As much hype as there has been about these restrictions, I don't think I've heard of even one case of somebody getting their service terminated for running an ftp or http server.
You have now. I had my MediaOne service suspended without notice for this. Get this: I discovered a hacker on my system. (He came in through a hole in imapd; I've since locked down security fairly tightly.) He left a pretty good trace of his activity. One thing I discovered is that he'd also cracked a number of other MediaOne sites. So, I wrote MediaOne and told them, "Watch it. You've been compromised." And, in good faith, I gave them all the traces and logs I had.
A few days later I found my service disconnected. When I called them they told me the reason was "because I was running a server." Well, isn't that a nice way to treat someone who's on your side against the hackers!
I asked if they would reconnect my service if I told them I'd take down my "server". They said yes. So I told them that. I didn't do it, of course, but I told them...
Now, reading this story, I'm really worried. You see, I'm on vacation a thousand miles from home... And, as of this morning, I can't telnet in! Is this just another AT&T (formerly MediaOne) service outage, or something far more sinister? Guess I'll find out in a week.
Looking over the FAQ for this King story, I see that it's $1 a pop (a mere few thousand words each time) for the first three installments, and $2.50 an ep after that, up to seven or eight payments total. That's $13-15.50 US for an approximately 350 page novel [...]
This marketting model is no different from what King did with a printed book a few years ago. Remember The Green Mile? Originally published as a six-part serial at $2.99 apiece. So the Loyal Reader winds up paying $18 for what amounts to a thick paperback. (The complete series is now collected in a single 536-page volume for $7.99.)
Now, serialized works are fine, but I'm certainly not going to pay a premium for the privilege of waiting six months to finish the thing! Publish it as a serial in a magazine, or charge something like $1/each, and then I'll consider it.
This is just the electronic equivalent. Again, charge something reasonable and I might consider it.
BTW, I'd love to find a good e-book reader that is approximately the same size as a paperback, with a high-res, high-contrast display. My Palm is nice, but the display positively blows chunks for reading anything longer than Iambe's column each day.
If you don't have the ability to do this there are general rules to follow as to what version of a browser supports what and how well. Most of that information can be found on the web, if not on netscape.com & microsoft.com.
Is there something wrong with following these rules? Or these if you're concerned about compatibility with older browsers? (Or even these rules, but that's taking things a bit too far...)
Then again, I'm an old fogey who remembers the days when the point of HTML was to allow the browser to render content according to the terminal's capabilities and user's preferences, not to specify the text font and exact pixel location of each image. Bah! Humbug!
Just out of curiosity: how many perl programmers here upgraded old perl scripts to use Perl 5 features when Perl 5 came out?
I didn't attempt a wholesale upgrade of my Perl4 scripts. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! However, once I got Srinivasan's Advanced Perl Programming and figured out how to really make use of all those cool new features, my scripts take serious advantage of Perl5's new features. In particular I make heavy use of references and complex data types, and I love the IO::Socket and Net::* modules!
Perl6 had better not break 99% of the legacy Perl4 and Perl5 code out there. I'd hate to have to convert a ton of scripts! But if it introduces useful new features I sure won't be shy about using them.
This is my biggest beef, too. I hate when a dialog pops up and steals focus while I'm tying. I end up sending half a dozen keystrokes to the dialog before my brain-to-finger buffer drains.:-) Heaven help me if one of those keys is a shortcut for a button on the dialog box!
Forget the intelligent agent nonsense. Just give me the ability to turn off the fscking pop-ups! I do like some notification of certain events. I like Outlook putting a little mail icon in my system tray, for example. I don't like it popping up a dialog box. And if I have something that's scrolling text that I want to keep an eye on while I do other things (running a compile, for example), I'll just arrange the windows so it's visible. Popup dialogs, especially those which steal focus, are evil.
Of course, then there's the other extreme. Some apps try to be nice by popping up dialogs at a lower depth. This will often put them behind another window, and with no button in the task bar. You have no indication at all that the app is waiting for you to click "OK" so it can get on with its job. At least well-behaved apps in Win98 can flash the taskbar button to let you know they want attention. That's a pretty good compromise.
