It's amazing how tech geeks are sometimes as scared of technology as average joes. Sure, Microsoft (or Liberty) would have a huge "hackable database"... but I've bought items from at least a couple dozen stores the past year, and all those have seperate "hackable databases"... if you're afraid of security, it would make better sense to have your CC# in just one, so you could monitor it easier, wouldn't it?
Speaking of other companies that have huge hackable databases... Citibank and NextCard both have my CC# and all my customer information (as well as those for millions of other people).. sure, every few months they try to set me up with a "free trial" for some thing or another, but it's a minor hassle, not any sort of major issue.
Why is one database with 50 million people's personal information on it worse than 10 databases with 5 million people each? (eg, Amazon + Buy.com + etc etc etc.)
I have no use for this sort of thing, but I'm not against it unless it becomes required to start up Windows or something (which is close to being done now).
I don't get what the hell this is for. (I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm seriously curious). I can understand why you'd want a PDA to organize yourself, carry pictures around, communicate wirelessly, play games, etc etc.
What are you supposed to do with a Linux PDA though? Pull it out of your pocket and peck at it whenever you think of a cool line of code? I doubt any communications accessories will be available for a while so you won't be able to telnet etc.
I think if you want to support Microsoft's competitors, you might want to go Palm on this one..:-\
- 16MB of RAM is mighty good for a PalmOS PDA without an MP3 player built in. I have a Sony CLIE with 8mb of RAM and an 8 mb memory stick and it's easy to keep memory available with very minimal memory management (ie delete the programs you don't use). No PalmOS devices until recently (ie September) had more than 8mb of RAM onboard.
- The Treo 180 is the "base" unit. The color 270 will hopefully have some kind of expansion. It costs $200 more than the mono unit and color PDA's generally only cost $50-$100 more than their comparable monochrome devices (ie, Palm's color m505 is $70 more than their mono m500; Handspring's Prism is $100 more than their mono Neo, even though the Prism has a rechargable battery). The $200 increase must be coming from someplace other than just the screen: Hopefully hi-res and a SD or CF slot will be included. Handspring's FAQ indicates they won't have a SpringBoard Treo anytime soon... which is a shame, since they make damn nice MP3 player Springboards (with lots of additional memory to boot).
- GSM isn't THAT bad in the US. Maybe it's just because I live on the west coast, where GSM (Cingular, Voicestream, AT&T) seems to be more popular than the alternatives (Sprint, Verizon). And, according to Handspring, a CDMA (and/or other network) version of the Treo is on its way.
- The battery life ain't that bad... the Treo has 2.5 hours of talk time or over 60 hours of standby time [handspring.com]... pretty much the same as my Nokia [nokia.com]. Maybe the color Treo will have a better battery, since color screens eat up batteries faster.
- By the way, for the dummies posting about how "big" the Treo is... it ain't that big. My tiny Nokia phone is 4.3" tall, 1.9" wide, and 4.2 oz. The Treo is 4.3" tall, 2.7" wide, and 5.4 oz. It'll still easily fit in my pocket!
Generally on cell phones they're voice activated by pressing a button and then saying "Mom" and then matching it with a "Mom" that you recorded before... so it's not really voice recognition, it's just matching what you said versus a recording.
I've used this and I can say it's pretty worthless.. it's only worthwhile use is while driving so you don't have to look at the phone, but while in the car most of the background noise fudges it up. Don't even try it on a busy street. It'd take me an average of 3 tries to get it right.
I haven't used this feature on my cellphone in months...
It would be a nice extra feature to have in the Treo, but I don't think it's a big deal. I wouldn't pay $1 more for it..
I have a crappy retail job while I'm going to college and I have access to thousands of people's addresses, credit card numbers, phone numbers, full names, etc. Go to a mall dumpster and you'll find credit card receipts for hundreds of people. The girl ringing up your cargo shorts at Old Navy has access to your information just as easily as these "hackers" and "identity thieves."
