Given how long military pilots have been using flight simulators, it makes sense that there would be a similar type of computerized Risk game for commanders. It will be interesting to see the crossover between the military use of it, and the commercial / retail aspect of it. Where Hollywood fits into this, other than through its ownership of the software firm in question, is a bit sketchy to me - that article is pretty hokey IMHO.
I tried to stay out of this, but the iPod bashing seems to continue.
Seems to be a lot of talk about the iPod being dead-in-the-water (or nearly so) as an MP3 player. I, as a NJB owner and occasional Apple owner (my G3 has been powered up twice in the past year), find the iPod quite appealing, and would gladly exchange my NJB plus two hundred dollars for one. Here's why the iPod will, IMHO, kick the NJB's butt.
#1 - Size. The NJB is exactly the wrong size, as are all the other HD-based MP3 players I've seen. Too big to be really carry-in-on-you portable, too small to hold a useable display or enough buttons to properly save/name playlists, manage files, explore your collection etc.
#2 - Data storage. The NJB didn't used to do this, and even now barely does.
#3 - Speed. USB. Slow. Firewire. Fast. Swapping out even a 6GB NJB MP3 library takes a LONG, LONG time, like many hours. Assuming the software doesn't time out on you, which, ten firmwares later, it still does. Often.
#4 - Reliability. PB5300s be damned, Apple makes decent stuff. I'm on my second NJB, and its starting to die too. Creative puts a *90-day* warranty on the things, they're so flaky. Really.
#5 - Battery life. The NJB gets 2 hours IME from a set of NiMH AAs. There are also issues with overheating, failure to charge, and improper charge status reporting on the units. What good is 1000 hours of music if you can only enjoy it two hours at a time? Many NJB owners are resorting to $50-$70 ratpacks worth of bulky NiMH D-cells to get to the 10hr battery life the iPod advertizes as standard. Bring on the lithium polymer.
#6 - Support. 1-800-SOS-APPL vs. we-wont-even-give-you-a-number-to-call-unless-you- go-through-this-web-wizard and "we think you dropped it". Worse if you're outside the US. Sign me up for some iPod Applecare - after two dead Rios and two dead NJB's, I could use some warranty love.
#7 - Output level. Based on the Reg's comment about the iPod sounding good, and based on the fact that NJB owners everywhere are opening up their units (voiding their 90 day warranty) to try to solder in a reasonable output level.
#8 - Aesthetics. 'nuff said.
#9 - Price. The iPod is cheaper ($400USD) than the NJB was when I bought my first one at $759CAD ($499USD), less than a year ago. If this 1.8" drive format is standardized, then bigger drives should be able to be shoehorned in, as NJB owners have been doing.
#10 - Drive letter (or the mac version, mount-it-on-the-desktop) support. Try using cheeseball banner-ads-galore gotta-use-it-to-load-the-device-whoops-i-crashed-a gain Creative Playcenter and you'll see what I mean.
#11 - Boot times. Even with the latest firmware, its still 20+ seconds from powering the unit up to getting a sound out of it. For those with bigger HDs, older firmware, or less-than-perfect ID3 tags, startup times of two minutes or more are the norm. I can't imagine the iPod would be worse than THAT.
#12 - Proprietary file system with no repair / diagnosis options. There's no way to do a "real" format on an NJB. As in one that actually looks for bad sectors. One bad sector on your fragile fujitsu 2.5" HD? Count on lockups, freezeups, and untold general annoyances. There's no defrag, either.
There's plenty more, but I think the point is made. 'nuff of the pooh-poohing. As soon as someone can get this thing to accept MP3s from a PeeCee running Windoze and/or Linux, it will be the next big thing. (and save the archos jukebox praise, unless you've actually used one - or at least fondled a dead one).
Haha, doncha know he bought his Win9x license legitimately off Ebay?
Just what we need...
m@
Why this? Why not that? Why did I post?
on
Portable N64
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There seems to be an awful lot of "why bother" posts on here. Obviously hardware hacking and/or "portablizing" isn't for everyone - so why assume that what you think would be cool is what someone else thinks would be cool? The fact is that this guy decided to take something apart and build a smaller custom cabinet for it, interfacing a few things that aren't supposed to go together. Regardless of what your iBook does, what the XBox could do with a really long extension cord, or what games look better on what system, the point is that some guy took one of his electronic devices, and repackaged it into something smaller and funky looking. It could have been anything - stop thinking about what device he chose (admittedly his contraption is pretty strange) and instead look at what he did - some interesting hardware modifications and some neat "use whatcha got" hardware adaptations. No need to fire off cheap shots of discouragement.
You're right that its expensive - Acadia is now (and from what I recall was even before the program started) the most expensive university in Canada. Atlantic Canada has, one could argue, entirely too many universities in the first place, and locking one up into such a high-tech venture certainly leaves plenty of other schools for those who aren't interested in it. For the first few years the program existed, faculty support (and thus relevance to the students) was lacking, but as the program becomes a way of life, it is actually starting to have a net positive effect.
All of that being said, I'm still not convinced that the 7th grade is the place to be starting this. Especially at the expense of the taxpayer.
(I posted the original article hoping more to generate discussion related to the other parts of the article, but oh well!)
The univeristy I got my first degree from, Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, gives all its students AND all its faculty IBM Thinkpads. It's a very small (less than 4000 students) but well-respected university a few hours north of Maine. Every residence room is wired with 100mbit ethernet to a decent internet pipe, as is every classroom, parts ot the campus pub, most on-campus hangouts, and the first two floors of the library. Even the town, with a population of less than 4,000 (not including the students) has both cable and DSL available for $39CAD (~$25USD)/mo. It's a wired place.
