Sony did a good job with a "justaphone" they recently released, the Naite. I bought one a few months ago for around $120. No contracts, basic phone, no sliding, good screen, some free games that are good, bluetooth, a decent camera, small form factor, and really good battery life. It even accepts standard microSD cards, if you need it.
The free Sony management software is really pretty good, too. It offers phone backups, you can send/receive text messages through your machine while it's plugged in, and it didn't come with a lot of BS carrier lock-in stuff.
The funny thing is, for a phone that is "justaphone", why does it need bluetooth, a camera, games, a microSD slot, and management software on the computer?
However they don't explain why we should believe that current dealers would be willing to start collecting and submitting taxes to the government. They already have a product that they are selling tax-free, what is the incentive for the dealers to start charging more for the same product?
You just assume dealers would still be selling it on the street. Do you see any alcohol dealers on the street? Any tobacco dealers trying to get you to buy a smoke? When something is legalized it gets controlled by the FDA for purity and sold in stores. Excessive profits are taken out by competition and dealers either get unemployed or find a job somewhere else. Learn some basic economics, FFS.
I don't mind people smoking pot but do not want my children to buy a pack on the streets.
You do realize that because it is illegal, your children are much more likely to be able to buy it on the streets right now? Dealers don't have age limits. If it was taxed and controlled your kids wouldn't be able to buy it unless they showed up at a state liquor store with ID showing they are 21. Right now they can probably get it at school if they wanted to.
Wake up - do you really think after legalization dealers are going to be roaming the streets convincing your kids to buy a pack of smokes? The biggest risk you're going to face is them going over to their friends house while their parents aren't home and getting into "daddy's stash." Kids have been doing this for years with alcohol, which is far more toxic and dangerous than cannabis, and actually can cause poisoning. The worst thing that can happen on cannabis is some kid gets the munchies and eats too much food.
BTW one of my chief annoyances with the Mac OS is the inability to quickly and easily switch between windows. You have to juggle windows around on the screen. i.e. It's stuck in the pre-95 era. The Windows & Linux tab bars are a very easy solution to that problem.
Surely you've never used Mac OS X in the last 10 years. OS X has had a Dock for the last 10 years that performs the same function as what you call the tab bar. Also, alt-Tab works just fine on OS X.
To make matters even worse, we are definitely hitting 48 cores right now.
Luckily we aren't anywhere near 48 cores and there is some time left to come up with a new Linux (Windows?).
Total BS. I just installed two HP Proliant DL785G6 servers which have a total of 8 AMD 6-core CPUs each, for a total of 48 cores. Coming very soon is the new HP DL970 servers which will have a total of eight Intel 8-core servers, or 64 cores.
Bad summary. Doesn't Slashdot do the most minimal fact checking first?
The iOS device is not tuned like the PS3 or Wii, Apple is directly targeting iOS devices for general purpose mobile computing and home computing.
The AppleTV has never been sold as anything other than a set top box to plug into your TV. Where did you get "general purpose home computer" from? Certainly not Apple.
Sure enough, they each separately report back that - wow - there seems to be some subversives on campus, so they each get 100 agents undercover. "The place is CRAWLING with subversives!" Next thing you know, "You can't walk 5 feet without seeing someone or something suspicious - people who don't fit in, blah blah blah". All these people who got iPads so they can review them, or they can develop the "next big thing"... and they're going to be obsolete in 3 months because everything we said about them was true.
Uh yeah.... because iPads are exactly like FBI agents... They're kinda subversive... or whatever.
What I'm hearing is "SJ wants to do this, SJ wants to do that, SJ wants to promote a version of HTML5 that is the Apple approved version that nobody else can run, similar to IE in the MS days."
I'm gonna give you a big fat "Citation Needed" for this one - Anonymous Coward.
I reinstalled Dungeons and Dragons Online recently. The installer uses Pando. However, it wasn't very sneaky about it. It was in the install at some point.
The problem is that Turbine, makers of DDO and Lord of the Rings Online, is installing what is essentially the equivalent of adware or spyware without the user's permission. You have to manually uninstall it afterwards, and you are not given a choice whether or not to install it. Would you accept it if a game publisher installed adware toolbars into your browser without your permission?
This automatically puts Turbine on my shit list. I thought they were pretty cool for releasing DDO as a free to play game, but then when I found they installed Pando Media Booster, I uninstalled both Pando and DDO. You don't get to treat your customers like shit and expect us not to uninstall your software and send it to the/dev/null where it belongs.
