I'll believe IE 7 is secure when it has been out for 6-12 months and hasn't had a major vulnerability reported.
You had better not run Firefox than, because Firefox has never had a period that long wihout a major vulnerability.
Assuming that you're safe because you're not Microsoft is like assuming that the 747 is safe because it's not a DC-10. Microsoft software continues to get more secure. If an attitude of immunity prevails in the oepn-source community, it's only a matter of time until Microsoft software will be more secure.
If a temporary page area is what you're looking for, one of the many personal Wiki services out there is probably a better bet. My project, Wikinote, requires only a username and password to sign up (no email address or other info), provides a decent amount of Wiki markup (though very little control over page appearence), and keeps page history if you ever need to revert. In addition, SSL is used throughout the page, passwords are salted and hashed (and never stored), and there is integration with Shortify to automatically save URLs for later reference.
Why? Because although these books were licensed by Lucas, they were not official parts of the story.
Actually, most EU content is considered cannon, unless it disagrees with the films or other Lucas-produced works. Indeed, much of the content used in the prequels came from the EU.
I never got this from Slashdot. Did you ever consider that basic cellular phones don't go away when the user is done with them?
Seriously, there are thousands of decent GSM phones that you can get on eBay. The Nokia 3590 is one of my favorites - great RF, GSM 850/1900 (covers the entire US, Canada, and Mexico), good battery life, and a simple UI.
Guess what? The Nokia 3590 goes for $25 on eBay.
If you want a small clamshell, the Ericsson T39 goes for around $50 on eBay. There's also the Moto v66 (around $40 on eBay) and hundreds of other models.
Do a little research on Phonescoop and buy yourself the phone that you want. There are 1.5 BILLION GSM subscribers in the world, which means that the secondary market is absolutely huge. Finding a good mobile phone is not a challenge.
). I've also flown into KDEN in a light plane. KSC's looks a lot bigger, that extra 100 feet of width makes the difference:-)
The 16,000ft runway at KDEN (16R/32L) is relatively new; you may have flown in before it was completed. Aren't landing fees at KDEN pretty high as well?
Mostly it isn't left vs. right but just the conclusions they make. AT&T out sources 200 jobs to a tech firm in England [or something] and all of a sudden they're "unamerican".
Most Americans are indifferent to outsourcing. Like illegal immigration, we like to talk big that "jobs are being lost", but, deep down, we want lower prices.
Or there is such a thing as "war on terror" or "civil war in Iraq was inevitable anyways".
The "War on Terror" is and has always been a bullshit idea. Almost 1/2 of the US opposed the war in Iraq, myself included.
I mean why was Enron so successful for so long? Was the media really looking that hard?
Because Enron spent millions of dollars to weave a web of lies. They had fake trading floors, one of the biggest buildings in Texas, and plenty of employees who were unaware of what was really going on.
Why is Cheney not in prison? What exactly is a "hunting accident" anyways?
Because accidentally peppering someone with a shotgun is unlikely to land you in prison. Had the man that Cheney shot died, we might be looking at a more serious issue. Hunting accidents are an unfortunate part of the sport.
You probably don't like it when people stereotype Canadians, so cut us some slack. In a nation of 300 million people, there's plenty of room for different opinions. The views of the president don't necessarily reflect the views of the people.
This has been widely reported, but I don't believe that it's correct. T-Mo USA is the fastest growing T-Mo division, and in various quarters it has been the only one to turn a profit.
T-Mo USA's 3G delay has more to do with spectrum than anything else - they are waiting for new spectrum auctions because there's just not enough room in T-Mo's existing 1900MHz licenses.
If Microsoft had made the error, we'd have to wait until the second Tuesday of the month for the fix. If this bug wasn't caught by tomorrow for me, then I'd have to wait an entire month for a fix. Ubuntu put out the patch as soon as it was discovered. There is no bias here, I use Windows just as much as Linux. However, Microsoft's patching cycles simply suck.
Patching is quite frankly irrelivent with this bug. While it certainly has to be done to close the hole in the future, there are already hundreds of thousands of Ubuntu systems out there with the password sitting on the disk. How are you to be sure as an administrator that the password has not been compromised already? What about backup copies that might have the password?