The students really do all use the laptops, and for more than ICQing from one side of class to another (although that's fun too). My fourth year, I was a teaching assistant, and one of my assignments was to moderate online discussion groups for classes on ACME (Acadia's online discussion and coursework system) - one of the things my professors and I found was that the students making the most intelligent posts online were often NOT the students making intelligent points in class - opening up online discussion allowed a lot of shy, nervous, or whatever people to come out and say their piece to the class in a forum that they were comfortable in. Professors really do reply to their emails, and students and professors alike use powerpoints and websites on a regular basis.
Also, because students were posting on a forum (like Slashdot), URLs and other methods of backing points in their arguments up was quite common, and helped to add a level of intelligence and legitimacy to discussions.
Overall, the Acadia Advantage, as it is called, works quite well - while there are some who criticize it, enrollment at the school is up substantially, and students are well-trained in internet research methodology, online collaboration, web publishing, and lots more regardless of their major. It works, and it gets a lot of attention in Canada (its why I chose the school in the first place). Hopefully the same benefits will be seen in giving the computers to younger kids, as the man from Maine proposes.
Early adopters for a new audio format would be primarily
1) Audiophiles
2) Techtoy-loving geeks (thats us)
3) Music freaks
Group 1 is *never* going to embrace a technology that uses lossy compression - and there's no way a 500MB disk is going to hold even a single album without it. Group #1 is looking for 96/24 and increased fidelity and longevity, size be damned.
Group 2 is going to run away at high speed from anything that incorporates rights management to such a crazy degree.
Group 3 is just fine with CDs and CDRs - why pay $10 for a 500MB blank when that same $10 gets you 20 or 30 blank 650MB CDRs that work in every CD player you have, with your choice of lossy (MP3) or lossless (traditional redbook CD audio) formats, and no rights management?
Perhaps I'm missing the obvious here (it happens to me a lot) but, why not pass on the information on the guy here? My guess is you'd have some pretty accurate intelligence information passed back to you in fairly short order. Seven million bored geeks - put 'em to use!
THis will be banned in the work-place. Talk about industrial espionage! "No watches allowed!"
This may be common knowledge, but there are many places in government where wearing any electronic device at all is prohibited, for exactly this reason. CSIS (Canada's spy agency) has such a rule in place, at least for the programmer / hax0r positions. They check you on entry and exit.
Isn't this the same Casio watch camera thing that's been advertized (with some pretty hokey ads) for the past six months?
Unfortunate for us Palm users
on
Palm OS Spinoff
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Unfortunate because:
#1 - Having the OS and hardware made by the same company is IMHO part of what has kept the Palm stable enough to be useable in a "if this crashes with my [flight information / meeting notes / date's phone number] in it, I'm screwed" sort of way. As Apple has shown, there are definite advantages to having the hardware and software guys on the same team.
#2 - As anyone who's dealt with Windoze will attest, the "it's their fault" / "no its THEIR fault" blame shifting that goes on between software and hardware vendors whenever a conflict comes up can only mean one thing: much longer waiting times before issues are resolved. With present-day Palm, like with Apple, we the consumer can say "your problem, you fix it!" and, while they may not fix it, they at least have to acknowledge that, hardware or software, its their company's problem and not some other company's problem.
#3 - Dilution of the OS. The Palm OS works as well as it does because it is purpose built. I daresay Win CE has, as one of its many faults, the "all things to all people" problem, which makes it bloated and cumbersome and all that. Once a seperate company owns the Palm OS, logically they would seek to expand it across as many different pieces of hardware as possible, to maximize revenue and marketshare. As the OS is rewritten to run on more and more things, it moves away from the original "here's the OS we wrote to run on this one little machine" and closer to "here's a Windows CE competitor. Hey Bill! Come and crush us!".
Obviously, I'm no expert. But its food for thought.
It should be a simple software fix to upgrade the telemarketer's systems to search for something beyond that simple tone - even recognizing the entire "the number you have reached has been disconnected" speech pattern would be pretty simple I would think.
A better solution would involve telepone companies getting involved - say you get such a call, you could dial *TELEMARKETER or something, and the number that just called you would be added to a blacklist - when enough people blacklisted the number, that number would be prevented from making outgoing calls for a set period of time.
Ahh, if only the telephone companies didn't make so much money off telemarketers, think of how quickly they would be gotten rid of.
(naive mode off) oh wait... we still have spam... scratch that last bit of wishful thinking then.
If, as the story suggests, MS really is going after those selling even single lisences, (I can understand them freaking if I sold 20,000 NT lisc. packs all at once, for example), they're doing themselves no service. A few reasons for my statement.
#1 - a lot of the software in question can NOT be purchased new any more, so its not like MS is missing out on a Win95 sale - there's plenty of legitimate uses for old Win9x OS, esp if you have a machine that has limited RAM or CPU (ie my toshiba libretto, a P75 with 16MB). IE no loss. So why spend the $
#2 - people buying used OS's are not buying them to get the disks. Come on, everybody and their brother has a CDR and will burn you off a copy of the Windows cabinet files. I'd like to see a geek version of Survivor, where we get dropped into a foreign country and have to come up with a CDR filled with Microsoft Juarez as quickly as possible. It would be a half-hour show, unedited. Point: people are buying these things on EBay because they want to be quasi-legitimate, ie "I should buy a copy of the software that I use!". Remove that as a possibility, and how many people are really going to spend $150 on an OS for a $150 computer? Arrr, Billy, time t'uh fire up me CDR!
