I bought a Palm III last year, on ebay. Things Palm has to do to get me to buy another one:
Lower price - compare the functionality to a CE device. Mind you, I'm never going to buy one of those peices of crap, nor do I want or need that kind of functionality in a Palm, but there's no justification for the price.
Smaller form-factor; baby, if you can put the features of the III (upgradability, accessories, backwards compatability) into the V's form-factor, you'll have a winner. Forget color! Only ONE reason I can think of for color, and that's maps, and for that, you really need gobs more memory. Really. Even the V is really too big for most people to conveniently carry around, but DON'T shrink the screen. ultimately, a credit-card form-factor would be best, like those wallet calculators - only make the screen the size of the whole thing.
User-replacable writing pad; I wasn't clued into the fact that I needed to put a piece of scotch tape over the writing area of my Palm III. End result: scratched-up screen, Palm asking to take my device for 3 weeks and bill me $100 to replace a peice of.2mm acetate. Giant fucking load of bullshit - makes me not want to ever do business with you again. If this is a part subject to wear, then let the user replace it cheaply.
Functionality? The desktop software sucks. You need a sketch-pad software so people can sketch quick diagrams or maps. That's a gimme, not a value-add. 160x160 is insufficient. 320x320? getting there. 640x640? We have the technology, we can rebuild him, the price-point is already there. I also think that there should be MUCH more pager integration going on, with a wider variety of vendors. I'm a gadget guy, I love gadgets, but at some point, clipping more things to my belt than Batman becomes tiresome - I'm sick of carrying a pager AND a palm-pilot, and there are so many cool things that could be done with integrating a text-pager, fuck the internet, that's lame. Just let me download stock quotes, weather, and news every hour like my text pager, automatically, from a satellite. Why is that so hard?
Drop functionality; Dude, the email feature is weak. Unless you can provide a viable competitive email client on the PC side to Outlook, the current offering sucks. There isn't enough memory to store my emails consistently without jamming my synchs, and composing email on the Palm is pretty pointless if I can't send, and paying for a Palm VII with monthly service fee just isn't worth being able to email. I save email for my desktop. If you could include a decent email client with your desktop software, integrate it with the schdule stuff, like Outlook does, make it 100% outlook compatible so I can use it, and still function with the others in my office who use Outlook, and synch all that to my Palm, that had enough memory, and enough resolution to actually display enough text on screen, that would be cool. But until you do that, it's useless, why bother?
In short, I'm unexited by Palm, but it's still by far, the best solution to the personal info management problem there is.
I got sick of Netscape 4.72 crashing, hosing font tables, misrendering pages.
I downloaded Netscape 6 beta. Was not impressed. I downloaded Mozilla M16. It's fucking more stable than Netscape 4.72. Although it's a little quirky about signing into sites, I have to go out and go back in to get the authenticated pages for some reason.
I say that good engineering is worth the wait. For the impatient ones, there's IE 5.5 - enjoy.
oh, it's about the money all right. The money they spend on hyping and promoting crap like n'synch, and not getting the sales they expect because the consumers aren't suckers anymore - because they heard it on Napster first, and decided not to buy because they know it sucks.
Saying that we have a right to return the CD is no excuse. We should have a right to fully sample before the purchase. It costs them NOTHING, and inthe long run, actually benefits them, because there's a big difference between a satisfied customer who will buy another CD every week for the next 5 years, and a seriously pissed-off customer who bought a peice of shit Kid Rock CD, and who is afraid to waste another $20 on another piece of shit. A happy, informed consumer, is a good consumer. That's a profitable relationship.
oops, I did it again. downloaded your song, and listened for free, ooh baby baby - yeah, you think I'm in love, will pay $20 bucks I'm not that gullible!
. . . in short while the exact physics may have been off (damn, I should have paid more attention in Art School), the essence of what I said was correct - the neutrinos and photons are generated at the same time, and travel at the same speed, but the neutrinos get here first because they got out first. The photons were trapped during the first stages.
Why wasn't I moderated up? I need more karma. I deserve more karma. I'm not a fucking Signal11 wannabe dammit!
I thought that the reason neutrino bursts seem to show up prior to the photons from a nova was because the fusion process releases neutrinos, and the nova is an accelerated fusion process, that begins in the core of the star, the neutrinos escape through the outer shell of gasses and propagate from there on out, but the photons are blocked by the outer shell, or reflected inwards by magnetism/gravity, or simply aren't coming from a wide-enough area, yet. It's several minutes later that the reaction defeats inertia and expands outwards, blowing off the outer layers of the star, causing the plasma to expand outward, and emit the photons (and more neutrinos).
