Palm as a standalone company has no future selling cheap, simple devices. If they ever took off, Casio would start pumping them out for $25.
Palm, as a standalone company, has no future selling anything else.
Big, bloated, power consuming computing devices are something that MS specializes in. Palm cannot beat MS at its own game. This has already been demonstrated by Palm releasing a Pocket PC based phone, what exactly did they design on it, the "Palm" logo?
Palm's original interface was wonderful and simple to use. It let me quickly get access to information, enter data, and keep my life organized.
Yah sure my phone has a phonebook attached to it. Ignoring the fact that to use ANY of the advanced features of it, I have to place all numbers in my phone's memory first. When I upgrade phones I am then screwed over, no way to transfer all that extra meta-data onto the sim card!
Or, when upgrading phones, I could opt for the $30 data sync package for phone A, and buy the $30 data sync package for phone B, and HOPE that there is some way to get them to talk to each other, and that the meta-data I want to keep is maintained by both programs....
Palm's low cost simple devices rock. Or they would, except that Palm never made any low cost simple devices. Their Zire's were horribly overprices from the beginning. $50 tops. Even then, I would have a simple $20 model that had 8MB of ram and a grayscale screen, though color could likely be done now days.
Could it play video? Nope. MP3s? Nope. Built in camera? Nope.
1 A calendar 2 The todo list has due dates, and the deadlines show up in the Calendar. Suprisingly, Even Outlook 2003 doesn't do this. 3 The ability to sync with some desktop PIM software, hopefully something besides MS Outlook.
See I had grown too used to Palm, to my mind, these are obvious.
Of course you have a calendar... And naturally the todo list has due dates, what sort of an idiot would make it otherwise?
(surprisingly... I have seen too many brain dead todo list implementations in my short life!)
m505 was good, too short of a battery life though. My GFs m505 kept on killing itself even after the BIOS update (would occasionally hard reset itself and lose all of its data despite having plenty of battery power)
I liked my Clie, until I had to fix one thing and broke 5 others. Wonderful 2wk battery life.:) Bit too big though, with todays tech, they could make the things so small.
Simplicity, price, and size please
on
The Future of the PDA
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· Score: 5, Insightful
How about something that has the functionality of the older palms:
basic handwriting reco through graffiti or the like
Keeps track of names, phone numbers, basic notes, a todo list
Simple interface
It doesn't even need a color screen, though grayscale would be nice just for legibility reasons.
A 20mhz or so CPU should suffice, if even that much is needed. It would be cool if it could fit in the credit card holder of my wallet (most wallets suck as it is, when you are limited to the subset of wallets that can carry a PDA, it becomes really hard to find a non-cruddy one), and has a week long battery life or some such. Oh yes, and STATIC MEMORY. Honestly, only 4 or so megs are needed.
Again, I'm not asking how easy it is. I'm asking WHY a "beginning bio class" at a "junior college" would be doing that with a virus.
My High School genetics class modified the DNA of a bacteria, made them change color.
It was insanely interesting AND we learned a ton about genetics, and I mean a ton. We had to study a lot of the chemical reactions that were taking place, how the new gene was going work, and various other aspects of genetics (how cells divide, on a very very detailed chemical level, etc).
This stuff is pretty darn easy to do. Fun as well.:)
Watching a movie with subtitles is like trying to drive while staring at the speedometer the whole time.... and not having the suspension of disbelief constantly ruined by needing to look away from the action to read.
It really is not that serious, after watching a few subtitled TV shows or movies, you get used to it. In fact, I am weirded out now when things are not subtitled.
A 60-gig iPod stores more music than anybody owns.
Define "own". Legally? Likely.
I have seen people with over a terabyte of pirated MP3s though. Rather despicable, you know that they just go and grab every song by every band that they can find. Bleck.
Why not a C# notepad, mspaint, explorer.exe, taskmgr, regedit etc?
Because the second you tried to loadup a C# notepad, mspaint, explorer.exe, taskmgr and regedit all at once, your computer would become too slow to use!
A minimum of 20 megs of ram per app, assuming that they are not actually DOING anything. If they actually do something, crud, heh, plan on a few hundred at least.
You know what? If I plopped down the cash for a gig of memory, I want to use it for something like video or photo editing, playing games, or SOMETHING that deserves to require memory.
As it is right now, Firefox eats up over 300MB (with page caching turned down to a hard limit of 5 pages total, still 300megs, wtf..), Eclipse apparently thinks that 70MB or so is ok, and VS.NET 2005 likes eating up a few hundred.
