programming for WinCE/Windows using any of the nice RAD tools that you can get, and I don't see so much in the way of linux
Since the Zaurus runs Java, you can use any number of Java RAD IDEs today to write your code. Forte and Visual Age are two free ones that come to mind.
In Sweden we often poke fun at the Norwegians (like the Germans do to the Ostfriesen)
Ya, we make fun because their lederhosen have blue suspenders and the feather in their peter-pan style hat is mostly yellow. Our suspenders of course are green and our feather is red. Also, our wooden clogs are much better!
And those Ostfriesen are ridiculous too. Can't stop ribbing them!
There is a reason XBox and PS/2 sell at a loss for $300. Anything more and they are too expensive for most consumers, or so Microsoft and Sony believe.
The issue is not about buying a used $400 laptop for retro games. It is about people having enough money for a computer that they can use for school/work and some games OR a game machine.
And of course, if you can afford both... why not just buy an even better laptop?
The article I read said the investigators were hired by the plaintiffs. The article went on to say that the dept denied there were any break-ins. The judge's response was something like "you don't think they would leave any evidence of the break-in do you?"
Sounds like witch-hunt logic to me.
Did they break in? Probably, and I say that only because I'm sure their systems suck.
I just don't like the idea that someone can claim to have broken into your system and you have to take all your systems offline. There has to be a pretty high standard for a claim like that to stand. I think right now everything is up to the judge's discretion.
Hmmm, game appliance for $350
on
Portable GameCube
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...$400 and it becomes portable for 3 hours of play. (Game cube retail $199 + 150 screen + $50 battery pack.)
This is getting into used laptop territory. Why would I want this GB setup when I can buy a used laptop with 10.4 inch active matrix screen and 5 hours of gameplay?
I think their price point is a little high. Maybe for $250 it would be sweet. At $400 it is for the rich kid that has everything and needs one more thing for the closet.
sweeping action with far-reaching but unclear ramifications
Okay, the dept of interior has leaky systems. That is bad. Very bad. Maybe forcing all their systems offline is the right answer. I don't know.
A judge becoming your CTO at the behest of people making claims against you smells pretty stinky. From what I read, the complainants' investigators claimed to have edited trust records through the Internet. The interior department denied this happened. Who is right?
From now on if a group claims that their personal information is at risk that organization can be forced go entirely offline?
Scary because most judges are not technically competent nore do they have advisors technically competent enough to know who is making sense and who is just talking slick.
1) How do the news stories get uploaded to the paper?
Flat bed device, or keep a small stack of them in a feeder bin to something that looks like a fax machine/printer. When you have something to "print" it prints it on the epaper.
2) The "e-paper" might be light and thin, but a wireless networked computer isn't.
The epaper itself has no electronics, only small pixel balls that get rotated to make pictures/text. The rotating is done by an external device. The epaper keeps the balls positioned without requiring electronics.
3) What happens when it gets dirty?
What happens when your laptop screen gets dirty? You wipe it clean.
4) Breaks?
Throw it away and get a new one.
5) Oh, and what about batteries?
No batteries or plugs for the paper itself. See #2 above.
6) They're not exactly environmentally-friendly.
What do you mean?
Re:Fax will die but the name will live forever
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 2
Fax is the slang term that sprang up because facsimile was less convenient to say. Sort of like some people say "fridge" instead of "refrigerator", except that the "x" in fax is completely made up for phonetic convenience.
Fax was not a real word until recently. Even a few years ago many dictionaries refused to acknowledge its existence.
The word fax certainly did not exist before facsimile machines became popular.
Now that it is here, it will not go away while people have "faxes" to send.
...how does one recycle these papers? Do you just burn them?
Think outside the fireplace. The idea here is that you do not throw them away. We call it paper, but it is really a device. You keep using it until it breaks.
A good analogy to throwing epaper away after reading it is to discard your monitor after reading this slashdot post.
Fax will die but the name will live forever
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 2
Eventually everyone will send their faxes through the internet (email, direct upload, etc) using simple PC interfaces or dedicated devices that look just like today's fax machines. Recipients will have software that gets the "fax" so they can view and print it. (See jfax/efax for an example today.) These things will still be called "fax"es.
These things will not be called email ever even though the underlying communication mechanism might well be that.
Fax machines that use voice lines will die. Fax machines will not.
Of course this is a good idea. One click is a good idea too. Sure this one is more complex.
Would anyone have built this algorithm into a Tivo style device without the protections of our wonderful patent system? Would an engineer keep this idea to himself/herself rather than improve their recording unit and benefit from being first to market?
