One of the key functions of RIM-style e-mail is that the server tells the phone that it has to download something instead of the phone polling the server if there is something to do. It is useful if you need to be informed of something immediately after the e-mail arrives instead of waiting until the next scheduled contact.
RIM does not have a monopoly on this feature. Have you ever heard of Push IMAP? It's an open protocol that $YOUR_HOSTING_COMPANY probably already runs on their mail server.
From the linked article: The protocol was designed to provide for a secure way to automatically keep communicating new messages between a server and a mobile device like a PDA or Smartphone. It should reduce the time and effort needed to synchronize messages between the two (by using an open connection that is kept alive by some kind of heartbeat).
I can appreciate your opinions with respect to your suggestion of using free alerting tools, and although they are valid, the online monitoring needs of each company is different from one another. What makes services like RepuTrace(TM) necessary can be described using two words - core competence.
Hahahaha... If you believe that crap I've got a bridge I want to sell you. Whenever I hear a consulting firm trot out those words "this is our 'core competence'" I put on my knee high boots because the shit is going to be deep...
Look, if you're not in touch enough with your customers to know what forums online they frequent, and don't know how to setup a Google News alert to find new articles on the web written about your company, go hire a college intern that does. Seriously, you don't need to pay somebody thousands of dollars to do this stuff. Any college student with a passing ability to use the internet can already tell you how to do this, so go try to sell your snake oil somewhere else...
Why is it so far fetched that video games can be addictive?
I never denied that video games can be addictive, but, as others have said, almost anything can be addictive. By the same logic they use for video games, I have a few cups of coffee every single day, spending thousands of dollars over a lifetime on them. I feel like I can't function properly in the morning without my first cup of coffee, therefore I'm a coffee addict. I'm also a sleep addict, a water addict, a food addict, etc. You really need to ask yourself: is it harming me or not?
I still find the idea of people being addicted to video games a stretch.
The sooner you realize that the AMA is a business association of medical professionals that is dedicated to increasing the profit and revenue streams to their members, aka "doctors", the sooner you'll understand why we have these diagnostic classifications. I'm not saying that doctors don't help people on a daily basis, but the kind of money that can be made once one of these pseudo-sicknesses is classified as an actual disorder and is covered by health insurance is astronomical. Mental health treatment alone is one of the most expensive forms of health care around. It's in their financial interests to have everything we do be considered a "disorder" of some type or another. As in any case, follow the money.
Remember, there is a fine line between a "hobby" and "mental illness."
Several companies are selling this as a service or as software.
One company is Milton based RepuTrace, another is in Seattle.
What boggles my mind the most after reading the article is that they seem to be selling a service that Google offers for free. You can go to Google News and setup custom alerts that email you whenever your company's name appears in a news or blog article anywhere on the interweb... Sounds like the exact same service this company is selling, although they offer you either email alerts or a "phone call", presumably for those people that are not computer literate enough to regularly read email.
This seems like a totally unnecessary service being marketed to people and companies that don't know any better.
Are there smartphones out there that don't require a data plan?
For example, with my Treo I'm forced to purchade the $15/month unlimited data plan from Sprint. It's required for all their smartphones.
Yes, I bought an Unlocked GSM Treo 650 a couple years ago, put a SIM card in it from T-Mobile, later decided I wanted to switch to Cingular because their GPRS data was faster than T-Mobile, and I've been using it ever since.
If you want an unlocked GSM smartphone you just have to buy it yourself, pay the true cost of the phone (hint, it's closer to $600 than the $299 your carrier wants to sell it to you for with a 2 year contract), and get a SIM card from the phone company.
Sure it costs more up front, but if you figure in the monthly cost of voice + unlimited data plans, you're going to spend a few grand over 2 years time. Also, make sure you don't sign a contract. I'm on month-to-month with Cingular (even though they usually tell you such a plan doesn't exist when you first talk to them, be persistent and refuse to sign a contract if you're not getting a subsidised phone).
Welcome to/. where false information can sadly get you a +5 informative moderation.
I was not incorrect, but I should have clarified that I was talking about a multi-threaded 3d rendering engine, and not the game client itself. The 3d rendering engine, whether it uses OpenGL (Mac) or Direct3D (PC) is a small part of the game client. The overall game client has always been multi-threaded.
