I don't hate MS. I definitely don't love them either though - I think they're too big to generalize, like Sony.
They piss me off with a lot of the things they do, and I hate their tendency to just buy any company with something they like, especially now that they're in the console gaming market.
I used to love MS-DOS and know it pretty much inside out. Back when GUIs were a novelty, I thought Win 3.1 was pretty cool, but that soon wore off. Win95 annoyed me, but I had one of the rare fast, stable systems after OSR2 came out and I learned to like it. Win98... meh. More of the same but a bit more bloated. Never played with NT or 2000 much, but 2003 is truly awesome, and when I compare it to all the other OSes I've tried including OS/2, Workbench, MacOS 7 through X, BeOS, and various Linux distros from 1998 to present, I'd go with Win2k3... if price wasn't an issue, that is. WinXP... DOES have Swiss cheese security, but a knowledgable user can actually make it quite fast, stable, and secure with relatively little effort. I'm kind of ambivalent about it, but it DOES work, and I only see it crash on PCs loaded to the breaking point with bundled crap and spyware.
The XBox on the other hand, I hate outright. It's a clumsy attempt to muscle in on the console gaming market, except it has maybe a half dozen games I'd want to play if you include the 360. After the power cord fiasco though, I'm not getting any XBox period. (MS recalled power cords and replaced them with one with a fuse, when the real problem was shorting contacts on the power supply board that can (and may have) caused house fires. MS took the cheap and sleazy way out of this one and risked their customers' personal safety in the process so their consoles are dead to me.)
Also, I used to say MS was at least good at making hardware. It was generally easy to set up and use, ergonomic, functional, and durable, with good built quality. Since the XBox though, I'm afraid to say that anymore since of the XBox owners I know, about 80-90% have had to replace their system at least once, sometimes as much as 3 or 4 times, usually due to dead DVD drives, though I know someone who updated his 360's and ended up with a next-gen paperweight.
VB.NET... is beautful. The common-language runtimes that load to support a.NET app add stupid overhead if you're just writing a small app, but in time this should become better integrated with Windows, so it will become less of an issue. As for development, it's the only IDE I've used that feels like it WANTS me to get the job done. Minor common mistakes in syntax are automatically and properly mended, and most of the time I need only guess at the keyword I want to use, and it will pop up a quick menu to choose it from. When accessing class members, the menu shows me all of them and their types, making object oriented programming a breeze. C++ is fun, but I seriously think it's about a decade overdue to be phased out. Then again, it's sad that only MS will ever make VB.NET so it will stay proprietary... still, it's my first choice for hassle-free fully-featured languages, and if you make a dumb mistake that would normally crash your PC, the.NET framework almost always catches it, making it much less of a headache to debug. I'll add the diaclaimer to that whole paragraph: I'm not a professional programmer, but have done a bit of coding in a dozen or two languages.
I guess overall, I don't love or hate MS. I just watch them carefully because they might always do something terribly stupid. They are capable of great things though, it's just a matter of hit and miss.
I guess if this becomes a long-term problem, they could always do like Japan (and probably other countries...) and start minting pennies out of aluminum, or some other cheap, affordable metal.
(It still takes a lot of energy to produce, so why did aluminum get so cheap anyway?)
I agree... I cut my visits to Wired to a minimum when I noticed they started using Javascript to reload their pages every 30 seconds. I would assume it's for some kind of tracker to see how long each page is being read - but it feels like someone's reading over my shoulder, and I don't really want to leave my browser open to any of their pages now, or manually disable Javascript to read their site, so they're history to me.
On no less than three stereo systems and three phones, I've been able to hear when my phone's communicating with the tower, so for me that would be the first sign.
Motorola StarTac (AMPS?) *pop-pop* *pop* (before any connection)
Nokia.... impossible to remember serial number 65xx? (CDMA) *low BUZZZZZZZZZZZZ*
Nokia 3220 (GSM) *bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bzzzzzzzzzzzzz....* (receiving a call) *bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip*... (updating with tower)
It seems you've never seen the kind of clamshells they're talking about. I've opened a few blister-packed items where the plastic was so thick and hard I had to pick a weak spot then stick the tip of my sharpened pocket knife into the pack, then twist it back and forth for a couple minutes to drill a small hole to stick the blade into so I could start wiggling it back and forth to get it stuck into the bubble and start cutting. That's ridiculous - you pretty much need a bandsaw to open things like that.
Then again, it was thoroughly fused all the way around so you really couldn't call it a "clamshell" until you saw a path around 3/4 of its periphery...
I still have my Rio 300, but I stopped using it within the first year because first the battery compartment door cracked and stopped holding the battery in, then when I taped it shut, the belt clip just snapped in half one day.
The clip is totally user-removable, but when I contacted Diamond, they refused to sell me a replacement part, so I never bought from them again.
Since then, I got a Lexar LDP-400 that did the job, but one day forgot that it had memory ("Total mem: 0MB, Free mem: 0MB") recently replaced with a Samsung YP-Z5 that's giving me no problems - and to my shock and amazement - seems to be made entirely of metal, with consistent button feedback and an overall solid, rugged design. I usually manage to dodge crappy planned-obsolete tech, but I was still amazed to see such a solidly-built gadget. Time will tell if it's really as rugged as it feels...
What I did was far simpler, but you just reminded me of one of my neater beginner programming assignments: When I first started learning VB.NET, our professor had us make a console app that could interpret a dozen or so assembly commands, store a series of them, and keep track of its own instruction pointer, then once it was finished, we had to write a program in our cut-down version of assembly to do a few specific calculations, and show an imaginary memory dump from the pretend-assembler interpreter.