#3 - Given that many computer buyers pay extra for their copy of Windows (ie, it was an option for $100 or so - most system builders do this in the US, yes?). If I pay extra for a feature, can I not sell it off seperately? I (as joe computer buyer) didn't sign or agree anything beyond that flimsy click-through contract at startup, and who's to say it was even me that set up the computer instead of my 7 year old daughter?
I can't see this being a smart idea. All it does is make M$ look bad, and encourage those who want to go legit but don't want to buy, or cant use, the latest OS, to pirate.
I was looking for pretty much the exact same thing as you, about two months ago. I settled on a refurb IBM Thinkpad 770x I got off ebay for $700, but I've seen them as low as $500 depending on the video features. It can hold two LiOn batteries at once, and you can hot-swap batteries (ie if you had ten batteries, you could keep swapping between them, yanking one out while the other powers the machine - with the money you save on the thing, you could buy a bag full of batteries).
It's a PII-300, which is plenty for everything I do (human rights reporting in a developing country with unpredictable power, half 110v, half 220v, half the time not working) and should be fine for coding. Big 14" TFT screen, nice IBM keyboard, built in 56k modem (altho I put in a 3com 10/100 / worldport cellular card). It's also got a digital LCD that indicates % battery remaining, and the standby function with win2k works very quickly (ie you can punch it inand out of standby mode in 3-5 seconds, standby being virtually zero power). I put 320mb of ram in mine.
Also has hardware DVD decoding (dvd drive goes where the 2nd battery does, and you can hot-swap), AC3 audio out, SVideo capture and TV out, NTSC, PAL and SECAM. Infrared on the front and the back if you're palmy. Stereo speakers.
Considering how quickly laptops depeciate (the 770X was $3499USD MSRP two years ago), it seems silly to buy a 1ghz machine if you don't need it. These machines have 3 yr wty on them, which means you can buy one that still has a year left on it - word on the street (well usenet street) is that IBM careth not whether or not you're the original owner. A pal in IBM service confirmed this, but ymmv.
Hope this helps, email me if you want more info.
More embarassing than innovative
on
Talking Palm
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I can't see this being a bit hit. My experience with voice recognition software, even on fast computers, has been that without a good microphone and very little background noise, recognition is horrific. Most of the world is, unfortunately, rather noisy and as such muttering into a palm pilot is going to produce very little workable speech - and yelling into a palm pilot is likely to get one arrested for being a freak.
Worse - imagine sitting in a boardroom meeting.
CEO: "well, gang, sales results are up for this quarter!"
fifteen cronies all mutter into thier palm pilots in unison - "well comma gang comma sales results are up for this quarter exclamation mark new sentence" except for the one poor sap who accidentally brushed his thumb across the front panel of the palm while dictating, and is madly muttering "begin edit delete r-e-s-u-l-t-s-delete-s end edit". Just what the world needs - longer meetings.
Or a girl gives you her number at a bar, and you proceed to yell it into your palm pilot - is that cool? What about those of us who love using our palm pilots while in the bathroom? Imagine wandering into a public bathroom with geeks muttering in every stall? The kind of stuff I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night having nightmares about, I tell you. Even grocery stores would produce entries like this:
TODO LIST: Don't forget attention shoppers to get sale on meatloaf a gift in aisle for mom seven
In related news, the Canadian government has announced today its first step towards national ID cards - the "maple leaf card" (no folks I am not making this up) to be issued to new immigrants to Canada. Sadly for those of us who would like to see IDs unforgeable, has such groundbreaking new anti-tamper technologies as "magnetic stripes" - (gasps of amazement) and "might one day maybe be upgraded to" fingerprints, etc. Sounds to me that the Canadian government is more interested in rushing something into useage, with no more thought to security than has been put into Canadian "tamper-proof" (read widely counterfeited) passports and other identification cards.
It will be interesting to see if this card is expanded to cover all Canadian citizens at some point - a recent Globe and Mail Poll suggested 80% of Canadians would be willing to carry and show a national ID card. Of course, like Canadian border security and Canadian passports, this card too will become a farce if its not designed and implemented with a modicum of security. Somehow, to my brain, it seems pretty sketchy to entrust national security to a magnetic-stripe based card.
There are more submarines in Canada's biggest mall (West Edmonton) than in the Canadian Navy.... and Americans have better encryption on the cards in their TV sets (DirecTV, we all know how secure that is) than Canadians will have on their national ID cards. Bleh.
IDs at airline check-ins don't do anything for security, partly because getting fake IDs is so easy.
No form of IDing people is effective if IDs are easily faked. Were airline check-in IDs done "properly", ie an effective form of ID was presented that was:
#1 - Nearly impossible to fake
#2 - Confirmed via network connection (like a credit card)
...then much more could be done - an "all-points-bulletin" on an individual would come much closer to preventing his flight (both literally and figuratively) than any such system available now, and would do so nearly instantaneously. Much like nuclear weapons or Dan Quayle's mouth, it would have to be tightly controlled by the government so as not be misused, but the principle is sound.
Also, if there was a bar code or similar machine-readable encoding of the number on the ID card, then soon anyone (airline, dentist, grocery store, border guard, building security) would start swiping the card and recording our movements and activities in a way that would be very easy to combine in giant databases.
