that exists only to serve up images from the camera. There's no apache/IIS proxying between watcher and camera.
I like the way the Axim looks, and price is ok I guess, but I just hate WinCE. It's mostly personal preference - I grew up on PalmOS, but I just can't learn to love Wince
To each his own. I like some aspects of POS, but when it comes down to it, I can't use it. I have a Clie NX70V (which has recently started to suck, only turning on at random intervals) and liked Palm OS, as long as I didn't ask much of it. It works great for reading ebooks and having my schedule, but not much else. Though Picsel Viewer is pretty awesome, and increased the usefulness quite a bit... But once I started to think of it as more than an expensive ebook reader and datebook I got frustrated, because POS couldn't keep up. But a lot of people don't want or need what I do.
Also, WinCE != Pocket PC/Windows Mobile. I don't really like Pocket PC in a number of ways, though I do like vanilla Windows CE, which is a lot more flexible. I am a minority- for me, my PDA is my computer, not just an addressbook. At home, I use my PDA as my main machine. I just got the Axim but I've not made the transition to it yet (I'll prolly get a bluetooth keyboard, or at least a USB adapter + usb kb first). As a general purpose computer, POS simply doesn't cut it for me.
I certainly don't love WinCE, but I use it. I use it because it's the only option available to me. My first PDAs were Newtons, and the Newton OS will forever be my preferred OS. The power of having a multitasking OS, like you get with WinCE and Linux, but the refinement of UI and ease of use as Palm OS. It was the best of both worlds. But since my poor Newton 2100 was getting old I had to move on.
Nope, it wasn't the drivers. If you ever have the chance to hop onto #zaurus on irc.freenode.net you'll find a lot of folks with similar experience. The card works great- for a while. And then it stops. The primary place I was using this card was on a Linux-based Zaurus C760. Drivers suck worse on Linux PDAs than on CE, but there were drivers and they worked. On my first card, it stopped working after a month. At the time, I had not only a Zaurus but a Dell Axim X5 Basic to test with and got the exact same problem on both with that card. Returned and got a new card. Card was fine for two weeks, then the same problems happened again. Eventually got a third card that lasted for almost two motnhs, but at that point I couldn't return it. At that point I bought a different card- an Ambicom CF wifi- which worked great in both my CE and Linux PDAs and never had any problems whatsoever.
CE is far from being where Win 3.11 was. Don't get me wrong, there are shitty drivers for some devices out there- but that's the case on every platform. I've never had any problems, but I always do research to make sure I'm getting something at least decent. The WCF12 was one out of only a few options that would work on both my Zaurus and Axim. Finding CF wifi cards that work on CE is easy, but the number of cards that work on the Zaurus is a lot smaller, so I had to limit my choices.
I was disappointed to find that this one is 320x240. There's apparently a comparable 4700 model with VGA, but it only has 64MB of RAM.
And it costs $650. I really wanted the hx4700 but couldn't rationalize it, not when I could get (and got today in the mail) the Dell Axim x50v for $375 after a 25% coupon. The Axim only has 64 MB of RAM too, but big deal- it has 128 MB of ROM and SD and CF slots. Slots I don't need for BT or wifi, since they're both built-in.
The Dell Axim X50v I just got has a VPN client, though I've not yet used it. It does has built-in wifi. To date, I've not had any issues with wifi on any WinCE or PPC device I've owned, including this Dell with its built-in wifi, a Orinoco WaveLAN card in a few devices (iPAQ 3650, Jornada 720), Compaq WL100 wifi card in an iPAQ 3650 and an Ambicom Wifi card on a Dell Axim X5 Basic and Sigmarion 3. Performance was quite good- using NetFront on the older devices or IE on WM2003 (when it finally improved) or vanilla WinCE 3.0 (where it doesn't suck) I get load times a little faster than on a desktop machine of comparable power running Firefox or IE.
I did have a ton of issues with a Linksys WCF12- nay, 3 of those cards- with a Linux-based Zaurus C760, but that was the fault of the cards, which are straight shite.
Your point was made very clearly. I just disagree with it. A phone beeping- in the speaker, like I said- is completely discrete. Maybe I didn't make my point well, or perhaps you just skimmed over what I wrote:
To clarify:
1. I don't tihnk anyone was talking about using the phone's ringer as the means of beeping. That is, no ringtones to convey your signal strength.
