The PalmOS Treos (650, 680, 700p) are pretty much feature-complete (I have push-IMAP, web, google maps, pim, music player, etc etc) and more importantly are usable one-handed.
Disclaimer: I have a Treo 650 and it has been a great phone for almost 2 years. How in the hell am I supposed to use it one handed? Sure, I can take a phone call with one hand, but you can do that with the iPhone as well. Anything that requires interactive input requires one hand to hold the phone and the other to touch the screen or use the stylus. I don't see any revolutionary speech input device on the Treo or the iPhone, nor would I want one. I like being able to put someone on speakerphone and enter an appointment in my calendar on my Treo, but unfortunately that requires two hands. Can you imagine the confusion the other person would have as they start telling you the meeting time and you start saying "Open Calendar! New appointment! Friday January 12th, 2:00 pm!"
I'm fairly sure Apple will have iChat functionality available by release. The software for the phone isn't even complete yet.
Sorry but you sound like a Treo fanboy that can't believe his expensive toy will be obsolete in a few months. I for one am looking forward to upgrading to the iPhone when it is released. The Treo is a great phone, but the iPhone will be better.
And as a reminder for those of you who got your hopes up in November of 2006 -- you might want to look at who was President in 1994. Hint: His last name wasn't "Bush".
And as a reminder for those of you who got your hopes dashed in November of 2006 -- You might want to look at who controlled congress in 1994, and you might also want to read up on the constitution where you would find that Congress writes the laws, the president merely signs them or vetoes them.
If I was going to buy a car, it would be in my best interest to have a good lock on the car. If I was going to buy an operating system, it would not be in my best interest to have loads of artificial restrictions in the operating system.
Or, to put it another way, would you let the car dealership install an extra lock on your car that only they had the key to and could lock you out of at any time? Of course not, the thought would be silly, but that's exactly what you are doing if you buy Vista or update Windows XP to include "Windows Genuine (dis)Advantage."
I'm not sure why this keeps coming up, but let me feed the trolls a little bit and take this one point by point:
Didn't these folks come out swinging against Linux and OSS development long ago and far away?
Not that I'm aware of, although Linux has been a competitor to Solaris (in Sun's eyes) in the past, they didn't actively try to sabotage it, they just acted indifferently at times; although now they fully support it (All Sun hardware is certified Linux compatible, etc.).
Didn't they make some deal with Microsoft RE: OpenOffice?
Umm... No, they sued Microsoft, and won, settling for $2 billion for the dirty tricks MS played trying to embrace and extend Java. And by the way, why in the hell do people keep ripping on Sun for stupid shit like this? Sun FUCKING GAVE YOU GUYS OpenOffice, out of pure generosity and to contribute to Free FUCKING Software. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
Weren't they somehow implicated in the SCO debacle as someone backing the lawsuit?
Again FUCK NO! Sun has licensed Unix System V from Santa Cruz Operation for several years now, as they are the proxy that licenses the original AT&T Unix code to companies like HP (HP-UX), IBM (AIX), SGI (IRIX), and Sun (Solaris). Every one of those companies pays licenses to SCO in order to legally be able to sell UNIX. Looks like everyone that runs commercial Unix funds SCO to some degree... Guess we're all guilty.
Look, man, I'm glad they've "finally seen the light" and opened up their stuff (still CDDL for most of the code though, right?) but they've done it when it was convenient and when they've got something to gain now, not because it was the right thing to do. Many thanks and all, and definitely a company to consider an ally -- but it's not like we shouldn't be watching just in case they go all "Novell" on us.
I can't believe you're such a loser that you still give Sun a hard time after all they have done for the Free Software community. Richard M. Stallman himself said that Sun had released more lines of free software source code than any other single entity (paraphrasing because I can't find the quote right now). So why can't you just forgive them and say "good job, cheers" for a change?
Disclaimer: I currently work in an environment with all HP hardware and RHEL 4. But I have worked on a lot of Sun's and we still have a lot left in our data center.
The situation with Zune/iPod is no different than the situation with Office/ODF. *More* real choices = better for the consumer and lower prices by all! We need a serious challenger to Apple for no other reason than to force them to cross that final frontier - playing nicely with everyone else (i.e., not forcing their product chain down our throats with restrictive DRM).
Seriously wtf are you smoking? The Zune has DRM that is way more restrictive than the iPod. Songs that expire? Your own bands music that can be splooged (or whatever they call it) to somebody wirelessly but they can't keep it and it expires after they listen to it 3 times?
