I'm not a friend of the EEE Line anymore (too expensive, bad displays), but I'd prefer the Acer Aspire One over the used X40 anytime. It's a bit lighter, has a _much_ brighter LED backlight display. The displays on the X-series Thinkpads are no-gos (except perhaps the current x61 - which is in another league regarding price). Additionally I want a small energy-efficient SSD on these netbooks, not a 4.2k rpm hdd.
I'm really waiting to buy the Aspire One as a small companion to my MBP 15".
Quote: "But to be fair, and to avoid attributing to EU regulators a moral high ground they don't in fact possess, I have my doubts that the EU would have gone as far as it has if Microsoft was a European company"
Please take a look at http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/antitrust/cas es/ which contains a huge list of antitrust cases (with damages > 500 million euro/650 million US$ per company (!)) initiated by the EU mainly against european companies.
Youtube was in deep trouble. First they didn't have a real business model. The whole company obviously was waiting for a white knight to save them, the numbers seemed to be painted red, deep red. And second, the obvious copyright reasons.
Not the sort of company that looks like an attractive bride, does it?
But this purchase was NOT a mistake. Why you may ask again? Short answer: peering agreements.
Google has the fat pipes (read: dedicated lines) they are basically an owner of a worldwide internet backbone. They will be pushing massive amounts of data into other carriers networks. Pushing alot more data at internet-exchange-points than pulling mostly equals to big cheques. Nothing Youtube was dealing with, but Google does this sort of stuff.
Imho Youtube will be a money maker, just because of the bandwith.
Software hasn't really improved for maaany years now, Spreadsheets and Word Processors are more colourful, higher resolution. But are these products smarter, better at all? Would a postgraduate write a better doctoral thesis with Office 2007 than with - say - Word 6.0? Is image manipulation thaat much better with the latest photoshop than with PS 5.5? With some minor exceptions the answer is clearly no.
- We were promised Virtual Reality with VR Helmets more than 10 years ago - is this _just_ a matter of hardware? - Smart voice recognition? Anyone tried it lately? Anyone tried to write pretty standard letters with it? Desastrous. - Intelligent assistents, understanding the user's needs? Operating system/application wizards that improve it's capabilties while you're working with 'em?
The applications are missing, they're faster, more colourful, higher resolution, antialiased... but still DUMB.
Computers are already pretty powerful, please start and make the software smarter, not faster.
no I would not replace my LCD just for the PS3, I always wanted a larger screen (it's 32 inch), but the PS3 would be a nice reason to buy a bit earlier...
Gran Toursimo HD... the only game out there that could possibly make be buy a PS/3. I would have to replace my LCD-TV (no HDMI), would spend big bucks on a PS/3 and even for the game itself.
I always liked GT... had bought a PS/1 _only_ for Gran Toursimo, same about half a year ago with a PS/2, because I was in a spending mood.
I personally haven't touched a computer game for six or seven years right now - except Gran Tourismo.
Buying each track, each car? This would be just a rip-off. So, Sony/Polyphony Digital/Whoever you're expecting me to pay hundreds of bucks to play all the nice cars and tracks that had been available in every game before? I say NEVER, NEVER.
YOu now what? Your PS/3 seems to be a blatant consumer rip-off and if the story is true the day will come that I - as a consumer - will stop buying Sony products.
Go and copy some macbooks, your big days are obviously over.
I've read nearly a dozen different books on J2EE design patterns, but the outcome was always the same. More or less the standard J2EE pattern catalog from Sun changed here a bit added there a bit. Problem is: Sun's pattern catalog is bullshit (from a technical standpoint) and - what's more important - simply wasted time. It doesn't take into account the existence of frameworks and describes technologies/patterns that are simply historical.
Floyd's book (EJB design patterns) was completely different with cool new ideas and he wasn't afraid to say that EJBs suck in many situations.
Go and read it (even if everything changed from the API side with EJB 3.0) and order "Bitter EJB" from Bruce Tate, too!
[a] no tablet [b] has a glossy display and [c] has no core _2_ duo
Do you read before you post?
Fantastic Thinkpads, but PLEASE makeover the X!
on
Rethinking the Thinkpad
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm a road warrior and I've been using Thinkpads only since '99 and never looked back. A-series, T-series and now a Z-series thinkpad. Even though my current thinkpad is one of the first models designed and produced by Lenovo it's still a real thinkpad.
