Yes. The way it works is alot like DSL. You get the physical line through the carrier (For DSL, it would be your local telephone company, such as Qwest, Verizon, Bell South, etc. For Cable, it would be AT&T, Cox, Comcast, etc.) but you get the internet service through the ISP. For DSL, you generally have your choice of ISPs (Most telcos have their own, plus EarthLink, DirecTV, and lots of local ISPs offer DSL service.) For Cable, you only have one choice. If you have AT&T cable, your only ISP choice is Excite@Home. They brand the service as AT&T@Home, Cox@Home, Comcast@Home, etc.. based on your cable company.
Um, no. Just because it's on excite.com, doesn't make it official. It's actually an AP (Associated Press) newswire story that just about every news web site carries. It just so happens that Excite has a news web site (news.excite.com) that carried the story. It is exactly the same as when the cable television station MSNBC does a story on Microsoft. It's not an official statement from Microsoft, it's just a news organization reporting on a company, that, by coincidence, happens to be its parent company.
Yes, but, again, if you read the info, he was supposed to EMAIL the answers. So they were NOT planning, expecting, or even thinking about the possibility of, a phone interview.
Again, according to Chris, he called out of the blue. And he was supposedly in a hurry. That's no time to run to Radio Shack to pick up one of those. I would hope that they went out and got one for the next time this happens, but if they didn't already have one . . .
I mean, even if they did, if Bruce was really busy, Chris probably didn't want to tell a big movie star "can you hang on while I go searching for our tape recorder, it'll only be 10 minutes or so..."
Actually, my digital answering machine has no such function. I just checked, and my old analog-tape-based one doesn't either. Just called my sister, and her's doesn't either. They all have 'memo' mode, but I just tried to use it during a call, and it didn't work.
Heck, what if they have voice mail, and no answering machine? I've got plenty of friends who have that!
Might I recommend webcriteria.com?
on
Homepage Usability
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· Score: 3, Informative
hehe... Yes, this is a blatant ad, but I used to work for them, and I still feel a little company loyalty.
For a good service that provides what isn't, strictly speaking, usability data, try http://www.webcriteria.com. They do computerized testing of your web site that checks for "clutter" and fluff. It tells you how long an average user takes to read your page, how long it takes an average user to surf through your site to find a specific piece of information, or for commerce sites, it will even tell you how hard it is to place an order.
Yes, it's a blatant ad, and I don't even work there anymore, I just think it's a great service. (Plus, they have the coolest programmers on the planet, programming AI that does everything.)
As Chris DiBona answered, Bruce called them 'out of the blue', so they weren't prepared to record the phone call. And if you've ever tried to hold a manual tape recorder up to a phone, you'd know how impractical (and tiring) it is. Plus the sound quality sucks ass.
According to Xerox's Gyricon page, this technology is being geared for billboards. Their smallest font is a size 20! NOT adequate for use in anything that you can hold in front of you. By the time that they are ever able to create more reasonable font sizes, LEPs will be in full scale production.
Yes, but . . . Various 'e-ink' technologies hope to have 100+ dpi within 2 years, with one (sorry, no links, since I don't remember the names of the companies that I read about last week) hoping to have 300 dpi by 2005. Since LEPs will only (hopefully) be in full production for small-scale projects (car stereos, clocks, maybe PDAs) by 2005, you do the math.
Of course, all of the e-ink projects are made to be 'seldom-write' passive displays where you change the display maybe once or twice a day. They're not at all suitable for full-motion, full-screen video (including scrolling a static page!) They are meant to be electronically-rewritable paper, NOT a replacement for a computer screen. Think CD-RW vs. Hard drive.
Well, I do, for one. I run a Pentium 3/1G, with a couple SCSI drives, on a 400W PSU. Even in an enclosed computer cabinet, it's so loud that you can hear it in another room. I will be immediatly researching all this hardware, because I've been looking for a good quiet solution for use in my home office. (It's kind of annoying to have to speak louder on the phone because my PC is loud...)
hear hear! While I am not employed by Microsoft, and I don't particularly LIKE Microsoft, I do have to agree that this article is just a big 'LINUX ROX' rant. I worked for a small web company as their only Windows admin for a few months. We had 50 employees, with 50 Windows boxes (an ugly mix of desktop and laptops, running NT4, W2k Pro, and W98.) Along with 3 Windows NT servers, an Exchange server, and a SQL server. That was our 'in-house' network. We (Being an internet company) also had an array of 5 Linux boxes that our service ran on. We had myself as the Windows admin, and one other person as the Linux admin. The Windows boxes went down so infrequently that I got laid off and replaced with a college student 'PC TECH' getting half my salary, who handled it no problem, even with too much free time. Our poor Linux guy, however, was constantly applying new patches, solving network issues, and the like...
