Take a Sharp Zaurus C860. Soup it up with an XScale 624MHz processor. Add a USB 2.0 host port. Sell it for $400.
Bonus points: stuff in a 40GB hard disk and sell it for $550.
I'd buy either of these in a heartbeat. My killer app/feature is the USB 2.0 host to hook up things like my digital camera, external hard drive, USB keyboard, DVD burner, network dongle, etc (even all of these at the same time through a hub). The Linux OS means I don't have to worry about the OS becoming obsolete and not having drivers for new hardware.
When I'm on vacation, I'd just take my digital SLR with one or 2 CF cards, one of these PDAs and a USB hard disk. I'd download my CF cards into the hard disk every night and not worry about storage capacity. Beats lugging a laptop around anyday.
Sharp, I hope you're listening and release the C9x0 series soon with a USB 2.0 host.
An interesting signal is one that is from off-planet. It gets more interesting if the direction of origin is some other galaxy. It gets even more interesting if there is no scientific reason for any object in that galaxy to produce the signal.
Why would you say that? I would think that a signal originating from a nearby star, say within a 25 light-year radius of our position would be a lot more interesting than a signal from a million light years away. In the first case, we actually have a chance of direct contact. In the second, all we could hope for is that the aliens send us their version of the Encyclopaedia Galactica, and we'd have little hope of establishing round-trip communication (unless we invent some kind of FTL communication or drive.)
I think this is a very short sighted view. If other countries stopped outsourcing to India, India would scarcely be able to grow at the 6-8% per year that it has been doing and expects to continue doing. Without outsourcing, the Indian market is currently nowhere near sufficient to support all the technically skilled manpower that is already employed and continues to come out of its colleges at current wage levels. Outsourcing is not sufficient in the long run and India will need to move up the value chain, but it cannot suddenly aspire to being a technological leader and innovator without the hard work, struggle and drudgery that precedes it, especially when a benevolent superpower isn't pouring billions and billions of dollars into the economy as happened with Japan and Germany. BTW, there is nothing unfair in being paid less than the minimum wage in another country, as long as the wage being paid is fair in the country where the worker is. This is obviously the case, as otherwise there would be nobody working at this call center near your house.
I bought an Epson PM-940 printer in Japan. When I tried installing the printer driver in English Windows XP, it spat out an error that said something like 'Invalid Environment' and quit. Unfortunately, this model has no direct equivalent in the English speaking world, and I'm still trying to get it to work under Linux. Hopefully Mandrake 10 with a new version of gimp-print drivers (which say they support the PM-940) will solve the issue.
Yes, you had to kiss the goddess exactly 3 times before you could make love to her. Any less and she wouldn't let you, any more and she'd faint! (Lord, What a geek I am!)
It's possibly Battlestar. Although most of the action takes place on a tropical planet, you have to make your way out of a doomed spaceship (the Battlestar) first. The source for this and a whole bunch more 'interactive fiction' can be found at The Interactive Fiction Archive, specifically here.
I've been using CDs from Crash Recovery Kit for Linux for a while, for both crash recovery (obviously), and for quickly booting up Linux on assorted machines for debugging, network connectivity or other tasks.
1. Post bigoted and ill-substantiated rant on Indians and outsourcing. 2. Wait for insecure and disgruntled moderators to mod up. 3. Profit! (get karma boost)
>> You dont need nuclear weapons for that. Look at Japan. Heck even cuba doesnt have nuclear weapons. They all manage to stand up to US "bullying". And now after being nuclear power also, successive Indian govts vie (with pakistan) to be "better friend" of US rather than saying anything against their "bullying tactics".
Japan is virtually a colony of the west. Their constitution (whose drafting was overseen by the US) does not allow their military an offensive role, so they depend on the US for their external security. They have a colonial mindset where everything American and Western is preferred and many of their women prefer caucasian men Cuba only survives because Castro has been extremely quiet after the fall of the Soviet Union and the US has bigger things to worry about.
>> There were many reports pointing the lack of safety in Indian nuclear power plants including some official/semiofficial agency report. You mean like this, this, this, this, this or this?
My suggestion is to buy an entry-level SLR of Canon or Nikon that has a full manual mode.
