..is the bomb! What's Palm doing on this front? NOTHING!
Forget handheld GPS units, and their tiny little screens. Forget big-screen chart plotters, and their multi-thousand dollar price tags. Get a Pocket PC from your favorite maker, a GPS add-on, some nav software, and be sailing the high seas for $500. Or driving the roads, or flying the now-friendly skies. Pocket PC navigation software rocks.
In fact, Microsoft Streets was one of the killer apps making Pocket PC so popular in the first place.
Spinrite is well worth the 90 bucks. Not just for now, but if you have any kind of a disk crash in the future.
I'm cheap as hell when it comes to software. Practially everything else I use is free, except Windows itself. But I had no trouble paying for Spinrite. It's the best software purchase I've ever made.
There's info at grc.com specifically about Zip problems. Check it out.
In India, we get that country's best and brightest doing our tech support -- the equivalent of our best universities' students, looking not only for good jobs, but hands-on experience with users for a future career in IT.
But in the US, we wind up with the dregs of society. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. Our best and brightest do not need to take tech support jobs, nor do they remain in places like rural Mississippi.
So if you're wondering where those errors on your credit report come from, originating from typos and common misspellings...
Here's a news flash kids: renting a house costs just as much as buying a house except that renting builds no equity value!!!
Perhaps in the Southeast or the Midwest, but not in California, for example. Rents top out at what a typical worker can pay, but prices continue to soar. In Orange County, for example, it costs $350-400k to buy a condo that one could rent for $1200/mo. A house that rents for $1500-2k/mo might sell for $700k.
Plenty of people in California pay well over 50% of their monthly income in rent.
"Affordability," that is, the percentage of residents who could afford to buy today, is less than 10% in many areas of California.
...I've never been able to make heads or tails of it. It has all its own cute names(TM?) for things, and another stupid pseudo-HTML markup language to learn. So developing Zope apps is way more confusing than it needs to be, even though day to day administration and use is pretty slick.
Despite being a whole lot less slick, I find OpenACS a lot easier to create apps with. The page flow of the canned apps is more elegant too.
Other than simple popularity of the clients (Windows Media, Real) and licensing issues (Ogg), what are the technical issues involved in *serving* these different formats?
...for those who want to make a lot of money, but can't do anything else (for whatever reason).
I know at least 3 very talented programmers who are now selling real estate in Los Angeles. These are guys with advanced degrees from good schools like Caltech, 15+ years of experience, and resumes to drool over. But after a couple of years of unemployment/underemployment, they put on their gold Century 21 jackets, to go shoulder to shoulder with housewives from the Valley, selling residential real estate.
You can fit 11 hours of good quality audio on a CD-R. This is enough for most people. It's also easier to find stuff by organizing it on your own CDs, than trying to search through 10,000 tracks on a fiddly little gadget interface. So get an mp3-compatible car stereo and burn your own disks. You'll enjoy less theft risk, too.
In my experience, mini- FM transmitters sound cleaner than jacks, unless they're good quality RCA jacks. The mini-microphone-type jack you're likely to get on the front of a car stereo will eventually create enough static to drown out all the music, as will the pigtail you might use to connect to an RCA jack on the rear.
FWIW, I've seen head units with these jacks on the front, and/or RCA jacks on the rear. I even had a cheaper Blaupunkt unit with an rear RCA input. It was fine for awhile, but in the end the mini- FM transmitter was a much cleaner, better sounding solution.
Now, a head unit with an RCA jack on the front would be another story, but do you really want wires and crap cluttering up your car?
I say make CD players ogg/mp3 compatible, and burn your own discs. You can get 11 hours of audio on each one -- enough for almost anyone. The theft risk would be a lot less than the latest-greatest-all-encompassing audio magic-box too.
...which is why foreigners driving on our roads, otherwise legally or not, should have drivers' licenses. Licensing enables insurance, driving records, and general management of the driving population, wherever they may come from.
I used to do this through the old netscape.com Actually it was a tool to encourage switching browsers, and make that easier for you. It was also integrated with a webmail account, which I think they planned to make money on. Of course it went away with Netscape itself.
Personally, I used the service to migrate all my settings from Windows to Linux, and then back again, as well as keep a backup of my address book.
Your favorite NPR shows are all at npr.org, almost immediately after broadcast. In fact I listen to NPR more online now than on the radio, partly because of timeshifing, and partly because my local stations don't carry all the shows I like.
