PDAs are useful. However, $700 PDAs aren't worth it, IMHO, except to show everyone around you that you can afford a $700 PDA.
You can get pretty much the same thing by buying a Palm m105 and a folding keyboard to go with it. Minus a few features of dubious value, like a colour screen. It'll cost about 1/3 as much however.
The thing that a watch/planner/calculator/notepad/gameboy/e-book reader combination can't do that a PDA can is be all in the same device. That's one of the reasons they're so wonderful. You pick up the one device and you're set. It's also worth noting that there still aren't any watches that can function like the alarm clock feature of Palm's datebook, and no paper notepads that can rearrange themselves and be sorted alphabetically like Palm's to-do list.
Heh. You know, when I was playing marathon quake sessions in college, I didn't notice any need to use the washroom. Or eat. Or sleep. Most of the time the thing that interrupted my gameplay was map changes. It was during the time I was waiting for the next map to load, or to find the next server that I noticed the biological need for any of these. Adrenaline was telling my body "that's not important! Stay alive!" It wasn't until the adrenaline stopped for several minutes that those datagrams stopped being sent.
And damn, did my bladder ever need the relief afterwards!
Okay, let's assume that burning fossil fuels isn't what's causing global warming, and we reduce or eliminate our use of fossil fuels anyway.
So now we've just managed to clean up our air to the point where Los Angeles and Toronto no longer have pollution advisories on the Weather Channel, but Rio de Janerio and Amersterdam are flooded.
Well, we've just done one very good thing, and the other thing was expected anyway and didn't happen overnight, so it's not like we had to rush a huge evacuation or anything. Maybe we've just built better dikes instead.
If we *don't* do these things, then Los Angeles and Toronto will have even lower air quality *and* Rio and Amsterdam will be flooded too.
But what of the costs! They'll be enormous! Well, that's what they said about replacing CFC's, eliminating particulate waste from coal power plants, and not using PCB's to cool big electrical transformers. Oddly enough, coal power plants are now selling that particulate waste as a replacement for gypsum in fire-resistant wallboard, the extra cost of not using CFC's in your car's air conditioner is about $20, not $1500, and your electric utility is now spouting on about how good and wonderful they are for not using PCB's in your friendly neighbourhood power transformer (despite the fact that the government had to force them to do so).
Even better is the fact that we can reduce our current CO2 production just by not wasting our fuel! Are we so wealthy that we don't have to worry about how much we spend on fuel, but not wealthy enough to not use it so much? There was one company here in Canada that went to parliament saying that "hey, this Kyoto thing isn't so hard. We met those goals already and look at the millions of dollars we saved!"
By forcing people to look at the problem, we can start to find solutions. A large part of the problem here is waste. Waste is bad because its a sign of inefficiency. Why can't some people realize that when it's so blazingly obvious?
Well, okay, maybe not. Basically, for a *lot* of games, the mouse is a much better and more natural controller than the keyboard or joystick, which is really all the PS2 controller is.
When they come out with a mouse for the playstation 2, I'll be right there. Until then, it's the best controller yet and only available for the PC.
Wow. Only 70 comments and the site's kacked and died. Is this a new record?
Re:It's done already, at red light cameras
on
Sensors Gone Wild
·
· Score: 2
The red light cameras are exactly the same as having an actual cop standing at a street corner doing nothing but taking pictures of people breaking the law. Only a lot more accurate, a lot cheaper, and a lot less boring for the cop in question. It's one thing to have a system that detects illegal behaviour in public, and a whole different ballgame to be doing the same in private. Something like that would break laws about search without a warrant.
At the same time, even public cameras need to be severely restricted to uses such as red light monitoring, as my right to privacy extends to the sorts of public places I hang out in, like churches, bars, and S&M clubs.
Have they lost their minds? Why don't they all just go right over to the Microsoft campus and make a big sign that says "we want j00 to 0wn our asses?"
Microsoft has enough money to keep these clowns in court until the end of time. The legal bills alone will destroy Eolas.
Maybe what they're *really* trying to do is to goad MS into buying the company. This seems to be a popular business model, I just never realized that people had to go to such lengths to get Microsoft's attention.
Earth to Brandon Wiley, have you perhaps heard of the Morris worm?