How you can compare the DRM infested Zune with ODF is beyond me. One is an open document specification that could enable people on different OS, hardware, or software to exchange files, the other is a closed platform music player with DRM so restrictive that your entire music collection can auto-delete itself because you forgot to pay your monthly bill...
I'm Australian and I've heard that word for at least a couple of decades. There was even a sleazy guy with a hand puppet of that name on childrens TV for years.
I'm just giving you hard time, as you could probably tell by the smiley I used. I think "wife aggro" is the perfect term to describe the whole "you should spend more time with the family" vibe that a lot of my married friends get from their wives when they want to do a little gaming in their free time.
I'm still amazed that watching TV for 8 hours a day is a perfectly acceptable time sink, but raiding for 8 hours isn't... I guess it's the societal gaming stigma that haunts us to this day.
I've streamlined the household chores, doing a bit more than my share to keep wife aggro down:).
Dude, you just used a WoW term (aggro, well, more like a generic MMORPG term) to describe your relationship with your wife... I think you are in serious denial about your addiction:)
If anyone has ever played a game called Guild Wars, it's like the MMORPG equivelant of this. There are soon to be over 1000 skills that can be used (after the October 28th release of the latest update), and the game has so many similarities to Magic the Gathering that they can't be ignored.
Basically, each player can have up to 8 skills in use at a time. You have to pick the skills carefully before battle, and it's important to pick skills that synergize with each other. You form a group of up to 8 players, so 8 players with 8 skills each means you're basically building a Magic deck with a total of 64 cards.
Every skill is an attack, spell, enchantment, or hex. The game focuses on balanced gameplay, with every type of skill having a counter, or sometimes multiple counters. For example, a warrior might have an axe attack skill called "Eviscerate" that will do a lot of damage to you if it hits. An elementalist might bring a skill called "Blinding Flash", which if he casts it on the warrior, will temporarily blind him, causing 90% of his attacks to miss, and therefore countering the damage that would be caused by the "Eviscerate". To make things even more fun/complex, the warrior will have an allied monk on his team, who brings a skill called "Mend condition", which will remove blindness from the warrior, allowing his attacks to hit. This all happens in real-time, with skills having anywhere between 1/4 second and 10 second activation times, so you have to think quickly. The game is really like a fast game of Magic, or speed chess if you will.
One of the things that impresses me the most about Guild Wars is the amount of time that they spend balancing the game and making sure that no one build or set of skills is all powerful. Unbalanced skills make gameplay boring because everyone will bring the most powerful skill and then it's just a question of who has the fastest reflexes. Arenanet, the developer of Guild Wars even hired James Finney, the guy that used to work for Blizzard and made the amazing game Starcraft well balanced, to head up the group that is in charge of balancing all the skills.
Another thing they do to balance things is allow anyone to create a level-20 PVP character (maximum level), and there are no overpowered items, like in WoW. If you want to try a game that is MMORPG-like, but with the balance of a well-crafted card game like MtG, I highly recommend Guild Wars.
Given the state of the market right now, I wouldn't ship a computer with a TV tuner in it, either. If the FCC were to get its act together and really make CableCard the standard, and eliminate proprietary converter boxes, then I think you'd see an explosion in the types of set-top boxes and DVRs. I have no doubt Apple would be at the top of the list.
I think you're missing the point here. Apple doesn't want to play in the existing cable/satellite/OTA arenas. They are already heavily dominated by entrenched monopolies. Apple has created an entirely new distribution channel using the Internet and the iTunes store. The future is on-demand video delivered over broadband Internet, where Apple doesn't have to force their customers to give the cable company a cut.
I know that if I could by an iTV today and download the few TV shows I watch every week for $1.99, I'd cancel my cable bill in a heartbeat, and I'm sure a lot of iPod users that have seen how well iTunes works would as well. Apple is creating an entirely new distribution model; they aren't wrapping hardware around existing outdated distribution models.
What you are asking to do is possibly against the computer abuse and fraud act. You are asking to disrupt someone elses connection by 'hacking/cracking' thier traffic.
I would disagree. This is not illegal, but it is unethical. You are not hacking or cracking anything on their computer. All you are doing is sending a TCP reset packet on an open wireless network. Their computer can choose to ignore it or honor the reset request; you are not accessing or tampering with any data on their computer itself. But seriously, if enough people start doing this, the various BitTorrent client programs will simply be modified so that they can detect spoofed TCP reset packets and ignore them. By doing this, you're basically contributing to the arms race that is p2p abusers vs. network admins.
