Only cheap if we're looking at short-term economics.
I freely admit that I'm not a physicist or nuclear power expert in any way (I'm a programmer) so I won't comment on safety and efficiency. I've heard several suggestions that it really isn't that cheap to run and that the original suggestions were misguided but again I don't know the details so won't comment.
The one thing I've heard consistently enough to feel relatively confident in repeating, though, is that waste storage and decomissioning costs are huge. Except that because of when they appear they frequently aren't factored into the cost equations.
As a Brit, I've heard it suggested several times that our energy needs could be covered several times over by off-shore windfarms - which sounds interesting, plus is rather safer than nuclear fission if and when something fails. Anyone?
Let's assume for the moment that they're not trying to sit on bugs. So, they want people to read their content. Now, the only advantage to them reading their exact wording on their server exclusively is that it gets them onto their servers.
Except that neither of them carry banner ads, so a hit _costs_ them money rather than making them money. There's a small argument that they might want people on their site to get them to click around on it and get some more information (and therefore, hopefully, buy something) but if you're going to want that then surely it won't make any difference where you read it - I mean, if you're interested you'll go there from the e-mail in all probability and if you aren't you're just going to jump straight out anyway.
So the logic of this decision on both of their parts rather falls down IMHO. Microsoft come across as wanting to stifle reporting and discussion of problems in their software (what a surprise there!) and @stake come across as a group new to the game who don't understand what they're doing. Neither is something I'd want people to percieve of me.
Yes, but how is this actually more than just Gauntlet from a new viewpoint? And how is Gauntlet anything more than a sophisticated Mosters In The Dungeon? (OK, can't remember the proper name, but that old mainframe thing and one of the first computer games _ever_).
Truly original games are rather more rare than you might think and a new viewpoint does not a new genre make.
(Favourite old game - Deathchase on the Spectrum. Chasing through forests very fast, trying to shoot other motorbikes. Fantastic tension, brilliant game, ran on a Z80 and had 9K of code. Also arguably near-Wolfenstein3D-level first person 3D...)
This assumes, though, that each extra dollar is worth the same to the individual surely?
If everyone is charged tax at (say) 20%, its impact one someone who's earning minimum wage is fairly substantial but its impact on someone earning $1 million / year is negligible. Mr Minimum Wage has a very low disposable income and is running on tight margins to get an acceptable standard of living. Mr. Millionaire, on the other hand, could afford several acceptable standards of living and has a pretty large disposable income.
Charge tax at a curve and you start getting closer to a genuinely level burden on the population.
Surely this is a problem of detailed execution rather than of principle, though?
We seem to agree in principle that graduated tax is a good thing. Your main complaint seems to be, though, that its current execution is substantially suboptimal.
Now, I don't know the details so I can't comment on the details (I'm British) but the execution would have to be a _long_ way suboptimal before I'd concede the principle should be avoided on that ground.
Interesting to see how far we differ on spending levels. Left-liberal here (broadly) who is very happy to live in a country where the state funds education to 18, most healthcare for all and at least trys to regulate out the excesses of free market capitalism - BSE springs rapidly to mind. And would happily pay more tax to help these and other programs to be better funded and more effective. After all, it seems a pretty fundamental principle to me that people shouldn't be denied medical treatment or decent education because they can't afford it. Education in particular, as it's probably the best way of ensuring they have some chance of a decent income in later life. Otherwise it all gets rather circular...
I understand the principle that we all have an equal responsibility very well. In some ways, I agree. However, I'm also a left-liberal who's in favour of graduated income taxation.
Let me explain. I want all to support equally in terms of the impact of that support on their personal wellbeing. If someone only has £100 to their name, to tax them £95 is a huge burden. Taxing someone that £95 when they have £1,000 isn't all that bad and when they have £10,000 it's become largely irrelevant. So, is asking all of them for £95 asking them to take equal responsibility for funding the government? Not really, as the burden this imposes on them is vastly different. For the poorest it is a very onerous responsibility - for the richest it's almost insignificant. Far from equal.
The need for money isn't a straight line graph but a curve. The difference an extra £5 will make to me when I only have £5 before is huge - if I have £500 before it's not that great. So, tax in the same way. The load of responsibility that this then places on each individual stays essentially constant - and we have the happy side-effect that this means we're not bankrupting the poor.