Just because there are centralized databases with this stuff now doesn't mean anything, besides people can get 2 million of them at a time. What is someone going to do with 2 million records instead of just 20?
People steal no matter what. Computers don't make that easier or more effective.
There's no problem copying to/from memory sticks, including MP3's... I wouldn't deter people from buying a Clie if they want to play MP3's.. I've never had problems playing an MP3 on the Clie. It also plays the secure ATRAC3 files, if you're into that sort of thing. The Clie also comes with a nice input wand that lets you control music without taking the Clie out of your pocket (and can actually provide input for PDA functions, if any programs were ever to take advantage of that).
Memory sticks go up to 128mb currently, so if you want to store your entire CD collection you're out of luck (unless you have a CD collection consisting of 3 CD's). A 128mb Memory Stick costs about $100 if you shop around a little.
I'd recommend buying a Clie 760 if you want an MP3 player and a PDA (it's the best PDA out there), but if you just want an MP3 player buy an Ipod or something.
If you've ever played Civ2, and got bored with it, don't buy this. It's the EXACT SAME GAME. I wouldn't even call it "evolutionary."
It's like adding the 4 new teams to baseball and adding a Designated Hitter and calling it "MLB 2."
Even the tech tree is EXACTLY THE SAME except for a couple (crappy) additions. 'Hmm, hey Sid, how bout we add "Pringles Factory" in between "Recycling Bins" and "Polyurethane Production"' 'AGAGAAAA' (that's the incoherent sound Sid always makes because clearly he's a DRUNK)
Did it really take them six years for this? Hey release the source code for Civ1 Sid, even the open source community could do a better update than this...
This doesn't have any real "implications" for the future. You can make all the open-source Tetris or Zork games you want. Makers of commercial Tetris games have always had to have permission to sell these games.
These games are obvious clones made simply for profitting off Atari and Hasbro's work. "Mac-Man"? "Partiot Command"? "Missle Defender"?
This is nothing new and anyone who's aware of anything that's going on with anything in the world knows this.
Hey, that's good smarts there. I use the best browser out there, but because it's not cool to like Microsoft, I must be stupid and ignorant for using it.
Since when did I start arguing that Windows was always better than Unix?
Unix has its uses: 1) Network Stability 2) nothing
Win98 and Win2000 betas were buggy, but guess what they had to make up for it? About a billion features no other OS or program in the world has. Can Mozilla say that? Mozilla has no reason to be buggy except for very crappy programming.
2. I would but it has so many bugs and there would be no purpose to doing it (and making a working crappy browser instead of a non-working crappy browser)
3. Oh yeah, there's a conspiracy. Those Netscape, AOL and Opera folks must be supergeniuses to get around Microsoft's traps
4). Ahh, I disagree with your religion for open-source so I must be a liar and a troll. Hey, I'm not the one making conspiracy theories and heresy calls (your #3 and #4).
Ok, my OS sucks! But at least it doesn't take 72 hours to boot up and i press one button to get to this web page, and I don't have to type in 'bin/apps/jkd/usr/frig/lambadoo/zigga/mozilla -d 40 044.444 %d || 4000^2 -lal gugu nip nip *woozzzzz* -ip -dns(www.slashdot.org) -prot http gu gu ga ga ga' to get here...
I'm not proud, I'm just saying corporate (ie "good") companies make better products that DON'T crash as often in such an advanced OS as my great Win98, I'm sure everyone here is proud that their computer has been running a straight 384 days (about half the amount of time since they've been out of the house, and a tenth of the time since they "almost" got a date).
Sure open source is a hobby, but if it's not a GOOD product it shouldn't be on the front page of this website every 3 days and talked about so much, when there are much better (ALSO free) products already out there.
I made this checkers game in Visual Basic as a hobby (but don't try crowning your pieces), that doesn't make it international news.
boohoo hoo I'm using my IE5.5 BETA, and it works fine...