A better solution, if you have access to the network hardware itself, would be to implement some type of QoS or rate limiting. This can be done easily enough on a Linksys WRT54-G with custom firmware, so it shouldn't cost more than $100 for a total solution.
My doctor actually PRESCRIBED eating more butter when I stopped eating meat.
Yep, just goes to show you that a few years of man trying to "chemically" engineer a substitute for nature will not be healthy, and besides, keeping chemical intake down is a good thing.
Um, actually the FDA encouraged the use of trans-fats, in order to protect us from the horrible greedy corporations who were poisoning us with trans-fat free butter and natural animal fats.
Unfortunately it now appears that the trans-fats are actually worse for you than butter and lard. Sure, butter and lard will clog your arteries, but trans-fats will clog your arteries and give you cancer.
Too dumb to read a food label? All the constituents are clearly labeled.
You and I may be intelligent enough to know that anything on the shelf that says "partially hydrogenated soybean oil" contains trans-fats, but I dare you to ask 10 people off the streets in a red state what it is. My guess is that only 1 out of 10 will even know what it means, and that it is harmful to them.
How can anyone trust the FDA to actually have the consumers, and not the multi-billion dollar food conglomerates interests in mind?
This is the same federal agency that has let the food industry poison us for decades through the use of trans-fats, which have been shown to cause obesity, cancer, and many more health problems. The only reason that they use trans-fats is that it increases the shelf life of foods, which saves the big food companies a few cents on refrigeration and storage costs.
So the food industry would rather save a few cents per package, and doesn't care about poisoning the average american citizen. The FDA has been complicit in this, and has let them get away with it for decades, only in the last couple years have they actually required food companies to even list the amount of trans-fats included in food items. This is for a substance that the FDA has determined there is no safe amount.
No thanks. I don't trust the FDA to protect me from foods that will be small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. I foresee a whole new generation of unhealthy americans that will be dying from strange diseases, none the wiser that it's their poisoned food supply causing it.
The difference is that you see the things you disagree with, while the things you agree with you tend to gloss over. Most right wingers see CNN, NPR, BBC, etc as liberal (while most leftists call them neutral) and most liberals call Fox conservative (while most rightists call it neutral). It's all about hearing what you agree with MOST of the time and letting it reinforce your ideas.
Dude, if you think that Fox News is neutral then it's not hard to see why you might be frustrated here at Slashdot. If you can't handle the truth and need bias in your news then go ahead and watch Fox. There's a reason why most intelligent people here agree with the "groupthink", and that is that it's right. If 99% of people in the world agree that the world is round, having the other 1% call it "groupthink" doesn't make it any less true. You can call Slashdot's comment section groupthink if you want, but I tend to think of it as a lot of higher than average intelligence people exchanging ideas. The moderation system also tends to create a great s/n ratio as well.
My personal favorite for arguments like this (that the game trained him how to shoot a gun) is that they use it for EVERY case, including the ones where the game could NOT have trained him to use a gun (Like GTA).
I'm going to quote some Eminem lyrics here for extreme truth:
They say music can alter moods and talk to you, Well can it load a gun up for you, and cock it too? Well if it can, then the next time you assault a dude, Just tell the judge it was my fault and i'll get sued.
Okay so what do we really need? We need TiO2 building coverings and in bathrooms and desks because it feels great and works.
Why do we need any of these things? I know they say no bacteria can survive on these surfaces, but how do we know that for sure? Once the bacteria has a mutation that allows survival on this surface it will be everywhere, and it will probably be a superbug. Our normal wood, metal, and glass desk surfaces have worked fine for hundreds of years. Why should we change them just so that we have the potential of making an environment where a superbug can grow and flourish? I'll stick with just cleaning my desk regularly, with soap and water, and not using any of this antibacterial crap that just fosters the creation of really nasty superbugs.
The mow-ped, built from stuff people throw away is helping to keep stuff out of the landfill, helping to reduce pollution and is a poke in the eye to the uberglobalists that insist we all buy brand new cars every year and constantly fill them up with hyperinflated, over priced gas..
You're kidding right? Reduce pollution? That weed-eater engine is a 2-stroke engine, which puts out much greater pollution than a 4-stroke engine that you find in a car.