Your average rich person has a good money supply and (relative to that supply) low demand. If the demand on their money was high, they wouldn't be rich by definition. Anyway. This means that the value to them of each additional dollar - or pound, in my case - they receive is low, as is the chance of its being used. If it's simply stockpiled, it isn't benefitting the economy after all.
Now, the poor by definition have a low money supply. Their demand is demonstrably high, as they've usually either got debts to pay off or certain commoditites which they would purchase if they had more money. Therefore, the personal value they'd get from each additional unit is high, as is the chance of its use. It's less likely to become part of a stagnant stockpile and more likely to actually get used, promoting economic wellbeing.
Now. If we have a flat tax cut, some of this extra money will get released to this high-value sector, who will use it and so grow the economy. Some will also get release to the rich low-value sector, though, who are less likely to use it and more likely to simply take it out of general circulation by saving it - contracting the economy, as the government was at least spending it before.
If you want to get maximum economic benefit from a tax cut, give it to those who are most likely to use the proceeds. Target it at the poorest sectors of society.
The other point, which I've really got to make. If you want to keep the economy happy, don't cut tax substantially at all. All it would do would be to cause a consumer spending boom, resulting in rapid inflation (supply and demand again, remember) and a consequent crash. Get government to spend it, but do so in such a way that, while not directly funding society which'd cause the boom problem, reduces inequality. Lower inequality means that the standard deviation of personal monetary value will fall, resulting in a less distorted economy and more total economic activity, so faster growth.
To tie this together properly, you need to tie individual licenses to individual machines. This is also assuming that small bits of paper and CD boxes never once got lost when installing software all round the department. I wouldn't like to bet on that.
If the licenses are properly stored, it's less of an issue than it might appear - but it's still a big, time-consuming job.
You've already got CD-ROMs in the machine, which can simply be replaced by CD-RWs on the spec sheets of new machines. So, the cost comes down.
Now, looking at retailers in the UK, floppy drives cost £15 each. CD-ROMs are going for £30, CD-RWs for £120 so we have an additional cost per machine of £75 if we replace both floppy and CD-ROM with a CD-RW. Hardly huge. The other sensible suggestion - LS120 - would cost £70 and you'd still need a CD-ROM, so the cost extra for that would be £55. For which you have to use media 5 times smaller and 5-6 times _more_ expensive.
If you stick with RWs, burning the CDs is really easy. If you then add DirectCD (lovely program) it's no different from using any disk. Yes, this requires the users to fit the drives to their own machines - but the same is true with anything other than HDD floppies. And the cost per megabyte is _tiny_ compared with any competitor.
Really, if you're committed to removable drives for the students, CD-RWs are by far the best.
Y'see, F1 banned most computer control in '94. Before then, ABS braking and traction control (to name to two biggies) were very common - now both are banned. They still have semi-auto gearboxes.
Now, absolutely seriously, some of the F1 teams were researching this just before the ban, and reckoned they were at most a year from making a car which could lap the circuit at a competitive speed autonomously.
In some ways, this may be an easier challenge than road car driving. By requiring them to drive flat out, you don't have to assess the speed as hard, just distance from the next corner and whether the car is sliding for speed. Traction control sorts out a lot of the speeds, line isn't a difficult challenge at most tracks. I wouldn't like to try Monaco, but Sepang (GP tomorrow) should be doable. ABS brakes are easy enough, too, and they're a big part of the skill. Remember, too, that judging braking power and distances are _easier_ for a computer. It just goes as hard as it can and lets the ABS deal with it, for the time dictated by its start and finish speeds - both of which it can work out pretty easily. A racing auto gearbox? Easy, especially when you've got semi-auto already. Program it to shift up at the rev limiter for acceleration. Downshifts are easy, too - the existing boxes already have programmed downshifts and all you need to add to that is the knowledge of corner entry speeds - not a big job to calculate. Also, it's a qualifying shootout - so an otherwise empty track and no need for collison avoidance at speed.
If they can train the system by prigramming it with data from a live driver, it becomes _far_ easier. I can't tell from the website whether this is permissible or not, but if it is then they're laughing. Even if the driver concerned isn't that fast.
This really isn't as hard a challenge as it sounds. Whether they can beat Michael Schumacher or not, I wouldn't like to bet. But I'd certainly bet that they could build an AI which would lap fast enough to qualify.