People don't buy cell phones, etc., per se -- they buy services, then take whatever hardware is provided to accomplish that. There may be minor choices to be made in terms of hardware, but hardware is never the driving factor. It's always the service, or the function. And if people do not continue to demand these services, the supporting hardware will die.
Of all the services offered by cell phone companies, etc., how many have proven truly popular? Except for text messaging, hardly anything that phones didn't do already. What makes this author think people want their phone to ring when their clothes are finished drying? And especially, that they'll pay extra for that?
I spend my summers boating in the Pacific Northwest. I've been "warsailing" for two years now. Whenever I settle down in a new marina for the night, or even a cove with houses around it, I boot up and see what king of internet access I can get. More often than not, I'm able to hop on someone's network -- usually a Linksys router at the default settings. Sometimes it may be from a liveaboard boat w/ cable access (yes, they have that now in marinas), but most of the time it's from a nearby house. The signals seem to travel really well across water -- hundreds of yards.
Most better marinas have paid WiFi now. Others have somewhere you can jack in your laptop. Still others have internet cafes nearby, which capitalize on the large boater market -- everyone relies on email these days. Small marinas are starting to offer free WiFi. Internet access has become an important feature for attracting business. And there's nothng better than surfing the net from your own boat.
One beautiful evening last summer, I was sitting on the foredeck of my boat, with my laptop and a glass of red wine, reading my email while enjoying the fabulous view of the BC coastal range. It was a surreal, TV-commercial moment -- priceless! Yes, this is for real. We really can live like this these days.
The reality of the situation has nothing to do with corporate conspiracies
The reality is that I was a lobbyist for an automotive components manufacturer, negotiating with CARB, going toe to toe with lobbyists from the other side. They promised more money for campaign donations, so they won. No conspiracy, just business as usual in American politics.
but for the moment these new engines may be good enough for Europe but they are not clean enough to be acceptable over here
That depends on where you draw the line. This one was very purposefully drawn.
Slashdot Mirror
MS Streets has been out for years, and is still the best of the lot. Same with the Maptech stuff for marine navigation.
..is the bomb! What's Palm doing on this front? NOTHING!
Forget handheld GPS units, and their tiny little screens. Forget big-screen chart plotters, and their multi-thousand dollar price tags. Get a Pocket PC from your favorite maker, a GPS add-on, some nav software, and be sailing the high seas for $500. Or driving the roads, or flying the now-friendly skies. Pocket PC navigation software rocks.
In fact, Microsoft Streets was one of the killer apps making Pocket PC so popular in the first place.
It does NTFS and Unix filesystems too.
Spinrite is well worth the 90 bucks. Not just for now, but if you have any kind of a disk crash in the future.
I'm cheap as hell when it comes to software. Practially everything else I use is free, except Windows itself. But I had no trouble paying for Spinrite. It's the best software purchase I've ever made.
There's info at grc.com specifically about Zip problems. Check it out.
In India, we get that country's best and brightest doing our tech support -- the equivalent of our best universities' students, looking not only for good jobs, but hands-on experience with users for a future career in IT.
But in the US, we wind up with the dregs of society. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. Our best and brightest do not need to take tech support jobs, nor do they remain in places like rural Mississippi.
So if you're wondering where those errors on your credit report come from, originating from typos and common misspellings...
Here's a news flash kids: renting a house costs just as much as buying a house except that renting builds no equity value!!!
Perhaps in the Southeast or the Midwest, but not in California, for example. Rents top out at what a typical worker can pay, but prices continue to soar. In Orange County, for example, it costs $350-400k to buy a condo that one could rent for $1200/mo. A house that rents for $1500-2k/mo might sell for $700k.
Plenty of people in California pay well over 50% of their monthly income in rent.
"Affordability," that is, the percentage of residents who could afford to buy today, is less than 10% in many areas of California.
...how do you support yourself in a city with a very high cost of living, especially when you're broke, with no credit?
...I've never been able to make heads or tails of it. It has all its own cute names(TM?) for things, and another stupid pseudo-HTML markup language to learn. So developing Zope apps is way more confusing than it needs to be, even though day to day administration and use is pretty slick.
Despite being a whole lot less slick, I find OpenACS a lot easier to create apps with. The page flow of the canned apps is more elegant too.
Other than simple popularity of the clients (Windows Media, Real) and licensing issues (Ogg), what are the technical issues involved in *serving* these different formats?
...is the one behind the wheel. This is just as true with computers as it is with cars.
...for those who want to make a lot of money, but can't do anything else (for whatever reason).
