Bluetooth capable and GPRS enabled... Nokia 6310? I don't know what they cost in the States, but I upgraded my old phone to one for 30 with a discount. It doesn't do the whole MP3/radio & game things though.
You can also do that on OS X, and using an editor like Emacs you can use a server through FTP just like you would a normal directory. But lets face it, if you're using Emacs, you'd probably find it easier to use another method of publishing files that you all ready know.
I think since blogging became popular, it's easy for anyone to start something where they can at least cut and paste things on to the web. Now we just need to concentrate on making sure interesting people are doing it.
And all UK'ers should watch it! It's very bizarre, extremely little dialogue (makes The Driver seem over-wordy), but you know exactly what's going on. Everything's caricature, beautifully drawn, and surreal.
My best film of the year so far. (LOTR III might knock it off the top spot tomorrow.)
Thing is, you'd have to prove the advertiser wanted it sent out, otherwise a competitor could pay for spam to be sent out in a company's name so they get banned. This means if someone's good at covering their tracks, they can still spam and take the orders off the back of it.
Also many, many spams are for scams. Who are you going to fine when the people mentioned don't exist, and the websites are all controlled in countries which don't particularly care if people are getting ripped off or not, as long as the hosting bills are paid?
Really, the answer for this, as several others have mentioned, is to stop people clicking on spam and ordering things. Once orders are down, people won't use it any more.
While the Google toolbar has some useful features, it's popup blocking is not as good as that within Moz/Firebird. Google toolbar will block all pop ups from a site, whether they are caused by the page loading (generally bad) or by you clicking a link which launches a pop up.
You can click on an option in the toolbar to allow pop ups from particular sites (if you have the toolbar showing), but that lets adverts through, or you can ctrl (or shift?) click on links to let it pop up. That's not as good as Moz/Firebird which block the loading when entering or leaving a site, but allow user clicked links to load in pop ups, which is sometimes wanted.
Yeah, bandwidth and hardware are rather limiting in building an large search service. There is Nutch, a project to start an open source search engine.
Until that gets off the ground, if you're woried about Google, you can use different searches as well. Someone like Hotbot lets you chose the engine from the standard search page.
Really, with all the different engines out there, it's not like you have to use Google, it's just been the best for relevant results for a while.
I think this is partly to do with the work they're trying on moving blogs back down the rankings, I've had higher rankings on some of my own sites than I expected recently.
The link farms do get caught, I know a local company that got their own and several customers sites banned for everything except the specific names of the companies. Sometimes it takes a while, so if you see something that you think is a link farm, mail them about it or post it in the relevent Google newsgroup, apparently they do check them and it helps them find people who are using nefarious means to get a high ranking.
I'm a little curious how the key is shared between the keyboard and the computer?
A complete guess, but when I set up my bluetooth phone with my laptop, I had to 'pair' the devices - putting a code in to both so they would talk to each other and not be open to the rest of the world.
They might be using a more transparent version of this for the keyboards, so they aren't easily hackable / don't interfere with each other when two people use them next to each other. It might be when it first detects the keyboard it'll ask you to type a particular word/code in to the keyboard which will activate the connection.
I've got a D-link bluetooth adapter for my iBook and a mate bought one for his IBM laptop at the same time, seems to work fine for both systems. He can link up to his mobile phone fine, and we set up networking between the two computers using them to see how easy it was - no problem.
Was about the cheapest from a known brand I'd seen as well.
Not owned any myself (yet) but the people I've talked to with European sports cars (Lotus and Porsches, mainly) maintain the fun is in the corners rather than the straights. Straights and going very fast are fun for a while, but throwing a sports car at a corner and taking it just right is where the long-term joy is.
Top supercars often come in very short runs, in this case 230 cars. Even for something so expensive, it probably wasn't worth Porsche putting the work in to change them for US import. They could sell that many in Europe and to other countries who would look at the crash test and emmissions data required in Germany and decide that they could accept that it was equal or more stringent than their own standards.
SmallFurryCreature gives a good explanation of what a TV license is. Currently in the UK it costs GBP116 (about US$185) a year. For that there are two TV stations and 5 national radio stations, all with no adverts. They also have a clutch of extra digital TV and radio channels you need a digital receiver of some kind for (set top box and aerial, or paid for cable/satellite service.)
