Being an investor I'm guessing you know the product pretty well. Here are my concerns:
* Screen size: It looks like the built in screen only does 640x480, a resolution at which I cringe when thinking about browsing most of the popular websites. 1024x768 seems to be the minimum resolution I'm confortable at these days and with such a small screen, that would be pretty horrid.
* No built in PCMCIA slot. Most people don't see how important this can be to a portable device. What will I have to do when another wireless network standard comes out (and I'm pretty sure they will come out)? I could get a USB or firewire version of the device but that makes the machine bigger and more clunky.
* Replacable battery. I can't seem to find any information on this. Is the battery in the unit easily changed with another one? The pages say that the unit will get 9.5 hours on a charge, which is very likely the maximum theoretical limit. I'm guessing the unit gets more like 6 hours on a chage, 4 if you are doing really have usage.
* Sound. The page doesn't say if there is a built in speaker although I'm guessing it has built in audio.
* And most importantly, does it run linux?:)
I'm not sure you are allowed to divulge any information on the product. Regardless, these are some of the things I'd question before being interested in the product beyond cool geek value.
Well, I'm sure they wanted to put a larger hard drive in the unit but since they are using the small hard drive from Toshiba (the one that comes in the iPod) I don't think they had much of a choice what with only 5 and 10 gig versions.
Regardless, this thing seems pretty well connected. With that connectivity, why not store your mp3's on an external drive/system? Then you can just stream your music via samba or http or something to the device? You could probably have a small (1 gig or so) "cache" of your favorite songs at the time. I'd love to have an mp3 player with a built in 802.11[a|b] card. My home and my workplace have wireless internet access so I'd just need an hour or so of music for the commute and such.
Looks like a pretty cool device but I'd want to see if the small screen is crisp enough to read and browse the web with.
Geoffeg
Re:Perl isn't unreadable - some Perl programs are
on
Exegesis 4 Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, I disagree and think just the opposite. In many cases, I find that perl is easier to read because of all the "symbols" at the begining of variables and such.
For instance, in Java "String foo;" and in perl "$foo". Now, later in the code, if I see "$foo" in my perl code, I know immediatly that I'm dealing with a scalar, or %foo is a hash, whereas in most other languages I have to either remember the variable declarations or go back and find the variable declaration in the file.
Also, I think alot the supposed unreadability of perl has to do with regex. Since regex is such a basic part of perl, it gets used alot and when you come across "$_ =~ s/^([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/;" you may attribute the mess of characters to perl when in fact, most of the mess is regex, which exists in many languages.
This is not to say that I haven't see lots of ugly code, perl or otherwise but I don't think perl is really any more difficult to read than other languages.
If you have an ebook you want to read the it the "old skool" way; print it out, take it to Kinko's and say "bind this". Takes about 5 minutes and costs just a few bucks. Looks pretty nice too!
Personally, I think book's should be published electronically (PDF and HTML please) and the old way, freedom of choice.
I really think more publishing companies should release ebook versions.
Carrying 20 books back and forth between home, work and other places isn't fun. But having an electronic version of those books that I can throw on my laptop is easier (less strain on the back). Now, I could get my employer to buy copies of all the books I need for the job but that still doesn't help me when I'm out on the porch and too lazy to run back in the house to actually find the book. Not to mention when I'm simply away from the house (at parents, at conferences or just away). On the other hand, I would much rather read a real book than read it off my monitor or laptop screen.
For example: I recently purchased the JBoss Administration and Development documentation/book for $10 (which helps the Jboss group) in PDF format. I printed the document out (double sided, two pages per sheet to save money and make the book smaller), took it to Kinko's and had them bind it. Overall, I spent about $20 (paper, toner, binding, etc) and got a very nice looking book. I'm guessing that authors don't get anywhere near a $10 royalty for each book sold via a professional publisher. And no, I am not suggesting that professional publishers are bad and eveil and should be done away with.
And as for the publishing format, I prefer HTML and if I could have my way, HTML and PDF in addition to the dead tree "format". PDF's print and look better but HTML docs are a little more accessible, universal and easier to index with htdig. In my dream world, every technical book published via dead tree's has a CDROM or URL for the electronic version.
