Or to put it slightly less sillily, what was (and is!) your motivation for getting involved in this side of the Computer Science world, say, as opposed to the nice safe, clean theoretical stuff?
So if there exists a person, let's name him Richard, - well if Richard wants to pay five-hundred dollars for an item in a game, then Richard is living a very sad life.
I object! And how exactly did you know about this? Are you watching me?
Also, wheres the AI programs that can run errands for me, like pay the bills online, record my TV shows, remind me about important dates. Oh, an AI lawyer and account would be nice too.
Well, I've got an 'AI system' which records TV shows for me - even suggests new shows it thinks I may like, based on what I've recorded before. It's called TiVo. And I've got an 'AI system' which reminds me about important dates. It's called a web calendar. Oh, and apart from a very small number of bills, I pay everything except for my credit card bill using Direct Debit. Okay, it's not AI, but they do get paid automatically, and I track them (and pay my credit card bill) online...
As you typically don't have many applications open on a handheld, isn't there a way to use the scroll button in combination with otehr buttons to either a) scroll the window b) scroll through open applications or c) scroll through the list of availbale applications?
On the iPAQ, at least, the matchbox packages which mallum has been putting out are setup to bind the record button (on the side of the device) as a command button. Holding down that button and hitting left and right on the joypad scrolls through the open top-level windows. I frequently run my iPAQ with the title bar minimised away, and flip through windows this way. I tend to leave the dock open, because having a clock/wireless strength meter/memory & CPU meter visible is nice. There are more shortcut keys listed in the matchbox manual on mallum's handhelds.org page...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ogg seems to take significantly more processing power to decode.
You're wrong:-)
I currently have my iPAQ sitting on the other side of the room playing an Ogg file. Ogg playing seems to take around 30% of the CPU time, while MP3 playing takes around 20%. That's with madplay - a high quality integer-only MP3 decoder - playing the MP3, and the integer-only version of the Ogg Vorbis reference decoder. Okay, the Ogg decoding takes more, but I'd guess that the Ogg decoder could be optimised a bit more as well...
I'm on the 'conference' floor with an iPAQ:-)
The wi-fi access works okay. Go say hello to Sarah, Michael and Ollie on the Linux-on PS2 stall in the corner if you read this.
SD, as I understand it (and I'm writing this on a device with an SD slot) is an extension of MMC - Multi-Media Card. While they don't look as silly, MMC is somewhat like a smaller version of SmartMedia - around 50% the size - incidentally, SM is exactly the same surface size as CF. MMC, like SM, is memory-only...
The three main things which SD adds over MMC, AIUI:
Non-memory devices. This is important - having a slot on a PDA (as opposed to say, an MP3 player or camera) which can only take memory is silly, so this was a necessary change to move MMC into the PDA world.
More addressing space for memory. MMC, AIUI, is limited to 64Mb - SD can go bigger (I don't know how big) and that's important. I have a 256Mb CF card in my PDA, and I wouldn't use anything smaller...
Some DRM thing - I'm ignoring it and hoping it goes away.
There is some amount of industry pressure behind this stuff (note DRM above), but it is much smaller than CF, which is a good thing. The other thing, which is a problem, is that I understand that apparantly implementing an SD driver needs a pay-for license for the standard. This is a bad thing for handheld Linux - the Zaurus has a closed-source SD driver, and it's an issue for iPAQ Linux.
The Radio6 (aka 6music) stream is still there, but it looks like the others have gone:-(
A mate of mine has a more complex system, written in Perl, which parses the Radio 4 online listings and downloads everything, splitting the stream up into individual programs - we were planning on re-writing it in Python using PyOgg. He's going to be mightily pissed-off.
All is not lost for you, however. You can hack something up with a combination of trplayer, vsound and lame (or something similar). Google for it or drop me a line for more info. It's no good for me, since there's no realplayer for Linux-on-iPAQ, which is where streaming really shines...
Oh, and Fanshaw Explains (or something like that) isn't in the same league as ISIHAC:-)
I hate to tell you, but parts of Israel are somewhat earthquake-prone. I lived in Jerusalem for a few months back in 94/95, and I apparently slept through an earthquake which woke up my 3 room-mates. Not a big one, but bigger than we tend to get here in the UK:-) Wasn't there a big earthquake in the 1920s which caused a lot of damage in S'fat? What do you think the Jordan valley is, if not a fault line?
And Russia is so mind-bogglingly big that I bet there are some areas which are hot zones...
For reference, Banias is the name of a river in northern Israel - one of the three sources of the river Jordan. It's a pretty area, and great for gentle hiking. There are nice pictures of it here, here, here and through Google image search
There are other/. things spread around on Thinkgeek, since a few of the links from the page above are 404-ed. Personally, I'd buy more stuff from them, but their shipping charges and times are really bad for the UK, so I don't...
