I've played with them at work. They have nifty features like voice dictation and handwriting recognition but they are about 85% accurate. It can even partially understand cursive! Very cute lil things but not quite there yet.
Sounds almost like one of the early descriptions I heard of the Newton.
I couldn't help but smile at that typo and think "My Athlong is bigger than your 'thlong"
Doh!
Yeah, I saw it as I was hitting the submit button. Funny how the motor nerves learn certain combinations, which frequenly repeated become automatic. So, type 'long' a lot for several years and then try to just type 'lon' when you're tired and cognitive fails to recognize and override. Yeah, the CPU is new, but the ape driving the keyboard is the same old one:-)
Nothing would be worse than M$ buying borland. It would be the end of JBuilder--a fantastic java IDE. Not to mention delphi and KYLIX! This would be B*A*D.
I sure hope there's some sort of public comment allowed to the FTC on such a move, because this could, as you point out, clearly be viewed as quashing competition. As JBuilder is a excellent Java development tool, and we all know by now about how Microsoft wants to kill or cripple Java. Further, JBuilder is expanded and repackaged by Oracle, a chief DB rival of Microsoft. I'm sure if I spent the afternoon I could come up with many other reasons this is anti-competitive and in dire need of a letter stating so.
In other completely suprising news, Democrats recommend higher taxes!
You must live in California, too, however spending cuts won't be enough, taxes will have to go up. In another bit of hard news yesterday, the Dept of the Interior will make good on its threat to cut off excess Colorado River water to Southern California, particularly affecting the Imperial Valley, expect your produce prices to go up. That's going to make any tax increase more painful.
I'm more concerned about a cabinet level spy chief, which reminds of of the abuses of J. Edgar Hoover, than taxes.
Getting back to advertising, better ads would be an improvement. I'm fed up with animated ads and disable flash and animated gifs. At some point I'll probably have a firewall blocking the loading of ads from their distribution sites. It's too bad, really, because sometimes ads do work, but all advertisers suffer on my desktop the sins of the few. Bouncing, flashing, scrolling, etc. while I'm trying to read is NOT going to have a productive affect, rather I will focus my energies on disabling all advertising coming it. IMHO some ads are no improvement over spam, even though I'm responsible for the choice of selecting and loading the page containing the garrish devils.
IAB is probably nothing more than a front for someone who designs and sells ads for a living, and further, desires higher rates and a bigger canvas. Make advertising too bad and you kill the golden goose (assuming it's not just 14kt gold plated eggs already) A logical approach to internet advertising seems beyond them.
I didn't think they were quitting the PC Chip market. I actually read the article.
What are you, some kind of troublemaker?
Yeah, I read it too, back when the original confusion came out. It's all about positioning and Ruiz, IMHO, is correct, whereas Intel vs AMD looks, atm, like Ford vs GM vs Chrysler up to 1973, when bigger and bigger engines ruled, but also thirsty engines. What with declining payrolls and some people taking salary cuts, better bang for the buck seems a pretty wise strategy. Though it's kinda ironic this is the same company which is readying a P4 stompin' 64bit Athlong (Hammer)
Ah well, I just plunked the C-Notes for 2600/333 and it sure is fascinating to see how it actually makes WinXP appear fast. Though, once I make the Linux drive and have dual boot I expect I'll need some speed goggles 8-)
Besides pulverizing concrete, it can pulverize small objects including jelly fish, and chicken feet without destroying the organic compounds. The chickens don't like it.
The bit about edible waste being 4x the value of non-edible waste brings to mind something from a fast food commercial... "bits and bits and parts and parts" regarding those little fried bits of chicken-like substance at a certain chain.
I wonder if there's a similar law representing toxicity to the environment of semiconductor manufacturing techniques.
Regarding the natural world environment, you're correct, as I've seen some harsh criticism of the volume and toxicity of waste byproduct of semiconductor manufacturing. It's not so simple as, just add a little sand and some magic and voila! It's probably not reported so much because the wonders of innovation and heated competition make for more sexy news writing.
Something not mentioned much, but observed by more than a few grumbling parties, is the ever increasing size of code. My first encounter with this was upgrading from RSTS/E 7.? to 8.0, which was darn exciting back in the day, yet the size of the kernel would have been about 50% larger if we activated all the features *I* wanted to (and since I was the admin, lemme tellya, it was darn painful to trim off a few features I lusted after to squeeze it into our memory and performance target.) These days, it's often the OS, ever notice how Windows installs got to needing more space than your entire first harddisk? Common response seems to be, just throw more memory at it. Yet, I think there's a Moore-like law with versions of Windows, i.e. every 2 years a new version comes out with twice as much code.