And this is your employer's fault? It is your job to work at the rate you're paid.
In a field like software development, the value of contributions of an employee tend to be directly related to how much experience they have with software engineering in general, and also with how much experience they have in the particular industry that they are presently developing for.
To put it another way, every year an employee's contribution to a company increases.
It seems fair that the employee receives part of that additional contribution.
This is especially true in a field such as software development where workers are expected to spend part of their own time (uncompensated!) improving their skill set and learning how to do their job better. The reason that they do this? There is an expectation from the employee, that if they make a determined effort to add more value to the company, and if they make a personal investment in their skill set that directly correlates to them being able to do a better job that results in the company earning more money, that they should receive part of the dividends on that investment.
trangely i felt more under microscope in US than i did in singapore. Every time i visited BankAm in US to deposit my paycheck ($4000-$6000) i needed to provide TWO photo IDs to deposit and withdraw. Additionally i needed to fill in a few nasty forms for an amount beyond $5,000/- In singapore since the system already has my photo and EP number and details, they don;t even bother asking. They took one good look at my face, compared it with record (seeing it was not canceled) and that's it.
A lot of US banks still use black and white terminals, though those are MOSTLY phased out...
We have many relics of past infostructures laying around.
The day I can pick hold of a remote and say 'I'm not interested in a new car, new home, feminine hygiene products, alcoholic beverages, non-alcoholic beverages, fast food, women's clothes, men's clothes, new watches, perfume, chocolate bars, after shave, etc, etc.'
As nice as this would be, it is not going to happen. Marketers have this delusion that they are providing a service to society by "informing" us about new products.
Mind you, from a capitalistic point of view, they are technically correct, but the ads continuously have less and less value to them. I don't actually mind ads that tell me about the product, but most ads are just BS.
"Buy these shoes!"
Ok, what material are they constructed out of? (Plastic) How long can I expect them to last? (About a month...) How much do they cost? ($100+usd)
Hmm, maybe there is a reason that ads are devoid of information.
I would love to see a bread ad on tv:
"Our competitors shove high fructose corn syrup, fake maple coloring, and many other unnatural ingredients into their bread. Our bread, is made out of, bread."
Re:Obesity comes from a simple condition...
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
What type of exercise plan are you using? Are you including a good amount of weight training in your regimen? Weight training increases metabolism, which makes the rest of the process much much easier.:)
Also, cut out snacks COMPLETELY. This is so hard to do in America, but it doesn't matter if the snacks are low card, no carb, or whatever, don't eat them. Chew sugar free gum or something. Literally do not spend a cent on snacks. Not only will you save enough for a vacation, but stay healthy as well.
It is driving me freaking nuts personally, bleck. I could really go for some chocolate right about now...
Other than being a marketing coup (which costs money running the marketing) the Centrino is outsold in the retail market by the AMD Sempron based simply on cost
Maybe in the low margin market, but in general, as much as I love AMD, Pentium M chips offer more scalablility (from ultra mobile 1.2GHz chips, to speeding 2.12GHz chips) from a pure performance point of view.
That and all Centrino really means is that you have an Intel MoBo, AND an Intel Wireless device, you can get a laptop that is identical to a "Centrino" model except for having a non-Intel wifi card in it, that alone will cause it to lose the Centrino mark.
But the Pentium M does rock.:)
(you can't get a centrino in the $500-700 price point).
You can't get a real MOBILE laptop at the $500-$700 price point. I was stupid and bought one of those budget laptops as my first laptop, I ended up with a huge honking machine that is being used as a nice linux desktop box. Sure it has an LCD screen (with a highly limited viewing angle), but at over 7Lbs, it is a desktop!
Laptops, 4.5LB or under.
If OEMs are stupid enough to back themselves into yet another low margin product line, then fine, they can go ahead and be that stupid.
On the other hand, it doesn't make any difference if the obstacle is a boulder or a smashed car or a dog or a person.
To an extent is does, swerving off the road to hit a low rock might do less damage to the car than hitting deer antlers, even if the rock is technically bigger.
Isn't the amount of energy at impact a quantitative measure of the effect on others?
The first time the program chooses to swerve into a School Bus instead of some trucker in a semi, the public outrage would be enormous.
Even if, technically, it WAS the best choice, people would lose all faith in the system immediately.
