The hysterical paert for me is, having taken both Mr Tannenbaum's Networking and OS course in the late eighties, early nineties, was that it was stupefyingly simple to get a passing garde, if not a 10 (scale 1 to 10, 10 good) in the book courses. The books were a pleasant and fast read, and, according to college culture in the Netherlands at the time, nothing on the tests would not be in the books (So I stopped going. Duh; they were morning courses.) The test for both these introductory courses would consist of five relatively simple essay questions requiring a, maximum, 5 sentence answer, out of a standard pool of, oh, say, 25 questions at most and all the previous tests and correct answers were archived and retrievable at the faculty student union.
In other words, to ace the test you had to memorize not even the whole wonderful books, but 25 very clearly explained features of networks or OSes, along the lines of "list the 7 layers if the OSI model".
If you couldn't ace either of those tests in the first of the allowed three hours, you were a slow writer, or you just simply hadn't done your legwork to the copying machine. It never took me more than a week to study for either, and I didn't get 10s on them because I was on Usenet too much. The practical section of the work for either course consisted of having eight weeks to modify his clearly written C code for Minix or a networking stack. If you were new to C and compiling your OS for the first time like most of us were, you could actually get in trouble and be confused and be late, otherwise it was pretty straightforward. (Mind you, the times were such we were doing everything on 5.25" floppys, and 3.5" floppys were these things only the macheads had seen.)
In short, as far as undergrad life went, if someone went all happy happy joy joy that s/he passed a course by the great Tannenbaum, the appropriate reaction was to cock an eyebrow and wish them the best of luck in the rest of their computing career: s/he'd need it. Maybe things got way way tougher once you became a grad student with him, but an undergrad Tannenbaum grade just didn't mean that much.
I just went to broadbandreports. Am on T_Mobile GPRS (unlimited / $30,- a month) myself. 38kbps, 1.878s latency. Just fine for email and browsing. Yes, it drops connection, some days often. But it comes back.
I used to be on Verizon's CDPD service. 9k on an Extremely Good Day! Constant drops. But it was all I could get.
Re:It will take years for these standards to settl
on
Buzzword du Jour: DRM
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I think something did. I got a letter just like Sycraft outlined a few months ago for one of my domains, and was very confused, until I figured out that it was basically some sort of transfer scam for a fly-by-night registrar that was charintg way more than doster does. I got one again from the smae place last night, and it looked the same, except it had printed on it in big letter along the middle
"This is not a bill." and some more words about it being an offer for service.
Many if not ost of the licensees of Symbian were actually licensing Symbian with a layer of Nokia polish on it called 'Series 60', which was licensed through Nokia. Sendo, Siemens, Samsung, those are all Series 60 phones, which means that these companies will not notice a change.
Sony/Ericsson also licensed from Symbian, they are the ones who would be most nervous. That Nokia bought the shares makes me think S/E simply didn't want them, or couldn't afford them. So far Nokia has not been in the habit of screwing venture partners. (Tough on contractors, yes, though.)
Firmware is indeed upgradeable on Nokia phones, but you need specialized hardware for it, and it wipes out your current settings, contacts, and calendar. Basically you get apristine phone back, so it can be fairly traumatic.
As a UI designer, I once saw somebody have my dream job: he was creating an application for JPL to visualize the data and state of a deep-space probe. It would reflect the health of the probe at-a-glance and give access to further data. So it had NASA, space, complex data, and cool visualization all rolled into one. It would be for Depp Space One.
He was not enjoying the work and the circumstances (like the pay). I would have given my left arm (i.e. learned to program on OpenVMS from nothing) for that gig. We all have different dreams.
Actually, it reads like Penny Arcade just didn't play the media game very well.
If Children's Hospital Seattle is anything like Children's Hospital Boston, where I worked, it has a PR department able to have put this drive as a heartwarming story on the night newscasts of three networks on the same day, just by having a well-filled Rolodex of exactly who to call. The media don't appaear where nothing is expected, for things like this they need to be told in a very targetted way. I would suggest that Child's Play next time work a little closer with the available media-handlers at their target, as much as they have a distaste for the media.
There are PR handlers looking at this like a totally wasted opportunity on all sides, both for getting Children's Hospital Seattle and Child's Play in the news.
