"The new N91 features a 4gb microdrive and a 2 megapixel digital camera, and plays music in MP3, AAC and WMV formats. With this phone, Nokia reckons it has an iPod killer
The only downside is the long extension cord.
However, as the BBC points out, people are not necessarily buying these phones for their camera or music features."
Really! This pub chef story was carried by the BBC World Service, this morning (California time)
regarding a chef bitten by a spider and had the presence of mind to snap a picture or two of it, which helped identify
which spider it was and how to treat the venom. I think this link carries and actual photo from the phone.
To me this pretty much looks like Microsoft ran the screenshots up the metaphoric flagpole and didn't like the salutes.
Meanwhile telling people to get them off their websites is a guaranteed method of making sure everyone will download them and save them and look them over much more critically, trying to figure out what Ms doesn't want them to see. Pretty effective marketing, really.
A single low-level kernel is NOT an operating system, it's just part of one. The Linux kernel, for example, is not by itself an operating system, since it cannot operate alone.
Kinda sorta true, but the operating system is effectively the kernel with an interface, such as a commandline or GUI tool. Environment is all the extra tools, graphics and gewgaws which remove the end user from the mundane interactivity with the kernal at higher level. Windows has removed the end user to a very high level, which is apparent when end users say (like happened yesterday) "I can't find PE_Survey.EXE" because the.EXE extention is hidden and the application is represented by a Tool Type icon (this is a function of Windows Explorer.) Depending upon user configuration and experience I may encounter various levels of confusion with end users knowing what I'm talking about when I refer to Hard Disk or 'C' drive (which in Windows are really partitions, funny they still haven't got to named devices...)
We have figured out a way to extract yet more money from the running capitalist dogs.
Oh, heck, they've been doing that for years! Large civil projects were often performed out of Hong Kong years ago before the handover, because HK companies could get the job done unlike so many bureacratic failures within the PRC.
KMT party chairman visits Beijing. I wonder how the PRC press handled that, characterizing the ROC as a rogue province as long as they have. Must have kept the censors on their toes, especially when he walked off the plane in a suit, rather than rags and waving a 'Death to China' banner and dripping blood from his fangs... or is it only North Korea who portrays others like that..
Why MS ever come up with the concept that an OS was suuposed to be anything but a platform on which to run apps. I do not give a rat's ass about the OS. The OS doe not do any real "work." When it get in the way of apps, it is no longer of any value.
It probably helps to think of Windows in two different terms. 1) the Operating System 2) The environment. The OS probably changes very little from major release to major release. The environment, however, with all those background tasks, DLLs, pretty widgets and sounds are what seems to gobble up the majority of resources.
MS keeps bloating the OS, making apps ever less convenient and usable. MS seems hell-bent on "developing" itself out of business.
On the contrary, I think they've got some people who don't give a rat's patoot about hardware or kernel particulars, but just want a warm fuzzy computing experience and that is what they target. That and making sure there's always some incremental improvement which keeps you coming back every couple years and upgrading Windows or Office.
Hearing that as the "just fine" spec makes me very concerned for what the real just fine spec is. Probably 1 gig of RAM and a 3GHz processor, I am guessing.
Exactly. I'm wondering what the heck it's doing with all those CPU cycles (I've already got a pretty good idea what is going on with memory.)
I expect quantum improvements when I go up 1 GHz. Tuned as my home computer is, it's gone downhill a bit when I put the MS anti-spyware tool on. I suspect it's a cow and is examining every single thing I do, even resizing images in Photoshop.
Not necessarily. Most likely, it's slower hard drives and less RAM. My Pentium-M (1.5GB RAM, 7200RPM IDE drive on its own controller) ran circles around my dual Xeon (both at 1.7GHz). This is using Linux, though, so Windows users may have vastly different experiences.
Pentium-M 2.40GHz, 1.0GB RAM 5400 RPM HD. My desktop Athlon, clocked at 1.667 GHz runs circles around it and I mean running applications already in memory. I expect the difference in memory and support chips have much to do with the difference likely the bus speed is greater, too.
I'm running XP on a 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM, and I barely consider THAT acceptable.
In my experience laptops are considerably slower than desktops. I expect it is due to the reliance on power saving chips which run slower. My laptop has 1GB and is pretty quick, once things have loaded, but it's time to close apps when I hear it start to page, because it pages s-l-o-w.