The iPad is pretty much toddler safe. They can bang away on the screen, touch it and get a response, and play around in apps pretty easily. What's more, it wipes clean pretty easily after they get their drool infested hands all over it. The only thing you need to be careful of is the home screen... They will definitely hold their fingers down and put your icons into "jiggle mode," and if you're not careful they can easily delete apps. Just supervise them while they use it and make sure they don't do anything really crazy, like email your boss or delete an expensive app.
I wish Apple had a "safe mode" where you couldn't delete any apps, move any icons, or change any settings. It would be nice to hand it over to the kids and not worry about them doing anything to it.
No way I'd pay $1 to watch a TV episode once. Don't know about others, but assuming a $1 price point to own a song is more or less legitimate, can't see paying that much for a single viewing of a TV show. I value the vast majority of TV shows less than a single good song, so even $1 to own a TV show episode is pushing it (this may be why the only TV shows I own copies of are Firefly, Flying Circus, and Fawlty Towers).
Basically, the TV shows are either going to be ad supported or cost money. You pick. You can pay $0.99 to rent an ad-free version, or you can go to Hulu where advertisers are paying approximately 20 cents per ad to show you about 5 ad spots during the show.
TV content is not free to produce, but $0.99 is probably the most reasonable price they've had so far.
Now, if they would only add 5.1 surround for HD shows and closed captioning, they'd have a guaranteed hit on their hands.
Now, what I want to know is does the interface give me a custom "shows I like" menu that will show that I have not watched or what is new, or will it be like the crappy current interface where I have to go searching for everything......
The interface Steve showed looked very nice. It has a favorite shows section where you can see icons for each show you like, with a numeric badge similar to the push notification on iOS showing new content for each show. The favorite shows icons can even be rearranged by holding down the select button on one of them for a few seconds, which puts the icons into "jiggle mode" similar to rearranging icons on iOS.
In short, they just made the first set top box interface that doesn't completely suck.
Seriously... the number one requested feature is a frick'n DVR!!!
That's because people are idiots and they only want the function of the DVR - being able to time shift their favorite shows. They don't care how it is delivered. The DVR is a hack, meant to record content that is broadcast at a fixed time for later playback.
When people finally have the "universal library in the cloud with all TV shows and Movies ever created" they'll wonder why they even cared about DVRs in the first place.
I am not sure whether/. users appreciate the whole situation in India. Terrorists using blackberry is an actual problem here.
I'm not sure whether/. users appreciate the whole situation in India. Terrorists using human language is an actual problem here. Therefore, we must now eavesdrop on all conversations. Furthermore, whispering is now forbidden, as you might be quiet enough that our microphones can't hear you. Speak loudly and clearly citizen - move along, nothing to see hear.
Ok, the Indian government can tell Blackberry to give up its keys for a particular encryption layer, but what is to stop people from using RSA 512-bit encryption with their e-mails? Wouldn't this force terrorists to pay attention to what encryption methods they are using?
The problem is that the entire Blackberry infrastructure is built around them never having your decryption keys. The keys are generated by the customers, and stored on their own Blackberry Enterprise Servers and mobile devices. So, even if they wanted to eavesdrop on their customers communication, the only way that would be possible would be to release new versions of the BES with built-in back doors. If that was the case, I think customers would just switch to Microsoft ActiveSync, which uses SSL and is secure.
I can't help but think that all of these lawmakers don't understand how public/private key encryption works. They must think it works similar to the old wiretaps where you just connect two wires onto their line and listen in. Is there no way to explain encryption to these lawmakers in a way that they can understand? Maybe we need to resurrect zombie Ted Stevens to break out his "series of tubes" conversations...
o continue: I had many problems with upper management, one of which was their wanting me to 'tweak' time sheet accounting so that new entry level minimum wage employees were paid for as little as 75% of their legitimate hours worked.
That's actually a criminal offense (payroll fraud, or something similar) and you should have called your state labor commission and reported them right then and there.
Well two weeks after I left I found out the newbie replacement didn't perform the audit when I accidentally clicked on a bookmark at home (Putty) and I was suddenly in a server from my old job. I logged out and didn't feel particularly compelled to tell them that my keys were still trusted. About a month later I made the same mistake. The hole was no longer there. I thought to myself, "Good for him. I guess he's not so incompetent at all."
But curiousity a la Facebook and Twitter revealed that a server had actually gone down that day. Apparently there was a 'rm -rf' oopsy!!!
I hate to say this, but you could have ended up in jail for this little "oopsy". If for any reason they thought the "rm -rf" wasn't an oopsy, and was malicious, and someone did forensics on the server and determined you had logged on after your termination date, you probably would have had the FBI knocking on your door.