It was... really fun, and a hundred times more thought provoking than another "hello world" or craps program.
When I took "Computer Systems Technology" at my local college (2yr diploma) we did a course that taught things from the different models of software deployment to the Software Development Life Cycle, and even project management - as far as things like managing human resources on the project, contingency plans, deliverables for different project phases etc.
At the end of the program, right before doing practicum work, we split into teams and did a "special projects" course where we put all of that to use and came up with an idea, then self-managed it to completion and handed in all the project artifacts like MS Project files, writeups, source code, etc. as applicable.
NO! It's still a bad idea right now, as there is a flood of highly qualified unemployed tech workers already.
However, if you're like me and just love IT anyway, then you're going to take it anyway, suffer, and possibly find a way in the end. I had to look for a job for a whole year, but now I'm in IT and even if I'm just doing simple hardware tech work, I'm happy with it...
As for a good career choice? With job security? Not a chance... maybe find a niche like fiber optic cable splicing/installation, wide area networking, firmware design (my eventual goal...), one of many niches of OS design, or even a repair/maintenance field like printer repair - because they will always break, and it's hard to outsource hardware repairs.
If you have dreams of becoming a hotshot coder... please stop now. Do it as a hobby, and maybe you'll get good enough and just find the right job, but you absolutely can not count on it as a viable career at this point.
I'm not going to get in-depth with the reasons here - I am not a pro photographer, nor are most people, but I know how to properly set things like white balance, shutter speed, focal aperture, etc... to get the effects I want.
I have a Sony DSC-P150 I got a few years ago. It was about $400 at the time, and is a 7MP camera with built-in Zeiss lens. A friend of mine got an Olympus DSLR (don't know the model) also 7MP.
Comparing the two: - For ordinary photos, we're about comparable, except my pics are slightly blurrier (I'd say 90-95% quality of his DSLR), and he can save uncompressed, where I can't. - In low light - actually both cameras are outstanding. In extreme darkness, I can see a little grain on my camera, but it's so small I can't tell if it's the CCD or just JPEG artifacts. - Startup time is about the same. Actually, I'm probably about a half second faster, and what's more, my camera has to remove its lens cover and extend the lens. We can both go from off to having shot one pic, saved it, and ready to shoot again in about 3-5 seconds, so so much for the DSLR speed argument. My time also includes autofocus. - He can do extreme, artistic, impractical things like set his shutter speed to several seconds. Fine - even if I had it, I wouldn't use it. - THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE: My camera was $400 a couple years ago, and his was $800 this year. 200% the cost, 110% the quality, 120% the functionality... to me, it just doesn't add up why you'd pay that much, but hey - it's his hobby, so whatever floats his boat... For most people, including avid amateur photographers, I'd say only consider DSLR if you're getting REALLY serious about photography, or want some heavy-duty extra features that wouldn't be needed in "normal" photography. Otherwise, you're just paying for a camera that lacks preview ability, and collects dust on its sensor... oh, and that can interchange lenses, but then again with a cheap adapter, I could do the same - and there are point & shoot cams that already have a ring for lenses on them.
I couldn't agree more. I just finally got a job doing hardware support after looking for an IT job for almost exactly a full year. All the while, I would read job boards on sites like Monster.com and see 10+ page threads full of highly-trained (college/university training, plus at least CompTIA certs) IT workers who couldn't get a job to save their lives. Shortage of workers? Then WTF are these guys? I guess they're not IT workers because NO ONE WILL HIRE THEM.
I've seen job ads for local shops that copy+pasted their qualifications from Lockheed Martin postings, including proprietary software experience that they will NEVER find. I've seen ads for VB.NET programmers with at least FOUR YEARS OF EXPERIENCE - TWO YEARS AFTER IT CAME OUT!
What they want is a worker with a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience in everything, a university degree in computing, an alphabet soup of certifications, and a willingness to work 24/7 on minimum wage... the problem is that they've found a compromise at least financially ("all that matters") - with outsourcing.
Same here - when I was learning VS.NET, there were so many common routines that used a simple but annoying-to-type algorithm that were I using a language like C/C++, would just provide more code to put typos in or forget a keyword. Once I unlearned doing things the long way, I would just type in the first few letters of the function I wanted, pick the right suggestion from the list, and watch as one line does something like connect to an SQL server over a network.
I'd say we're at the point where code reuse is not only ubiquitous, but transparent - at least in some languages. There will always be fundamental building block languages like assembler for those who NEED to get down and dirty with the hardware. Personally, I'd like to do more of that, but I can't really justify it since whatever I'm doing, I can afford to sacrifice a little CPU or RAM in exchange for saving 30+ hours of coding.
As true as your points are, I find the distro argument has become the solve-all fallback to defend Linux now. If you use RedHat, people will say you're a silly newbie and should use Mandrake - unless you already are, then they'll say use Debian - but if you are, they'll say use Ubuntu, - and if you are, then... [insert favorite distro here]
Even if you don't have to be a Linux expert to use Linux (I guess you don't - you just have to read and understand docs for weeks on end...) you DO have to be a Linux expert just to know which distribution to install in the first place! I think with the ubiquity of different versions of Linux out there, this has really become a sticking point with potential new users, as they see the list, have no idea, and end up either getting WinXP Home, Pro, or Media Center.:/
Sony didn't protect their trademark. They protected their regional lockouts while dragging their own trademark through the mud, as evidenced by all the angry comments on every site that reported this.
