Sorry, but you're going to have to define "entire network". Both of those entities have two vastly different networks. I guarantee you that there general email/file serving network does not run on the same segment as their Electronic Funds network. The EF networks are designed to be rundundant and do not support any kind of complex traffic. Packet sizes are generally very small and data requests are either to verify the current available balance, or to make a simple modification to that balance. Hence why you cannot transfer funds between multiple unlinked accounts at an ATM machine as that would drastically increase the complexity of the system supporting the information delivery. I've been job hunting recently in Japan and can tell you that all the major banks in Tokyo, to include Bank of America, are hiring UNIX SYSADMINS and programmers and paying them extremely well.
I would be interrested to see a report from the real heavy information hitters such as EBay or Amazon which are supporting millions of concurrnt connections while serving up pages of text from multiple datasources as well as graphics. I'd bet a buffalo nickel that they're not doing that on Win2K.
The only bone I have to pick with you is that you don't seem to understand the concept of dimensions. In the 3rd dimension, there is no such thing as "THE 2nd dimension." The second dimension is an infinite array of 1st dimensions. The 3rd an infinite array of 2nd dimensions...etc. I took a course in cosmology 3 years ago and we covered the following:
Einstein's whole basis for relativity was that an even occurs at a location that is described in 4 dimensional coordinates. That event is then propogated at the speed of light throughout all four dimensions. Two different observers located at different points in space-time actually witness different versions of the event based on there RELATIVE location and velocity RELATIVE to the event.
Just to make your heads hurt, understand that 1 second is now defined as the time it takes light to travel ~3.0x10^8 meters. Since the speed of light is defined as ~3.0x10^8 m/s, the units and values cancel out to read that the speed of light is simply 1...no units. This makes the math quite easy, but is a b!7ch to rationalize in your head when you try and apply it to a real world event.
Also, the article did not say that being outside the universe would make everything clear. It said that with respect to quantum theory, the observer is genarally located outside of the space of the object that is being observed. As we presently do not know how to be located "outside" of the universe, we just have to accept that, not only can there be multiple observers, but they can also be observing from the inside of the very object they are observing. The quantum implications of this are in itself, enough to give anyone a really bad headache.
If your nipples are below your ribcage, you have two possible solutions:
#1) You're a girl and need to investigate this amazing invention called a bra.
#2) You're a guy and should shoot yourself before you infect the rest of the gener pool.
As far as the software goes. Give it away and let them spread it around. After it get's sufficiently popular, file a patent on the idea and sue everyone using it. That seems to be the standard business model these days.
When it seems that every other article about NASA is complaining about budget shortfalls for the ISS and how it is limitting its value as a research facility, I find this kind of stuff mildly aggravating. I am happy that my tax dollars are spent on space exploration, but I don't don't see much wisdom behind the way its being handled.
Robotic drills huh? looks like someone has once again "Bullshitted NASA"
I don't normally rant, but this is complete bullsh!t. If I was actually in the US, I wouldn't be paying money for a piss-poor quality, streamed, first-run movie when I could see it in the theater with a giant screen and good sound for under $10. Instead, I have to wait months overseas for the films to be released and I have two equally poor choices. #1 Watch it on the local military base for dirt cheap in an uncomfortable theater that was designed for public addresses, not hollywood films; or #2 pay $15 out in town for a foreign language dubbed version with sub-titles. Their main market exists overseas, not in the US. The real pisser is that I can't even get to a feedback form on the site to complain. I would greatly appreciate if a fellow service member, or just kind hearted American could pass this rant onto the 'nice people' who are running the site. In the mean time, I will remain stoked that XXX is actually coming out this week.
"Calculating an object like a mortar's trajectory is trivial"
Calculating a trajectory from known information is trivial. Calculating a trajectory based on radar coordinates when the object is already in motion is time consuming. You need at least two range vectors to get a rough idea and three or more to get somewhat accurate. These vectors currently come from radar which means the radar has to be conveniently pointing in the direction the shell is coming from to get the best time response. From there the system has to get the vectors, do the math, spin up the laser and reorient it, and fire it all in the relative short time that an artillery shell is in flight which is between 4 to 15 seconds give or take. Systems in the 80's were not that responsive regardless of how little actual computation is involved.
