The Neo is a Handspring product, and some of us have had too many bad experiences with that company. A brand new m105, if you can find it, goes for $50 more than a Zire.
As for a used m105 or Clie -- yeah, you can save money that way. You can also get burned. Buying used or refurbished gadgets is a whole different can of worms, and has nothing to do with the price/performance value of a given product.
Ridiculous? T-Mobile charges $5 a megabyte. That's too expensive for file transfers or heavy graphics -- but the connection's too slow for that anyway. If you just use the connection to read the news or follow slashdot (in low-graphcis mode of course), it shouldn't cost that much.
So Steve Ballmer is unable to speak coherently. So what? Not his fault, he's constrained by all the weird corporate mumbo-jumbo.
Let's ignore all that, and just focus on.NET the software platform. As such it's pretty much designed as an alternative to Java, or more specificaly Java 2 Enterprise Edition. Anything else is just noise -- or an excuse to make cheap jokes.
Does anyone know what the hell this actually *MEANS*?
That's actually quite an important question. Let me give it a stab.
As I've previously argued,.NET has some nice technical advantages over J2EE, but probably has no hope of overcoming Java's lead. (And even if it did MS would just screw it up.) But the Java/.NET thing doesn't have to be an either/or choice. It only works that way because Microsoft has very deliberately excluded Java backward compatibility from.NET. (There's J# or whatever it's called now, but that's just a migration path.)
Now, various open source people have gone off doing what they do best, and their efforts are beginning to converge:
Mono, the open-source version of.NET, seems to be moving forward apace.
The IKVM people seem to have negated Microsoft's non-support for Java.
Mono's biggest missing piece is an IDE. Eclipse is a first-rate IDE, and now runs under Mono.
Aside from giving Mono an IDE, Varga has given an impressive demonstration of the robustness of IKVM and Mono.
So the whole Java versus.NET debate has changed radically, and now may be less of debate than a negotiation towards coexistence.
Of course, Microsoft will almost certainly make silly, unnecessary changes.NET that will render it incompatible with Mono. But that might actually work against them, and destroy the Evil Empire's control of.NET.
I think you're confusing the way the Zire is sold with the way the Zire is designed. This model is at least as powerful and as feature rich as the old Palm V -- which used to be the high-end model! The Zire is being marketed as "just an organizer" because that sounds better than "it's cheap because it's only got 2 meg and no feature ports".
Marketspeak often understates things this way. Interbase is marketed as an "embedded DBMS" even though it's a perfectly good general-purpose scalable DBMS. But calling it "embedded" plays to the strengths of the product (small footprint, easy to administer, fast) that correspond to weaknesses in products like Oracle and SQL Server.
The Relative Percentage is an integer between 1 and 99
Which, as any math person knows, doesn't make any sense. Intuitively, nobody is entitled to a 100 or 0, because nobody gets a better score or worse score than everybody. But a little thought about the definition of rounding tells you that it makes perfect sense to give a 100 to the top 0.5% of test takers. And of course a 0 to the bottom 0.5% -- a group that certainly includes Colin Fahey!
I quite agree. The right solution, at least for me, is not to combine phone and PDA, but to make it easier for phone and PDA to work together.
Consider my Samsung SCH3500, which was the most popular phone in the U.S. when I bought it a couple years ago. It can't even talk to a Palm without an expensive, hard-to-find serial cable. Plus special software to handle the data format gap. But it's hardly suprising -- the different features within this phone are not integrated, so why should they give any thoughts to external devices.
For some reason American cell companies seem to think "integration" is a dirty word. Why else is IRDA a common feature in other countries, but not here?
Fortunately, American companies are beginning to see the promise of Bluetooth. I hunger for the day that I can afford to switch phones and put a Bluetooth adapter in my m515. I'll never be offline again!
But I intend to stay away from CDMA and TDMA providers. American providers like these protocols better than the more standard GSM, because it allows them to cram more calls into one tower. But try sending data over these providers! Clumsy and expensive.