(No, the figures don't add up, they're not complete - they're all I've got)
As you can see, what happens is that an electoral entity (party in this case, candidate in the US Presidential elections) needs a strong genographic base. The Conservatives are traditionally strong in the south and rural areas, Labour in the north and industrial. Nationalist are strong within their own regions, the SDP/Liberals were strong, er, a little pretty much everywhere. So, as the figures rather clearly show, they got _severely_ stiffed. Because they had broad (if shallower) support, they were ignored.
Having read through the linked study, I strongly disagree with many of the basic assumptions used to underpin his model.
If we want a simple explanation of why an electoral college or first-past-the-post system is wrong, it gives some voters more power than others. If you're in a safe region, your power is nearly nil. If you're in a swing region, your power is considerable. Can we really trumpet the principle of 'one person, one vote' when there is such a huge - and entirely irrational - difference in the value of individual votes?
Odd to see a Linux-focussed site only thinking about x86. Not a moan at you in particular, but the bunch here in _general_.
If you're running Linix and OS-only software, you can run LinuxPPC. If you can run LinuxPPC, use a PowerBook or iBook, and get that battery life _today_.
Or, for that matter, get one of the larger WinCE boxes (remember the IBM WorkPad z50?) which has no drives and can run for most of a day with no heroic measures. Possibly a Psion 7 could have the same treatment too, just never heard of it being done.
Eww. Sorry, but the idea of having one of these phones and picking your nose is just too horrible. I've got this mental image of accidentally dialling someone who picks up the phone to the sound of me picking my nose...
Actually, what I'm currently finding more worrying is that, of the three kind (if misguided, see below) moderators who modded me up, two gave me a funny. I can see it's mildly amusing, but it's not a windup or a joke. I'm being credited with writing a joke _I_ don't get;)
Even more worrying, though, is that the post hit 5. It's OK, but not one of my best ever - yet it got a 5. The only things I can see which are different are that
1) It's early - #17 or something
2) It's short
Neither of which should really help it. It's a serious post, not karma whoring before I get moaned at, but not _that_ good. Come on guys... For the second time, I genuinely want to mod one of my own comments as overrated.
SLASH is being rewritten, right? Any chance of a mod where it only lets you moderate if you're viewing in Newest First (so reducing this problem) and not at all until a thread hits a certain number of comments?
... people tend to think it's rather rude to use a mobile in a lot of public places, or to stick your fingers in your ears, while talking to yourself (which is what you'll appear to be doing until people work out about these things) tends to get you dismissed as mad. As far as I can see, this combines each and every one of those problems with remarkable efficiency.
I'd guess public acceptance will be a huge problem, I'm afraid. This may simply be a leap too far.
To my eyes, both software patents and reverse engineering have their places and uses. The problem (as with most situations) is where either are used out of those cases.
Let's imagine I've just written Quake 4, or whatever. It contains some fantastic new breakthrough in rendering technology that produces photorealistic images in real time on a P233. Yes, this is a deliberately daft example, before I get jumped on, just to illustrate how far ahead it would be.
Now, this is a completely new technique which I've devised all by myself after years of painstaking research. It's not been done before, it's not a derivative of other work and it's not obvious. It would seem a good candidate for a patent, thus allowing me to exploit this technology and get a return on my research investment. Especially as, if reverse engineered - not exactly hard with computer software - I'd have a million rivals tomorrow, and little advantage over them.
Now, let's imagine I've written Access 2002. It's got an interesting but not revolutionary file format, so it gets patented. With the side-effect that you couldn't release a legal compatible program and I can get perpetual upgrade fees from my clients as they have to keep up with this program because once their data's in it, nothing else can get at it. Without reverse engineering, which breaks the law...
Across computing as a whole, both need to be permissible. Within individual subsections, you can't really have both. Working out where to draw the lines is a complex problem, but gives a far better solution than an absolute answer applying to everything, which would always cause problems _somewhere_.
Also speeds up running the code, as keeping it pre-tokenised means the interpreter has a _lot_ less to do. No need to work out what each instruction does, or to check if they're valid.
When you get used to it, it's really rather fast to use.
I think the thing that really impressed me when I last heard about it was actually the tape reader. It was reading punched paper tape so fast the paper was snapping... The reader could run faster, paper couldn't. In 1944. Wow.
Actually, that's exactly why I bought mine when I did - to replace a Palm III which failed when I accidentally conducted that test. Cracked the glass over the screen, which rendered the digitiser useless.