WoW has always been multithreaded on both Mac and PC. It was only with the 2.0.1 patch that Multithreaded OpenGL support was added, and then only to the Intel Mac client. There is no Direct3D equivalent, and from this technote, likely no equivalent from DirectX 9.
You're wrong here. There is a Direct3d equivelant, and it's been out for a lot longer than multithreaded OpenGL has been out on the Mac. The link you posted btw, is just people talking about testing the multi-threaded OpenGL client on their Macs.
I've got a die-hard WoW player who's a PC gamer at home and a graphic artist during the day on a Mac. Any other night and some weekends, I'll find him here at work playing WoW on the Mac because he says it runs better than the screaming zonker PCs he built for games. Ok, maybe it's the Quad G5 with 4.5 gigs of RAM, nvidia 6600 and 30" monitor, but even that's an old machine and graphics card now.
He's probably got a crappy PC at home then. My friend just got a brand new Mac Pro 2.6 quad (the standard model). We upgraded it to 3GB of RAM and it still barely plays WoW at 1024x768 because of the crappy Nvidia 7300 graphics card that comes standard.
You want a Mac that plays WoW as good as a PC? Try finding an Nvidia 8800 series graphics card for it. That's the best performing graphics card out there now. You can't buy it for a Mac.
I play WoW on a 37" 1080P HDTV with an Nvidia 8800GTX 768MB. I play at 1920x1080 with 4xAA and all settings maxed. I consistently get 60 fps in most places, with the exception of a couple places in Shattrath city where pretty much everybody lags (I think it's a problem with the game). Try that on your Mac and tell me how well the game plays.
It's funny that you use your Windows PC for fun and your Mac for work, because that is the exact opposite of how the Mac is marketed by Apple.
It's mainly that I don't trust my Windows PC to do any more than play games without getting infected, rootkited, zombified, and generally hacked. My Mac is where I do all of my: online shopping, online banking/billpay, iTunes/iPod, email, basically anything involving personal information that I don't want a hacker/identity thief to get a hold of.
You know the Windows ecosystem is in trouble when all your computer can reliably and safely do is run games.
WoW on the Mac has always been multi-threaded also. Just now the OpenGL part is multithreaded. As far as I'm aware, no one has gotten Multithreaded OpenGL working on the PC... well, ok, ID had it working with Quake3 in certain very specific cases, but overall, multithreaded rendering processes are by far in the minority, and I'm pretty sure that WoW falls into this category.
You're absolutely right. I should have been more specific. What I should also mention is that most PC gamers use DirectX instead of OpenGL. The DirectX portions of WoW have always been multi-threaded. We are talking about the graphics rendering engine portion of the game. Of course the core game itself has always been multi-threaded on both platforms. It's the OpenGL multi-threading that was late on Mac because Apple didn't even support it until a point release on Tiger (I think it was 10.4.8 or 10.4.9 if my memory serves me correctly).
I first noticed the accelerating proliferation of this "belief in magic" at the point where city populations became dominated by a 3rd generation raised away from the farm, who didn't have even a grandparent's tales to connect them to How The World Really Works.
That's an interesting theory. Since I moved to the east coast I'm amazed that some of the most intelligent people I know, who should know better, actually believe in some of this magic. Mediums, psychics, fortune telling, you name it. It's been pretty shocking to see some well educated people that are easily in the top 2% as far as income is concerned lose all sense of reality and fork over hundreds (thousands?) of dollars to these charlatans.
And to top that, World of Warcraft on Mac actually has a leg up on its PC counterpart through the use of multi-threaded OpenGL.
Actually, you've got it backwards. The PC version of WoW had a leg up on it's Mac counterpart because the PC version has always been multi-threaded. Mac just finally arrived to the party, so you might start to see framerates on your Mac that approach framerates on similar PC type hardware. FWIW, I own an Apple Powerbook G4 15", so I'm not a Windows fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. I just use my PC for games, and the Mac when I want to get real work done.
I tend to listen to Theo's opinion carefully on this subjects.
You shouldn't. After seeing the way that Theo blew up when one of the OpenBSD contributers was rightfully accused of stealing code from a wifi driver without attribution, I will never listen to a word that man says again. The words "crazy" and "psychopath" come to mind.
You can take your regulated monopoly and stuff it. You must be an astroturfer for AT&T because I sure as hell don't want to go back to the days when I had to pay 50 cents a minute for long distance. Do you?