GSM provides a simple, always-on protocol called GPRS, where you get charged by the amount of bandwidth you use, not the time you're online. GSM providers used to be hard to find, but no more. I think that other providers will come to regret their shortsightedness.
I'd much rather have an integrated cell phone and pager
It occurs to me that we sort of have that, since many cell phones accept pages and text message. Problem is that the cell companies don't provide a simple way to send a page.
do a routine weekly backup on e-mail files and bookmarks
Aha! Another excuse for me to get in a round of POP bashing!
Seriously, though, it makes no sense to continue using POP, and this is one reason why. Go to IMAP, and all the email gets kept on the server. You'll also get fewer complaints from users who need to access their email over slow dialup lines.
You can also configure Windows to put the user home directory, the desktop directory, and the bookmarks directory on a server. Saving files to a server might seem inefficient, but modern networks are fast enough for this. But I don't recommend it unless your server runs NTFS.
Environmentalists keep trying to do stuff like that in the U.S., but nobody wants the inconvenience. In California, after a lot of noise and confrontation, we have a "recycle value" of 3 cents per container. Any more would cut into soda pop consumption, and drive 7-11 out of business! Of course, such a small deposit has no effect at all.
The answer to that is that they don't want to make all their users change email clients. But the answer to that is that Outlook has so many security issues, they need to change anyway.
Plastic bags are only a problem in other countries where everybody's too lazy to pick them up? Jingoistic nonsense. America is drowning in litter, much of it plastic. Not only is it expensive to go around picking it up (when was the last time you saw a freeway without a "cleanup sponsored by" sign?), we're rapidly running of landfill space. If other countries don't hide the mess as well, it's because they're broke, not because they're lazy.
Any way, if you had read past the stupid Slashdot headline, you'd know that SA isn't banning most plastic bags. Just thin plastic shopping bags that aren't worth recycling. Those "lazy" people will jump to pick them up if they can make some money doing it, and this law gives them an incentive. Hey, using market forces to clean up the environment! How insidious!
Yeah, I admit that this is somewhat of a flamebait, (but so was the original/. question) but that's the problem with closed source and a abusive monopoly. If MS had been forced to open all API's and file formats like some of us were hoping, you wouldn't be having this problem.
Not so much flamebait as redundant. Or maybe Offtopic. Understand, I happen to totally agree with you. But so do most other Slashdotters. And those that don't agree are probably familiar with your arguments. We've all argued over this many times before. It just doesn't make sense to fire up this issue every time somebody reminds you of it.
This guy wrote an Ask Slashdot so we could help him with a technical problem, and that's what we should do. The fact that this problem is caused by an abusive software monopoly and closed-source programming is just not that useful or interesting, at least not in this context.
Are all the editors too busy playing The Sims to actually read the articles before posting them? South Africa hasn't banned all plastic bags, or even most of them. They've only banned plastic shopping bags. And not even all of those -- just the super-thin ones that aren't worth recycling.
Which sounds pretty sensible to me. If these bags had even a tiny monetary value, they'd soon be scavanged up by SA's huge impoverished underclass. By forcing merchants to use recyclable bags, the solve an ecological problem and inject a little money into the lower economy too.
Re:TiVo has always been a bundled product(?)
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 1
Uhm, did you read my post, or were you too busy nitpicking? That was precisely my point: the no-subscription Tivo can't make money unless it's bundled with something. Although, as somebody else pointed out, the cost of manufacturing most have gone down by now, so maybe they can sell just the hardware at a profit.
Re:Strictly a bundled concept
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 1
You remind me of the hardware feature that I most miss from my first-generation Tivo: multiple receivers. Seems a dumb oversight. The most famous Tivo featue is Pause Live TV. But I never use my Tivo to watch live TV, because that means the receiver can't be used for automatic recording. Or for my favorite, the "he didn't tell me to record this, but I know he'll like it" feature.