Not only is it the employer's responsibility to shut down access for terminated or resigning employees, it is the employee's responsibility to destroy any company data they might still have. This includes ssh private keys that might give them access to company systems. It's always a good idea to cover your ass, especially when dealing with former employers that are unethical enough to short their own employee paychecks.
When PCs became affordable for the average joe, the "average gamer" changed and Sierra could no longer afford to write games that catered to an educated audience. They were just too small a part of the market.
Speaking as someone who thoroughly enjoyed the Sierra games as a kid (and Monkey Island, Infocom, and many others) I think this is a bit of a cop-out. Sure, there is a huge market of "twitch" gamers that never existed back in the 80s, but that doesn't mean the educated market disappeared. If anything, the educated gamer market is even larger than it was back then, as hardware has gotten cheaper. What has happened, I suppose, is that only the big mega-hits get funded by the studios.
We need to go back to indie studios that are self-funded and deliver games that even small niche markets like educated gamers want. There is more than enough money to go around. If you make good games, people will play them (and pay you for them).
The posts from users running Linux on the forum are showing times that are 4-5x faster than those posting benchmarks from Windows. What's going on there?
If you RTFA you'll see the Intel engineer was asked by his coworkers that challenged him to do this benchmark using only a single socket system. What you have are Linux geeks with 2 way or 4 way servers that want to start a dick measuring contest.
I would say a 5 ghz. overclock is pretty damn impressive. If someone wants to put up a benchmark from Linux on their single socket system that beats his 50 second benchmark, I would be equally impressed. Putting up a result from your 4 CPU server that is only 10 seconds faster just makes you look pathetic.
Why would you assume that? The engineer from Intel was limited to using a single socket system. I could argue that there is something seriously wrong with your Linux compiled binary since you have 4x as many sockets and ran less than twice as fast.
If you RTFA you'll see they intentionally limited the Intel guy to 1 socket. What fun would it be if he ran it on an 8-way server in the lab that you couldn't even buy in real life?
In 1998, 2002, 2007 and 2008, there were zero US airline fatalities. No Boeing jetliner operated by a US airline has had a fatal crash since 9/11. None of the fly-by-wire Airbus models (A320 and later) operated by a US airline have ever had a fatal crash, not even the one that had to land in the Hudson River after a bird strike.
Keep in mind, these vehicles are piloted by trained professionals and inspected by engineers multiple times a day, and have backup systems for everything. If we built cars like airplanes you would have to have two engines and two braking systems in every vehicle just in case the first one failed in traffic. You would also need an FAA approved flight plan just to travel to the grocery store.
It has been proven that a car with ABS brakes can stop faster than the old "pump the brakes rapidly" method. So, when you need to stop fast, feel free to mash your foot to the floor as hard as possible and let the ABS brakes do their thing. I know it creates that funky pulsing sensation as the brakes pulse hundreds of times per second, but it truly can stop faster than you can by pumping. Don't try to second-guess the automatic systems... just let them do their job and hopefully prevent an accident.
I'd rather be able to charge things with standard USB ports, cables, backup batteries, etc, as they were intended, than charge with Apple-approved chargers 2x as fast.
That sounds nice until you consider that it takes almost 8 hours to fully charge an iPad over a USB port. I'd rather plug it in for 5 hours to the Apple charger than wait so long.
Is there a practical reason that the iPhone / iPod cannot be recharged and / or synced via a simple USB mico connector interface?
Yes... Profit!
No, actually, if you RTFA, the iPhone has 2 charging modes - one uses 500ma, which is the upper-limit of a standard USB port, and a quick-charging mode which uses 1000ma. The iPhone needs to do a power negotiation to determine if the port is capable of providing 1000ma of power. This requires some signaling.
So, in an effort to provide a superior product that can charge twice as fast from a wall charger, but won't fry your computer by drawing too much power from it's computer port, Apple put some logic in the iPhone and some corresponding resistors in their charger.
Or, naw, you're right, Apple just wants to charge everyone for everything...
Slashdot Mirror
Sony did a good job with a "justaphone" they recently released, the Naite.
I bought one a few months ago for around $120. No contracts, basic phone, no sliding, good screen, some free games that are good, bluetooth, a decent camera, small form factor, and really good battery life. It even accepts standard microSD cards, if you need it.
The free Sony management software is really pretty good, too. It offers phone backups, you can send/receive text messages through your machine while it's plugged in, and it didn't come with a lot of BS carrier lock-in stuff.