Both Canon and Nikon's SLR lenses can be used on their digital SLR lines and Nikon lenses can also be used on D-SLRs from Fujifilm and Kodak.
Your idea of a manual focus camera might be OK from a creative viewpoint, but when you are taking party pictures or want to take some quick shots without a lot of fuss, I've found autofocus useful and necessary in order to capture the moment. Both Nikon and Canon allow you to defeat AF and switch the lenses to manual focus when you need to.
Another important thing is to buy from a fairly reputed dealer who won't try to bait-and-switch you or saddle you down with low quality 'accessories' as part of your special purchase deal. I recommend B & H Photo and Video or Adorama
B & H has the Canon EOS Rebel GII with a beginner's lens on sale for $199.95, and the Nikon N55 with a slightly better lens for $229.95
If you have a little more money to spend, I'd recommend you get one of these SLR bodies with a slightly more decent lens, such as a 28-105 F3.5-4.5. In my experience I've found that my lenses are the bottleneck rather than the capabilities of the body. Invest in a decent lens or lenses up-front and you can be a lot more productive and creative from the start.
64 bit processors are all fine and dandy, but what I'd like to see are more 64 bit, 66/100/133Mhz PCI bus slots on motherboards. Yes, Id like to put my gigabit NIC, my IEEE1394b storage silo and my Ultra320 RAID scratch volume on my 64 bit machine please. The KT800 chipset doesn't seem to cut it in this regard. Kudos to Apple for doing this with the (higher end) PowerMac G5s. Now that's a machine I drool over.
And what choice do they have? It's either take the job or be unemployed and have no money food etc, and hope that your familiy can support you. (Welfare? doesn't exist of course)
What makes you think that IBM are even looking for the best talent?
Whatever level of talent they require, they can't get away with paying a 'sweatshop wage' if they want to retain their people. They might be able to find inexperienced or untalented people to work for them at relatively low wages for maybe 6 months at a time, but once these employees get some experience at IBM under their belt, they will be able to command a much better price and will leave in short order.
How much bargaining power in the job market do you think these Indian workers have?
you seem to be woefully misinformed about the Indian job market. The number one concern of employers is how to retain their employees for more that 6 months due to aggressive recruiting techniques and incentives from competitors.
Check out Monster India,
Naukri or
Career India for a clue, or just look at the results for this Google search.
This argument is so stupid it hardly justifies a rebuttal. Nobody is being forced to labour in an IBM sweatshop in India. IBM will have to pay top-dollar in Indian wages in order to attract the best talent. IT professsionals in India are already being paid quite well relative to their counterparts in other fields. (hence the mad scramble by most Indians to get any possible qualification in IT so they can get on the gravy train.) You can be assured that Indian employees of IBM can not only afford healthcare, but also cars and nice apartments.
Err... not sure where you're getting this idea from. Here's a quote from the XFree86 4.3 release notes for the radeon module:
radeon is a XFree86 driver for ATI RADEON based video cards. It contains full support for 8, 15, 16 and 24 bit pixel depths, dual-head setup, flat panel, hardware 2D acceleration, hardware 3D acceleration (except R300 cards), hardware cursor, XV extension, Xinerama extension.
Sure sounds like 3d is supported for a lot of different kinds of radeons.
ScottForbes said: China and India may have pockets of technological expertise, but they are not "caught up" in any meaningful sense -- they are not inventing radical new technologies or approaching first-world levels of infrastructure, health care or political stability. It will be a long, long time, measured in centuries, before either country equals the U.S. in an economic, scientific or military sense, even if the U.S. stops advancing.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works ye mighty and despair!
- Shelley, Ozymandias
Look up the quote. You might find it interesting.
China is economically about 10-15 years behind the US. India is about 20-25 years behind. Militarily, the US is overwhelmingly superior, but all that is required for an effective deterrent is a small fleet of nuclear missile subs, coupled with a reasonably convincing conventional defensive force. Around half the people driving the US technology industry are of Chinese and Indian origin. When the economies of these countries begin to be comparable with the US, the brain drain will stop and possibly reverse. The currently xenophobic and increasingly paranoid nature of US society and government will act as a catalyst.