Now, as for O'Reilly's Safari books online. I subscribed to the service for about 3 months and decided it wasn't for me. The idea is nice but I just don't think I'm ready for it. Their service requires me to be online to read the books (you aren't allowed to spider your subscribed books). When I'm somewhere without a netlink (coffee shop, plane, etc), it becomes rather impossible to use Safari. I doubt that this is something that can be fixed with Safari since the whole point of the service is "books online".
I don't see why no-cache has to affect the browser remembering your scroll position. If no-cache is set AND the page has NOT changed since the last load/view, return to the previous position on the page.
Huh, certainly seems like Romero is satanic. The price of the car is currently $66,766.66. Screenshot. I would definetly have this car inspected and taken to your local exorcists-R-US before driving it around.
A few months ago, I encounted a similar problem.. 40 or so CD's that I wanted to rip but I wasn't interested in sitting in front of my PC and switching out the discs. So, I started building a lego mindstorms mechanism to do it for me.
When a CD was finished ripping, the PC would automatically eject the CD. The machine would sense the tray being out and pick up the CD (using a piece of double sided tape on the end of an arm). The CD would be dropped to the left of the CD tray (using a little pneumatic "solenoid") and the mechanism would go off to the right of the CD tray, pick up another CD, drop it in the tray. The whole process was timed perfectly so the drive would know when to close. The to-be-burned stack was simply stacked onto one of those spindles you get when you purchase a bunch of blank CD's. It worked pretty well but I took it apart before I documented it.:(
Now that I've been laid off:( maybe I should try to reconstruct it. This time I could build a better unit now that I know where some improvements could be made. I'll work on it next week, if anyone is interested in the source or a small how-to, feel free to email me.
Well, slashdot posted the info 13 minutes after the show ended here (8pm). Searching tvguide.com and tv.yahoo.com shows that particular episode as not airing again.
Anyone have any idea if it will air again or maybe someone who captured it to mpeg or something?
A few months ago, I took a tour of a shipping company that I will not name but will refer to as FooBar Inc.
The tour was at night, when shipping companies come alive and really start moving things. The tour was fun (seeing the shipping crates, all the people running around like crazy, etc) until I got to one of the sorting wharehouses. The packages to be sorted would be pulled into the wharehouse where people would go through each package and THROW it onto one of three conveyor belts. The topmost belt was about 5 feet high, the middle at about 3 and the bottom on the ground. I was totally shocked to see the the people doing the sorting THROW (not toss) printers, iMac's, monitors, tv's and other fragile equipment onto the belts. Sometimes they would miss and the package would fall to the floor, ignored until someone came around, picked it up and tossed it onto the wrong belt. Higher up in the wharehouse, where the smaller packages where sorted, the sorters would also throw the packages into the wrong chutes, toss the packages on top of the equipment or onto the floor.
Now, I'm not blaming the sorters (completely). They are payed minimum wage to do a horribly shitty and boring job. I do blame FooBar Inc for not paying these people right or not doing more checks to see how things are running.
After the tour, I never shipped anything the same way again. Recently, I've been either having a packing and shipping store do it for me. If I don't do that I pack the item in multiple boxes (usually 2 or 3) with little styrofoam peanuts between each box. It's a complete pain in the ass to pack (especially larger objects) but it seems to do the trick.
If you want something shipped right, don't ship it, take the package to the destination yourself.
I downloaded linux 2.4.12, unzipped it to make/usr/src/linux, downloaded preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.12-1 and did "patch -p0 preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.12-1.patch" and got tons of errors and warnings from patch along the lines of:
I believe ogg sounds better at the same bitrate as a mp3.
I took some of my favorite CD's (ones that I've listened to over and over again and know very well) and did a little comparison. I ripped one track off each of the discs (usually my favorite track), encoded the resulting.wavs to mp3s (lame@128, no VBR) and to oggs, both at 128kbit. I came back a day later and loaded up each group of songs (the mp3, the ogg and the wav) into xmms and winamp. I turned on shuffle and began switching back and forth between songs (so I wouldn't know which format I was listening too) with my eyes closed. Obviously the.wav sounded the best as it was an exact copy of the CD, then I found that the ogg sounded better than the mp3. Ogg seems to sound crisper and bring out the little details of a song much better.