The fix is to change the administrator/root password. The bug only affects a system at install-time, and it will continue to affect new installs so long as the broken installer is floating around. Patching it today is hardly more effective than patching it on April 6.
The few installations I've seen have used RG-6. Anyway, my guess is even with RG-59 they're using double- or quad-shielded cable in the studio. Cablecos and installers in general, on the other hand, can and do cut corners wherever possible, including using unshielded cable. Some years ago, I used to live about a block from a firehouse, and every time those guys hopped on the radio - which was quite regularly, obviously - channels 19-21 on the cable TV turned to complete shit. Guess what frequencies the fire department was using.;)
Comcast has been putting in RG-6 quad-shield with compression fittings exclusively in my area for some time now. Areas that have been installed in the last few years are remarkably good (even on analog channels), unlike, for example, 15 years ago.
Each 6MHz channel is approximately 20-40Mbps, even with a pretty bad S/N ratio. There are 125 cable channels that have no problems being carried over RG-59 with crappy connectors, and Verizon doesn't have to use them for analog channels.
Verizon has to be careful not to underestimate modern HFC systems - there's a lot of bandwidth there. Should the cable company ever decide to eliminate "extended basic" service, there's plenty of bandwidth for them to offer performance comparabale to FiOS.
Look at the Sidekick, it a mediocre PDA-Phone but with rap stars and Paris Hilton paid to promote it, its suddenly the must have pda-phone for so many kids. Most of whom would have been happy with a plain-jane cell phone.
Having owned everything from the B&W Sidekick/Hiptop ("Jet") to the color Sidekick ("Turner") to the Sidekick II ("PV-100"), as well as a number of Palm OS and Windows Mobile smartphones (HTC Wallaby/T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone, Treo 180, Treo 650, HTC Wizard/T-Mobile MDA) and a Symbian device (Nokia 6600), I can tell you this:
The sync features of the Sidekick work better than any device I've owned. Palm OS and Windows Mobile simply do not compare to having the device kept up-to-sync over the air, all the time
The battery life on the Sidekick is much better. All of the WM/Palm OS devices I have owned have a "standby" mode and an "on" mode - they last days in "standby", but just a few hours of PDA use will drain the battery. The Sidekick is never in "standby", and it goes 1.5-2 days, regardless of how I use it. As long as you don't use the device more than a few hours a day, and don't have any continuous sync apps (e.g. Chatter on the Treo), the battery life is fine. Unfortunately, I'm a heavy user who needs to get email when it arrives, not 30 minutes later.
The microbrowser on the Sidekick blows Blazer out of the water. Blazer has all kinds of cool features, but at the end of the day, a browser that only handles
Not having a touchscreen is a huge advantage. I like to keep my phone in my pocket, not on a belt clip or in a case. Having a touchscreen means that I have to use a case, or be constantly concerned about damaging the screen.
AIM on the Sidekick is the single best IM client for any mobile device. I can be signed in 24/7, without draining my battery or spending a lot on SMS. It's a better client than even the desktop version of AIM, on par with GAIM - except that I don't have to sign off when I leave my notebook or desktop
The phone book app on the Sidekick is better designed and better executed than any other that I have seen. Being able to customize labels and tag numbers/addresses/email addresses appropriately is a big advantage.
The notes app on the Sidekick is better than the app on Palm OS or Windows Mobile. When I want to take a note, I want to create a new note quickly, and I don't want to have to worry about naming or filing the notes. The Sidekick notes app replaces sticky notes, which is exactly what it's there for.
Sound profiles on the Sidekick make more sense than Palm OS devices, and certainly more sense than the system in Windows Mobile.
I carried the Sidekick before Paris Hilton (or any other celebrity, for that matter) had one. I carried it before it was color, months before the 1.1 software update. I could care less who else carries a Sidekick. Don't assume for a second that Sidekick users are only there because it's a "cool" device. Many of us use the Sidekick because it does what it does better than anything else on the market.
Instead Apple sill just sit back and sell iBooks, since if the device is big enough to need a bag you might as well just have a laptop. The tablet PC tought us all this lesson pretty well (as the tablet form has been doing for years) but only Apple seems to learn.
