100 MHz clock, running Linux, w/o graphics overhead, that should be pretty damn fast for just about anything. I wonder if there's a WinXP/CE device like this, yet? I'm pretty sure this is the preview of a battleground for Consumer Electronics, or the opening shot. I expect the cost to be very low... so, who feels like quickly carving out an early career in programming these things?:-)
Maybe coming up with better ideas for games, for a start. Now that I have a system I can realistically look at buying games for, I scanned the titles and darn few look interesting. Then Gavin Camp and friends put together Scorched3D and, heck, that's all I can think about playing. They're closing in on v32 with numerous improvements and they're having fun develping it. Check it out here
Essentially what happens is a game company lanches with a hot idea, a sexy game everyone has to have and a console maker feels they have to have, too. All is right with the world and there's money in the coffers. Then after a few games, or extentions of the first successful title, it's a scramble. Take anything, a dead horse which can spare a little more hide for whipping, and dress it up. Reviews say it stinks, nothing like their glory days, etc. The only company which seems to be eluding this downfall is EA, but in my book they're still rehashing old titles every year, 2002 football, 2003 football, etc.
It's not really unlike what happens with rock bands. The great songs they've played in clubs and garages for years are finely honed, they cut an album, it's hot, they're stars. Then the sophomore jinx kicks in and they release a mediocre second album and disappear.
What boggles my mind is the wealth of original ideas explored back in the day on C64, Apple][ and Atari 65xx processors. Almost all were designed by some guy in his basement, submitted to the emerging game companies, and sold 10,000-30,000 copies. You rarely hear their names anymore, but that's like the band analogy, they had one great idea. Imagine mining those things, finding the owners to get that stamp of approval (to keep the lawyers out of it later) and do a new release. I know a lot of those games still kick ass in emulators. Imagine what a Gavin Camp could do with them, with OpenGL, etc.
I've found that a lot of the stuff you can buy from the sharper image, brookstone, etc. is kind of cheesy.
I've felt the same way about their stuff the past couple years. It looks pretty cool in the catalogs, but there is a Sharper Image store down the road and much of the stuff, up close, looks like maybe a good idea manufactured cheaply. In some cases, a stupid idea, altogether. Catalogs can sell stuff you wouldn't normally buy, because some little deception (usually a hot babe holding/using it) used to redirect your attention from it's faults.
That said... With all the crap the music industry has been doing lately, I'm less inclined to buy their products. Are they going to dismiss my few hundred $ a year, no longer spent, on music piracy? I don't even download MP3's (I haven't even had a system I could do anything with them until recently.) I'm more likely to visit the local used CD store and pick up old, pre-DRM music (which might become a hot collector's item if the current trend continues.)
Some day on eBay:
3034898724 Beatles Sgt Pepper Non DRM Current bid: $57.61
Now they can actually bring out electronic books which you can read in your bed.
I suggest trying to read something on a conventional laptop, in bed, before speculating what a boon this would be. I find laptops to be difficult at best for reading. Try a palm-size computer. Even my ultra-slim Sony VAIO comes in at 2 pounds and generates considerable heat.
I worry about cooking the CPU when resting it on insulative materials, like a comforter. In the summer I occasionally receive a mild burn if I set it on my knees while wearing shorts.
Further, it's unwieldy if you shift position as often as I do, usually I read on my side or back, and a 4 oz. paperback or magazine still works best. Further, it doesn't require batteries.:o)
For dual screens, it's great for development takes place on one and preview uses the other screen. Probably good for demoing where control requires one screen and display on the other.
Saw Star Trek: Nem3sis, which is pretty darn cool for a Star Trek movie, even cooler considering it's Next Gen cast. (Hey, even Wil Wheaton got a cameo.)
Finishing installations, patches, hardware tweaks on my home-built PC (Asus A7V8X, AMD 2600/333, 256Meg PC3500 DDR, etc.) and it still resets quite often.
When not doing the above, playing around with Scorched3D, which is a blast if I can ever get more than a few rounds without a reset.