Whichever twit stuck glass in there and made it inseparable from the screen should lose their job. That little incident made it a non-economic repair. Why they couldn't jsut use perspex. Wouldn't even scratch - there was a screen protector over the glass, too.
Not the same. You're still stuck with a 160*160 screen for one thing, while I get 640*240. Also, it don't exactly look stable. I can hold in one hand and type in the other without any problems at all.
Seriously, the keyboard isn't the only issue. The whole system is just better. It feels like a proper computer, while the Palm feels like a jumped up personal organiser. And no, that doesn't cause problems by being too complicated, it works beautifully.
Actually, they're the same system now. May have been different before, but last time I checked the same company owned both brandnames and marketted the same product as both, depending on where.
A heck of a lot of parts - even of the old stuff - were interchangeable, though.
Didn't nVidia write a wrapper to let their post-GeForce cards run Glide stuff?
I'd have to second the choice of a GeForce 2 MX card. My chosen upgrade at the moment, should I ever get round to doing these things and have the funds.
I had a Palm III, I've now got a Psion 5. Much better.
Yes, it's bigger, heavier and takes more power, Surprising how little you notice any of them, though, when you get to play with one. I now have a keyboard so I can stick work on it and write essays (or whatever) _anywhere_. Try doing that with Graffiti and you'll go mad quickly. I did. Yes, you can do that with laptops, but they're far bigger, heavier and more expensive - and don't boot up in a sensible time. This works beautifully for working away from home.
Also, you have a nice OS. EPOC32 is a nice thing to use, really.
All in all, it's just better. Far less a toy and far more a proper computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Bite all you want, but I'm not trolling.
No, it doesn't need much space. Yes, it needs rather a lot of shielding and phenomenal security and yes, it has to be there for a _very_ long time.
Storage _isn't_ cheap.
Only cheap if we're looking at short-term economics.
I freely admit that I'm not a physicist or nuclear power expert in any way (I'm a programmer) so I won't comment on safety and efficiency. I've heard several suggestions that it really isn't that cheap to run and that the original suggestions were misguided but again I don't know the details so won't comment.
The one thing I've heard consistently enough to feel relatively confident in repeating, though, is that waste storage and decomissioning costs are huge. Except that because of when they appear they frequently aren't factored into the cost equations.
As a Brit, I've heard it suggested several times that our energy needs could be covered several times over by off-shore windfarms - which sounds interesting, plus is rather safer than nuclear fission if and when something fails. Anyone?
Let's assume for the moment that they're not trying to sit on bugs. So, they want people to read their content. Now, the only advantage to them reading their exact wording on their server exclusively is that it gets them onto their servers.
Except that neither of them carry banner ads, so a hit _costs_ them money rather than making them money. There's a small argument that they might want people on their site to get them to click around on it and get some more information (and therefore, hopefully, buy something) but if you're going to want that then surely it won't make any difference where you read it - I mean, if you're interested you'll go there from the e-mail in all probability and if you aren't you're just going to jump straight out anyway.
So the logic of this decision on both of their parts rather falls down IMHO. Microsoft come across as wanting to stifle reporting and discussion of problems in their software (what a surprise there!) and @stake come across as a group new to the game who don't understand what they're doing. Neither is something I'd want people to percieve of me.
Yes, but how is this actually more than just Gauntlet from a new viewpoint? And how is Gauntlet anything more than a sophisticated Mosters In The Dungeon? (OK, can't remember the proper name, but that old mainframe thing and one of the first computer games _ever_).
Truly original games are rather more rare than you might think and a new viewpoint does not a new genre make.
(Favourite old game - Deathchase on the Spectrum. Chasing through forests very fast, trying to shoot other motorbikes. Fantastic tension, brilliant game, ran on a Z80 and had 9K of code. Also arguably near-Wolfenstein3D-level first person 3D...)
This assumes, though, that each extra dollar is worth the same to the individual surely?
If everyone is charged tax at (say) 20%, its impact one someone who's earning minimum wage is fairly substantial but its impact on someone earning $1 million / year is negligible. Mr Minimum Wage has a very low disposable income and is running on tight margins to get an acceptable standard of living. Mr. Millionaire, on the other hand, could afford several acceptable standards of living and has a pretty large disposable income.
Charge tax at a curve and you start getting closer to a genuinely level burden on the population.
Surely this is a problem of detailed execution rather than of principle, though?
