Not true... the scroll wheel is still there, in the same position to the right of the screen. It's been made smaller though, and hopefully more comfortable to use (the wide-ridged plastic wheel on the current models can make clicking somewhat painful).
The inablility to directly connect to POP or IMAP servers stinks IMO
How exactly would you do that? There needs to be a GPRS-to-TCP/IP bridge somewhere, and with the Hiptop/Sidekick product line it's always Danger. The Hiptop mail client does support POP and limited IMAP connectivity over the Danger bridge.
if you are buying a device for robust email access and PDA functionality
I'd imagine most people don't buy a Hiptop for those reasons; otherwise they'd just get a Treo or Blackberry. Always-on web access and AOL Instant Messenging are the real selling points of the Hiptop platform.
Even as a gaming machine, the Nokia N-Gage would blow this thing away...
True. But then, the Hiptop was never designed to be a powerful platform for gaming.
You can managae your phone over the web via danger's server.
True, all your PIM data is stored on the network so you don't lose it all if your handset dies.
Problem is, the Address Book in the web interface has no export feature (currently; perhaps there will be an upgrade concurrent with the Hiptop2 launch). That makes it pretty useless for syncing data that originates on your handset onto your computer.
I don't need to register to pick one up at the newsstand, why should I for the site?
But if you wanted to get a subscription to the print version of the newspaper, you'd be required to give them your name and address and possibly credit card number.
Online news sources should consider this dual model for their own use -- it may be justified to ask for personal information from devoted and regular users of the content, but the occasional visitor shouldn't be asked to jump through any hoops. The first few pageviews should always be "free".
They are after all driven by the number of eye balls that grace their sites.
Common misconception -- they are driven by the number of dollars that advertisers are willing to pay to get their message into some number of eye balls.
Online advertisers don't care as much about reaching the widest audience possible as they are about reaching the segment of the audience most likely to result in sales. A site operator can make more money with 10,000 users he knows everything about than he can with 10,000,000 users he knows nothing about.
The presence of a box of software in a retail store does not guarantee that someone would definitely have paid for it. Viz the clearance section. (Okay, a retail copy of Doom III would surely have been purchased due to high demand, but I'm making a more general point here.)
Actually, by the time a software box (or CD, or DVD, or just about any other retail product) makes it to the store shelves, the creators and fabricators and printers and distributors and truck drivers have all already been paid for it. Most stores buy product and then resell it, rather than working on consignment.
Stealing from a retail store is literally only stealing from that store. If the store needs to buy more copies to replace those that were stolen, they will. And if they don't, then we're talking about theoretical losses for everyone else in the supply chain, not actual losses. We're on even ground with file leechers again.
But would a software-based emulator accurately reproduce the behavior of the infamous "More Magic" switch?
That's a serious question, by the way. How can it be proven that an emulated system will perform exactly the same way that the original system would?
Consider that even among the most popular emulators, those for videogame consoles and handhelds, you won't find many claimed by their authors to have more than 99% compatbility.
Yes, gaming hardware may possibly be more difficult to emulate than well-documented business hardware due to the number of custom chips that effectively have to be reverse-engineered, but do you want to migrate your mission-critical systems from physical hardware to emulated hardware only to find that they depend on the 1% of functionality that's not accurately emulated?
Odd that 'harmonizing' is always in one direction - for some reason, no one ever wants to decrease IP regulation to harmonize with some other country.
Sometimes harmonizing is the most inappropriate course of action.
Case in point: michael's continuous efforts to harmonize his role as a Slashdot editor (who makes a story available for comment) and a role as a Slashdot poster (who provides commentary independent of the story itself).
Knock it off, guy. If you have something to add to a story you should do it the same way the rest of us do, and be subject to the same rules of moderation.
Leave it to NYT to misinform people. The article says that IBM put the code "in the public domain".
While many at Slashdot have caught this mistake, relatively few at the New York Times are likely to.
Instead of/in addition to posting about the error here, why not send off a note to the Times to let them know about the important flaw in their coverage of this story?
If there is one observation that can be made about the surging popularity of blogs in the past few years, it's that Media is able to function better when it gets feedback from its readers.