This DDOS attack was carried out in 1988, and it was done by mistake. Our boy Robert Morris wasn't careful about how quickly the worm spread itself, and as a result when it started infecting computers, about one in seven of them would relentlessly pound away at any host it could find. Now, the Internet wasn't nearly as big as it was today, but even so it meant that hundreds or thousands of infected hosts were lining up to rape any given computer.
These days, you have to be CAREFUL when you write your virii or it'll be much much more than just a minor annoyance, it will flood networks out of existence. This white paper doesn't outline an attack strategy, it demonstrates the destructive effect of sloppy virus design.
How about $12 for being able to keep it forever, and the ability to suck it down through a fat pipe?
Like, come on, which would you rather download it from? Someone else's ADSL modem that has a 640K upload speed and 3 other people on it, or through the studio's OC-148, where you can download it at your max bandwidth?
Heh. My broadband provider has a 5 gig/month limit before they start charging at $10 a gig.
5000 / 700 = 7.143
So 7 full-length movies a month, plus the usual sort of activity I do on the net that doesn't involve movies.
I don't even rent that many in a month. And at $4 per 1 day rental (new releases, I hope), it comes to $28 per month in rentals, which is roughly my budget per month to rent anyway.
My big worry though is that the program you'd need to play these movies would probably be bloatware programmed by a bunch of lazy monkeys and have a billion banner ads extolling the virtues of WB, their website, the movie's website, the website for the theatres that it originally played in, and the overpriced pop that was sold in the theatres it originally played in.
Or worse, they'll put TV commercials in at the beginning and no fast-forward button, giving you a real "theatre-quality" experience while at the same time wasting your bandwidth on the extra 15 minute footage.
Heh. You can fix that problem entirely by removing *all* the fans and just rack-mounting the suckers without cases inside a freezer. Preferably a meat locker around 200 sq ft. Then all your cooling needs are met with one unit.:)
Replace the water with a non-conducting oil (and most are) and Ta-da, your faith in water retention need not exist. One lunatic even submerged his entire kit in castor oil, which just goes to prove that it won't roast everything.:)
We haven't had children yet because we want to wait for things to become financially stable (we want our kids to have a good home)
Don't wait for financial stability. Reasons:
1) Financial stability in the working class is a myth. Fortune magazine had an article a couple weeks ago that went on about how "our" generation (ie, generation X, whatever that means) certainly isn't seeing the good fortune of our parents, and about how we should all have 5 million dollars saved up by the time we're 65, yet on average we're nowhere near meeting that goal - which is wildly ludicrous anyway. Half of us genexers are still working at Starbucks anyway, because it's the best we could find.
2) Love makes a good home, not money. Love != money && money != love. Repeat this mantra until you de-program yourself of the bullshit you believe now. I grew up dirt poor, yet IMHO, my family life as a child could hardly have been better. Most important was that my parents loved each other, were both there, and didn't ever hit each other.
3) The only thing more money brings is a different lifestyle. A more expensive house, a more expensive car, a more expensive computer. None of these equate happiness, just that you can say "I have more money than you" to your neighbour. And who wants to have kids that get whatever they want anyway?
Re:Just Call it a LIBRARY, Please!
on
Libraries Are 31337
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Confusing, euphemistic titles are as bad as Political Correctness in my book
Correction: Confusing, euphemistic titles ARE political correctness.
Heh. Maybe not, but it's close enough that it makes no odds.:)
You must not have checked out the books I did then
on
Libraries Are 31337
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Because before I had a computer of my own, Libraries were by and large my *only* source of porn.
Of course, they didn't have a lot of pictures of Nekkid Wimmin, but like a certain magazine likes to say, they have "Porn for nerds. Babes that matter."
Authors like Anais Nin, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Camille Paglia, and Nancy Friday are the ones I can remember right off the top of my head, and I've also found a whole host of compilations of erotic short stories by a vast number of authors.
And on top of the porn there's also tons of truly informative stuff on human sexuality in public libraries. "The New Kinsey Report," "Female sexual awareness," and "The Erotic Mind," are books that helped enlighten me, and there are now literally hundreds of newer titles can be found just by using my library's web page search engine.
Perhaps the library doesn't have *as much* porn as the Internet does, but 99% of what's on the net is crap, and what the library has is all the truly worthwhile stuff. No credit card required!;)
Anyone producing a TV show that is intended to have commercial breaks is either a) not an artist, or b) a corporate whore, degrading themselves for money.