BETA doesn't mean that it's fine if it's full of crappy bugs, a crappy interface, and nothing that makes it any better than any other browser in the world (including opera)..
- Jeremy Fuller
Re:Who cares about these games?
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 1
I would, but I like whining about crap:(
That's why people responded to me, after all! It's what makes the Internet great:(
In depth information? From Slashdot?? Who ARE you?
- Jeremy Fuller
Who cares about these games?
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Isn't anyone else sick of first person shooter games? Every one is the exact same thing, except for having, say, a rapid laser gun instead of a machine gun, and to be "good" you need a $40/month line and about $200 worth of extra equipment just for the game...
I'll stick to my Pokemon Pinball, thank you very much!
What's really going on? Slashdot authors don't do anything but forward what they read on the headlines from MSNBC that mention 'Linux' or 'Star Wars' or whatever else would never catch any normal person's eye, and then tries to make their users tell the truth.
It's really a brilliant scheme; they get so many pageviews from this due to all the inaccurate info that needs to be corrected through so many user messages.
If there were a backdoor, guess the only way it would be exploited? Yep, you're right, if it were OPEN SOURCE. Since Microsoft doesn't make open source programs, I can be confident that nobody will be able to hack into my Microsoft PowerPoint until Microsoft themselves find out about it, and immediately release a patch.
What do you get with Open Source? You got it, a crappy closed-market operating system like Linux. If a company spends millions and millions of dollars making a product, they should be allowed to keep how it works secret. If this causes major problems, people will stop using that product, which is obviously not the case with Windows. Even with the most minor security problem, Microsoft has everyone's computer in the world pop up a window that says, 'CRITICAL UPDATE AVAILABLE! DOWNLOAD NOW,' which makes that 'backdoor' never be used to do any major damage.
What does do major damage? All these open-source holier-than-Microsoft "hackers" who spend all their time praying to their open source gods making spoofers and routers and god knows what to take down Buy.com for giggles and poops.
YAAAR. YHNF. IDSHYCFWSSD. HAND. For the Usenet Illiterate, YAAAR means You Are An Arrogant Retard, and YHNF means You Have No Friends, and IDSHYCFWSSD means I Don't See How You Can Function Without Strong Stimulant Drugs. HAND means Have A Nice Day.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how tech geeks are sometimes as scared of technology as average joes. Sure, Microsoft (or Liberty) would have a huge "hackable database"... but I've bought items from at least a couple dozen stores the past year, and all those have seperate "hackable databases"... if you're afraid of security, it would make better sense to have your CC# in just one, so you could monitor it easier, wouldn't it?
Speaking of other companies that have huge hackable databases... Citibank and NextCard both have my CC# and all my customer information (as well as those for millions of other people).. sure, every few months they try to set me up with a "free trial" for some thing or another, but it's a minor hassle, not any sort of major issue.
Why is one database with 50 million people's personal information on it worse than 10 databases with 5 million people each? (eg, Amazon + Buy.com + etc etc etc.)
I have no use for this sort of thing, but I'm not against it unless it becomes required to start up Windows or something (which is close to being done now).
I don't get what the hell this is for. (I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm seriously curious). I can understand why you'd want a PDA to organize yourself, carry pictures around, communicate wirelessly, play games, etc etc.
:-\
What are you supposed to do with a Linux PDA though? Pull it out of your pocket and peck at it whenever you think of a cool line of code? I doubt any communications accessories will be available for a while so you won't be able to telnet etc.
I think if you want to support Microsoft's competitors, you might want to go Palm on this one..
- 16MB of RAM is mighty good for a PalmOS PDA without an MP3 player built in. I have a Sony CLIE with 8mb of RAM and an 8 mb memory stick and it's easy to keep memory available with very minimal memory management (ie delete the programs you don't use). No PalmOS devices until recently (ie September) had more than 8mb of RAM onboard.