Of course... When you file for an IPO, you can no longer toot your own horn, so let Cringely do it for you!!
So, let's see... Cringely worked for Apple in the early days, he has had close ties with the founders of Excite and PayPal... That man is the unluckiest 'almost-millionare' ever... (Then again, I'm sure he makes a good living, and he doesn't have to worry about stock market fluctuations.)
hehe... Yeah, same ad in Portland, OR. (Well, they say 'Portland', not 'New York', but close enough.)
I thought it was hilarious. A 'software truce'? Yeah, right. The entire purpose of this ad is to GET disgruntled employees to turn their employers in...
Now, I'm a Microsoft-software user, I'm even a hard-working MCSE, so I make a living off of legally-licensed MS software (and I do encourage clients to use legal copies) but come on... This is just a Microsoft-sponsored marketing campaign. (P.S. Yes, I do advise some clients to use Linux-based servers, even though I don't support Linux.)
While this is still vapourware, it looks bad for Transmeta.
Well, it looks to me like this is just a Guyserville Pentium III (i.e. Mobile Pentium III with SpeedStep) that has been UNDERclocked to 300MHz. If you find a way to underclock the exisiting ones that far, I bet they'd only need half a watt, too...
Has anyone actually brought out a notebook using their Crusoe processor yet, as in: can you buy one down the store right now?
Yeah. Head down to CompUSA or Fry's, and check out the Sony 'PictureBook' PCG-C1XN. It's powered by a Crusoe processor, and I've seen it in stores for over two months now.
My prediction: despite their technical innovation Transmeta will founder and eventually get bought out by... AMD.
No... More likely by Via. They've been the ones on a processor-company buying spree. AMD seems to want to do it the hard way.
Um, try reading the TOS. They do not ban downloading porn; they can not enter your house as they please; they actually REQUIRE you to have some form of firewall so that NOONE can monitor your computer; and they don't monitor what you do personally, just in aggregate, like every other ISP out there...
Man, people, please read the linked articles before over-reacting... It's just standard legalese. It may be worded more 'harshly', but it's the same as every major ISP out there. (Well, the requirement that you can't run a server is very @Home-like, and a little much, I do have to admit that.)
This is exactly what I'm looking for. I have the old PictureBook (PCG-C1X, 266Mhz Pentium MMX) and on the standard battery, I'm lucky to get 1 hr of usage. With the double length battery, I get 2.5-3 hrs of life. As for performance? It gets the performance of a 266 MMX. Sony also has their slightly newer version, the PCG-C1XS, which sports a Pentium II 400MHz, and theoretically gets the same battery life as mine. For me, I bought it because it was small. Battery life was a tradeoff, so if I could get the same form factor, slightly faster, with noticably longer battery life, I'm all for it.
I'm actually going to the review site right now, so I'm going to see what benchmarking they do. If I can easily do the same tests, I'll post my results here. But, from the outward looks of the new PictureBook, it looks like it is the same base hardware as the Pentium-II 400 model, not mine, so a comparison to that one would be better. (I get the feeling that they were just using the Crusoe as a drop-in for the Pentium-II 400.)
Okay, I'm going to try to find 3DMark2000 and SYSMark2000 and run them on mine... Unfortunately, I only get a 33.6 connection, so if they're too big, I'm not going to bother. I'll post my results tomorrow if I get them. But, for the record, a Pentium MMX 266 should get about 1/4 the scores of a Pentium III 600. (I know because my desktop is a P3/600, and all benchmarks I *HAVE* run show about a 4 to 1 advantage.) So, it looks like the Crusoe is noticably faster than my PictureBook, and probably slightly faster than the Pentium-II 400-powered one. Oh, yes... Playing Unreal Tournament I get about 1-2fps...:-)
Well, I didn't mean that the idea isn't original (although it isn't. They used the Quake 1 engine for the first movie 'Apartment Hunting' I linked to) I meant that the STORY was old news because I (mistakenly) thought that the animation announced in the story was a year old.