With physical limitation of the current components nearing the top of the "rate of declinging return" curve, poor performance of the software will eventually catch up with users expectations. Thus, leaner, faster code could become a market direction.
"** NEW: Office-O-Lux, With 50% less redundant code! ***"
Offsite backup copies are also a good part of any intelligently thought out recovery system. You're business burns to the ground, gets flooded or trashed by a twister? Get new hardware and your offsite backups and you should be back in business with a minimum of hassle.
See previous IDE/RAID article and postings, it's been very informative for me. I'm now in the position of realistically considering RAID for data storage and backup. Maybe I'll add one of those cheapie $199 Walmart boxen, stick in a network card and a couple drives (assuming the PS will support this demand) and use it for offline archival, just power it up when I need to post things or retrieve them.
I've already got 2 80G drives in my PC (which I just slapped together over the weekend) and I'm still a bit floored at the concept of having this much space, yet, once I get into rendering and animation, in the next couple weeks (Christmas-New Years break, Wheeee!) I'll probably also be floored how quickly it goes.:-|
I dunno, I prefer them lightly grilled with an order of chips.
My price for peace and harmony in my inbox would be around $10 per letter.
I figure my personal time is more valuable than my work time (what with the commute cutting into it), I get about 1 hour in the morning (mostly getting ready for work, but the usual check for email and occasional foray into webspace) and about 5 hours at night, before zonking out and leaving the light on, which will be shut off during the nightly pee run. Work is 8 Hrs + 1 Hr lunch (which I could call personal time, but since I have to be back at the grindstone by 1 PM, it pretty much limits what I can do with it.) So, as anyone can see, I have to adjust the value of personal time much higher than work time, since it is in scarcity during the week, when I have to devote about 30 minutes to download (no DSL, yet) and sift through the chaff.
All idealism aside. Since 90%+ of these cretins forge email address and appropriate bandwidth on other's servers and networks to ply their nefarious trade, what makes anyone actually believe the won't forge tokens? You realize that crackers will be looking for these things on mail servers, bag them up and sell them to people of ill repute such as Ralsky (who, of course, will deny he's doing anything wrong as rolls around naked in his ill gotten lucre.)
I tried the original scorch, which I actually registered for about 10 years back, and loved it. I've got some version (1.5?) on my 300MHz laptop and the timing has been flaky and options don't seem to like saving properly, hanging the game upon reload...
This weekend, in between participating in a search for a missing friend (Marshall was found alive and reported returning home, many thanks to those who participated) I put some of the finishing touches on a new desktop system, which I'd love to play scorched earth on.
There was a recommendation for a game called Worms, IIRC, but I haven't had a chance to check it out. I'll now have decent sound, 1280x1024 resolution and a processor less suited to burning my left knee and getting little else done.
BTW, i'm more of a strategy gamer and was somewhat dismayed by offerings at the stores this weekend. Stuff like scorch, Iron Dragon, Empire, and Conquest are fun, any other recommendations from the Past of gaming?;-)
I've been rather dismayed with the Ultima games on my laptop. Using MOSLO has been an extreme annoyance. I just finished (yesterday, actually) building my first non-Sun desktop (AMD2600/333, etc) with XP installed (still waiting for Mandrake 9.0 to ship!!!) and expect no better if I take this collection of Ultimas and try to run it on XP. Sorry to say, but it's actually better to get one of the emualtors for C64 or Apple ][ for the earlier (1,2,3,4) Ultima games.
I worked at the library in my highschool and part of my duty, each day, was to go through a section of books and make sure they were in the correct order, before resuming my usual duty of launching deadly paper-clip projectiles into the ceiling tiles in the periodicals room. I got to know a lot of names and titles and never read them, but the school had about 12 full stacks of fiction/science fiction. Now I'm a fiction junkie and a lot of those names from those days look familiar as I pick up titles.
