Not at all the same thing. Transmeta creates IP. SCO just buys up old unwanted IP, and tries to make it pay by claiming that successful products are based on that IP.
The fork lifts already have a VT220 terminal running 802.11b, so adding another device would not be difficult.
So why on earth does a forklift have a terminal interface? The only reason I can think of is that the manufacturer was anticipating precisely the application you're trying to implement. Perhaps you should contact them.
Read the article again. There's nothing there about the new downloads being for the PSP. The PSP is only mentioned because you can already buy movies on UMD disk, which the PSP supports. Setting up a PSP to accept downloads would be something of a pain. (Yes, hackers are transferring movies to PSP -- but most consumer are not hackers.) Most likely Sony plans a watch-on-your-computer service, similar to MovieLink.
Downloads will have to be at least 720 x 388 in order to compete with existing download services -- and maybe more to compete with pirate downloads. Which is what this is all about, coming up with a legal download service that people will pay to use, instead of pirate downloads they don't get any money for.
A lot of search engines have experimented with clustered results. Altavista even had a graphic program (Java? I forget) that displayed clusters as a kind of map. The idea sounds good, but isn't all that useful in today's billion-page web. Since clusters are based on keywords in the results, what you're really doing is getting suggestions for additional keywords for your search. And since the clusters that come up first are the most popular ones, the keywords that generate them are the least likely to help you "drill down". Faster to just look at your Google results and ask yourself, "Why is this too broad and what additional keywords should I add?"
By "disconnected" I mean that Python has its own unique approach to objects. It's been a while since I worked with Python, but as I recall, it has some very un-Javaish notions about creating ad hoc object types. I assume Jython implements some kind of compatibility layer to handle this difference in object semantics. Groovy, by contrast, deals with objects in precisely the same way as Java does.
I'm curious to know what benefits you see from runing Python code on a JVM instead a native runtime.
This is all public information. SAIC might fire him for saying negative things about them, or just for being a little wonky. But NDAs are about private information.
There seem to be a lot of Java and.NET scripting languages that are just ports of Python or Perl. I suppose these have their uses, but the disconnect between the language and the concepts of the underlying runtime strike me as a problem.
Lately, I've become interested in Groovy, a JVM-based scripting language that combines concepts from Java (syntax, access to the class libraries) with concepts from Perl (dynamic typing, native syntax for collections and regular expressions). It would be interesting to see something similar for.NET.
A good point. However, replacement batteries would not need to be compatible with the original design, since you don't need the laptops to actually be portable. That would reduce the cost of replacment batteries somewhat.
The sentence may be validEnglish, but it's not clear English.
However, the suggestion that the writer isn't a native speaker is both bigoted and illogical. Only a native speaker could spawn that many subordinate clauses in such a confusing way!
XML and other quibbles
on
Firefox Hacks
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Why is XML not a "core topic"? Serving web pages as XML is the Next Big Thing, in my opinion. In any case, XML is a lot more relevent to most people's needs than hacking the browser as a game platform!
Not that anything was really excluded. They seem to have had a little trouble coming up with 100 hacks. Some I see on the list are interesting, but not strictly about Firefox (CSS, Bugzilla). Some are pretty lame ("Identify and Use Toolbar Icons"). Some are not even hacks (a list of customized prebuilt versions).
Some hacks do look interesting -- integrating Firefox with other apps, making chromes and extensions, and (as I said) XML support. Maybe these are good enough to justify the price of the book. Though a book about these specific topics might be money better spent.
Unless you have deep pockets, you're stuck with off-the-shelf technology. That doesn't leave you with a lot of options, since standard computer hardware is mostly designed for situations where there is a reliable power supply. (Non-standard custom-built hardware is much more flexible -- and much more expensive.) This goes even for UPSs, which are meant to support clean shutdown, not extended replacement for regular power.
The off-the-shelf system that doesn't need a reliable power source is an old-fashioned laptop. You can buy obsolete laptops very cheap. Many are too big and bulky by todays standards, but will fill in nicely for a desktop system when power comes and goes.
End time fanatics love to claim the number of the beast as a prophecy of some future Orwellian state. But in fact it was probably just a numerological reference to Nero. You add up the numerical value of the Greek letters for "Neron Kaiser" ("Emperor Nero") and you get 616. But isn't the number 666? In most current Bibles. But the people who put the Bible together had their choice of manuscripts -- and they rejected the ones that say 616.
Referring to the current emperor as a number sounds strange. But it wouldn't have done to refer to him by name -- not if you wanted to avoid becoming lion food.
I think this is a good case that highlights online gaming addiction and how it needs to be classified as a disease.
I agree that gaming addiction is out of control. But this has nothing to do with that. People kill each other for all kinds of stupid reasons. Hundreds of people (mostly women) die every year at the hands of a current or former domestic partner. People die because somebody thought they were rude, or objected to their style of dress. Homicidal rage is a pathology looking for an excuse.