Oops. Since the site was slashdotted when I tried to get there, I just saw the link, which had in it 'apthunt.htm' so I assumed it was the same animation I saw a year ago... I have since d/l'ed it, and it is most definitely *NOT* 'Apartment Hunting'. It is just as cool, though. (Although, I'm going to have to find my old Quake 2 CD so I can view it 'properly', instead of the AVI I just watched.)
Teaches me to open my big mouth... (Moderators, please moderate my original comment back down as 'ignorant')
Yeah, I know. That's why I was being sarcastic. For a more realistic 'in my day', how 'bout this one:
In my day, we had to code 3d by hand, not to mention such now-standard effects such as alpha transparency, multitexturing, and 'plasma' effects. We only had 256 colors to choose from, not this strange thirty-two-bit stuff. So we had to invent our own routines to make it look like there were more colors. Plus, we didn't have the luxury of 3d accelerators, SIMD extensions, or even floating point units to help us! All we had was 386 protected mode assembly instructions.
And as for your 'internet'? No fancy-pants 1Mbps DSL connections for us. We had to download these demos the hard way. Over a 9600 baud modem dialing to foreign countries, and downloading all night long. (Yes, I dialed from Portland, OR to a BBS in Norway to download '2nd Reality' on a 9600 baud modem. It took about 2 hours. Not to mention the pain of dowloading Linux kernel 0.9. My hard drive wasn't big enough to fit all the disk (3.5" floppy) images, so I had to download a few, write the disks, delete the images, download a few more......)
And, yes, I was learning assembly during that time frame. I don't remember a bit of it now, but at the time, I could code a 'plasma' routine that looked pretty wicked-cool.....
Well. This is actually old news. If you want lots of cool alternative animations, try HotWired's Animation Express. This animation has been there for a year now. (Post date 16 Sep 1999, which is when I saw it.) Be sure not to miss Edgar Beals excelleng works, including Gia nt Cow and the Wenchel l Bogum series...
But, it is hilarious...
P.S. Yes, I know it's considered bad form to point out when a/. story is out of date, but this one is even worse because the story says that they just released it...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Then the record industry will just stop putting stickers on. That way we'll have no way to know which CDs have this technology, and which don't.
Yes. The way it works is alot like DSL. You get the physical line through the carrier (For DSL, it would be your local telephone company, such as Qwest, Verizon, Bell South, etc. For Cable, it would be AT&T, Cox, Comcast, etc.) but you get the internet service through the ISP. For DSL, you generally have your choice of ISPs (Most telcos have their own, plus EarthLink, DirecTV, and lots of local ISPs offer DSL service.) For Cable, you only have one choice. If you have AT&T cable, your only ISP choice is Excite@Home. They brand the service as AT&T@Home, Cox@Home, Comcast@Home, etc.. based on your cable company.
Um, no. Just because it's on excite.com, doesn't make it official. It's actually an AP (Associated Press) newswire story that just about every news web site carries. It just so happens that Excite has a news web site (news.excite.com) that carried the story. It is exactly the same as when the cable television station MSNBC does a story on Microsoft. It's not an official statement from Microsoft, it's just a news organization reporting on a company, that, by coincidence, happens to be its parent company.
Yes, but, again, if you read the info, he was supposed to EMAIL the answers. So they were NOT planning, expecting, or even thinking about the possibility of, a phone interview.
Oh, really? Check out Chris' comment, or, if you're too lazy, here's a quote:
So, no, he didn't know he was going to interview over the phone.
Again, according to Chris, he called out of the blue. And he was supposedly in a hurry. That's no time to run to Radio Shack to pick up one of those. I would hope that they went out and got one for the next time this happens, but if they didn't already have one . . .
I mean, even if they did, if Bruce was really busy, Chris probably didn't want to tell a big movie star "can you hang on while I go searching for our tape recorder, it'll only be 10 minutes or so..."
Actually, my digital answering machine has no such function. I just checked, and my old analog-tape-based one doesn't either. Just called my sister, and her's doesn't either. They all have 'memo' mode, but I just tried to use it during a call, and it didn't work.
