Antisocial people can make music by themselves without the need for the Internet. Sociable people will make music together with or without the Internet and may even use the Internet to help communicate when collaborating on a project. Technology is a convenient scapegoat, as usual.
Yeah, you've got to give it to Sony for actually trying new things. It's easier to be a follower than a leader. They tried a lot of new things - CD, MD, SACD, Walkman, S/P-DIF, BetaMax, U-Matic, BluRay, the list goes on. Some of them have been raging successes, and some have been monumental flops. But if they didn't try, they'd miss out of the successes.
Matrox never went away completely - they just left the consumer market. They still sell cipsets for connecting very large numbers of monitors to computers. Dual-head is nothing to them - they do eight- and even sixteen-head chipsets. They don't handle games well, but it you just want lots of displays...
This product doesn't look suited to the consumer market, either. It looks like a solution for airport terminals or something - hide away a PC with one of their multi-head video cards and use this to carry the video to where you want people to see it.
I loved the keyboard/mouse that came with my G4 Sawtooth and dislike the new Apple keyboard/mouse, too. Smaller hand motions are usually better, and I liked being able to move just my fingers and not my whole wrist. But I've found that a Wacom tablet with the pen is easier on my hand than any mouse, and more accurate and faster to boot. You can hit anywhere on the screen instantly. Oh, and I have a Sanwa IceKey keyboard (the MacAlly IceKey is a rebadged, Americanised version of this).
I know it was supposed to be a joke, but your WiFi wouldn't work too well inside the house anyway because of all the multipath interference from reflections (802.11n will help there). And if you wanted to read slashdot on your notebook in the backyard, you'd be totally screwed.
Of course no-one wants to upgrade. What does Vista actually offer? A new, unfamiliar UI to learn? Annoying "security" warnings? Incompatibility with lots of apps? Most of the cool features, like Avalon and WinFS, were axed and/or promised as updates for XP, anyway. Right now, the only thing Vista offers is new, better DirectX, but there aren't any games that require it yet.
It makes perfect sense - Google and DoubleClick both make money from inserting ads into web sites. But while Google have some of the least intrusive/annoying ads, DoubleClick are at the opposite end of the spectrum. But then both of them have a reputation for gathering personal information, too. If this does happen, I hope Google makes DoubleClick ads less irritating, and not the other way around.
Actually for anyone who's actually tried Vista and Office 2k7 it is clear that there are massive improvements in security, stability, and most importantly ease of use.
Straight out ridiculous assertion. I use it because I have to for compatibility testing at work. It is anything but easier to use. MS had it right as close to right as they ever have with 2003 server. Now they've moved everything around for no good reason in Vista, so we have to re-learn everything. Some things are just silly now, including, but limited to:
Some menus drop down and some expand to the right, which is inconsistent. Also, the ones that expand to the right obscure the titles of other menus, making it harder to navigate.
Some menu bars are above toolbars and some are below. Irritating inconsistency.
Some explorer windows have no titles, so you can't tell what they are when they're minimised.
Control panels have been renamed for no good reason making them harder to find.
Many views have less empty space, making them look "busy" or "crowded" and harder to find things.
Supplied desktop pictures all cause eyestrain after extended use.
I haven't shut down my Vista box since I installed it almost 2 months ago and it's still snappy even on a Pentium M with 1GB of RAM.
People said the same things about XP. Anecdotes then are the same as anecdotes now. Just because it's been stable for you means nothing. You haven't said what you actually do with the machine.
What's more important is that the intuitive interface and time saving features such as searching and sorting significantly decrease the time spent mucking around with the OS and leave you to do your work.
Searching the start menu is only a huge time-saver in Vista because they've made it completely impractical to use with a mouse. Instead of thinking about improving the start menu, they crippled it and added a search box as compensation. See my previous comments about dubious UI "improvements".
As such Vista would have a huge impact in increasing productivity not only through its stability but through the amount someone can get done with it relative to XP, its only real competition.