Re:TiVo can be just like a VCR, if you really want
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 1
Well, that eliminates the convenience factor. And my favorite feature, "record every episode, whenever it's on". Without these things, I'd just as soon use a VCR.
Here's something from the get-a-life department. I raised this same point on the AVForum features suggestions forum, hoping to catch the eye of a Tivo employee. I immediately got flamed by several Tivo fanatics, all of whom thought it was my responsibility to constantly scan the upcoming shows screen and catch overlap issues manually.
Re:The point: progessive scan TiVo output
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 1
Aha! That's the first sensible reason I've heard for combining these two devices.
Can it not record HDTV now? Perhaps it could with a software upgrade or hardware attachment? Support for HDTV or some other digital format would seem to be the only justification for such a box.
Assuming we ever get HDTV. Yeah, some stations have already started to broadcast it, but not enough to matter. Others are dragging their feet, and will probly get indefinite extensions. (And how on earth are they supposed to upgrade cable to handle it?) There's not enough content, because there's not enough viewers, because there's not enough content... This was too big a change to force through by federal fiat.
Well, 1930 seems a pretty arbitrary flexion point. But I agree with your general argument. Even though technology did play a role. The more deterministic thinkers would argue that causality worked the other way: information technology was invented because the changing economy need it. My semi-educated opinion is that economy and technology influence each other.
Slashdot Mirror
As for a used m105 or Clie -- yeah, you can save money that way. You can also get burned. Buying used or refurbished gadgets is a whole different can of worms, and has nothing to do with the price/performance value of a given product.
Ridiculous? T-Mobile charges $5 a megabyte. That's too expensive for file transfers or heavy graphics -- but the connection's too slow for that anyway. If you just use the connection to read the news or follow slashdot (in low-graphcis mode of course), it shouldn't cost that much.
Let's ignore all that, and just focus on .NET the software platform. As such it's pretty much designed as an alternative to Java, or more specificaly Java 2 Enterprise Edition. Anything else is just noise -- or an excuse to make cheap jokes.
As I've previously argued, .NET has some nice technical advantages over J2EE, but probably has no hope of overcoming Java's lead. (And even if it did MS would just screw it up.) But the Java/.NET thing doesn't have to be an either/or choice. It only works that way because Microsoft has very deliberately excluded Java backward compatibility from .NET. (There's J# or whatever it's called now, but that's just a migration path.)
Now, various open source people have gone off doing what they do best, and their efforts are beginning to converge:
- Mono, the open-source version of
.NET, seems to be moving forward apace.
- The IKVM people seem to have negated Microsoft's non-support for Java.
- Mono's biggest missing piece is an IDE. Eclipse is a first-rate IDE, and now runs under Mono.
- Aside from giving Mono an IDE, Varga has given an impressive demonstration of the robustness of IKVM and Mono.
So the whole Java versusOf course, Microsoft will almost certainly make silly, unnecessary changes .NET that will render it incompatible with Mono. But that might actually work against them, and destroy the Evil Empire's control of .NET.
Marketspeak often understates things this way. Interbase is marketed as an "embedded DBMS" even though it's a perfectly good general-purpose scalable DBMS. But calling it "embedded" plays to the strengths of the product (small footprint, easy to administer, fast) that correspond to weaknesses in products like Oracle and SQL Server.
Plus sea turtles choke on them. Kind puts these other issues in perspective.
Consider my Samsung SCH3500, which was the most popular phone in the U.S. when I bought it a couple years ago. It can't even talk to a Palm without an expensive, hard-to-find serial cable. Plus special software to handle the data format gap. But it's hardly suprising -- the different features within this phone are not integrated, so why should they give any thoughts to external devices.
For some reason American cell companies seem to think "integration" is a dirty word. Why else is IRDA a common feature in other countries, but not here?
Fortunately, American companies are beginning to see the promise of Bluetooth. I hunger for the day that I can afford to switch phones and put a Bluetooth adapter in my m515. I'll never be offline again!