I know at least 3 very talented programmers who are now selling real estate in Los Angeles. These are guys with advanced degrees from good schools like Caltech, 15+ years of experience, and resumes to drool over. But after a couple of years of unemployment/underemployment, they put on their gold Century 21 jackets, to go shoulder to shoulder with housewives from the Valley, selling residential real estate.
What a fucking waste of talent.
"Solutions" is annoying as hell, smarmy salesdroid-speak. Just say IBM is in the *service* business, and be done with it.
Why not just cut them off from the internet?
Because dictator Kim might throw a tantrum and pop a nuke if we cut off his porn!
You can fit 11 hours of good quality audio on a CD-R. This is enough for most people. It's also easier to find stuff by organizing it on your own CDs, than trying to search through 10,000 tracks on a fiddly little gadget interface. So get an mp3-compatible car stereo and burn your own disks. You'll enjoy less theft risk, too.
In my experience, mini- FM transmitters sound cleaner than jacks, unless they're good quality RCA jacks. The mini-microphone-type jack you're likely to get on the front of a car stereo will eventually create enough static to drown out all the music, as will the pigtail you might use to connect to an RCA jack on the rear.
FWIW, I've seen head units with these jacks on the front, and/or RCA jacks on the rear. I even had a cheaper Blaupunkt unit with an rear RCA input. It was fine for awhile, but in the end the mini- FM transmitter was a much cleaner, better sounding solution.
Now, a head unit with an RCA jack on the front would be another story, but do you really want wires and crap cluttering up your car?
I say make CD players ogg/mp3 compatible, and burn your own discs. You can get 11 hours of audio on each one -- enough for almost anyone. The theft risk would be a lot less than the latest-greatest-all-encompassing audio magic-box too.
Wasn't the Rio Karma just reviewed here on Slashdot?
...which is why foreigners driving on our roads, otherwise legally or not, should have drivers' licenses. Licensing enables insurance, driving records, and general management of the driving population, wherever they may come from.
California does fingerprint, BTW.
I used to do this through the old netscape.com Actually it was a tool to encourage switching browsers, and make that easier for you. It was also integrated with a webmail account, which I think they planned to make money on. Of course it went away with Netscape itself.
Personally, I used the service to migrate all my settings from Windows to Linux, and then back again, as well as keep a backup of my address book.
Your favorite NPR shows are all at npr.org, almost immediately after broadcast. In fact I listen to NPR more online now than on the radio, partly because of timeshifing, and partly because my local stations don't carry all the shows I like.
...such as this one for my T20:
62p9631.pdf
Other laptop makers make them available too.
People don't buy cell phones, etc., per se -- they buy services, then take whatever hardware is provided to accomplish that. There may be minor choices to be made in terms of hardware, but hardware is never the driving factor. It's always the service, or the function. And if people do not continue to demand these services, the supporting hardware will die.
Of all the services offered by cell phone companies, etc., how many have proven truly popular? Except for text messaging, hardly anything that phones didn't do already. What makes this author think people want their phone to ring when their clothes are finished drying? And especially, that they'll pay extra for that?
...and those able to remain committed and finish things, in the traditional way. Grow up.
Real rock stars get chicks, and there are plenty of chicks with good jobs!
I spend my summers boating in the Pacific Northwest. I've been "warsailing" for two years now. Whenever I settle down in a new marina for the night, or even a cove with houses around it, I boot up and see what king of internet access I can get. More often than not, I'm able to hop on someone's network -- usually a Linksys router at the default settings. Sometimes it may be from a liveaboard boat w/ cable access (yes, they have that now in marinas), but most of the time it's from a nearby house. The signals seem to travel really well across water -- hundreds of yards.
Most better marinas have paid WiFi now. Others have somewhere you can jack in your laptop. Still others have internet cafes nearby, which capitalize on the large boater market -- everyone relies on email these days. Small marinas are starting to offer free WiFi. Internet access has become an important feature for attracting business. And there's nothng better than surfing the net from your own boat.
One beautiful evening last summer, I was sitting on the foredeck of my boat, with my laptop and a glass of red wine, reading my email while enjoying the fabulous view of the BC coastal range. It was a surreal, TV-commercial moment -- priceless! Yes, this is for real. We really can live like this these days.
The reality of the situation has nothing to do with corporate conspiracies
The reality is that I was a lobbyist for an automotive components manufacturer, negotiating with CARB, going toe to toe with lobbyists from the other side. They promised more money for campaign donations, so they won. No conspiracy, just business as usual in American politics.
but for the moment these new engines may be good enough for Europe but they are not clean enough to be acceptable over here
That depends on where you draw the line. This one was very purposefully drawn.