An imaginary sword is a stupid thing to get killed over -- but it's glib to dismiss it as unimportant because it's imaginary. The guy put a lot of effort into winning it, and somebody was willing to pay a lot of money to "possess" it. Absurd, if you're not a gamer, but not more absurd than paying six figures for some obscure collectible -- and that happens every day.
Indeed.com and workzoo.com are interesting, and I think you for linking them. I was skeptical at first, because both sites simply aggregate listings scrapped from regular job boards. Scraper sites are usually a waste of time, with lots of mangled data and obsolete listings. But these two seem to be rather more sophisticated.
Their RSS feeds are useful -- but it's worth noting why. The feeds are dynamically generated, and incorporate whatever search criteria the user specifies. So now I have several new feeds in my Sage panel that incorporate searches from these two sites, and I can quickly check them for new listings. A static feed -- all the listings in a category -- would be much less useful, since each category has thousands of listings a day.
Which is not to criticize the static feeds on craigslists. These work because each category gets maybe a dozen listings per day. Then again, craigslist listings are short because each category is part of a geographical job board. So there's actually no way to search all the jobs on all the various craigslist boards. By contrast, you can search all the indeed.com listings with a simple dynamic feed:
I've been using the Craigslist RSS job feeds for a while now, and find it handy. A quick glance at my Sage sidebar tells me which feeds have new listings. A click on a particular feed title gives me all the new job titles, so I can quickly browse the ones that interest. I now check the Craigslist feeds several times a day, whereas I only used to check the Cragslist web pages once a day.
Thing is, I don't seem to be a very typical RSS user. Most of them seem to be a lot better at divided-attention tasks than I am, and like to exploit that skill by having an RSS ticker, or something similar, in one corner of their screen. Which might not be a very good way to browse job listings.
I'd urge you to consider using Atom instead of RSS. It's not a big deal for the short term, since current applications seem to support pretty much the same feature set for both RSS and Atom feeds. But Atom seems to be a more extendable, forward-looking format, with support for "semantic web" features.
You're quite correct in pointing out that programming and system admining are not Computer Science skill. However, it's important to remember that there's more to computing than "Computer Science". There are schools that have "Computer and Information Systems" programs which emphasize practical skills instead of CS fundamentals. In that case you could probably transfer programming credits -- if you studied core programming languages like C++ and Java. They'd probably be more skeptical of classes in scripting languages. These have practical value, but don't teach core skills.
Because (a) there's a limit to how much secrecy a law enforcment agency can impose; (b) it makes them look good, because they're leveraging all those desktop computers instead of spending a lot of money on supercomputer time; (c) a technically-literate crook will already be assuming they do something like this; (d) technically-illiterate crook won't know how to respond anyway.
Cops are certainly justified in keeping specifics of current investigations secret. But they can't and shouldn't keep their basic strategies and tools secret. We, who pay their bills, have a right to know whether they're intrepid technicops or bumbling fools.
I share your lack of enthusiasm -- but then, I'm burned out by all things Trek. The concept is totally worn out, and deserves to be retired.
That said, I can't rule out the possibility that Shatner's concept might result in something worth watching. I'm not a fan of teen angst shows, which is another genre that's been done to death. But all genres you see on TV -- cop shows, medical shows, workplace comedies, household comedies -- have been done to death. TV doesn't have the courage to try anything really new. But if you get the right combination of good writing and good acting, you can actually do something good with even the most cliched material. As every Buffy fan knows.
Much as I'd like to see Star Trek just disappear and be replaced by something really original, I know that's not going to happen. Next best is to have Berman and his hack stories retired, replaced by somebody with some actual creativity. Which person is certainly not Joseph Michael Straczynski; aside from having too many names, he's even more of a cliche-monger than Berman.
William Shatner might not seem any better, since his occasional attempts at writing have been truely pathetic. But at least he knows that he's a bad writer, and knows how to hire good ones. And he seems to have some sense where the Trek franchise has gone wrong -- more so than anybody else connected with it.
I can understand requiring backdoors to VoIP telephones, but to the internet and instant messaging clients too?
Why should one particular medium be immune? People have gone to jail because of fatal disclosures in their email. IM isn't particularly different in that respect.
Pretty soon good old fasioned postal service will be the only way to truly privately communicate. They can't open personal letters, can they?
They can open anything, if they can show enough probable cause to get a warrant. (The Patriot Act may have lowered the bar on this -- I'm not an expert.) And there's nothing particularly difficult about intercepting snail mail.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all the same thing. Transmeta creates IP. SCO just buys up old unwanted IP, and tries to make it pay by claiming that successful products are based on that IP.
...then the article itself does not exist. Sounds like Epimenides is making trouble again!
That's zero things.
Not to mention the writing! But which character will die in every episode?
Downloads will have to be at least 720 x 388 in order to compete with existing download services -- and maybe more to compete with pirate downloads. Which is what this is all about, coming up with a legal download service that people will pay to use, instead of pirate downloads they don't get any money for.
Slashdot only copied a shitty headline.