Krishna
Re:Why haven't they? Because the culture is broken
on
Sun Sued Over H1-B Workers
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why is the parent modded up? It is merely spouting thinly veiled racist stereotypes. I am an Indian (and nominally a Hindu by birth). There is no such thing as a standard "disfunctional Indian Hindu culture" among Indians. It is similar to making the claim that Americans have a "loud, fat, Christian warmongering" culture. Indians, just like people of all other countries, come with a wide variety of mindsets. If Indians were merely sheep who followed management/leadership directives blindly, they would lack the initiative to run an advanced space program, independently develop nuclear technology or even remain a democracy for more than 50 years. The real reason why we're not seeing the next Microsoft or Intel start in India is that most Indians with the talent and initiative choose to start or join Silicon Valley firms, since India lacks a lot of the infrastructure necessary for these kinds of firms to be based in that country. Give India another 10 years to get its act together in terms of infrastructure and education, and I guarantee you'll see corporations comparable to Intel or Sony start up in India.
Does anyone know what the expected disc layout is? Does it pick up any AVI files in the root directory and play them or is there a well defined structure/index file? How are multiple languages, subtitles and menus handled? This info is necessary for standardisation on a uniform DiVX disc format.
Take an old mouse, pull a micro-switch off the circuit board (used for the button) and superglue a flat plastic plate to it. A very small amount of pressure on the plate will cause the switch to be depressed. You can hook up a fairly simple latch circuit to take this momentary contact input and trigger a relay hooked to an alarm. You could use a 555 IC with a regular relay or you could even use an off the shelf latch relay like The KL Type relay on this page.
I think the real forerunner of VR and cyberspace is found in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, written in 1966. Chillingly excellent story.
Why would you want to run DOS programs under Wine, when you have a leaner emulator that does just the job you want? Windows is running these programs in a virtual (emulated) DOS window anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean LBA48 is soon going to be obsolete?
Take a Sharp Zaurus C860.
Soup it up with an XScale 624MHz processor.
Add a USB 2.0 host port.
Sell it for $400.
Bonus points: stuff in a 40GB hard disk and sell it for $550.
I'd buy either of these in a heartbeat.
My killer app/feature is the USB 2.0 host to hook up things like my digital camera, external hard drive, USB keyboard, DVD burner, network dongle, etc (even all of these at the same time through a hub).
The Linux OS means I don't have to worry about the OS becoming obsolete and not having drivers for new hardware.
When I'm on vacation, I'd just take my digital SLR with one or 2 CF cards, one of these PDAs and a USB hard disk. I'd download my CF cards into the hard disk every night and not worry about storage capacity. Beats lugging a laptop around anyday.
Sharp, I hope you're listening and release the C9x0 series soon with a USB 2.0 host.
Krishna
Why would you say that? I would think that a signal originating from a nearby star, say within a 25 light-year radius of our position would be a lot more interesting than a signal from a million light years away. In the first case, we actually have a chance of direct contact. In the second, all we could hope for is that the aliens send us their version of the Encyclopaedia Galactica, and we'd have little hope of establishing round-trip communication (unless we invent some kind of FTL communication or drive.)
Krishna
I think this is a very short sighted view.
If other countries stopped outsourcing to India, India would scarcely be able to grow at the 6-8% per year that it has been doing and expects to continue doing.
Without outsourcing, the Indian market is currently nowhere near sufficient to support all the technically skilled manpower that is already employed and continues to come out of its colleges at current wage levels.
Outsourcing is not sufficient in the long run and India will need to move up the value chain, but it cannot suddenly aspire to being a technological leader and innovator without the hard work, struggle and drudgery that precedes it, especially when a benevolent superpower isn't pouring billions and billions of dollars into the economy as happened with Japan and Germany.
BTW, there is nothing unfair in being paid less than the minimum wage in another country, as long as the wage being paid is fair in the country where the worker is. This is obviously the case, as otherwise there would be nobody working at this call center near your house.
Krishna
I bought an Epson PM-940 printer in Japan. When I tried installing the printer driver in English Windows XP, it spat out an error that said something like 'Invalid Environment' and quit.
Unfortunately, this model has no direct equivalent in the English speaking world, and I'm still trying to get it to work under Linux.
Hopefully Mandrake 10 with a new version of gimp-print drivers (which say they support the PM-940) will solve the issue.