Take it even a step further. Web base everything and ensure that your cgi cripts only produce HTML 1.0 compliant pages. You can of course go higher than 1.0, but then you start to get into the "What browsers do I support?" question.
Your code could indeed be written in perl, although I would recommend ANSI C or C++ for two reasons. #1 You are already familiar with the language and compilers. #2 You probably deal with large variable quantities of data that are processor intensive and would suffer from "script" style languages.
The beauty of this is you can now switch to only one compiler since the applications are only running on the web server. My programming shop is responsible for producing software that tracks and manages supply and maintenance in the Western Pacific for the Marine Corps. You may not have alot of customers who are running your software from a tent in the middle of BFE over an 8KBit pipe. But I'm sure web basing will still reduce the number of customer support issues that involve you going to the machine the software is installed on to see what the customer is talking about when he says, "I'm getting this strange error."
Turns out we're both correct. I was definitely wrong about why the article was posted. But you have to admit I was right about the TROLL part. It was so good in fact, that I didn't even get past the title before I had linked through to the artle to see what was up. I must admit I was a bit curious on how someone would combine those two shells.
How often do you pass a story without reading the article? I will refrain from b|7ch|ng about the legitimate stories I've had rejected, but this is nothing more than a glorified TROLL. There is no real news behind the story and it's even headlined as FAKE NEWS dated 25 September. I wonder how many slashdotters just had valuable time wasted where they could have been spending their work hours reading more legitimate slashdot stories:)
Well, when I first moved to Japan about a year and a half ago, I was absolutely floored by a pair of AIBO's in a CompuTown that were actually playing with each other. I still don't quite make enough money to justify spending that much money, but for those that do have the $$(or Yen as the case may be), the things are pretty damned impressive.
I'm going to keep my wallet pointed at the Panasonic 42in FlatPanel Plasma HDTV though. In the past year, the price has dropped from 1,200,000Y (~$9,800.00) to 690,000Y (~$5,700.00). Not only does it have the TV Tuner, but it also has a VGA/Serial input so your computer can display nifty stuff on it while you're not watching TV, like: Art, News and Stock prices, or most importantly, Quake 4 which will be out by the time I can afford it:)
OK, the too many movies line is getting old. Let me flesh this out a bit.
I graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a Degree in Engineering and have been invited back to teach Computer Science by that department's chair. I am currently living in Japan where I study Distributed Operating System design and Artificial Intelligence research in my spare time. While I may speak enough Japanese to pick up a girl at a bar, I do not understand enough to watch movies; hence why I don't have cable.
The FACTs of the discussion are these:
#1 Research on the human brain and how it learns is still considered to be in its infancy. Current experiements in the subject are almost barbaric in their simplicity; such as performing CT scans on a subjects brain while they are exposed to extremem emotional states, just to see which location in the brain becomes more active.
#2 Expert systems already exist today that are capable of creating, or rewriting the rules they operate off of. Exactly how much memory do they need to have and how much information do they need before they begin writing rules that don't pertain to their original design? What point does the information processing load become more than the current hardware can handle?
#3 Neural networks of some pretty fair complexity have been played with, but we still haven't quite reached the stage where the computer will mimic human learning and no one can say how close we are. Again, how do we know we don't already have the right algorithm, and just not the right input information.
One might infer from my sig that I read too many books, but Dostoevsky had the fall of the Russian government, the rise of communism and the abolishment of the church in Russia nailed decades before it actually happened. Bullishly pushing forward with a misunderstood technology or concept has screwed us over many times. I don't think it's out of line to accept that the artistic half of our species occassionally has very clear insight into our future.