See above for my comments on stability and usability. Also, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and to a lesser extent, AIX are all very real competition. At home I have no Windows PCs. All Mac and Sun, and I'm very happy with them. At work I have a Windows PC for compiling and testing. For everything else (including editing source code that's compiled on the PC), I have Macs.
Further, Office 2k7 has similar improvements which allow you to get more things done quicker. Instead of digging blindly through cascading menus the things you need most are there on the ribbon when you need them. The instant preview feature means less guesswork when applying formatting. There are scores of other usability improvements that in total allow me to save a significant amount of time.
I haven't used it enough to comment on this, but if it's anything like the "improvements" in Vista, it probably makes life harder.
As a bonus it loads and runs much quicker than OO.o ever did on the same box in Ubuntu. Those are simple facts.
You have a point there. OO.o is bloated and slow. Thing is, I never need most of office or OO.o - HTML and LaTeX/PDF are better for 90% of tasks. I do however use Visio a bit.
Those people claiming Vista and Office 2k7 are somehow not ready for the big time are sadly mistaken and perhaps shouldn't be in charge of making decisions when their decisions will amount to their companies and governments missing the opportunity to dramatically increase their productivity.
As I recall Apple said that they don't want to bring down cingular's network because Joe Enduser installed a custom application. I don't understand why that would be an issue personally.
That's just Apple FUD. I have never had an app bring down any of my Java MIDP handsets (NEC e606, NEC e616, Sony Ericsson Z800i, Nokia 6280). The systems are designed very carefully to avoid the possibility of apps bringing down the RF stack or screwing with basic phone functionality. Maybe the iPhone OS is just poorly designed and it's easy for bad apps to bring down the phone.
I'm a Mac user, and I'll say it straight up: Apple only wants to stop the carriers from screwing customers with the iPhone so that Apple can screw customers harder with it instead. So it doesn't have AT&T ringtone, messaging, and pr0n software. You're locked in with Apple software instead. They've already confirmed that you can't install your own apps. The phones are network locked, too, so I don't see how they're stopping the carriers from screwing customers, anyway.
A carrier doesn't screw you too badly. I have a Hutch3 branded Nokia 6280. It was a lot cheaper than the unbranded version. It's network locked and has branded firmware and has a Hutch3 logo on the case. However, it can be unlocked and have the firmware replaced. Hutch3 will do this for me for free one year after I bought the phone. Also, I can install any Java MIDP application I write or download.
You don't get it. It's not all about speed. In a lot of applications, you don't need anywhere near 20MIPS. In a lot of places 1MIPS is more than enough. The thing is a microcontroller, not a general purpose computer. Also, think about power consumption, operating temperature range, power supply noise reduction, etc. The PICmicro is very good at what it does, and cheap, too. It's also a very good learning tool.
And you haven't refuted any of my original points: the PICmicro is easy to understand, with a simple instruction set, and it's easy to calculate timing. It's also cheap and readily available. This makes it a very good platform to learn about microcontrollers and embedded programming with.
The Microchip PICmicro is a very good choice. Try the PIC16F84 - the chip is cheap, programmers that connect to a PC parallel port are simple to build, a chip can be electronically erased and reprogrammed hundreds of times.
The assembly language is also very simple. There are only thirty-five instructions and two addressing modes. It's also very easy to calculate instruction timing (for delay loops, etc.). I learned to program those things when I was at high school.
Things like the BASIC stamp are less than helpful. You aren't close enough to the metal. If you don't like the PICmicro, an AVR chip would be my second choice.
I honestly can't see them holding out for long with this policy (like the one about only being able to transfer the license to a new machine once that they dropped). Besides disaster recovery, there are times when you just want to re-install because it's the simplest way to get rid of all the crap you've put on your system, or that has been left behind by badly behaved apps that don't uninstall cleanly. No-one is going to put up with having to install an old OS first and then upgrade.
