and an evaluation will be done to see if it will continue after that.
Relax, complainers. It's not that T-Mobile is deciding whether or not they WANT to continue it. They just don't know whether their network will hold up after a few days. And this has nothing to do with the hurricane, just business as usual at T-Mobile. When I use their Starbucks hotspots, I'm lucky to have one workday without a service interruption, let alone a few days.
First, they sell Motorola phones, and Motorola partnered with Apple to build it. Also, they're a GSM carrier, and they seem to sell bleeding edge phones a little bit quicker than other carriers. Motorola probably built the first version as GSM because more carriers use that protocol. I love Verizon, but ditched 'em for Cingular because Cingular gets cooler phones faster. Granted, the coverage isn't as good, but hey, geeks love toys.
You could say the same thing about all kinds of niche features on today's laptops:
Who needs firewire? I mean, really, if you're going to edit video, why would you do it on a laptop with its miserably small, dim screen, slow internal drives, and short battery life?
Who needs a TV tuner? Why fork over $2,000 for a laptop that can't show a decent picture with a DirecTV tuner or a satellite box, and even then you're looking at a tiny screen? You can get a bigger and better TV for $150 from Wal-Mart.
The answer to all of these questions (and the RAID one) is that more people are ditching desktops for laptops as their primary machines.
Intel's doing the right thing by offering RAID support at the chipset level because it really doesn't cost them much. What if vendors suddenly came out with dramatically better battery life, or hard drives that required less power? We're already seeing smaller hard drives. Intel's just getting their own part of the work out of the way - in business, you never want to be the weak link in the chain.
...could even be scaled up to provide large areas of free GSM service.
How exactly do you get large numbers of GSM transceivers for free? This sounds suspiciously like a dot-bomb business model. I mean, I'm willing to buy a wifi router and give away my internet connection because any tool with a wifi card can figure out how it works and take advantage of it. But buy a GSM transceiver, host an Asterisk server, and manage it all for strangers who walk past my house? What a tech support pain in the ass.
Apple should take note of this surge of interest and really consider selling the OS only. I know I'd line up to buy one.
If they did, then they'd have to support it on your hardware, and that's a money-losing proposition this early in the game. Even if you publish a very specific set of supported devices, you immediately take a huge support load hit when everybody and their brother starts bringing in their devices that kinda-sorta-but-not-quite made the list. Plus, you get the negative PR that comes with, "I bought the new OSX, but it kept crashing on my Crapposan P4 that I got from Ebay."
Cool! I'm glad you think so! If you would, please show up at our store (you can find the address on the website), and install Linux on all of our PC's along with an open source point of sale system, and an open source accounting package. It should be a seamless transition. Sunday mornings are the best time for us. Looking forward to seeing you then!
Be careful what you ask for. I went through a consulting gig cleaning up after something just like that. The business owner got a friendly neighborhood geek to install a complete Linux setup at his small office. Two months later, after countless support calls for things that truly weren't related to Linux (crashing hard drives due to El Cheapo equipment, crashes from bad drivers, etc), the geek threw his hands up in the air and decided he had better things to do with his free time, and started charging $$$ for support calls. The business owner realized he had the same support costs whether he was using MS or Linux, and decided to switch back to what he was comfortable with.
Buyer beware: there's nothing wrong with relying on free software, but you can't rely on free consulting for your business. It dries up sooner or later. Whenever you need human labor, it's going to cost money, and no small business network is labor-free.
You're using examples of Ebay, Google and Microsoft's web sites as your "large-scale" web app description. If you truly do want to build something as large-scale as that, then you're going to have a lot of hiring to do. Take a look at your local market - or even better, place ads for architect-level people in each of the languages you're considering. See what kinds of people you get, and that should weigh into your decision.
...can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet.
As far as I'm concerned, she doesn't even have to sit. She just has to lie there, hold still, and keep moving those hands and fluttering those eyelids. Maybe breathe a little harder too.
Great... now the fat, sweaty, stupid, irritating, guy next to me on every single flight I've ever taken can now be surfing for horse pr0n
I hate to break this to you, but I was actually doing that the whole time on my Treo. I just kept it in my pocket and snuck looks when you went to the restroom.
I read Macromedia's blogs religiously because I find 'em very interesting. It helps me build a personal, emotional connection to software. The guys behind the software are real people with ideas and struggles just like me, and that gives me warm and fuzzy feelings.
Why would any company not want to establish personal, emotional connections to their software?
Yeah, sure, there's risks involved if your employees reveal corporate secrets or turbulence, but if you trust them enough with your source code, why would you think they wouldn't be smart enough to walk the line with blogs as well? If you don't trust your employees enough to blog, it doesn't say anything about your employees - it says something about your paranoia and your inability to hire reliable staff.