John said: "Reviewers are dependent on getting new products in advance of their official release. "
Jafac said: "yeah, like Junkies are dependent on getting a new shot of heroin every day."
If some trade rag with ethical journalistic standards gets scooped by an unethical one, that's too bad - sooner or later, readers are going to realize that the other magazine has biased reviews, and more timely doesn't mean shit if it's WRONG INFORMATION.
That's right, like my post from yesterday said; My company has a whole department of people whose job it is to "manage trade magazine relationships".
The thirst for a scoop drives the trade rags to contact the vendor for an early copy of a product, and the trade rag gets babysitting throughout the review process, that a normal user would not, and so does not encounter any bugs. How would a review look if the guy who reviewed (for example) Quicken and MS Money, went through all the features in detail of MS Money, but for the Quicken section just said - "I couldn't get it installed, because the installer kept crashing on me halfway through"? I'm sure Intuit wouldn't like that very much and would bitch.
If this was the standard by which magazine reviews were done, you'd see some very quick action on the part of the software companies to make DAMN sure their products worked for everyone out of the box with no special handholding.
Again, I blame the trade press. And by extension, Reagan's deregulation of the industry back in the 80's.
This really isn't an ethical dilemma for nVidia. Come to think of it, it's their JOB to ensure a favorable press image. They have a duty to their shareholders.
The ethical dilemma comes in for the reviewers and trade press. If a reviewee refuses to support the reviewer, then the reviewer should make a mention of that in the review: "Well, here's a review, a shootout between the ATI Radeon, and Voodoo 5, but unfortunately, ATI didn't supply us with product, so I guess they're going to lose. Too bad ATI doesn't understand the concept of Time To Market." If the trade rag wants a scoop, and is willing to kiss-up to the vendor for said scoop, or advertising revenue for that matter, then they have to confront a little thing that seems to no longer exist: Journalistic Integrity.
heh, if you look at the PRICE of the box, you can see that they originally intended to have a Radeon, substituted cheaper hw at the last minute, and didn't lower the price accordingly.
Of course, at that price, you can also tell it was intended to be a 4-way 500MHz G4 with 256 megs of RAM.
I'll make a few generalizations as to this "Apple coverage on Slashdot" phenomenon.
Mainly speaking, Slashdot's audience is people who consider themselves geeks. People who are generally technophiles. The audience has been diverse, but has gotten more and more homogenized throught the purifying flamewars.
Technophiles like technology. They tend to like technology for technology's sake. They swallow the industrialization viewpoint that technology will save mankind. That as mankind progresses through time, their intellect creates things that improves life, in general, and advances the race as a whole - towards some utopian future. Many fear that in the process, we've been diverted from utopia to distopia, by narrow-minded greedy corporate profit-seekers. This may or may not be true - but conspiracy theories abound on Slashdot. Somewhere along the way, the people with the money, the people that run corporations, figured out that if you don't put the brakes on technological advancement, you don't maximize the profits you gain along the way. The only way to put the brakes on technological advancement is to eliminate the competition that fosters, no, *demands* it. So when you get a couple of huge monopolies like Intel and Microsoft in charge of the main forefront of the technical advancement (at least how it's perceived, the Personal Computer *is* that), there's the perception that technological progress has been slowed, or halted, due to corporations seeking to maximize profit gain by the process. Market power does this. So it's no wonder that Slashdot people root for the underdog. Miguel says Unix sucks. Maybe he's right, but Unix is the underdog, and the last-best-hope for the technolgical revolution. Whether or not Open Source and Linux are the best thing, technically, they represent a return to competition, resistance to the hegemony. I think most technophiles recognize that competition is good, spurs technology, steers us closer towards the utopian goal. Most technophiles seem to recognize Apple, ultimately as a threat to competition, if it were to gain too much marketshare. But right now, they're an attack dog on a leash. I know I'd like to see Apple flourish, for the only reason, that I'd like to see the PPC platform proliferate, and I'd like to see CHIRP become a major player in the PC market. I root for Apple, because they're the only foothold CHIRP has left. If Apple dies, the PPC dies, the thought that any alternative hardware platform is viable (Alpha, Transmeta, SPARC, hell, ANYTHING) dies with it. Intel continues to dominate (forget AMD, will ya?) and maybe Linux becomes the OS of the future, replacing Windows, maybe it doesn't. Just keep in mind, that in the long run, closed source equals controlled Intellectual Property, equals maximized profit. Open Source is not in a software vendor's best interest, if the consumer is not educated. If all other hardare platforms fail, and are overrun by Intel, and if Linux becomes the primary OS, and all competing OSes are shut out eventually, Linux will slowly become proprietary, by hook or crook. Because that is the way this game is played.