Exactly how complex does the learning algorithm have to be before a connection to the internet makes a machine dangerous? Seriously, we really don't understand how close or far we are to making a machine self aware. Is connecting an AI unit to the NET really an ethically responsible thing to do?
Just to add some info here. Just because an article talks about usage and approval of FOSS in the "DoD" (Department of Defense), it doesn't mean that there is signifigant usage. Remember that the DoD is comprised of some management overhead and three sub departments: Army, Navy, Air Force. While Linux may be used and even endorsed by the "DoD", it's usage is not permitted without one hell of a waiver process in the Department of the Navy. Especially under NMCI(Navy Marine Corps Intranet), Linux is not even listed as an approved legacy system, much less something EDS will agree to support.
Additonally, each branch of the service is autonomous in IT management, which means there are FOUR DIFFERENT ways of running a network with the associated FOUR sets of management overhead and of course, they aren't interoperable. This is a fairly generalized statement, but most of the systems I deal with daily in the Marine Corps are specific to us and don't work with the other services systems despite the fact that they all do the EXACT SAME THING.
So kids, the moral of the story is: Write you congressman and complain about the misuse of your tax dollars. And don't forget to tell them that free software == excuse for lower taxes == more votes for them.
I'll answer your questions as well as a few of the above posts.
NTT does make an adapter that connects to a standard serial port with accompanying software to backup info on your PC. Additionally, the phone has a 8M memory stick that I can save anything I want on. I will admit that the ability to sync the phone to software such as outlook is missing, but then again, I've tried using that feature with my palm before and after the coolness factor wore off, I realized that I wasn't nearly busy enough to benefit from it. I am however, a mid-level executive with 40 people working for me and I travel about once every two or three months. I am also single and have a fairly active social calender. I would say a vast majority of people do not fall into a category of being more busy than I am and would come to the same conclusion. I also kind of enjoy the seperation. My cell phone is tied to my personal life. Sure, I keep my work calendar on it and receive work related phone calls, but the emails I get on it are entirely just from friends. I really wouldn't want to be reading work emails on my time off.
The phone has a Java VM on it and there are tons of applications to download for entertainment, or PDA like functions. FAQs and HOWTOs are available on the net on how to write apps for the phone, so I can even do my own custom code if I wanted.
As far as the camera being useless....It takes 640x480 256K.jpg's and the phones 4M can hold about 40 at any given time. The memory stick expands that to over 100 pics. I've taken the phone on weekend trips and never run out of space. I can snap pictures and email them to friends on the spot. Plus I didn't have to carry an additional camera around just to preserve the memories. Not to mention that it's a damned great conversation starter in a bar when you take a girl's picture and then play around with it using the phones photo editing software. All that for $190 is more than worth it. You couldn't even buy the 3 seperately in the states for that price!
I only paid $190 for my cell phone and it does everything the palm does, plus surfs the internet and receives full blown email without having to add a modem attachment. It also has a.3 MegaPixel digital camera in it. Why would anyone pay 3x as much for a heavier, less useful toy?
Perhaps P2P was a bad example, although I do know people who specifically use Kazaa to get music because they refuse to pay the high prices charged for CDs. They openly admit what they do, although they probably don't expect anything serious to happen to them. Perhaps linking to or publishing the code to DeCSS would have been a better example.
As far as what's going on in the middle east... You can link to web sites all you want, but until you come and work with me out here in the III Marine Expeditionary Force, where our Area Of Responsibility includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Indi-Pakistan, North Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia; You have no concept of either A)what a battlefield is, or B)what's REALLY going on in the world. Just a note: We have more attacks per day on one of our public.mil servers than we have had real contingency issues(to include disasters and humanitarian aid) in the whole theater all year.
True, but at the same time wrong. Has anybody else noticed that the internet is currently the most active battlefield in hostory?
Lowlife (but capitolist god bless 'em) pigs generate spam to sell their penis enlargement scam and mail clients develop ways to filter and block email. Distraction.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks attempt to shake the very foundations of the NET through bandwidth flooding and sysadmins implement redundancy and load balancing. Jamming - Frequency Hopping.