Many manufacturers do, except for Nokia & Sony Ericsson. Samsung, for example, is pumping out phones in world markets will all kinds of OSes, just to see what sticks.
Actually, you touch on what I consider a problem with Tufte and the computer domain. Many people always point to Tufte as the examples to follow into making clear displays and websites to display lost of data. But when you actually try to adapt anything he does, one quickly find out that most of his examples of visualizing repetitive data are predicating on using high-resoltuion output -- like paper. Not screen. You cannot show 40 T-shirts, or faces, or blocks depciting small differences in a dataset on a 72 or even 110 dpi screen, at the same time. Unless your screen is a poster. Just can't be done.
In fact, when actually specifically starts to give recommendations working on the screen, they are not so good, although I cannot find the link to such a recommendation that supports my opinion.
Other way round: accessory makers have started implementing Nokia specs, not the other way round. You can get Jabra's that work with Nokia now.
(BTW, Sony-Ericsson also required accessory makers to implement the Bluetooth Handsfree profile, instead of the Headset profile accessory-makers first implemented.)
Not exactly. The MPAA is already doing screenings, every Sunday, for voting members, in a beautiful movie theatre with great sound. For free.
I have been to one, the voting members are allowed to take a guest. The theatre was almost empty, and the people there were not likely to be dealing with screaming four year old ("So what does one wear to a matinee Academy screening," I asked my host, the Academy member. -- "A walker," his roommate yells from the kitchen. You get the picture.)
Alas, on screen that afternoon was this Sharon Stone On Death Row flick, "Last Dance" or something. I spent the rest of the weekend watching his VHS tapes on the home theatre system -- the studios hadn't switched to DVDs yet.
FCC approval is bad enough -- now Nokia has to get FDA approval for a handset too?
Actually, much of what you dicsuss might be done by a separate glucose meter that interfaces with the Nokia phone using the PopPort. That could be a 3d party opportunity.
Phones in these 'low' series are consumer products, Nokia expects to sell millions of them. Adding the hardware, which will only make it desireable to a very small part of those millions, just isn't a good proposition if it makes the hardware more expensive for the overwhelming amount of people who don't want it. It makes the phone more expensive to subsidize for the operator, and Nokia lives and dies by the operator liking the phones.
MMS and cameras will make millions of users send packets of data around over the operator's network. Bluetooth will only do that for a minority of users when they use the phone as a GPRS modem. The operators don't see the value in offering this to users.
I believe you can't actually rebadge the keys, the template has holes punched out that fit around the keys, much like Nokia's faceplates for the current phones.
SO you actually don't see that much of your design on the front -- it is all keys and screen -- but a lot of it on the back.
Absolutly, but my one anecdote was when it went the other way round.
I remember taking my N-Gage (I am one of the early Nokia testers) into a federal building. The security guard had to be convinced that it was a phone when I gave that as an answer when he asked me what it was. If I had said "Oh, it is my game-boy" he would have let me right through. The thing doesn't look like a phone unless you know it is one.
Thing is, this report is inaccuaret. I have been testing an N-Gage for Nokia for the last five months, and it actually does have a Bluetooth indicator -- just like the 3650 it is an icon on the main screen. It shows when your phone is open, and when it has made a connection. Also, no file can be sent to the phone over BT without the user accepting the file, so you can actually say "No" when a request comes in.
When we first got the 3650s with that functionality in the Nokia Boston building, we were all -- ok, I was -- walking around and spamming each-others phone with pics -- but every time, the owner of the handset I was sending to saw that it was from my phone, and they had to accept the incoming picture.
It is not gonna be the hacker that breaks it, in the case of mobile-phone DRM. Phone DRM is will be deployed very soon, and for real, quite sophisiticated, and it will be huge.
And it will be broken soon by rogue manufacturers who know consumers will pay more for phones that let them do what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
The hysterical paert for me is, having taken both Mr Tannenbaum's Networking and OS course in the late eighties, early nineties, was that it was stupefyingly simple to get a passing garde, if not a 10 (scale 1 to 10, 10 good) in the book courses. The books were a pleasant and fast read, and, according to college culture in the Netherlands at the time, nothing on the tests would not be in the books (So I stopped going. Duh; they were morning courses.) The test for both these introductory courses would consist of five relatively simple essay questions requiring a, maximum, 5 sentence answer, out of a standard pool of, oh, say, 25 questions at most and all the previous tests and correct answers were archived and retrievable at the faculty student union.