You said you don't have consoles or play games, and it seems you missed some key points, so I'll explain a bit:
Sony HATES importers, and always has, because they want people in Japan to buy from SCEJ, North America to buy from SCEA, and Europe from SCEE, (Sony Computer Entertainment Japan/America/Europe) so that each national branch knows how well a game did in a given region, and so each Sony branch can support itself on profits from its respective region without, say, taking a transfer from SCEJ to compensate for imports (which they can't track.) To this end, they cripple their hardware to pretend it can't read disks from a mismatched region in much the same way DVD players do. There ARE different TV standards in some countries, but to a knowledgable importer this is never a major issue (nor does it apply to PSPs.)
Strangely enough, the PSP does not check region codes on games, yet they sued Lik-Sang on the false pretense that by offering the customers PSPs from another region, they were HARMING the customers, and the court bought it! The only way their argument could possibly be true is if the different electrical mains standards were different enough to fry the hardware - and guess what? The PSP I bought at launch came with an adapter that works on everything from 120V, 60Hz to 240V, 50Hz. I could fly to Europe today and plug my PSP in, and it would work the same as a European model - it just wouldn't play European UMD movies because a single byte in the firmware doesn't match up with the disc. The customers who imported them would tell you that rather than Lik-Sang harming them, Sony were being bastards toward Europe as usual by making them wait forever for a console that doesn't even use a different display standard this time!
Lik-Sang, assuming you had a console, was a goldmine of hard to find and incredibly useful items such as the SmartJoy adapter (to play console FPSes with a keyboard and mouse), handheld-to-TV adapters, LCD-compatible lightguns, etc. These things could always be found at small HK gaming specialty shops, but Lik-Sang was the best organized, best stocked, and most reputable of them all (really without contest or viable competition.) For a typical order from them, you might have to investigate (with background checks to ensure you're not scammed) 50 HK game shops, and order from 5-10 just to get all the parts and games you wanted. Sony squashed this gaming resource basically in order to protect their antiquidated accounting practices, by successfully suing Lik-Sang for something that was NEVER ILLEGAL BEFORE THIS. This is a very bad precedent for console gamers, and so even if Lik-Sang wasn't loved by so many, it would still be quite chilling that Sony got away with such a flaky argument in court.
I was thinking the exact same thing. If you said that Linux had DRM that kept you from deleting important files as a regular user, they'd jump all over you here. It's not DRM at all... and it should actually stabilize the system a fair bit considering the havoc I've seen from bad drivers like 3dfx or Creative's.
I used Eudora for many years until one day a failed message filter blew up and send 100,000+ messages to my own inbox. After that, Eudora crashed every time it tried to load, but then I grabbed a copy of Thunderbird, imported my mailbox and deleted all the filter-spam (over about 3 days...) and have been happily using Thunderbird ever since.
It was really that one fatal weakness to an unreasonable condition that made me switch in the first place, but I remember Eudora quite fondly. It did everything I ever needed it to - then, so does Thunderbird now. I'm sure whatever comes of this collaboration will only do good for both clients.
1. Beatmania IIDX The greater state of zen you can achieve, the better you'll play - there is no room for "waugh! This is too hard!", you simply interpret the note patterns and enact them.
2. Gran Turismo 4 / Tourist Trophy I always hated the Turismo games because they claimed to be sims, but the physics would do bizarre things like spin your car 1000+ degrees when you were going 30mph. GT4 was redesigned, and eliminated that quite nicely, seeming real on tarmac, grass, AND sand (sadly not rally courses:( ) introducing me to the neat world of sim racing. Tourist Trophy 1-upped that by making a beautifully detailed simulation of modern sportbikes. I still love taking a random bike out on the Nurburgring and seeing how it fares, where doing the same with a car is a hellish gauntlet of deathtraps.
3. Dead or Alive 2: LE / Hardcore A lot of people seem to hate this game... on any other game it's always "but I've been blocking for the last 2 minutes! Why didn't my guy block once?!" or "Oh! So it was down, away to down, forward down to back, forward up diagonal, HP LK MP HK!" Those games are great fun too, but they're not fighting games... it's more of a magic battle at that point. In DoA2, you actually fight with the fighting style your character uses, you can REVERSE moves like pretty much any real martial art, and the characters are responsive like SNK fighters. It also doesn't hurt that I've played this game with my friends something like five years after it came out, and we were still seeing new moves under rare conditions.
4. Wipeout XL / 2097 This got it right where so many futuristic racers have failed. A soundtrack made up of mostly big-name techno artists' hits, tight responsive controls, awesome tracks, an arsenal of crazy weapons. AI that won't use the most devastating weapons, but bands together in a hive mind, pelting you with barrages from multiple opponent cars. Top it off with futuristic graphics and menu design from the Designer's Republic, and you have a cult classic.
5. Idol Janshi Suuchi Pai: Idol Janshi wo Tsukucchaou! An anime-styled non-hentai mahjong game for Dreamcast (boy... I could do a "comfort games" list for Dreamcast alone!) Character designs by Ken'ichi Sonoda of Gunsmith Cats fame, good pro voice acting throughout, and tons of funny scenarios with each character, depending on what mode you play. A few classic cheats from the Suuchi Pai series are used by the AI, and earnable by the player in a panel-matching minigame between rounds. After beating story mode, you can enter "making mode," and make your own character, then (mahjong) fight for new parts for them. It's a niche game, especially considering no one in North America plays mahjong... but for fans of these games, and the series, they've jam-packed it with replayability and unlockables.