Rooting for the underdog keeps competition alive. Competition is the way to a technological utopia. Monopolies (or oligopolies) are the way to a utopia, for the rich and powerful only. A hellhole for the rest of us. Just beware, that the underdog can sometimes become the Alphadog, and bite the hand that feeds it. Technophiles are a perceptive bunch, so I doubt the tide will not turn when or if that began to happen. I remember back in the DOS 1.x days, Microsoft was everyman's hero, because they freed people from the proprietary hell that was dumb-terminals and mainframes. There was hope for the future. We just didn't know who we handed the keys over to yet.
I agree, the dual proc G4 is pretty much right on price-wise. But did you price compare that high-end cube? way out of the ballpark.
I think these things were originally supposed to have the Radeon, and at the last minute, don't (whether that's ATI-spite, or it's just not ready, I dunno), and they weren't able to do something about the price lists. Or maybe they're just greedy. Apple greedy? no way!
Personally, when I heard the story about the cube, I was in the market for buying a new machine for my wife. When I heard the price, I decided: iMac. Cube? No fucking way.
No, it IS a big deal, because given the opportunity to fix it, Microsoft did not.
And on the tail of several serious other exploits, which Microsoft DENIED were bugs, but instead insisted were valuable, necessary features (like the fucking bullshit SHS thing).
This isn't a case of "he who has not sinned cast the first stone". This is the case of a marketing department making engineering decisions that adversely affects hundreds of millions of people across the world. And laughing all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
don't count on it. Motorola seems to be having problems with clock speed ramping lately.
(probably fucking Bill Walker's fault again)
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I have to agree with this.
.2mm acetate. Giant fucking load of bullshit - makes me not want to ever do business with you again. If this is a part subject to wear, then let the user replace it cheaply.
I bought a Palm III last year, on ebay. Things Palm has to do to get me to buy another one:
Lower price - compare the functionality to a CE device. Mind you, I'm never going to buy one of those peices of crap, nor do I want or need that kind of functionality in a Palm, but there's no justification for the price.
Smaller form-factor; baby, if you can put the features of the III (upgradability, accessories, backwards compatability) into the V's form-factor, you'll have a winner. Forget color! Only ONE reason I can think of for color, and that's maps, and for that, you really need gobs more memory. Really. Even the V is really too big for most people to conveniently carry around, but DON'T shrink the screen. ultimately, a credit-card form-factor would be best, like those wallet calculators - only make the screen the size of the whole thing.
User-replacable writing pad; I wasn't clued into the fact that I needed to put a piece of scotch tape over the writing area of my Palm III. End result: scratched-up screen, Palm asking to take my device for 3 weeks and bill me $100 to replace a peice of
Functionality? The desktop software sucks. You need a sketch-pad software so people can sketch quick diagrams or maps. That's a gimme, not a value-add. 160x160 is insufficient. 320x320? getting there. 640x640? We have the technology, we can rebuild him, the price-point is already there. I also think that there should be MUCH more pager integration going on, with a wider variety of vendors. I'm a gadget guy, I love gadgets, but at some point, clipping more things to my belt than Batman becomes tiresome - I'm sick of carrying a pager AND a palm-pilot, and there are so many cool things that could be done with integrating a text-pager, fuck the internet, that's lame. Just let me download stock quotes, weather, and news every hour like my text pager, automatically, from a satellite. Why is that so hard?
Drop functionality;
Dude, the email feature is weak. Unless you can provide a viable competitive email client on the PC side to Outlook, the current offering sucks. There isn't enough memory to store my emails consistently without jamming my synchs, and composing email on the Palm is pretty pointless if I can't send, and paying for a Palm VII with monthly service fee just isn't worth being able to email. I save email for my desktop. If you could include a decent email client with your desktop software, integrate it with the schdule stuff, like Outlook does, make it 100% outlook compatible so I can use it, and still function with the others in my office who use Outlook, and synch all that to my Palm, that had enough memory, and enough resolution to actually display enough text on screen, that would be cool. But until you do that, it's useless, why bother?
In short, I'm unexited by Palm, but it's still by far, the best solution to the personal info management problem there is.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I got sick of Netscape 4.72 crashing, hosing font tables, misrendering pages.
I downloaded Netscape 6 beta. Was not impressed. I downloaded Mozilla M16. It's fucking more stable than Netscape 4.72. Although it's a little quirky about signing into sites, I have to go out and go back in to get the authenticated pages for some reason.
