One thing that people aren't realizing is that some people simply cannot "fetch" things for themselves. I'm talking, of course, of paraplegic and quadriplegic individuals. People have trained monkeys for this purpose, but having a pet monkey is stressful even for the able bodied. So a bot that can do this would be a blessing. A quadriplegic could have the laser pointer on a headband and point with it using their head.
MSI Wind, £225 If there's one laptop that could seriously end the Eee's reign, it's the MSI Wind. We believe it could be the perfect blend of portability and usability, due to the fact it's slightly larger than an Eee PC, with a bigger keyboard and a choice of screen sizes.
Eight- and 10-inch versions are available, as are Silverthorne CPUs ranging from 1GHz to 1.5GHz. You even get a choice of hard drive types: there are solid-state models for anyone prone to dropping things, and 2.5-inch models for anyone who wants to store lots of multimedia files.
Best of all, the entry-level Wind is set to cost just 299 (£225), or 699 (£530) for the high-end model. Like all good uber-portables, it's available in a variety of colours including blue, silver and pink.
That sounds like the cream of the crop. MSI is a fairly quality manufacturer, and they are offering multiple configurations. The Cloudbook was promising up until I got my hands on one, however, and UGH! You can't get around that funky micro trackpad on one side and clicking buttons on another, and the damn thing gets hotter than my MacBook when crunching video. And that wasn't under any load at all.
Really, what people need to compare the Eee and its progeny to is not full-sized laptops but PDAs. The Eee, the Wind, the OLPC, etc. are more like overgrown Palms than mini notebooks. If you look at them that way, suddenly their uses present themselves. If you expect full-sized laptop performance, particularly desktop replacement laptop performance, from one of these, you are in for a rude awakening.
Now that Intel has seen people go bonkers for the Eee and similar devices, I wonder if they will put out a consumer version of the Classmate with Atom inside? A little Atom-powered mini lappie with a 1.8" HD ala the Cloudbook and a decent amount of RAM would own. Another suggestion would be to put an IBM/Lenovo/Toshiba style pointing stick "eraserhead" as the pointing device. The Cloudbook's miniature trackpad on the left and clicking buttons on the right suck ass. And the full-size trackpad on the Eee is wasteful of space which could be freed up with a pointing stick and a set of clicking buttons beneath the keyboard.
Gimme one of those, with a REAL Linux inside (Debian Lenny would be perfect, or Kubuntu) and I'd be sold.
Well there was also John Stuart Mill and his wife/collaborator Harriet Taylor-Mill. But these are only a handful of Victorians. Most Victorians believed women to be the "weaker vessel." Including Queen Victoria.
Oh yeah, Mary Wollstonecraft's hubby was Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet.
...and his Little Wars: A game for boys from twelve years of age to 150, and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boy's games and books. (Dig the not-so-veiled sexism of that title!) Yes, his rule set for gaming has passed into the Public Domain, so you can use them for free if you want to.
Little Wars was initially released in 1913. A 2004 printed edition of the work comes with a foreword...by Gary Gygax.
I also have an old school Sony monitor, this one being a Mac VGA monitor from roughly the same time. It is still crisp and clear and full of win.
On an off-topic note, my signature line is a response to the Crowley quote. Crowley didn't live long enough to see the publication of the Golden Dawn materials by Regardie almost singlehandedly revive western magick as a going concern in the '60s, and he certainly didn't live long enough to see Free/Open Source's success. Power is multiplied when shared. If anything, the one who hoards knowledge and does not share is less powerful than the one who shares their knowledge with others and works together with them. It works in real life, and it also works from an esoteric standpoint.
Tri-Stat dX, best known as the core rules for the Anime RPG Big Eyes, Small Mouth, is still a lot more manageable than that. My absolute favorite system is the original Traveller rules, but since Traveller^5 seems to be held up indefinitely that's no longer viable. At least with Tri-Stat dX you can still find the core rules in downloadable form, even though White Wolf technically owns it and doesn't seem to want to do anything with it.
Game play mechanics should NEVER get in the way of interactive storytelling. BFRPG has the same flaws AD&D had back in the day, and D20 has now. And don't talk to me about GURPS, that's an even worse offender.
Gen Con didn't just screw Make A Wish, they screwed the fans at Celebration IV. To give an example: they produced an insufficient amount of certain collectables that were supposed to be sold there, and then allowed DEALERS to buy what little they had produced. If you wanted an embroidered C-IV patch, they were made of unobtainium at the event itself. And now, I checked on eBay, and guess what? Look up item # 150215899090 and you will see the upshot of that policy.
I am looking forward to C-V. The Los Angeles Convention Center was a great venue for this event, and hopefully it will return there. Hopefully Lucasfilm will have a more professional partner next time.
Use Audacity, a free/open source program. Available for Mac OS X, Windows, and the platform it originated on, Linux. Ask it to generate a 25,000Hz sine-wave tone for 10 seconds. Then take a listen to the results. Can you hear the tone? I can.
You can often get the same effect by playing "uncool" music.
I seem to remember some stores piping in the local classical music station to cut down on teen loitering. If I remember correctly, it worked just fine. Cheaper too.