Of course you could program in certain "must avoid" objects, but how long would your switch statement eventually be? And computers are horrible at context, what happens when some full size fan with "Sunday School Day Car Trasport" on it is involved in an accident, and the computer does not recognize that the van should be identified the same as a school bus?
It's not as complicated or slow as you make it out to be. I wrote software that does object tracking and path prediction, in Java, on a PIII 333 MHz machine. It's not that complicated.
Then why is it that every single ridgid body physics simulation I have seen, completely and utterly sucks? Seriously, just rolling balls down a hill inevitably breaks.
Well ok ok this is due to the step size, think wall, hey look, ball goes through the wall! Massivly irritating.
You are right, simple ridgid body physics simulators ARE easy to program, anyone who has taken a few quarters of physics could make one, Newtonian physics is rather trival, but I still think that things would not work out perfectly according to the equations, as most of the equations tend to assume a perfect world, you take a small error in the coefficent of friction of rubber against ice, combined with a small error in measuring various vehicular mass, combined with the small error in every other aspect of the simulation, and what happens to the numbers?
You are likely right in that the best solution probebly won't change, but I would seriously question the data after a certain point.
Any decent algorithm would use a feedback mechanism like this anyway to deal with things like different road surfaces and tire wear.
This is prehaps the only way of keeping things even remotely close to reality, have all of the algorithms be dynamic, only try to guess ahead by a little bit and constantly correct internal variables and estimates against real world values.
Unfortunately you are right, on an individual case by case level; a lot of innocents do die.
The stupid ass husband also dies though. Of course children are then born HIV positive, so in all likelihood the husband should be kept alive just so the bastard can suffer some more.
I think any country with an AIDs epidemic would benefit from beating the living crud out of man who cheats on his wife.
For that matter, first time beat him, second time, just kill him.
If somehow this policy could be supported on a social level (so no way could a man "secretly" cheat on his wife, someone WOULD report him), I am willing to bet that AIDS would disappear from such countries in a matter of a few decades, with the rate or new HIV infections coming to a halting even sooner than that!
You know, a lot of those Old Testament biblical laws did make sense, it is just that they ended up being enforced only on women, (male judges, juries, and executioners. . ..), if they were enforced equally and fairly, I doubt we would have a lot of the problems that we do.:)
(hey wait, that works for almost ANY halfway decent law system! There is an idea, enforce rules and laws equally regardless of gender!:-D )
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Palm, as a standalone company, has no future selling anything else.
Big, bloated, power consuming computing devices are something that MS specializes in. Palm cannot beat MS at its own game. This has already been demonstrated by Palm releasing a Pocket PC based phone, what exactly did they design on it, the "Palm" logo?
Palm's original interface was wonderful and simple to use. It let me quickly get access to information, enter data, and keep my life organized.
Yah sure my phone has a phonebook attached to it. Ignoring the fact that to use ANY of the advanced features of it, I have to place all numbers in my phone's memory first. When I upgrade phones I am then screwed over, no way to transfer all that extra meta-data onto the sim card!
Or, when upgrading phones, I could opt for the $30 data sync package for phone A, and buy the $30 data sync package for phone B, and HOPE that there is some way to get them to talk to each other, and that the meta-data I want to keep is maintained by both programs.
Palm's low cost simple devices rock. Or they would, except that Palm never made any low cost simple devices. Their Zire's were horribly overprices from the beginning. $50 tops. Even then, I would have a simple $20 model that had 8MB of ram and a grayscale screen, though color could likely be done now days.
Could it play video? Nope. MP3s? Nope. Built in camera? Nope.
Would it keep you organized? Heck yah it would.
See I had grown too used to Palm, to my mind, these are obvious.
Of course you have a calendar... And naturally the todo list has due dates, what sort of an idiot would make it otherwise?
(surprisingly... I have seen too many brain dead todo list implementations in my short life!)
m505 was good, too short of a battery life though. My GFs m505 kept on killing itself even after the BIOS update (would occasionally hard reset itself and lose all of its data despite having plenty of battery power)
:) Bit too big though, with todays tech, they could make the things so small.
I liked my Clie, until I had to fix one thing and broke 5 others. Wonderful 2wk battery life.
It doesn't even need a color screen, though grayscale would be nice just for legibility reasons.