That's true... I have 4 MP3 players, and I got 3 of them before the iPod even existed, though I bet Apple wants us to think they invented MP3, much less MP3 players. This article isn't news, it's not even a worthy discussion topic, it's just rampant iPod fanboyism.
It's not that much of a revolution - they're a bit tougher than most players. At one time they were easier to use, back then MP3 player firmware was insane. They've always been more expensive than competitors' products with equal or more features. They started off DISPOSABLE, as in your battery dies, you go buy a new pod... and I guess for audiophiles, the audio quality isn't as noisy as some players (if you don't use one of the signal-distorting equalizers or have an old pod that dampens bass by 10dB) and they can play uncompressed audio (?) The real success of the iPod isn't a superior product, it's that they actually had TV and print ads in mainstream media, so unlike all the other players, it succeeded. Also, if it comes from Apple, it's automatically hip - you get to use the same brand of computer products that everyone uses in movies. Sure, it's a nice player, except the screenless shuffle, but it has to be the most overhyped gadget of the last several years.
I send e-mail, use three IM clients, and have a blog... However, my real name hasn't been on the Internet in 10 years, aside from online orders I've made. Sign-ups that require a name get a fake one. My installation of Windows thinks I'm "me," so when little surprises like MS Office metadata tags with creator names show up, I shrug it off because my files are marked with "Author: me" and so on...
My username varies from place to place. I have a few I use a lot, a few I use occasionally, and a bunch of one-timers. I have a mail account for quick personal mail, one for spam and signups, one for business correspondence, and one for projects with classmates/coworkers.
Basically, it's my strategy to avoid putting personally identifiable info online, and when I do, I make note of it, and assume someone has added it to all the other info I have out there. I still socialize online, and even met a few gaming friends in person, they just didn't know my name until I met them face to face.
It may seem paranoid to some, but there's no need to assume there's evil at work here: Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity... maybe some of the databases I'm in will simply be compromised and dump ALL their user info into plain sight. In that case, I'd like to keep as much of that leaked data false as I can.:)
Today George Lucas, tomorrow, Uwe Boll... Maybe one day the theatres will be safe for moviegoers once again!
My biggest gripe though isn't that they're putting out movies that aren't worth $5, it's that they're charging $15-20 to go see them, and you don't even get a DVD for that price!
They're using Counter Strike to train??? Awesome. I couldn't ask for a better combat simulation... except maybe frogger. So now we'll have to be on the lookout for terrorists standing hovering in the air with 1" of their feet touching hanging signs, making 100yd headshots with Mac10s, and never using grenades since they only kill in about a 5-10' radius? Or maybe they'll just buy an AWM and shoot it into the side of a mountain our guys are behind, hoping to hit one with the amazing 50' of stone-penetrating.338 Lapua?
Boy, the first time these guys try to apply their "training" to the real world, we're gonna see some world-class comedy!
Actually, if you just get 2k3 and find a guide online to "convert it to a workstation," what you get is XP done right. It's essentially XP in most places, you just don't suffer from atrocious security exploits popping up every week. It's very low maintenance, and since it's eventually getting most of Vista's anticipated new features, I'm just sticking with 2003.:p
It is too expensive for a home desktop OS though. It's stupid, this proves MS could have done much better with XP, but no one gets the existing, working desktop OS because they sell it specifically for the server market...
I'll second this. Every year or two, I grab a half dozen of the most popular distros and see if any of them are usable. I've been doing this since 1999, and I still haven't seen one I'd say is installable with under 10 years of PC experience (I have about 18, so it's well doable, just a pain,) much less ready for the desktop. One exception to this is Ubuntu, which has worked more often than not, though periodically I'll have a driver just black out and never work again, or I'll be reading manpages on something and one will refer me to another, which refers me to another, which refers me to another - which isn't there. The biggest improvement I've noticed in the last few years though is that the GUIs aren't as brutally sluggish as they once were, though it could just be that average CPU power has caught up with them now.
Still, this is/. so if the Sydney Morning Herald says it's good to go, then shucks, I guess the whole mainstream media agrees that Linux is ready for the desktop! lol, who cares what tech publications say anyway?
My slant is that like you said, reality is bigger than we know. Even then, we can only perceive it with our senses, and instruments that translate it either directly to sensory info, or some form of perceivable data, which still leaves plenty unobserved.
What we CALL reality on the other hand, is far different... I think most people would tell you bigfoot isn't real. Does that mean no such creature exists? Not neccesarily, but in our society "bigfoot isn't real" is the accepted view that most people would call reality. For me, it's a linguistic/social thing. Could some people have been abducted by UFOs? Sure, why not? Most accounts have major discrepancies and logical flaws though, so generally if someone makes such a claim, they're automatically lumped in with the crazy fringe. It's so hard to verify things like these, so people tend to assume they're either delusional or lying.
Go to a predominantly religious community, and anyone will tell you God is real. Can they prove it? Probably not. If you're the disbeliever in the crowd of believers? They'd probably think there was something wrong with you and act accordingly: maybe trying to correct your views to match theirs; so it's just easier to add "God is real" to your factbook while in that area since that's how opinion is polarized there.
Aah! Don't get me started! The story's done and I'll keep going as long as there's discussion!:p
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I don't hate MS. I definitely don't love them either though - I think they're too big to generalize, like Sony.