~20 mile mountain bike ride in Wilder Ranch, west of Santa Cruz, in the mud, on Sunday, weather was perfect, mud was sloppy and fun, couldn't have been a better ride.
Saw Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, which utterly rocks, I'll be seeing it again
Called family back in Michigan (I live in CA) on Christmas Eve, found my nephew is going into tee-shirt silk-screening business, may have a few orders for him.
Woke up this morning (Christmas Day) with a splitting headache, ate half pot of oatmeal, ate half a chocolate orange and read a few more chapters of Rama.
Going out to see Gangs of New Your, shortly
Back to the grind tomorrow and friday then 5 more days off.
Reminds me of Politically Correct Holiday Stories by James Finn Garner.
His first book, Politically Correct Fairy Tales was pretty cute, but by the time Holiday Stories came out the jokes had run their course. What with the climate of paranoia today, I've got a kick out of some of the political satire running locally.
He knows when you are sleeping... He knows when you're awake... He knows if you've been bad or good...
No, not Santa Claus, John Poindexter, so you better watch out!
That is utter foolishness. A gun will not have an OS, it will be hard coded. My microwave doesn't 'crash' and I don't think my gun would either.(emphasis mine)
I like that. A forceful statement followed up by some hedging.
"Be the first person on your block to see the Blue Screen of Death for the last time, ever!"
I'm sure fellow/.ers will have something to say about that.
Are you suggesting that the guns will have virii, worms, and that Microsoft will actually come out with an XP/CE for Guns which will have buffer overflow problems, allowing guns to be turned against their owners?
Well, yeah, I guess I could see all that...
BTW: Bowling for Columbine was pretty good, if you haven't seen it, do.
Alien and Aliens, for sure, after that, they kinda went downhill. IIRC there's yet another one in the planning. I'm not sure who's the Company here, the spooks trying to get one of these things back to earth to use as a killing machine, or the people who keep milking the Aliens and Ripley for yet another B movie.
Ok, what you said, but for me it was Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and other off-the-beaten-track of Hollywood stars stuff. Michael J. Fox was just to much of a *star* for my tastes. Imagine Britney Spears or Leonardo DiCaprio in the next Star Wars movie and you can probably get my feeling on the whole thing.
I thought Yahoo used Inktomi. I must say, though, I never use Yahoo to search, even though they do use Google, because the features aren't as good as going straight to Google. I only use Yahoo for a free email box I don't mind being loading with spam and to check news.
We are a more diverse group of individuals than you may think.
Sure, but heck, this isn't www.imdb.com I'm old enough to have seen each of these movies in theaters and I've never considered them particularly stand-out sci-fi, more like Walter Mitty realized (i.e. dad's a geek, go back in time change things, dad's not a geek and there's a cool toyota in the garage with your name on it) Ok, maybe that appeals to some...
I don't think that MS is any more innovative than the average goldfish. They have been acquiring for years. Sometimes acquiring technology without actually merging or buying up the company, but simply buying enough stock that, as a board member they get better access to the companies technology, i.e. General Magic (which is winding down liquidation of assets) It's practically the american way. MS only real gift is that they've made rafts of cash on the operating system and office products, everything they've sold is derivative.
it seems like innovation and discovery is happening much more in the area of biology than anywhere else.
Well, sure, you don't have all these bioligical, gene decrypting, DNA patenting companies dying left and right the way you do tech companies. Sure IBM, Intel, and AMD have been discovering neat things this year, but we've really pretty much got to wait for the demand from high tech to catch up with what it can do today. There's disks and processors and memory and graphics cards that are so unbelievably kick-ass, yet, I just got a GeForce 2 MX200 (just to tide me over a couple months, broke from Christmas shopping and building my dream system) and I'm pretty amazed what $39 card can do. It'll take some temptation for me to part with $$$ for the latest and greatest when the most demanding thing I play is Scorch3d (www.scorch3d.co.uk) which does just peachy.