Heck, what if they have voice mail, and no answering machine? I've got plenty of friends who have that!
hehe... Yes, this is a blatant ad, but I used to work for them, and I still feel a little company loyalty.
For a good service that provides what isn't, strictly speaking, usability data, try http://www.webcriteria.com. They do computerized testing of your web site that checks for "clutter" and fluff. It tells you how long an average user takes to read your page, how long it takes an average user to surf through your site to find a specific piece of information, or for commerce sites, it will even tell you how hard it is to place an order.
Yes, it's a blatant ad, and I don't even work there anymore, I just think it's a great service. (Plus, they have the coolest programmers on the planet, programming AI that does everything.)
As Chris DiBona answered, Bruce called them 'out of the blue', so they weren't prepared to record the phone call. And if you've ever tried to hold a manual tape recorder up to a phone, you'd know how impractical (and tiring) it is. Plus the sound quality sucks ass.
Hey, some of us didn't know he had a book, so saying that was a good thing (salesmanship-wise.)
Yes, but . . . Various 'e-ink' technologies hope to have 100+ dpi within 2 years, with one (sorry, no links, since I don't remember the names of the companies that I read about last week) hoping to have 300 dpi by 2005. Since LEPs will only (hopefully) be in full production for small-scale projects (car stereos, clocks, maybe PDAs) by 2005, you do the math.
Of course, all of the e-ink projects are made to be 'seldom-write' passive displays where you change the display maybe once or twice a day. They're not at all suitable for full-motion, full-screen video (including scrolling a static page!) They are meant to be electronically-rewritable paper, NOT a replacement for a computer screen. Think CD-RW vs. Hard drive.
Well, I do, for one. I run a Pentium 3/1G, with a couple SCSI drives, on a 400W PSU. Even in an enclosed computer cabinet, it's so loud that you can hear it in another room. I will be immediatly researching all this hardware, because I've been looking for a good quiet solution for use in my home office. (It's kind of annoying to have to speak louder on the phone because my PC is loud...)
hear hear! While I am not employed by Microsoft, and I don't particularly LIKE Microsoft, I do have to agree that this article is just a big 'LINUX ROX' rant. I worked for a small web company as their only Windows admin for a few months. We had 50 employees, with 50 Windows boxes (an ugly mix of desktop and laptops, running NT4, W2k Pro, and W98.) Along with 3 Windows NT servers, an Exchange server, and a SQL server. That was our 'in-house' network. We (Being an internet company) also had an array of 5 Linux boxes that our service ran on. We had myself as the Windows admin, and one other person as the Linux admin. The Windows boxes went down so infrequently that I got laid off and replaced with a college student 'PC TECH' getting half my salary, who handled it no problem, even with too much free time. Our poor Linux guy, however, was constantly applying new patches, solving network issues, and the like...
Of course... When you file for an IPO, you can no longer toot your own horn, so let Cringely do it for you!!
So, let's see... Cringely worked for Apple in the early days, he has had close ties with the founders of Excite and PayPal... That man is the unluckiest 'almost-millionare' ever... (Then again, I'm sure he makes a good living, and he doesn't have to worry about stock market fluctuations.)
Hey, I may be anonymous, but I'm no coward.
So.... Would that be Microsoft, or AOL?
hehe... Yeah, same ad in Portland, OR. (Well, they say 'Portland', not 'New York', but close enough.)
I thought it was hilarious. A 'software truce'? Yeah, right. The entire purpose of this ad is to GET disgruntled employees to turn their employers in...
Now, I'm a Microsoft-software user, I'm even a hard-working MCSE, so I make a living off of legally-licensed MS software (and I do encourage clients to use legal copies) but come on... This is just a Microsoft-sponsored marketing campaign. (P.S. Yes, I do advise some clients to use Linux-based servers, even though I don't support Linux.)
Yes. CDex is great for that. I can rip a whole CD in about 5 minutes with my 24x CD-ROM on a Pentium III 733..
Well, it looks to me like this is just a Guyserville Pentium III (i.e. Mobile Pentium III with SpeedStep) that has been UNDERclocked to 300MHz. If you find a way to underclock the exisiting ones that far, I bet they'd only need half a watt, too...
Yeah. Head down to CompUSA or Fry's, and check out the Sony 'PictureBook' PCG-C1XN. It's powered by a Crusoe processor, and I've seen it in stores for over two months now.