Is it just me?
The first thing that struck me was "Damned.. those Windows look just like those in MacOS, with the shiny look and all.."
I just thought they were stuck for some wallpaper and ran outside with a digital camera, quick and snapped the outside of their building. Wallpaper is a poor reason to buy an operating system, but I think the default for XP looked a heck of a lot better.
Following on from what you said, considering that the system requirements for XP Pro state a 300MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, the real requirements for this thing could be huge. I'm sure many of you would strongly disagree with the idea that XP can run acceptably with 128MB of RAM.
Regarding XP: I started out my current CPU with 256MB and it was acceptably fast until I ran anything, like Photoshop. A look at memory showed from start-up I had 50% free. When I moved up to 768MB I found I still had 50% free after startup. Only when I pushed it up to 1.3 GB did I notice startup consuming less than 50%, it seemed to cap around 370 MB, so there's obviously some formula for loading DLLs. The question is, will this practice extend to Longhorn and at what point do you get out 100% of the memory you add.
BTW: Win95 with 8 MB paged like there was no tomorrow.
What? How many killed and injured? An unfortunate choice of words, considering what happened in Japan. I think that's a bit colored anyway from someone who hates mornings and is undoubtably in a
less than spritely mood.
I thought the bit about "Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM" being good (This is good news for today's PC users, some of whom are concerned that they won't have the PC muscle needed to run the next Windows.) rather
disturbing. Sounds like the thing is going to be an absolute pig, like XP and 95 before it. (Remember when they said you could run 95 in 8MB? We found you realistically needed 24MB) Even though RAM is cheap, I'm not fond of
loading 1GB into a box and then seeing about 1/3 of it taken up by stuff 'I may need and would be really neat if already loaded in memory so IE and other apps would appear to load quickly.' A bit like asking if someone has a pen knife and they
hand you one of those swiss army knives with the works, when all you need is just a small sharp blade for 5 seconds (you spend 30 seconds trying to find the actal knife blade in the Victorinox monster.) A PC is a hole in your desktop into which you continually shovel money. With Longhorn you'd better get a bigger shovel
Lovely screen shots. What about the operating system are they supposed to convey, other than it looks more annoying than even XP (I don't do icons in Explorer windows, I do Details.)
I just started reading the second book and it begins with a space attack that LOOKS like it is in the movie. I wonder if it overlaps a little bit and sets up a sequel. I can't wait to see this one. I hope it scores big.
If the dismal reception it's got in reviews and on slashdot is anything to go by, it'll rule the box office. The Cat In The Hat raked it in and it's in imdb's bottom 100. No flame or troll intended, but we just don't know what people really are going to like and/or be willing to shell for and maybe even be taking a chance on. It could gross big and then fall off fast as people who crowded movie houses to see this film about books that people have been crazy about for over 20 years and then decide they don't like it.
I'm in no hurry to see it myself. I'll probably rent it on DVD after it's demoted from the Hot New DVD's rack.
The way things are warming up for this movie, it could run for 100 years on a solar panel locked in a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, "beware the leopard"
I think marvin was talking about relative processing power, not lamenting having a big head. This movie has definately been dumbed down from the book tremendously. Worse is that this guy is on board, if not downright stupid himself.
I think Rickman's voice will help a lot, but Marvin looks rather cute, as in marketable, as in toy sales. Maybe the head is where the batteries are actually kept or heatsinks (maybe he's overclocked?)
When I met Douglas, years ago, I asked who was the inspiration for Ford (I was convinced it was Eric Idle) and Douglas said the character was actually inspired by a college roommate.
Informative, in some ways, like DNA's acceptance of merkins for Z an F, but they were aliens anyway, eh?
I thought the whole thing pretty well skirted what's on many minds. In a he's-answering-our-questions-let's-not-offend-him sort of way.
I didn't see any explanation for the two heads, either and would have liked to see the rationale. The idea, as I understand it rather grosses me out and I always thought of Z as a pretty funny character, not gross. Nothing says funny like having two heads up on your shoulders, getting knocked together.
A blackbox on a jet is also designed to be able to survive an explosion... and resist tampering. Will the Windows blackbox file be able to say the same?