Heath care needs to catch up and it's been identified by venture capital as the Next Big Thing, some time back, which is likely to deliver to them the return on investment that some technology never came close to -- or it's time would never come. We all get sick, we all need medications, we all fork out the big bucks for health care. It's a natural.
The sad thing is, with the profit squeezing and tricks by private managed health care, it's getting worse all the time. I've noticed local clinics now usually have one or two doctors and the rest are PA's (Physicians Assistants) Nothing wrong with them most of the time, but when I'm sick I expect to see a doctor, after all, that's what my health insurance and I are paying for.
Many spammers actually try to sell perfectly good items, items I'd even like to own. I absolutely refuse to buy anything from a spammer though, so, yeah, they do help brick and mortar businesses inadvertently. Of course that could be an isidious trick by SAID brick and mortar businesses, but it's hard to wrap my mind around the mom & pop stores I usually buy stuff from.
I have two of these cars, the Tamaya ones, which I bought long before they appeared in spam, from businesses located in Hong Kong. One works great and is fun to play with, I've even taken it down to the local pub and raced it around pint glasses to the amazement of others who wanted one, too. Most of the mini RC cars the spammers are pushing are thie Piece of Sh!t knockoffs, though one of my Tamaya cars seems to have a big of a bug, so quality take all that with a grain of NaCl.
All that said, yeah, some spammers advertise nothing but cons and garbage products any brick and mortar store would be run out of town for carrying. And then there's pr0n... you can imagine how effective a boycott for would be. It's probably the fastest growing sector of the economy and had Enron execs invested, well, the company would probably be turning a tidy profit without the offshore shell game.
Hey, those should work great with my robots!
on
Wi-Fi From The Sky
·
· Score: 1
A network in the sky to control my robots on the ground, what a novel idea. Surely this could come to no harm to anyone. All I need to do now is download XP service pac
[NO CARRIER]
Should charge by the spelling error...
on
Taxing Text Messages?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Spell Philippines with one 'l', two 'p'
Taxing bad spelling could have the effect of balancing the budget and teaching good spelling.:-)
A few years ago when Silicon Valley CEO's were getting busted for thinking they were chatting up children for hot dates. It's my theory that all the competent execs were pervs and when they got locked up the bubble burst.
Slashdot Mirror
From the tech doc (pdf) page 2, tech specs, I read:
But I see where you quote from, in the body of page 1 in the same PDF:
So does that mean it executes one instruction per clock cycle? Apparently.
100 MHz clock, running Linux, w/o graphics overhead, that should be pretty damn fast for just about anything. I wonder if there's a WinXP/CE device like this, yet? I'm pretty sure this is the preview of a battleground for Consumer Electronics, or the opening shot. I expect the cost to be very low... so, who feels like quickly carving out an early career in programming these things? :-)
And Dec. 27 is....?
Essentially what happens is a game company lanches with a hot idea, a sexy game everyone has to have and a console maker feels they have to have, too. All is right with the world and there's money in the coffers. Then after a few games, or extentions of the first successful title, it's a scramble. Take anything, a dead horse which can spare a little more hide for whipping, and dress it up. Reviews say it stinks, nothing like their glory days, etc. The only company which seems to be eluding this downfall is EA, but in my book they're still rehashing old titles every year, 2002 football, 2003 football, etc.
It's not really unlike what happens with rock bands. The great songs they've played in clubs and garages for years are finely honed, they cut an album, it's hot, they're stars. Then the sophomore jinx kicks in and they release a mediocre second album and disappear.
What boggles my mind is the wealth of original ideas explored back in the day on C64, Apple][ and Atari 65xx processors. Almost all were designed by some guy in his basement, submitted to the emerging game companies, and sold 10,000-30,000 copies. You rarely hear their names anymore, but that's like the band analogy, they had one great idea. Imagine mining those things, finding the owners to get that stamp of approval (to keep the lawyers out of it later) and do a new release. I know a lot of those games still kick ass in emulators. Imagine what a Gavin Camp could do with them, with OpenGL, etc.