But I intend to stay away from CDMA and TDMA providers. American providers like these protocols better than the more standard GSM, because it allows them to cram more calls into one tower. But try sending data over these providers! Clumsy and expensive.
GSM provides a simple, always-on protocol called GPRS, where you get charged by the amount of bandwidth you use, not the time you're online. GSM providers used to be hard to find, but no more. I think that other providers will come to regret their shortsightedness.
I think the problems with the food pyramid have less to do with "speculation" than with politics.
Seriously, though, it makes no sense to continue using POP, and this is one reason why. Go to IMAP, and all the email gets kept on the server. You'll also get fewer complaints from users who need to access their email over slow dialup lines.
You can also configure Windows to put the user home directory, the desktop directory, and the bookmarks directory on a server. Saving files to a server might seem inefficient, but modern networks are fast enough for this. But I don't recommend it unless your server runs NTFS.
Environmentalists keep trying to do stuff like that in the U.S., but nobody wants the inconvenience. In California, after a lot of noise and confrontation, we have a "recycle value" of 3 cents per container. Any more would cut into soda pop consumption, and drive 7-11 out of business! Of course, such a small deposit has no effect at all.
Sorry guy, S&M is still recreation, not employment!
The answer to that is that they don't want to make all their users change email clients. But the answer to that is that Outlook has so many security issues, they need to change anyway.
So stir-fry is really a Portuguese invention? Learn something every day!
I'm not a fan of plastic bag stories. But I have to admit that story was fun to read!
This is Slashdot, fer crisakes. If you're not a geek, you don't belong here!
Any way, if you had read past the stupid Slashdot headline, you'd know that SA isn't banning most plastic bags. Just thin plastic shopping bags that aren't worth recycling. Those "lazy" people will jump to pick them up if they can make some money doing it, and this law gives them an incentive. Hey, using market forces to clean up the environment! How insidious!
This guy wrote an Ask Slashdot so we could help him with a technical problem, and that's what we should do. The fact that this problem is caused by an abusive software monopoly and closed-source programming is just not that useful or interesting, at least not in this context.
Which sounds pretty sensible to me. If these bags had even a tiny monetary value, they'd soon be scavanged up by SA's huge impoverished underclass. By forcing merchants to use recyclable bags, the solve an ecological problem and inject a little money into the lower economy too.
Uhm, did you read my post, or were you too busy nitpicking? That was precisely my point: the no-subscription Tivo can't make money unless it's bundled with something. Although, as somebody else pointed out, the cost of manufacturing most have gone down by now, so maybe they can sell just the hardware at a profit.
You remind me of the hardware feature that I most miss from my first-generation Tivo: multiple receivers. Seems a dumb oversight. The most famous Tivo featue is Pause Live TV. But I never use my Tivo to watch live TV, because that means the receiver can't be used for automatic recording. Or for my favorite, the "he didn't tell me to record this, but I know he'll like it" feature.
Here's something from the get-a-life department. I raised this same point on the AVForum features suggestions forum, hoping to catch the eye of a Tivo employee. I immediately got flamed by several Tivo fanatics, all of whom thought it was my responsibility to constantly scan the upcoming shows screen and catch overlap issues manually.
Can it not record HDTV now? Perhaps it could with a software upgrade or hardware attachment? Support for HDTV or some other digital format would seem to be the only justification for such a box.
Assuming we ever get HDTV. Yeah, some stations have already started to broadcast it, but not enough to matter. Others are dragging their feet, and will probly get indefinite extensions. (And how on earth are they supposed to upgrade cable to handle it?) There's not enough content, because there's not enough viewers, because there's not enough content... This was too big a change to force through by federal fiat.
Well, 1930 seems a pretty arbitrary flexion point. But I agree with your general argument. Even though technology did play a role. The more deterministic thinkers would argue that causality worked the other way: information technology was invented because the changing economy need it. My semi-educated opinion is that economy and technology influence each other.