Most people only use maybe 30 hours a month on the internet. I work at an ISP and I can attest that at least 60% of our customers use less than that, and a good chunk of those use WAY less. Like about 5 hours.
Are *you* willing to pay $40+ a month to spend 30 hours on the net, just to check your e-mail and maybe read theweathernetwork.com or espn.com every morning?
Actually, that and your verbing "to lame" and your nouning of "teach", as in ""wh3n th3y l4m3 2 us" and "give n00bz 4 learnin'" are both cool.
Heh. "When they lame 2 us" is more of a jive/ebonics take, which happens to be in part the roots of lamerspeek. That and the way taggers and the skater crowd (one and the same often enough) intentionally screw up both spelling and the letters themselves. This particular phrase would be closer to "When they b lame 2 us," which was common in early-mid nineties rap.
"Give n00bz a learnin" is probably not even lamerspeak at all. It's taken directly from late 80's ebonics (minus n00bz, of course). I wish I could remember what movie I heard that line from.
Now that I've totally deconstructed my own words in a way that only an English teacher could love, I've revealed myself as a total pansy ass white boy, but hey, at least I can grok this shit, and I know what it's like to be po'.;)
So the solution isn't to teach them how to spell, but how to actually type at some speed faster than 15wpm.
I work in tech support (one of many hats) and I've noticed an interesting correlation - newbies young and old don't know how to touch type. Of course, I doubt that many people who long ago learned to type on a manual or electric typewriter haven't long since switched to a computer, in no small part because of how word processing capabilities make the job a whole lot easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, what are you waiting for then? :)
PDAs are useful. However, $700 PDAs aren't worth it, IMHO, except to show everyone around you that you can afford a $700 PDA.
You can get pretty much the same thing by buying a Palm m105 and a folding keyboard to go with it. Minus a few features of dubious value, like a colour screen. It'll cost about 1/3 as much however.
The thing that a watch/planner/calculator/notepad/gameboy/e-book reader combination can't do that a PDA can is be all in the same device. That's one of the reasons they're so wonderful. You pick up the one device and you're set. It's also worth noting that there still aren't any watches that can function like the alarm clock feature of Palm's datebook, and no paper notepads that can rearrange themselves and be sorted alphabetically like Palm's to-do list.
Heh. You know, when I was playing marathon quake sessions in college, I didn't notice any need to use the washroom. Or eat. Or sleep. Most of the time the thing that interrupted my gameplay was map changes. It was during the time I was waiting for the next map to load, or to find the next server that I noticed the biological need for any of these. Adrenaline was telling my body "that's not important! Stay alive!" It wasn't until the adrenaline stopped for several minutes that those datagrams stopped being sent.
And damn, did my bladder ever need the relief afterwards!
Okay, let's assume that burning fossil fuels isn't what's causing global warming, and we reduce or eliminate our use of fossil fuels anyway.
So now we've just managed to clean up our air to the point where Los Angeles and Toronto no longer have pollution advisories on the Weather Channel, but Rio de Janerio and Amersterdam are flooded.
Well, we've just done one very good thing, and the other thing was expected anyway and didn't happen overnight, so it's not like we had to rush a huge evacuation or anything. Maybe we've just built better dikes instead.
If we *don't* do these things, then Los Angeles and Toronto will have even lower air quality *and* Rio and Amsterdam will be flooded too.
But what of the costs! They'll be enormous! Well, that's what they said about replacing CFC's, eliminating particulate waste from coal power plants, and not using PCB's to cool big electrical transformers. Oddly enough, coal power plants are now selling that particulate waste as a replacement for gypsum in fire-resistant wallboard, the extra cost of not using CFC's in your car's air conditioner is about $20, not $1500, and your electric utility is now spouting on about how good and wonderful they are for not using PCB's in your friendly neighbourhood power transformer (despite the fact that the government had to force them to do so).
Even better is the fact that we can reduce our current CO2 production just by not wasting our fuel! Are we so wealthy that we don't have to worry about how much we spend on fuel, but not wealthy enough to not use it so much? There was one company here in Canada that went to parliament saying that "hey, this Kyoto thing isn't so hard. We met those goals already and look at the millions of dollars we saved!"
By forcing people to look at the problem, we can start to find solutions. A large part of the problem here is waste. Waste is bad because its a sign of inefficiency. Why can't some people realize that when it's so blazingly obvious?
Nuff said.