I believe that was covered in one of the articles. Microsoft likes to see what people have been doing to their operating system. I don't like some processes, so I replace them with a copy of notepad.exe I'm sure they'd point out that this is not acceptable, even if it had nothing to do with the error.
The accumulation of diagnostic data isn't the real concern, it's the transfer to external sources. I question the legality of sending document data if, for example, it contains protected heathcare information (as many of my documents do) it may violate HIPAA.
Which is an excellent point. So where does this diagnostic data go?
Suppose I was some insensitive clod sitting around a computer lab at school, experimenting with my wargame stuff, trying to figure out whether the US could invade India or China, in some far-fetched scenario and my process died... next thing you know someone sifting through debugging data in Bangalore or Shanghai gets the idea that the US has the Theo Roosevelt off the coast just for that actual and imminent purpose and it gets forwarded to all the necessary wrong parties...
Or maybe closer to the pocket book, didn't we just see something in the news about some outsourcing thing in India playing around with people's bank accounts in New York? Can't find the story right now...
"Think of it as a flight data recorder, so that any time there's a problem, that 'black box' is there helping us work together and diagnose what's going on," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates
Except the blackbox on a jet won't (unless I'm woefully uninformed more than usual) tell what you were doing in your own seat when the plane went down.
"occupant of 17A was eating peanuts, doing inflight magazine crossword and had dirty underwear"
"Our stance on this is that the user is in control," Sullivan [Windows lead product manager] said. "In the consumer environment, you will be presented with a dialog that clearly gives you the choice whether to share the information and then also provides exactly what the detail is so you can parse character by character what's being sent."
Sounds reasonable, so long as it doesn't hide anything from view. Of course, if you have Visual Studio you can hit Debug and lookie yourself, which is
usually more helpful than anything I've ever got back from Microsoft.
The probablem was likely caused by a faulty driver
And consumers could have a tough time knowing just what information they were sending. Though they'll be able to see the contents of a document, they may not recognize the significance of the technical data--such as register settings--that's being sent.
Consumers stick with what works. If hitting Don't Send works, they stick with it. If the problem persists then they'll probably send.
It said, "what we have here is failure to communicate." What's that mean?
one wonders if many of these kids have any idea of what they could actually be dealing with. Back in 1982 (we were 12), all that happened to us after hacking into government computers was my friend Lance getting his Apple ][+ confiscated followed by a job offer 9 years later from the same folks who confiscated his computer back in 1982. Now however, hacking into even an educational system could net you serious Federal penalties depending upon the system one hacks into.
Indeed, some good fodder for movies back then, but a slap on the wrist. What behavioural change might one expect if some existing statutes were pulled into effect, such as child endangerment, contributing to the deliquency of a minor, etc, where parents don't keep up with what their kids have been doing on the computer?
Seems entirely reasonable that at some point someone will drag the kid away from the parents/home to be placed in some child welfare state. Legal experts opinions welcome.
Recent numbers as of 2004?!?!? Cripes, that's like... what? The dark ages! It's practically in cuneiform, even. What takes so long
for this kind of thing to get to press? Oh, right, right... the server with the information was being attacked and it took a few months
to figure out how to disconnect it from the network and get data off of it... "anybody still got one of those 3.5" floppy disks?"
I couldn't help but notice that almost every site with a link in a slashdot article gets
virtually nuked!
2000. It was speculated that a lot of it came from Texas oil companies, friends of the Bush Dynasty and Enron, of course. Must have been a bitter moment to realize he'd have to do something about Enron when it became apparent that they were a big shell game.
Slashdot Mirror
The only downside is the long extension cord.
However, as the BBC points out, people are not necessarily buying these phones for their camera or music features."
Really! This pub chef story was carried by the BBC World Service, this morning (California time) regarding a chef bitten by a spider and had the presence of mind to snap a picture or two of it, which helped identify which spider it was and how to treat the venom. I think this link carries and actual photo from the phone.
Meanwhile telling people to get them off their websites is a guaranteed method of making sure everyone will download them and save them and look them over much more critically, trying to figure out what Ms doesn't want them to see. Pretty effective marketing, really.