I've felt the same way about their stuff the past couple years. It looks pretty cool in the catalogs, but there is a Sharper Image store down the road and much of the stuff, up close, looks like maybe a good idea manufactured cheaply. In some cases, a stupid idea, altogether. Catalogs can sell stuff you wouldn't normally buy, because some little deception (usually a hot babe holding/using it) used to redirect your attention from it's faults.
That said... With all the crap the music industry has been doing lately, I'm less inclined to buy their products. Are they going to dismiss my few hundred $ a year, no longer spent, on music piracy? I don't even download MP3's (I haven't even had a system I could do anything with them until recently.) I'm more likely to visit the local used CD store and pick up old, pre-DRM music (which might become a hot collector's item if the current trend continues.)
Some day on eBay:
3034898724 Beatles Sgt Pepper Non DRM Current bid: $57.61
Talk softly and carry a big stick.
New advice:
Be huge, take IP, run the little guy down with your army of lawyers.
Not saying this is happening, but it's certainly a familiar pattern with Microsoft.
I suggest trying to read something on a conventional laptop, in bed, before speculating what a boon this would be. I find laptops to be difficult at best for reading. Try a palm-size computer. Even my ultra-slim Sony VAIO comes in at 2 pounds and generates considerable heat.
I worry about cooking the CPU when resting it on insulative materials, like a comforter. In the summer I occasionally receive a mild burn if I set it on my knees while wearing shorts.
Further, it's unwieldy if you shift position as often as I do, usually I read on my side or back, and a 4 oz. paperback or magazine still works best. Further, it doesn't require batteries. :o)
For dual screens, it's great for development takes place on one and preview uses the other screen. Probably good for demoing where control requires one screen and display on the other.
Saw Star Trek: Nem3sis, which is pretty darn cool for a Star Trek movie, even cooler considering it's Next Gen cast. (Hey, even Wil Wheaton got a cameo.)
Finishing installations, patches, hardware tweaks on my home-built PC (Asus A7V8X, AMD 2600/333, 256Meg PC3500 DDR, etc.) and it still resets quite often.
When not doing the above, playing around with Scorched3D, which is a blast if I can ever get more than a few rounds without a reset.
~20 mile mountain bike ride in Wilder Ranch, west of Santa Cruz, in the mud, on Sunday, weather was perfect, mud was sloppy and fun, couldn't have been a better ride.
Saw Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, which utterly rocks, I'll be seeing it again
Called family back in Michigan (I live in CA) on Christmas Eve, found my nephew is going into tee-shirt silk-screening business, may have a few orders for him.
Woke up this morning (Christmas Day) with a splitting headache, ate half pot of oatmeal, ate half a chocolate orange and read a few more chapters of Rama.
Going out to see Gangs of New Your, shortly
Back to the grind tomorrow and friday then 5 more days off.
His first book, Politically Correct Fairy Tales was pretty cute, but by the time Holiday Stories came out the jokes had run their course. What with the climate of paranoia today, I've got a kick out of some of the political satire running locally.
He knows when you are sleeping...
He knows when you're awake...
He knows if you've been bad or good...
No, not Santa Claus, John Poindexter, so you better watch out!
I like that. A forceful statement followed up by some hedging.
"Be the first person on your block to see the Blue Screen of Death for the last time, ever!"
Are you suggesting that the guns will have virii, worms, and that Microsoft will actually come out with an XP/CE for Guns which will have buffer overflow problems, allowing guns to be turned against their owners?
Well, yeah, I guess I could see all that...
BTW: Bowling for Columbine was pretty good, if you haven't seen it, do.
Alien and Aliens, for sure, after that, they kinda went downhill. IIRC there's yet another one in the planning. I'm not sure who's the Company here, the spooks trying to get one of these things back to earth to use as a killing machine, or the people who keep milking the Aliens and Ripley for yet another B movie.
Ok, what you said, but for me it was Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and other off-the-beaten-track of Hollywood stars stuff. Michael J. Fox was just to much of a *star* for my tastes. Imagine Britney Spears or Leonardo DiCaprio in the next Star Wars movie and you can probably get my feeling on the whole thing.