Seems to me everyone would eventually stumble into this feature since it is born of customer demand. Heck, it's a software feature.
I'm tired of the bankrupt argument that patents help create and share ideas. They mostly diminish new competition wherever they exist in critical mass.
OS/2 was cool because you could run OS/2 native applications (there were not many) and you could run Windows applications. Why didn't OS/2 specific applications take off? Because it was stupid to write OS/2 applications if you could get by with the inferior multitasking of Win 3.1.
Think about it (back in the early 90's): Write a program in Windows and all the OS/2 & Warp users can run it AND all the Windows 3.1 users can too. Write a native application for OS/2 and you will see the difference in sales pretty quick.
Producing an OS/2 that runs native Windows + Linux ironically makes their previous business model flaw larger in that there is NO incentive for developers to write native OS/2 applications.
Sorry, this one is destined to die again... slowly with vestiges kept alive for a while by islands of hobbyists that appreciate it or keep it for snob appeal. The market is not big enough to sustain an OS development and support effort without users that must have THAT OS to run their critical apps.
50 million handicapped people in the United States alone
There are about 275 million people total in the USA. I find it hard to believe that almost 1 out of 5 is handicap. Okay, maybe if we count all the lawyers it makes sense.
It is narrow thinking to propose that we ever have the "final" answer because there is no way to prove that something is right. We can only prove that things are wrong.
Newton thought he had it covered, and the world agreed. Then Einstein came along and shook our understanding in strange ways. People got comfortable, then Schroedinger and his damn cats show up and screw things up again. Then we get comfortable. Then scientist discover that we still do not have whole story yet again.
Don't you get it? The wonderfulness of it all is that we will never know it all. The beauty of creation is that we will always have something more to discover.
Re:Without Air You Cannot Breathe
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
come from people will fourth grade spelling errors
Typos happen to the best of us don't they?
Without Air You Cannot Breath
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Its obvious that without air you cannot breath. It is also obvious that without a car you cannot drive 100mph on a highway. Writing a book to make these points would be ridiculous.
Yet intellectual monopoly marketing by companies has been so successful, it is not ridiculous to write a book that makes the point that the patent system as we have it today is the tool [used] by entrenched players to keep anyone else from playing.
I'm glad to see this book. Maybe it will wake a few more folks up. I hope so.
Many of us live in free countries where we can dissipate Linux's desktop momentum by making Windows a platform that runs everything. Don't get your panties in a bunch, this is happening and no one is going to pass a law to stop it.
The WE that I refer to is those people that would like to see Linux become a real alternative for every business and home user for every purpose. Not just a niche OS that is almost ready for business desktop use.
The people that fall into the WE category (not you) should not get too excited in a positive way when good Linux apps are delivered into the Windows OS. The folks that should get excited are the ones that want Windows uber alas.
Trust me; if you can show me an OS that does everything that Windows does that I like, is more stable, AND is free / cheap, I'll switch
By bringing the apps into your Windows PC you are not getting any proof of anything. You are just getting a better Windows machine. Why would anyone be fool enough to switch from Windows if they can have it all there?
Lets be real, there will always be an app or two that only runs in Windows until there is a critical mass of soccer moms using Linux as a desktop. Ports like this hurt the chances that such critical mass will ever be achieved. Bill likes this.
I think there is less opportunity here than some people think. Most of the soccer moms do not use Linux on their home PCs because of the following reason: It was not installed on her machine when she purchased it at Circuit City with 4 years of AOL service for the family to balance the checkbook and surf the net.
That's it. Nothing more. Have the big consumer outlets sell PCs with Linux and a useful office suite running in Gnome or KDE with an Outlook clone and you have them then.
Bring the good Linux apps into Windows? Where is the motivation for the retailers to gamble on Linux if everytime that rare soccer mom asks for that "Linux thing her kids told her about" the sales person can say, "Ohh, you don't have to do that. It all runs under Windows too!"
Isnt this backward? Should we be porting software from Windows to Linux(e.g., WINE) instead of from Linux to Windows? Come on, Windows has enough good software already. Why spend time porting the useful stuff from Linux into the busted Windows environment?
This makes it easier for people to stay in Windows. I'm gonna do some research because I suspect Bill G. must be behind this.
Slashdot Mirror
programming for WinCE/Windows using any of the nice RAD tools that you can get, and I don't see so much in the way of linux
Since the Zaurus runs Java, you can use any number of Java RAD IDEs today to write your code. Forte and Visual Age are two free ones that come to mind.