If a kid didn't play fair with you, did you run and bitch to your parents every minute of the day, or did you eventually learn not to play with the kid.
What if the kid owned over 90% of all the toys in the playground and only let you play with the crappy blocks unless you were his friend?
alpha - Code that doesn't compile or runs incorrectly. Alpha testing is literally checking to see if the code compiles and runs as expected, done by the developers themselves.
beta - The code works now, but there may still be major bugs. A small group of internal testers try it and report any bugs they find. This is now called "closed beta" by MMO developers or "alpha" by the Mozilla team.
Your definitions of alpha and beta are pretty flawed. Alpha software is software that is in development that is not yet feature complete. Beta software is software that is finally feature complete, but not yet stable enough for release. There is a big difference, but the main difference between alpha and beta is whether the program is "feature complete" or not. The features don't have to all work, and betas are expected to have problems, but the features should all be there before software moves from alpha to beta.
Look, people, as far as I'm concerned, I can't wait for Bush to get out of office either - and I'm a registered Republican. But this throwing around "illegal" just because you want it to be (not because it really is) is starting to reflect more on your desperation to get him out in any way possible than it reflects on the President's actions.
What part of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." do you not understand?
Bush broke the law, plain and simple. By violating the 4th amendment to the constitution, which he swore an oath to uphold, he broke the law. Breaking the law is by definition illegal. Pull your head out of the sand and wake up before you don't have a country to wake up to any more.
It can save a system from being compromised due to other services which are either weaker, or poorly configured. Taking some time to get SELinux working properly in ones production environment (if that system is important) is more than worth the time it takes to read up on it. Being a lazy sys admin rarely pays off in the long run.
I agree that SELinux is a good idea, but how do we get vendors to "play nicely" with it? I'm a Linux sysadmin working on a lot of Oracle database servers. Oracle says I have to have SELinux turned off, and in our experience, Oracle won't even install or run with SELinux enabled. I would love to be able to turn SELinux on but Oracle says I can't. Is there any hope for those of us that run commercial apps on Linux and want to see better security?
Other interesting points are that nVidia users are notoriously bad at upgrading their drivers,
Having owned both ATI and NVidia cards, I think the reason for this is that the Nvidia drivers are just so much more stable and bug-free than the ATI drivers. With most ATI cards I've owned I had to upgrade my drivers every 2 weeks just to fix annoying bugs and try to resolve slow framerate issues. During the ATI 9x00 line of cards, it wasn't uncommon to get a 10% framerate increase from a driver update one week, then the next week get another 10-15% framerate increase from another driver update. In fact, the ATI drivers were so buggy and incomplete that people felt the need to release their own versions of ATI drivers just to fix some of the glaring bugs in them. I don't know if they've improved since then, but I also haven't bought an ATI card since then because Nvidia is just so much higher quality.
I can't tell if the link in your sig is a joke site or if you really are that crazy... If you're serious, just stop listening to all the voices in your head and take some medication mmmkay?
I stopped reading right there. Sorry dude, I hate to break it to your "leet marketing gurus" but there is no such thing as "above layer 7"... Unless you're analyzing the context of the content I just downloaded to tell me what you think the Slashdot post I just read is trying to say... there's no such thing as layer 8.
I'm not buying a laptop until quad-core units roll out.
Yeah because I would feel like my penis size was really inadequate if I only had a dual core...
Re:And yes, you can play Theora in WMP
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I think for people whose experience was never soured by MS-DOS, Bash won't actually be such a big deal.
I cut my teeth on DOS batch files before I ever saw a bash shell, and before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gates eye. For that very reason I felt right at home using bash. Hell, DOS might have sucked compared to bash, but it actually had some pretty good stuff like pipes, variables, and gotos. Did you know there is a "more" command in DOS? And you can pipe files to it? I used to do a "type filename.txt|more" all the time, and DOS even had a rudimentary editor called "copy con filename.txt", which would literally copy the stdin from the console (keyboard) directly into the file... better not make a typo:-)
Ah the good old days... Now you kids get off my lawn!
I seconded ideas on ideastorm that suggested Dell get rid of this stupid division between Latitude and Inspiron, but who knows if that will ever happen. Just a single line of well built laptops in a few different screen sizes is all we need (it works for Apple and if Dell wants to entire the retail market seriously, it would help to have a reduced model line).