TWO STROKE ENGINES
Advantages: - Two-stroke engines do not have valves, simplifying their construction. - Two-stroke engines fire once every revolution (four-stroke engines fire once every other revolution). This gives two-stroke engines a significant power boost. - Two-stroke engines are lighter, and cost less to manufacture. - Two-stroke engines have the potential for about twice the power in the same size because there are twice as many power strokes per revolution.
Disadvantages: - Two-stroke engines don't live as long as four-stroke engines. The lack of a dedicated lubrication system means that the parts of a two-stroke engine wear-out faster. Two-stroke engines require a mix of oil in with the gas to lubricate the crankshaft, connecting rod and cylinder walls. - Two-stroke oil can be expensive. Mixing ratio is about 4 ounces per gallon of gas: burning about a gallon of oil every 1,000 miles. - Two-stroke engines do not use fuel efficiently, yielding fewer miles per gallon. - Two-stroke engines produce more pollution. From: -- The combustion of the oil in the gas. The oil makes all two-stroke engines smoky to some extent, and a badly worn two-stroke engine can emit more oily smoke. -- Each time a new mix of air/fuel is loaded into the combustion chamber, part of it leaks out through the exhaust port.
So they may be way less expensive, but they pollute way more than a 4-stroke motor.
The problem of syncing-up the audio and video latency alone is tough to conquer (and is most likely the reason you can't stream iTMS TV show audio over AirTunes now).
Actually, his problem is very easily solved: Read the raw data off of your network filesystem and do the decoding on the set-top box. All audio/video latency problems vanish, unless of course your content was encoded incorrectly.
The problem with the Airport Express and audio syncing with TV is that while the video decoding is taking place on the computer, the audio is being sent in apple lossless codec to the airport express, which is actually decoding it, adding additional latency (and buffering) of it's own. Do the video and audio decoding on the same device and these latency problems disappear.
USB 2.0 is supposed to be 480mbps, not 12mbps, unless they're using the stupid hi-speed 2.0 specification which is actually just USB 1.1...
How sucky does this device have to be if it can only read/write from the hard drive at 12mbps? At those data transfer rates, you might be able to record a TV show (assuming 4-5 mbps for video) and watch one at the same time if you're lucky, but good luck recording 2 shows and watching a 3rd, and good luck copying data to and from it across the network. 100 megabits will seem like the fastest thing around compared to your poor old 12mbps USB hard drive...
The second is that they frequently have world event- where there is a battle, with war preparations, or there is a new enemy who appears for awhile, or things like that.
You've gotta be kidding me. If you think "we're preparing for a war, your realm must collect 10,000,000,000 leather hides" to be a quest with a story, you can probably not bother going to the movies any more... Just hang a piece of paper on your wall and write "story goes here" on it and watch it for a couple hours, it should be at least as exciting as killing and skinning a million of the same monsters all day long.
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I'm fairly sure Apple will have iChat functionality available by release. The software for the phone isn't even complete yet.
Sorry but you sound like a Treo fanboy that can't believe his expensive toy will be obsolete in a few months. I for one am looking forward to upgrading to the iPhone when it is released. The Treo is a great phone, but the iPhone will be better.
Not that I'm aware of, although Linux has been a competitor to Solaris (in Sun's eyes) in the past, they didn't actively try to sabotage it, they just acted indifferently at times; although now they fully support it (All Sun hardware is certified Linux compatible, etc.).
Umm... No, they sued Microsoft, and won, settling for $2 billion for the dirty tricks MS played trying to embrace and extend Java. And by the way, why in the hell do people keep ripping on Sun for stupid shit like this? Sun FUCKING GAVE YOU GUYS OpenOffice, out of pure generosity and to contribute to Free FUCKING Software. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
Again FUCK NO! Sun has licensed Unix System V from Santa Cruz Operation for several years now, as they are the proxy that licenses the original AT&T Unix code to companies like HP (HP-UX), IBM (AIX), SGI (IRIX), and Sun (Solaris). Every one of those companies pays licenses to SCO in order to legally be able to sell UNIX. Looks like everyone that runs commercial Unix funds SCO to some degree... Guess we're all guilty.
I can't believe you're such a loser that you still give Sun a hard time after all they have done for the Free Software community. Richard M. Stallman himself said that Sun had released more lines of free software source code than any other single entity (paraphrasing because I can't find the quote right now). So why can't you just forgive them and say "good job, cheers" for a change?
Disclaimer: I currently work in an environment with all HP hardware and RHEL 4. But I have worked on a lot of Sun's and we still have a lot left in our data center.