At least the way I understand it, presentation of this card to non-government types would be optional - I can't see them wrestling your card from you in the grocery over your right to buy a rutabaga. In Canada, for example, from what I recall it is illegal for any non-government person to demand your SIN - they can ask, but they can not prevent you from anything should you not provide it (and provide sufficient alternate identification). Obviously legislation like this would prevent the abuses you're talking about. Heck our passports are all individually numbered, but my dentist rarely asks to see it. Compared to encryption backdoors and export restrictions, Tempest monitoring, nuclear weapons, and all the other no-fun-for-common-folk stuff the US gov't has at its disposal, universal ID cards don't seem all that scary to me.
At the risk of sounding overly pessimistic, I would have to concede that the *vast* majority of American society acts (spends, purchases, travels, fills out stupid contest forms, surfs the web, etc etc) in such a way that there is no real privacy or anonymity. The addition of a single universal identification card is not going to change that one way or the other, for the simple reason that it would stay in your wallet 99.9% of the time. Purchasing something? Use your tracked-and-databased credit card, or some cash you withdrew using your tracked-and-databased bank card. Heck, even write a tracked-and-databased cheque or fill out a tracked-and-databased withdrawal slip at the local bank if you're really old-fashioned. Given the phenomenal popularity of so-called "rewards programs", with their accompanying tracked-and-databased "membership cards" in virtually every sector of consumer-ness, its pretty hard to advance the argument that the average computer gives an arse about his or her privacy. The card would come out for international travel, airline boardings, government service renewals (license and plate renewals, traffic stops, airport visits, etc). Even if the government has this information, so what? It's not like they're not going to figure out based on your credit card / airline paper trail. The difference is the speed with which felons / unwanted persons can be found - "you can't come on the plane, you're under arrest" versus "CNN has just learned that person x, who flew into the World Trade Center last month, was actually tagged in a government database somewhere!"
With the assumption that the intent of this program would be protect those who obey the law (ie joe citizen), what exactly is wrong with adopting a federal identification system?
According to a recent Washington Post article, there are more than a half million Americans wandering around the country with outstanding arrest warrants. That's ten times the adult population of the country I'm in, so forgive me for saying it sounds like a lot of criminals. One particularly telling quote from that article of interest to the original poster and his theory of "isn't our drivers license enough?": "Right now, if you have an outstanding parking ticket, you can't get your license renewed. But if you have a murder warrant out on you, you still get your license renewed," said Mike Davis, spokesman for the Baltimore County Executive Office.
Perhaps I'm being too logical here, but it seems a system of national identity cards would do a lot more good than harm. A half million felons. Hnmm.
As for the counterfeiting option, one would hope that Sun, Oracle and the feds could between them come up with a card that could not be easily counterfeited, and that could be updated remotely as security breaches were identified. Assuming it was connected to an "active" system (ie cards can be validated / invalidated by a central server so that duplicates and/or invalid cards would be ferreted out quickly, unlike the passive systems such as used in DirecTV et al).
Like bicycle locks and car alarms, a universal, centrally-administered digital ID card represents an item that would be totally unneccesary if it weren't for the criminal element in society. Sad, but becoming increasingly neccesary IMHO. (whew, I'm done... anyone still reading?)
(abovementioned WP article here - http://www.browardcrime.com/tyntk_052000_fugitives.htm)
When Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, we responded not by becoming independent from fossil fuels but by establishing a permanent military presence in Islamic holy lands. Even then we were warned by ibn Laden of the consequences of our actions. Even now he is saying that America will not be safe until we leave their holy lands.
You're right. We responded not by instantly switching from our centuries-old dependencies on fossil fuel to Mr. Fusion-powered cars and oh-so-good-for-the-environment NiCD-powered electric cars (1990 remember), all the while letting the Kurds and Kuwaitis and (undoubtedly in short order) the Israelis get steamrolled by Iraq. Instead we responded to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait by taking our ships and aircraft to the Gulf and floating around for a few months saying "please get out of Kuwait and go back to your own country. Respect their sovereignty and we will respect yours." From August to January, we floated around and tried diplomacy. When it didn't work, we (the Western world - I'm not American) punted the Iraqis back into their own country. We did not level Bagdhad.
Of course Bin Laden wants us out of the Middle East. How will he set up his pan-Arabic regime if the US is hanging around trying to protect smaller countries (Kuwait, Israel, et al)?
If the US leaves the Middle East, what will happen to Israel and its 6 million people? Well, just before they get completely slaughtered, they'll fire off their 100+ nuclear weapons - the so-called "Samson option". Tens of millions of Arabs who think their god is telling them to destroy Israel, and more than a hundred nuclear warheads within Israel's borders intent on proving them wrong. And having the US there as a stabilizing influence is a bad idea? You think Iraq would have stopped at Kuwait?
It's not a US thing. And its not even a US-plus-the-countries-kissing-the-US'-ass thing. There's a reason so many countries supported the actions of the Bush administration in 1990, and a similar reason so many countries support the actions of this Bush administration. And it isn't because they're all getting paid off by insert-big-corporation-here. It's because the alternative is even worse.
As for the crack about diplomacy, if you followed the past few international issues with the Taliban, such as their destroying of monuments or their imprisoning of aid workers, you'd understand that the Taliban is not interested in negotiating with the western world.
...sounds just like Hollow Man. An hour into it I was like "hmm, neat idea, let's see where they take it!" and then, as if someone had swapped scripts half-way thru, the movie went south, FAST. At least I didn't pay to see it (lord love divx)...
Slashdot Mirror
That would be The Last Starfighter. Lots of 80's vintage Cray rendering in that flick if memory serves correctly.