Actually I don't really expect Dell to ever do this. The reason why is this: Dell realized that the consumer and business markets are very different.
When consumers buy a PC they want the latest and greatest features, expecting that they probably won't be upgrading for a few years so they want whatever is hot right now. That means they might just buy a computer with Vista because it's flashy and has "cool" graphics. They might buy a computer that's silver colored and "looks more like a Mac."
Businesses want exactly the opposite. They want a computer that will continue to be supported and sold for years at a time. They like to standardize on a computer line that won't change much, because corporate desktop installs are usually cloned with a tool like Ghost and if hardware changes frequently that messes up the master image. They also standardize on older versions of software like Windows XP for the same reason. Keeping things simple and the same across all corporate desktops makes it very easy to troubleshoot issues. When your $10 an hour help desk staff can't figure out how to fix Windows, just reimage the desktop and give it back to the user.
That is the reason why Dell offers 2 distinct product lines. So they can offer newer technology to consumers, and offer stable technology with a longer support lifecycle to businesses. I don't see them changing any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
From the linked article:
The protocol was designed to provide for a secure way to automatically keep communicating new messages between a server and a mobile device like a PDA or Smartphone. It should reduce the time and effort needed to synchronize messages between the two (by using an open connection that is kept alive by some kind of heartbeat).
Look, if you're not in touch enough with your customers to know what forums online they frequent, and don't know how to setup a Google News alert to find new articles on the web written about your company, go hire a college intern that does. Seriously, you don't need to pay somebody thousands of dollars to do this stuff. Any college student with a passing ability to use the internet can already tell you how to do this, so go try to sell your snake oil somewhere else...
Remember, there is a fine line between a "hobby" and "mental illness."
This seems like a totally unnecessary service being marketed to people and companies that don't know any better.
If you want an unlocked GSM smartphone you just have to buy it yourself, pay the true cost of the phone (hint, it's closer to $600 than the $299 your carrier wants to sell it to you for with a 2 year contract), and get a SIM card from the phone company.
Sure it costs more up front, but if you figure in the monthly cost of voice + unlimited data plans, you're going to spend a few grand over 2 years time. Also, make sure you don't sign a contract. I'm on month-to-month with Cingular (even though they usually tell you such a plan doesn't exist when you first talk to them, be persistent and refuse to sign a contract if you're not getting a subsidised phone).
You want a Mac that plays WoW as good as a PC? Try finding an Nvidia 8800 series graphics card for it. That's the best performing graphics card out there now. You can't buy it for a Mac.
I play WoW on a 37" 1080P HDTV with an Nvidia 8800GTX 768MB. I play at 1920x1080 with 4xAA and all settings maxed. I consistently get 60 fps in most places, with the exception of a couple places in Shattrath city where pretty much everybody lags (I think it's a problem with the game). Try that on your Mac and tell me how well the game plays.
You know the Windows ecosystem is in trouble when all your computer can reliably and safely do is run games.
Bush broke the law, plain and simple. By violating the 4th amendment to the constitution, which he swore an oath to uphold, he broke the law. Breaking the law is by definition illegal. Pull your head out of the sand and wake up before you don't have a country to wake up to any more.
I can't tell if the link in your sig is a joke site or if you really are that crazy... If you're serious, just stop listening to all the voices in your head and take some medication mmmkay?
Ah the good old days... Now you kids get off my lawn!
When consumers buy a PC they want the latest and greatest features, expecting that they probably won't be upgrading for a few years so they want whatever is hot right now. That means they might just buy a computer with Vista because it's flashy and has "cool" graphics. They might buy a computer that's silver colored and "looks more like a Mac."
Businesses want exactly the opposite. They want a computer that will continue to be supported and sold for years at a time. They like to standardize on a computer line that won't change much, because corporate desktop installs are usually cloned with a tool like Ghost and if hardware changes frequently that messes up the master image. They also standardize on older versions of software like Windows XP for the same reason. Keeping things simple and the same across all corporate desktops makes it very easy to troubleshoot issues. When your $10 an hour help desk staff can't figure out how to fix Windows, just reimage the desktop and give it back to the user.
That is the reason why Dell offers 2 distinct product lines. So they can offer newer technology to consumers, and offer stable technology with a longer support lifecycle to businesses. I don't see them changing any time soon.