.NET app add stupid overhead if you're just writing a small app, but in time this should become better integrated with Windows, so it will become less of an issue. As for development, it's the only IDE I've used that feels like it WANTS me to get the job done. Minor common mistakes in syntax are automatically and properly mended, and most of the time I need only guess at the keyword I want to use, and it will pop up a quick menu to choose it from. When accessing class members, the menu shows me all of them and their types, making object oriented programming a breeze. C++ is fun, but I seriously think it's about a decade overdue to be phased out. Then again, it's sad that only MS will ever make VB.NET so it will stay proprietary... still, it's my first choice for hassle-free fully-featured languages, and if you make a dumb mistake that would normally crash your PC, the .NET framework almost always catches it, making it much less of a headache to debug. I'll add the diaclaimer to that whole paragraph: I'm not a professional programmer, but have done a bit of coding in a dozen or two languages.
They piss me off with a lot of the things they do, and I hate their tendency to just buy any company with something they like, especially now that they're in the console gaming market.
I used to love MS-DOS and know it pretty much inside out. Back when GUIs were a novelty, I thought Win 3.1 was pretty cool, but that soon wore off. Win95 annoyed me, but I had one of the rare fast, stable systems after OSR2 came out and I learned to like it. Win98... meh. More of the same but a bit more bloated. Never played with NT or 2000 much, but 2003 is truly awesome, and when I compare it to all the other OSes I've tried including OS/2, Workbench, MacOS 7 through X, BeOS, and various Linux distros from 1998 to present, I'd go with Win2k3... if price wasn't an issue, that is. WinXP... DOES have Swiss cheese security, but a knowledgable user can actually make it quite fast, stable, and secure with relatively little effort. I'm kind of ambivalent about it, but it DOES work, and I only see it crash on PCs loaded to the breaking point with bundled crap and spyware.
The XBox on the other hand, I hate outright. It's a clumsy attempt to muscle in on the console gaming market, except it has maybe a half dozen games I'd want to play if you include the 360. After the power cord fiasco though, I'm not getting any XBox period. (MS recalled power cords and replaced them with one with a fuse, when the real problem was shorting contacts on the power supply board that can (and may have) caused house fires. MS took the cheap and sleazy way out of this one and risked their customers' personal safety in the process so their consoles are dead to me.)
Also, I used to say MS was at least good at making hardware. It was generally easy to set up and use, ergonomic, functional, and durable, with good built quality. Since the XBox though, I'm afraid to say that anymore since of the XBox owners I know, about 80-90% have had to replace their system at least once, sometimes as much as 3 or 4 times, usually due to dead DVD drives, though I know someone who updated his 360's and ended up with a next-gen paperweight.
VB.NET... is beautful. The common-language runtimes that load to support a
I guess overall, I don't love or hate MS. I just watch them carefully because they might always do something terribly stupid. They are capable of great things though, it's just a matter of hit and miss.
I guess if this becomes a long-term problem, they could always do like Japan (and probably other countries...) and start minting pennies out of aluminum, or some other cheap, affordable metal.
(It still takes a lot of energy to produce, so why did aluminum get so cheap anyway?)
I agree... I cut my visits to Wired to a minimum when I noticed they started using Javascript to reload their pages every 30 seconds. I would assume it's for some kind of tracker to see how long each page is being read - but it feels like someone's reading over my shoulder, and I don't really want to leave my browser open to any of their pages now, or manually disable Javascript to read their site, so they're history to me.
On no less than three stereo systems and three phones, I've been able to hear when my phone's communicating with the tower, so for me that would be the first sign.
... (updating with tower)
Motorola StarTac (AMPS?)
*pop-pop* *pop* (before any connection)
Nokia.... impossible to remember serial number 65xx? (CDMA)
*low BUZZZZZZZZZZZZ*
Nokia 3220 (GSM)
*bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bzzzzzzzzzzzzz....* (receiving a call)
*bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip* *bip-bip*
It seems you've never seen the kind of clamshells they're talking about. I've opened a few blister-packed items where the plastic was so thick and hard I had to pick a weak spot then stick the tip of my sharpened pocket knife into the pack, then twist it back and forth for a couple minutes to drill a small hole to stick the blade into so I could start wiggling it back and forth to get it stuck into the bubble and start cutting. That's ridiculous - you pretty much need a bandsaw to open things like that.
Then again, it was thoroughly fused all the way around so you really couldn't call it a "clamshell" until you saw a path around 3/4 of its periphery...
I still have my Rio 300, but I stopped using it within the first year because first the battery compartment door cracked and stopped holding the battery in, then when I taped it shut, the belt clip just snapped in half one day.
The clip is totally user-removable, but when I contacted Diamond, they refused to sell me a replacement part, so I never bought from them again.
Since then, I got a Lexar LDP-400 that did the job, but one day forgot that it had memory ("Total mem: 0MB, Free mem: 0MB") recently replaced with a Samsung YP-Z5 that's giving me no problems - and to my shock and amazement - seems to be made entirely of metal, with consistent button feedback and an overall solid, rugged design. I usually manage to dodge crappy planned-obsolete tech, but I was still amazed to see such a solidly-built gadget. Time will tell if it's really as rugged as it feels...
What I did was far simpler, but you just reminded me of one of my neater beginner programming assignments: When I first started learning VB.NET, our professor had us make a console app that could interpret a dozen or so assembly commands, store a series of them, and keep track of its own instruction pointer, then once it was finished, we had to write a program in our cut-down version of assembly to do a few specific calculations, and show an imaginary memory dump from the pretend-assembler interpreter.