Given how long military pilots have been using flight simulators, it makes sense that there would be a similar type of computerized Risk game for commanders. It will be interesting to see the crossover between the military use of it, and the commercial / retail aspect of it. Where Hollywood fits into this, other than through its ownership of the software firm in question, is a bit sketchy to me - that article is pretty hokey IMHO.
Of course, the whole thing kinda reminds me of when the Marine Corps used DOOM II to train 4-man fire teams.
I tried to stay out of this, but the iPod bashing seems to continue.
- go-through-this-web-wizard and "we think you dropped it". Worse if you're outside the US. Sign me up for some iPod Applecare - after two dead Rios and two dead NJB's, I could use some warranty love.
a gain Creative Playcenter and you'll see what I mean.
Seems to be a lot of talk about the iPod being dead-in-the-water (or nearly so) as an MP3 player. I, as a NJB owner and occasional Apple owner (my G3 has been powered up twice in the past year), find the iPod quite appealing, and would gladly exchange my NJB plus two hundred dollars for one. Here's why the iPod will, IMHO, kick the NJB's butt.
#1 - Size. The NJB is exactly the wrong size, as are all the other HD-based MP3 players I've seen. Too big to be really carry-in-on-you portable, too small to hold a useable display or enough buttons to properly save/name playlists, manage files, explore your collection etc.
#2 - Data storage. The NJB didn't used to do this, and even now barely does.
#3 - Speed. USB. Slow. Firewire. Fast. Swapping out even a 6GB NJB MP3 library takes a LONG, LONG time, like many hours. Assuming the software doesn't time out on you, which, ten firmwares later, it still does. Often.
#4 - Reliability. PB5300s be damned, Apple makes decent stuff. I'm on my second NJB, and its starting to die too. Creative puts a *90-day* warranty on the things, they're so flaky. Really.
#5 - Battery life. The NJB gets 2 hours IME from a set of NiMH AAs. There are also issues with overheating, failure to charge, and improper charge status reporting on the units. What good is 1000 hours of music if you can only enjoy it two hours at a time? Many NJB owners are resorting to $50-$70 ratpacks worth of bulky NiMH D-cells to get to the 10hr battery life the iPod advertizes as standard. Bring on the lithium polymer.
#6 - Support. 1-800-SOS-APPL vs. we-wont-even-give-you-a-number-to-call-unless-you
#7 - Output level. Based on the Reg's comment about the iPod sounding good, and based on the fact that NJB owners everywhere are opening up their units (voiding their 90 day warranty) to try to solder in a reasonable output level.
#8 - Aesthetics. 'nuff said.
#9 - Price. The iPod is cheaper ($400USD) than the NJB was when I bought my first one at $759CAD ($499USD), less than a year ago. If this 1.8" drive format is standardized, then bigger drives should be able to be shoehorned in, as NJB owners have been doing.
#10 - Drive letter (or the mac version, mount-it-on-the-desktop) support. Try using cheeseball banner-ads-galore gotta-use-it-to-load-the-device-whoops-i-crashed-
#11 - Boot times. Even with the latest firmware, its still 20+ seconds from powering the unit up to getting a sound out of it. For those with bigger HDs, older firmware, or less-than-perfect ID3 tags, startup times of two minutes or more are the norm. I can't imagine the iPod would be worse than THAT.
#12 - Proprietary file system with no repair / diagnosis options. There's no way to do a "real" format on an NJB. As in one that actually looks for bad sectors. One bad sector on your fragile fujitsu 2.5" HD? Count on lockups, freezeups, and untold general annoyances. There's no defrag, either.
There's plenty more, but I think the point is made. 'nuff of the pooh-poohing. As soon as someone can get this thing to accept MP3s from a PeeCee running Windoze and/or Linux, it will be the next big thing. (and save the archos jukebox praise, unless you've actually used one - or at least fondled a dead one).
Haha, doncha know he bought his Win9x license legitimately off Ebay?
Just what we need...
m@
There seems to be an awful lot of "why bother" posts on here. Obviously hardware hacking and/or "portablizing" isn't for everyone - so why assume that what you think would be cool is what someone else thinks would be cool? The fact is that this guy decided to take something apart and build a smaller custom cabinet for it, interfacing a few things that aren't supposed to go together. Regardless of what your iBook does, what the XBox could do with a really long extension cord, or what games look better on what system, the point is that some guy took one of his electronic devices, and repackaged it into something smaller and funky looking. It could have been anything - stop thinking about what device he chose (admittedly his contraption is pretty strange) and instead look at what he did - some interesting hardware modifications and some neat "use whatcha got" hardware adaptations. No need to fire off cheap shots of discouragement.
You're right that its expensive - Acadia is now (and from what I recall was even before the program started) the most expensive university in Canada. Atlantic Canada has, one could argue, entirely too many universities in the first place, and locking one up into such a high-tech venture certainly leaves plenty of other schools for those who aren't interested in it. For the first few years the program existed, faculty support (and thus relevance to the students) was lacking, but as the program becomes a way of life, it is actually starting to have a net positive effect.
All of that being said, I'm still not convinced that the 7th grade is the place to be starting this. Especially at the expense of the taxpayer.
(I posted the original article hoping more to generate discussion related to the other parts of the article, but oh well!)
The univeristy I got my first degree from, Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, gives all its students AND all its faculty IBM Thinkpads. It's a very small (less than 4000 students) but well-respected university a few hours north of Maine. Every residence room is wired with 100mbit ethernet to a decent internet pipe, as is every classroom, parts ot the campus pub, most on-campus hangouts, and the first two floors of the library. Even the town, with a population of less than 4,000 (not including the students) has both cable and DSL available for $39CAD (~$25USD)/mo. It's a wired place.