I recommend that you look at some of the many places that tablets are becoming popular, then come back and say that.
Not everyone has the same needs in hardware. Windows and Linux give us the freedom to choose the hardware that works best for us - in my case, a widescreen, Pentium-M (Dothan 1.73GHz) based notebook with a GeForce Go 6400, 4-hour battery life, DVD burner, and a webcam that still weighs less - and cost less - than the iBook.
Oh, but maybe I should have waited until Apple released what I wanted.
I can speak for my NVIDIA experience, and I can tell you that my bottom-of-the-line GeForce 6200 AGP card came right up with component video, and the TV wizard came up to guide me throguh setting it up as 1080i.
Actually, in the case of aluminum, requiring less energy than new production is a very real benefit. Production of aluminum from bauxite requires large quantities of electrical energy, far more than it does to recycle aluminum.
Other materials are likely similar - remember, everything from mining (or drilling) to refining to transportation requires energy, and when compared on a total energy use, recycling makes a lot of sense for a lot of materials.
Metals make ideal canidates for recycling because existing refining processes already are able to cope with impurities.
Palm has provided the necessary Java runtime environment free of charge to 650 users (and $5.99 for others). Once downloaded, you can run Opera or Kmaps (an excellent Java app that downloads data from Google Local and even gets the scrolling part down well) or any other Java app compiled for Palm OS.
Opera Mini, the Java version of Opera, is nowhere near as fully-featured as the Opera version for Windows Mobile, or even the Opera version for Symbian. It's certainly an option, but it's a hack at best - the interface just isn't up to snuff.
While I agree that the first generation 650s froze often, those issues have been fixed with firmware updates.
I had the latest firmware on my Treo 650 at the time (about 3 months ago), and I suspect that the lockups might have been because of the 3rd-party mail software that I used (Chatter). That said, Palm OS really doesn't have any reliable way for apps to run in the background.
Comment about "web performance" amusing
on
Treo 700w Review
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I find all of the comments about "web performance" in the article to be highly amusing - the device that the 700w is being compared to, the 650, used the absolutely abysmal Blazer browser.
Imagine a browser that switches to a "simple" mode for any page over 200k. That's absurd. Imagine a browser that takes 35-40 seconds to render some pages - while locking the device. That's Blazer.
PIE isn't exactly a great web browser, but it's sure a hell of a lot better than Blazer. And you can also choose Opera, NetFront, or Minimo on Windows Mobile - the alternatives for Palm OS are generally few and far between.
Also, the 240x240 screen size isn't a limitation of Windows Mobile; there are WM devices with 640x480 and 320x240 screens.
Having owned the Treo 650, I never understood why everyone loved it so much - my device crashed frequently (always requiring a soft-reset; WM devices sometimes "bog down" but rarely lock), had a crappy USB/power connector (the Palm design is frankly garbage - it relies on the tension of plastic clips to hold the connector together), had a quiet earpiece (though this was fixable with 3rd-party software), and had a number of interesting "quirks" that made it unusable as a video/gaming system (1px white border around the screen - all the time, practically impossible to allocate more than 2-4MB of memory).
The RSX graphics rasterizer(not GPU) is built on very mature process tech.
Funny how you say that, as I certainly think that NVIDIA would object to their 300 million transistor, GeForce 7800-derived chip being called a "graphics rasterizer".
The Front Row remote is really an awful design, and no amount of justification will change that fact.
If Apple ever wants to add TV to Front Row, the remote will need number buttons, fast forward/rewind buttons (not "next/previous"), a clear and an enter key (to go with the number buttons), a mute button, a record button, dedicated volume and page buttons (unless you like paging through the guide one line at a time), channel buttons, a power button for the TV, and probably a button to bring up the guide.
Overloading the menu navigation keys with functions is generally a very bad idea. How do you pause TV while you're in the menu system? Can you change the channel? Mute? Change the volume level?
Microsoft's Media Center remote is well laid-out, the buttons are grouped appropriately and they all have unique shapes. The TiVo remote is similar.
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone. You are exposing yourself to all kinds of risks you have no idea about. Because the media and the FDA were bought and sold a long time ago.
Well, you could believe the well-documented report prepared by the EU's Scientific Committee on food, which references numerous independent studies and finds no link between aspartame and migranes, epilepsy, or genotoxicity and carcinogenicity.