A 20mhz or so CPU should suffice, if even that much is needed. It would be cool if it could fit in the credit card holder of my wallet (most wallets suck as it is, when you are limited to the subset of wallets that can carry a PDA, it becomes really hard to find a non-cruddy one), and has a week long battery life or some such. Oh yes, and STATIC MEMORY. Honestly, only 4 or so megs are needed.
Price? No more than $50.
The reviewer is on crack, cheap phones that are included free with plan, yes, 2 megapixel, we CAN get higher, just that they cost money.
With a few exceptions (Motorola Razr, etc) the American market has shown a lack of willingless to PAY for cell phones.
Thus we get whatever is free.
We are 2-3 years (or more...) behind in cell phone tech, but on the plus side, the $$$ savings allows us to pay for the gas for our SUVs...
My High School genetics class modified the DNA of a bacteria, made them change color.
It was insanely interesting AND we learned a ton about genetics, and I mean a ton. We had to study a lot of the chemical reactions that were taking place, how the new gene was going work, and various other aspects of genetics (how cells divide, on a very very detailed chemical level, etc).
This stuff is pretty darn easy to do. Fun as well.
It really is not that serious, after watching a few subtitled TV shows or movies, you get used to it. In fact, I am weirded out now when things are not subtitled.
Define "own". Legally? Likely.
I have seen people with over a terabyte of pirated MP3s though. Rather despicable, you know that they just go and grab every song by every band that they can find. Bleck.
No, I got it from MY system resource usage stats.
Albiet this was Beta 2, but unless they fixed a 200MB memory leak...
Though admitedly I was working on a huge app that also had had some webapp components and a good sized SQL database it was working with.
Because the second you tried to loadup a C# notepad, mspaint, explorer.exe, taskmgr and regedit all at once, your computer would become too slow to use!
A minimum of 20 megs of ram per app, assuming that they are not actually DOING anything. If they actually do something, crud, heh, plan on a few hundred at least.
You know what? If I plopped down the cash for a gig of memory, I want to use it for something like video or photo editing, playing games, or SOMETHING that deserves to require memory.
As it is right now, Firefox eats up over 300MB (with page caching turned down to a hard limit of 5 pages total, still 300megs, wtf..), Eclipse apparently thinks that 70MB or so is ok, and VS.NET 2005 likes eating up a few hundred.
In a field like software development, the value of contributions of an employee tend to be directly related to how much experience they have with software engineering in general, and also with how much experience they have in the particular industry that they are presently developing for.
To put it another way, every year an employee's contribution to a company increases.
It seems fair that the employee receives part of that additional contribution.
This is especially true in a field such as software development where workers are expected to spend part of their own time (uncompensated!) improving their skill set and learning how to do their job better. The reason that they do this? There is an expectation from the employee, that if they make a determined effort to add more value to the company, and if they make a personal investment in their skill set that directly correlates to them being able to do a better job that results in the company earning more money, that they should receive part of the dividends on that investment.
A lot of US banks still use black and white terminals, though those are MOSTLY phased out...
We have many relics of past infostructures laying around.
Look into Toshiba.
14.1" screen, less than 4.5 LBs, with CDROM drive, etc.
1.6GHz+ Pentium M should be enough, 2Ghz if you need it.
See, I was getting this big geek boner right, then, as I scrolled through the tech specs, I saw something that made me go limp:
Intel GMA950 Integrated Video.
That is like geek cock block.
As nice as this would be, it is not going to happen. Marketers have this delusion that they are providing a service to society by "informing" us about new products.
Mind you, from a capitalistic point of view, they are technically correct, but the ads continuously have less and less value to them. I don't actually mind ads that tell me about the product, but most ads are just BS.
"Buy these shoes!"
Ok, what material are they constructed out of? (Plastic) How long can I expect them to last? (About a month...) How much do they cost? ($100+usd)
Hmm, maybe there is a reason that ads are devoid of information.
I would love to see a bread ad on tv:
"Our competitors shove high fructose corn syrup, fake maple coloring, and many other unnatural ingredients into their bread. Our bread, is made out of, bread."
Sold.
I worked with MS's Mobile PC department last summer. Check my journal entries, my blog from that time period got mostly deleted.
:)
It is not TOO big of a secret, I'll tell you that at least a few of the posts above are pretty close.
But I am under NDA. :-D
Its cool, you will drool.
What type of exercise plan are you using? Are you including a good amount of weight training in your regimen? Weight training increases metabolism, which makes the rest of the process much much easier. :)
...