In Sweden we often poke fun at the Norwegians (like the Germans do to the Ostfriesen)
Ya, we make fun because their lederhosen have blue suspenders and the feather in their peter-pan style hat is mostly yellow. Our suspenders of course are green and our feather is red. Also, our wooden clogs are much better!
And those Ostfriesen are ridiculous too. Can't stop ribbing them!
There is a reason XBox and PS/2 sell at a loss for $300. Anything more and they are too expensive for most consumers, or so Microsoft and Sony believe.
... why not just buy an even better laptop?
The issue is not about buying a used $400 laptop for retro games. It is about people having enough money for a computer that they can use for school/work and some games OR a game machine.
And of course, if you can afford both
The article I read said the investigators were hired by the plaintiffs. The article went on to say that the dept denied there were any break-ins. The judge's response was something like "you don't think they would leave any evidence of the break-in do you?"
Sounds like witch-hunt logic to me.
Did they break in? Probably, and I say that only because I'm sure their systems suck.
I just don't like the idea that someone can claim to have broken into your system and you have to take all your systems offline. There has to be a pretty high standard for a claim like that to stand. I think right now everything is up to the judge's discretion.
not that I could afford one
That is why they have a pricing problem.
...$400 and it becomes portable for 3 hours of play. (Game cube retail $199 + 150 screen + $50 battery pack.)
This is getting into used laptop territory. Why would I want this GB setup when I can buy a used laptop with 10.4 inch active matrix screen and 5 hours of gameplay?
I think their price point is a little high. Maybe for $250 it would be sweet. At $400 it is for the rich kid that has everything and needs one more thing for the closet.
sweeping action with far-reaching but unclear ramifications
Okay, the dept of interior has leaky systems. That is bad. Very bad. Maybe forcing all their systems offline is the right answer. I don't know.
A judge becoming your CTO at the behest of people making claims against you smells pretty stinky. From what I read, the complainants' investigators claimed to have edited trust records through the Internet. The interior department denied this happened. Who is right?
From now on if a group claims that their personal information is at risk that organization can be forced go entirely offline?
Scary because most judges are not technically competent nore do they have advisors technically competent enough to know who is making sense and who is just talking slick.
Finally they punctured the lenses in the rats' eyes
The old threat now seems like a remedy!
Curious, do the lenses heal after the puncture damage? Seems like a sad trade to get your nerve back but lose the ability to focus.
1) How do the news stories get uploaded to the paper?
Flat bed device, or keep a small stack of them in a feeder bin to something that looks like a fax machine/printer. When you have something to "print" it prints it on the epaper.
2) The "e-paper" might be light and thin, but a wireless networked computer isn't.
The epaper itself has no electronics, only small pixel balls that get rotated to make pictures/text. The rotating is done by an external device. The epaper keeps the balls positioned without requiring electronics.
3) What happens when it gets dirty?
What happens when your laptop screen gets dirty? You wipe it clean.
4) Breaks?
Throw it away and get a new one.
5) Oh, and what about batteries?
No batteries or plugs for the paper itself. See #2 above.
6) They're not exactly environmentally-friendly.
What do you mean?
Fax is the slang term that sprang up because facsimile was less convenient to say. Sort of like some people say "fridge" instead of "refrigerator", except that the "x" in fax is completely made up for phonetic convenience.
Fax was not a real word until recently. Even a few years ago many dictionaries refused to acknowledge its existence.
The word fax certainly did not exist before facsimile machines became popular.
Now that it is here, it will not go away while people have "faxes" to send.
...how does one recycle these papers? Do you just burn them?
Think outside the fireplace. The idea here is that you do not throw them away. We call it paper, but it is really a device. You keep using it until it breaks.
A good analogy to throwing epaper away after reading it is to discard your monitor after reading this slashdot post.
Eventually everyone will send their faxes through the internet (email, direct upload, etc) using simple PC interfaces or dedicated devices that look just like today's fax machines. Recipients will have software that gets the "fax" so they can view and print it. (See jfax/efax for an example today.) These things will still be called "fax"es.
These things will not be called email ever even though the underlying communication mechanism might well be that.
Fax machines that use voice lines will die. Fax machines will not.
I had the opportunity to experiment with a small sample of ePaper and was very disappointed for the following reasons:
1. It was not very reusable. After making one paper airplane, the creases remained very pronounced and at some folds it looked a little cracked.
2. The airplanes I made did not fly very far or well. The material is both heavy and limp.
I cannot imagine ever switching to E-Paper until it is much lighter and stiffer.