For some fun, take your headphone or speaker connection (as long as its a barrel connector) and pull it about halfway out. Now, if you do it right you can hear some kind of fuzzy noise on mp3's, maybe encoding artifacts but it sounds like noise. The higher the bitrate, the less prominent it is. I'm imagining I can hear that when I'm listening normally but it's mixed correctly so it's very low-key. Anyways, it sounds strange and ogg doesnt seem to produce this "noise".
Has anyone gotten vim (gvim) to work in OS X (aqua, not just console)? I've seen screenshots at vim.org ( http://macosx.sage-tech.net/screens/vim-shot1.jpg ) but havent seen a place to download the binary. I also see no configuration option for it in vim 6's./configure.
While this is cool, I'd love it if it did wavelan. Heck, I'd love a wavelan mp3 player. Something I can carry around the house or office and stream mp3's off an NFS directory, web site or samba share. I know, I could go get an iPaq but it's just a little too much.
Ok, here is the list of reasons I don't think I'll be buying an iBook:
* No PCMCIA slot. Now, you're thinking "who cares, its got 10/100 ethernet, modem, wavelan, etc!". Well, that's great for now, but what about when new technologies come around. Say this was 2 years ago, I wouldn't be able to easily use wavelan (without getting some annoying dongle for USB or firewire).
* No serial ports. Yes, I know I can get a serial to USB converter, I don't want to have to carry around the stupid dongle.
* No parallel port. Yes, I also know that Mac's have never and will never come with parallel ports and that there are probably parallel to USB converters out there, just like serial. So now I have to carry around two dongles, serial and parallel.
* No floppy drive. Yes, I know I can get a USB floppy drive and yes, I know "they're useless, d00d!" but ocassionaly, I like to have floppy access.
Now, on the positive side, it runs OS X and OS X seems to be pretty damned cool. I compiled postgresql and apache on the iMac at work and it had very few problems! OS X.I should clear up the speed issues too. I think I'll wait and see how much X.I clears/speeds up the iMac before I decide on an iBook.
I live in Covington. Did you happen to see RMS when he came to town? I thought he gave a very good talk (even if he did jump around the stage like a monkey)?
Ok, so, everyone gets this in their cellphone. The sound is irrestable to look at, so, your in a movie theatre and instead of just ignoring the noise like everyone does now, everyone is forced to look at the source.
This will be both good and bad. Since everyone in the movie theatre will simultaneously look at the person with the phone, the person will be extremely embarrased and run out.
The problem this doesn't solve is that in a large room with many people (think conference or meeting) each time a cell phone goes off, everyone will look at the source of the sound, just like they do now!
If people would just learn how to use the "vibrate" feature they would stop interrupting people and be much happier (if the cell phone is placed in the correct 'location').:)
I hope someone videotapes or broadcasts this thing (realvideo please) so we can all enjoy the event! Hopefully oreilly will do it themselfs!
Geoff
Re:Does it also work for FedEX vehicles?
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 1
Actually, my father once told me that some passenger busses in europe used flywheels for movement. Don't know too much about the details, a few google searches should turn up something.
And then there are people like me that think we should work out our problems on this rock before we send them elsewhere.
Then we are never going to get off this rock, ever. Sorry to burst your bubble but this rock will always have its problems. Don't get me wrong, I think we should continue to do our best to work out those problems and resolve them but I also believe we should explore our world around us.
Besides, don't you want to figure out what the heck all those monoliths were doing?
Slashdot Mirror
Being an investor I'm guessing you know the product pretty well. Here are my concerns:
:)
* Screen size: It looks like the built in screen only does 640x480, a resolution at which I cringe when thinking about browsing most of the popular websites. 1024x768 seems to be the minimum resolution I'm confortable at these days and with such a small screen, that would be pretty horrid.
* No built in PCMCIA slot. Most people don't see how important this can be to a portable device. What will I have to do when another wireless network standard comes out (and I'm pretty sure they will come out)? I could get a USB or firewire version of the device but that makes the machine bigger and more clunky.