It was... really fun, and a hundred times more thought provoking than another "hello world" or craps program.
When I took "Computer Systems Technology" at my local college (2yr diploma) we did a course that taught things from the different models of software deployment to the Software Development Life Cycle, and even project management - as far as things like managing human resources on the project, contingency plans, deliverables for different project phases etc.
At the end of the program, right before doing practicum work, we split into teams and did a "special projects" course where we put all of that to use and came up with an idea, then self-managed it to completion and handed in all the project artifacts like MS Project files, writeups, source code, etc. as applicable.
NO! It's still a bad idea right now, as there is a flood of highly qualified unemployed tech workers already.
However, if you're like me and just love IT anyway, then you're going to take it anyway, suffer, and possibly find a way in the end. I had to look for a job for a whole year, but now I'm in IT and even if I'm just doing simple hardware tech work, I'm happy with it...
As for a good career choice? With job security? Not a chance... maybe find a niche like fiber optic cable splicing/installation, wide area networking, firmware design (my eventual goal...), one of many niches of OS design, or even a repair/maintenance field like printer repair - because they will always break, and it's hard to outsource hardware repairs.
If you have dreams of becoming a hotshot coder... please stop now. Do it as a hobby, and maybe you'll get good enough and just find the right job, but you absolutely can not count on it as a viable career at this point.
I'm not going to get in-depth with the reasons here - I am not a pro photographer, nor are most people, but I know how to properly set things like white balance, shutter speed, focal aperture, etc... to get the effects I want.
I have a Sony DSC-P150 I got a few years ago. It was about $400 at the time, and is a 7MP camera with built-in Zeiss lens.
A friend of mine got an Olympus DSLR (don't know the model) also 7MP.
Comparing the two:
- For ordinary photos, we're about comparable, except my pics are slightly blurrier (I'd say 90-95% quality of his DSLR), and he can save uncompressed, where I can't.
- In low light - actually both cameras are outstanding. In extreme darkness, I can see a little grain on my camera, but it's so small I can't tell if it's the CCD or just JPEG artifacts.
- Startup time is about the same. Actually, I'm probably about a half second faster, and what's more, my camera has to remove its lens cover and extend the lens. We can both go from off to having shot one pic, saved it, and ready to shoot again in about 3-5 seconds, so so much for the DSLR speed argument. My time also includes autofocus.
- He can do extreme, artistic, impractical things like set his shutter speed to several seconds. Fine - even if I had it, I wouldn't use it.
- THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE: My camera was $400 a couple years ago, and his was $800 this year. 200% the cost, 110% the quality, 120% the functionality... to me, it just doesn't add up why you'd pay that much, but hey - it's his hobby, so whatever floats his boat... For most people, including avid amateur photographers, I'd say only consider DSLR if you're getting REALLY serious about photography, or want some heavy-duty extra features that wouldn't be needed in "normal" photography. Otherwise, you're just paying for a camera that lacks preview ability, and collects dust on its sensor... oh, and that can interchange lenses, but then again with a cheap adapter, I could do the same - and there are point & shoot cams that already have a ring for lenses on them.
I couldn't agree more. I just finally got a job doing hardware support after looking for an IT job for almost exactly a full year. All the while, I would read job boards on sites like Monster.com and see 10+ page threads full of highly-trained (college/university training, plus at least CompTIA certs) IT workers who couldn't get a job to save their lives. Shortage of workers? Then WTF are these guys? I guess they're not IT workers because NO ONE WILL HIRE THEM.
I've seen job ads for local shops that copy+pasted their qualifications from Lockheed Martin postings, including proprietary software experience that they will NEVER find. I've seen ads for VB.NET programmers with at least FOUR YEARS OF EXPERIENCE - TWO YEARS AFTER IT CAME OUT!
What they want is a worker with a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience in everything, a university degree in computing, an alphabet soup of certifications, and a willingness to work 24/7 on minimum wage... the problem is that they've found a compromise at least financially ("all that matters") - with outsourcing.
Same here - when I was learning VS.NET, there were so many common routines that used a simple but annoying-to-type algorithm that were I using a language like C/C++, would just provide more code to put typos in or forget a keyword. Once I unlearned doing things the long way, I would just type in the first few letters of the function I wanted, pick the right suggestion from the list, and watch as one line does something like connect to an SQL server over a network.
I'd say we're at the point where code reuse is not only ubiquitous, but transparent - at least in some languages. There will always be fundamental building block languages like assembler for those who NEED to get down and dirty with the hardware. Personally, I'd like to do more of that, but I can't really justify it since whatever I'm doing, I can afford to sacrifice a little CPU or RAM in exchange for saving 30+ hours of coding.
As true as your points are, I find the distro argument has become the solve-all fallback to defend Linux now. If you use RedHat, people will say you're a silly newbie and should use Mandrake - unless you already are, then they'll say use Debian - but if you are, they'll say use Ubuntu, - and if you are, then... [insert favorite distro here]
:/
Even if you don't have to be a Linux expert to use Linux (I guess you don't - you just have to read and understand docs for weeks on end...) you DO have to be a Linux expert just to know which distribution to install in the first place! I think with the ubiquity of different versions of Linux out there, this has really become a sticking point with potential new users, as they see the list, have no idea, and end up either getting WinXP Home, Pro, or Media Center.
Sony didn't protect their trademark. They protected their regional lockouts while dragging their own trademark through the mud, as evidenced by all the angry comments on every site that reported this.