Remote exploits and virus appear everyday and patches are generated quickly for the more quality OS's and virus updates are required daily for Micro$oft OS's. Infiltration.
Governing bodies exist that the people disagree with such as the RIAA and MPAA. Demonstrations are held in both violent(DDoS) and non-violent(civil disobedience of P2P) manners. Revolution.
Needless to say, civilization has managed to survive for thousands of years despite man's desire to control everything including his fellow men. I think the internet will find a way.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - An Anonymous Coward was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There wasn't any more details, but athorities think he was hacked to death with a blunt spoon by author Stephen King. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will be willing to provide an alibi for Stephen - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture by killing this annoying f&#k. Truly a World icon.
The last part of your is true though, DVDs can really dent box office sales.
I will have to disagree there. Until my local 'Best Denki' (Japanese version of Best Buy) starts carrying 40 foot home theater screens, and starts selling a sound system that will shake the foundation of my house when the dinosaur is getting close in Jurasic Park, I will continue to be an avid theater goer. The DVD is just bonus quality that I get to enjoy a few months later. I don't think there will ever be a home entertainment medium that can adequately replace the theater experience.
Not sure where you live, but here in Japan with my 12MBit ADSL connection, I can suck down a 1400MB file in under an hour. That's usually about the same time I would kill driving all the way to a rental place and back, not to mention the money I save in gas and also not having to pick a different movie because the one I wanted was already rented by other people.
We have the same deal with Cell Phones in Japan. All incoming calls are free, and the use of email often negates the need for outgoing calls. And yes, I did say email, not that dinky SMS protocol.
Most folks don't even bother getting a land line since you have to actually purchase the line for about $600.00+. Calling a local land line is about 3 cents per minute and calling a cell phone is around 10 to 12 cents per minute. Cell phones have a completely different prefix, so you won't accidentally get raped on the bill. The flip side of course is that outgoing calls on cell phones run about 20 cents per minute and you won't find any 4000 night/weekend plans around here. My plan is 5000 yen/mo. (about $38 at the current rate) and I get around 200 outgoing minutes excluding the 1 to 2 yen per email charge and my daily web activities checking news and weather. If I have a busy social calendar, which is about 4 dates per week plus assorted work functions, my bill is arround $100.00. I never use my land line for anything more than a link to my 12MBit ADSL provider.
I'm not so sure on that one. I've helped alot of people put together computers and in some cases, they had used a flat panel at work and were willing to pay the rediculous price for the monitor since I got the rest of the PC for them so cheap. You can also get E-machines with 17in flat panels from Best Buy for under $1000. I have also used these flat panel displays at work and it is damned tempting. The screen is much sharper and brighter. However, I'm in love with my $350 19in that I've had for a year and a half, so I personally will wait. The question is, how many home users(read mom,dad, grandma, etc...) who only use a PC for IM and email actually have a 19in or larger monitor? The article may have some validity.
The answer is yes and no. For any application that is doing massive ammounts of number manipulation on a small and colocated set of data (i.e. cachable) you will see performance at approx 4.7x10^9 operations per second. This is for the most part completely unrealistic since today's data applications usually operate on large quantities of data that are spread out through memory. For the average case, the computer will operate at somewhere over the speed of the Front Side Bus (FSB) which is still running close to the same speed it has been running at for the past 4 years. You will indeed notice a speed increase due to any computations that do not require the use of the FSB, but it will probably only be around 50% faster as opposed to 400% faster. The intuitive reader will note that the jump from a 100MHz to 400MHz processor was also limitted by the FSB and thus did not acheive a 400% increase in speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but you're going to have to define "entire network". Both of those entities have two vastly different networks. I guarantee you that there general email/file serving network does not run on the same segment as their Electronic Funds network. The EF networks are designed to be rundundant and do not support any kind of complex traffic. Packet sizes are generally very small and data requests are either to verify the current available balance, or to make a simple modification to that balance. Hence why you cannot transfer funds between multiple unlinked accounts at an ATM machine as that would drastically increase the complexity of the system supporting the information delivery. I've been job hunting recently in Japan and can tell you that all the major banks in Tokyo, to include Bank of America, are hiring UNIX SYSADMINS and programmers and paying them extremely well.