You probably know this, but the person who moderated you Insightful instead of Funny probably doesn't: the military's web servers are not critical for battles. They're completely isolated from their operational systems.
This is straight from the textbook: give them a free taste of something for long enough to realise they like it, then introduce a "reasonable" fee. Most of them will feel like they can't live without it and accept the fee rather than go without.
That's the outflow of an inherent problem with allowing operators to be overloaded. People will inevitable make them do different things on different types, making it impossible to know what an operator does without knowing something about the types of the arguments.
Of course, there are arguments for the other side, two. One is that people will create similarly named methods on different objects that do completely different things, and ambiguous operators are no worse than ambiguous method calls. Another is that in cases where the normal operation of an operator is meaningless, it should be acceptable to overload it with different functionality.
Overloading the bit shift operator on I/O streams is a case of the second way of thinking: a bit shift makes no sense on an object, so why not use it for something else.
That depends on where you live and the license that comes with the software. In most of the world, making backups of console games is not legal, as it is explicitly or implicitly prohibited by the terms of the license. (As opposed to the license agreements for most PC software which explicitly allow making backup copies.)
But anyway, if I make it, "Buy this ModChip and play burned copies of your friends' games!" it becomes circumvention of copyright anywhere. I'm sure you get my point.
ModChips are not illegal because they violate any hardware license agreement. Unlike software which you typically buy a license to use (MS/Apple/etc. own the software, and sell you a license to use it - you own nothing), you typically buy hardware (you own you Xbox/PowerBook/OptiPlex/etc.).
ModChips are illegal because they are promoted as being useful for circumventing copyright (i.e. "Buy this ModChip and play burned games!"). In Australia, ModChips are legal if they are only promoted for the purposes of defeating region coding (i.e. "Buy this ModChip and play imported Japanese games!").
Retrofitted water cooling isn't promoted as being useful for circumventing copyright, and I can't think of any way it possibly could be used for circumventing copyright. There is absolutely nothing illegal about it.
Your post is not insightful, it is ignorant.
Re:China has cheap broadband access
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Australia doesn't have cheap broadband. It's a rip-off here, just like in the US of A.
That's rubbish. I can get over twice the performance of GCC on palette-based video blit on PowerPC. GCC wastes far too much time performing loads and stores. It can't think like a human. I wouldn't write a whole app in assembly language, but it's worth it for small, performance-critical parts.
NiCd is still used in applications that demand high current. Things like power tools, small mobile cranes, spacecraft, aviation, RC models, etc. LiIon and NiMH are better for most things, though. They're much lighter, don't suffer from memory effect and/or voltage depression. That's why you don't see NiCd anywhere near as much, now.
Slashdot Mirror
And music that people make by themselves isn't necessarily bad.
Antisocial people can make music by themselves without the need for the Internet. Sociable people will make music together with or without the Internet and may even use the Internet to help communicate when collaborating on a project. Technology is a convenient scapegoat, as usual.
Yeah, you've got to give it to Sony for actually trying new things. It's easier to be a follower than a leader. They tried a lot of new things - CD, MD, SACD, Walkman, S/P-DIF, BetaMax, U-Matic, BluRay, the list goes on. Some of them have been raging successes, and some have been monumental flops. But if they didn't try, they'd miss out of the successes.
Matrox never went away completely - they just left the consumer market. They still sell cipsets for connecting very large numbers of monitors to computers. Dual-head is nothing to them - they do eight- and even sixteen-head chipsets. They don't handle games well, but it you just want lots of displays...
This product doesn't look suited to the consumer market, either. It looks like a solution for airport terminals or something - hide away a PC with one of their multi-head video cards and use this to carry the video to where you want people to see it.
I loved the keyboard/mouse that came with my G4 Sawtooth and dislike the new Apple keyboard/mouse, too. Smaller hand motions are usually better, and I liked being able to move just my fingers and not my whole wrist. But I've found that a Wacom tablet with the pen is easier on my hand than any mouse, and more accurate and faster to boot. You can hit anywhere on the screen instantly. Oh, and I have a Sanwa IceKey keyboard (the MacAlly IceKey is a rebadged, Americanised version of this).