Why I love them:
[1] High mechanical quality, e.g. look at the hinges holding the display, that's solid metal! My last one, a T41p looked like brand new after 18 months and I used it every day for at least 8 hours, look at a typical Sony/Dell/HP after that timeframe! [2] best keyboard in the industry, actually I even prefer my Thinkpad keyboard over Cherry keyboards [3] the thinkpad light above the display (I love it), the docking solutions are very advanced, support is great
I personally don't care whether it has the latest GPU, fastest harddrive, etc. - and - I'm not gonna buy a glossy screen either.
BUT _please_ give me a new thinkpad X-series tablet! I absolutely need a higher resolution than 1024x768. I would immediately (tomorrow morning, before breakfast and shower) buy a X61s tablet with resolution > 1024x768, core 2 duo and 3rd generation mobile data service (e.g. HSDPA).
But, as far as I know, it's not gonna happen. The x60/x61 tablet will still have 1024x768:-(
Ever had that message with your local workstation?
This is just another playground for the next gen. of Dot-Com-Companies, nothing serious.
a.) web-applications rely on high-speed-always-on internet connections (I'll be in an airplane this afternoon, no text processing for me then?)
b.) Will always offer less features and a bad UI compared to classical desktop applications, because restricted by web browser capablilites
c.) are currently much harder to code than classical desktop apps (e.g. editable drop down boxes anyone? Easy thing in NetBeans/VS.NET, very tough in webapps or server-pushing information to the client, requires long-lasting GET requests filtered by many firewalls)
d.) collaborative features are easily added to classical desktop apps
Conclusion: less possibilities, harder to code (you'll always be tricking, hacking to get a nice effect), bad UI (restricted by browsers)
The only competition to desktop apps I do currently see is MS XAML.
Bye!
The THE opportunity for spotty and smelling nerds!
on
Gangs on the Internet
·
· Score: 1
Go and easily be part of one of the coolest gangs in your town... You'll have a GF (yeah, a *real* one, not a real-doll) a convertible, some guns, everyone's gonna treat you respectful...
Go and f*cking build a website, the stuff you do best:-)
Simple. Currently I'm reading ebooks with a Compaq TC1000 tablet PC. And I'm reading in dark situations, like bed, airplane, etc. regularly. And I'm enjoying the backlight of my tablet... but it gets to hot, consumes too much energy and is heavier (3 pounds).
I personally will switch _only_ to an ebook reader with some kind of lightsource (be it backlight or side-leds or whatever).
I don't need much RAM, no note-taking, no mp3 player no WLAN, etc.
Just a quick, 768x1024 (or higher) resolution ebook reader for PDF and HTML with some kind of lightsource.
Feature fuck??? I just want the most basic and important features everyone's expecting from the device. Good performance, a lower price and some sort of lightsource.
Leave the WLAN and the MP3 player out for example!
An NO ONE is gonna replace a laptop with such an ebook reader, it's just an addition.
You don't want a backlight, you want a traditional light that shines onto the page, like you do with traditional books. Backlit screens are harder to read over long periods. This is pretty much the whole point of e-ink
May be. Just some sort of lightsource.
1024x768? If I'm not mislead about the resolution of e-ink, the screen on that is likely to support 4-8 times that resolution.
Even for an early adaptor this thing is disappointing.
1. VERY expensive, Euro 649 (that includes VAT over here) for a black+white ebook reader. I'm come on... Please leave the WLAN out next time. 2. VERY slow, VERY slow. Page flipping sometimes takes 2 seconds, sometimes 3-4. That's bad for a newspaper, but it's simply unusable for a technical documentation where you're searching for specific parts, etc.
3. No backlight, I (as a consumer) don't care wheter that's realizable or not, but I would like to have some sort of backlight. Yes a book doesn't have a backlight, too. But my books at least don't cost 650 Euros.
Nice is: a 1024x768 resolution, everything else is not usable for my purposes.
I have to agree, somehow. It's just a matter of tools, even with CORBA tools would have been able to create IDL, the required supporting classes, proxies, whatever so CORBA could have been easy on the surface and a well fitting chair for the developers.
We've had a solid and good working standard for distributed environments, so why this mess with webservices?
Let's do SOAs based on WebServices. Right now, right here.
The only Web-Service-Standard that's currently finalized and widely accepted is WS-I basic profile. So, no standard on...
- authentication (no, dear MS people, HTTP basic is _NOT_ sufficient for the IBM MQ guys) - transaction management, transport and control (please say properietary soap headers) - encryption (there IS a standard for XML encryption, but it's unsure how to use it within SOAP) - naming services (UDDI is so dead, it's already smelling, go and find a public UDDI registry that's not just a webpage, that you can query via SOAP, IBM's developing a Websphere Naming Service, superb!) -... and so on, and so on...