I would be interrested to see a report from the real heavy information hitters such as EBay or Amazon which are supporting millions of concurrnt connections while serving up pages of text from multiple datasources as well as graphics. I'd bet a buffalo nickel that they're not doing that on Win2K.
The only bone I have to pick with you is that you don't seem to understand the concept of dimensions. In the 3rd dimension, there is no such thing as "THE 2nd dimension." The second dimension is an infinite array of 1st dimensions. The 3rd an infinite array of 2nd dimensions...etc. I took a course in cosmology 3 years ago and we covered the following:
1st dimension: Length
2nd dimension: Width
3rd dimension: Depth
4th dimension: Time
Einstein's whole basis for relativity was that an even occurs at a location that is described in 4 dimensional coordinates. That event is then propogated at the speed of light throughout all four dimensions. Two different observers located at different points in space-time actually witness different versions of the event based on there RELATIVE location and velocity RELATIVE to the event.
Just to make your heads hurt, understand that 1 second is now defined as the time it takes light to travel ~3.0x10^8 meters. Since the speed of light is defined as ~3.0x10^8 m/s, the units and values cancel out to read that the speed of light is simply 1...no units. This makes the math quite easy, but is a b!7ch to rationalize in your head when you try and apply it to a real world event.
Also, the article did not say that being outside the universe would make everything clear. It said that with respect to quantum theory, the observer is genarally located outside of the space of the object that is being observed. As we presently do not know how to be located "outside" of the universe, we just have to accept that, not only can there be multiple observers, but they can also be observing from the inside of the very object they are observing. The quantum implications of this are in itself, enough to give anyone a really bad headache.
If your nipples are below your ribcage, you have two possible solutions:
#1) You're a girl and need to investigate this amazing invention called a bra.
#2) You're a guy and should shoot yourself before you infect the rest of the gener pool.
As far as the software goes. Give it away and let them spread it around. After it get's sufficiently popular, file a patent on the idea and sue everyone using it. That seems to be the standard business model these days.
Learning UNIX administration in 24 hours is like learning how to secure a Microsoft server in 24 hours.
Well, I guess since it's actually possible to administer UNIX, there's a difference.
When it seems that every other article about NASA is complaining about budget shortfalls for the ISS and how it is limitting its value as a research facility, I find this kind of stuff mildly aggravating. I am happy that my tax dollars are spent on space exploration, but I don't don't see much wisdom behind the way its being handled.
Robotic drills huh? looks like someone has once again "Bullshitted NASA"
I don't normally rant, but this is complete bullsh!t. If I was actually in the US, I wouldn't be paying money for a piss-poor quality, streamed, first-run movie when I could see it in the theater with a giant screen and good sound for under $10. Instead, I have to wait months overseas for the films to be released and I have two equally poor choices. #1 Watch it on the local military base for dirt cheap in an uncomfortable theater that was designed for public addresses, not hollywood films; or #2 pay $15 out in town for a foreign language dubbed version with sub-titles. Their main market exists overseas, not in the US. The real pisser is that I can't even get to a feedback form on the site to complain. I would greatly appreciate if a fellow service member, or just kind hearted American could pass this rant onto the 'nice people' who are running the site. In the mean time, I will remain stoked that XXX is actually coming out this week.