* Replacable battery. I can't seem to find any information on this. Is the battery in the unit easily changed with another one? The pages say that the unit will get 9.5 hours on a charge, which is very likely the maximum theoretical limit. I'm guessing the unit gets more like 6 hours on a chage, 4 if you are doing really have usage.
* Sound. The page doesn't say if there is a built in speaker although I'm guessing it has built in audio.
* And most importantly, does it run linux?
I'm not sure you are allowed to divulge any information on the product. Regardless, these are some of the things I'd question before being interested in the product beyond cool geek value.
Geoffeg
Well, I'm sure they wanted to put a larger hard drive in the unit but since they are using the small hard drive from Toshiba (the one that comes in the iPod) I don't think they had much of a choice what with only 5 and 10 gig versions.
Regardless, this thing seems pretty well connected. With that connectivity, why not store your mp3's on an external drive/system? Then you can just stream your music via samba or http or something to the device? You could probably have a small (1 gig or so) "cache" of your favorite songs at the time. I'd love to have an mp3 player with a built in 802.11[a|b] card. My home and my workplace have wireless internet access so I'd just need an hour or so of music for the commute and such.
Looks like a pretty cool device but I'd want to see if the small screen is crisp enough to read and browse the web with.
Geoffeg
Actually, I disagree and think just the opposite. In many cases, I find that perl is easier to read because of all the "symbols" at the begining of variables and such.
For instance, in Java "String foo;" and in perl "$foo". Now, later in the code, if I see "$foo" in my perl code, I know immediatly that I'm dealing with a scalar, or %foo is a hash, whereas in most other languages I have to either remember the variable declarations or go back and find the variable declaration in the file.
Also, I think alot the supposed unreadability of perl has to do with regex. Since regex is such a basic part of perl, it gets used alot and when you come across "$_ =~ s/^([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/;" you may attribute the mess of characters to perl when in fact, most of the mess is regex, which exists in many languages.
This is not to say that I haven't see lots of ugly code, perl or otherwise but I don't think perl is really any more difficult to read than other languages.
Just my two cents,
Geoffeg
If you have an ebook you want to read the it the "old skool" way; print it out, take it to Kinko's and say "bind this". Takes about 5 minutes and costs just a few bucks. Looks pretty nice too!
Personally, I think book's should be published electronically (PDF and HTML please) and the old way, freedom of choice.
Geoffeg
Now everytime I switch cell phone providers I'll have to buy a new laptop to work with the providers network! :)
I really think more publishing companies should release ebook versions.
Carrying 20 books back and forth between home, work and other places isn't fun. But having an electronic version of those books that I can throw on my laptop is easier (less strain on the back). Now, I could get my employer to buy copies of all the books I need for the job but that still doesn't help me when I'm out on the porch and too lazy to run back in the house to actually find the book. Not to mention when I'm simply away from the house (at parents, at conferences or just away). On the other hand, I would much rather read a real book than read it off my monitor or laptop screen.
For example: I recently purchased the JBoss Administration and Development documentation/book for $10 (which helps the Jboss group) in PDF format. I printed the document out (double sided, two pages per sheet to save money and make the book smaller), took it to Kinko's and had them bind it. Overall, I spent about $20 (paper, toner, binding, etc) and got a very nice looking book. I'm guessing that authors don't get anywhere near a $10 royalty for each book sold via a professional publisher. And no, I am not suggesting that professional publishers are bad and eveil and should be done away with.
And as for the publishing format, I prefer HTML and if I could have my way, HTML and PDF in addition to the dead tree "format". PDF's print and look better but HTML docs are a little more accessible, universal and easier to index with htdig. In my dream world, every technical book published via dead tree's has a CDROM or URL for the electronic version.
Now, as for O'Reilly's Safari books online. I subscribed to the service for about 3 months and decided it wasn't for me. The idea is nice but I just don't think I'm ready for it. Their service requires me to be online to read the books (you aren't allowed to spider your subscribed books). When I'm somewhere without a netlink (coffee shop, plane, etc), it becomes rather impossible to use Safari. I doubt that this is something that can be fixed with Safari since the whole point of the service is "books online".