2. When you talk by someone talking on their cell phone- with or without a hands-free headset- do you hear the conversation very well? I don't know about you, but I don't. A third party not being able to hear the tones that are being played in the phone's builtin or hands-free headset speaker is precisely what makes it discrete.
Again, if you were talking about hooking the phone up to external speakers- a boombox, like I said- no, that would be quite the opposite of discrete. But used the regular way there's no reason it wouldn't be.
I agree fully that waving your PDA around like it's a tricorder looks a bit suspicious. But turning your head or looking up and down isn't going to home in on that signal. If you wanted to achieve the same thing, you'd have to turn, take a few steps (say, the length of an arm), note the effect ... Or crouch (move your PDA down) or jump (move it up) all while stuck on your ear.
If your goal is not looking suspicious, why not just act a little more discrete when war-walking? I mean, you're not going to get the same effect as waving your arm in an arc to approximate the strength while using the Treo as a phone and simply looking up, down, left or right. There's no reason you couldn't get the same effect (mind you, a very small effect) by making discrete movements with the PDA. And, you'd probably get better reception without a big chunk of meat and bone blocking the signal.
Also, it's be a bit more discrete to have a PDA with built-in wifi. There are a million CE devices like this, and one Linux Zaurus SL-6000L. If you're trying to be sneaky, pointing your antenna'd Treo at someone's house prolly wouldn't cut it.
Use one of the many PDAs that can do this. You could use various VoIP software right now to get this. And no, before you gripe about having to sign up with Vonage or something, there are softwares that would let you do ip-to-ip stuff too, no server, just you and your pals.
Moral: You can buy some short-term profit, but screwing your customers is a bad strategy long-term.
Two issues with this:
1. Most companies only seem to think in the short- or medium-term. Not the long term. There are a lot of things that are bad for the long term that businesses do, but all that matters to your stockholders is your quarterly report.
2. Screwing your customers works in the long term if everyone else is doing it. Which is how things are now. Maybe if some wireless carrier starts practicing in a more constumer friendly (read: moral) way, maybe the others will have to follow suit or die. If only.
Way to be discrete dude....
I don't think he was thinking of piping the sound out to a boombox carried around like a backpack... Probably more like using the little built-in speaker. You know, the Treo is a phone- and as such, it has a pretty normal phone-speaker. No one else would hear.
Innocent looking? Did regular Linux and CE PDAs, both of which work fine as wireless sniffers, look all that menacing in the first place?
Replace that with a field of poppies and a few cats and then we'll talk. I've no need for pitiful addictions like tobacco and caffeine. If you're going to stick me in a box for the rest of my life, I'm gunna do it with style.
You must've been asleep for most of your childhood, if you missed all the cheap=crap SW marketing that came before the prequels were announced.
Or maybe you'd like to try to hammer out the Konami code on that evil controller?
It was easy- you did it on the little real buttons and d-pad on the armpiece. duh.
I mean, they already have replaced the d-pad in favor of the analog stick. At least, in practice. The N64 and GC both have d-pads- but in most games in both cases you never even touch the d-pad.
How much physical RAM does Python require? Could its heap be squeezed onto something small like the GBA (32K RAM, comparatively unlimited ROM)?
The GBA has more RAM than that. It has 32 KB that is so-called "in-chip Work RAM", but according to these specs it also has 256 KB of on-chip work RAM. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I'm sure it can be worked with. After all, people have a gimped-out version of Linux (uClinux) running on the GBA, I'm sure a gimped out port of Pippy could work.
Pippy, you say? While you really couldn't run full-blown, real-deal Python, you could run Pippy, which is a much pared down version of Python for Palm OS. According to the Pippy README, "modern" POS devices have 256 KB of RAM. It may say 16 MB on the box, but that is storage, not heap. If it can be done on POS, it should be doable on the GBA. With the resources of the GBA, Lua would probably be a better fit, though.
It also would probably be possible to have a game pack that had more RAM, and then use it to extend the GBA's RAM, perhaps 8 MB. The GB can address 32 MB total. So, between RAM and storage, you could get a lot in a cart that the GBA could access.
Then... you right a hybrid multi-key/chording keyboard using the buttons on the GBA so you can program it on the device! Or, you could just do what's easier all around and buy a PDA. Even a cheap, older Pocket PC would do. I can run Python+Tkiner, Python+win32, Perl/Tk- not just CLI perl, but a GUI and all- on my old iPAQ 3650. It owns, even.