Remember that Slashdot just recently updated their code (this was like a few weeks ago) and they mentioned that there would be some serious bug issues for a bit.
This is not how Real Companies handle code updates.
Granted, any rollout of new code is going to turn up some minor issues that were not well anticipated and need to be patched up as they're discovered. But a flaw that makes the site 100% unresponsive on a regular basis is not one of those. (And no, I don't believe it can be pinned on lazy RSS readers flooding the site at the top of every hour. The patterns I've experienced aren't consistent with that.)
The proper way to handle this would be to roll back Slashdot to the previous, stable version of the code until the performance issues can be identified, corrected, and re-tested.
Can't roll the site back non-destructively? Well, that'd be another flaw with the code as well.
I got my current project because they asked for a revision, and I completely trashed their UI. The new UI took one-tenth the time for data input, and was more expandable. Then I changed how the business processes work. Now I am working on reporting tools. The customer loves it.
You got lucky, then. Are you your own boss? Do you work in a small, relatively informal shop?
In most employment situations, doing what you want to do instead of what you've been instructed to do is a terminable offense.
(Hmm, maybe I shouldn't be posting to Slashdot right now.)
We know that Real did not license Apple's FairPlay technology for Harmony. That leaves two options:
a) they built a clean-room implementation of it using publicly available documentation and affirmedly legal reverse-engineering techniques, or b) they copied Apple's on implementation in violation of intellectual property laws, including the DMCA.
Do you know which of these actually happened? I don't. It would be a little premature of us to defend or decry either side until that information comes to light, don't you think?
First, they don't have to use the DMCA, it is a choice.
A choice that they are legally beholden to make in a certain way. If they don't defend Apple's intellectual property to the greatest extent possible under the law (read: under ALL laws), then they are not representing the best interests of their shareholders.
You wonder why some here seem to be getting "personally offended", and then you go on to characterize all "Java guys" as whimpering infants with an inability to comprehend the "Real World(TM)"?
Code written by a great hacker usually doesn't need maintenance because it already does the right thing.
I see you've never worked with a typical business team.
Sure, a great hacker will produce code that Does the Right Thing based on the specs he (or she) is given, but in the real world those specs are guaranteed to be between 5% and 100% WRONG. The client can't explain what it is they actually want, the business rep can't help draw real specifications out of them, the systems analyst can't convert the nebulous requirements into a solid spec.
Clean as the code may be, if the Right Thing at the core of it turns out to be the Wrong Thing, you're going to have a maintenance nightmare.
Sure, they might be slightly slower, but considering all the other optimizations id is famous for, it's unlikely anybody would notice.
Are you kidding me?
Gamers will spend $400 on a video card, more than it would cost to buy an Xbox AND a PS2, in hopes of getting an extra handful of fps in 3D Shooter Game #837.
The translucent crispy part of a McDonalds fry is rotten potato.
Based on the Food Science I studied in college, this cannot be true.
Potatoes turn brown and mealy when they rot. If you find dark spots or limp areas on your fries, that's part of the potato that has gone bad. And yes, I do tend to find fries with those qualities more often at McDonalds than at other quickserve restaurants...
The translucent crispy part -- that's just part of the fry that has been saturated with the frying oil.
Slashdot Mirror
No scroll wheel on the new one
Not true... the scroll wheel is still there, in the same position to the right of the screen. It's been made smaller though, and hopefully more comfortable to use (the wide-ridged plastic wheel on the current models can make clicking somewhat painful).
The inablility to directly connect to POP or IMAP servers stinks IMO
How exactly would you do that? There needs to be a GPRS-to-TCP/IP bridge somewhere, and with the Hiptop/Sidekick product line it's always Danger. The Hiptop mail client does support POP and limited IMAP connectivity over the Danger bridge.
if you are buying a device for robust email access and PDA functionality
I'd imagine most people don't buy a Hiptop for those reasons; otherwise they'd just get a Treo or Blackberry. Always-on web access and AOL Instant Messenging are the real selling points of the Hiptop platform.
Even as a gaming machine, the Nokia N-Gage would blow this thing away...