In other words, to ace the test you had to memorize not even the whole wonderful books, but 25 very clearly explained features of networks or OSes, along the lines of "list the 7 layers if the OSI model".
If you couldn't ace either of those tests in the first of the allowed three hours, you were a slow writer, or you just simply hadn't done your legwork to the copying machine. It never took me more than a week to study for either, and I didn't get 10s on them because I was on Usenet too much. The practical section of the work for either course consisted of having eight weeks to modify his clearly written C code for Minix or a networking stack. If you were new to C and compiling your OS for the first time like most of us were, you could actually get in trouble and be confused and be late, otherwise it was pretty straightforward. (Mind you, the times were such we were doing everything on 5.25" floppys, and 3.5" floppys were these things only the macheads had seen.)
In short, as far as undergrad life went, if someone went all happy happy joy joy that s/he passed a course by the great Tannenbaum, the appropriate reaction was to cock an eyebrow and wish them the best of luck in the rest of their computing career: s/he'd need it. Maybe things got way way tougher once you became a grad student with him, but an undergrad Tannenbaum grade just didn't mean that much.
For that funky mono sound. The N-Gage had a stereo headset. The QD ships with a mono headset and I think the jack is mono itself.
I just went to broadbandreports. Am on T_Mobile GPRS (unlimited / $30,- a month) myself. 38kbps, 1.878s latency. Just fine for email and browsing. Yes, it drops connection, some days often. But it comes back.
I used to be on Verizon's CDPD service. 9k on an Extremely Good Day! Constant drops. But it was all I could get.
History also indicates that DRM, especially on phones, won't be of any use to guard content for long.
Actually, I think something did. I got a letter just like Sycraft outlined a few months ago for one of my domains, and was very confused, until I figured out that it was basically some sort of transfer scam for a fly-by-night registrar that was charintg way more than doster does. I got one again from the smae place last night, and it looked the same, except it had printed on it in big letter along the middle
"This is not a bill." and some more words about it being an offer for service.
Many if not ost of the licensees of Symbian were actually licensing Symbian with a layer of Nokia polish on it called 'Series 60', which was licensed through Nokia. Sendo, Siemens, Samsung, those are all Series 60 phones, which means that these companies will not notice a change.
Sony/Ericsson also licensed from Symbian, they are the ones who would be most nervous. That Nokia bought the shares makes me think S/E simply didn't want them, or couldn't afford them. So far Nokia has not been in the habit of screwing venture partners. (Tough on contractors, yes, though.)
Firmware is indeed upgradeable on Nokia phones, but you need specialized hardware for it, and it wipes out your current settings, contacts, and calendar. Basically you get apristine phone back, so it can be fairly traumatic.
As a UI designer, I once saw somebody have my dream job: he was creating an application for JPL to visualize the data and state of a deep-space probe. It would reflect the health of the probe at-a-glance and give access to further data. So it had NASA, space, complex data, and cool visualization all rolled into one. It would be for Depp Space One.
He was not enjoying the work and the circumstances (like the pay). I would have given my left arm (i.e. learned to program on OpenVMS from nothing) for that gig. We all have different dreams.
Actually, it reads like Penny Arcade just didn't play the media game very well.
If Children's Hospital Seattle is anything like Children's Hospital Boston, where I worked, it has a PR department able to have put this drive as a heartwarming story on the night newscasts of three networks on the same day, just by having a well-filled Rolodex of exactly who to call. The media don't appaear where nothing is expected, for things like this they need to be told in a very targetted way. I would suggest that Child's Play next time work a little closer with the available media-handlers at their target, as much as they have a distaste for the media.
There are PR handlers looking at this like a totally wasted opportunity on all sides, both for getting Children's Hospital Seattle and Child's Play in the news.
Perhapsyou should wear one, then.
No! It can't be done! You madman! Nothing can stop Jennifer Lopez movies!
Many manufacturers do, except for Nokia & Sony Ericsson. Samsung, for example, is pumping out phones in world markets will all kinds of OSes, just to see what sticks.
