Take the $50 you would have spent on this device and invest in a decent pair of noise-cancelling headphones instead. There's no reason your desire not to listen to TV ought to trump the desires of those who DO wish to listen.
You and the airport do not have a right to bomb me with adverts from some crappy TV.
What gives you the idea that you have a right to peace and quiet when you're in a place of public accomodation? That's simply ludicrous.
Don't like going to restaurants that have TVs blaring in the corner? Try going somewhere classier than a sports bar for once. You don't have the right to decide what everyone else is or isn't allowed to watch while they eat.
I worked as a cashier in a grocery store for years and if I had a nickel for everytime someone got confused on how to use the credit/debit card machine at the register, I'd be a millionaire.
I don't know if you do a lot of shopping at other places, but one of the problems with credit/debit card kiosks is that every store's model works differently.
At my supermarket, I can swipe the card at anytime while my groceries are being scanned, press the "credit" button, and then make my signature on the touchscreen with a stylus.
At the electronics store, I have to hand my card to the cashier, then they print out a paper receipt and slide it into a frame that records my signature electronically as I write it in pen on the paper.
At the music store, I first have to tell the cashier "credit", they push a button on the register, THEN I can swipe my card, and get a carbon-paper reciept to sign, and THEN hand my card to the cashier to verify that the signature on it matches the one I just signed.
Given that voters should only be using one type of machine, in the district where they are registered, this should not be a problem. But the bottom line remains: if e-voting is screwed up due to user error, the machines were not designed to be error-proof enough.
But please, would people stop this 1980s concept of cable companies being a monopoly!
I'll stop it when the cable companies actually stop BEING local monopolies.
If you live in my city, the only full-service cable company you can get is Comcast. In the next city over, the only choice is Time Warner. In other cities, it's just Adelphia or just Bright House or just Cablevision.
There are very few municipalities in the United States with multiple cable companies offering overlapping coverage areas. If Austin's one of them, more power to them; most of us are still stuck with the choice between paying monopoly rates for cable TV and Internet service, or not having cable TV & internet at all.
in a market used to getting software for free, the prospects can't look good...
I think you're conflating Linux hobbyists with proponents of Linux in business.
The corporate world is not used to getting software for free; rather, they traditionally spend tens of thousands of dollars on it. Not even the plethora of free-as-beer Linux distros available today has broken most businesses of this habit; it's almost as if the distro with the highest price tag does the best in the biz market.
If the cost of owning J. Random Desktop Linux plus Microsoft Office ended up being lower than the cost of owning Microsoft Windows plus Microsoft Office, I think we'd see a substantial migration away from Windows on corporate desktops. But MS has no motivation to enable that scenario by even writing a Linux port of Office, much less price it to compete with an all-MS product offering.
But physical size and battery usage are salient aspects of technological advancedness. If two devices have the same CPU/graphics/sound/etc. capabilities but one is more compact and more energy-efficient than the other, than that one has more advanced technology.
As is the case with the original GameBoy vs. the GameBoy Pocket, for example.
You would think that/. would look at the supplied links and do some filtering when it comes to links hosted by a University.
Maybe it's different where you went to school, but my university had more available bandwidth than most small companies or ISPs. There's nothing about academia that's inherently more slashdottable than any other type of site.
Mario DS Zelda DS MarioKart DS Super Metroid DS Donkey Kong DS
Sign me up! Those are perhaps the five most consistently enjoyable franchises in home videogaming history and I'll gladly pay to see what new twists Nintendo manages to add to the games this time around.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure Gran Turismo 4 will just be a marginal improvement on Gran Turismo 3. Increasing polygon counts is not innovation.
Look at the Sega handhelds. They've always been a much better product than the gameboy, but they still couldn't crack it.
Speaking of crack, are you on it? The Game Gear was twice the form factor of the original GameBoy, used 50% more batteries and had less than half the playtime. Not to mention, Nintendo still had the Konamis and Capcoms of the world locked to exclusive contracts, while Sega had low-rent European software houses churning out mediocre ports of Genesis titles.
I owned both, and although the GameBoy had fewer colors, a lower-resolution screen, and a weaker CPU, it was still by far the more fun of the two. I think this is because the designers didn't try to make a device that was just a battery-powered version of an existing home console, but rather made a device that was specifically suited for portable gaming, even though it had fewer bells and whistles.
That's why the GameBoy family is on its nth hardware generation right now, while the Lynx, the Game Gear, the Nomad, the TurboXpress, the NeoGeo Pocket, and all the others never made it past two.