"Calculating an object like a mortar's trajectory is trivial"
Calculating a trajectory from known information is trivial. Calculating a trajectory based on radar coordinates when the object is already in motion is time consuming. You need at least two range vectors to get a rough idea and three or more to get somewhat accurate. These vectors currently come from radar which means the radar has to be conveniently pointing in the direction the shell is coming from to get the best time response. From there the system has to get the vectors, do the math, spin up the laser and reorient it, and fire it all in the relative short time that an artillery shell is in flight which is between 4 to 15 seconds give or take. Systems in the 80's were not that responsive regardless of how little actual computation is involved.
Take it even a step further. Web base everything and ensure that your cgi cripts only produce HTML 1.0 compliant pages. You can of course go higher than 1.0, but then you start to get into the "What browsers do I support?" question.
Your code could indeed be written in perl, although I would recommend ANSI C or C++ for two reasons. #1 You are already familiar with the language and compilers. #2 You probably deal with large variable quantities of data that are processor intensive and would suffer from "script" style languages.
The beauty of this is you can now switch to only one compiler since the applications are only running on the web server. My programming shop is responsible for producing software that tracks and manages supply and maintenance in the Western Pacific for the Marine Corps. You may not have alot of customers who are running your software from a tent in the middle of BFE over an 8KBit pipe. But I'm sure web basing will still reduce the number of customer support issues that involve you going to the machine the software is installed on to see what the customer is talking about when he says, "I'm getting this strange error."
It worked wonders for our shop of 5 programmers
Turns out we're both correct. I was definitely wrong about why the article was posted. But you have to admit I was right about the TROLL part. It was so good in fact, that I didn't even get past the title before I had linked through to the artle to see what was up. I must admit I was a bit curious on how someone would combine those two shells.
How often do you pass a story without reading the article? I will refrain from b|7ch|ng about the legitimate stories I've had rejected, but this is nothing more than a glorified TROLL. There is no real news behind the story and it's even headlined as FAKE NEWS dated 25 September. I wonder how many slashdotters just had valuable time wasted where they could have been spending their work hours reading more legitimate slashdot stories :)
Well, when I first moved to Japan about a year and a half ago, I was absolutely floored by a pair of AIBO's in a CompuTown that were actually playing with each other. I still don't quite make enough money to justify spending that much money, but for those that do have the $$(or Yen as the case may be), the things are pretty damned impressive.
:)
I'm going to keep my wallet pointed at the Panasonic 42in FlatPanel Plasma HDTV though. In the past year, the price has dropped from 1,200,000Y (~$9,800.00) to 690,000Y (~$5,700.00). Not only does it have the TV Tuner, but it also has a VGA/Serial input so your computer can display nifty stuff on it while you're not watching TV, like: Art, News and Stock prices, or most importantly, Quake 4 which will be out by the time I can afford it
OK, the too many movies line is getting old. Let me flesh this out a bit.
I graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a Degree in Engineering and have been invited back to teach Computer Science by that department's chair. I am currently living in Japan where I study Distributed Operating System design and Artificial Intelligence research in my spare time. While I may speak enough Japanese to pick up a girl at a bar, I do not understand enough to watch movies; hence why I don't have cable.
The FACTs of the discussion are these:
#1 Research on the human brain and how it learns is still considered to be in its infancy. Current experiements in the subject are almost barbaric in their simplicity; such as performing CT scans on a subjects brain while they are exposed to extremem emotional states, just to see which location in the brain becomes more active.
#2 Expert systems already exist today that are capable of creating, or rewriting the rules they operate off of. Exactly how much memory do they need to have and how much information do they need before they begin writing rules that don't pertain to their original design? What point does the information processing load become more than the current hardware can handle?
#3 Neural networks of some pretty fair complexity have been played with, but we still haven't quite reached the stage where the computer will mimic human learning and no one can say how close we are. Again, how do we know we don't already have the right algorithm, and just not the right input information.
One might infer from my sig that I read too many books, but Dostoevsky had the fall of the Russian government, the rise of communism and the abolishment of the church in Russia nailed decades before it actually happened. Bullishly pushing forward with a misunderstood technology or concept has screwed us over many times. I don't think it's out of line to accept that the artistic half of our species occassionally has very clear insight into our future.