Krishna
Yes, you had to kiss the goddess exactly 3 times before you could make love to her. Any less and she wouldn't let you, any more and she'd faint!
(Lord, What a geek I am!)
Krishna
It's possibly Battlestar. Although most of the action takes place on a tropical planet, you have to make your way out of a doomed spaceship (the Battlestar) first. The source for this and a whole bunch more 'interactive fiction' can be found at The Interactive Fiction Archive, specifically here.
Krishna
I've been using CDs from Crash Recovery Kit for Linux for a while, for both crash recovery (obviously), and for quickly booting up Linux on assorted machines for debugging, network connectivity or other tasks.
Krishna
Slashdot 'Get Karma Quick' scheme:
1. Post bigoted and ill-substantiated rant on Indians and outsourcing.
2. Wait for insecure and disgruntled moderators to mod up.
3. Profit! (get karma boost)
Krishna
>> You dont need nuclear weapons for that. Look at Japan. Heck even cuba doesnt have nuclear weapons. They all manage to stand up to US "bullying". And now after being nuclear power also, successive Indian govts vie (with pakistan) to be "better friend" of US rather than saying anything against their "bullying tactics".
Japan is virtually a colony of the west. Their constitution (whose drafting was overseen by the US) does not allow their military an offensive role, so they depend on the US for their external security. They have a colonial mindset where everything American and Western is preferred and many of their women prefer caucasian men
Cuba only survives because Castro has been extremely quiet after the fall of the Soviet Union and the US has bigger things to worry about.
>> There were many reports pointing the lack of safety in Indian nuclear power plants including some official/semiofficial agency report.
You mean like this, this, this, this, this or this?
Krishna
My suggestion is to buy an entry-level SLR of Canon or Nikon that has a full manual mode.
Both Canon and Nikon's SLR lenses can be used on their digital SLR lines and Nikon lenses can also be used on D-SLRs from Fujifilm and Kodak.
Your idea of a manual focus camera might be OK from a creative viewpoint, but when you are taking party pictures or want to take some quick shots without a lot of fuss, I've found autofocus useful and necessary in order to capture the moment. Both Nikon and Canon allow you to defeat AF and switch the lenses to manual focus when you need to.
For Canon SLRs, look at http://www.canoneos.com/index.html
For Nikon, look at http://www.nikonusa.com/template.php?cat=1&grp =6
Another important thing is to buy from a fairly reputed dealer who won't try to bait-and-switch you or saddle you down with low quality 'accessories' as part of your special purchase deal.
I recommend B & H Photo and Video or Adorama
B & H has the Canon EOS Rebel GII with a beginner's lens on sale for $199.95, and the
Nikon N55 with a slightly better lens for $229.95
If you have a little more money to spend, I'd recommend you get one of these SLR bodies with a slightly more decent lens, such as a 28-105 F3.5-4.5. In my experience I've found that my lenses are the bottleneck rather than the capabilities of the body. Invest in a decent lens or lenses up-front and you can be a lot more productive and creative from the start.
Krishna
This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "extracting information"!
64 bit processors are all fine and dandy, but what I'd like to see are more 64 bit, 66/100/133Mhz PCI bus slots on motherboards.
Yes, Id like to put my gigabit NIC, my IEEE1394b storage silo and my Ultra320 RAID scratch volume on my 64 bit machine please. The KT800 chipset doesn't seem to cut it in this regard.
Kudos to Apple for doing this with the (higher end) PowerMac G5s. Now that's a machine I drool over.
Krishna
What choice do they have? Lets see, they could work for Sun, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola, Yahoo, Adobe, Hughes, EDS or Oracle, to name a few employers in India.
Whatever level of talent they require, they can't get away with paying a 'sweatshop wage' if they want to retain their people. They might be able to find inexperienced or untalented people to work for them at relatively low wages for maybe 6 months at a time, but once these employees get some experience at IBM under their belt, they will be able to command a much better price and will leave in short order.you seem to be woefully misinformed about the Indian job market. The number one concern of employers is how to retain their employees for more that 6 months due to aggressive recruiting techniques and incentives from competitors. Check out Monster India, Naukri or Career India for a clue, or just look at the results for this Google search.
Krishna
This argument is so stupid it hardly justifies a rebuttal.