TLD's by country make very little sense. Of what sense is geographic location of a domain server when talking about the internet?
Actually, TLDs by country make a lot of sense! As much as everyone tries to convince themselves that "the net is without borders", the fact of the matter is that it's not. Money, hard national currency, still changes hands for domain names. Squabbles arise over who can legitimately own which names, which can only be decided in a court of law. Who arbitrates the dispute over 'mcdonalds.com' when the McDonalds restaurant chain finds that a sheep rancher by the name of Angus McDonald in the Scottish highlands already owns it?
I say, get rid of the generic TLDs altogether. Assign TLDs by legal jurisdiction. If McDonalds restaurant wants a 'mcdonalds.???' address for each country they do business in, let them register with each country. If there's a conflict (Angus has already registered 'mcdonalds.uk') the dispute can be settled in the courts of the country that governs that domain.
As already pointed out, it's currently difficult to get anything added to the '.us' domain. Of course, that would have to change. Perhaps add '.com.us' for all the US commerical sites, keeping '.city.state.us' as it is. This means that we might end up with 'mcdonalds.com.us', 'mcdonalds.co.uk', and 'mcdonalds.fi' if the United Status, the United Kingdom, and Finland have different second-level naming conventions. So be it.
And there's nothing to say that a site registered as 'foobar.tm' needs to be physically located in Turkmenistan. You could still have a single machine anywhere on the planet simultaneously hosting 'foobar.tm', 'slashdot.us', and 'hotgrits.ca'. But any disputes over the 'foobar.tm' name get resolved in the Turkmenistan courts.
It's nice to think of the net as being without borders. Call me when it actually happens.
Except that it may well not be the end user who needs to know this. This is potentially more of the "treat the user as the admin" approach so common in Windows.
Fine, so set it up to alert the admin instead of the end user. The fact of the matter is that there currently isn't any way to get this sort of status info using 'lpd'. I don't care who it gets reported to, but we need a protocol that will report it to someone.
Q. How much does a complete, fully integrated SGI Reality Center solution cost? A.The cost is variable, depending upon the size of your facility and your need for custom applications development. SGI Reality Center facilities, complete with installation and integration, start at under U.S. $300,000.
I read a Bob Metcalfe article in InfoWorld where he proposed junking the.com,.org,.net, etc. TLDs and just keeping the country codes. I like this idea. Each country controls its own domain, and can apply whatever bizarre local interpretation of trademark law it has to its domain names. Corporations would need to register in every country in which they want a virtual presence.
The paperwork alone should keep cybersquatting to a minimum...
I find that it's not work that's taking up my time. My feeling is that if I'm working more than 40 hours a week (crunch time excluded) then my company needs to hire additional engineers. I generally leave on time.
The kids, on the other hand... Oy! I love 'em, and I love being with 'em. But it's work to look after a hyperactive (literally) seven-year-old and an inquisitive two-year-old. Most nights I crash shortly after I get them into bed. Little energy vampires, the lot of 'em!
I occasionally have to go out of town for a week at a time on business. Those days consist of a 12-hour debugging session, dinner, and maybe a little reading or TV. And my wife gripes because I'm getting a vacation!
So no, technology isn't robbing me of my life. Taking care of personal business at work via the web actually frees up my time and lets me spend more of it doing what I want to do.
We're only dismissive because it's basically finished. Let's see: lpr and Postscript. and smb if you need to use Windoze. Everything else is window-dressing.
Well, this is pretty exciting to those of us who actually make the printers... We make specialty industrial printers. IPP is nice in that status and printer capabilities can be returned from the printer. This means that conditions like paper out and ink levels can be reported back to the user. As far as I know, lpd and SMB can't do that. (If they can, let me know! I've got a nice inkjet attached to my Linux box at home, and I'd love to get it to report ink levels to the Win98 clients that print to it!)
Let's face it, printers today have more computing power than desktop machines did a few years ago. Let's treat them like the independent computers they are, rather than as some dumb peripheral plugged into an isolated machine.
I'm using Sprint PCS in the USA (Chicago area, actually) and find text messaging really handy. It could be a lot better, of course...