No... More likely by Via. They've been the ones on a processor-company buying spree. AMD seems to want to do it the hard way.
Um, try reading the TOS. They do not ban downloading porn; they can not enter your house as they please; they actually REQUIRE you to have some form of firewall so that NOONE can monitor your computer; and they don't monitor what you do personally, just in aggregate, like every other ISP out there...
Man, people, please read the linked articles before over-reacting... It's just standard legalese. It may be worded more 'harshly', but it's the same as every major ISP out there. (Well, the requirement that you can't run a server is very @Home-like, and a little much, I do have to admit that.)
This is exactly what I'm looking for. I have the old PictureBook (PCG-C1X, 266Mhz Pentium MMX) and on the standard battery, I'm lucky to get 1 hr of usage. With the double length battery, I get 2.5-3 hrs of life. As for performance? It gets the performance of a 266 MMX. Sony also has their slightly newer version, the PCG-C1XS, which sports a Pentium II 400MHz, and theoretically gets the same battery life as mine. For me, I bought it because it was small. Battery life was a tradeoff, so if I could get the same form factor, slightly faster, with noticably longer battery life, I'm all for it.
I'm actually going to the review site right now, so I'm going to see what benchmarking they do. If I can easily do the same tests, I'll post my results here. But, from the outward looks of the new PictureBook, it looks like it is the same base hardware as the Pentium-II 400 model, not mine, so a comparison to that one would be better. (I get the feeling that they were just using the Crusoe as a drop-in for the Pentium-II 400.)
Okay, I'm going to try to find 3DMark2000 and SYSMark2000 and run them on mine... Unfortunately, I only get a 33.6 connection, so if they're too big, I'm not going to bother. I'll post my results tomorrow if I get them. But, for the record, a Pentium MMX 266 should get about 1/4 the scores of a Pentium III 600. (I know because my desktop is a P3/600, and all benchmarks I *HAVE* run show about a 4 to 1 advantage.) So, it looks like the Crusoe is noticably faster than my PictureBook, and probably slightly faster than the Pentium-II 400-powered one. Oh, yes... Playing Unreal Tournament I get about 1-2fps... :-)
Is it just me, or is it kind of funny that they have a horse on the cover of a book whose acronym is 'NAG'?
Well, I didn't mean that the idea isn't original (although it isn't. They used the Quake 1 engine for the first movie 'Apartment Hunting' I linked to) I meant that the STORY was old news because I (mistakenly) thought that the animation announced in the story was a year old.
hehe.... <Wipes egg off face>
Oops. Since the site was slashdotted when I tried to get there, I just saw the link, which had in it 'apthunt.htm' so I assumed it was the same animation I saw a year ago... I have since d/l'ed it, and it is most definitely *NOT* 'Apartment Hunting'. It is just as cool, though. (Although, I'm going to have to find my old Quake 2 CD so I can view it 'properly', instead of the AVI I just watched.)
Teaches me to open my big mouth... (Moderators, please moderate my original comment back down as 'ignorant')
Yeah, I know. That's why I was being sarcastic. For a more realistic 'in my day', how 'bout this one:
In my day, we had to code 3d by hand, not to mention such now-standard effects such as alpha transparency, multitexturing, and 'plasma' effects. We only had 256 colors to choose from, not this strange thirty-two-bit stuff. So we had to invent our own routines to make it look like there were more colors. Plus, we didn't have the luxury of 3d accelerators, SIMD extensions, or even floating point units to help us! All we had was 386 protected mode assembly instructions.
And as for your 'internet'? No fancy-pants 1Mbps DSL connections for us. We had to download these demos the hard way. Over a 9600 baud modem dialing to foreign countries, and downloading all night long. (Yes, I dialed from Portland, OR to a BBS in Norway to download '2nd Reality' on a 9600 baud modem. It took about 2 hours. Not to mention the pain of dowloading Linux kernel 0.9. My hard drive wasn't big enough to fit all the disk (3.5" floppy) images, so I had to download a few, write the disks, delete the images, download a few more......)
And, yes, I was learning assembly during that time frame. I don't remember a bit of it now, but at the time, I could code a 'plasma' routine that looked pretty wicked-cool.....
But, it is hilarious...
P.S. Yes, I know it's considered bad form to point out when a /. story is out of date, but this one is even worse because the story says that they just released it...