Or you could believe the (generally poorly-documented) reports scattered around the Internet.
Remember, the placebo effect can be very powerful - without double-blind placebo-controlled tests, it is difficult to determine if a substance really does have an effect.
At the end of the day, I'm going to keep talking on my cell-phone, I'm going to keep driving (but not while talking on the phone), and I'm going to continue drinking aspartame beverages. All of these activities carry a risk, but we cannot live our lives fearing some phantom risk that may never materialize.
The MDA is really a nice device. So nice, in fact, that I'm typing this comment on it right now. I could be in an airport connected with Wi-Fi (which the MDA has), or crusing down the highway at 75mph (riding in a bus, of course). Actually, right now I'm sitting in class connected through the campus wireless network.
The MDA has all the power of a PDA, with plenty of memory, a decent (though slow by Windows Mobile standards) CPU, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a 240x320 touchscreen, stereo audio (that sounds quite good), a keyboard, a miniSD slot for expansion, 1.3 megapixel camera, and, of course, a quadband GSM phone with EDGE.
It charges off of USB (with a standard mini-B connector), lets me talk for 10 hours on a charge, and does pretty much everything that you didn't think a phone should do.
FYI, the MDA is manufactured by HTC, the same company that makes the Treo 650, Dell Axim, and a bunch of other devices.
I find that comment amusing and puzzling. When it comes to online music sales or portable music device sales, they are indeed a de-facto monopoly. They have become increasingly good at locking you in - iPod ties to iTunes which ties to iTMS.
It's exactly what Microsoft did - use their OS monopoly to get a browser monopoly.
It really depends on the server, actually, and when you like to play.
Reading around a bit, I'm convinced that I'm on the the worst WOW server, Kel'Thuzad. Queue'Thuzad is almost always queued from 4pm-midnight, and at peak times the queue can reach 650-800. Lag'Thuzad has also been down for "emergency maintenence" more times than I can possibly remember.
The odd thing is, Kel'Thuzad was crap at first (like it is now), became decent 2-3 months after the game shipped, and then regressed now. The only explaination that I can come up with is that WOW has increased so greatly in size that it has overwhelmed the servers.
The OP wasn't particularly specific about whether this school was part of a district, and if it's not, much of the following can be disregarded.
Having actually worked in a medium-large district in IT (PC Support Tech in Poudre School District, 43 schools), I can tell you that little frosted us more than people like you. Fort Collins, CO is a pretty technical area (HP, Agilent, and LSI Logic are large employers and there is a major university), so there were a lot of parents with technical expertise. There's nothing wrong with offering advice, but far too many of the parents assumed that they knew better than the professionals employed by the district. Knowing how to write a C compiler or admin a Linux system doesn't mean that you understand the kind of requirements and challenges faced by IT workers.
At PSD, we ran Windows because it was cheap. Really cheap. If you are a reasonably large district (~ 14000 seats in our case), Microsoft is willing to give you a deal. Under $40 a seat for Windows + Office, in many cases.
Could we have switched to Linux? Perhaps. But such a project requires a lot of time and a lot of money. We hadn't even migrated from 2000 to XP when I left PSD.
We didn't accept donated hardware in PSD because it costs quite a bit more to support - it's frequently outdated, and when it breaks it becomes a nightmare to repair. We purchased 1800 systems over the summer when I was at PSD in 2004, so it really doesn't make sense to spend hours refurbishing and deploying a few donated systems. 20 hours of extra labor is all it takes to erase all of the benefit from a donated system, and that's assuming that the system is as good as what we would have purchased.
Bottom line: talk to the district IT department. They know their requirements better than you do.
I've been saying this for years - cellular service is cheaper in the US. You can slice it any way you want it - SMS is cheaper, you pay less per minute, and data service is way cheaper.
T-Mobile USA has unlimited EDGE and WiFi (at their HotSpot locations) for $30 a month. Sprint and Verizon offer unlimited EV-DO for $60 a month, and Cingular offers unlimited UMTS for $60 a month.
Paying by the kilobyte went out of vogue here in the US almost four years ago.