Many of my friends work for the same company where they have two-way text pagers with a tiny QWERTY keyboard. Most of them don't carry cellphones all the time (and when they do, it's just the 'on-call' phone they sometimes carry for work). They can send email to my phone, and I can send it to their pagers. This works great for low-priority messages -- anything we'd use email for if we were tied to our desks all day. For high-priority messages we just pick up the phone, of course. (Or send email that says, "Call me!":-)
The downside for me is that Sprint doesn't support email directly to the phone, nor does it support composing replies well. I have it set up so that I receive mail via SMS. Of course, SMS has a 100 character limit, which really bites. Especially when the 'From:' line and quoted text is counted. I ended up creating an email-to-SMS proxy that strips out the garbage, and also forwards the original text to my Yahoo account. So, if I need to I can connect to Yahoo and see the full text. And I have to connect to Yahoo to compose and send mail. Sprint charges by the minute for connect time (pay for a block of time up front, or pay about 35 cents/minute if you go over your time limit) and there's no way to compose messages offline. Talk about a cash cow for Sprint!
Entering text on the keypad really isn't bad, even without the predictive entry. It could be better, though. I have a Sanyo 4000 phone. Text entry for its addressbook is really nice. Press a key repeatedly to cycle through upper and lower case letters, and press [1] to cycle through common symbols. The browser (supplied by Phone.com) isn't nearly as convenient. I have to use a menu item to shift between uppercase, lowercase, and symbols. So my email messages tend to be monocase.
Mobile text messaging is really nice in a lot of situations where you don't need the immediacy of a voice call, or if you want to broadcast a message to a group. ("Hey everyone, pizza and movies at my house tonight!") This is what's going to drive the wireless revolution, not that silly "Shop Amazon.com anytime, anywhere from your phone!" idiocy.
I'll probably get modded down for saying this, but before everyone jumps on the proverbial bandwagon and starts endorsing this idea, don't forget about the ecological issues involved. As we all know, short-sighted developers looking for cheap power have ravaged the Earth's ecosystem in so many ways; from spreading CFCs to burning precious fossil fuels.
Actually, ecological issues are one of the primary reasons for exploiting the moon. Think: The Earth has an ecology. The moon doesn't. It's an airless, lifeless hunk of rock. Can you think of a better place to put all those nasty polluting heavy industries? What's industrial waste doing to the Earth? What do you think it could do to the moon that would be worse?
I say, move everything we possibly can off-planet. Run fusion plants on the moon and beam the power to Earth via microwave. If it pollutes the environment, move it out to the lifeless rock where it won't do any harm!
Yes, there are practical issues involved, especially "How do we get raw materials up there?" and "How do we get finished goods back down?" Power is easy; other things will take some thought to work out. But save the tree-hugging crap for someplace that has trees!
"I fully intend to e-mail my representatives, and I hope they realize the important impact that Microsoft has had on the computing industry alone, and ALL the other industries as well." From a FIN site visitor.
Um, guys, are you sure that's a quote in favor of Microsoft?
And, hopefully since Microsoft will apparantly maintain full control of the hardware and the software, the machine will be a bit more reliable than what we're used to seeing come from them.
This line is sure to draw derisive laughter, but in my experience this is pretty much true. We have some test equipment (scopes, logic analyzers, etc.) that run Win9x. They're pretty darned stable. The reasons? As far as I can tell it's because the drivers are supplied for a single, known platform; and nobody is installing ghod-only-knows-what apps that drop random DLLs in the system directory.
As much as it pains me to say it, Windows is actually a reasonably good UI for a dedicated single-purpose device.
Of course, if the X-Box (doesn't that sound like something out of Marvel Comics?) doesn't run Mario or Pokèmon, my kids will have nothing to do with it!
SysInternals has your answer
on
Creating BSODs?
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· Score: 4
SysInternals has a solution for this. One of its products is called BlueSave, which is a utility that will save the text of the BSOD to a file. BlueSave is conveniently packaged along with a companion utility that will cause your PC to crash to the BSOD.