But - seriously - I don't expect any renumeration for my posts on Slashdot, therefore I hold myself up to an amateur standard. The 'editors' are paid for their work, and are asking the audience to subscribe (or tip, or however they want to put it), which suggests to me that they should be held up to a professional standard.
How will you take advantage of user moderation and your filters (threshold friend/foes, reason modifer, etc.) A killfile only goes so far.
I haven't thought all the details through yet, but authenticated NNTP is pretty standard nowadays, and it would have to be authenticated anyway to make sure only subscribers used it. Once I've authenticated to the NNTP server, I expect my standard settings to be applied to the comments I read - I'm quite happy with my normal settings most of the time. It may be possible to implement some of the more advanced features by extending NNTP (in an open way, so it can be implemented by anyway, and in a way which doesn't break non-extended readers), or by overloading existing NNTP functionality.
Hey, I'm not going to write this stuff. I don't speak Perl - if it was Python, I might give it a go - but I am willing to pay for the functionality as part of a bundle:-)
One change which could be made [...] would be to have paying subscribers get a "live" feed (aka as soon as it's posted, subscribers can read and reply). Logged-in users get a 5 minute delay. AC's get a 15 minute delay.
I disagree. One thing which I think is very important is that paying users should not get any preference in that kind of thing - same reason I don't like the "free karma/moderation/etc. for paying users" suggestions. I'm happy to suggest extra access methods for subscribers, but it's important not to swing the dynamics of the site towards paying users.
Most of the things I suggested would, hopefully, be things which would improve the site as a whole, not just for paying users. The only two subscriber-only things I suggested were NNTP access and early web-based access, and in both cases, I effectively meant read-only access. I'd happily have the "reply" link appear at the bottom of a comment served over NNTP - my newsreader is intelligent enough to launch a web browser for me if I ask it to, and I'd like early access on the web to avoid the slashdot effect, not so I could post more quickly.
I've been reading Slashdot for quite a while now (yes, I've got a low UID - I started reading before UIDs existed). Sure, I refresh a lot, but it's mainly the front page, since so much of the content seems to be uninteresting to me nowadays - I don't know if it's my interests which have changed, or Slashdot's focus, probably a bit of both. I don't post too much any more, partly through dispair at the inanity of much of the content, partly through my growing annoyance with the way the site has been run, and largely because I choose to post in other fora, mainly on two mailing lists which constitute real communities, one a Linux list within my company, the other being the list of my LUG. This site is not a real community, and will never be - it may have been at some point in the past, but it certainly isn't now, as a single-minded (close to) autocracy, where the topics of discussion are chosen by a small, closed group, and staying on-topic and within the acceptable norms are enforced by moderators.
I am frankly disgusted by the lack of professionalism shown by the people running this site - it's okay to be kooky when you're running a site as a spare-time activity, and not too bad when it's free to readers and paid for by advertising. I will not pay to support this site when the actual content (excluding Jon Katz, who simply writes unreadable pap) is all written by users, when the spelling and grammer remain at a childish level, when there is no open-ness in the site. The new ads are annoying enough that I now have the Junkbuster running on my machine at work (and have encouraged my colleagues who read Slashdot to use me as a proxy). I am a natural Slashdot reader, a Unix professional (and yes, I take pride in my work - do the editors here?), affluent and free-spending online, but I only come here because of the content which is supplied by the users.
I will not respond to the stick. I will not subscribe to get rid of ads - I have a technical solution to that problem, so why should I be forced into a financial solution? I'm an engineer - I solve things technically.
I will respond to the carrot. Don't say "subscribe or bad things will happen". Say "subscribe and good things will happen". Some possible examples:
For foo's sake, hire a real editor, not a Perl hacker who ended up running a web site with 250000 readers, and have everything which goes on the front page run by them first. We all know how readable most Perl is - we need someone who's good at writing English!
NNTP access. The excuse - and it has only ever been an excuse - for not providing one has been that no-one has worked out how to force ads down people's pipes over NNTP. I'll subscribe, so get no ads, but I want to read over NNTP.
More real, technical content. Get rid of Katz, and pay someone with a clue to write interesting stuff.
More open-ness. I want to hear what's going on, what's coming up, what's a problem, what's an unexpected bonus. I want an open discussion forum about the site - not one to constantly attack the 'editors', meaning they enter the discussion on the defensive, but an open discussion. To be honest, I'd like to know what the 'editors' do all day - there are 5-10 story posts a day (plus maybe another 5 in sections with volunteer editors), and I really can't work out how that's a full-time job.