Kinda sorta true, but the operating system is effectively the kernel with an interface, such as a commandline or GUI tool. Environment is all the extra tools, graphics and gewgaws which remove the end user from the mundane interactivity with the kernal at higher level. Windows has removed the end user to a very high level, which is apparent when end users say (like happened yesterday) "I can't find PE_Survey.EXE" because the .EXE extention is hidden and the application is represented by a Tool Type icon (this is a function of Windows Explorer.) Depending upon user configuration and experience I may encounter various levels of confusion with end users knowing what I'm talking about when I refer to Hard Disk or 'C' drive (which in Windows are really partitions, funny they still haven't got to named devices...)
Oh, heck, they've been doing that for years! Large civil projects were often performed out of Hong Kong years ago before the handover, because HK companies could get the job done unlike so many bureacratic failures within the PRC.
KMT party chairman visits Beijing. I wonder how the PRC press handled that, characterizing the ROC as a rogue province as long as they have. Must have kept the censors on their toes, especially when he walked off the plane in a suit, rather than rags and waving a 'Death to China' banner and dripping blood from his fangs... or is it only North Korea who portrays others like that..
It probably helps to think of Windows in two different terms. 1) the Operating System 2) The environment. The OS probably changes very little from major release to major release. The environment, however, with all those background tasks, DLLs, pretty widgets and sounds are what seems to gobble up the majority of resources.
MS keeps bloating the OS, making apps ever less convenient and usable. MS seems hell-bent on "developing" itself out of business.
On the contrary, I think they've got some people who don't give a rat's patoot about hardware or kernel particulars, but just want a warm fuzzy computing experience and that is what they target. That and making sure there's always some incremental improvement which keeps you coming back every couple years and upgrading Windows or Office.
Exactly. I'm wondering what the heck it's doing with all those CPU cycles (I've already got a pretty good idea what is going on with memory.)
I expect quantum improvements when I go up 1 GHz. Tuned as my home computer is, it's gone downhill a bit when I put the MS anti-spyware tool on. I suspect it's a cow and is examining every single thing I do, even resizing images in Photoshop.
Pentium-M 2.40GHz, 1.0GB RAM 5400 RPM HD. My desktop Athlon, clocked at 1.667 GHz runs circles around it and I mean running applications already in memory. I expect the difference in memory and support chips have much to do with the difference likely the bus speed is greater, too.
In my experience laptops are considerably slower than desktops. I expect it is due to the reliance on power saving chips which run slower. My laptop has 1GB and is pretty quick, once things have loaded, but it's time to close apps when I hear it start to page, because it pages s-l-o-w.
I just thought they were stuck for some wallpaper and ran outside with a digital camera, quick and snapped the outside of their building. Wallpaper is a poor reason to buy an operating system, but I think the default for XP looked a heck of a lot better.
Regarding XP: I started out my current CPU with 256MB and it was acceptably fast until I ran anything, like Photoshop. A look at memory showed from start-up I had 50% free. When I moved up to 768MB I found I still had 50% free after startup. Only when I pushed it up to 1.3 GB did I notice startup consuming less than 50%, it seemed to cap around 370 MB, so there's obviously some formula for loading DLLs. The question is, will this practice extend to Longhorn and at what point do you get out 100% of the memory you add.
BTW: Win95 with 8 MB paged like there was no tomorrow.
What? How many killed and injured? An unfortunate choice of words, considering what happened in Japan. I think that's a bit colored anyway from someone who hates mornings and is undoubtably in a less than spritely mood.
I thought the bit about "Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM" being good (This is good news for today's PC users, some of whom are concerned that they won't have the PC muscle needed to run the next Windows.) rather disturbing. Sounds like the thing is going to be an absolute pig, like XP and 95 before it. (Remember when they said you could run 95 in 8MB? We found you realistically needed 24MB) Even though RAM is cheap, I'm not fond of loading 1GB into a box and then seeing about 1/3 of it taken up by stuff 'I may need and would be really neat if already loaded in memory so IE and other apps would appear to load quickly.' A bit like asking if someone has a pen knife and they hand you one of those swiss army knives with the works, when all you need is just a small sharp blade for 5 seconds (you spend 30 seconds trying to find the actal knife blade in the Victorinox monster.) A PC is a hole in your desktop into which you continually shovel money. With Longhorn you'd better get a bigger shovel
Lovely screen shots. What about the operating system are they supposed to convey, other than it looks more annoying than even XP (I don't do icons in Explorer windows, I do Details.)