I thought Yahoo used Inktomi. I must say, though, I never use Yahoo to search, even though they do use Google, because the features aren't as good as going straight to Google. I only use Yahoo for a free email box I don't mind being loading with spam and to check news.
Sure, but heck, this isn't www.imdb.com I'm old enough to have seen each of these movies in theaters and I've never considered them particularly stand-out sci-fi, more like Walter Mitty realized (i.e. dad's a geek, go back in time change things, dad's not a geek and there's a cool toyota in the garage with your name on it) Ok, maybe that appeals to some...
Oh how I hate ebay listings with MIDI. What ARE these dipsh!ts thinking... I agree 100%
Star Wars
Star Trek
Terminator
LoTR
I don't think that MS is any more innovative than the average goldfish. They have been acquiring for years. Sometimes acquiring technology without actually merging or buying up the company, but simply buying enough stock that, as a board member they get better access to the companies technology, i.e. General Magic (which is winding down liquidation of assets) It's practically the american way. MS only real gift is that they've made rafts of cash on the operating system and office products, everything they've sold is derivative.
This would not be a bad thing. Now to get rid of animated gifs, who do they need to buy up and lock only into IE to spare us from those?
Well, sure, you don't have all these bioligical, gene decrypting, DNA patenting companies dying left and right the way you do tech companies. Sure IBM, Intel, and AMD have been discovering neat things this year, but we've really pretty much got to wait for the demand from high tech to catch up with what it can do today. There's disks and processors and memory and graphics cards that are so unbelievably kick-ass, yet, I just got a GeForce 2 MX200 (just to tide me over a couple months, broke from Christmas shopping and building my dream system) and I'm pretty amazed what $39 card can do. It'll take some temptation for me to part with $$$ for the latest and greatest when the most demanding thing I play is Scorch3d (www.scorch3d.co.uk) which does just peachy.
Heath care needs to catch up and it's been identified by venture capital as the Next Big Thing, some time back, which is likely to deliver to them the return on investment that some technology never came close to -- or it's time would never come. We all get sick, we all need medications, we all fork out the big bucks for health care. It's a natural.
The sad thing is, with the profit squeezing and tricks by private managed health care, it's getting worse all the time. I've noticed local clinics now usually have one or two doctors and the rest are PA's (Physicians Assistants) Nothing wrong with them most of the time, but when I'm sick I expect to see a doctor, after all, that's what my health insurance and I are paying for.
Many spammers actually try to sell perfectly good items, items I'd even like to own. I absolutely refuse to buy anything from a spammer though, so, yeah, they do help brick and mortar businesses inadvertently. Of course that could be an isidious trick by SAID brick and mortar businesses, but it's hard to wrap my mind around the mom & pop stores I usually buy stuff from.
I have two of these cars, the Tamaya ones, which I bought long before they appeared in spam, from businesses located in Hong Kong. One works great and is fun to play with, I've even taken it down to the local pub and raced it around pint glasses to the amazement of others who wanted one, too. Most of the mini RC cars the spammers are pushing are thie Piece of Sh!t knockoffs, though one of my Tamaya cars seems to have a big of a bug, so quality take all that with a grain of NaCl.
All that said, yeah, some spammers advertise nothing but cons and garbage products any brick and mortar store would be run out of town for carrying. And then there's pr0n... you can imagine how effective a boycott for would be. It's probably the fastest growing sector of the economy and had Enron execs invested, well, the company would probably be turning a tidy profit without the offshore shell game.
[NO CARRIER]
Taxing bad spelling could have the effect of balancing the budget and teaching good spelling. :-)
A few years ago when Silicon Valley CEO's were getting busted for thinking they were chatting up children for hot dates. It's my theory that all the competent execs were pervs and when they got locked up the bubble burst.
At least we still have Slashdot!
"IN SOVIET RUSSIA the Party Drives You!"