Got any support for your claim that the Archos AV320 (and presumably other models in the Archos product line) are powered by embedded Linux? I have a Gmini 400 and there's nary a copy of the GPL to be found...
Generally that is not what management will hear, they hear: "I'm finished"
This is why coders must be trained never to use the word "finished" until they actually are finished. With the code, with testing, with documentation, with everything.
Management isn't going to recognize that "final angle bracket typed into the code editor" does not equal "finished" unless the coders themselves acknowledge it.
I don't know where this idea that MS doesn't hire skilled people to design and develop software came from, but it's wrong.
It has always appeared to me that MS hires top students from the very best schools.
That's not a Good Thing. Very few 21-year-olds, even those who got the best grades at the best schools, understand software design or business process well enough for a major company to be able to rely on them.
Real-world experience is an important factors in successful design, and it's something that can't be taught in a school.
As smart as each new class of new direct-from-school hires might be (and I've known several, and they were all brilliant), Microsoft would probably generate higher-quality software if they hired 35-year-olds with a dozen years of experience at other successful software companies instead. Of course, it's going to be harder to find 35-year-olds willing to work 60-hour weeks in return for $45 grand, a free bike, and all the soda they can drink...
If a serial comes up in the same place more than once, then it is fake and disabled. This would be a global database, but not unrealistic.
No, that would be very unrealistic. Here's just a few reasons why:
1. If two bills have the same serial number, one of them (the non-counterfeit) is still legal tender.
2. You'd basically have to require every location that accepts cash transactions, from your bank to the hotdog cart on the corner, to be jacked into a secure financial network. Where's the infrastructure for it?
3. Even if flea market vendors and busboys get online, how quickly can we expect updates to be propagated? Think routing tables times a billion. If a store can only send out a log of what bills it received and gave out once a week, that means counterfeits may only be identified once a week, even if other stores sent out updates twice an hour. By then, the bill-passers have gotten away cleanly and some poor sucker is left holding the bag.
4. Security concerns. If the government knows which bills were involved in transactions where, and at what time, how easy would it be to take the next step and force banks to tie those transactions to specific people? The beauty of cash in this climate of debit and credit cards is anonymity.
If you want to think that architecting a global tracking database of a logistical complexity that has never been attempted in history is preferable to a specific software vendor implementing a feature at the government's request, I can't stop you. But some relative context would be good.
I have to say, although the points he makes might be entirely correct, maybe he deserves it.
It's one thing for an American politician or civilian to state that the strategy in Iraq is failing. But for an officer of the military, someone whose duty to his country and to his fellow soldiers is to execute the orders given to him to the best of his capabilities, should he really be refuting his superiors in a public forum?
I'm not sure the percentages Gartner cites are accurate, and I don't like the way the tone of the report suggests that it's Linux's fault that users are installing Windows Pirate Edition once they get their boxes home.
But there is a grain of truth here. Consider Joe Average who does his computer shopping at Walmart. He already has a computer with Win98SE at home, it just runs a little slowly.
There are two models on display at Walmart -- one with Windows XP preinstalled, and one with Linspire that costs $200 less. Why not buy the cheaper one and install the copy of Windows I already own on it, he wonders. And so he does.
Ok, in real-life you don't know whether the other side would use CS, but then in real-life you wouldn't be told it was an exercise without CS. So is that really important?
Yes, it is.
A real-life mission briefing may include (inaccurate) information that the enemy does not have a certain capability, only for the forces to find out that they do during the engagement. If (no, WHEN) that happens, they better be prepared with a way of countering it.
Why are they idiots for offering us a more attractive product than the competition?
You're right though -- it is just an advertising gimmick when it comes down to it. I mean, I've had a webmail account that I check about once a week, and I don't think it's ever gona above 10MB of storage at a time. I would think that's pretty typical webmail usage.
Only a very small percentage of the user base will ever come close to reaching their max, whether it's 1GB, 2GB, 100GB, whatever. The companies have almost nothing to lose by promising the stars and the moon, since most of us don't have access to a spaceship that can take us there anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
It's got 32-bit precision... it can go to 11 HUNDRED MILLION if you like.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't conceive of any relational database scenario where maintaining referential integrity WOULDN'T be a requirement.
Garbage In, Garbage Out. Who cares how fast your queries run if the data has gotten munged?
Summary: WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH
Take the $50 you would have spent on this device and invest in a decent pair of noise-cancelling headphones instead. There's no reason your desire not to listen to TV ought to trump the desires of those who DO wish to listen.
You and the airport do not have a right to bomb me with adverts from some crappy TV.
What gives you the idea that you have a right to peace and quiet when you're in a place of public accomodation? That's simply ludicrous.