Also, cut out snacks COMPLETELY. This is so hard to do in America, but it doesn't matter if the snacks are low card, no carb, or whatever, don't eat them. Chew sugar free gum or something. Literally do not spend a cent on snacks. Not only will you save enough for a vacation, but stay healthy as well.
It is driving me freaking nuts personally, bleck. I could really go for some chocolate right about now...
Or when ever
anyways
Oh yes, err, staying healthy.
Damnit I mentioned chocolate.
Someone paid attention in Economics class during that lecture about "well defined property rights"!
Information about what I do, collected using my machine, is my property. You pay me for it with something of value.
People aren't pissed that information is being collected, they are pissed that they aren't getting PAID for it!
Maybe in the low margin market, but in general, as much as I love AMD, Pentium M chips offer more scalablility (from ultra mobile 1.2GHz chips, to speeding 2.12GHz chips) from a pure performance point of view.
That and all Centrino really means is that you have an Intel MoBo, AND an Intel Wireless device, you can get a laptop that is identical to a "Centrino" model except for having a non-Intel wifi card in it, that alone will cause it to lose the Centrino mark.
But the Pentium M does rock.
You can't get a real MOBILE laptop at the $500-$700 price point. I was stupid and bought one of those budget laptops as my first laptop, I ended up with a huge honking machine that is being used as a nice linux desktop box. Sure it has an LCD screen (with a highly limited viewing angle), but at over 7Lbs, it is a desktop!
Laptops, 4.5LB or under.
If OEMs are stupid enough to back themselves into yet another low margin product line, then fine, they can go ahead and be that stupid.
Ok how do you manage uphill BOTH ways?
/.! :)
Wow, Bill Cosby is on
To an extent is does, swerving off the road to hit a low rock might do less damage to the car than hitting deer antlers, even if the rock is technically bigger.
The first time the program chooses to swerve into a School Bus instead of some trucker in a semi, the public outrage would be enormous.
Even if, technically, it WAS the best choice, people would lose all faith in the system immediately.
Of course you could program in certain "must avoid" objects, but how long would your switch statement eventually be? And computers are horrible at context, what happens when some full size fan with "Sunday School Day Car Trasport" on it is involved in an accident, and the computer does not recognize that the van should be identified the same as a school bus?
Then why is it that every single ridgid body physics simulation I have seen, completely and utterly sucks? Seriously, just rolling balls down a hill inevitably breaks.
Well ok ok this is due to the step size, think wall, hey look, ball goes through the wall! Massivly irritating.
You are right, simple ridgid body physics simulators ARE easy to program, anyone who has taken a few quarters of physics could make one, Newtonian physics is rather trival, but I still think that things would not work out perfectly according to the equations, as most of the equations tend to assume a perfect world, you take a small error in the coefficent of friction of rubber against ice, combined with a small error in measuring various vehicular mass, combined with the small error in every other aspect of the simulation, and what happens to the numbers?
You are likely right in that the best solution probebly won't change, but I would seriously question the data after a certain point.
This is prehaps the only way of keeping things even remotely close to reality, have all of the algorithms be dynamic, only try to guess ahead by a little bit and constantly correct internal variables and estimates against real world values.
Hmm, downhill on the way back at least! :)
Unfortunately you are right, on an individual case by case level; a lot of innocents do die.
.), if they were enforced equally and fairly, I doubt we would have a lot of the problems that we do. :)
:-D )
The stupid ass husband also dies though. Of course children are then born HIV positive, so in all likelihood the husband should be kept alive just so the bastard can suffer some more.
I think any country with an AIDs epidemic would benefit from beating the living crud out of man who cheats on his wife.
For that matter, first time beat him, second time, just kill him.
If somehow this policy could be supported on a social level (so no way could a man "secretly" cheat on his wife, someone WOULD report him), I am willing to bet that AIDS would disappear from such countries in a matter of a few decades, with the rate or new HIV infections coming to a halting even sooner than that!
You know, a lot of those Old Testament biblical laws did make sense, it is just that they ended up being enforced only on women, (male judges, juries, and executioners. . .
(hey wait, that works for almost ANY halfway decent law system! There is an idea, enforce rules and laws equally regardless of gender!
Those have to be one of the stupidest idea ever.
Way to commoditize sex. It seems like it becomes something to trade at that point
"Here I'll put on a condom and you lick my cock then I'll get out a dental dam and like your pussy."
Talk about taking all the fun out of an activity just to have fun doing an activity....