Oh yes, and it also pays for the BBC website, which considering how much I use it is almost worth the license fee on it's own. Recently there has been discussion of why the BBC site is available to the rest of the world for free and with no adverts, considering the bandwidth bill is coming out of the UK license fee payers pockets. They've been trialing some code to tell where in the world you're viewing it from, so I'd guess they're going to serve adverts to non-UK visitors at some point.
The general idea behind keeping the license fee is to ensure a certain quality of programming and that educational programs get made. The quality of BBC shows at the moment isn't as high as it used to be, but compared to almost anything except the best American imports (ER, West Wing, some comedies, etc) it still holds up well. It's certainly better than our commercial stations (we have three, but can only pick up two in many areas like mine) - I only watch the station 'ITV' once every couple of weeks for the Formula One races.
The 'Never stop looking' view only really works if all you're after is money. Workplace environment can count for a heck of a lot, and when you find a good bunch of people you enjoy working with, that can add a lot to wanting to stay, sometimes a lot more than the money. Constantly looking can be a stress on it's own, and I want to use my holiday to relax, not do interviews.
"Leave that job" doesn't have to be immediate. It can mean looking for another job while still working in the place you want to leave.
Just starting proper looking can be a great relief in a very stressful job. I used to work for an impossible employer who'd pile more work on, change prorities constantly (sometimes several times in the same day) and much of my work would never get in to use. When I started to look properly (i.e. not just in fits and bursts) I found my stress level dropped usefully as I knew I was doing something to help my escape. It still took me a few months to find another job, but it was much easier to cope with the bad behaviour of the boss while I applying for new ones.
I'd never suggest just leaving a job, I know people who've done that and haven't been able to find something new for months - that's just replacing one set of stress with another, it's not really solving the situation.
Ah, is that in the areas where the stops have the automatic updates for time of arrival? I've seen the aerials on the side of the units, but didn't guess that they were transmitting on the wifi frequency. I suppose it makes sense though, letting them use off the shelf components.
I'm in Brighton rather than London, and hotspots are popping up everywhere around here, what with Consume nodes, Pier to Pier, and Loose Connection wiring up some of the local pubs. You can even use it on part of the beach if that sort of thing floats your boat.
Running cars is expensive, but given the cost of the Segway you could run a car for a long time before the costs even out. And in a car you have the potential to drive much further should you need to, which the Segway doesn't give you. Really, for short trips walking or a bike is much cheaper than a Segway, or even ordering taxis.
The Postmen in the UK use bicycles. They don't run out of power, and they're very cheap and easy to fix, can survive all weather, and aren't as likely to get stolen as something that costs $5,000+
Really, the Segway is an impressive piece of engineering, though I was a lot more impressed by the motorised wheelchairs Kamen invented before it. Unfortunately there's just not really enough call for it to make the thing economically viable.
I can't see why this article rates a Slashdot story. Basically it's Sinclair saying he thinks the Segway is OK, but he might have something better in the pipeline. There's nothing about what that might be, it's just a piece to fill out the BBC technology section.
Reporting on what he comes up with when it's actually launched, that's a story. Adding to hype about a product that effectively doesn't exist yet, surely that's just encouraging the sort of disappointment people felt about IT/ginger/the Segway when it was launched.
I think OS X is only going to capture a small amount of the Linux desktop market. The high cost of buying the hardware and OS compared to an Intel/AMD PC and Linux will keep people who want a low-cost solution buying just the box/laptop and putting Linux on it. However, OS X is pulling people who can afford Apple computers over, and it gives a nice combination of ability to run programs like MS Office, and being able to run lots of useful OSS apps natively.
One great advantage OS X has over Linux at the moment is standardization of the interface - the save options are always in the same place, the buttons all look similar, generally lots of thought has gone in to the design of the interface. This is something that would be very difficult to do across the various OSS projects, but very easy for a company who controls an OS and software for it to do.
An old VW bug weighs between 755-820 kg, and the new 1228kg, so you could sort out the maths from there. I don't know how that'll compare to your Escort as they changed weight a lot over the years as well (later models costing more as more safety measures came in; strengthening, airbags, that sort of stuff.)