Exactly how complex does the learning algorithm have to be before a connection to the internet makes a machine dangerous? Seriously, we really don't understand how close or far we are to making a machine self aware. Is connecting an AI unit to the NET really an ethically responsible thing to do?
Just to add some info here. Just because an article talks about usage and approval of FOSS in the "DoD" (Department of Defense), it doesn't mean that there is signifigant usage. Remember that the DoD is comprised of some management overhead and three sub departments: Army, Navy, Air Force. While Linux may be used and even endorsed by the "DoD", it's usage is not permitted without one hell of a waiver process in the Department of the Navy. Especially under NMCI(Navy Marine Corps Intranet), Linux is not even listed as an approved legacy system, much less something EDS will agree to support.
Additonally, each branch of the service is autonomous in IT management, which means there are FOUR DIFFERENT ways of running a network with the associated FOUR sets of management overhead and of course, they aren't interoperable. This is a fairly generalized statement, but most of the systems I deal with daily in the Marine Corps are specific to us and don't work with the other services systems despite the fact that they all do the EXACT SAME THING.
So kids, the moral of the story is: Write you congressman and complain about the misuse of your tax dollars. And don't forget to tell them that free software == excuse for lower taxes == more votes for them.
I'll answer your questions as well as a few of the above posts.
.jpg's and the phones 4M can hold about 40 at any given time. The memory stick expands that to over 100 pics. I've taken the phone on weekend trips and never run out of space. I can snap pictures and email them to friends on the spot. Plus I didn't have to carry an additional camera around just to preserve the memories. Not to mention that it's a damned great conversation starter in a bar when you take a girl's picture and then play around with it using the phones photo editing software. All that for $190 is more than worth it. You couldn't even buy the 3 seperately in the states for that price!
NTT does make an adapter that connects to a standard serial port with accompanying software to backup info on your PC. Additionally, the phone has a 8M memory stick that I can save anything I want on. I will admit that the ability to sync the phone to software such as outlook is missing, but then again, I've tried using that feature with my palm before and after the coolness factor wore off, I realized that I wasn't nearly busy enough to benefit from it. I am however, a mid-level executive with 40 people working for me and I travel about once every two or three months. I am also single and have a fairly active social calender. I would say a vast majority of people do not fall into a category of being more busy than I am and would come to the same conclusion. I also kind of enjoy the seperation. My cell phone is tied to my personal life. Sure, I keep my work calendar on it and receive work related phone calls, but the emails I get on it are entirely just from friends. I really wouldn't want to be reading work emails on my time off.
The phone has a Java VM on it and there are tons of applications to download for entertainment, or PDA like functions. FAQs and HOWTOs are available on the net on how to write apps for the phone, so I can even do my own custom code if I wanted.
As far as the camera being useless....It takes 640x480 256K
I only paid $190 for my cell phone and it does everything the palm does, plus surfs the internet and receives full blown email without having to add a modem attachment. It also has a .3 MegaPixel digital camera in it. Why would anyone pay 3x as much for a heavier, less useful toy?
Just curious
Perhaps P2P was a bad example, although I do know people who specifically use Kazaa to get music because they refuse to pay the high prices charged for CDs. They openly admit what they do, although they probably don't expect anything serious to happen to them. Perhaps linking to or publishing the code to DeCSS would have been a better example.
.mil servers than we have had real contingency issues(to include disasters and humanitarian aid) in the whole theater all year.
As far as what's going on in the middle east... You can link to web sites all you want, but until you come and work with me out here in the III Marine Expeditionary Force, where our Area Of Responsibility includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Indi-Pakistan, North Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia; You have no concept of either A)what a battlefield is, or B)what's REALLY going on in the world. Just a note: We have more attacks per day on one of our public
True, but at the same time wrong. Has anybody else noticed that the internet is currently the most active battlefield in hostory?