Don't like going to restaurants that have TVs blaring in the corner? Try going somewhere classier than a sports bar for once. You don't have the right to decide what everyone else is or isn't allowed to watch while they eat.
I worked as a cashier in a grocery store for years and if I had a nickel for everytime someone got confused on how to use the credit/debit card machine at the register, I'd be a millionaire.
I don't know if you do a lot of shopping at other places, but one of the problems with credit/debit card kiosks is that every store's model works differently.
At my supermarket, I can swipe the card at anytime while my groceries are being scanned, press the "credit" button, and then make my signature on the touchscreen with a stylus.
At the electronics store, I have to hand my card to the cashier, then they print out a paper receipt and slide it into a frame that records my signature electronically as I write it in pen on the paper.
At the music store, I first have to tell the cashier "credit", they push a button on the register, THEN I can swipe my card, and get a carbon-paper reciept to sign, and THEN hand my card to the cashier to verify that the signature on it matches the one I just signed.
Given that voters should only be using one type of machine, in the district where they are registered, this should not be a problem. But the bottom line remains: if e-voting is screwed up due to user error, the machines were not designed to be error-proof enough.
I also think that Steve Jobs is a cool guy but doesn't deserve much space in the history of computing.
Why not? Without him, Woz would probably STILL be tinkering in his garage today.
(I mean, he probably does anyway, but without Jobs Apple Computer wouldn't have taken off)
But please, would people stop this 1980s concept of cable companies being a monopoly!
I'll stop it when the cable companies actually stop BEING local monopolies.
If you live in my city, the only full-service cable company you can get is Comcast. In the next city over, the only choice is Time Warner. In other cities, it's just Adelphia or just Bright House or just Cablevision.
There are very few municipalities in the United States with multiple cable companies offering overlapping coverage areas. If Austin's one of them, more power to them; most of us are still stuck with the choice between paying monopoly rates for cable TV and Internet service, or not having cable TV & internet at all.
in a market used to getting software for free, the prospects can't look good...
I think you're conflating Linux hobbyists with proponents of Linux in business.
The corporate world is not used to getting software for free; rather, they traditionally spend tens of thousands of dollars on it. Not even the plethora of free-as-beer Linux distros available today has broken most businesses of this habit; it's almost as if the distro with the highest price tag does the best in the biz market.
If the cost of owning J. Random Desktop Linux plus Microsoft Office ended up being lower than the cost of owning Microsoft Windows plus Microsoft Office, I think we'd see a substantial migration away from Windows on corporate desktops. But MS has no motivation to enable that scenario by even writing a Linux port of Office, much less price it to compete with an all-MS product offering.
But physical size and battery usage are salient aspects of technological advancedness. If two devices have the same CPU/graphics/sound/etc. capabilities but one is more compact and more energy-efficient than the other, than that one has more advanced technology.
As is the case with the original GameBoy vs. the GameBoy Pocket, for example.
You would think that /. would look at the supplied links and do some filtering when it comes to links hosted by a University.
Maybe it's different where you went to school, but my university had more available bandwidth than most small companies or ISPs. There's nothing about academia that's inherently more slashdottable than any other type of site.
you do get to experience the travel between all three (cities in the next GTA game)
OMG! All the thrill of driving hundreds of miles down a bleak and barren interstate highway, right there in the palm of my hands!
Can't wait! I hope the FM radio reception simulator is realistically spotty enough!
Mario DS
Zelda DS
MarioKart DS
Super Metroid DS
Donkey Kong DS
Sign me up! Those are perhaps the five most consistently enjoyable franchises in home videogaming history and I'll gladly pay to see what new twists Nintendo manages to add to the games this time around.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure Gran Turismo 4 will just be a marginal improvement on Gran Turismo 3. Increasing polygon counts is not innovation.
Look at the Sega handhelds. They've always been a much better product than the gameboy, but they still couldn't crack it.
Speaking of crack, are you on it? The Game Gear was twice the form factor of the original GameBoy, used 50% more batteries and had less than half the playtime. Not to mention, Nintendo still had the Konamis and Capcoms of the world locked to exclusive contracts, while Sega had low-rent European software houses churning out mediocre ports of Genesis titles.
I owned both, and although the GameBoy had fewer colors, a lower-resolution screen, and a weaker CPU, it was still by far the more fun of the two. I think this is because the designers didn't try to make a device that was just a battery-powered version of an existing home console, but rather made a device that was specifically suited for portable gaming, even though it had fewer bells and whistles.
That's why the GameBoy family is on its nth hardware generation right now, while the Lynx, the Game Gear, the Nomad, the TurboXpress, the NeoGeo Pocket, and all the others never made it past two.