We've provided the source and executable to a program, BSOD, that you can use to intentionally crash your computer in order to test BlueSave. Note that this program uses a device driver component to perform privileged operations and is therefore not exploiting a bug in Windows NT.
Uh, and you think Microsoft employees can't log into any system and have full access to their own email etc?
I really have to wonder... Do they? Email, possibly, but given the PC-centric setup of every other office I've ever seen running Microsoft's products I really have to wonder whether or not someone in Redmond can sit down and be productive on any system on campus.
My current employer is a Microsoft shop. Most of us who have used more than one machine ended up turning off roaming profiles because they got completely hosed. (Try logging in at a desktop and a laptop simultaneously and watch that profile go south!) Even when you can login to another machine, what good does it do you if all your tools are on the local harddrive on your primary machine? If all the machines in the building are set up with the same set of apps, no problem. Otherwise you're in deep doo-doo. Okay, MS-Office is probably installed everywhere. You can access your email and Word docs. What about anything else? Can I sit down at an ME's desk and compile code? Can an ME sit down at my desk and fire up AutoCAD? No way!
Contrast this to a previous employer which was a Sun shop. Everything was server-centric just an X-Terminal on your desk. It does display only, with all your data stored in a central location. All your data. Not to mention all your apps. Even in the pre-X-Terminal days when we were using Sun3s all the data and major apps were stored centrally. The local machine just held the standard SunOS image, and every machine was set up identically. You really could login on any machine in the building and do everything you could do at your own desk.
And, somehow, the UI was faster even piping the display across the network than Windows is locally. Go figure.
I'm really sorry to say it, but pinball is dead. I'm sorrier than most, because I used to work as a programmer at Capcom during their all-too-brief flirtation with the pinball industry. I did much of the diagnostic code for the games, plus a little bit of OS-level code and a little bit of rules-level code. Also, I was the primary coder on Big Bang Bar. Never heard of it? I'm not surprised. It was the very next game scheduled for production before Capcom pulled the plug on the pinball operation. If you're lucky, maybe you can find one of the dozen or so pre-production units that made it to the arcades.
The short of it is, pinball is a mechanical game. A pinball machine in the arcade takes a lot of abuse. Parts break. Switches stick. It just plain gets dirty. It's a very high maintenance item for any arcade owner or route operator, for not a very high return. The latest Mortal Street Kombat Fighter will pay for itself in a matter of weeks, and the only maintenance it requires is to wipe the screen and empty the cashbox. Pinball machines are lucky if they pay themselves off in months, and they require constant adjustment. Is it any wonder that operators don't want to buy them?
*sigh* Programming pinball machines was the best job I've ever had, with some of the best people. At least I got a BBB machine after I left. My wife tells me to think of it this way: How many people get paid for a year and a half to build themselves their own pinball machine?
My company uses VoIP for communications to its remote sites. (At least in the US; I'm not sure if we're using it for sites in Europe.) Latency isn't a problem. The problem is dropped or mis-ordered packets. This causes many iterations of "What did you say?", "Let me call you back when the network is less congested.", and "Screw it, just send me email." The latter is, of course, generally a good thing.:-)
I just checked MIT's hacks page, and my company's proxy told me this:
WebTrack Control List category criminal skills is restricted.
I guess they're afraid I'll start playing Tetris on our 3-story building...
Speaking of which, we manufacture barcode printers. I've been tempted to sneak in a Tetris game with a refresh rate of one frame per label. Maybe it's time for that!
Homer Simpson first utters "D'oh!", aiding millions in articulating a precise feeling of self-inflicted stupidity. (1990)
Okay, so the series began 14-Jan-1990. Didn't Homer ever say "D'oh!" on the Tracey Ullman show? Or in the Christmas Special (which aired in 1989, as I recall)? Don't tell me Demotivators got it wrong!
The "Schaumburg Commerce District" (that strip on Golf Road with all the malls) also imposes a hefty tax on all purchases made there. Welcome to Illinois, where every piss-ant governmental body can tax you. (There are even Forest Preserve taxation districts!)