Well, okay, maybe not. Basically, for a *lot* of games, the mouse is a much better and more natural controller than the keyboard or joystick, which is really all the PS2 controller is.
When they come out with a mouse for the playstation 2, I'll be right there. Until then, it's the best controller yet and only available for the PC.
Heh. Angband doesn't need to be played under windows either. :)
Wow. Only 70 comments and the site's kacked and died. Is this a new record?
The red light cameras are exactly the same as having an actual cop standing at a street corner doing nothing but taking pictures of people breaking the law. Only a lot more accurate, a lot cheaper, and a lot less boring for the cop in question. It's one thing to have a system that detects illegal behaviour in public, and a whole different ballgame to be doing the same in private. Something like that would break laws about search without a warrant.
At the same time, even public cameras need to be severely restricted to uses such as red light monitoring, as my right to privacy extends to the sorts of public places I hang out in, like churches, bars, and S&M clubs.
Have they lost their minds? Why don't they all just go right over to the Microsoft campus and make a big sign that says "we want j00 to 0wn our asses?"
Microsoft has enough money to keep these clowns in court until the end of time. The legal bills alone will destroy Eolas.
Maybe what they're *really* trying to do is to goad MS into buying the company. This seems to be a popular business model, I just never realized that people had to go to such lengths to get Microsoft's attention.
Heh. People that annoyed Stalin were exiled to Siberia if they were lucky, and were too important to simply kill. :)
Why beat around in the bush with a public announcement when you can just write a virus to DDOS yourselves? :)
Earth to Brandon Wiley, have you perhaps heard of the Morris worm?
This DDOS attack was carried out in 1988, and it was done by mistake. Our boy Robert Morris wasn't careful about how quickly the worm spread itself, and as a result when it started infecting computers, about one in seven of them would relentlessly pound away at any host it could find. Now, the Internet wasn't nearly as big as it was today, but even so it meant that hundreds or thousands of infected hosts were lining up to rape any given computer.
These days, you have to be CAREFUL when you write your virii or it'll be much much more than just a minor annoyance, it will flood networks out of existence. This white paper doesn't outline an attack strategy, it demonstrates the destructive effect of sloppy virus design.
How about $12 for being able to keep it forever, and the ability to suck it down through a fat pipe?
Like, come on, which would you rather download it from? Someone else's ADSL modem that has a 640K upload speed and 3 other people on it, or through the studio's OC-148, where you can download it at your max bandwidth?
For only $12 US, I'll choose the studio, thanks.
Heh. My broadband provider has a 5 gig/month limit before they start charging at $10 a gig.
5000 / 700 = 7.143
So 7 full-length movies a month, plus the usual sort of activity I do on the net that doesn't involve movies.
I don't even rent that many in a month. And at $4 per 1 day rental (new releases, I hope), it comes to $28 per month in rentals, which is roughly my budget per month to rent anyway.
My big worry though is that the program you'd need to play these movies would probably be bloatware programmed by a bunch of lazy monkeys and have a billion banner ads extolling the virtues of WB, their website, the movie's website, the website for the theatres that it originally played in, and the overpriced pop that was sold in the theatres it originally played in.
Or worse, they'll put TV commercials in at the beginning and no fast-forward button, giving you a real "theatre-quality" experience while at the same time wasting your bandwidth on the extra 15 minute footage.
Heh. You can fix that problem entirely by removing *all* the fans and just rack-mounting the suckers without cases inside a freezer. Preferably a meat locker around 200 sq ft. Then all your cooling needs are met with one unit. :)
Replace the water with a non-conducting oil (and most are) and Ta-da, your faith in water retention need not exist. One lunatic even submerged his entire kit in castor oil, which just goes to prove that it won't roast everything. :)
We haven't had children yet because we want to wait for things to become financially stable (we want our kids to have a good home)
Don't wait for financial stability. Reasons:
1) Financial stability in the working class is a myth. Fortune magazine had an article a couple weeks ago that went on about how "our" generation (ie, generation X, whatever that means) certainly isn't seeing the good fortune of our parents, and about how we should all have 5 million dollars saved up by the time we're 65, yet on average we're nowhere near meeting that goal - which is wildly ludicrous anyway. Half of us genexers are still working at Starbucks anyway, because it's the best we could find.