Early access to stories might be nice, so paying customers get to at least try to avoid the slashdot effect.
I won't pay using PayPal - I know this has already been covered. I would really prefer not to pay using Dollars - I'm not in the US, and I don't really want to pay commission on my subscription. I reckon that taking Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Pounds Sterling and Euros would cover a very large majority of the Slashdot readership, whould encourage non-US subscriptions (over half the people on the 'net aren't in the USA). I've done a little bit of work for a charity on an on-line donation page, and we can take Dollars, Pounds, Euros are Shekels (it's a Jewish charity...) easily enough.
I want some status info. Number of subscriptions, number of subscribers (these two are different - think about it), ideally some proper financial info like costs/revenue. I understand that the latter may be hard, but I would really like the other two.
Overall, the two main problems I have are that I refuse, on principle, to respond to the stick, but I'd welcome to carrot, and I'd like to see the staff taking things a little more seriously. Not high-and-mighty serious, but trying to do a professional job serious.
Re:South Effrica
on
Biohackathon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For those ignorant people who have no idea what the parent is talking about, it's a Spitting Image song from a while back.
For what it's worth, I've been to South Africa and met lots of nice people there:-)
I believe I signed up for SMS notification of results this afternoon...
It's not available in the USA, of course - it's only available in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Belguim and the Netherlands. You could always try signing up using one of the the European numbers. It's being done with Eurosport, a pan-European free-to-air (over satellite) sport channel - the info is here. Of course, I'm assuming that the OP is American, which isn't necessarily true, but the point that this service is only provided in Europe stands.
I just saw myself in the mirror in the lift (elevator) on the way into work this morning. All I can say is that however much sleep I need, I'm not getting enough:-(
And the answer, unfortunately, is not to Be. I don't know much about the company, but I played with the OS, and it was pretty nice. I liked the GUI enough that my Afterstep desktop is clearly BeOS-inspired...
Slashdot Mirror
Or to put it slightly less sillily, what was (and is!) your motivation for getting involved in this side of the Computer Science world, say, as opposed to the nice safe, clean theoretical stuff?
I object! And how exactly did you know about this? Are you watching me?
Well, I've got an 'AI system' which records TV shows for me - even suggests new shows it thinks I may like, based on what I've recorded before. It's called TiVo. And I've got an 'AI system' which reminds me about important dates. It's called a web calendar. Oh, and apart from a very small number of bills, I pay everything except for my credit card bill using Direct Debit. Okay, it's not AI, but they do get paid automatically, and I track them (and pay my credit card bill) online...
You got SECOND POST
Or FIRST ON-TOPIC POST
Okay, I read this as:
NEXT sells computers.
Now that would be news!
On the iPAQ, at least, the matchbox packages which mallum has been putting out are setup to bind the record button (on the side of the device) as a command button. Holding down that button and hitting left and right on the joypad scrolls through the open top-level windows. I frequently run my iPAQ with the title bar minimised away, and flip through windows this way. I tend to leave the dock open, because having a clock/wireless strength meter/memory & CPU meter visible is nice. There are more shortcut keys listed in the matchbox manual on mallum's handhelds.org page...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ogg seems to take significantly more processing power to decode.
You're wrong :-)
I currently have my iPAQ sitting on the other side of the room playing an Ogg file. Ogg playing seems to take around 30% of the CPU time, while MP3 playing takes around 20%. That's with madplay - a high quality integer-only MP3 decoder - playing the MP3, and the integer-only version of the Ogg Vorbis reference decoder. Okay, the Ogg decoding takes more, but I'd guess that the Ogg decoder could be optimised a bit more as well...
I'm on the 'conference' floor with an iPAQ :-)
The wi-fi access works okay. Go say hello to Sarah, Michael and Ollie on the Linux-on PS2 stall in the corner if you read this.
And no, there is currently noSolaris 9 for Intel. Again, believe me, I'd know if there were. :-)
The three main things which SD adds over MMC, AIUI:
There is some amount of industry pressure behind this stuff (note DRM above), but it is much smaller than CF, which is a good thing. The other thing, which is a problem, is that I understand that apparantly implementing an SD driver needs a pay-for license for the standard. This is a bad thing for handheld Linux - the Zaurus has a closed-source SD driver, and it's an issue for iPAQ Linux.
A mate of mine has a more complex system, written in Perl, which parses the Radio 4 online listings and downloads everything, splitting the stream up into individual programs - we were planning on re-writing it in Python using PyOgg. He's going to be mightily pissed-off.
All is not lost for you, however. You can hack something up with a combination of trplayer, vsound and lame (or something similar). Google for it or drop me a line for more info. It's no good for me, since there's no realplayer for Linux-on-iPAQ, which is where streaming really shines...