A bit of a blue-sky thought: but could they have potentially docked with the ISS? Between the resources of the shuttle and ISS, would it have been impossible to keep the crews of both alive long enough for another shuttle to have been sent up for them? Or could some of them have used the Soyuz that acts as an escape craft for the station to leave, giving some more of the resources over to the remaining crews?
I realise they'd have had to do this near the start of the mission - to give them enough fuel to match orbits and dock. But potentially could this be a way of rescuing shuttle crews should something like this happen again?
(OK, this idea probably has more to do with a Tom Clancy / Larry Niven novel than real life.)
Yeah, I was looking around a while after hearing good things about them and happened to see one in a store in Canada while I was in holiday. They've finally got them in places like PC World in the UK now.
I've always felt a bit wary about laptops and buying them without actually being able to put my hands on them. With a desktop you can always plug in a new keyboard, but with a laptop you're always going to be stuck with what it comes with when you're on the move.
I think you mean a 'SIM card' which you can swap between phones and the new phone automatically becomes 'yours' - i.e. you get billed for your calls in the normal way, you still have your address book intact, same number etc. We have this in Europe as well as the Japanese having it, given what you said, I think the States / Canada are one of the few places that don't have it (in fact, I thought you did have!)
Personally, I'm very pro-Bluetooth (though I don't have it on my phone yet, it's a couple of years old.) That way I can just use my laptop or PDA to access the net with my phone in my pocket, and if I want to go to the beach / pub / club I can take a tiny phone rather than big integrated device. I was at a BBQ the other night with someone who was using this system and it's great - allows you to use niche products which are good at what they do, and can communicate with each other really easily. Neat.
The Amstrad PCW range (all of two computers) used 3" floppy disks. There's still a market in the UK for these disks as although the manufacture of PCW machines stopped years ago there's still quite a few chugging around, mainly used by authors (a niche which seems to be filled mainly by the G3 iMac now.)
I believe some of the popular Atari computers used the same format disk.
I know a few people with Sony laptops and have heard they generally have battery life problems, in that the batteries don't last very long in age rather than power performance. Several of them advised me not to buy a Sony unless I wanted to replace the supplied battery in about a year, and personally I'd expect better quality from a manufacturer like Sony.
However, the Dells we have at work are pretty good machines and the batteries have lasted, though they're not as stylish as the ones from Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
Bluetooth capable and GPRS enabled... Nokia 6310? I don't know what they cost in the States, but I upgraded my old phone to one for 30 with a discount. It doesn't do the whole MP3/radio & game things though.
You can also do that on OS X, and using an editor like Emacs you can use a server through FTP just like you would a normal directory. But lets face it, if you're using Emacs, you'd probably find it easier to use another method of publishing files that you all ready know.
I think since blogging became popular, it's easy for anyone to start something where they can at least cut and paste things on to the web. Now we just need to concentrate on making sure interesting people are doing it.
And all UK'ers should watch it! It's very bizarre, extremely little dialogue (makes The Driver seem over-wordy), but you know exactly what's going on. Everything's caricature, beautifully drawn, and surreal.
My best film of the year so far. (LOTR III might knock it off the top spot tomorrow.)
Thing is, you'd have to prove the advertiser wanted it sent out, otherwise a competitor could pay for spam to be sent out in a company's name so they get banned. This means if someone's good at covering their tracks, they can still spam and take the orders off the back of it.
Also many, many spams are for scams. Who are you going to fine when the people mentioned don't exist, and the websites are all controlled in countries which don't particularly care if people are getting ripped off or not, as long as the hosting bills are paid?
Really, the answer for this, as several others have mentioned, is to stop people clicking on spam and ordering things. Once orders are down, people won't use it any more.
While the Google toolbar has some useful features, it's popup blocking is not as good as that within Moz/Firebird. Google toolbar will block all pop ups from a site, whether they are caused by the page loading (generally bad) or by you clicking a link which launches a pop up.
You can click on an option in the toolbar to allow pop ups from particular sites (if you have the toolbar showing), but that lets adverts through, or you can ctrl (or shift?) click on links to let it pop up. That's not as good as Moz/Firebird which block the loading when entering or leaving a site, but allow user clicked links to load in pop ups, which is sometimes wanted.
Yeah, bandwidth and hardware are rather limiting in building an large search service. There is Nutch, a project to start an open source search engine.
Until that gets off the ground, if you're woried about Google, you can use different searches as well. Someone like Hotbot lets you chose the engine from the standard search page.