Lowlife (but capitolist god bless 'em) pigs generate spam to sell their penis enlargement scam and mail clients develop ways to filter and block email. Distraction.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks attempt to shake the very foundations of the NET through bandwidth flooding and sysadmins implement redundancy and load balancing. Jamming - Frequency Hopping.
Remote exploits and virus appear everyday and patches are generated quickly for the more quality OS's and virus updates are required daily for Micro$oft OS's. Infiltration.
Governing bodies exist that the people disagree with such as the RIAA and MPAA. Demonstrations are held in both violent(DDoS) and non-violent(civil disobedience of P2P) manners. Revolution.
Needless to say, civilization has managed to survive for thousands of years despite man's desire to control everything including his fellow men. I think the internet will find a way.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - An Anonymous Coward was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There wasn't any more details, but athorities think he was hacked to death with a blunt spoon by author Stephen King. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will be willing to provide an alibi for Stephen - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture by killing this annoying f&#k. Truly a World icon.
The last part of your is true though, DVDs can really dent box office sales.
I will have to disagree there. Until my local 'Best Denki' (Japanese version of Best Buy) starts carrying 40 foot home theater screens, and starts selling a sound system that will shake the foundation of my house when the dinosaur is getting close in Jurasic Park, I will continue to be an avid theater goer. The DVD is just bonus quality that I get to enjoy a few months later. I don't think there will ever be a home entertainment medium that can adequately replace the theater experience.
Not sure where you live, but here in Japan with my 12MBit ADSL connection, I can suck down a 1400MB file in under an hour. That's usually about the same time I would kill driving all the way to a rental place and back, not to mention the money I save in gas and also not having to pick a different movie because the one I wanted was already rented by other people.
We have the same deal with Cell Phones in Japan. All incoming calls are free, and the use of email often negates the need for outgoing calls. And yes, I did say email, not that dinky SMS protocol.
Most folks don't even bother getting a land line since you have to actually purchase the line for about $600.00+. Calling a local land line is about 3 cents per minute and calling a cell phone is around 10 to 12 cents per minute. Cell phones have a completely different prefix, so you won't accidentally get raped on the bill. The flip side of course is that outgoing calls on cell phones run about 20 cents per minute and you won't find any 4000 night/weekend plans around here. My plan is 5000 yen/mo. (about $38 at the current rate) and I get around 200 outgoing minutes excluding the 1 to 2 yen per email charge and my daily web activities checking news and weather. If I have a busy social calendar, which is about 4 dates per week plus assorted work functions, my bill is arround $100.00. I never use my land line for anything more than a link to my 12MBit ADSL provider.
Metallica S&M would run over $20 on this. I'd rather pay the $16 for the CD and be able to burn it in the for4mat of my choice. (i.e. ogg)
I'm not so sure on that one. I've helped alot of people put together computers and in some cases, they had used a flat panel at work and were willing to pay the rediculous price for the monitor since I got the rest of the PC for them so cheap. You can also get E-machines with 17in flat panels from Best Buy for under $1000. I have also used these flat panel displays at work and it is damned tempting. The screen is much sharper and brighter. However, I'm in love with my $350 19in that I've had for a year and a half, so I personally will wait. The question is, how many home users(read mom,dad, grandma, etc...) who only use a PC for IM and email actually have a 19in or larger monitor? The article may have some validity.
The answer is yes and no. For any application that is doing massive ammounts of number manipulation on a small and colocated set of data (i.e. cachable) you will see performance at approx 4.7x10^9 operations per second. This is for the most part completely unrealistic since today's data applications usually operate on large quantities of data that are spread out through memory. For the average case, the computer will operate at somewhere over the speed of the Front Side Bus (FSB) which is still running close to the same speed it has been running at for the past 4 years. You will indeed notice a speed increase due to any computations that do not require the use of the FSB, but it will probably only be around 50% faster as opposed to 400% faster. The intuitive reader will note that the jump from a 100MHz to 400MHz processor was also limitted by the FSB and thus did not acheive a 400% increase in speed.