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I'll believe IE 7 is secure when it has been out for 6-12 months and hasn't had a major vulnerability reported.
You had better not run Firefox than, because Firefox has never had a period that long wihout a major vulnerability.
Assuming that you're safe because you're not Microsoft is like assuming that the 747 is safe because it's not a DC-10. Microsoft software continues to get more secure. If an attitude of immunity prevails in the oepn-source community, it's only a matter of time until Microsoft software will be more secure.
Just like the DC-10.
If a temporary page area is what you're looking for, one of the many personal Wiki services out there is probably a better bet. My project, Wikinote, requires only a username and password to sign up (no email address or other info), provides a decent amount of Wiki markup (though very little control over page appearence), and keeps page history if you ever need to revert. In addition, SSL is used throughout the page, passwords are salted and hashed (and never stored), and there is integration with Shortify to automatically save URLs for later reference.
Why? Because although these books were licensed by Lucas, they were not official parts of the story.
Actually, most EU content is considered cannon, unless it disagrees with the films or other Lucas-produced works. Indeed, much of the content used in the prequels came from the EU.
I never got this from Slashdot. Did you ever consider that basic cellular phones don't go away when the user is done with them?
Seriously, there are thousands of decent GSM phones that you can get on eBay. The Nokia 3590 is one of my favorites - great RF, GSM 850/1900 (covers the entire US, Canada, and Mexico), good battery life, and a simple UI.
Guess what? The Nokia 3590 goes for $25 on eBay.
If you want a small clamshell, the Ericsson T39 goes for around $50 on eBay. There's also the Moto v66 (around $40 on eBay) and hundreds of other models.
Do a little research on Phonescoop and buy yourself the phone that you want. There are 1.5 BILLION GSM subscribers in the world, which means that the secondary market is absolutely huge. Finding a good mobile phone is not a challenge.
). I've also flown into KDEN in a light plane. KSC's looks a lot bigger, that extra 100 feet of width makes the difference :-)
The 16,000ft runway at KDEN (16R/32L) is relatively new; you may have flown in before it was completed. Aren't landing fees at KDEN pretty high as well?
Republic is a form of Democracy
Yes, and any modern cellphone is a form of computer. But you don't see us calling my Nokia 3590 a "computer".
Mostly it isn't left vs. right but just the conclusions they make. AT&T out sources 200 jobs to a tech firm in England [or something] and all of a sudden they're "unamerican".
Most Americans are indifferent to outsourcing. Like illegal immigration, we like to talk big that "jobs are being lost", but, deep down, we want lower prices.
Or there is such a thing as "war on terror" or "civil war in Iraq was inevitable anyways".
The "War on Terror" is and has always been a bullshit idea. Almost 1/2 of the US opposed the war in Iraq, myself included.
I mean why was Enron so successful for so long? Was the media really looking that hard?
Because Enron spent millions of dollars to weave a web of lies. They had fake trading floors, one of the biggest buildings in Texas, and plenty of employees who were unaware of what was really going on.
Why is Cheney not in prison? What exactly is a "hunting accident" anyways?
Because accidentally peppering someone with a shotgun is unlikely to land you in prison. Had the man that Cheney shot died, we might be looking at a more serious issue. Hunting accidents are an unfortunate part of the sport.
You probably don't like it when people stereotype Canadians, so cut us some slack. In a nation of 300 million people, there's plenty of room for different opinions. The views of the president don't necessarily reflect the views of the people.
This has been widely reported, but I don't believe that it's correct. T-Mo USA is the fastest growing T-Mo division, and in various quarters it has been the only one to turn a profit.
T-Mo USA's 3G delay has more to do with spectrum than anything else - they are waiting for new spectrum auctions because there's just not enough room in T-Mo's existing 1900MHz licenses.
If Microsoft had made the error, we'd have to wait until the second Tuesday of the month for the fix. If this bug wasn't caught by tomorrow for me, then I'd have to wait an entire month for a fix. Ubuntu put out the patch as soon as it was discovered. There is no bias here, I use Windows just as much as Linux. However, Microsoft's patching cycles simply suck.
Patching is quite frankly irrelivent with this bug. While it certainly has to be done to close the hole in the future, there are already hundreds of thousands of Ubuntu systems out there with the password sitting on the disk. How are you to be sure as an administrator that the password has not been compromised already? What about backup copies that might have the password?