Yes, but I tried the same thing with Audacity's tone generator after remembering that small fact about mp3. No crunching there. Guess what? I still heard the tone. I guess I just have damn good ears, or all the loud amplified music I listened to in my youth didn't kill the high end of my hearing. It probably rolled off a bit of my midrange, but my ultra-high-end is still present and accounted for.
Followed the link to TFA. I listened to the tone that I, as a 44-year-old, was not supposed to be able to hear. Sure enough, I heard it. It's faint, I had to use DJ-style headphones to isolate it enough, but it was audible.
I couldn't be the only person who can hear a 25,000Hz tone at my age. I could see how this device could backfire big time. I certainly wouldn't stick around a store where my ears were so assaulted. I hope this never catches on in the US.
That's my congresscritter. He's in a safely Dem district, and he never gets a primary challenge. Considering all the money Big Media gives him, I'm hoping he'll retire soon.
MS was BRILLIANT in not bundling HD-DVD with the XBox 360. They can now quietly put out a plug-in Blu-Ray player for the box and catch what's looking like a tsunami for Blu-Ray.
HD-DVD will be the RCA SelectaVision of the high definition DVD-like disk era. Remember those? Flimsy 12" disks encased in a plastic carrier and read by a stylus, they'd fall apart after a few plays. This allowed Pioneer to own the videodisc market with LaserDisc.
The version of Scientology celebrities receive is way different (and far easier) than the version the "raw meat" (non-celebs) get. And even though the Scn. celebs are the biggest Public Relations tools Scientology has to bring the "raw meat" through the doors and get their butts in the seats for the "free personality tests," they keep the celebs far, far away from them.
I occasionally get zapped by my MacBook, although I'm not sure whether the problem is static electricity or something going on in the lappie itself. The power supply can be run either ungrounded or grounded, and usually my preference is to run grounded. This reminds me: gotta visit a genius sometime soon about this. Oh yeah: it's encased with plastic.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that people aren't realizing is that some people simply cannot "fetch" things for themselves. I'm talking, of course, of paraplegic and quadriplegic individuals. People have trained monkeys for this purpose, but having a pet monkey is stressful even for the able bodied. So a bot that can do this would be a blessing. A quadriplegic could have the laser pointer on a headband and point with it using their head.
MSI Wind, £225
If there's one laptop that could seriously end the Eee's reign, it's the MSI Wind. We believe it could be the perfect blend of portability and usability, due to the fact it's slightly larger than an Eee PC, with a bigger keyboard and a choice of screen sizes.
Eight- and 10-inch versions are available, as are Silverthorne CPUs ranging from 1GHz to 1.5GHz. You even get a choice of hard drive types: there are solid-state models for anyone prone to dropping things, and 2.5-inch models for anyone who wants to store lots of multimedia files.
Best of all, the entry-level Wind is set to cost just 299 (£225), or 699 (£530) for the high-end model. Like all good uber-portables, it's available in a variety of colours including blue, silver and pink.
That sounds like the cream of the crop. MSI is a fairly quality manufacturer, and they are offering multiple configurations. The Cloudbook was promising up until I got my hands on one, however, and UGH! You can't get around that funky micro trackpad on one side and clicking buttons on another, and the damn thing gets hotter than my MacBook when crunching video. And that wasn't under any load at all.
Really, what people need to compare the Eee and its progeny to is not full-sized laptops but PDAs. The Eee, the Wind, the OLPC, etc. are more like overgrown Palms than mini notebooks. If you look at them that way, suddenly their uses present themselves. If you expect full-sized laptop performance, particularly desktop replacement laptop performance, from one of these, you are in for a rude awakening.
Now that Intel has seen people go bonkers for the Eee and similar devices, I wonder if they will put out a consumer version of the Classmate with Atom inside? A little Atom-powered mini lappie with a 1.8" HD ala the Cloudbook and a decent amount of RAM would own. Another suggestion would be to put an IBM/Lenovo/Toshiba style pointing stick "eraserhead" as the pointing device. The Cloudbook's miniature trackpad on the left and clicking buttons on the right suck ass. And the full-size trackpad on the Eee is wasteful of space which could be freed up with a pointing stick and a set of clicking buttons beneath the keyboard.
Gimme one of those, with a REAL Linux inside (Debian Lenny would be perfect, or Kubuntu) and I'd be sold.
#^_^# -- my mistake.
Well there was also John Stuart Mill and his wife/collaborator Harriet Taylor-Mill. But these are only a handful of Victorians. Most Victorians believed women to be the "weaker vessel." Including Queen Victoria.
Oh yeah, Mary Wollstonecraft's hubby was Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet.
...and his Little Wars: A game for boys from twelve years of age to 150, and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boy's games and books. (Dig the not-so-veiled sexism of that title!) Yes, his rule set for gaming has passed into the Public Domain, so you can use them for free if you want to.
Little Wars was initially released in 1913. A 2004 printed edition of the work comes with a foreword...by Gary Gygax.
I also have an old school Sony monitor, this one being a Mac VGA monitor from roughly the same time. It is still crisp and clear and full of win.