- The Treo 180 is the "base" unit. The color 270 will hopefully have some kind of expansion. It costs $200 more than the mono unit and color PDA's generally only cost $50-$100 more than their comparable monochrome devices (ie, Palm's color m505 is $70 more than their mono m500; Handspring's Prism is $100 more than their mono Neo, even though the Prism has a rechargable battery). The $200 increase must be coming from someplace other than just the screen: Hopefully hi-res and a SD or CF slot will be included. Handspring's FAQ indicates they won't have a SpringBoard Treo anytime soon... which is a shame, since they make damn nice MP3 player Springboards (with lots of additional memory to boot).
- GSM isn't THAT bad in the US. Maybe it's just because I live on the west coast, where GSM (Cingular, Voicestream, AT&T) seems to be more popular than the alternatives (Sprint, Verizon). And, according to Handspring, a CDMA (and/or other network) version of the Treo is on its way.
- The battery life ain't that bad... the Treo has 2.5 hours of talk time or over 60 hours of standby time [handspring.com]... pretty much the same as my Nokia [nokia.com]. Maybe the color Treo will have a better battery, since color screens eat up batteries faster.
- By the way, for the dummies posting about how "big" the Treo is... it ain't that big. My tiny Nokia phone is 4.3" tall, 1.9" wide, and 4.2 oz. The Treo is 4.3" tall, 2.7" wide, and 5.4 oz. It'll still easily fit in my pocket!
Generally on cell phones they're voice activated by pressing a button and then saying "Mom" and then matching it with a "Mom" that you recorded before... so it's not really voice recognition, it's just matching what you said versus a recording.
I've used this and I can say it's pretty worthless.. it's only worthwhile use is while driving so you don't have to look at the phone, but while in the car most of the background noise fudges it up. Don't even try it on a busy street. It'd take me an average of 3 tries to get it right.
I haven't used this feature on my cellphone in months...
It would be a nice extra feature to have in the Treo, but I don't think it's a big deal. I wouldn't pay $1 more for it..
I have a crappy retail job while I'm going to college and I have access to thousands of people's addresses, credit card numbers, phone numbers, full names, etc. Go to a mall dumpster and you'll find credit card receipts for hundreds of people. The girl ringing up your cargo shorts at Old Navy has access to your information just as easily as these "hackers" and "identity thieves."
Just because there are centralized databases with this stuff now doesn't mean anything, besides people can get 2 million of them at a time. What is someone going to do with 2 million records instead of just 20?
People steal no matter what. Computers don't make that easier or more effective.
There's no problem copying to/from memory sticks, including MP3's... I wouldn't deter people from buying a Clie if they want to play MP3's.. I've never had problems playing an MP3 on the Clie. It also plays the secure ATRAC3 files, if you're into that sort of thing. The Clie also comes with a nice input wand that lets you control music without taking the Clie out of your pocket (and can actually provide input for PDA functions, if any programs were ever to take advantage of that).
Memory sticks go up to 128mb currently, so if you want to store your entire CD collection you're out of luck (unless you have a CD collection consisting of 3 CD's). A 128mb Memory Stick costs about $100 if you shop around a little.
I'd recommend buying a Clie 760 if you want an MP3 player and a PDA (it's the best PDA out there), but if you just want an MP3 player buy an Ipod or something.
Worst $50 I've ever spent. :(
If you've ever played Civ2, and got bored with it, don't buy this. It's the EXACT SAME GAME. I wouldn't even call it "evolutionary."
It's like adding the 4 new teams to baseball and adding a Designated Hitter and calling it "MLB 2."
Even the tech tree is EXACTLY THE SAME except for a couple (crappy) additions. 'Hmm, hey Sid, how bout we add "Pringles Factory" in between "Recycling Bins" and "Polyurethane Production"' 'AGAGAAAA' (that's the incoherent sound Sid always makes because clearly he's a DRUNK)
Did it really take them six years for this? Hey release the source code for Civ1 Sid, even the open source community could do a better update than this...