The students really do all use the laptops, and for more than ICQing from one side of class to another (although that's fun too). My fourth year, I was a teaching assistant, and one of my assignments was to moderate online discussion groups for classes on ACME (Acadia's online discussion and coursework system) - one of the things my professors and I found was that the students making the most intelligent posts online were often NOT the students making intelligent points in class - opening up online discussion allowed a lot of shy, nervous, or whatever people to come out and say their piece to the class in a forum that they were comfortable in. Professors really do reply to their emails, and students and professors alike use powerpoints and websites on a regular basis.
Also, because students were posting on a forum (like Slashdot), URLs and other methods of backing points in their arguments up was quite common, and helped to add a level of intelligence and legitimacy to discussions.
Overall, the Acadia Advantage, as it is called, works quite well - while there are some who criticize it, enrollment at the school is up substantially, and students are well-trained in internet research methodology, online collaboration, web publishing, and lots more regardless of their major. It works, and it gets a lot of attention in Canada (its why I chose the school in the first place). Hopefully the same benefits will be seen in giving the computers to younger kids, as the man from Maine proposes.
Early adopters for a new audio format would be primarily
1) Audiophiles
2) Techtoy-loving geeks (thats us)
3) Music freaks
Group 1 is *never* going to embrace a technology that uses lossy compression - and there's no way a 500MB disk is going to hold even a single album without it. Group #1 is looking for 96/24 and increased fidelity and longevity, size be damned.
Group 2 is going to run away at high speed from anything that incorporates rights management to such a crazy degree.
Group 3 is just fine with CDs and CDRs - why pay $10 for a 500MB blank when that same $10 gets you 20 or 30 blank 650MB CDRs that work in every CD player you have, with your choice of lossy (MP3) or lossless (traditional redbook CD audio) formats, and no rights management?
How can this possibly succeed? I don't get it.
Perhaps I'm missing the obvious here (it happens to me a lot) but, why not pass on the information on the guy here? My guess is you'd have some pretty accurate intelligence information passed back to you in fairly short order. Seven million bored geeks - put 'em to use!
THis will be banned in the work-place. Talk about industrial espionage! "No watches allowed!"
This may be common knowledge, but there are many places in government where wearing any electronic device at all is prohibited, for exactly this reason. CSIS (Canada's spy agency) has such a rule in place, at least for the programmer / hax0r positions. They check you on entry and exit.
Isn't this the same Casio watch camera thing that's been advertized (with some pretty hokey ads) for the past six months?
Unfortunate because:
#1 - Having the OS and hardware made by the same company is IMHO part of what has kept the Palm stable enough to be useable in a "if this crashes with my [flight information / meeting notes / date's phone number] in it, I'm screwed" sort of way. As Apple has shown, there are definite advantages to having the hardware and software guys on the same team.
#2 - As anyone who's dealt with Windoze will attest, the "it's their fault" / "no its THEIR fault" blame shifting that goes on between software and hardware vendors whenever a conflict comes up can only mean one thing: much longer waiting times before issues are resolved. With present-day Palm, like with Apple, we the consumer can say "your problem, you fix it!" and, while they may not fix it, they at least have to acknowledge that, hardware or software, its their company's problem and not some other company's problem.
#3 - Dilution of the OS. The Palm OS works as well as it does because it is purpose built. I daresay Win CE has, as one of its many faults, the "all things to all people" problem, which makes it bloated and cumbersome and all that. Once a seperate company owns the Palm OS, logically they would seek to expand it across as many different pieces of hardware as possible, to maximize revenue and marketshare. As the OS is rewritten to run on more and more things, it moves away from the original "here's the OS we wrote to run on this one little machine" and closer to "here's a Windows CE competitor. Hey Bill! Come and crush us!".
Obviously, I'm no expert. But its food for thought.
It should be a simple software fix to upgrade the telemarketer's systems to search for something beyond that simple tone - even recognizing the entire "the number you have reached has been disconnected" speech pattern would be pretty simple I would think.
A better solution would involve telepone companies getting involved - say you get such a call, you could dial *TELEMARKETER or something, and the number that just called you would be added to a blacklist - when enough people blacklisted the number, that number would be prevented from making outgoing calls for a set period of time.
Ahh, if only the telephone companies didn't make so much money off telemarketers, think of how quickly they would be gotten rid of.
(naive mode off) oh wait... we still have spam... scratch that last bit of wishful thinking then.
If, as the story suggests, MS really is going after those selling even single lisences, (I can understand them freaking if I sold 20,000 NT lisc. packs all at once, for example), they're doing themselves no service. A few reasons for my statement.
#1 - a lot of the software in question can NOT be purchased new any more, so its not like MS is missing out on a Win95 sale - there's plenty of legitimate uses for old Win9x OS, esp if you have a machine that has limited RAM or CPU (ie my toshiba libretto, a P75 with 16MB). IE no loss. So why spend the $
#2 - people buying used OS's are not buying them to get the disks. Come on, everybody and their brother has a CDR and will burn you off a copy of the Windows cabinet files. I'd like to see a geek version of Survivor, where we get dropped into a foreign country and have to come up with a CDR filled with Microsoft Juarez as quickly as possible. It would be a half-hour show, unedited. Point: people are buying these things on EBay because they want to be quasi-legitimate, ie "I should buy a copy of the software that I use!". Remove that as a possibility, and how many people are really going to spend $150 on an OS for a $150 computer? Arrr, Billy, time t'uh fire up me CDR!