True. But then, the Hiptop was never designed to be a powerful platform for gaming.
You can managae your phone over the web via danger's server.
True, all your PIM data is stored on the network so you don't lose it all if your handset dies.
Problem is, the Address Book in the web interface has no export feature (currently; perhaps there will be an upgrade concurrent with the Hiptop2 launch). That makes it pretty useless for syncing data that originates on your handset onto your computer.
Eye balls = advertiser $$$. I didn't think it needed to be spelled out.
What you're not acknoweldging that that not all eye balls are equal.
Some eyeballs = advertiser $. Other eyeballs = advertiser $$$$$. It depends on who the eyeballs belong to, and what's being advertised.
I don't need to register to pick one up at the newsstand, why should I for the site?
But if you wanted to get a subscription to the print version of the newspaper, you'd be required to give them your name and address and possibly credit card number.
Online news sources should consider this dual model for their own use -- it may be justified to ask for personal information from devoted and regular users of the content, but the occasional visitor shouldn't be asked to jump through any hoops. The first few pageviews should always be "free".
They are after all driven by the number of eye balls that grace their sites.
Common misconception -- they are driven by the number of dollars that advertisers are willing to pay to get their message into some number of eye balls.
Online advertisers don't care as much about reaching the widest audience possible as they are about reaching the segment of the audience most likely to result in sales. A site operator can make more money with 10,000 users he knows everything about than he can with 10,000,000 users he knows nothing about.
The presence of a box of software in a retail store does not guarantee that someone would definitely have paid for it. Viz the clearance section. (Okay, a retail copy of Doom III would surely have been purchased due to high demand, but I'm making a more general point here.)
Actually, by the time a software box (or CD, or DVD, or just about any other retail product) makes it to the store shelves, the creators and fabricators and printers and distributors and truck drivers have all already been paid for it. Most stores buy product and then resell it, rather than working on consignment.
Stealing from a retail store is literally only stealing from that store. If the store needs to buy more copies to replace those that were stolen, they will. And if they don't, then we're talking about theoretical losses for everyone else in the supply chain, not actual losses. We're on even ground with file leechers again.
Put in another way, you can't burn a CSS-encrypted DVD yourself.
No, but you could rip an encrypted DVD to your hard drive, and mount it as if it were an actual DVD disc.
But would a software-based emulator accurately reproduce the behavior of the infamous "More Magic" switch?
That's a serious question, by the way. How can it be proven that an emulated system will perform exactly the same way that the original system would?
Consider that even among the most popular emulators, those for videogame consoles and handhelds, you won't find many claimed by their authors to have more than 99% compatbility.
Yes, gaming hardware may possibly be more difficult to emulate than well-documented business hardware due to the number of custom chips that effectively have to be reverse-engineered, but do you want to migrate your mission-critical systems from physical hardware to emulated hardware only to find that they depend on the 1% of functionality that's not accurately emulated?
what would you call someone who is NOT charged with rape and ordered to donate DNA for investigation and then says NO?
I'd call that guilty until proven innocent..
Furthermore, I'd call that a person exercising their intrinsic civil rights, as affirmed in the Fifth Amendment.
Argue over terminology if you must, but in either case it's Obtaining Something You Don't Deserve To Have.
It's just as immoral to leech pirated software from Bittorrent as it is to run out of Software Etc. with a box under your arm.
their consistent mentioning of taking the cache of the chip. That's a nice dream and all, but where the hell are you going to put it then?
With the abolishment of mainboard bottlenecks, who needs cache anymore? It'll be just as fast to pull data from main memory every time you need it.
Odd that 'harmonizing' is always in one direction - for some reason, no one ever wants to decrease IP regulation to harmonize with some other country.
Sometimes harmonizing is the most inappropriate course of action.
Case in point: michael's continuous efforts to harmonize his role as a Slashdot editor (who makes a story available for comment) and a role as a Slashdot poster (who provides commentary independent of the story itself).
Knock it off, guy. If you have something to add to a story you should do it the same way the rest of us do, and be subject to the same rules of moderation.
