India's railway system, although showing its age, ist pretty okay. Not terribly fast, comfortable or efficient, but at least you can get almost anywhere within reasonable time.
Roads, on the other hand, are simply impossible. The highways that the article talks about are linking the four biggest metropolitan areas, and replacing "roads" that would be considered not fit to connect small villages in the USA.
While it might be true that most engineers, politicians, managers etc in India speak English really well (comparable to a native speaker), it is a misconception that *everybody* in India speaks English.
Generally, I would say 50% speak no English at all, 25% enough for simple things (asking for the way, buying something), and 25% speak English well enough for a complex conversation.
(These are extremely rough numbers, in a small village the quota of english speakers will be a lot lower) but I experienced it first hand - I recently spent half a year working in india, and I, too, thought that everybody would speak english - boy was I wrong! Try asking for the way in english in the middle of a slum, or getting your motorcycle fixed in a hole-in-the-wall shop round the corner. Luckily, Indian people are extremely friendly towards strangers, so this kind of situations was usually resolved by someobody recognizing that i only speak english, calling over his uncle, who had a friend who knew somebody who could translate...
This thing is just *ugly* !
on
iMac LCD Impostors
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why does only Apple manage to produce really good-lookin, stylish PC cases? It shouldn't be very hard to do, should it?
But somehow no Windows-PC maker offers a computer that looks as good as an apple.
Well, time to case-mod that ugly beige box myself, I guess...
Re:"Netscape-style plug-in modules" - HUH?
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It means that IE 6 doesn't support Netscape-style plug-ins anymore, it only accepts Microsofts own ActiveX-control format.
So you can't open a.pdf in IE6, you have to download it and then start up Acrobat viewer and open it from your harddrive.
Maybe Acrobat is available as an ActiveX-control by now, I'm not sure about that
Palm is winning the battle? Here in Europe I havent seen a single Smartphone based on PalmOS that was available in Stores. The rather clunky VisorPhone is your best choice here. Jave doesnt play that big a role; its more of a nice extension to play around with. And it also has yet to become popular. Whereas Microsoft recently bought a stake in the British cell phone upstart Sendo with plans to release smartphones based on Microsoft`s Stinger platform from Sendo, Siemens and many more. T
BeOS runs on x86 only, as far as I know [except some old apples etc, I know](something which has held them back in the embedded market also). It will probably take a comparably long time to port some BeOS-on-PDA to StrongARM or whatever Palm plans on using.
One more thing: I guess the real PDA battle will be fought in the smartphone market (it just means hauling one box less around in your pockets if you have phone and pda integrated, and of course it makes sense too combine an adress manager etc with a phone). Microsofts Stinger platform is quite ready, whereas Palm isnt able to offer something competitive. I havent heard much of the EPoc/Psion-base Symbian platform, too...
Looks like another market that will go to microsoft.
Does anybody know what they are selling now that their handheld division is gone?
The future of Symbian (their joint venture with Motorola etc to produce EPOC-based smartphones) is very unclear, and they havent brought any products to market yet.
And "corporate networks" does sound like buzzword-inflated vaporware to me. (Don't want to flame here, I just havent heard of the thing that they want to base their business on yet)
BTW: Their stock dropped just a little bit after the announcement, although they just admitted that their core market is gone. The stock market is really weird sometimes...
(well, it could be that analysts dont understand tech, but it could also be a factor that their stock is at an all-time low already...)
On the other hand, maybe its time now to grab a cheap 5mx...
Well, the Psions are slick devices, but they had an awfully small market niche:
Want a device that fits comfotably into your pocket? Take a palm.
Want near-PC functionality to go? WinCE for you, which is also backed by a ton of marketing money, looks flashy (those hires color screens...) and appeals to business types (Hey, this is windows, we can integrate it easily into our windows-running corporate network)(yeah i know this is wrong, but corporate buyers dont know it and are fooled by the name)
The psions are really cool, but the market for freaks (who value programmability, long battery life etc) just isn't that bit.
Besides, what has kept me from using a Revo or 5mx is that the keyboard is too small to touch-type and therefore quite useless for me.
Yeah, EA bought some really good game developers (Maxis, Bullfrog, Origin, etc), but have you noticed that all the good guys left after the development house they founded got bought by EA?
Peter Molyneux from Bullfrog left to found Lionhead, some other ex-bullfroggies founded Mucky Feet, Origin is by far not what it used to be, the Roberts brothers (who did Wing Commander, Privateer etc for Origin) now work for Microsoft, Garriott (founder of Origin and creator of Ultima) quit...
The list of new small development houses spawned by geniuses leaving their recently-bought-out-by-publishing-giant teams is quite long.
Also, have you noticed that EA tends to treat the firms it acquired like its sports division, i.e. producing sequels again and again?