I have not much against Linux, but what the hell would you do with a Linux PDA?
Plus the $89 price tag is misleading.. a wireless modem will probably cost $200, and without it you can't even WinNuke anyone!
At least it invented network FPS'ing...
What about the Gameboy Link Cable? They should sue Won.net and Battle.net
- Jeremy Fuller
- Jeremy Fuller
These games are obvious clones made simply for profitting off Atari and Hasbro's work. "Mac-Man"? "Partiot Command"? "Missle Defender"?
This is nothing new and anyone who's aware of anything that's going on with anything in the world knows this.
- Jeremy Fuller
Good luck with your Lynx surfing!
- Jeremy Fuller
If you replaced "Mozilla" and "IE5.5" in his post, he would have been moderated to (5, Insightful).
- Jeremy Fuller
Unix has its uses: 1) Network Stability 2) nothing
Win98 and Win2000 betas were buggy, but guess what they had to make up for it? About a billion features no other OS or program in the world has. Can Mozilla say that? Mozilla has no reason to be buggy except for very crappy programming.
- Jeremy Fuller
2. I would but it has so many bugs and there would be no purpose to doing it (and making a working crappy browser instead of a non-working crappy browser)
3. Oh yeah, there's a conspiracy. Those Netscape, AOL and Opera folks must be supergeniuses to get around Microsoft's traps
4). Ahh, I disagree with your religion for open-source so I must be a liar and a troll. Hey, I'm not the one making conspiracy theories and heresy calls (your #3 and #4).
- Jeremy Fuller
I'm not proud, I'm just saying corporate (ie "good") companies make better products that DON'T crash as often in such an advanced OS as my great Win98, I'm sure everyone here is proud that their computer has been running a straight 384 days (about half the amount of time since they've been out of the house, and a tenth of the time since they "almost" got a date).
Sure open source is a hobby, but if it's not a GOOD product it shouldn't be on the front page of this website every 3 days and talked about so much, when there are much better (ALSO free) products already out there.
I made this checkers game in Visual Basic as a hobby (but don't try crowning your pieces), that doesn't make it international news.
- Jeremy Fuller
I'm using my IE5.5 BETA, and it works fine...
BETA doesn't mean that it's fine if it's full of crappy bugs, a crappy interface, and nothing that makes it any better than any other browser in the world (including opera)..
- Jeremy Fuller
That's why people responded to me, after all! It's what makes the Internet great :(
- Jeremy Fuller
- Jeremy Fuller
I'll stick to my Pokemon Pinball, thank you very much!
- Jeremy Fuller
It's really a brilliant scheme; they get so many pageviews from this due to all the inaccurate info that needs to be corrected through so many user messages.
- Jeremy Fuller
What do you get with Open Source? You got it, a crappy closed-market operating system like Linux. If a company spends millions and millions of dollars making a product, they should be allowed to keep how it works secret. If this causes major problems, people will stop using that product, which is obviously not the case with Windows. Even with the most minor security problem, Microsoft has everyone's computer in the world pop up a window that says, 'CRITICAL UPDATE AVAILABLE! DOWNLOAD NOW,' which makes that 'backdoor' never be used to do any major damage.
What does do major damage? All these open-source holier-than-Microsoft "hackers" who spend all their time praying to their open source gods making spoofers and routers and god knows what to take down Buy.com for giggles and poops.
- Jeremy Fuller
A bad one, that's what. :(
- Jeremy Fuller
- Jeremy Fuller
YAAAR. YHNF. IDSHYCFWSSD. HAND. For the Usenet Illiterate, YAAAR means You Are An Arrogant Retard, and YHNF means You Have No Friends, and IDSHYCFWSSD means I Don't See How You Can Function Without Strong Stimulant Drugs. HAND means Have A Nice Day.
- Jeremy Fuller