We seem to agree in principle that graduated tax is a good thing. Your main complaint seems to be, though, that its current execution is substantially suboptimal.
Now, I don't know the details so I can't comment on the details (I'm British) but the execution would have to be a _long_ way suboptimal before I'd concede the principle should be avoided on that ground.
Interesting to see how far we differ on spending levels. Left-liberal here (broadly) who is very happy to live in a country where the state funds education to 18, most healthcare for all and at least trys to regulate out the excesses of free market capitalism - BSE springs rapidly to mind. And would happily pay more tax to help these and other programs to be better funded and more effective. After all, it seems a pretty fundamental principle to me that people shouldn't be denied medical treatment or decent education because they can't afford it. Education in particular, as it's probably the best way of ensuring they have some chance of a decent income in later life. Otherwise it all gets rather circular...
Yes and no. Imagine the following situation, though:
200 machines
190 2000 Workstation licenses
10 2000 Server licenses
140 Office 2000 SBE licenses
40 Office Premium licenses
20 Office 2000 developer licenses
and imagine that you're the Microsoft auditor. Tell me you're just going to count to 200 with a straight face.
Surely that's rather mathematically simplstic?
I understand the principle that we all have an equal responsibility very well. In some ways, I agree. However, I'm also a left-liberal who's in favour of graduated income taxation.
Let me explain. I want all to support equally in terms of the impact of that support on their personal wellbeing. If someone only has £100 to their name, to tax them £95 is a huge burden. Taxing someone that £95 when they have £1,000 isn't all that bad and when they have £10,000 it's become largely irrelevant. So, is asking all of them for £95 asking them to take equal responsibility for funding the government? Not really, as the burden this imposes on them is vastly different. For the poorest it is a very onerous responsibility - for the richest it's almost insignificant. Far from equal.
The need for money isn't a straight line graph but a curve. The difference an extra £5 will make to me when I only have £5 before is huge - if I have £500 before it's not that great. So, tax in the same way. The load of responsibility that this then places on each individual stays essentially constant - and we have the happy side-effect that this means we're not bankrupting the poor.
You miss the point.
.sig seems curiously appropriate right now ;)
Think of this in terms of supply and demand.
Your average rich person has a good money supply and (relative to that supply) low demand. If the demand on their money was high, they wouldn't be rich by definition. Anyway. This means that the value to them of each additional dollar - or pound, in my case - they receive is low, as is the chance of its being used. If it's simply stockpiled, it isn't benefitting the economy after all.
Now, the poor by definition have a low money supply. Their demand is demonstrably high, as they've usually either got debts to pay off or certain commoditites which they would purchase if they had more money. Therefore, the personal value they'd get from each additional unit is high, as is the chance of its use. It's less likely to become part of a stagnant stockpile and more likely to actually get used, promoting economic wellbeing.
Now. If we have a flat tax cut, some of this extra money will get released to this high-value sector, who will use it and so grow the economy. Some will also get release to the rich low-value sector, though, who are less likely to use it and more likely to simply take it out of general circulation by saving it - contracting the economy, as the government was at least spending it before.
If you want to get maximum economic benefit from a tax cut, give it to those who are most likely to use the proceeds. Target it at the poorest sectors of society.
The other point, which I've really got to make. If you want to keep the economy happy, don't cut tax substantially at all. All it would do would be to cause a consumer spending boom, resulting in rapid inflation (supply and demand again, remember) and a consequent crash. Get government to spend it, but do so in such a way that, while not directly funding society which'd cause the boom problem, reduces inequality. Lower inequality means that the standard deviation of personal monetary value will fall, resulting in a less distorted economy and more total economic activity, so faster growth.
Make sense, people?
(This
Not true.
To tie this together properly, you need to tie individual licenses to individual machines. This is also assuming that small bits of paper and CD boxes never once got lost when installing software all round the department. I wouldn't like to bet on that.
If the licenses are properly stored, it's less of an issue than it might appear - but it's still a big, time-consuming job.
I'd still go for CD-RWs, personally.
You've already got CD-ROMs in the machine, which can simply be replaced by CD-RWs on the spec sheets of new machines. So, the cost comes down.