And let's not forget the Illinois Use Tax, which says that if you bought something (anything!) out-of-state but use it in-state, you must pony up the Illinois sales tax on it anyway. No one pays this of course, but I know someone who got nailed on it. He bought a camcorder on a trip to Hong Kong, but failed to pay Illinois their cut. He got a nasty letter from the state demanding money. Apparently the U.S. Customs department (he'd declared the camcorder on re-entry to the country) ratted him out to the state.
We're getting there, just wait until there is a nice Bluetooth add-on for Palm, or better, the Visor.
I have a Symbol SPT-1740 -- Basically, a Palm III with integrated barcode scanner and Spectrum24 wireless LAN. It came (a month ago) with PalmOS 3.32 already installed. Not having had a lot of prior experience with the Palm, I didn't even know that Hotsync at 115200 or Direct IR was anything special. The network Hotsync over the air is pretty spiffy.
Now if I could just get my company to buy me a Spectrum24 access point to use at home...
Anyone have a good way to add Slashdot as an AvantGo channel? I'd love to get the full text of the articles and comments (at a high threshhold), but if even if I customize my settings for "Slashdot Lite", AvantGo spends too much memory grabbing the administrative pages (FAQ, code, etc.) before grabbing the content. Is there a "Slashdot Lite--" that's just the articles without the administrative links?
Slashdot Mirror
You have now. I had my MediaOne service suspended without notice for this. Get this: I discovered a hacker on my system. (He came in through a hole in imapd; I've since locked down security fairly tightly.) He left a pretty good trace of his activity. One thing I discovered is that he'd also cracked a number of other MediaOne sites. So, I wrote MediaOne and told them, "Watch it. You've been compromised." And, in good faith, I gave them all the traces and logs I had.
A few days later I found my service disconnected. When I called them they told me the reason was "because I was running a server." Well, isn't that a nice way to treat someone who's on your side against the hackers!
I asked if they would reconnect my service if I told them I'd take down my "server". They said yes. So I told them that. I didn't do it, of course, but I told them...
Now, reading this story, I'm really worried. You see, I'm on vacation a thousand miles from home... And, as of this morning, I can't telnet in! Is this just another AT&T (formerly MediaOne) service outage, or something far more sinister? Guess I'll find out in a week.
This marketting model is no different from what King did with a printed book a few years ago. Remember The Green Mile? Originally published as a six-part serial at $2.99 apiece. So the Loyal Reader winds up paying $18 for what amounts to a thick paperback. (The complete series is now collected in a single 536-page volume for $7.99.)
Now, serialized works are fine, but I'm certainly not going to pay a premium for the privilege of waiting six months to finish the thing! Publish it as a serial in a magazine, or charge something like $1/each, and then I'll consider it.
This is just the electronic equivalent. Again, charge something reasonable and I might consider it.
BTW, I'd love to find a good e-book reader that is approximately the same size as a paperback, with a high-res, high-contrast display. My Palm is nice, but the display positively blows chunks for reading anything longer than Iambe's column each day.
Is there something wrong with following these rules? Or these if you're concerned about compatibility with older browsers? (Or even these rules, but that's taking things a bit too far...)
Then again, I'm an old fogey who remembers the days when the point of HTML was to allow the browser to render content according to the terminal's capabilities and user's preferences, not to specify the text font and exact pixel location of each image. Bah! Humbug!
I didn't attempt a wholesale upgrade of my Perl4 scripts. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! However, once I got Srinivasan's Advanced Perl Programming and figured out how to really make use of all those cool new features, my scripts take serious advantage of Perl5's new features. In particular I make heavy use of references and complex data types, and I love the IO::Socket and Net::* modules!
Perl6 had better not break 99% of the legacy Perl4 and Perl5 code out there. I'd hate to have to convert a ton of scripts! But if it introduces useful new features I sure won't be shy about using them.
This is my biggest beef, too. I hate when a dialog pops up and steals focus while I'm tying. I end up sending half a dozen keystrokes to the dialog before my brain-to-finger buffer drains. :-) Heaven help me if one of those keys is a shortcut for a button on the dialog box!