Leave it to NYT to misinform people. The article says that IBM put the code "in the public domain".
While many at Slashdot have caught this mistake, relatively few at the New York Times are likely to.
Instead of/in addition to posting about the error here, why not send off a note to the Times to let them know about the important flaw in their coverage of this story?
If there is one observation that can be made about the surging popularity of blogs in the past few years, it's that Media is able to function better when it gets feedback from its readers.
Remember that Slashdot just recently updated their code (this was like a few weeks ago) and they mentioned that there would be some serious bug issues for a bit.
This is not how Real Companies handle code updates.
Granted, any rollout of new code is going to turn up some minor issues that were not well anticipated and need to be patched up as they're discovered. But a flaw that makes the site 100% unresponsive on a regular basis is not one of those. (And no, I don't believe it can be pinned on lazy RSS readers flooding the site at the top of every hour. The patterns I've experienced aren't consistent with that.)
The proper way to handle this would be to roll back Slashdot to the previous, stable version of the code until the performance issues can be identified, corrected, and re-tested.
Can't roll the site back non-destructively? Well, that'd be another flaw with the code as well.
I got my current project because they asked for a revision, and I completely trashed their UI. The new UI took one-tenth the time for data input, and was more expandable. Then I changed how the business processes work. Now I am working on reporting tools. The customer loves it.
You got lucky, then. Are you your own boss? Do you work in a small, relatively informal shop?
In most employment situations, doing what you want to do instead of what you've been instructed to do is a terminable offense.
(Hmm, maybe I shouldn't be posting to Slashdot right now.)
None of Apple's "IP" is being violated
We know that Real did not license Apple's FairPlay technology for Harmony. That leaves two options:
a) they built a clean-room implementation of it using publicly available documentation and affirmedly legal reverse-engineering techniques, or
b) they copied Apple's on implementation in violation of intellectual property laws, including the DMCA.
Do you know which of these actually happened? I don't. It would be a little premature of us to defend or decry either side until that information comes to light, don't you think?
First, they don't have to use the DMCA, it is a choice.
A choice that they are legally beholden to make in a certain way. If they don't defend Apple's intellectual property to the greatest extent possible under the law (read: under ALL laws), then they are not representing the best interests of their shareholders.
You wonder why some here seem to be getting "personally offended", and then you go on to characterize all "Java guys" as whimpering infants with an inability to comprehend the "Real World(TM)"?
You're not a Hacker. You're an Ass.
Perl is a very powerful tool.
In the same way that "Cocaine is a hell of a drug", yes.
Code written by a great hacker usually doesn't need maintenance because it already does the right thing.
I see you've never worked with a typical business team.
Sure, a great hacker will produce code that Does the Right Thing based on the specs he (or she) is given, but in the real world those specs are guaranteed to be between 5% and 100% WRONG. The client can't explain what it is they actually want, the business rep can't help draw real specifications out of them, the systems analyst can't convert the nebulous requirements into a solid spec.
Clean as the code may be, if the Right Thing at the core of it turns out to be the Wrong Thing, you're going to have a maintenance nightmare.
Sure, they might be slightly slower, but considering all the other optimizations id is famous for, it's unlikely anybody would notice.
Are you kidding me?
Gamers will spend $400 on a video card, more than it would cost to buy an Xbox AND a PS2, in hopes of getting an extra handful of fps in 3D Shooter Game #837.
The Sempron name is intended to evoke phrases like "semper fidelis" and other such tokens of solidity and steadfastness. ...Semprini?
Toyota rebrands the Cavalier in Japan, but otherwise there's little sharing between the two companies
Does Chevy still produce the Prizm model, formerly of its Geo imprint? Those are/were practically identical to Toyota's Corolla.
The translucent crispy part of a McDonalds fry is rotten potato.
Based on the Food Science I studied in college, this cannot be true.
Potatoes turn brown and mealy when they rot. If you find dark spots or limp areas on your fries, that's part of the potato that has gone bad. And yes, I do tend to find fries with those qualities more often at McDonalds than at other quickserve restaurants...
The translucent crispy part -- that's just part of the fry that has been saturated with the frying oil.