Really, with all the different engines out there, it's not like you have to use Google, it's just been the best for relevant results for a while.
I think this is partly to do with the work they're trying on moving blogs back down the rankings, I've had higher rankings on some of my own sites than I expected recently.
The link farms do get caught, I know a local company that got their own and several customers sites banned for everything except the specific names of the companies. Sometimes it takes a while, so if you see something that you think is a link farm, mail them about it or post it in the relevent Google newsgroup, apparently they do check them and it helps them find people who are using nefarious means to get a high ranking.
I'm a little curious how the key is shared between the keyboard and the computer?
A complete guess, but when I set up my bluetooth phone with my laptop, I had to 'pair' the devices - putting a code in to both so they would talk to each other and not be open to the rest of the world.
They might be using a more transparent version of this for the keyboards, so they aren't easily hackable / don't interfere with each other when two people use them next to each other. It might be when it first detects the keyboard it'll ask you to type a particular word/code in to the keyboard which will activate the connection.
I've got a D-link bluetooth adapter for my iBook and a mate bought one for his IBM laptop at the same time, seems to work fine for both systems. He can link up to his mobile phone fine, and we set up networking between the two computers using them to see how easy it was - no problem.
Was about the cheapest from a known brand I'd seen as well.
NB: I'm nothing to do with the company, etc. etc.
Not owned any myself (yet) but the people I've talked to with European sports cars (Lotus and Porsches, mainly) maintain the fun is in the corners rather than the straights. Straights and going very fast are fun for a while, but throwing a sports car at a corner and taking it just right is where the long-term joy is.
Top supercars often come in very short runs, in this case 230 cars. Even for something so expensive, it probably wasn't worth Porsche putting the work in to change them for US import. They could sell that many in Europe and to other countries who would look at the crash test and emmissions data required in Germany and decide that they could accept that it was equal or more stringent than their own standards.
SmallFurryCreature gives a good explanation of what a TV license is. Currently in the UK it costs GBP116 (about US$185) a year. For that there are two TV stations and 5 national radio stations, all with no adverts. They also have a clutch of extra digital TV and radio channels you need a digital receiver of some kind for (set top box and aerial, or paid for cable/satellite service.)
Oh yes, and it also pays for the BBC website, which considering how much I use it is almost worth the license fee on it's own. Recently there has been discussion of why the BBC site is available to the rest of the world for free and with no adverts, considering the bandwidth bill is coming out of the UK license fee payers pockets. They've been trialing some code to tell where in the world you're viewing it from, so I'd guess they're going to serve adverts to non-UK visitors at some point.
The general idea behind keeping the license fee is to ensure a certain quality of programming and that educational programs get made. The quality of BBC shows at the moment isn't as high as it used to be, but compared to almost anything except the best American imports (ER, West Wing, some comedies, etc) it still holds up well. It's certainly better than our commercial stations (we have three, but can only pick up two in many areas like mine) - I only watch the station 'ITV' once every couple of weeks for the Formula One races.
The 'Never stop looking' view only really works if all you're after is money. Workplace environment can count for a heck of a lot, and when you find a good bunch of people you enjoy working with, that can add a lot to wanting to stay, sometimes a lot more than the money. Constantly looking can be a stress on it's own, and I want to use my holiday to relax, not do interviews.
"Leave that job" doesn't have to be immediate. It can mean looking for another job while still working in the place you want to leave.
Just starting proper looking can be a great relief in a very stressful job. I used to work for an impossible employer who'd pile more work on, change prorities constantly (sometimes several times in the same day) and much of my work would never get in to use. When I started to look properly (i.e. not just in fits and bursts) I found my stress level dropped usefully as I knew I was doing something to help my escape. It still took me a few months to find another job, but it was much easier to cope with the bad behaviour of the boss while I applying for new ones.
I'd never suggest just leaving a job, I know people who've done that and haven't been able to find something new for months - that's just replacing one set of stress with another, it's not really solving the situation.
Paul
I'm in Brighton rather than London, and hotspots are popping up everywhere around here, what with Consume nodes, Pier to Pier, and Loose Connection wiring up some of the local pubs. You can even use it on part of the beach if that sort of thing floats your boat.