The funny thing is, for a phone that is "justaphone", why does it need bluetooth, a camera, games, a microSD slot, and management software on the computer?
Sounds a lot like a smartphone to me.
You just assume dealers would still be selling it on the street. Do you see any alcohol dealers on the street? Any tobacco dealers trying to get you to buy a smoke? When something is legalized it gets controlled by the FDA for purity and sold in stores. Excessive profits are taken out by competition and dealers either get unemployed or find a job somewhere else. Learn some basic economics, FFS.
You do realize that because it is illegal, your children are much more likely to be able to buy it on the streets right now? Dealers don't have age limits. If it was taxed and controlled your kids wouldn't be able to buy it unless they showed up at a state liquor store with ID showing they are 21. Right now they can probably get it at school if they wanted to.
Wake up - do you really think after legalization dealers are going to be roaming the streets convincing your kids to buy a pack of smokes? The biggest risk you're going to face is them going over to their friends house while their parents aren't home and getting into "daddy's stash." Kids have been doing this for years with alcohol, which is far more toxic and dangerous than cannabis, and actually can cause poisoning. The worst thing that can happen on cannabis is some kid gets the munchies and eats too much food.
Surely you've never used Mac OS X in the last 10 years. OS X has had a Dock for the last 10 years that performs the same function as what you call the tab bar. Also, alt-Tab works just fine on OS X.
I have a 1st gen AppleTV. Where did you buy the Broadcome CrystalHD chip? I'd love to be able to play 1080p on it.
To make matters even worse, we are definitely hitting 48 cores right now.
Total BS. I just installed two HP Proliant DL785G6 servers which have a total of 8 AMD 6-core CPUs each, for a total of 48 cores. Coming very soon is the new HP DL970 servers which will have a total of eight Intel 8-core servers, or 64 cores.
Bad summary. Doesn't Slashdot do the most minimal fact checking first?
The AppleTV has never been sold as anything other than a set top box to plug into your TV. Where did you get "general purpose home computer" from? Certainly not Apple.
Uh yeah.... because iPads are exactly like FBI agents... They're kinda subversive... or whatever.
What I'm hearing is "SJ wants to do this, SJ wants to do that, SJ wants to promote a version of HTML5 that is the Apple approved version that nobody else can run, similar to IE in the MS days."
I'm gonna give you a big fat "Citation Needed" for this one - Anonymous Coward.
The problem is that Turbine, makers of DDO and Lord of the Rings Online, is installing what is essentially the equivalent of adware or spyware without the user's permission. You have to manually uninstall it afterwards, and you are not given a choice whether or not to install it. Would you accept it if a game publisher installed adware toolbars into your browser without your permission?
This automatically puts Turbine on my shit list. I thought they were pretty cool for releasing DDO as a free to play game, but then when I found they installed Pando Media Booster, I uninstalled both Pando and DDO. You don't get to treat your customers like shit and expect us not to uninstall your software and send it to the /dev/null where it belongs.
The iPad is pretty much toddler safe. They can bang away on the screen, touch it and get a response, and play around in apps pretty easily. What's more, it wipes clean pretty easily after they get their drool infested hands all over it. The only thing you need to be careful of is the home screen... They will definitely hold their fingers down and put your icons into "jiggle mode," and if you're not careful they can easily delete apps. Just supervise them while they use it and make sure they don't do anything really crazy, like email your boss or delete an expensive app.
I wish Apple had a "safe mode" where you couldn't delete any apps, move any icons, or change any settings. It would be nice to hand it over to the kids and not worry about them doing anything to it.
Basically, the TV shows are either going to be ad supported or cost money. You pick. You can pay $0.99 to rent an ad-free version, or you can go to Hulu where advertisers are paying approximately 20 cents per ad to show you about 5 ad spots during the show.
TV content is not free to produce, but $0.99 is probably the most reasonable price they've had so far.
Now, if they would only add 5.1 surround for HD shows and closed captioning, they'd have a guaranteed hit on their hands.
The interface Steve showed looked very nice. It has a favorite shows section where you can see icons for each show you like, with a numeric badge similar to the push notification on iOS showing new content for each show. The favorite shows icons can even be rearranged by holding down the select button on one of them for a few seconds, which puts the icons into "jiggle mode" similar to rearranging icons on iOS.
In short, they just made the first set top box interface that doesn't completely suck.
That's because people are idiots and they only want the function of the DVR - being able to time shift their favorite shows. They don't care how it is delivered. The DVR is a hack, meant to record content that is broadcast at a fixed time for later playback.
When people finally have the "universal library in the cloud with all TV shows and Movies ever created" they'll wonder why they even cared about DVRs in the first place.