I know it was supposed to be a joke, but your WiFi wouldn't work too well inside the house anyway because of all the multipath interference from reflections (802.11n will help there). And if you wanted to read slashdot on your notebook in the backyard, you'd be totally screwed.
Of course no-one wants to upgrade. What does Vista actually offer? A new, unfamiliar UI to learn? Annoying "security" warnings? Incompatibility with lots of apps? Most of the cool features, like Avalon and WinFS, were axed and/or promised as updates for XP, anyway. Right now, the only thing Vista offers is new, better DirectX, but there aren't any games that require it yet.
It makes perfect sense - Google and DoubleClick both make money from inserting ads into web sites. But while Google have some of the least intrusive/annoying ads, DoubleClick are at the opposite end of the spectrum. But then both of them have a reputation for gathering personal information, too. If this does happen, I hope Google makes DoubleClick ads less irritating, and not the other way around.
You're a troll, but I'll bite.
Straight out ridiculous assertion. I use it because I have to for compatibility testing at work. It is anything but easier to use. MS had it right as close to right as they ever have with 2003 server. Now they've moved everything around for no good reason in Vista, so we have to re-learn everything. Some things are just silly now, including, but limited to:
People said the same things about XP. Anecdotes then are the same as anecdotes now. Just because it's been stable for you means nothing. You haven't said what you actually do with the machine.
Searching the start menu is only a huge time-saver in Vista because they've made it completely impractical to use with a mouse. Instead of thinking about improving the start menu, they crippled it and added a search box as compensation. See my previous comments about dubious UI "improvements".
See above for my comments on stability and usability. Also, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and to a lesser extent, AIX are all very real competition. At home I have no Windows PCs. All Mac and Sun, and I'm very happy with them. At work I have a Windows PC for compiling and testing. For everything else (including editing source code that's compiled on the PC), I have Macs.
I haven't used it enough to comment on this, but if it's anything like the "improvements" in Vista, it probably makes life harder.
You have a point there. OO.o is bloated and slow. Thing is, I never need most of office or OO.o - HTML and LaTeX/PDF are better for 90% of tasks. I do however use Visio a bit.
Another ridiculous asser
That's just Apple FUD. I have never had an app bring down any of my Java MIDP handsets (NEC e606, NEC e616, Sony Ericsson Z800i, Nokia 6280). The systems are designed very carefully to avoid the possibility of apps bringing down the RF stack or screwing with basic phone functionality. Maybe the iPhone OS is just poorly designed and it's easy for bad apps to bring down the phone.
I'm a Mac user, and I'll say it straight up: Apple only wants to stop the carriers from screwing customers with the iPhone so that Apple can screw customers harder with it instead. So it doesn't have AT&T ringtone, messaging, and pr0n software. You're locked in with Apple software instead. They've already confirmed that you can't install your own apps. The phones are network locked, too, so I don't see how they're stopping the carriers from screwing customers, anyway.
A carrier doesn't screw you too badly. I have a Hutch3 branded Nokia 6280. It was a lot cheaper than the unbranded version. It's network locked and has branded firmware and has a Hutch3 logo on the case. However, it can be unlocked and have the firmware replaced. Hutch3 will do this for me for free one year after I bought the phone. Also, I can install any Java MIDP application I write or download.
The iPhone will be a joke until:
You don't get it. It's not all about speed. In a lot of applications, you don't need anywhere near 20MIPS. In a lot of places 1MIPS is more than enough. The thing is a microcontroller, not a general purpose computer. Also, think about power consumption, operating temperature range, power supply noise reduction, etc. The PICmicro is very good at what it does, and cheap, too. It's also a very good learning tool.