How you can compare the DRM infested Zune with ODF is beyond me. One is an open document specification that could enable people on different OS, hardware, or software to exchange files, the other is a closed platform music player with DRM so restrictive that your entire music collection can auto-delete itself because you forgot to pay your monthly bill...
I'm still amazed that watching TV for 8 hours a day is a perfectly acceptable time sink, but raiding for 8 hours isn't... I guess it's the societal gaming stigma that haunts us to this day.
Cheers.
If anyone has ever played a game called Guild Wars, it's like the MMORPG equivelant of this. There are soon to be over 1000 skills that can be used (after the October 28th release of the latest update), and the game has so many similarities to Magic the Gathering that they can't be ignored.
Basically, each player can have up to 8 skills in use at a time. You have to pick the skills carefully before battle, and it's important to pick skills that synergize with each other. You form a group of up to 8 players, so 8 players with 8 skills each means you're basically building a Magic deck with a total of 64 cards.
Every skill is an attack, spell, enchantment, or hex. The game focuses on balanced gameplay, with every type of skill having a counter, or sometimes multiple counters. For example, a warrior might have an axe attack skill called "Eviscerate" that will do a lot of damage to you if it hits. An elementalist might bring a skill called "Blinding Flash", which if he casts it on the warrior, will temporarily blind him, causing 90% of his attacks to miss, and therefore countering the damage that would be caused by the "Eviscerate". To make things even more fun/complex, the warrior will have an allied monk on his team, who brings a skill called "Mend condition", which will remove blindness from the warrior, allowing his attacks to hit. This all happens in real-time, with skills having anywhere between 1/4 second and 10 second activation times, so you have to think quickly. The game is really like a fast game of Magic, or speed chess if you will.
One of the things that impresses me the most about Guild Wars is the amount of time that they spend balancing the game and making sure that no one build or set of skills is all powerful. Unbalanced skills make gameplay boring because everyone will bring the most powerful skill and then it's just a question of who has the fastest reflexes. Arenanet, the developer of Guild Wars even hired James Finney, the guy that used to work for Blizzard and made the amazing game Starcraft well balanced, to head up the group that is in charge of balancing all the skills.
Another thing they do to balance things is allow anyone to create a level-20 PVP character (maximum level), and there are no overpowered items, like in WoW. If you want to try a game that is MMORPG-like, but with the balance of a well-crafted card game like MtG, I highly recommend Guild Wars.
I know that if I could by an iTV today and download the few TV shows I watch every week for $1.99, I'd cancel my cable bill in a heartbeat, and I'm sure a lot of iPod users that have seen how well iTunes works would as well. Apple is creating an entirely new distribution model; they aren't wrapping hardware around existing outdated distribution models.
A better solution, if you have access to the network hardware itself, would be to implement some type of QoS or rate limiting. This can be done easily enough on a Linksys WRT54-G with custom firmware, so it shouldn't cost more than $100 for a total solution.
How can anyone trust the FDA to actually have the consumers, and not the multi-billion dollar food conglomerates interests in mind?
This is the same federal agency that has let the food industry poison us for decades through the use of trans-fats, which have been shown to cause obesity, cancer, and many more health problems. The only reason that they use trans-fats is that it increases the shelf life of foods, which saves the big food companies a few cents on refrigeration and storage costs.
So the food industry would rather save a few cents per package, and doesn't care about poisoning the average american citizen. The FDA has been complicit in this, and has let them get away with it for decades, only in the last couple years have they actually required food companies to even list the amount of trans-fats included in food items. This is for a substance that the FDA has determined there is no safe amount.
No thanks. I don't trust the FDA to protect me from foods that will be small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. I foresee a whole new generation of unhealthy americans that will be dying from strange diseases, none the wiser that it's their poisoned food supply causing it.
So they may be way less expensive, but they pollute way more than a 4-stroke motor.
The problem with the Airport Express and audio syncing with TV is that while the video decoding is taking place on the computer, the audio is being sent in apple lossless codec to the airport express, which is actually decoding it, adding additional latency (and buffering) of it's own. Do the video and audio decoding on the same device and these latency problems disappear.
How sucky does this device have to be if it can only read/write from the hard drive at 12mbps? At those data transfer rates, you might be able to record a TV show (assuming 4-5 mbps for video) and watch one at the same time if you're lucky, but good luck recording 2 shows and watching a 3rd, and good luck copying data to and from it across the network. 100 megabits will seem like the fastest thing around compared to your poor old 12mbps USB hard drive...