You said you don't have consoles or play games, and it seems you missed some key points, so I'll explain a bit:
Sony HATES importers, and always has, because they want people in Japan to buy from SCEJ, North America to buy from SCEA, and Europe from SCEE, (Sony Computer Entertainment Japan/America/Europe) so that each national branch knows how well a game did in a given region, and so each Sony branch can support itself on profits from its respective region without, say, taking a transfer from SCEJ to compensate for imports (which they can't track.) To this end, they cripple their hardware to pretend it can't read disks from a mismatched region in much the same way DVD players do. There ARE different TV standards in some countries, but to a knowledgable importer this is never a major issue (nor does it apply to PSPs.)
Strangely enough, the PSP does not check region codes on games, yet they sued Lik-Sang on the false pretense that by offering the customers PSPs from another region, they were HARMING the customers, and the court bought it! The only way their argument could possibly be true is if the different electrical mains standards were different enough to fry the hardware - and guess what? The PSP I bought at launch came with an adapter that works on everything from 120V, 60Hz to 240V, 50Hz. I could fly to Europe today and plug my PSP in, and it would work the same as a European model - it just wouldn't play European UMD movies because a single byte in the firmware doesn't match up with the disc. The customers who imported them would tell you that rather than Lik-Sang harming them, Sony were being bastards toward Europe as usual by making them wait forever for a console that doesn't even use a different display standard this time!
Lik-Sang, assuming you had a console, was a goldmine of hard to find and incredibly useful items such as the SmartJoy adapter (to play console FPSes with a keyboard and mouse), handheld-to-TV adapters, LCD-compatible lightguns, etc. These things could always be found at small HK gaming specialty shops, but Lik-Sang was the best organized, best stocked, and most reputable of them all (really without contest or viable competition.) For a typical order from them, you might have to investigate (with background checks to ensure you're not scammed) 50 HK game shops, and order from 5-10 just to get all the parts and games you wanted. Sony squashed this gaming resource basically in order to protect their antiquidated accounting practices, by successfully suing Lik-Sang for something that was NEVER ILLEGAL BEFORE THIS. This is a very bad precedent for console gamers, and so even if Lik-Sang wasn't loved by so many, it would still be quite chilling that Sony got away with such a flaky argument in court.
I was thinking the exact same thing. If you said that Linux had DRM that kept you from deleting important files as a regular user, they'd jump all over you here. It's not DRM at all... and it should actually stabilize the system a fair bit considering the havoc I've seen from bad drivers like 3dfx or Creative's.
I used Eudora for many years until one day a failed message filter blew up and send 100,000+ messages to my own inbox. After that, Eudora crashed every time it tried to load, but then I grabbed a copy of Thunderbird, imported my mailbox and deleted all the filter-spam (over about 3 days...) and have been happily using Thunderbird ever since.
It was really that one fatal weakness to an unreasonable condition that made me switch in the first place, but I remember Eudora quite fondly. It did everything I ever needed it to - then, so does Thunderbird now. I'm sure whatever comes of this collaboration will only do good for both clients.
1. Beatmania IIDX
:( ) introducing me to the neat world of sim racing. Tourist Trophy 1-upped that by making a beautifully detailed simulation of modern sportbikes. I still love taking a random bike out on the Nurburgring and seeing how it fares, where doing the same with a car is a hellish gauntlet of deathtraps.
The greater state of zen you can achieve, the better you'll play - there is no room for "waugh! This is too hard!", you simply interpret the note patterns and enact them.
2. Gran Turismo 4 / Tourist Trophy
I always hated the Turismo games because they claimed to be sims, but the physics would do bizarre things like spin your car 1000+ degrees when you were going 30mph. GT4 was redesigned, and eliminated that quite nicely, seeming real on tarmac, grass, AND sand (sadly not rally courses
3. Dead or Alive 2: LE / Hardcore
A lot of people seem to hate this game... on any other game it's always "but I've been blocking for the last 2 minutes! Why didn't my guy block once?!" or "Oh! So it was down, away to down, forward down to back, forward up diagonal, HP LK MP HK!" Those games are great fun too, but they're not fighting games... it's more of a magic battle at that point. In DoA2, you actually fight with the fighting style your character uses, you can REVERSE moves like pretty much any real martial art, and the characters are responsive like SNK fighters. It also doesn't hurt that I've played this game with my friends something like five years after it came out, and we were still seeing new moves under rare conditions.
4. Wipeout XL / 2097
This got it right where so many futuristic racers have failed. A soundtrack made up of mostly big-name techno artists' hits, tight responsive controls, awesome tracks, an arsenal of crazy weapons. AI that won't use the most devastating weapons, but bands together in a hive mind, pelting you with barrages from multiple opponent cars. Top it off with futuristic graphics and menu design from the Designer's Republic, and you have a cult classic.
5. Idol Janshi Suuchi Pai: Idol Janshi wo Tsukucchaou!
An anime-styled non-hentai mahjong game for Dreamcast (boy... I could do a "comfort games" list for Dreamcast alone!) Character designs by Ken'ichi Sonoda of Gunsmith Cats fame, good pro voice acting throughout, and tons of funny scenarios with each character, depending on what mode you play. A few classic cheats from the Suuchi Pai series are used by the AI, and earnable by the player in a panel-matching minigame between rounds. After beating story mode, you can enter "making mode," and make your own character, then (mahjong) fight for new parts for them. It's a niche game, especially considering no one in North America plays mahjong... but for fans of these games, and the series, they've jam-packed it with replayability and unlockables.