Phew, that was a long rant, just my thoughts.
I don't see why no-cache has to affect the browser remembering your scroll position. If no-cache is set AND the page has NOT changed since the last load/view, return to the previous position on the page.
What am I missing here?
Huh, certainly seems like Romero is satanic. The price of the car is currently $66,766.66. Screenshot. I would definetly have this car inspected and taken to your local exorcists-R-US before driving it around.
Geoffeg
A few months ago, I encounted a similar problem.. 40 or so CD's that I wanted to rip but I wasn't interested in sitting in front of my PC and switching out the discs. So, I started building a lego mindstorms mechanism to do it for me.
:(
:( maybe I should try to reconstruct it. This time I could build a better unit now that I know where some improvements could be made. I'll work on it next week, if anyone is interested in the source or a small how-to, feel free to email me.
When a CD was finished ripping, the PC would automatically eject the CD. The machine would sense the tray being out and pick up the CD (using a piece of double sided tape on the end of an arm). The CD would be dropped to the left of the CD tray (using a little pneumatic "solenoid") and the mechanism would go off to the right of the CD tray, pick up another CD, drop it in the tray. The whole process was timed perfectly so the drive would know when to close. The to-be-burned stack was simply stacked onto one of those spindles you get when you purchase a bunch of blank CD's. It worked pretty well but I took it apart before I documented it.
Now that I've been laid off
Geoffeg
Well, slashdot posted the info 13 minutes after the show ended here (8pm). Searching tvguide.com and tv.yahoo.com shows that particular episode as not airing again.
Anyone have any idea if it will air again or maybe someone who captured it to mpeg or something?
I really wanted to see it.
Geoffeg
A few months ago, I took a tour of a shipping company that I will not name but will refer to as FooBar Inc.
The tour was at night, when shipping companies come alive and really start moving things. The tour was fun (seeing the shipping crates, all the people running around like crazy, etc) until I got to one of the sorting wharehouses. The packages to be sorted would be pulled into the wharehouse where people would go through each package and THROW it onto one of three conveyor belts. The topmost belt was about 5 feet high, the middle at about 3 and the bottom on the ground. I was totally shocked to see the the people doing the sorting THROW (not toss) printers, iMac's, monitors, tv's and other fragile equipment onto the belts. Sometimes they would miss and the package would fall to the floor, ignored until someone came around, picked it up and tossed it onto the wrong belt. Higher up in the wharehouse, where the smaller packages where sorted, the sorters would also throw the packages into the wrong chutes, toss the packages on top of the equipment or onto the floor.
Now, I'm not blaming the sorters (completely). They are payed minimum wage to do a horribly shitty and boring job. I do blame FooBar Inc for not paying these people right or not doing more checks to see how things are running.
After the tour, I never shipped anything the same way again. Recently, I've been either having a packing and shipping store do it for me. If I don't do that I pack the item in multiple boxes (usually 2 or 3) with little styrofoam peanuts between each box. It's a complete pain in the ass to pack (especially larger objects) but it seems to do the trick.
If you want something shipped right, don't ship it, take the package to the destination yourself.
Geoffeg
Could you please post his slashdot userid? I'm interested in reading his comments.
Geoffeg
If you look at the URL, the first set of numerics is the year ('99','00',etc).
Geoffeg
I downloaded linux 2.4.12, unzipped it to make /usr/src/linux, downloaded preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.12-1 and did "patch -p0 preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.12-1.patch" and got tons of errors and warnings from patch along the lines of:
Hunk #1 FAILED at xx.
What am I doing wrong here?
Geoffeg
I believe ogg sounds better at the same bitrate as a mp3.
.wavs to mp3s (lame@128, no VBR) and to oggs, both at 128kbit. I came back a day later and loaded up each group of songs (the mp3, the ogg and the wav) into xmms and winamp. I turned on shuffle and began switching back and forth between songs (so I wouldn't know which format I was listening too) with my eyes closed. Obviously the .wav sounded the best as it was an exact copy of the CD, then I found that the ogg sounded better than the mp3. Ogg seems to sound crisper and bring out the little details of a song much better.