#3 - Given that many computer buyers pay extra for their copy of Windows (ie, it was an option for $100 or so - most system builders do this in the US, yes?). If I pay extra for a feature, can I not sell it off seperately? I (as joe computer buyer) didn't sign or agree anything beyond that flimsy click-through contract at startup, and who's to say it was even me that set up the computer instead of my 7 year old daughter?
I can't see this being a smart idea. All it does is make M$ look bad, and encourage those who want to go legit but don't want to buy, or cant use, the latest OS, to pirate.
Smart move, Billy....
I was looking for pretty much the exact same thing as you, about two months ago. I settled on a refurb IBM Thinkpad 770x I got off ebay for $700, but I've seen them as low as $500 depending on the video features. It can hold two LiOn batteries at once, and you can hot-swap batteries (ie if you had ten batteries, you could keep swapping between them, yanking one out while the other powers the machine - with the money you save on the thing, you could buy a bag full of batteries).
It's a PII-300, which is plenty for everything I do (human rights reporting in a developing country with unpredictable power, half 110v, half 220v, half the time not working) and should be fine for coding. Big 14" TFT screen, nice IBM keyboard, built in 56k modem (altho I put in a 3com 10/100 / worldport cellular card). It's also got a digital LCD that indicates % battery remaining, and the standby function with win2k works very quickly (ie you can punch it inand out of standby mode in 3-5 seconds, standby being virtually zero power). I put 320mb of ram in mine.
Also has hardware DVD decoding (dvd drive goes where the 2nd battery does, and you can hot-swap), AC3 audio out, SVideo capture and TV out, NTSC, PAL and SECAM. Infrared on the front and the back if you're palmy. Stereo speakers.
Here's one on EBay (no affil, this is an auction that's already ended)
Considering how quickly laptops depeciate (the 770X was $3499USD MSRP two years ago), it seems silly to buy a 1ghz machine if you don't need it. These machines have 3 yr wty on them, which means you can buy one that still has a year left on it - word on the street (well usenet street) is that IBM careth not whether or not you're the original owner. A pal in IBM service confirmed this, but ymmv.
Hope this helps, email me if you want more info.
I can't see this being a bit hit. My experience with voice recognition software, even on fast computers, has been that without a good microphone and very little background noise, recognition is horrific. Most of the world is, unfortunately, rather noisy and as such muttering into a palm pilot is going to produce very little workable speech - and yelling into a palm pilot is likely to get one arrested for being a freak.
Worse - imagine sitting in a boardroom meeting.
CEO: "well, gang, sales results are up for this quarter!"
fifteen cronies all mutter into thier palm pilots in unison - "well comma gang comma sales results are up for this quarter exclamation mark new sentence" except for the one poor sap who accidentally brushed his thumb across the front panel of the palm while dictating, and is madly muttering "begin edit delete r-e-s-u-l-t-s-delete-s end edit". Just what the world needs - longer meetings.
Or a girl gives you her number at a bar, and you proceed to yell it into your palm pilot - is that cool? What about those of us who love using our palm pilots while in the bathroom? Imagine wandering into a public bathroom with geeks muttering in every stall? The kind of stuff I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night having nightmares about, I tell you. Even grocery stores would produce entries like this:
TODO LIST: Don't forget attention shoppers to get sale on meatloaf a gift in aisle for mom seven
I can't see it being too useful.
In related news, the Canadian government has announced today its first step towards national ID cards - the "maple leaf card" (no folks I am not making this up) to be issued to new immigrants to Canada. Sadly for those of us who would like to see IDs unforgeable, has such groundbreaking new anti-tamper technologies as "magnetic stripes" - (gasps of amazement) and "might one day maybe be upgraded to" fingerprints, etc. Sounds to me that the Canadian government is more interested in rushing something into useage, with no more thought to security than has been put into Canadian "tamper-proof" (read widely counterfeited) passports and other identification cards.
Toronto Star Article
Globe and Mail Article
It will be interesting to see if this card is expanded to cover all Canadian citizens at some point - a recent Globe and Mail Poll suggested 80% of Canadians would be willing to carry and show a national ID card. Of course, like Canadian border security and Canadian passports, this card too will become a farce if its not designed and implemented with a modicum of security. Somehow, to my brain, it seems pretty sketchy to entrust national security to a magnetic-stripe based card.
There are more submarines in Canada's biggest mall (West Edmonton) than in the Canadian Navy.... and Americans have better encryption on the cards in their TV sets (DirecTV, we all know how secure that is) than Canadians will have on their national ID cards. Bleh.
IDs at airline check-ins don't do anything for security, partly because getting fake IDs is so easy.
No form of IDing people is effective if IDs are easily faked. Were airline check-in IDs done "properly", ie an effective form of ID was presented that was:
#1 - Nearly impossible to fake
#2 - Confirmed via network connection (like a credit card)
...then much more could be done - an "all-points-bulletin" on an individual would come much closer to preventing his flight (both literally and figuratively) than any such system available now, and would do so nearly instantaneously. Much like nuclear weapons or Dan Quayle's mouth, it would have to be tightly controlled by the government so as not be misused, but the principle is sound.
Also, if there was a bar code or similar machine-readable encoding of the number on the ID card, then soon anyone (airline, dentist, grocery store, border guard, building security) would start swiping the card and recording our movements and activities in a way that would be very easy to combine in giant databases.