I picked up Prey just before heading off to a week of camping in Death Valley, but didn't finish Rendevouz with Rama (yeah, I'm just getting around to it) so it traveled well, but I've yet to crack the binding. I did like Airframe, Disclosure, and Rising Sun was very cool. Jurassic Park was great, Lost World ok, Timeline very cool (even with the hokey time traveling device)
Look for FUD from Microsoft expressing miserable experiences with Lindows/Linux in order to protect their sacred cow.
"Why, ah didn't know the difference and when it didn't presaint me with the qualitah ah expect from those dear ol' gennelmen at Microsoft, why ah was naturally shocked! I tried deseperately to take the horrible machine back, but the man said, 'We don't take those back, and as to your feelings, frankly we don't give a damn!' Wah, ah was close to tears! Then that brave Mr. Gates stomped the awful man into the ground with his Windows XP boots and saved they day and mah honor! I'll nevah switch again!"
Well, as a long-time observer I'll say this, they're very smart and very patient now. It'll probably work really really great with Sony brand stuff and ok with other brand stuff. Sony doesn't cut off their own nose to spite their face.
Consider, Sony doesn't exactly drop lemons in the laps of consumers and they have built a solid name with their products. I'm even using a VAIO laptop (though it's 3 yrs old and I consider it slowwwww, it's still an excellent design and has withstood much punshiment)
I'd look at how this flies in the face of what Microsoft has been attempting to do with entry into the set-top and TV-centric market (which is lackluster at best, but highly lucrative if they ever could exercise that monopoly power again) The XBox was not just a game, but planned as their gateway to managing your TV viewing (with games, internet, spying on you, all that good stuff...)
The entire trash output of the US for the next century could fit in one square mile of landfill 300 feet deep.
If it were well managed, it would produce enough natural gas to eliminate the need for fossil fuels for several power plants. Too bad most of that just goes into the atmosphere.
My bugbear isn't PC's and Consumer Electronics so much as composite packaging. See those drink boxes they've been pushing the last ten years? How do you cost effectively recycle paper/aluminum/plastic containers? And I don't mean just crush them into a little cube and use them for filler in junk made of molded various plastics in park benches, etc. The packaging industry has a lot to answer for, too, as landfills are really cloggin up with composite junk you can't recycle.
It seems such a natural movie script, with at least four or five great movies to pull out of the series.
Uh.. Narration? This is why many great books don't make great movies, or can be excessively hard to make movies of. Where the story mostly dialogue, it'd be easy, but my only read was Robots of Dawn and IIRC Asimov is as heavy on narration, to establish things as other writers, which is tough to do in a movie.
My PIII 800 compile time is much faster than these refrigators.
Sure, but kick off about 10 concurrent compile jobs and see how they compare.
I ran some benchmarks, years ago, on a PDP 11/50 and found optimum performance on that beast was with 4 jobs running concurrently, rather than just one.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds almost like one of the early descriptions I heard of the Newton.
Scroll down to: Drawing on a Tablet PC
Scroll down to Alias Sketchbook comment
I couldn't help but smile at that typo and think "My Athlong is bigger than your 'thlong"
Doh!
Yeah, I saw it as I was hitting the submit button. Funny how the motor nerves learn certain combinations, which frequenly repeated become automatic. So, type 'long' a lot for several years and then try to just type 'lon' when you're tired and cognitive fails to recognize and override. Yeah, the CPU is new, but the ape driving the keyboard is the same old one :-)
I sure hope there's some sort of public comment allowed to the FTC on such a move, because this could, as you point out, clearly be viewed as quashing competition. As JBuilder is a excellent Java development tool, and we all know by now about how Microsoft wants to kill or cripple Java. Further, JBuilder is expanded and repackaged by Oracle, a chief DB rival of Microsoft. I'm sure if I spent the afternoon I could come up with many other reasons this is anti-competitive and in dire need of a letter stating so.
You must live in California, too, however spending cuts won't be enough, taxes will have to go up. In another bit of hard news yesterday, the Dept of the Interior will make good on its threat to cut off excess Colorado River water to Southern California, particularly affecting the Imperial Valley, expect your produce prices to go up. That's going to make any tax increase more painful.
I'm more concerned about a cabinet level spy chief, which reminds of of the abuses of J. Edgar Hoover, than taxes.