Stuff that CORBA has been offering for nearly a decade! So why are webservices popular? Because of the technology? No way! They're freaking slow (our Java RMI services are nearly 50 times faster than those implemented with Apache Axis 1.4 here, and axis is pretty good). No, just because of the tools!
Go, build a Webservice with NetBeans and a client with VS.net 2005 and you will have to implement two or three lines of code... That would have been possible with CORBA, too! The fall of CORBA is just a matter of tools, the technology is clearly better, offers more features, is very performant.
I didn't know Google was a Java shop. Do they mainly code serverside stuff in Java these days? If so, which technology are they using (O/R mapper, servlet container, tricks & quirks). Would be interesting to know.
.NET has some pretty nice features, a good IDE, and at least one good language (C#), but it's nowhere as much used as MS hoped it would be.
I'm dealing with a lot (!) european training and system houses (look at my nick), Java courses (including J2EE stuff, application servers, Spring, Hibernate, Certification, etc.) here outsell.NET courses by a factor of five. MS-oriented training institutes are going more and more into the infrastructure products (Microsoft CRM, Sharepoint) and financial applications..NET doesn't sell. At least not in europe.
Same analysis for popular Job search-engines. Demand for skilled Java experts is a lot (!) higher than.NET people, newly started projects (where people are looking for coaches, trainers, consultants, devs) are running on Java (most of them), not.NET.
These aren't two business people finishing a deal! These are comrades, even more THAT'S LOVE! Look at their eyes, how they look at each other, the smiles in their faces, incredible. There's hope for mankind, we're still able to really, really love each other.
Replacing Scotty would - of course - destroy this enormous love...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a friend of the EEE Line anymore (too expensive, bad displays), but I'd prefer the Acer Aspire One over the used X40 anytime. It's a bit lighter, has a _much_ brighter LED backlight display. The displays on the X-series Thinkpads are no-gos (except perhaps the current x61 - which is in another league regarding price). Additionally I want a small energy-efficient SSD on these netbooks, not a 4.2k rpm hdd.
I'm really waiting to buy the Aspire One as a small companion to my MBP 15".
Yeah, really well put, but...
s es/ which contains a huge list of antitrust cases (with damages > 500 million euro/650 million US$ per company (!)) initiated by the EU mainly against european companies.
Quote: "But to be fair, and to avoid attributing to EU regulators a moral high ground they don't in fact possess, I have my doubts that the EU would have gone as far as it has if Microsoft was a European company"
Please take a look at http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/antitrust/ca
Youtube was in deep trouble. First they didn't have a real business model. The whole company obviously was waiting for a white knight to save them, the numbers seemed to be painted red, deep red. And second, the obvious copyright reasons.
Not the sort of company that looks like an attractive bride, does it?
But this purchase was NOT a mistake. Why you may ask again? Short answer: peering agreements.
Google has the fat pipes (read: dedicated lines) they are basically an owner of a worldwide internet backbone. They will be pushing massive amounts of data into other carriers networks. Pushing alot more data at internet-exchange-points than pulling mostly equals to big cheques. Nothing Youtube was dealing with, but Google does this sort of stuff.
Imho Youtube will be a money maker, just because of the bandwith.
According to: http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=62 27 the company coopertating with Tesco is FormJet. They'll distribute via http://www.tescosoftware.com/. FormJet has a Website online (a bit difficult to find from their homepage) where the products are listed: http://www.formjetplc.com/500-products.htm. They list an office suite there called "Ability Office".
l n=en and has a wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ability_Office.
The "Ability Office" website is at: http://www.ability.com/sales/products/office.php?
This is not just one of the usual OpenOffice forks.
$1700 a month!?!
Please remember that's
a.) nearly 10 years ago and
b.) rented from a friend (therefore probably a lot less than the market price)
So I got to assume that if you don't have 12k a months _at least_ you're a pretty poor guy in Menlo Park?
Remember that kids, next time you read job offerings from california...
Software hasn't really improved for maaany years now, Spreadsheets and Word Processors are more colourful, higher resolution. But are these products smarter, better at all? Would a postgraduate write a better doctoral thesis with Office 2007 than with - say - Word 6.0? Is image manipulation thaat much better with the latest photoshop than with PS 5.5? With some minor exceptions the answer is clearly no.
- We were promised Virtual Reality with VR Helmets more than 10 years ago - is this _just_ a matter of hardware?
- Smart voice recognition? Anyone tried it lately? Anyone tried to write pretty standard letters with it? Desastrous.
- Intelligent assistents, understanding the user's needs? Operating system/application wizards that improve it's capabilties while you're working with 'em?
The applications are missing, they're faster, more colourful, higher resolution, antialiased... but still DUMB.
Computers are already pretty powerful, please start and make the software smarter, not faster.