Running cars is expensive, but given the cost of the Segway you could run a car for a long time before the costs even out. And in a car you have the potential to drive much further should you need to, which the Segway doesn't give you. Really, for short trips walking or a bike is much cheaper than a Segway, or even ordering taxis.
The Postmen in the UK use bicycles. They don't run out of power, and they're very cheap and easy to fix, can survive all weather, and aren't as likely to get stolen as something that costs $5,000+
Really, the Segway is an impressive piece of engineering, though I was a lot more impressed by the motorised wheelchairs Kamen invented before it. Unfortunately there's just not really enough call for it to make the thing economically viable.
I can't see why this article rates a Slashdot story. Basically it's Sinclair saying he thinks the Segway is OK, but he might have something better in the pipeline. There's nothing about what that might be, it's just a piece to fill out the BBC technology section.
Reporting on what he comes up with when it's actually launched, that's a story. Adding to hype about a product that effectively doesn't exist yet, surely that's just encouraging the sort of disappointment people felt about IT/ginger/the Segway when it was launched.
I think OS X is only going to capture a small amount of the Linux desktop market. The high cost of buying the hardware and OS compared to an Intel/AMD PC and Linux will keep people who want a low-cost solution buying just the box/laptop and putting Linux on it. However, OS X is pulling people who can afford Apple computers over, and it gives a nice combination of ability to run programs like MS Office, and being able to run lots of useful OSS apps natively.
One great advantage OS X has over Linux at the moment is standardization of the interface - the save options are always in the same place, the buttons all look similar, generally lots of thought has gone in to the design of the interface. This is something that would be very difficult to do across the various OSS projects, but very easy for a company who controls an OS and software for it to do.
OK, thanks rpi & ray. Thought it was a bit too obvious not to have been tried.
An old VW bug weighs between 755-820 kg, and the new 1228kg, so you could sort out the maths from there. I don't know how that'll compare to your Escort as they changed weight a lot over the years as well (later models costing more as more safety measures came in; strengthening, airbags, that sort of stuff.)
A bit of a blue-sky thought: but could they have potentially docked with the ISS? Between the resources of the shuttle and ISS, would it have been impossible to keep the crews of both alive long enough for another shuttle to have been sent up for them? Or could some of them have used the Soyuz that acts as an escape craft for the station to leave, giving some more of the resources over to the remaining crews?
I realise they'd have had to do this near the start of the mission - to give them enough fuel to match orbits and dock. But potentially could this be a way of rescuing shuttle crews should something like this happen again?
(OK, this idea probably has more to do with a Tom Clancy / Larry Niven novel than real life.)
Yeah, I was looking around a while after hearing good things about them and happened to see one in a store in Canada while I was in holiday. They've finally got them in places like PC World in the UK now.
I've always felt a bit wary about laptops and buying them without actually being able to put my hands on them. With a desktop you can always plug in a new keyboard, but with a laptop you're always going to be stuck with what it comes with when you're on the move.
I think you mean a 'SIM card' which you can swap between phones and the new phone automatically becomes 'yours' - i.e. you get billed for your calls in the normal way, you still have your address book intact, same number etc. We have this in Europe as well as the Japanese having it, given what you said, I think the States / Canada are one of the few places that don't have it (in fact, I thought you did have!)
Personally, I'm very pro-Bluetooth (though I don't have it on my phone yet, it's a couple of years old.) That way I can just use my laptop or PDA to access the net with my phone in my pocket, and if I want to go to the beach / pub / club I can take a tiny phone rather than big integrated device. I was at a BBQ the other night with someone who was using this system and it's great - allows you to use niche products which are good at what they do, and can communicate with each other really easily. Neat.
The Amstrad PCW range (all of two computers) used 3" floppy disks. There's still a market in the UK for these disks as although the manufacture of PCW machines stopped years ago there's still quite a few chugging around, mainly used by authors (a niche which seems to be filled mainly by the G3 iMac now.)
I believe some of the popular Atari computers used the same format disk.
I know a few people with Sony laptops and have heard they generally have battery life problems, in that the batteries don't last very long in age rather than power performance. Several of them advised me not to buy a Sony unless I wanted to replace the supplied battery in about a year, and personally I'd expect better quality from a manufacturer like Sony.
However, the Dells we have at work are pretty good machines and the batteries have lasted, though they're not as stylish as the ones from Sony.