I took some of my favorite CD's (ones that I've listened to over and over again and know very well) and did a little comparison. I ripped one track off each of the discs (usually my favorite track), encoded the resulting
For some fun, take your headphone or speaker connection (as long as its a barrel connector) and pull it about halfway out. Now, if you do it right you can hear some kind of fuzzy noise on mp3's, maybe encoding artifacts but it sounds like noise. The higher the bitrate, the less prominent it is. I'm imagining I can hear that when I'm listening normally but it's mixed correctly so it's very low-key. Anyways, it sounds strange and ogg doesnt seem to produce this "noise".
Just my OPINION,
Geoffeg
Has anyone gotten vim (gvim) to work in OS X (aqua, not just console)? I've seen screenshots at vim.org ( http://macosx.sage-tech.net/screens/vim-shot1.jpg ) but havent seen a place to download the binary. I also see no configuration option for it in vim 6's ./configure.
Any ideas?
Geoffeg
Ok, so does this affect all IE 5.x versions or just IE 5.0 or 5.5? Does it affect IE 6 or has anyone tested that?
Geoffeg
While this is cool, I'd love it if it did wavelan. Heck, I'd love a wavelan mp3 player. Something I can carry around the house or office and stream mp3's off an NFS directory, web site or samba share. I know, I could go get an iPaq but it's just a little too much.
Any ideas?
Geoffeg
Well, I think that some people on /. are interested in this stuff, so they post it. If you aren't interested, just ignore it.
:)
It's not "News for Scoria, stuff (s)he thinks matters."
Geoffeg
Ok, here is the list of reasons I don't think I'll be buying an iBook:
* No PCMCIA slot. Now, you're thinking "who cares, its got 10/100 ethernet, modem, wavelan, etc!". Well, that's great for now, but what about when new technologies come around. Say this was 2 years ago, I wouldn't be able to easily use wavelan (without getting some annoying dongle for USB or firewire).
* No serial ports. Yes, I know I can get a serial to USB converter, I don't want to have to carry around the stupid dongle.
* No parallel port. Yes, I also know that Mac's have never and will never come with parallel ports and that there are probably parallel to USB converters out there, just like serial. So now I have to carry around two dongles, serial and parallel.
* No floppy drive. Yes, I know I can get a USB floppy drive and yes, I know "they're useless, d00d!" but ocassionaly, I like to have floppy access.
Now, on the positive side, it runs OS X and OS X seems to be pretty damned cool. I compiled postgresql and apache on the iMac at work and it had very few problems! OS X.I should clear up the speed issues too. I think I'll wait and see how much X.I clears/speeds up the iMac before I decide on an iBook.
Just my two cents.
Geoffeg
Hey,
I live in Covington. Did you happen to see RMS when he came to town? I thought he gave a very good talk (even if he did jump around the stage like a monkey)?
Geoff
Ok, so, everyone gets this in their cellphone. The sound is irrestable to look at, so, your in a movie theatre and instead of just ignoring the noise like everyone does now, everyone is forced to look at the source.
:)
This will be both good and bad. Since everyone in the movie theatre will simultaneously look at the person with the phone, the person will be extremely embarrased and run out.
The problem this doesn't solve is that in a large room with many people (think conference or meeting) each time a cell phone goes off, everyone will look at the source of the sound, just like they do now!
If people would just learn how to use the "vibrate" feature they would stop interrupting people and be much happier (if the cell phone is placed in the correct 'location').
Just my OPINION.
Geoffeg
I hope someone videotapes or broadcasts this thing (realvideo please) so we can all enjoy the event! Hopefully oreilly will do it themselfs!
Geoff
Actually, my father once told me that some passenger busses in europe used flywheels for movement. Don't know too much about the details, a few google searches should turn up something.
Geoff
Then we are never going to get off this rock, ever. Sorry to burst your bubble but this rock will always have its problems. Don't get me wrong, I think we should continue to do our best to work out those problems and resolve them but I also believe we should explore our world around us.
Besides, don't you want to figure out what the heck all those monoliths were doing?