I say that good engineering is worth the wait. For the impatient ones, there's IE 5.5 - enjoy.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
oh, it's about the money all right. The money they spend on hyping and promoting crap like n'synch, and not getting the sales they expect because the consumers aren't suckers anymore - because they heard it on Napster first, and decided not to buy because they know it sucks.
Saying that we have a right to return the CD is no excuse. We should have a right to fully sample before the purchase. It costs them NOTHING, and inthe long run, actually benefits them, because there's a big difference between a satisfied customer who will buy another CD every week for the next 5 years, and a seriously pissed-off customer who bought a peice of shit Kid Rock CD, and who is afraid to waste another $20 on another piece of shit.
A happy, informed consumer, is a good consumer. That's a profitable relationship.
But I guess they want to keep their blowjobs.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
oops, I did it again.
downloaded your song,
and listened for free,
ooh baby baby -
yeah, you think I'm in love,
will pay $20 bucks
I'm not that gullible!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
. . . in short while the exact physics may have been off (damn, I should have paid more attention in Art School), the essence of what I said was correct - the neutrinos and photons are generated at the same time, and travel at the same speed, but the neutrinos get here first because they got out first. The photons were trapped during the first stages.
Why wasn't I moderated up? I need more karma. I deserve more karma. I'm not a fucking Signal11 wannabe dammit!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I thought that the reason neutrino bursts seem to show up prior to the photons from a nova was because the fusion process releases neutrinos, and the nova is an accelerated fusion process, that begins in the core of the star, the neutrinos escape through the outer shell of gasses and propagate from there on out, but the photons are blocked by the outer shell, or reflected inwards by magnetism/gravity, or simply aren't coming from a wide-enough area, yet. It's several minutes later that the reaction defeats inertia and expands outwards, blowing off the outer layers of the star, causing the plasma to expand outward, and emit the photons (and more neutrinos).
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
No, the work didn't slow down, time did when they made light go faster than light yesterday. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
John said: "Reviewers are dependent on getting new products in advance of their official release. "
Jafac said: "yeah, like Junkies are dependent on getting a new shot of heroin every day."
If some trade rag with ethical journalistic standards gets scooped by an unethical one, that's too bad - sooner or later, readers are going to realize that the other magazine has biased reviews, and more timely doesn't mean shit if it's WRONG INFORMATION.
Unless the readers are stupid.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
That's right, like my post from yesterday said;
My company has a whole department of people whose job it is to "manage trade magazine relationships".
The thirst for a scoop drives the trade rags to contact the vendor for an early copy of a product, and the trade rag gets babysitting throughout the review process, that a normal user would not, and so does not encounter any bugs. How would a review look if the guy who reviewed (for example) Quicken and MS Money, went through all the features in detail of MS Money, but for the Quicken section just said - "I couldn't get it installed, because the installer kept crashing on me halfway through"? I'm sure Intuit wouldn't like that very much and would bitch.
If this was the standard by which magazine reviews were done, you'd see some very quick action on the part of the software companies to make DAMN sure their products worked for everyone out of the box with no special handholding.
Again, I blame the trade press. And by extension, Reagan's deregulation of the industry back in the 80's.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
This really isn't an ethical dilemma for nVidia. Come to think of it, it's their JOB to ensure a favorable press image. They have a duty to their shareholders.
The ethical dilemma comes in for the reviewers and trade press. If a reviewee refuses to support the reviewer, then the reviewer should make a mention of that in the review: "Well, here's a review, a shootout between the ATI Radeon, and Voodoo 5, but unfortunately, ATI didn't supply us with product, so I guess they're going to lose. Too bad ATI doesn't understand the concept of Time To Market."
If the trade rag wants a scoop, and is willing to kiss-up to the vendor for said scoop, or advertising revenue for that matter, then they have to confront a little thing that seems to no longer exist: Journalistic Integrity.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
DAMN you're good, grasshopper!
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
everybody does it. It's been this way for as long as I remember. Hardware vendors, software vendors, they all do it.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
heh, if you look at the PRICE of the box, you can see that they originally intended to have a Radeon, substituted cheaper hw at the last minute, and didn't lower the price accordingly.
Of course, at that price, you can also tell it was intended to be a 4-way 500MHz G4 with 256 megs of RAM.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
the iMac also has no fan.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I'll make a few generalizations as to this "Apple coverage on Slashdot" phenomenon.
Mainly speaking, Slashdot's audience is people who consider themselves geeks. People who are generally technophiles. The audience has been diverse, but has gotten more and more homogenized throught the purifying flamewars.