Nobody is being forced to labour in an IBM sweatshop in India. IBM will have to pay top-dollar in Indian wages in order to attract the best talent. IT professsionals in India are already being paid quite well relative to their counterparts in other fields. (hence the mad scramble by most Indians to get any possible qualification in IT so they can get on the gravy train.) You can be assured that Indian employees of IBM can not only afford healthcare, but also cars and nice apartments.
Krishna
Bangladesh is not an Indian city. It is an entirely different country. There is no tech sector worth speaking about in Bangladesh.
Krishna
Here's a quote from the XFree86 4.3 release notes for the radeon module:
Sure sounds like 3d is supported for a lot of different kinds of radeons.
Krishna
ScottForbes said:
China and India may have pockets of technological expertise, but they are not "caught up" in any meaningful sense -- they are not inventing radical new technologies or approaching first-world levels of infrastructure, health care or political stability. It will be a long, long time, measured in centuries, before either country equals the U.S. in an economic, scientific or military sense, even if the U.S. stops advancing.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works ye mighty and despair!
- Shelley, Ozymandias
Look up the quote. You might find it interesting.
China is economically about 10-15 years behind the US. India is about 20-25 years behind.
Militarily, the US is overwhelmingly superior, but all that is required for an effective deterrent is a small fleet of nuclear missile subs, coupled with a reasonably convincing conventional defensive force.
Around half the people driving the US technology industry are of Chinese and Indian origin. When the economies of these countries begin to be comparable with the US, the brain drain will stop and possibly reverse. The currently xenophobic and increasingly paranoid nature of US society and government will act as a catalyst.
Krishna
Why is the parent modded up? It is merely spouting thinly veiled racist stereotypes.
I am an Indian (and nominally a Hindu by birth). There is no such thing as a standard "disfunctional Indian Hindu culture" among Indians. It is similar to making the claim that Americans have a "loud, fat, Christian warmongering" culture.
Indians, just like people of all other countries, come with a wide variety of mindsets.
If Indians were merely sheep who followed management/leadership directives blindly, they would lack the initiative to run an advanced space program, independently develop nuclear technology or even remain a democracy for more than 50 years.
The real reason why we're not seeing the next Microsoft or Intel start in India is that most Indians with the talent and initiative choose to start or join Silicon Valley firms, since India lacks a lot of the infrastructure necessary for these kinds of firms to be based in that country.
Give India another 10 years to get its act together in terms of infrastructure and education, and I guarantee you'll see corporations comparable to Intel or Sony start up in India.
Krishna
Does anyone know what the expected disc layout is?
Does it pick up any AVI files in the root directory and play them or is there a well defined structure/index file? How are multiple languages, subtitles and menus handled? This info is necessary for standardisation on a uniform DiVX disc format.
Krishna
Take an old mouse, pull a micro-switch off the circuit board (used for the button) and superglue a flat plastic plate to it. A very small amount of pressure on the plate will cause the switch to be depressed. You can hook up a fairly simple latch circuit to take this momentary contact input and trigger a relay hooked to an alarm.
You could use a 555 IC with a regular relay or
you could even use an off the shelf latch relay like The KL Type relay on this page.
Krishna
USB 2.0 outperforms ieee1394a (480Mbps vs. 400Mbps).
FYI, here are the theoretical peak transfer rates of various buses.
USB 1.0 => 12Mbps
SCSI 1 = 40Mbps (5MBps)
SCSI 2 => 80Mbps (10MBps)
Ultra SCSI => 160Mbps (20MBps)
ATA33 => 264Mbps (33MBps)
Ultra Wide SCSI => 320Mbps (40MBps)
ieee1394a => 400Mbps
USB 2.0 => 480Mbps
ATA66 => 528Mbps (66MBps)
ATA100 => 800Mbps (100MBps)
Krishna
I think the real forerunner of VR and cyberspace is found in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, written in 1966. Chillingly excellent story.
Krishna
The Home Logic UR362 has this feature. Check out the bottom of page 3 on the review.
Krishna
It's called dosemu.
Why would you want to run DOS programs under Wine, when you have a leaner emulator that does just the job you want? Windows is running these programs in a virtual (emulated) DOS window anyway.
Krishna