Of course this is a good idea. One click is a good idea too. Sure this one is more complex.
Would anyone have built this algorithm into a Tivo style device without the protections of our wonderful patent system? Would an engineer keep this idea to himself/herself rather than improve their recording unit and benefit from being first to market?
Seems to me everyone would eventually stumble into this feature since it is born of customer demand. Heck, it's a software feature.
I'm tired of the bankrupt argument that patents help create and share ideas. They mostly diminish new competition wherever they exist in critical mass.
OS/2 was cool because you could run OS/2 native applications (there were not many) and you could run Windows applications. Why didn't OS/2 specific applications take off? Because it was stupid to write OS/2 applications if you could get by with the inferior multitasking of Win 3.1.
... slowly with vestiges kept alive for a while by islands of hobbyists that appreciate it or keep it for snob appeal. The market is not big enough to sustain an OS development and support effort without users that must have THAT OS to run their critical apps.
Think about it (back in the early 90's): Write a program in Windows and all the OS/2 & Warp users can run it AND all the Windows 3.1 users can too. Write a native application for OS/2 and you will see the difference in sales pretty quick.
Producing an OS/2 that runs native Windows + Linux ironically makes their previous business model flaw larger in that there is NO incentive for developers to write native OS/2 applications.
Sorry, this one is destined to die again
That is very close to the name these people already have...
http://www.lostbrain.com/notathome/index.html
50 million handicapped people in the United States alone
There are about 275 million people total in the USA. I find it hard to believe that almost 1 out of 5 is handicap. Okay, maybe if we count all the lawyers it makes sense.
It is narrow thinking to propose that we ever have the "final" answer because there is no way to prove that something is right. We can only prove that things are wrong.
Newton thought he had it covered, and the world agreed. Then Einstein came along and shook our understanding in strange ways. People got comfortable, then Schroedinger and his damn cats show up and screw things up again. Then we get comfortable. Then scientist discover that we still do not have whole story yet again.
Don't you get it? The wonderfulness of it all is that we will never know it all. The beauty of creation is that we will always have something more to discover.
come from people will fourth grade spelling errors
Typos happen to the best of us don't they?
Its obvious that without air you cannot breath. It is also obvious that without a car you cannot drive 100mph on a highway. Writing a book to make these points would be ridiculous.
Yet intellectual monopoly marketing by companies has been so successful, it is not ridiculous to write a book that makes the point that the patent system as we have it today is the tool [used] by entrenched players to keep anyone else from playing.
I'm glad to see this book. Maybe it will wake a few more folks up. I hope so.
Many of us live in free countries where we can dissipate Linux's desktop momentum by making Windows a platform that runs everything. Don't get your panties in a bunch, this is happening and no one is going to pass a law to stop it.
The WE that I refer to is those people that would like to see Linux become a real alternative for every business and home user for every purpose. Not just a niche OS that is almost ready for business desktop use.
The people that fall into the WE category (not you) should not get too excited in a positive way when good Linux apps are delivered into the Windows OS. The folks that should get excited are the ones that want Windows uber alas.
Trust me; if you can show me an OS that does everything that Windows does that I like, is more stable, AND is free / cheap, I'll switch
By bringing the apps into your Windows PC you are not getting any proof of anything. You are just getting a better Windows machine. Why would anyone be fool enough to switch from Windows if they can have it all there?
Lets be real, there will always be an app or two that only runs in Windows until there is a critical mass of soccer moms using Linux as a desktop. Ports like this hurt the chances that such critical mass will ever be achieved. Bill likes this.
I think there is less opportunity here than some people think. Most of the soccer moms do not use Linux on their home PCs because of the following reason: It was not installed on her machine when she purchased it at Circuit City with 4 years of AOL service for the family to balance the checkbook and surf the net.
That's it. Nothing more. Have the big consumer outlets sell PCs with Linux and a useful office suite running in Gnome or KDE with an Outlook clone and you have them then.
Bring the good Linux apps into Windows? Where is the motivation for the retailers to gamble on Linux if everytime that rare soccer mom asks for that "Linux thing her kids told her about" the sales person can say, "Ohh, you don't have to do that. It all runs under Windows too!"
No. Why would a user move when everything is being brought to them. Seems to me this makes it easier to stay in Windows.
Isnt this backward? Should we be porting software from Windows to Linux(e.g., WINE) instead of from Linux to Windows? Come on, Windows has enough good software already. Why spend time porting the useful stuff from Linux into the busted Windows environment?
This makes it easier for people to stay in Windows. I'm gonna do some research because I suspect Bill G. must be behind this.