A lot of search engines have experimented with clustered results. Altavista even had a graphic program (Java? I forget) that displayed clusters as a kind of map. The idea sounds good, but isn't all that useful in today's billion-page web. Since clusters are based on keywords in the results, what you're really doing is getting suggestions for additional keywords for your search. And since the clusters that come up first are the most popular ones, the keywords that generate them are the least likely to help you "drill down". Faster to just look at your Google results and ask yourself, "Why is this too broad and what additional keywords should I add?"
I'm curious to know what benefits you see from runing Python code on a JVM instead a native runtime.
This is all public information. SAIC might fire him for saying negative things about them, or just for being a little wonky. But NDAs are about private information.
But if you're going to dispense with batteries, there's no reason to use laptops at all. Desktop systems can also be made to run directly off DC.
Installing a extension just so you can tweak a few bookmark icons is just a bit, you know...
Lately, I've become interested in Groovy, a JVM-based scripting language that combines concepts from Java (syntax, access to the class libraries) with concepts from Perl (dynamic typing, native syntax for collections and regular expressions). It would be interesting to see something similar for .NET.
A good point. However, replacement batteries would not need to be compatible with the original design, since you don't need the laptops to actually be portable. That would reduce the cost of replacment batteries somewhat.
However, the suggestion that the writer isn't a native speaker is both bigoted and illogical. Only a native speaker could spawn that many subordinate clauses in such a confusing way!
Not that anything was really excluded. They seem to have had a little trouble coming up with 100 hacks. Some I see on the list are interesting, but not strictly about Firefox (CSS, Bugzilla). Some are pretty lame ("Identify and Use Toolbar Icons"). Some are not even hacks (a list of customized prebuilt versions).
Some hacks do look interesting -- integrating Firefox with other apps, making chromes and extensions, and (as I said) XML support. Maybe these are good enough to justify the price of the book. Though a book about these specific topics might be money better spent.
The off-the-shelf system that doesn't need a reliable power source is an old-fashioned laptop. You can buy obsolete laptops very cheap. Many are too big and bulky by todays standards, but will fill in nicely for a desktop system when power comes and goes.
Referring to the current emperor as a number sounds strange. But it wouldn't have done to refer to him by name -- not if you wanted to avoid becoming lion food.
An imaginary sword is a stupid thing to get killed over -- but it's glib to dismiss it as unimportant because it's imaginary. The guy put a lot of effort into winning it, and somebody was willing to pay a lot of money to "possess" it. Absurd, if you're not a gamer, but not more absurd than paying six figures for some obscure collectible -- and that happens every day.
Their RSS feeds are useful -- but it's worth noting why. The feeds are dynamically generated, and incorporate whatever search criteria the user specifies. So now I have several new feeds in my Sage panel that incorporate searches from these two sites, and I can quickly check them for new listings. A static feed -- all the listings in a category -- would be much less useful, since each category has thousands of listings a day.
Which is not to criticize the static feeds on craigslists. These work because each category gets maybe a dozen listings per day. Then again, craigslist listings are short because each category is part of a geographical job board. So there's actually no way to search all the jobs on all the various craigslist boards. By contrast, you can search all the indeed.com listings with a simple dynamic feed:
http://rss.indeed.com/rss/q/writer_api/l/
Thing is, I don't seem to be a very typical RSS user. Most of them seem to be a lot better at divided-attention tasks than I am, and like to exploit that skill by having an RSS ticker, or something similar, in one corner of their screen. Which might not be a very good way to browse job listings.
I'd urge you to consider using Atom instead of RSS. It's not a big deal for the short term, since current applications seem to support pretty much the same feature set for both RSS and Atom feeds. But Atom seems to be a more extendable, forward-looking format, with support for "semantic web" features.
You're quite correct in pointing out that programming and system admining are not Computer Science skill. However, it's important to remember that there's more to computing than "Computer Science". There are schools that have "Computer and Information Systems" programs which emphasize practical skills instead of CS fundamentals. In that case you could probably transfer programming credits -- if you studied core programming languages like C++ and Java. They'd probably be more skeptical of classes in scripting languages. These have practical value, but don't teach core skills.
Cops are certainly justified in keeping specifics of current investigations secret. But they can't and shouldn't keep their basic strategies and tools secret. We, who pay their bills, have a right to know whether they're intrepid technicops or bumbling fools.
That said, I can't rule out the possibility that Shatner's concept might result in something worth watching. I'm not a fan of teen angst shows, which is another genre that's been done to death. But all genres you see on TV -- cop shows, medical shows, workplace comedies, household comedies -- have been done to death. TV doesn't have the courage to try anything really new. But if you get the right combination of good writing and good acting, you can actually do something good with even the most cliched material. As every Buffy fan knows.
Much as I'd like to see Star Trek just disappear and be replaced by something really original, I know that's not going to happen. Next best is to have Berman and his hack stories retired, replaced by somebody with some actual creativity. Which person is certainly not Joseph Michael Straczynski; aside from having too many names, he's even more of a cliche-monger than Berman.
William Shatner might not seem any better, since his occasional attempts at writing have been truely pathetic. But at least he knows that he's a bad writer, and knows how to hire good ones. And he seems to have some sense where the Trek franchise has gone wrong -- more so than anybody else connected with it.