Getting back to advertising, better ads would be an improvement. I'm fed up with animated ads and disable flash and animated gifs. At some point I'll probably have a firewall blocking the loading of ads from their distribution sites. It's too bad, really, because sometimes ads do work, but all advertisers suffer on my desktop the sins of the few. Bouncing, flashing, scrolling, etc. while I'm trying to read is NOT going to have a productive affect, rather I will focus my energies on disabling all advertising coming it. IMHO some ads are no improvement over spam, even though I'm responsible for the choice of selecting and loading the page containing the garrish devils.
IAB is probably nothing more than a front for someone who designs and sells ads for a living, and further, desires higher rates and a bigger canvas. Make advertising too bad and you kill the golden goose (assuming it's not just 14kt gold plated eggs already) A logical approach to internet advertising seems beyond them.
What are you, some kind of troublemaker?
Yeah, I read it too, back when the original confusion came out. It's all about positioning and Ruiz, IMHO, is correct, whereas Intel vs AMD looks, atm, like Ford vs GM vs Chrysler up to 1973, when bigger and bigger engines ruled, but also thirsty engines. What with declining payrolls and some people taking salary cuts, better bang for the buck seems a pretty wise strategy. Though it's kinda ironic this is the same company which is readying a P4 stompin' 64bit Athlong (Hammer)
Ah well, I just plunked the C-Notes for 2600/333 and it sure is fascinating to see how it actually makes WinXP appear fast. Though, once I make the Linux drive and have dual boot I expect I'll need some speed goggles 8-)
Maybe they should get together with the russians, after all, the russians appear to have some assets coming available soon.
The bit about edible waste being 4x the value of non-edible waste brings to mind something from a fast food commercial ... "bits and bits and parts and parts" regarding those little fried bits of chicken-like substance at a certain chain.
Regarding the natural world environment, you're correct, as I've seen some harsh criticism of the volume and toxicity of waste byproduct of semiconductor manufacturing. It's not so simple as, just add a little sand and some magic and voila! It's probably not reported so much because the wonders of innovation and heated competition make for more sexy news writing.
Something not mentioned much, but observed by more than a few grumbling parties, is the ever increasing size of code. My first encounter with this was upgrading from RSTS/E 7.? to 8.0, which was darn exciting back in the day, yet the size of the kernel would have been about 50% larger if we activated all the features *I* wanted to (and since I was the admin, lemme tellya, it was darn painful to trim off a few features I lusted after to squeeze it into our memory and performance target.) These days, it's often the OS, ever notice how Windows installs got to needing more space than your entire first harddisk? Common response seems to be, just throw more memory at it. Yet, I think there's a Moore-like law with versions of Windows, i.e. every 2 years a new version comes out with twice as much code.
With physical limitation of the current components nearing the top of the "rate of declinging return" curve, poor performance of the software will eventually catch up with users expectations. Thus, leaner, faster code could become a market direction.
"** NEW: Office-O-Lux, With 50% less redundant code! ***"
Offsite backup copies are also a good part of any intelligently thought out recovery system. You're business burns to the ground, gets flooded or trashed by a twister? Get new hardware and your offsite backups and you should be back in business with a minimum of hassle.
I've already got 2 80G drives in my PC (which I just slapped together over the weekend) and I'm still a bit floored at the concept of having this much space, yet, once I get into rendering and animation, in the next couple weeks (Christmas-New Years break, Wheeee!) I'll probably also be floored how quickly it goes. :-|
True, but... consider who these people are. It seems more appropriate if the vows went something like this:
"Do you, Rob, take all Kathleen base?"
"I do."
"Do you, Kathleen, imagine a beowulf cluster of little Robs and Kathleens?"
"I do."
"No repeat after me.. with this token ring I thee wed..."
Sorry I couldn't be there to sneak a smooch with Kathleen, but who was the Goon?
Oop, my bad! That was probably one of the LV locals making sure things went smoothly for visitors. ;-)
I dunno, I prefer them lightly grilled with an order of chips.
My price for peace and harmony in my inbox would be around $10 per letter.
I figure my personal time is more valuable than my work time (what with the commute cutting into it), I get about 1 hour in the morning (mostly getting ready for work, but the usual check for email and occasional foray into webspace) and about 5 hours at night, before zonking out and leaving the light on, which will be shut off during the nightly pee run. Work is 8 Hrs + 1 Hr lunch (which I could call personal time, but since I have to be back at the grindstone by 1 PM, it pretty much limits what I can do with it.) So, as anyone can see, I have to adjust the value of personal time much higher than work time, since it is in scarcity during the week, when I have to devote about 30 minutes to download (no DSL, yet) and sift through the chaff.