Bullfrog under Molyneux produced a lot of different, original games (think Theme park, Syndicate, Popoulus, Dungeon Keeper). Now, what have they been doing since the acquisition by EA?
an uninspired sequel to Theme Park, an uninspired sequel to Dungeon Keeper,...
I'm not saying that EA is evil; due to EAs publishing power probably a lot more people play stuff like Dungeon Keeper now, but, well, Bullfrog, Origin etc on their own focused on making cool,innovative games; EA focuses on making money from good, but quite unimaginative games.
That's a good strategy, business-wise, but the gaming world has gotten a bit duller.
Fight Club - the film is better than the book
on
The Pledge
·
· Score: 1
There actually *is* one example where the film is better than the book, and that's Fight Club. I've read the novel after having seen and loved the film, and felt that the film did all the fine-tuning that the book lacked.
Genereally, however, you're right: books are almost always better than the film. Why? Maybe it`'s the fact that films are usually intended for a larger audience (and cost more), but I think part of the reason are just the differences in the media. In a book, you can use a whole page to describe a setting, the film can only show it, and if the viewer doesn`t notice a detail then it's lost, whereas the reader always gets every aspect of the story.
I don't really know why everybody continues to make fun of Gore just because of that one stupid sentence.
I mean, it was just a slip of the tongue, and everybody talks shit once in a while.
And Gore really did a lot to poromote the net and hi-tech in general and to make joe public aware of the net
It seems like all the phone companies are really running wild about the new possibilities with 3rd generation mobile voice + data transfer, aka UMTS.
All the prototype devices i've seen so far seem to feature full-fledged WWW access, color screens etc.
Who needs WAP anymore as soon as the first real UMTS apps are out?
I think WAP needs another year or two to advance from its current state as an overpriced toy, and by then UMTS will be up and running and WAP will seem really obsolete
I guess it comes down to this:
With quantum stuff, you can't measure something without altering what you've measured; i.e. once you've measured something, it's not the same anymore.
The practical application of this fact for cryto would be to send a one-time key before the encrypted message and compare the received key with the one that was sent.
If somebody intercepted the key, you'll notice because the interception altered the key, so the key that the intended receiver got would not be the same anymore as the one that was sent.
And if the key came through alright, you could be sure that nobody sneaked in on the key and send the message.
I'm no physics major, so correct me if I'm wrong; but I guess this would make spying secrets virtually impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
India's railway system, although showing its age, ist pretty okay. Not terribly fast, comfortable or efficient, but at least you can get almost anywhere within reasonable time.
Roads, on the other hand, are simply impossible. The highways that the article talks about are linking the four biggest metropolitan areas, and replacing "roads" that would be considered not fit to connect small villages in the USA.
While it might be true that most engineers, politicians, managers etc in India speak English really well (comparable to a native speaker), it is a misconception that *everybody* in India speaks English.
Generally, I would say 50% speak no English at all, 25% enough for simple things (asking for the way, buying something), and 25% speak English well enough for a complex conversation.
(These are extremely rough numbers, in a small village the quota of english speakers will be a lot lower) but I experienced it first hand - I recently spent half a year working in india, and I, too, thought that everybody would speak english - boy was I wrong! Try asking for the way in english in the middle of a slum, or getting your motorcycle fixed in a hole-in-the-wall shop round the corner.
Luckily, Indian people are extremely friendly towards strangers, so this kind of situations was usually resolved by someobody recognizing that i only speak english, calling over his uncle, who had a friend who knew somebody who could translate...
Why does only Apple manage to produce really good-lookin, stylish PC cases? It shouldn't be very hard to do, should it?
But somehow no Windows-PC maker offers a computer that looks as good as an apple.
Well, time to case-mod that ugly beige box myself, I guess...
It means that IE 6 doesn't support Netscape-style plug-ins anymore, it only accepts Microsofts own ActiveX-control format. So you can't open a .pdf in IE6, you have to download it and then start up Acrobat viewer and open it from your harddrive.
Maybe Acrobat is available as an ActiveX-control by now, I'm not sure about that
Palm is winning the battle? Here in Europe I havent seen a single Smartphone based on PalmOS that was available in Stores. The rather clunky VisorPhone is your best choice here. Jave doesnt play that big a role; its more of a nice extension to play around with. And it also has yet to become popular. Whereas Microsoft recently bought a stake in the British cell phone upstart Sendo with plans to release smartphones based on Microsoft`s Stinger platform from Sendo, Siemens and many more. T
BeOS runs on x86 only, as far as I know [except some old apples etc, I know](something which has held them back in the embedded market also). It will probably take a comparably long time to port some BeOS-on-PDA to StrongARM or whatever Palm plans on using.