Oh, and Fanshaw Explains (or something like that) isn't in the same league as ISIHAC :-)
It's really nice to get quality radio on a non-traditional device. I should mention that I'm posting this from my iPAQ too :-)
I hate to tell you, but parts of Israel are somewhat earthquake-prone. I lived in Jerusalem for a few months back in 94/95, and I apparently slept through an earthquake which woke up my 3 room-mates. Not a big one, but bigger than we tend to get here in the UK :-) Wasn't there a big earthquake in the 1920s which caused a lot of damage in S'fat? What do you think the Jordan valley is, if not a fault line?
And Russia is so mind-bogglingly big that I bet there are some areas which are hot zones...
mplayer has support for DVB and the Hollywood DXR3, according to their website.
For reference, Banias is the name of a river in northern Israel - one of the three sources of the river Jordan. It's a pretty area, and great for gentle hiking. There are nice pictures of it here, here, here and through Google image search
One of these?
There are other /. things spread around on Thinkgeek, since a few of the links from the page above are 404-ed. Personally, I'd buy more stuff from them, but their shipping charges and times are really bad for the UK, so I don't...
Fair enough, I should have caught that.
But - seriously - I don't expect any renumeration for my posts on Slashdot, therefore I hold myself up to an amateur standard. The 'editors' are paid for their work, and are asking the audience to subscribe (or tip, or however they want to put it), which suggests to me that they should be held up to a professional standard.
I haven't thought all the details through yet, but authenticated NNTP is pretty standard nowadays, and it would have to be authenticated anyway to make sure only subscribers used it. Once I've authenticated to the NNTP server, I expect my standard settings to be applied to the comments I read - I'm quite happy with my normal settings most of the time. It may be possible to implement some of the more advanced features by extending NNTP (in an open way, so it can be implemented by anyway, and in a way which doesn't break non-extended readers), or by overloading existing NNTP functionality.
Hey, I'm not going to write this stuff. I don't speak Perl - if it was Python, I might give it a go - but I am willing to pay for the functionality as part of a bundle :-)
I disagree. One thing which I think is very important is that paying users should not get any preference in that kind of thing - same reason I don't like the "free karma/moderation/etc. for paying users" suggestions. I'm happy to suggest extra access methods for subscribers, but it's important not to swing the dynamics of the site towards paying users.
Most of the things I suggested would, hopefully, be things which would improve the site as a whole, not just for paying users. The only two subscriber-only things I suggested were NNTP access and early web-based access, and in both cases, I effectively meant read-only access. I'd happily have the "reply" link appear at the bottom of a comment served over NNTP - my newsreader is intelligent enough to launch a web browser for me if I ask it to, and I'd like early access on the web to avoid the slashdot effect, not so I could post more quickly.
I am frankly disgusted by the lack of professionalism shown by the people running this site - it's okay to be kooky when you're running a site as a spare-time activity, and not too bad when it's free to readers and paid for by advertising. I will not pay to support this site when the actual content (excluding Jon Katz, who simply writes unreadable pap) is all written by users, when the spelling and grammer remain at a childish level, when there is no open-ness in the site. The new ads are annoying enough that I now have the Junkbuster running on my machine at work (and have encouraged my colleagues who read Slashdot to use me as a proxy). I am a natural Slashdot reader, a Unix professional (and yes, I take pride in my work - do the editors here?), affluent and free-spending online, but I only come here because of the content which is supplied by the users.
I will not respond to the stick. I will not subscribe to get rid of ads - I have a technical solution to that problem, so why should I be forced into a financial solution? I'm an engineer - I solve things technically.
I will respond to the carrot. Don't say "subscribe or bad things will happen". Say "subscribe and good things will happen". Some possible examples:
Overall, the two main problems I have are that I refuse, on principle, to respond to the stick, but I'd welcome to carrot, and I'd like to see the staff taking things a little more seriously. Not high-and-mighty serious, but trying to do a professional job serious.
For what it's worth, I've been to South Africa and met lots of nice people there :-)
It's not available in the USA, of course - it's only available in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Belguim and the Netherlands. You could always try signing up using one of the the European numbers. It's being done with Eurosport, a pan-European free-to-air (over satellite) sport channel - the info is here. Of course, I'm assuming that the OP is American, which isn't necessarily true, but the point that this service is only provided in Europe stands.
I just saw myself in the mirror in the lift (elevator) on the way into work this morning. All I can say is that however much sleep I need, I'm not getting enough :-(
And the answer, unfortunately, is not to Be. I don't know much about the company, but I played with the OS, and it was pretty nice. I liked the GUI enough that my Afterstep desktop is clearly BeOS-inspired...