Now, looking at retailers in the UK, floppy drives cost £15 each. CD-ROMs are going for £30, CD-RWs for £120 so we have an additional cost per machine of £75 if we replace both floppy and CD-ROM with a CD-RW. Hardly huge. The other sensible suggestion - LS120 - would cost £70 and you'd still need a CD-ROM, so the cost extra for that would be £55. For which you have to use media 5 times smaller and 5-6 times _more_ expensive.
If you stick with RWs, burning the CDs is really easy. If you then add DirectCD (lovely program) it's no different from using any disk. Yes, this requires the users to fit the drives to their own machines - but the same is true with anything other than HDD floppies. And the cost per megabyte is _tiny_ compared with any competitor.
Really, if you're committed to removable drives for the students, CD-RWs are by far the best.
No, I disagree.
Y'see, F1 banned most computer control in '94. Before then, ABS braking and traction control (to name to two biggies) were very common - now both are banned. They still have semi-auto gearboxes.
Now, absolutely seriously, some of the F1 teams were researching this just before the ban, and reckoned they were at most a year from making a car which could lap the circuit at a competitive speed autonomously.
In some ways, this may be an easier challenge than road car driving. By requiring them to drive flat out, you don't have to assess the speed as hard, just distance from the next corner and whether the car is sliding for speed. Traction control sorts out a lot of the speeds, line isn't a difficult challenge at most tracks. I wouldn't like to try Monaco, but Sepang (GP tomorrow) should be doable. ABS brakes are easy enough, too, and they're a big part of the skill. Remember, too, that judging braking power and distances are _easier_ for a computer. It just goes as hard as it can and lets the ABS deal with it, for the time dictated by its start and finish speeds - both of which it can work out pretty easily. A racing auto gearbox? Easy, especially when you've got semi-auto already. Program it to shift up at the rev limiter for acceleration. Downshifts are easy, too - the existing boxes already have programmed downshifts and all you need to add to that is the knowledge of corner entry speeds - not a big job to calculate. Also, it's a qualifying shootout - so an otherwise empty track and no need for collison avoidance at speed.
If they can train the system by prigramming it with data from a live driver, it becomes _far_ easier. I can't tell from the website whether this is permissible or not, but if it is then they're laughing. Even if the driver concerned isn't that fast.
This really isn't as hard a challenge as it sounds. Whether they can beat Michael Schumacher or not, I wouldn't like to bet. But I'd certainly bet that they could build an AI which would lap fast enough to qualify.
------------------------------|----------|-------
Conservative..........42.3....|376.......|58
Labour................30.8....|229.......|35
SDP/Liberal Alliance..22.6....|.22.......|.3
Welsh + Scottish Nats..1.7....|..6.......|.1
(No, the figures don't add up, they're not complete - they're all I've got)
As you can see, what happens is that an electoral entity (party in this case, candidate in the US Presidential elections) needs a strong genographic base. The Conservatives are traditionally strong in the south and rural areas, Labour in the north and industrial. Nationalist are strong within their own regions, the SDP/Liberals were strong, er, a little pretty much everywhere. So, as the figures rather clearly show, they got _severely_ stiffed. Because they had broad (if shallower) support, they were ignored.
Having read through the linked study, I strongly disagree with many of the basic assumptions used to underpin his model.
If we want a simple explanation of why an electoral college or first-past-the-post system is wrong, it gives some voters more power than others. If you're in a safe region, your power is nearly nil. If you're in a swing region, your power is considerable. Can we really trumpet the principle of 'one person, one vote' when there is such a huge - and entirely irrational - difference in the value of individual votes?
Odd to see a Linux-focussed site only thinking about x86. Not a moan at you in particular, but the bunch here in _general_.
If you're running Linix and OS-only software, you can run LinuxPPC. If you can run LinuxPPC, use a PowerBook or iBook, and get that battery life _today_.
Or, for that matter, get one of the larger WinCE boxes (remember the IBM WorkPad z50?) which has no drives and can run for most of a day with no heroic measures. Possibly a Psion 7 could have the same treatment too, just never heard of it being done.
I'm English. And the guy who made the root comment to this thread, for those who aren't concentrating :)
.uk e-mail address and website address, and a request for work in England ;)
Note a
Eww. Sorry, but the idea of having one of these phones and picking your nose is just too horrible. I've got this mental image of accidentally dialling someone who picks up the phone to the sound of me picking my nose...