At least the way I understand it, presentation of this card to non-government types would be optional - I can't see them wrestling your card from you in the grocery over your right to buy a rutabaga. In Canada, for example, from what I recall it is illegal for any non-government person to demand your SIN - they can ask, but they can not prevent you from anything should you not provide it (and provide sufficient alternate identification). Obviously legislation like this would prevent the abuses you're talking about. Heck our passports are all individually numbered, but my dentist rarely asks to see it. Compared to encryption backdoors and export restrictions, Tempest monitoring, nuclear weapons, and all the other no-fun-for-common-folk stuff the US gov't has at its disposal, universal ID cards don't seem all that scary to me.
m@
At the risk of sounding overly pessimistic, I would have to concede that the *vast* majority of American society acts (spends, purchases, travels, fills out stupid contest forms, surfs the web, etc etc) in such a way that there is no real privacy or anonymity. The addition of a single universal identification card is not going to change that one way or the other, for the simple reason that it would stay in your wallet 99.9% of the time. Purchasing something? Use your tracked-and-databased credit card, or some cash you withdrew using your tracked-and-databased bank card. Heck, even write a tracked-and-databased cheque or fill out a tracked-and-databased withdrawal slip at the local bank if you're really old-fashioned. Given the phenomenal popularity of so-called "rewards programs", with their accompanying tracked-and-databased "membership cards" in virtually every sector of consumer-ness, its pretty hard to advance the argument that the average computer gives an arse about his or her privacy. The card would come out for international travel, airline boardings, government service renewals (license and plate renewals, traffic stops, airport visits, etc). Even if the government has this information, so what? It's not like they're not going to figure out based on your credit card / airline paper trail. The difference is the speed with which felons / unwanted persons can be found - "you can't come on the plane, you're under arrest" versus "CNN has just learned that person x, who flew into the World Trade Center last month, was actually tagged in a government database somewhere!"
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With the assumption that the intent of this program would be protect those who obey the law (ie joe citizen), what exactly is wrong with adopting a federal identification system?
According to a recent Washington Post article, there are more than a half million Americans wandering around the country with outstanding arrest warrants. That's ten times the adult population of the country I'm in, so forgive me for saying it sounds like a lot of criminals. One particularly telling quote from that article of interest to the original poster and his theory of "isn't our drivers license enough?": "Right now, if you have an outstanding parking ticket, you can't get your license renewed. But if you have a murder warrant out on you, you still get your license renewed," said Mike Davis, spokesman for the Baltimore County Executive Office.
Perhaps I'm being too logical here, but it seems a system of national identity cards would do a lot more good than harm. A half million felons. Hnmm.
As for the counterfeiting option, one would hope that Sun, Oracle and the feds could between them come up with a card that could not be easily counterfeited, and that could be updated remotely as security breaches were identified. Assuming it was connected to an "active" system (ie cards can be validated / invalidated by a central server so that duplicates and/or invalid cards would be ferreted out quickly, unlike the passive systems such as used in DirecTV et al).
Like bicycle locks and car alarms, a universal, centrally-administered digital ID card represents an item that would be totally unneccesary if it weren't for the criminal element in society. Sad, but becoming increasingly neccesary IMHO. (whew, I'm done... anyone still reading?)
(abovementioned WP article here - http://www.browardcrime.com/tyntk_052000_fugitive
When Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, we responded not by becoming independent from fossil fuels but by establishing a permanent military presence in Islamic holy lands. Even then we were warned by ibn Laden of the consequences of our actions. Even now he is saying that America will not be safe until we leave their holy lands.
You're right. We responded not by instantly switching from our centuries-old dependencies on fossil fuel to Mr. Fusion-powered cars and oh-so-good-for-the-environment NiCD-powered electric cars (1990 remember), all the while letting the Kurds and Kuwaitis and (undoubtedly in short order) the Israelis get steamrolled by Iraq. Instead we responded to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait by taking our ships and aircraft to the Gulf and floating around for a few months saying "please get out of Kuwait and go back to your own country. Respect their sovereignty and we will respect yours." From August to January, we floated around and tried diplomacy. When it didn't work, we (the Western world - I'm not American) punted the Iraqis back into their own country. We did not level Bagdhad.
Of course Bin Laden wants us out of the Middle East. How will he set up his pan-Arabic regime if the US is hanging around trying to protect smaller countries (Kuwait, Israel, et al)?
If the US leaves the Middle East, what will happen to Israel and its 6 million people? Well, just before they get completely slaughtered, they'll fire off their 100+ nuclear weapons - the so-called "Samson option". Tens of millions of Arabs who think their god is telling them to destroy Israel, and more than a hundred nuclear warheads within Israel's borders intent on proving them wrong. And having the US there as a stabilizing influence is a bad idea? You think Iraq would have stopped at Kuwait?
It's not a US thing. And its not even a US-plus-the-countries-kissing-the-US'-ass thing. There's a reason so many countries supported the actions of the Bush administration in 1990, and a similar reason so many countries support the actions of this Bush administration. And it isn't because they're all getting paid off by insert-big-corporation-here. It's because the alternative is even worse.
As for the crack about diplomacy, if you followed the past few international issues with the Taliban, such as their destroying of monuments or their imprisoning of aid workers, you'd understand that the Taliban is not interested in negotiating with the western world.
m@
...sounds just like Hollow Man. An hour into it I was like "hmm, neat idea, let's see where they take it!" and then, as if someone had swapped scripts half-way thru, the movie went south, FAST. At least I didn't pay to see it (lord love divx)...