Forget the intelligent agent nonsense. Just give me the ability to turn off the fscking pop-ups! I do like some notification of certain events. I like Outlook putting a little mail icon in my system tray, for example. I don't like it popping up a dialog box. And if I have something that's scrolling text that I want to keep an eye on while I do other things (running a compile, for example), I'll just arrange the windows so it's visible. Popup dialogs, especially those which steal focus, are evil.
Of course, then there's the other extreme. Some apps try to be nice by popping up dialogs at a lower depth. This will often put them behind another window, and with no button in the task bar. You have no indication at all that the app is waiting for you to click "OK" so it can get on with its job. At least well-behaved apps in Win98 can flash the taskbar button to let you know they want attention. That's a pretty good compromise.
Actually, TLDs by country make a lot of sense! As much as everyone tries to convince themselves that "the net is without borders", the fact of the matter is that it's not. Money, hard national currency, still changes hands for domain names. Squabbles arise over who can legitimately own which names, which can only be decided in a court of law. Who arbitrates the dispute over 'mcdonalds.com' when the McDonalds restaurant chain finds that a sheep rancher by the name of Angus McDonald in the Scottish highlands already owns it?
I say, get rid of the generic TLDs altogether. Assign TLDs by legal jurisdiction. If McDonalds restaurant wants a 'mcdonalds.???' address for each country they do business in, let them register with each country. If there's a conflict (Angus has already registered 'mcdonalds.uk') the dispute can be settled in the courts of the country that governs that domain.
As already pointed out, it's currently difficult to get anything added to the '.us' domain. Of course, that would have to change. Perhaps add '.com.us' for all the US commerical sites, keeping '.city.state.us' as it is. This means that we might end up with 'mcdonalds.com.us', 'mcdonalds.co.uk', and 'mcdonalds.fi' if the United Status, the United Kingdom, and Finland have different second-level naming conventions. So be it.
And there's nothing to say that a site registered as 'foobar.tm' needs to be physically located in Turkmenistan. You could still have a single machine anywhere on the planet simultaneously hosting 'foobar.tm', 'slashdot.us', and 'hotgrits.ca'. But any disputes over the 'foobar.tm' name get resolved in the Turkmenistan courts.
It's nice to think of the net as being without borders. Call me when it actually happens.
Fine, so set it up to alert the admin instead of the end user. The fact of the matter is that there currently isn't any way to get this sort of status info using 'lpd'. I don't care who it gets reported to, but we need a protocol that will report it to someone.
From SGI's FAQ:
I read a Bob Metcalfe article in InfoWorld where he proposed junking the .com, .org, .net, etc. TLDs and just keeping the country codes. I like this idea. Each country controls its own domain, and can apply whatever bizarre local interpretation of trademark law it has to its domain names. Corporations would need to register in every country in which they want a virtual presence.
The paperwork alone should keep cybersquatting to a minimum...
Amen, brother. Amen!
I find that it's not work that's taking up my time. My feeling is that if I'm working more than 40 hours a week (crunch time excluded) then my company needs to hire additional engineers. I generally leave on time.
The kids, on the other hand... Oy! I love 'em, and I love being with 'em. But it's work to look after a hyperactive (literally) seven-year-old and an inquisitive two-year-old. Most nights I crash shortly after I get them into bed. Little energy vampires, the lot of 'em!
I occasionally have to go out of town for a week at a time on business. Those days consist of a 12-hour debugging session, dinner, and maybe a little reading or TV. And my wife gripes because I'm getting a vacation!
So no, technology isn't robbing me of my life. Taking care of personal business at work via the web actually frees up my time and lets me spend more of it doing what I want to do.
Well, this is pretty exciting to those of us who actually make the printers... We make specialty industrial printers. IPP is nice in that status and printer capabilities can be returned from the printer. This means that conditions like paper out and ink levels can be reported back to the user. As far as I know, lpd and SMB can't do that. (If they can, let me know! I've got a nice inkjet attached to my Linux box at home, and I'd love to get it to report ink levels to the Win98 clients that print to it!)
Let's face it, printers today have more computing power than desktop machines did a few years ago. Let's treat them like the independent computers they are, rather than as some dumb peripheral plugged into an isolated machine.