(And yes, I have a personal blog, and no, I'm not allowed to talk about company stuff in it, and yes, I've been disciplined for even coming close to the line.)
If you were really a time traveler, why would you want to show up at a known place on a known date? The government would be waiting with an awesome arsenal of firepower, waiting to forcefully take your tools from you.
Or if you're the big-business conspiracy theory type, substitute "government" for "private mercenaries."
I'm always amazed how people seem to be able to judge the quality of an operating system within just a couple of hours.
Journalists, especially high-profile ones like Mossberg, get preview versions of new gear long before the rest of us specifically so they can review it. They sign non-disclosure agreements to make sure the technology doesn't get into The Wrong Hands, and the vendors generally know the journalists will behave because the journalists have their entire career invested in it. If Mossberg tried to distribute pirated versions of Tiger ahead of the release date, Apple would stop giving him advance copies, and he'd lose prestige as a journalist.
It humours me how people are unwilling to go the final step and just make a freakin slate tablet.
Compaq/HP makes one that my boss uses, actually. The handwriting recognition just isn't that good yet: if you tend to write long, technical-oriented stuff (like programming or tech docs) then you're far better off with the keyboard. It has a detachable keyboard, but frankly, if you take the keyboard off, then it's never around when you need it. You end up carrying it around all the time no matter what, and then what's the point?
Slashdot Mirror
Are they really that hard up for porn?
Is that a trick question?
and an evaluation will be done to see if it will continue after that.
Relax, complainers. It's not that T-Mobile is deciding whether or not they WANT to continue it. They just don't know whether their network will hold up after a few days. And this has nothing to do with the hurricane, just business as usual at T-Mobile. When I use their Starbucks hotspots, I'm lucky to have one workday without a service interruption, let alone a few days.
That would be like becoming a cop because you want to be like Dirty Harry.
Or becoming a hacker because I wanted to meet Sandra Bullock. Man, what a time-waster this has turned out to be.
Why Cingular?
First, they sell Motorola phones, and Motorola partnered with Apple to build it. Also, they're a GSM carrier, and they seem to sell bleeding edge phones a little bit quicker than other carriers. Motorola probably built the first version as GSM because more carriers use that protocol. I love Verizon, but ditched 'em for Cingular because Cingular gets cooler phones faster. Granted, the coverage isn't as good, but hey, geeks love toys.
You could say the same thing about all kinds of niche features on today's laptops:
Who needs firewire? I mean, really, if you're going to edit video, why would you do it on a laptop with its miserably small, dim screen, slow internal drives, and short battery life?
Who needs a TV tuner? Why fork over $2,000 for a laptop that can't show a decent picture with a DirecTV tuner or a satellite box, and even then you're looking at a tiny screen? You can get a bigger and better TV for $150 from Wal-Mart.
The answer to all of these questions (and the RAID one) is that more people are ditching desktops for laptops as their primary machines.
Intel's doing the right thing by offering RAID support at the chipset level because it really doesn't cost them much. What if vendors suddenly came out with dramatically better battery life, or hard drives that required less power? We're already seeing smaller hard drives. Intel's just getting their own part of the work out of the way - in business, you never want to be the weak link in the chain.
Sure, but what if you run a company and want to un-wire your campus?
Commercial use of GSM frequencies requires a license from the FCC. It isn't an open frequency like 802.11b operates on.
...could even be scaled up to provide large areas of free GSM service.
How exactly do you get large numbers of GSM transceivers for free? This sounds suspiciously like a dot-bomb business model. I mean, I'm willing to buy a wifi router and give away my internet connection because any tool with a wifi card can figure out how it works and take advantage of it. But buy a GSM transceiver, host an Asterisk server, and manage it all for strangers who walk past my house? What a tech support pain in the ass.
Apple should take note of this surge of interest and really consider selling the OS only. I know I'd line up to buy one.
If they did, then they'd have to support it on your hardware, and that's a money-losing proposition this early in the game. Even if you publish a very specific set of supported devices, you immediately take a huge support load hit when everybody and their brother starts bringing in their devices that kinda-sorta-but-not-quite made the list. Plus, you get the negative PR that comes with, "I bought the new OSX, but it kept crashing on my Crapposan P4 that I got from Ebay."
Cool! I'm glad you think so! If you would, please show up at our store (you can find the address on the website), and install Linux on all of our PC's along with an open source point of sale system, and an open source accounting package. It should be a seamless transition. Sunday mornings are the best time for us. Looking forward to seeing you then!