On an off-topic note, my signature line is a response to the Crowley quote. Crowley didn't live long enough to see the publication of the Golden Dawn materials by Regardie almost singlehandedly revive western magick as a going concern in the '60s, and he certainly didn't live long enough to see Free/Open Source's success. Power is multiplied when shared. If anything, the one who hoards knowledge and does not share is less powerful than the one who shares their knowledge with others and works together with them. It works in real life, and it also works from an esoteric standpoint.
Ouch. I kinda disagree -- the Edsel had flair
Yes, but how many pieces of flair did it come with, standard?
I don't need all the "raw power". I just need the ability to manage my networks, run some web pages, access some databases remotely. That's it.
This looks like a job for Eee.
Tri-Stat dX, best known as the core rules for the Anime RPG Big Eyes, Small Mouth, is still a lot more manageable than that. My absolute favorite system is the original Traveller rules, but since Traveller^5 seems to be held up indefinitely that's no longer viable. At least with Tri-Stat dX you can still find the core rules in downloadable form, even though White Wolf technically owns it and doesn't seem to want to do anything with it.
Game play mechanics should NEVER get in the way of interactive storytelling. BFRPG has the same flaws AD&D had back in the day, and D20 has now. And don't talk to me about GURPS, that's an even worse offender.
Gen Con didn't just screw Make A Wish, they screwed the fans at Celebration IV. To give an example: they produced an insufficient amount of certain collectables that were supposed to be sold there, and then allowed DEALERS to buy what little they had produced. If you wanted an embroidered C-IV patch, they were made of unobtainium at the event itself. And now, I checked on eBay, and guess what? Look up item # 150215899090 and you will see the upshot of that policy.
I am looking forward to C-V. The Los Angeles Convention Center was a great venue for this event, and hopefully it will return there. Hopefully Lucasfilm will have a more professional partner next time.
Use Audacity, a free/open source program. Available for Mac OS X, Windows, and the platform it originated on, Linux. Ask it to generate a 25,000Hz sine-wave tone for 10 seconds. Then take a listen to the results. Can you hear the tone? I can.
You can often get the same effect by playing "uncool" music.
I seem to remember some stores piping in the local classical music station to cut down on teen loitering. If I remember correctly, it worked just fine. Cheaper too.
Yes, but I tried the same thing with Audacity's tone generator after remembering that small fact about mp3. No crunching there. Guess what? I still heard the tone. I guess I just have damn good ears, or all the loud amplified music I listened to in my youth didn't kill the high end of my hearing. It probably rolled off a bit of my midrange, but my ultra-high-end is still present and accounted for.
OK, you're an old fogey.
I suppose next you're going to yell at me to get off your lawn.
Followed the link to TFA. I listened to the tone that I, as a 44-year-old, was not supposed to be able to hear. Sure enough, I heard it. It's faint, I had to use DJ-style headphones to isolate it enough, but it was audible.
I couldn't be the only person who can hear a 25,000Hz tone at my age. I could see how this device could backfire big time. I certainly wouldn't stick around a store where my ears were so assaulted. I hope this never catches on in the US.
No, they have other things in mind, like their new line of Japanese food containers! Yes, it's true! SCO is now in the Bento business!
Brilliant. You made me LOL. Thanks.
Rep Berman, Howard L. [D-CA]
That's my congresscritter. He's in a safely Dem district, and he never gets a primary challenge. Considering all the money Big Media gives him, I'm hoping he'll retire soon.
MS was BRILLIANT in not bundling HD-DVD with the XBox 360. They can now quietly put out a plug-in Blu-Ray player for the box and catch what's looking like a tsunami for Blu-Ray.
HD-DVD will be the RCA SelectaVision of the high definition DVD-like disk era. Remember those? Flimsy 12" disks encased in a plastic carrier and read by a stylus, they'd fall apart after a few plays. This allowed Pioneer to own the videodisc market with LaserDisc.
Heh, Sony has gotten its revenge for Betamax.
The version of Scientology celebrities receive is way different (and far easier) than the version the "raw meat" (non-celebs) get. And even though the Scn. celebs are the biggest Public Relations tools Scientology has to bring the "raw meat" through the doors and get their butts in the seats for the "free personality tests," they keep the celebs far, far away from them.
Isn't this a F/OSS program? Couldn't you just recompile an uncompromised version of the source?
It's the only laptop I've ever heard of that uses Open Firmware
My iBook would like to have a word with you outside. Actually all Macs that belong to the "New World" generation have had Open Firmware. This stretches all the way to the iMac and the Blue & White Tower, and continues to the last G5 PowerMacs. All iBooks have OF.
EFI has now replaced OF in the MacIntel platform that was introduced with MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro.
I occasionally get zapped by my MacBook, although I'm not sure whether the problem is static electricity or something going on in the lappie itself. The power supply can be run either ungrounded or grounded, and usually my preference is to run grounded. This reminds me: gotta visit a genius sometime soon about this. Oh yeah: it's encased with plastic.
External USB2 DVD-/+RW drive. Ridiculously cheap nowadays. Problem solved. Thank me.