One more thing: I guess the real PDA battle will be fought in the smartphone market (it just means hauling one box less around in your pockets if you have phone and pda integrated, and of course it makes sense too combine an adress manager etc with a phone). Microsofts Stinger platform is quite ready, whereas Palm isnt able to offer something competitive. I havent heard much of the EPoc/Psion-base Symbian platform, too...
Looks like another market that will go to microsoft.
Does anybody know what they are selling now that their handheld division is gone?
The future of Symbian (their joint venture with Motorola etc to produce EPOC-based smartphones) is very unclear, and they havent brought any products to market yet.
And "corporate networks" does sound like buzzword-inflated vaporware to me. (Don't want to flame here, I just havent heard of the thing that they want to base their business on yet)
BTW: Their stock dropped just a little bit after the announcement, although they just admitted that their core market is gone. The stock market is really weird sometimes...
(well, it could be that analysts dont understand tech, but it could also be a factor that their stock is at an all-time low already...)
On the other hand, maybe its time now to grab a cheap 5mx...
Well, the Psions are slick devices, but they had an awfully small market niche:
Want a device that fits comfotably into your pocket? Take a palm.
Want near-PC functionality to go? WinCE for you, which is also backed by a ton of marketing money, looks flashy (those hires color screens...) and appeals to business types (Hey, this is windows, we can integrate it easily into our windows-running corporate network)(yeah i know this is wrong, but corporate buyers dont know it and are fooled by the name)
The psions are really cool, but the market for freaks (who value programmability, long battery life etc) just isn't that bit.
Besides, what has kept me from using a Revo or 5mx is that the keyboard is too small to touch-type and therefore quite useless for me.
Yeah, EA bought some really good game developers (Maxis, Bullfrog, Origin, etc), but have you noticed that all the good guys left after the development house they founded got bought by EA? Peter Molyneux from Bullfrog left to found Lionhead, some other ex-bullfroggies founded Mucky Feet, Origin is by far not what it used to be, the Roberts brothers (who did Wing Commander, Privateer etc for Origin) now work for Microsoft, Garriott (founder of Origin and creator of Ultima) quit...
The list of new small development houses spawned by geniuses leaving their recently-bought-out-by-publishing-giant teams is quite long.
Also, have you noticed that EA tends to treat the firms it acquired like its sports division, i.e. producing sequels again and again?
Bullfrog under Molyneux produced a lot of different, original games (think Theme park, Syndicate, Popoulus, Dungeon Keeper). Now, what have they been doing since the acquisition by EA? an uninspired sequel to Theme Park, an uninspired sequel to Dungeon Keeper,...
I'm not saying that EA is evil; due to EAs publishing power probably a lot more people play stuff like Dungeon Keeper now, but, well, Bullfrog, Origin etc on their own focused on making cool,innovative games; EA focuses on making money from good, but quite unimaginative games.
That's a good strategy, business-wise, but the gaming world has gotten a bit duller.
There actually *is* one example where the film is better than the book, and that's Fight Club. I've read the novel after having seen and loved the film, and felt that the film did all the fine-tuning that the book lacked.
Genereally, however, you're right: books are almost always better than the film. Why? Maybe it`'s the fact that films are usually intended for a larger audience (and cost more), but I think part of the reason are just the differences in the media. In a book, you can use a whole page to describe a setting, the film can only show it, and if the viewer doesn`t notice a detail then it's lost, whereas the reader always gets every aspect of the story.
Roaming around, it said? Well, now you just have to build such a robot using a WinCE device, and Windows can crash in *hardware*!
Whoops; just noticed that its actually tecchannel.de, not computerchannel.
The link to the concrete article is correcht,though. Sorry.
I don't really know why everybody continues to make fun of Gore just because of that one stupid sentence.
I mean, it was just a slip of the tongue, and everybody talks shit once in a while.
And Gore really did a lot to poromote the net and hi-tech in general and to make joe public aware of the net
It seems like all the phone companies are really running wild about the new possibilities with 3rd generation mobile voice + data transfer, aka UMTS. All the prototype devices i've seen so far seem to feature full-fledged WWW access, color screens etc. Who needs WAP anymore as soon as the first real UMTS apps are out? I think WAP needs another year or two to advance from its current state as an overpriced toy, and by then UMTS will be up and running and WAP will seem really obsolete
I guess it comes down to this:
With quantum stuff, you can't measure something without altering what you've measured; i.e. once you've measured something, it's not the same anymore.
The practical application of this fact for cryto would be to send a one-time key before the encrypted message and compare the received key with the one that was sent.
If somebody intercepted the key, you'll notice because the interception altered the key, so the key that the intended receiver got would not be the same anymore as the one that was sent. And if the key came through alright, you could be sure that nobody sneaked in on the key and send the message.
I'm no physics major, so correct me if I'm wrong; but I guess this would make spying secrets virtually impossible.