2) Love makes a good home, not money. Love != money && money != love. Repeat this mantra until you de-program yourself of the bullshit you believe now. I grew up dirt poor, yet IMHO, my family life as a child could hardly have been better. Most important was that my parents loved each other, were both there, and didn't ever hit each other.
3) The only thing more money brings is a different lifestyle. A more expensive house, a more expensive car, a more expensive computer. None of these equate happiness, just that you can say "I have more money than you" to your neighbour. And who wants to have kids that get whatever they want anyway?
Confusing, euphemistic titles are as bad as Political Correctness in my book
:)
Correction: Confusing, euphemistic titles ARE political correctness.
I could go on, but I probably shouldn't.
Heh. Maybe not, but it's close enough that it makes no odds. :)
Because before I had a computer of my own, Libraries were by and large my *only* source of porn.
;)
Of course, they didn't have a lot of pictures of Nekkid Wimmin, but like a certain magazine likes to say, they have "Porn for nerds. Babes that matter."
Authors like Anais Nin, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Camille Paglia, and Nancy Friday are the ones I can remember right off the top of my head, and I've also found a whole host of compilations of erotic short stories by a vast number of authors.
And on top of the porn there's also tons of truly informative stuff on human sexuality in public libraries. "The New Kinsey Report," "Female sexual awareness," and "The Erotic Mind," are books that helped enlighten me, and there are now literally hundreds of newer titles can be found just by using my library's web page search engine.
Perhaps the library doesn't have *as much* porn as the Internet does, but 99% of what's on the net is crap, and what the library has is all the truly worthwhile stuff. No credit card required!
Anyone producing a TV show that is intended to have commercial breaks is either a) not an artist, or b) a corporate whore, degrading themselves for money.
Hmm. I think they may be onto something here.
Most people only use maybe 30 hours a month on the internet. I work at an ISP and I can attest that at least 60% of our customers use less than that, and a good chunk of those use WAY less. Like about 5 hours.
Are *you* willing to pay $40+ a month to spend 30 hours on the net, just to check your e-mail and maybe read theweathernetwork.com or espn.com every morning?
Of course not. That would be stupid.
Actually, that and your verbing "to lame" and your nouning of "teach", as in ""wh3n th3y l4m3 2 us" and "give n00bz 4 learnin'" are both cool.
;)
Heh. "When they lame 2 us" is more of a jive/ebonics take, which happens to be in part the roots of lamerspeek. That and the way taggers and the skater crowd (one and the same often enough) intentionally screw up both spelling and the letters themselves. This particular phrase would be closer to "When they b lame 2 us," which was common in early-mid nineties rap.
"Give n00bz a learnin" is probably not even lamerspeak at all. It's taken directly from late 80's ebonics (minus n00bz, of course). I wish I could remember what movie I heard that line from.
Now that I've totally deconstructed my own words in a way that only an English teacher could love, I've revealed myself as a total pansy ass white boy, but hey, at least I can grok this shit, and I know what it's like to be po'.
So the solution isn't to teach them how to spell, but how to actually type at some speed faster than 15wpm.
I work in tech support (one of many hats) and I've noticed an interesting correlation - newbies young and old don't know how to touch type. Of course, I doubt that many people who long ago learned to type on a manual or electric typewriter haven't long since switched to a computer, in no small part because of how word processing capabilities make the job a whole lot easier.
0wr F4th3R, wh0 0wnz h34\/3n, j00 r0x0rs! M4y 4|| 0wr b4s3 s0m3d4y Bl0ng t0 j00! M4y j00 0wn 34rth juss |1|3 j00 0wn h34\/3n. G1v3 us th1s d4y 0wr w4r3z, mp3z, 'n pr0n thr0ugh a ph4t |. 4nd cut us s0m3 sl4ck wh3n w3 4ct lik3 n00b l4m3rz, juss 4s w3 g1v3 n00bz 4 l34rn1n wh3n th3y l4m3 2 us. Pl34s3 d0n't l3t us 0wn s0m3 p00r d00d'z b0x3n wh3n w3'r3 t00 p1ss3d t0 th1nk 4b0ut wh4t's r1ght 4nd wr0ng, 4nd 1f j00 c0uld k33p th3 f3i 0ff 0wr b4ckz, w3'd 'pr3c14t3 1t. F0r j00 0wn 4ll 0wr b0x3n 43v3r 4nd 3v3r, 4m3n!
:)
Now if that's not as incomprehensible as old English, I don't know what is.