And you haven't refuted any of my original points: the PICmicro is easy to understand, with a simple instruction set, and it's easy to calculate timing. It's also cheap and readily available. This makes it a very good platform to learn about microcontrollers and embedded programming with.
A lot of computer mice use them, and they are used in motion controllers.
The Microchip PICmicro is a very good choice. Try the PIC16F84 - the chip is cheap, programmers that connect to a PC parallel port are simple to build, a chip can be electronically erased and reprogrammed hundreds of times.
The assembly language is also very simple. There are only thirty-five instructions and two addressing modes. It's also very easy to calculate instruction timing (for delay loops, etc.). I learned to program those things when I was at high school.
Things like the BASIC stamp are less than helpful. You aren't close enough to the metal. If you don't like the PICmicro, an AVR chip would be my second choice.
I honestly can't see them holding out for long with this policy (like the one about only being able to transfer the license to a new machine once that they dropped). Besides disaster recovery, there are times when you just want to re-install because it's the simplest way to get rid of all the crap you've put on your system, or that has been left behind by badly behaved apps that don't uninstall cleanly. No-one is going to put up with having to install an old OS first and then upgrade.
You probably know this, but the person who moderated you Insightful instead of Funny probably doesn't: the military's web servers are not critical for battles. They're completely isolated from their operational systems.
This is straight from the textbook: give them a free taste of something for long enough to realise they like it, then introduce a "reasonable" fee. Most of them will feel like they can't live without it and accept the fee rather than go without.
That's the outflow of an inherent problem with allowing operators to be overloaded. People will inevitable make them do different things on different types, making it impossible to know what an operator does without knowing something about the types of the arguments.
Of course, there are arguments for the other side, two. One is that people will create similarly named methods on different objects that do completely different things, and ambiguous operators are no worse than ambiguous method calls. Another is that in cases where the normal operation of an operator is meaningless, it should be acceptable to overload it with different functionality.
Overloading the bit shift operator on I/O streams is a case of the second way of thinking: a bit shift makes no sense on an object, so why not use it for something else.
That depends on where you live and the license that comes with the software. In most of the world, making backups of console games is not legal, as it is explicitly or implicitly prohibited by the terms of the license. (As opposed to the license agreements for most PC software which explicitly allow making backup copies.)
But anyway, if I make it, "Buy this ModChip and play burned copies of your friends' games!" it becomes circumvention of copyright anywhere. I'm sure you get my point.
ModChips are not illegal because they violate any hardware license agreement. Unlike software which you typically buy a license to use (MS/Apple/etc. own the software, and sell you a license to use it - you own nothing), you typically buy hardware (you own you Xbox/PowerBook/OptiPlex/etc.).
ModChips are illegal because they are promoted as being useful for circumventing copyright (i.e. "Buy this ModChip and play burned games!"). In Australia, ModChips are legal if they are only promoted for the purposes of defeating region coding (i.e. "Buy this ModChip and play imported Japanese games!").
Retrofitted water cooling isn't promoted as being useful for circumventing copyright, and I can't think of any way it possibly could be used for circumventing copyright. There is absolutely nothing illegal about it.
Your post is not insightful, it is ignorant.
Australia doesn't have cheap broadband. It's a rip-off here, just like in the US of A.
That's rubbish. I can get over twice the performance of GCC on palette-based video blit on PowerPC. GCC wastes far too much time performing loads and stores. It can't think like a human. I wouldn't write a whole app in assembly language, but it's worth it for small, performance-critical parts.
Toyota Prius uses NiMH, not NiCd. Don't know about other hybrid cars.
Posting to Slashdot might be less counter-productive than spamming, but I don't see it as being useful.
NiCd is still used in applications that demand high current. Things like power tools, small mobile cranes, spacecraft, aviation, RC models, etc. LiIon and NiMH are better for most things, though. They're much lighter, don't suffer from memory effect and/or voltage depression. That's why you don't see NiCd anywhere near as much, now.