If the dismal reception it's got in reviews and on slashdot is anything to go by, it'll rule the box office. The Cat In The Hat raked it in and it's in imdb's bottom 100. No flame or troll intended, but we just don't know what people really are going to like and/or be willing to shell for and maybe even be taking a chance on. It could gross big and then fall off fast as people who crowded movie houses to see this film about books that people have been crazy about for over 20 years and then decide they don't like it.
I'm in no hurry to see it myself. I'll probably rent it on DVD after it's demoted from the Hot New DVD's rack.
Clearly a SEP field in place here.
The way things are warming up for this movie, it could run for 100 years on a solar panel locked in a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, "beware the leopard"
I think Rickman's voice will help a lot, but Marvin looks rather cute, as in marketable, as in toy sales. Maybe the head is where the batteries are actually kept or heatsinks (maybe he's overclocked?)
When I met Douglas, years ago, I asked who was the inspiration for Ford (I was convinced it was Eric Idle) and Douglas said the character was actually inspired by a college roommate.
I thought the whole thing pretty well skirted what's on many minds. In a he's-answering-our-questions-let's-not-offend-him sort of way.
I didn't see any explanation for the two heads, either and would have liked to see the rationale. The idea, as I understand it rather grosses me out and I always thought of Z as a pretty funny character, not gross. Nothing says funny like having two heads up on your shoulders, getting knocked together.
I believe that was covered in one of the articles. Microsoft likes to see what people have been doing to their operating system. I don't like some processes, so I replace them with a copy of notepad.exe I'm sure they'd point out that this is not acceptable, even if it had nothing to do with the error.
Which is an excellent point. So where does this diagnostic data go?
Suppose I was some insensitive clod sitting around a computer lab at school, experimenting with my wargame stuff, trying to figure out whether the US could invade India or China, in some far-fetched scenario and my process died... next thing you know someone sifting through debugging data in Bangalore or Shanghai gets the idea that the US has the Theo Roosevelt off the coast just for that actual and imminent purpose and it gets forwarded to all the necessary wrong parties ...
Or maybe closer to the pocket book, didn't we just see something in the news about some outsourcing thing in India playing around with people's bank accounts in New York? Can't find the story right now...
Does the wavelength of background light vary with pitch of your scream?
aaaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeeee ooooh! Indigo screen of death!
Except the blackbox on a jet won't (unless I'm woefully uninformed more than usual) tell what you were doing in your own seat when the plane went down.
"occupant of 17A was eating peanuts, doing inflight magazine crossword and had dirty underwear"
"Our stance on this is that the user is in control," Sullivan [Windows lead product manager] said. "In the consumer environment, you will be presented with a dialog that clearly gives you the choice whether to share the information and then also provides exactly what the detail is so you can parse character by character what's being sent."
Sounds reasonable, so long as it doesn't hide anything from view. Of course, if you have Visual Studio you can hit Debug and lookie yourself, which is usually more helpful than anything I've ever got back from Microsoft.
The probablem was likely caused by a faulty driver
And consumers could have a tough time knowing just what information they were sending. Though they'll be able to see the contents of a document, they may not recognize the significance of the technical data--such as register settings--that's being sent.
Consumers stick with what works. If hitting Don't Send works, they stick with it. If the problem persists then they'll probably send.
It said, "what we have here is failure to communicate." What's that mean?
Indeed, some good fodder for movies back then, but a slap on the wrist. What behavioural change might one expect if some existing statutes were pulled into effect, such as child endangerment, contributing to the deliquency of a minor, etc, where parents don't keep up with what their kids have been doing on the computer?
Seems entirely reasonable that at some point someone will drag the kid away from the parents/home to be placed in some child welfare state. Legal experts opinions welcome.
I bet we see this in 2005 as well.
What would really be news if we saw website attacks decline.
There will be a decline ... cut-backs and all, we had to lay off a lot of script kiddies and the rest is being outsourced to East Velcro.
I couldn't help but notice that almost every site with a link in a slashdot article gets virtually nuked!
there must be a connection, but what?
2000. It was speculated that a lot of it came from Texas oil companies, friends of the Bush Dynasty and Enron, of course. Must have been a bitter moment to realize he'd have to do something about Enron when it became apparent that they were a big shell game.
Yeah, unlike real life puppets which must be of the right political stripe.
all left-wing Ewoks take one step backwards ... towards the rancor pit...