;)
Actually, what I'm currently finding more worrying is that, of the three kind (if misguided, see below) moderators who modded me up, two gave me a funny. I can see it's mildly amusing, but it's not a windup or a joke. I'm being credited with writing a joke _I_ don't get
Even more worrying, though, is that the post hit 5. It's OK, but not one of my best ever - yet it got a 5. The only things I can see which are different are that
1) It's early - #17 or something
2) It's short
Neither of which should really help it. It's a serious post, not karma whoring before I get moaned at, but not _that_ good. Come on guys... For the second time, I genuinely want to mod one of my own comments as overrated.
SLASH is being rewritten, right? Any chance of a mod where it only lets you moderate if you're viewing in Newest First (so reducing this problem) and not at all until a thread hits a certain number of comments?
... people tend to think it's rather rude to use a mobile in a lot of public places, or to stick your fingers in your ears, while talking to yourself (which is what you'll appear to be doing until people work out about these things) tends to get you dismissed as mad. As far as I can see, this combines each and every one of those problems with remarkable efficiency.
I'd guess public acceptance will be a huge problem, I'm afraid. This may simply be a leap too far.
I'm responding with a loud maybe.
To my eyes, both software patents and reverse engineering have their places and uses. The problem (as with most situations) is where either are used out of those cases.
Let's imagine I've just written Quake 4, or whatever. It contains some fantastic new breakthrough in rendering technology that produces photorealistic images in real time on a P233. Yes, this is a deliberately daft example, before I get jumped on, just to illustrate how far ahead it would be.
Now, this is a completely new technique which I've devised all by myself after years of painstaking research. It's not been done before, it's not a derivative of other work and it's not obvious. It would seem a good candidate for a patent, thus allowing me to exploit this technology and get a return on my research investment. Especially as, if reverse engineered - not exactly hard with computer software - I'd have a million rivals tomorrow, and little advantage over them.
Now, let's imagine I've written Access 2002. It's got an interesting but not revolutionary file format, so it gets patented. With the side-effect that you couldn't release a legal compatible program and I can get perpetual upgrade fees from my clients as they have to keep up with this program because once their data's in it, nothing else can get at it. Without reverse engineering, which breaks the law...
Across computing as a whole, both need to be permissible. Within individual subsections, you can't really have both. Working out where to draw the lines is a complex problem, but gives a far better solution than an absolute answer applying to everything, which would always cause problems _somewhere_.
Also speeds up running the code, as keeping it pre-tokenised means the interpreter has a _lot_ less to do. No need to work out what each instruction does, or to check if they're valid.
When you get used to it, it's really rather fast to use.
I think the thing that really impressed me when I last heard about it was actually the tape reader. It was reading punched paper tape so fast the paper was snapping... The reader could run faster, paper couldn't. In 1944. Wow.
Actually, that's exactly why I bought mine when I did - to replace a Palm III which failed when I accidentally conducted that test. Cracked the glass over the screen, which rendered the digitiser useless.
Whichever twit stuck glass in there and made it inseparable from the screen should lose their job. That little incident made it a non-economic repair. Why they couldn't jsut use perspex. Wouldn't even scratch - there was a screen protector over the glass, too.
Not the same. You're still stuck with a 160*160 screen for one thing, while I get 640*240. Also, it don't exactly look stable. I can hold in one hand and type in the other without any problems at all.
Seriously, the keyboard isn't the only issue. The whole system is just better. It feels like a proper computer, while the Palm feels like a jumped up personal organiser. And no, that doesn't cause problems by being too complicated, it works beautifully.
Actually, they're the same system now. May have been different before, but last time I checked the same company owned both brandnames and marketted the same product as both, depending on where.
A heck of a lot of parts - even of the old stuff - were interchangeable, though.
Didn't nVidia write a wrapper to let their post-GeForce cards run Glide stuff?
I'd have to second the choice of a GeForce 2 MX card. My chosen upgrade at the moment, should I ever get round to doing these things and have the funds.
Yes, it's bigger, heavier and takes more power, Surprising how little you notice any of them, though, when you get to play with one. I now have a keyboard so I can stick work on it and write essays (or whatever) _anywhere_. Try doing that with Graffiti and you'll go mad quickly. I did. Yes, you can do that with laptops, but they're far bigger, heavier and more expensive - and don't boot up in a sensible time. This works beautifully for working away from home.
Also, you have a nice OS. EPOC32 is a nice thing to use, really.
All in all, it's just better. Far less a toy and far more a proper computer.
Psion Series 5 MX