What sticks are good UIs.
Actually, you touch on what I consider a problem with Tufte and the computer domain. Many people always point to Tufte as the examples to follow into making clear displays and websites to display lost of data. But when you actually try to adapt anything he does, one quickly find out that most of his examples of visualizing repetitive data are predicating on using high-resoltuion output -- like paper. Not screen. You cannot show 40 T-shirts, or faces, or blocks depciting small differences in a dataset on a 72 or even 110 dpi screen, at the same time. Unless your screen is a poster. Just can't be done.
In fact, when actually specifically starts to give recommendations working on the screen, they are not so good, although I cannot find the link to such a recommendation that supports my opinion.
Other way round: accessory makers have started implementing Nokia specs, not the other way round. You can get Jabra's that work with Nokia now.
(BTW, Sony-Ericsson also required accessory makers to implement the Bluetooth Handsfree profile, instead of the Headset profile accessory-makers first implemented.)
I am fortunate, as a foreigner, to have not encountered this then. I am not sure it is even correct for me to stand up for this.
If that site is yours, your Deathwatch needs some updating.
Not exactly. The MPAA is already doing screenings, every Sunday, for voting members, in a beautiful movie theatre with great sound. For free.
I have been to one, the voting members are allowed to take a guest. The theatre was almost empty, and the people there were not likely to be dealing with screaming four year old ("So what does one wear to a matinee Academy screening," I asked my host, the Academy member.
-- "A walker," his roommate yells from the kitchen. You get the picture.)
Alas, on screen that afternoon was this Sharon Stone On Death Row flick, "Last Dance" or something. I spent the rest of the weekend watching his VHS tapes on the home theatre system -- the studios hadn't switched to DVDs yet.
Then what you need to do is to sterilize the cell-phone covers every day. Almost every Nokia phone can have its covers taken off completly.
They woud probably deform if you tried to autoclave them. An alcohol-based sterilization would be better, with a little extra wipe of the screen.
FCC approval is bad enough -- now Nokia has to get FDA approval for a handset too?
Actually, much of what you dicsuss might be done by a separate glucose meter that interfaces with the Nokia phone using the PopPort. That could be a 3d party opportunity.
Not enough market to justify the extra hardware.
Phones in these 'low' series are consumer products, Nokia expects to sell millions of them. Adding the hardware, which will only make it desireable to a very small part of those millions, just isn't a good proposition if it makes the hardware more expensive for the overwhelming amount of people who don't want it. It makes the phone more expensive to subsidize for the operator, and Nokia lives and dies by the operator liking the phones.
MMS and cameras will make millions of users send packets of data around over the operator's network. Bluetooth will only do that for a minority of users when they use the phone as a GPRS modem. The operators don't see the value in offering this to users.
I believe you can't actually rebadge the keys, the template has holes punched out that fit around the keys, much like Nokia's faceplates for the current phones.
SO you actually don't see that much of your design on the front -- it is all keys and screen -- but a lot of it on the back.
Absolutly, but my one anecdote was when it went the other way round.
I remember taking my N-Gage (I am one of the early Nokia testers) into a federal building. The security guard had to be convinced that it was a phone when I gave that as an answer when he asked me what it was. If I had said "Oh, it is my game-boy" he would have let me right through. The thing doesn't look like a phone unless you know it is one.
Thing is, this report is inaccuaret. I have been testing an N-Gage for Nokia for the last five months, and it actually does have a Bluetooth indicator -- just like the 3650 it is an icon on the main screen. It shows when your phone is open, and when it has made a connection. Also, no file can be sent to the phone over BT without the user accepting the file, so you can actually say "No" when a request comes in.
When we first got the 3650s with that functionality in the Nokia Boston building, we were all -- ok, I was -- walking around and spamming each-others phone with pics -- but every time, the owner of the handset I was sending to saw that it was from my phone, and they had to accept the incoming picture.
It has a special profile that you can select that switches the phone transmitter on the device off.
It is not gonna be the hacker that breaks it, in the case of mobile-phone DRM. Phone DRM is will be deployed very soon, and for real, quite sophisiticated, and it will be huge.
And it will be broken soon by rogue manufacturers who know consumers will pay more for phones that let them do what they want.