Got any support for your claim that the Archos AV320 (and presumably other models in the Archos product line) are powered by embedded Linux? I have a Gmini 400 and there's nary a copy of the GPL to be found...
I'm still trying to reverse engineer your sentence. Ever heard of question marks?
Are all of his answers going to take the form of a sequence of flashing lights mounted to his life-support washing machine?
Generally that is not what management will hear, they hear:
"I'm finished"
This is why coders must be trained never to use the word "finished" until they actually are finished. With the code, with testing, with documentation, with everything.
Management isn't going to recognize that "final angle bracket typed into the code editor" does not equal "finished" unless the coders themselves acknowledge it.
I don't know where this idea that MS doesn't hire skilled people to design and develop software came from, but it's wrong.
It has always appeared to me that MS hires top students from the very best schools.
That's not a Good Thing. Very few 21-year-olds, even those who got the best grades at the best schools, understand software design or business process well enough for a major company to be able to rely on them.
Real-world experience is an important factors in successful design, and it's something that can't be taught in a school.
As smart as each new class of new direct-from-school hires might be (and I've known several, and they were all brilliant), Microsoft would probably generate higher-quality software if they hired 35-year-olds with a dozen years of experience at other successful software companies instead. Of course, it's going to be harder to find 35-year-olds willing to work 60-hour weeks in return for $45 grand, a free bike, and all the soda they can drink...
If a serial comes up in the same place more than once, then it is fake and disabled. This would be a global database, but not unrealistic.
No, that would be very unrealistic. Here's just a few reasons why:
1. If two bills have the same serial number, one of them (the non-counterfeit) is still legal tender.
2. You'd basically have to require every location that accepts cash transactions, from your bank to the hotdog cart on the corner, to be jacked into a secure financial network. Where's the infrastructure for it?
3. Even if flea market vendors and busboys get online, how quickly can we expect updates to be propagated? Think routing tables times a billion. If a store can only send out a log of what bills it received and gave out once a week, that means counterfeits may only be identified once a week, even if other stores sent out updates twice an hour. By then, the bill-passers have gotten away cleanly and some poor sucker is left holding the bag.
4. Security concerns. If the government knows which bills were involved in transactions where, and at what time, how easy would it be to take the next step and force banks to tie those transactions to specific people? The beauty of cash in this climate of debit and credit cards is anonymity.
If you want to think that architecting a global tracking database of a logistical complexity that has never been attempted in history is preferable to a specific software vendor implementing a feature at the government's request, I can't stop you. But some relative context would be good.
I have to say, although the points he makes might be entirely correct, maybe he deserves it.
It's one thing for an American politician or civilian to state that the strategy in Iraq is failing. But for an officer of the military, someone whose duty to his country and to his fellow soldiers is to execute the orders given to him to the best of his capabilities, should he really be refuting his superiors in a public forum?
Microsoft bought its way out through campaign donations supporting Bush.
Since when has the Republican Party needed actual kickbacks to favor Big Business?
I'm not sure the percentages Gartner cites are accurate, and I don't like the way the tone of the report suggests that it's Linux's fault that users are installing Windows Pirate Edition once they get their boxes home.
But there is a grain of truth here. Consider Joe Average who does his computer shopping at Walmart. He already has a computer with Win98SE at home, it just runs a little slowly.
There are two models on display at Walmart -- one with Windows XP preinstalled, and one with Linspire that costs $200 less. Why not buy the cheaper one and install the copy of Windows I already own on it, he wonders. And so he does.
One could argue that pornography is religion for the faithless.
Except for the fact that there are religious and non-religious people who enjoy porn, and religious and non-religious people who don't.
Nice try though.
Ok, in real-life you don't know whether the other side would use CS, but then in real-life you wouldn't be told it was an exercise without CS. So is that really important?
Yes, it is.
A real-life mission briefing may include (inaccurate) information that the enemy does not have a certain capability, only for the forces to find out that they do during the engagement. If (no, WHEN) that happens, they better be prepared with a way of countering it.
Why are they idiots for offering us a more attractive product than the competition?
You're right though -- it is just an advertising gimmick when it comes down to it. I mean, I've had a webmail account that I check about once a week, and I don't think it's ever gona above 10MB of storage at a time. I would think that's pretty typical webmail usage.
Only a very small percentage of the user base will ever come close to reaching their max, whether it's 1GB, 2GB, 100GB, whatever. The companies have almost nothing to lose by promising the stars and the moon, since most of us don't have access to a spaceship that can take us there anyway.