That's true... I have 4 MP3 players, and I got 3 of them before the iPod even existed, though I bet Apple wants us to think they invented MP3, much less MP3 players. This article isn't news, it's not even a worthy discussion topic, it's just rampant iPod fanboyism.
It's not that much of a revolution - they're a bit tougher than most players. At one time they were easier to use, back then MP3 player firmware was insane. They've always been more expensive than competitors' products with equal or more features. They started off DISPOSABLE, as in your battery dies, you go buy a new pod... and I guess for audiophiles, the audio quality isn't as noisy as some players (if you don't use one of the signal-distorting equalizers or have an old pod that dampens bass by 10dB) and they can play uncompressed audio (?) The real success of the iPod isn't a superior product, it's that they actually had TV and print ads in mainstream media, so unlike all the other players, it succeeded. Also, if it comes from Apple, it's automatically hip - you get to use the same brand of computer products that everyone uses in movies. Sure, it's a nice player, except the screenless shuffle, but it has to be the most overhyped gadget of the last several years.
I send e-mail, use three IM clients, and have a blog...
:)
However, my real name hasn't been on the Internet in 10 years, aside from online orders I've made. Sign-ups that require a name get a fake one. My installation of Windows thinks I'm "me," so when little surprises like MS Office metadata tags with creator names show up, I shrug it off because my files are marked with "Author: me" and so on...
My username varies from place to place. I have a few I use a lot, a few I use occasionally, and a bunch of one-timers. I have a mail account for quick personal mail, one for spam and signups, one for business correspondence, and one for projects with classmates/coworkers.
Basically, it's my strategy to avoid putting personally identifiable info online, and when I do, I make note of it, and assume someone has added it to all the other info I have out there. I still socialize online, and even met a few gaming friends in person, they just didn't know my name until I met them face to face.
It may seem paranoid to some, but there's no need to assume there's evil at work here: Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity... maybe some of the databases I'm in will simply be compromised and dump ALL their user info into plain sight. In that case, I'd like to keep as much of that leaked data false as I can.
Today George Lucas, tomorrow, Uwe Boll...
Maybe one day the theatres will be safe for moviegoers once again!
My biggest gripe though isn't that they're putting out movies that aren't worth $5, it's that they're charging $15-20 to go see them, and you don't even get a DVD for that price!
They're using Counter Strike to train??? .338 Lapua?
Awesome. I couldn't ask for a better combat simulation... except maybe frogger.
So now we'll have to be on the lookout for terrorists standing hovering in the air with 1" of their feet touching hanging signs, making 100yd headshots with Mac10s, and never using grenades since they only kill in about a 5-10' radius? Or maybe they'll just buy an AWM and shoot it into the side of a mountain our guys are behind, hoping to hit one with the amazing 50' of stone-penetrating
Boy, the first time these guys try to apply their "training" to the real world, we're gonna see some world-class comedy!
Actually, if you just get 2k3 and find a guide online to "convert it to a workstation," what you get is XP done right. It's essentially XP in most places, you just don't suffer from atrocious security exploits popping up every week. It's very low maintenance, and since it's eventually getting most of Vista's anticipated new features, I'm just sticking with 2003. :p
It is too expensive for a home desktop OS though. It's stupid, this proves MS could have done much better with XP, but no one gets the existing, working desktop OS because they sell it specifically for the server market...
Depends on the company you keep, I guess. I've still never found an MMO with a wordfilter on intellectual discussion.
I'll second this. Every year or two, I grab a half dozen of the most popular distros and see if any of them are usable. I've been doing this since 1999, and I still haven't seen one I'd say is installable with under 10 years of PC experience (I have about 18, so it's well doable, just a pain,) much less ready for the desktop. One exception to this is Ubuntu, which has worked more often than not, though periodically I'll have a driver just black out and never work again, or I'll be reading manpages on something and one will refer me to another, which refers me to another, which refers me to another - which isn't there. The biggest improvement I've noticed in the last few years though is that the GUIs aren't as brutally sluggish as they once were, though it could just be that average CPU power has caught up with them now.
/. so if the Sydney Morning Herald says it's good to go, then shucks, I guess the whole mainstream media agrees that Linux is ready for the desktop! lol, who cares what tech publications say anyway?
Still, this is
Haha... they are.
:p
My slant is that like you said, reality is bigger than we know. Even then, we can only perceive it with our senses, and instruments that translate it either directly to sensory info, or some form of perceivable data, which still leaves plenty unobserved.
What we CALL reality on the other hand, is far different... I think most people would tell you bigfoot isn't real. Does that mean no such creature exists? Not neccesarily, but in our society "bigfoot isn't real" is the accepted view that most people would call reality. For me, it's a linguistic/social thing. Could some people have been abducted by UFOs? Sure, why not? Most accounts have major discrepancies and logical flaws though, so generally if someone makes such a claim, they're automatically lumped in with the crazy fringe. It's so hard to verify things like these, so people tend to assume they're either delusional or lying.
Go to a predominantly religious community, and anyone will tell you God is real. Can they prove it? Probably not. If you're the disbeliever in the crowd of believers? They'd probably think there was something wrong with you and act accordingly: maybe trying to correct your views to match theirs; so it's just easier to add "God is real" to your factbook while in that area since that's how opinion is polarized there.
Aah! Don't get me started! The story's done and I'll keep going as long as there's discussion!