I'm using Sprint PCS in the USA (Chicago area, actually) and find text messaging really handy. It could be a lot better, of course...
Many of my friends work for the same company where they have two-way text pagers with a tiny QWERTY keyboard. Most of them don't carry cellphones all the time (and when they do, it's just the 'on-call' phone they sometimes carry for work). They can send email to my phone, and I can send it to their pagers. This works great for low-priority messages -- anything we'd use email for if we were tied to our desks all day. For high-priority messages we just pick up the phone, of course. (Or send email that says, "Call me!" :-)
The downside for me is that Sprint doesn't support email directly to the phone, nor does it support composing replies well. I have it set up so that I receive mail via SMS. Of course, SMS has a 100 character limit, which really bites. Especially when the 'From:' line and quoted text is counted. I ended up creating an email-to-SMS proxy that strips out the garbage, and also forwards the original text to my Yahoo account. So, if I need to I can connect to Yahoo and see the full text. And I have to connect to Yahoo to compose and send mail. Sprint charges by the minute for connect time (pay for a block of time up front, or pay about 35 cents/minute if you go over your time limit) and there's no way to compose messages offline. Talk about a cash cow for Sprint!
Entering text on the keypad really isn't bad, even without the predictive entry. It could be better, though. I have a Sanyo 4000 phone. Text entry for its addressbook is really nice. Press a key repeatedly to cycle through upper and lower case letters, and press [1] to cycle through common symbols. The browser (supplied by Phone.com) isn't nearly as convenient. I have to use a menu item to shift between uppercase, lowercase, and symbols. So my email messages tend to be monocase.
Mobile text messaging is really nice in a lot of situations where you don't need the immediacy of a voice call, or if you want to broadcast a message to a group. ("Hey everyone, pizza and movies at my house tonight!") This is what's going to drive the wireless revolution, not that silly "Shop Amazon.com anytime, anywhere from your phone!" idiocy.
Actually, ecological issues are one of the primary reasons for exploiting the moon. Think: The Earth has an ecology. The moon doesn't. It's an airless, lifeless hunk of rock. Can you think of a better place to put all those nasty polluting heavy industries? What's industrial waste doing to the Earth? What do you think it could do to the moon that would be worse?
I say, move everything we possibly can off-planet. Run fusion plants on the moon and beam the power to Earth via microwave. If it pollutes the environment, move it out to the lifeless rock where it won't do any harm!
Yes, there are practical issues involved, especially "How do we get raw materials up there?" and "How do we get finished goods back down?" Power is easy; other things will take some thought to work out. But save the tree-hugging crap for someplace that has trees!
Cool web site! A testimonial taken therefrom...
Um, guys, are you sure that's a quote in favor of Microsoft?
This line is sure to draw derisive laughter, but in my experience this is pretty much true. We have some test equipment (scopes, logic analyzers, etc.) that run Win9x. They're pretty darned stable. The reasons? As far as I can tell it's because the drivers are supplied for a single, known platform; and nobody is installing ghod-only-knows-what apps that drop random DLLs in the system directory.
As much as it pains me to say it, Windows is actually a reasonably good UI for a dedicated single-purpose device.
Of course, if the X-Box (doesn't that sound like something out of Marvel Comics?) doesn't run Mario or Pokèmon, my kids will have nothing to do with it!
SysInternals has a solution for this. One of its products is called BlueSave, which is a utility that will save the text of the BSOD to a file. BlueSave is conveniently packaged along with a companion utility that will cause your PC to crash to the BSOD.
I really have to wonder... Do they? Email, possibly, but given the PC-centric setup of every other office I've ever seen running Microsoft's products I really have to wonder whether or not someone in Redmond can sit down and be productive on any system on campus.
My current employer is a Microsoft shop. Most of us who have used more than one machine ended up turning off roaming profiles because they got completely hosed. (Try logging in at a desktop and a laptop simultaneously and watch that profile go south!) Even when you can login to another machine, what good does it do you if all your tools are on the local harddrive on your primary machine? If all the machines in the building are set up with the same set of apps, no problem. Otherwise you're in deep doo-doo. Okay, MS-Office is probably installed everywhere. You can access your email and Word docs. What about anything else? Can I sit down at an ME's desk and compile code? Can an ME sit down at my desk and fire up AutoCAD? No way!