All idealism aside. Since 90%+ of these cretins forge email address and appropriate bandwidth on other's servers and networks to ply their nefarious trade, what makes anyone actually believe the won't forge tokens? You realize that crackers will be looking for these things on mail servers, bag them up and sell them to people of ill repute such as Ralsky (who, of course, will deny he's doing anything wrong as rolls around naked in his ill gotten lucre.)
This weekend, in between participating in a search for a missing friend (Marshall was found alive and reported returning home, many thanks to those who participated) I put some of the finishing touches on a new desktop system, which I'd love to play scorched earth on.
There was a recommendation for a game called Worms, IIRC, but I haven't had a chance to check it out. I'll now have decent sound, 1280x1024 resolution and a processor less suited to burning my left knee and getting little else done.
BTW, i'm more of a strategy gamer and was somewhat dismayed by offerings at the stores this weekend. Stuff like scorch, Iron Dragon, Empire, and Conquest are fun, any other recommendations from the Past of gaming? ;-)
I've been rather dismayed with the Ultima games on my laptop. Using MOSLO has been an extreme annoyance. I just finished (yesterday, actually) building my first non-Sun desktop (AMD2600/333, etc) with XP installed (still waiting for Mandrake 9.0 to ship!!!) and expect no better if I take this collection of Ultimas and try to run it on XP. Sorry to say, but it's actually better to get one of the emualtors for C64 or Apple ][ for the earlier (1,2,3,4) Ultima games.
Saturation point of Spammers to Netizens
Balance point of IP lawsuits costs to anything remotely new or innovative which doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
How many trees have actually been saved by the "paperless office"
Explain Hollywood accounting
Produce a workable model where producers and artists are fairly compensated, and consumers have fair use and easy access to music
Ok, I know I'm only dreaming... Guess it's time to get back to work.
I picked up Prey just before heading off to a week of camping in Death Valley, but didn't finish Rendevouz with Rama (yeah, I'm just getting around to it) so it traveled well, but I've yet to crack the binding. I did like Airframe, Disclosure, and Rising Sun was very cool. Jurassic Park was great, Lost World ok, Timeline very cool (even with the hokey time traveling device)
"Why, ah didn't know the difference and when it didn't presaint me with the qualitah ah expect from those dear ol' gennelmen at Microsoft, why ah was naturally shocked! I tried deseperately to take the horrible machine back, but the man said, 'We don't take those back, and as to your feelings, frankly we don't give a damn!' Wah, ah was close to tears! Then that brave Mr. Gates stomped the awful man into the ground with his Windows XP boots and saved they day and mah honor! I'll nevah switch again!"
Consider, Sony doesn't exactly drop lemons in the laps of consumers and they have built a solid name with their products. I'm even using a VAIO laptop (though it's 3 yrs old and I consider it slowwwww, it's still an excellent design and has withstood much punshiment)
I'd look at how this flies in the face of what Microsoft has been attempting to do with entry into the set-top and TV-centric market (which is lackluster at best, but highly lucrative if they ever could exercise that monopoly power again) The XBox was not just a game, but planned as their gateway to managing your TV viewing (with games, internet, spying on you, all that good stuff...)
If it were well managed, it would produce enough natural gas to eliminate the need for fossil fuels for several power plants. Too bad most of that just goes into the atmosphere.
My bugbear isn't PC's and Consumer Electronics so much as composite packaging. See those drink boxes they've been pushing the last ten years? How do you cost effectively recycle paper/aluminum/plastic containers? And I don't mean just crush them into a little cube and use them for filler in junk made of molded various plastics in park benches, etc. The packaging industry has a lot to answer for, too, as landfills are really cloggin up with composite junk you can't recycle.
Will pull out a big-ass gun
Say something macho like, "You will not shoot that green shit at me!"
"quelle horreur!"
Uh.. Narration? This is why many great books don't make great movies, or can be excessively hard to make movies of. Where the story mostly dialogue, it'd be easy, but my only read was Robots of Dawn and IIRC Asimov is as heavy on narration, to establish things as other writers, which is tough to do in a movie.
Sure, but kick off about 10 concurrent compile jobs and see how they compare.
I ran some benchmarks, years ago, on a PDP 11/50 and found optimum performance on that beast was with 4 jobs running concurrently, rather than just one.