CPU power is not that important anymore.
Hi,
no I would not replace my LCD just for the PS3, I always wanted a larger screen (it's 32 inch), but the PS3 would be a nice reason to buy a bit earlier...
Gran Toursimo HD... the only game out there that could possibly make be buy a PS/3. I would have to replace my LCD-TV (no HDMI), would spend big bucks on a PS/3 and even for the game itself.
I always liked GT... had bought a PS/1 _only_ for Gran Toursimo, same about half a year ago with a PS/2, because I was in a spending mood.
I personally haven't touched a computer game for six or seven years right now - except Gran Tourismo.
Buying each track, each car? This would be just a rip-off. So, Sony/Polyphony Digital/Whoever you're expecting me to pay hundreds of bucks to play all the nice cars and tracks that had been available in every game before? I say NEVER, NEVER.
YOu now what? Your PS/3 seems to be a blatant consumer rip-off and if the story is true the day will come that I - as a consumer - will stop buying Sony products.
Go and copy some macbooks, your big days are obviously over.
I've read nearly a dozen different books on J2EE design patterns, but the outcome was always the same. More or less the standard J2EE pattern catalog from Sun changed here a bit added there a bit. Problem is: Sun's pattern catalog is bullshit (from a technical standpoint) and - what's more important - simply wasted time. It doesn't take into account the existence of frameworks and describes technologies/patterns that are simply historical.
Floyd's book (EJB design patterns) was completely different with cool new ideas and he wasn't afraid to say that EJBs suck in many situations.
Go and read it (even if everything changed from the API side with EJB 3.0) and order "Bitter EJB" from Bruce Tate, too!
Thanks, Floyd!
It is called a "MacBook".
No, it's not.
WTF are you talking about?
The Macbook is...
[a] no tablet
[b] has a glossy display and
[c] has no core _2_ duo
Do you read before you post?
I'm a road warrior and I've been using Thinkpads only since '99 and never looked back. A-series, T-series and now a Z-series thinkpad. Even though my current thinkpad is one of the first models designed and produced by Lenovo it's still a real thinkpad.
:-(
Why I love them:
[1] High mechanical quality, e.g. look at the hinges holding the display, that's solid metal! My last one, a T41p looked like brand new after 18 months and I used it every day for at least 8 hours, look at a typical Sony/Dell/HP after that timeframe!
[2] best keyboard in the industry, actually I even prefer my Thinkpad keyboard over Cherry keyboards
[3] the thinkpad light above the display (I love it), the docking solutions are very advanced, support is great
I personally don't care whether it has the latest GPU, fastest harddrive, etc. - and - I'm not gonna buy a glossy screen either.
BUT _please_ give me a new thinkpad X-series tablet! I absolutely need a higher resolution than 1024x768. I would immediately (tomorrow morning, before breakfast and shower) buy a X61s tablet with resolution > 1024x768, core 2 duo and 3rd generation mobile data service (e.g. HSDPA).
But, as far as I know, it's not gonna happen. The x60/x61 tablet will still have 1024x768
Eight cores in a workstation?
Where?
A new generation of processing power is coming
to us in less than 6 months!
2 physical CPUs on a Mainboard with each
2 Woodcrest units, 4MB 2nd each with each
2 cores
8 cores!
I'm looking forward to it. Put 16GB RAM into it and you'll
have a perfect setup for huge Websphere/Weblogic cluster
tests on a _single_ workstation!
See: http://pics.computerbase.de/1/3/0/0/4/2.png
Coooool!
Ever had that message with your local workstation?
.NET, very tough in webapps or server-pushing information to the client, requires long-lasting GET requests filtered by many firewalls)
This is just another playground for the next gen. of Dot-Com-Companies, nothing serious.
a.) web-applications rely on high-speed-always-on internet connections (I'll be in an airplane this afternoon, no text processing for me then?)
b.) Will always offer less features and a bad UI compared to classical desktop applications, because restricted by web browser capablilites
c.) are currently much harder to code than classical desktop apps (e.g. editable drop down boxes anyone? Easy thing in NetBeans/VS
d.) collaborative features are easily added to classical desktop apps
Conclusion: less possibilities, harder to code (you'll always be tricking, hacking to get a nice effect), bad UI (restricted by browsers)
The only competition to desktop apps I do currently see is MS XAML.
Bye!
Go and easily be part of one of the coolest gangs in your town... You'll have a GF (yeah, a *real* one, not a real-doll) a convertible, some guns, everyone's gonna treat you respectful...