I'm not sure whether /. users appreciate the whole situation in India. Terrorists using human language is an actual problem here. Therefore, we must now eavesdrop on all conversations. Furthermore, whispering is now forbidden, as you might be quiet enough that our microphones can't hear you. Speak loudly and clearly citizen - move along, nothing to see hear.
The problem is that the entire Blackberry infrastructure is built around them never having your decryption keys. The keys are generated by the customers, and stored on their own Blackberry Enterprise Servers and mobile devices. So, even if they wanted to eavesdrop on their customers communication, the only way that would be possible would be to release new versions of the BES with built-in back doors. If that was the case, I think customers would just switch to Microsoft ActiveSync, which uses SSL and is secure.
I can't help but think that all of these lawmakers don't understand how public/private key encryption works. They must think it works similar to the old wiretaps where you just connect two wires onto their line and listen in. Is there no way to explain encryption to these lawmakers in a way that they can understand? Maybe we need to resurrect zombie Ted Stevens to break out his "series of tubes" conversations...
That's actually a criminal offense (payroll fraud, or something similar) and you should have called your state labor commission and reported them right then and there.
I hate to say this, but you could have ended up in jail for this little "oopsy". If for any reason they thought the "rm -rf" wasn't an oopsy, and was malicious, and someone did forensics on the server and determined you had logged on after your termination date, you probably would have had the FBI knocking on your door.
Not only is it the employer's responsibility to shut down access for terminated or resigning employees, it is the employee's responsibility to destroy any company data they might still have. This includes ssh private keys that might give them access to company systems. It's always a good idea to cover your ass, especially when dealing with former employers that are unethical enough to short their own employee paychecks.
Speaking as someone who thoroughly enjoyed the Sierra games as a kid (and Monkey Island, Infocom, and many others) I think this is a bit of a cop-out. Sure, there is a huge market of "twitch" gamers that never existed back in the 80s, but that doesn't mean the educated market disappeared. If anything, the educated gamer market is even larger than it was back then, as hardware has gotten cheaper. What has happened, I suppose, is that only the big mega-hits get funded by the studios.
We need to go back to indie studios that are self-funded and deliver games that even small niche markets like educated gamers want. There is more than enough money to go around. If you make good games, people will play them (and pay you for them).
If you RTFA you'll see the Intel engineer was asked by his coworkers that challenged him to do this benchmark using only a single socket system. What you have are Linux geeks with 2 way or 4 way servers that want to start a dick measuring contest.
I would say a 5 ghz. overclock is pretty damn impressive. If someone wants to put up a benchmark from Linux on their single socket system that beats his 50 second benchmark, I would be equally impressed. Putting up a result from your 4 CPU server that is only 10 seconds faster just makes you look pathetic.
Why would you assume that? The engineer from Intel was limited to using a single socket system. I could argue that there is something seriously wrong with your Linux compiled binary since you have 4x as many sockets and ran less than twice as fast.
If you RTFA you'll see they intentionally limited the Intel guy to 1 socket. What fun would it be if he ran it on an 8-way server in the lab that you couldn't even buy in real life?
Keep in mind, these vehicles are piloted by trained professionals and inspected by engineers multiple times a day, and have backup systems for everything. If we built cars like airplanes you would have to have two engines and two braking systems in every vehicle just in case the first one failed in traffic. You would also need an FAA approved flight plan just to travel to the grocery store.
It has been proven that a car with ABS brakes can stop faster than the old "pump the brakes rapidly" method. So, when you need to stop fast, feel free to mash your foot to the floor as hard as possible and let the ABS brakes do their thing. I know it creates that funky pulsing sensation as the brakes pulse hundreds of times per second, but it truly can stop faster than you can by pumping. Don't try to second-guess the automatic systems... just let them do their job and hopefully prevent an accident.
That sounds nice until you consider that it takes almost 8 hours to fully charge an iPad over a USB port. I'd rather plug it in for 5 hours to the Apple charger than wait so long.
No, actually, if you RTFA, the iPhone has 2 charging modes - one uses 500ma, which is the upper-limit of a standard USB port, and a quick-charging mode which uses 1000ma. The iPhone needs to do a power negotiation to determine if the port is capable of providing 1000ma of power. This requires some signaling.
So, in an effort to provide a superior product that can charge twice as fast from a wall charger, but won't fry your computer by drawing too much power from it's computer port, Apple put some logic in the iPhone and some corresponding resistors in their charger.
Or, naw, you're right, Apple just wants to charge everyone for everything...