Be careful what you ask for. I went through a consulting gig cleaning up after something just like that. The business owner got a friendly neighborhood geek to install a complete Linux setup at his small office. Two months later, after countless support calls for things that truly weren't related to Linux (crashing hard drives due to El Cheapo equipment, crashes from bad drivers, etc), the geek threw his hands up in the air and decided he had better things to do with his free time, and started charging $$$ for support calls. The business owner realized he had the same support costs whether he was using MS or Linux, and decided to switch back to what he was comfortable with.
Buyer beware: there's nothing wrong with relying on free software, but you can't rely on free consulting for your business. It dries up sooner or later. Whenever you need human labor, it's going to cost money, and no small business network is labor-free.
You're using examples of Ebay, Google and Microsoft's web sites as your "large-scale" web app description. If you truly do want to build something as large-scale as that, then you're going to have a lot of hiring to do. Take a look at your local market - or even better, place ads for architect-level people in each of the languages you're considering. See what kinds of people you get, and that should weigh into your decision.
...can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet.
As far as I'm concerned, she doesn't even have to sit. She just has to lie there, hold still, and keep moving those hands and fluttering those eyelids. Maybe breathe a little harder too.
was thousands of people happily uninstalling iPodder and other low-quality podcast clients.
Man, am I glad there's finally a big podcast client that doesn't suck. Thank you, Apple, for making the basic stuff easy.
When I was an IT director I would have fired anyone who did a deployment w/o testing
He's the IT director. The guy who did the rollout has already been fired.
So can I file for unemployment for myself, and then complain about identity theft and say I didn't get it?
Sounds like a free iPod a week for half a year! I'm up for that game. Where do I sign up?
Remember that that cold soldering iron "Cold Heat" you see advertised on TV late night was invented by Romanian immigrants.
Yeah, and before you diss Americans, that "Pocket Fisherman" you see advertised on TV late night was invented by Americans...
Great... now the fat, sweaty, stupid, irritating, guy next to me on every single flight I've ever taken can now be surfing for horse pr0n
I hate to break this to you, but I was actually doing that the whole time on my Treo. I just kept it in my pocket and snuck looks when you went to the restroom.
Steve Ballmer
Please seek help.
OK, sure. What's a good psychologist blog I could read?
I read Macromedia's blogs religiously because I find 'em very interesting. It helps me build a personal, emotional connection to software. The guys behind the software are real people with ideas and struggles just like me, and that gives me warm and fuzzy feelings.
Why would any company not want to establish personal, emotional connections to their software?
Yeah, sure, there's risks involved if your employees reveal corporate secrets or turbulence, but if you trust them enough with your source code, why would you think they wouldn't be smart enough to walk the line with blogs as well? If you don't trust your employees enough to blog, it doesn't say anything about your employees - it says something about your paranoia and your inability to hire reliable staff.
(And yes, I have a personal blog, and no, I'm not allowed to talk about company stuff in it, and yes, I've been disciplined for even coming close to the line.)
I'm a touch typist and what I think just goes to my hands.
Using a phone keyboard? Your mind just automatically thinks to hit the 6 three times to get an oh? Man, you're way l33t.
Are you using two thumbs, or just one? What's the secret? You gotta fill me in.
-.. ..- .... .-.-.-
(Damn Slashdot's filters. Telling me to use less junk characters. Morse code isn't junk! It's top quality characters!)
If you were really a time traveler, why would you want to show up at a known place on a known date? The government would be waiting with an awesome arsenal of firepower, waiting to forcefully take your tools from you.
Or if you're the big-business conspiracy theory type, substitute "government" for "private mercenaries."
They've already called it "a joke":
Sun Micro President Denies Report of Plan to Go Private
I'm always amazed how people seem to be able to judge the quality of an operating system within just a couple of hours.
Journalists, especially high-profile ones like Mossberg, get preview versions of new gear long before the rest of us specifically so they can review it. They sign non-disclosure agreements to make sure the technology doesn't get into The Wrong Hands, and the vendors generally know the journalists will behave because the journalists have their entire career invested in it. If Mossberg tried to distribute pirated versions of Tiger ahead of the release date, Apple would stop giving him advance copies, and he'd lose prestige as a journalist.
does this mean I can tust my computer now?
Not if you're using the spell checker at the moment, no.
It humours me how people are unwilling to go the final step and just make a freakin slate tablet.
/HP makes one that my boss uses, actually. The handwriting recognition just isn't that good yet: if you tend to write long, technical-oriented stuff (like programming or tech docs) then you're far better off with the keyboard. It has a detachable keyboard, but frankly, if you take the keyboard off, then it's never around when you need it. You end up carrying it around all the time no matter what, and then what's the point?
Compaq