Go and f*cking build a website, the stuff you do best
Simple. Currently I'm reading ebooks with a Compaq TC1000 tablet PC. And I'm reading in dark situations, like bed, airplane, etc. regularly. And I'm enjoying the backlight of my tablet... but it gets to hot, consumes too much energy and is heavier (3 pounds).
I personally will switch _only_ to an ebook reader with some kind of lightsource (be it backlight or side-leds or whatever).
I don't need much RAM, no note-taking, no mp3 player no WLAN, etc.
Just a quick, 768x1024 (or higher) resolution ebook reader for PDF and HTML with some kind of lightsource.
Most people in the forums tend to agree with me.
Feature fuck??? I just want the most basic and important features everyone's expecting from the device. Good performance, a lower price and some sort of lightsource.
Leave the WLAN and the MP3 player out for example!
An NO ONE is gonna replace a laptop with such an ebook reader, it's just an addition.
You don't want a backlight, you want a traditional light that shines onto the page, like you do with traditional books. Backlit screens are harder to read over long periods. This is pretty much the whole point of e-ink
l eaflet-Iliad.pdf
May be. Just some sort of lightsource.
1024x768? If I'm not mislead about the resolution of e-ink, the screen on that is likely to support 4-8 times that resolution.
See the product specs: http://www.irextechnologies.com/downloads/Product
1024x768 16 grey tones.
Where'd you read the part about 2-4 seconds for a page refresh? If true, that would really suck.
Take a look at the videos mentioned in my first post or google for "Iliad page flip seconds". Plenty of first-hand reports there.
Even for an early adaptor this thing is disappointing.
1. VERY expensive, Euro 649 (that includes VAT over here) for a black+white ebook reader. I'm come on... Please leave the WLAN out next time.
2. VERY slow, VERY slow. Page flipping sometimes takes 2 seconds, sometimes 3-4. That's bad for a newspaper, but it's simply unusable for a technical documentation where you're searching for specific parts, etc.
see mobileread.com for videos.
3. No backlight, I (as a consumer) don't care wheter that's realizable or not, but I would like to have some sort of backlight. Yes a book doesn't have a backlight, too. But my books at least don't cost 650 Euros.
Nice is: a 1024x768 resolution, everything else is not usable for my purposes.
I'm waiting for the next generation.
I have to agree, somehow. It's just a matter of tools, even with CORBA tools would have been able to create IDL, the required supporting classes, proxies, whatever so CORBA could have been easy on the surface and a well fitting chair for the developers.
We've had a solid and good working standard for distributed environments, so why this mess with webservices?
It's a distributed, platform-neutral, language-neutral, object-oriented technology. The best OO could offer. What did you expect?
Btw. EJB > 2.0 wasn't that hard, either. Just unconvenient in some places.
Let's do SOAs based on WebServices. Right now, right here.
... and so on, and so on...
The only Web-Service-Standard that's currently finalized and widely accepted is WS-I basic profile. So, no standard on...
- authentication (no, dear MS people, HTTP basic is _NOT_ sufficient for the IBM MQ guys)
- transaction management, transport and control (please say properietary soap headers)
- encryption (there IS a standard for XML encryption, but it's unsure how to use it within SOAP)
- naming services (UDDI is so dead, it's already smelling, go and find a public UDDI registry that's not just a webpage, that you can query via SOAP, IBM's developing a Websphere Naming Service, superb!)
-
Stuff that CORBA has been offering for nearly a decade! So why are webservices popular? Because of the technology? No way! They're freaking slow (our Java RMI services are nearly 50 times faster than those implemented with Apache Axis 1.4 here, and axis is pretty good). No, just because of the tools!
Go, build a Webservice with NetBeans and a client with VS.net 2005 and you will have to implement two or three lines of code... That would have been possible with CORBA, too! The fall of CORBA is just a matter of tools, the technology is clearly better, offers more features, is very performant.
But coding these days requires click and run...
Sad.
I didn't know Google was a Java shop. Do they mainly code serverside stuff in Java these days? If so, which technology are they using (O/R mapper, servlet container, tricks & quirks). Would be interesting to know.
Any infos?
I'm dealing with a lot (!) european training and system houses (look at my nick), Java courses (including J2EE stuff, application servers, Spring, Hibernate, Certification, etc.) here outsell
Same analysis for popular Job search-engines. Demand for skilled Java experts is a lot (!) higher than
Alot of VB6 people are switching to Java here.
my 2 cents
microsoft.com
These aren't two business people finishing a deal! These are comrades, even more THAT'S LOVE! Look at their eyes, how they look at each other, the smiles in their faces, incredible. There's hope for mankind, we're still able to really, really love each other.
Replacing Scotty would - of course - destroy this enormous love...
Oh my..., all these feelings...