Technophiles like technology. They tend to like technology for technology's sake. They swallow the industrialization viewpoint that technology will save mankind. That as mankind progresses through time, their intellect creates things that improves life, in general, and advances the race as a whole - towards some utopian future. Many fear that in the process, we've been diverted from utopia to distopia, by narrow-minded greedy corporate profit-seekers. This may or may not be true - but conspiracy theories abound on Slashdot. Somewhere along the way, the people with the money, the people that run corporations, figured out that if you don't put the brakes on technological advancement, you don't maximize the profits you gain along the way. The only way to put the brakes on technological advancement is to eliminate the competition that fosters, no, *demands* it. So when you get a couple of huge monopolies like Intel and Microsoft in charge of the main forefront of the technical advancement (at least how it's perceived, the Personal Computer *is* that), there's the perception that technological progress has been slowed, or halted, due to corporations seeking to maximize profit gain by the process. Market power does this.
So it's no wonder that Slashdot people root for the underdog. Miguel says Unix sucks. Maybe he's right, but Unix is the underdog, and the last-best-hope for the technolgical revolution. Whether or not Open Source and Linux are the best thing, technically, they represent a return to competition, resistance to the hegemony. I think most technophiles recognize that competition is good, spurs technology, steers us closer towards the utopian goal. Most technophiles seem to recognize Apple, ultimately as a threat to competition, if it were to gain too much marketshare. But right now, they're an attack dog on a leash. I know I'd like to see Apple flourish, for the only reason, that I'd like to see the PPC platform proliferate, and I'd like to see CHIRP become a major player in the PC market. I root for Apple, because they're the only foothold CHIRP has left. If Apple dies, the PPC dies, the thought that any alternative hardware platform is viable (Alpha, Transmeta, SPARC, hell, ANYTHING) dies with it. Intel continues to dominate (forget AMD, will ya?) and maybe Linux becomes the OS of the future, replacing Windows, maybe it doesn't. Just keep in mind, that in the long run, closed source equals controlled Intellectual Property, equals maximized profit. Open Source is not in a software vendor's best interest, if the consumer is not educated. If all other hardare platforms fail, and are overrun by Intel, and if Linux becomes the primary OS, and all competing OSes are shut out eventually, Linux will slowly become proprietary, by hook or crook. Because that is the way this game is played.
Rooting for the underdog keeps competition alive. Competition is the way to a technological utopia. Monopolies (or oligopolies) are the way to a utopia, for the rich and powerful only. A hellhole for the rest of us.
Just beware, that the underdog can sometimes become the Alphadog, and bite the hand that feeds it. Technophiles are a perceptive bunch, so I doubt the tide will not turn when or if that began to happen. I remember back in the DOS 1.x days, Microsoft was everyman's hero, because they freed people from the proprietary hell that was dumb-terminals and mainframes. There was hope for the future. We just didn't know who we handed the keys over to yet.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
I agree, the dual proc G4 is pretty much right on price-wise. But did you price compare that high-end cube? way out of the ballpark.
I think these things were originally supposed to have the Radeon, and at the last minute, don't (whether that's ATI-spite, or it's just not ready, I dunno), and they weren't able to do something about the price lists. Or maybe they're just greedy. Apple greedy? no way!
Personally, when I heard the story about the cube, I was in the market for buying a new machine for my wife. When I heard the price, I decided: iMac. Cube? No fucking way.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
"I only believe in a fair fight when I can't rig it in my favor."
-Grimjack
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Yeah, hire a technician with a van full of TEMPEST stuff to sit outside your opponent's house, view his monitor, and confirm that he's cheating. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
Moto didn't botch the PowerPC production run.
Bill Walker.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
it's nothing more than a FUD/vapor/pissing contest.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
This is not propaganda. Microsoft is empirically bad.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
okay, can we say "Findings of Fact?" I knew you could.
This bullshit attitude that we have a choice in the matter has been proven FALSE in a court of law.
Microsoft has illegally driven competitors from the marketplace. There is no choice.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
No, it IS a big deal, because given the opportunity to fix it, Microsoft did not.
And on the tail of several serious other exploits, which Microsoft DENIED were bugs, but instead insisted were valuable, necessary features (like the fucking bullshit SHS thing).
This isn't a case of "he who has not sinned cast the first stone". This is the case of a marketing department making engineering decisions that adversely affects hundreds of millions of people across the world. And laughing all the way to the bank.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
You'd think that a company like Consumer's Union would be doing this.
Then again, I guess Ralph Nader is too busy running for president these days.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!