Contrast this to a previous employer which was a Sun shop. Everything was server-centric just an X-Terminal on your desk. It does display only, with all your data stored in a central location. All your data. Not to mention all your apps. Even in the pre-X-Terminal days when we were using Sun3s all the data and major apps were stored centrally. The local machine just held the standard SunOS image, and every machine was set up identically. You really could login on any machine in the building and do everything you could do at your own desk.
And, somehow, the UI was faster even piping the display across the network than Windows is locally. Go figure.
For a listing of the other pins Capcom made, check out the pinball link archive: http: //homepages.paradise.net.nz/~frenzy/pinlinks/games /games_manu_capcom.htm
The short of it is, pinball is a mechanical game. A pinball machine in the arcade takes a lot of abuse. Parts break. Switches stick. It just plain gets dirty. It's a very high maintenance item for any arcade owner or route operator, for not a very high return. The latest Mortal Street Kombat Fighter will pay for itself in a matter of weeks, and the only maintenance it requires is to wipe the screen and empty the cashbox. Pinball machines are lucky if they pay themselves off in months, and they require constant adjustment. Is it any wonder that operators don't want to buy them?
*sigh* Programming pinball machines was the best job I've ever had, with some of the best people. At least I got a BBB machine after I left. My wife tells me to think of it this way: How many people get paid for a year and a half to build themselves their own pinball machine?
My company uses VoIP for communications to its remote sites. (At least in the US; I'm not sure if we're using it for sites in Europe.) Latency isn't a problem. The problem is dropped or mis-ordered packets. This causes many iterations of "What did you say?", "Let me call you back when the network is less congested.", and "Screw it, just send me email." The latter is, of course, generally a good thing. :-)
I just checked MIT's hacks page, and my company's proxy told me this:
WebTrack Control List category criminal skills is restricted.
I guess they're afraid I'll start playing Tetris on our 3-story building...
Speaking of which, we manufacture barcode printers. I've been tempted to sneak in a Tetris game with a refresh rate of one frame per label. Maybe it's time for that!
Cool! The "God's eye view" turns warfare into a real-life game of Tiberian Sun or Total Annihilation! I just hope the expansion packs are good.
Bandwidth convinced me to move on campus.
Sonny, when I went to college the "HS" light still came on when my modem hit 1200 bps! Hrumph. Kids these days.
The "Schaumburg Commerce District" (that strip on Golf Road with all the malls) also imposes a hefty tax on all purchases made there. Welcome to Illinois, where every piss-ant governmental body can tax you. (There are even Forest Preserve taxation districts!)
And let's not forget the Illinois Use Tax, which says that if you bought something (anything!) out-of-state but use it in-state, you must pony up the Illinois sales tax on it anyway. No one pays this of course, but I know someone who got nailed on it. He bought a camcorder on a trip to Hong Kong, but failed to pay Illinois their cut. He got a nasty letter from the state demanding money. Apparently the U.S. Customs department (he'd declared the camcorder on re-entry to the country) ratted him out to the state.
Too bad I can't convince my wife to move.
I have a Symbol SPT-1740 -- Basically, a Palm III with integrated barcode scanner and Spectrum24 wireless LAN. It came (a month ago) with PalmOS 3.32 already installed. Not having had a lot of prior experience with the Palm, I didn't even know that Hotsync at 115200 or Direct IR was anything special. The network Hotsync over the air is pretty spiffy.
Now if I could just get my company to buy me a Spectrum24 access point to use at home...
Anyone have a good way to add Slashdot as an AvantGo channel? I'd love to get the full text of the articles and comments (at a high threshhold), but if even if I customize my settings for "Slashdot Lite", AvantGo spends too much memory grabbing the administrative pages (FAQ, code, etc.) before grabbing the content. Is there a "Slashdot Lite--" that's just the articles without the administrative links?