The fix is to change the administrator/root password. The bug only affects a system at install-time, and it will continue to affect new installs so long as the broken installer is floating around. Patching it today is hardly more effective than patching it on April 6.
The few installations I've seen have used RG-6. Anyway, my guess is even with RG-59 they're using double- or quad-shielded cable in the studio. Cablecos and installers in general, on the other hand, can and do cut corners wherever possible, including using unshielded cable. Some years ago, I used to live about a block from a firehouse, and every time those guys hopped on the radio - which was quite regularly, obviously - channels 19-21 on the cable TV turned to complete shit. Guess what frequencies the fire department was using. ;)
Comcast has been putting in RG-6 quad-shield with compression fittings exclusively in my area for some time now. Areas that have been installed in the last few years are remarkably good (even on analog channels), unlike, for example, 15 years ago.
Each 6MHz channel is approximately 20-40Mbps, even with a pretty bad S/N ratio. There are 125 cable channels that have no problems being carried over RG-59 with crappy connectors, and Verizon doesn't have to use them for analog channels.
Verizon has to be careful not to underestimate modern HFC systems - there's a lot of bandwidth there. Should the cable company ever decide to eliminate "extended basic" service, there's plenty of bandwidth for them to offer performance comparabale to FiOS.
Having owned everything from the B&W Sidekick/Hiptop ("Jet") to the color Sidekick ("Turner") to the Sidekick II ("PV-100"), as well as a number of Palm OS and Windows Mobile smartphones (HTC Wallaby/T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone, Treo 180, Treo 650, HTC Wizard/T-Mobile MDA) and a Symbian device (Nokia 6600), I can tell you this:
I carried the Sidekick before Paris Hilton (or any other celebrity, for that matter) had one. I carried it before it was color, months before the 1.1 software update. I could care less who else carries a Sidekick. Don't assume for a second that Sidekick users are only there because it's a "cool" device. Many of us use the Sidekick because it does what it does better than anything else on the market.
Instead Apple sill just sit back and sell iBooks, since if the device is big enough to need a bag you might as well just have a laptop. The tablet PC tought us all this lesson pretty well (as the tablet form has been doing for years) but only Apple seems to learn.
I recommend that you look at some of the many places that tablets are becoming popular, then come back and say that.
Not everyone has the same needs in hardware. Windows and Linux give us the freedom to choose the hardware that works best for us - in my case, a widescreen, Pentium-M (Dothan 1.73GHz) based notebook with a GeForce Go 6400, 4-hour battery life, DVD burner, and a webcam that still weighs less - and cost less - than the iBook.
Oh, but maybe I should have waited until Apple released what I wanted.
I can speak for my NVIDIA experience, and I can tell you that my bottom-of-the-line GeForce 6200 AGP card came right up with component video, and the TV wizard came up to guide me throguh setting it up as 1080i.
Actually, in the case of aluminum, requiring less energy than new production is a very real benefit. Production of aluminum from bauxite requires large quantities of electrical energy, far more than it does to recycle aluminum.
Other materials are likely similar - remember, everything from mining (or drilling) to refining to transportation requires energy, and when compared on a total energy use, recycling makes a lot of sense for a lot of materials.
Metals make ideal canidates for recycling because existing refining processes already are able to cope with impurities.
Palm has provided the necessary Java runtime environment free of charge to 650 users (and $5.99 for others). Once downloaded, you can run Opera or Kmaps (an excellent Java app that downloads data from Google Local and even gets the scrolling part down well) or any other Java app compiled for Palm OS.
Opera Mini, the Java version of Opera, is nowhere near as fully-featured as the Opera version for Windows Mobile, or even the Opera version for Symbian. It's certainly an option, but it's a hack at best - the interface just isn't up to snuff.
While I agree that the first generation 650s froze often, those issues have been fixed with firmware updates.
I had the latest firmware on my Treo 650 at the time (about 3 months ago), and I suspect that the lockups might have been because of the 3rd-party mail software that I used (Chatter). That said, Palm OS really doesn't have any reliable way for apps to run in the background.
I find all of the comments about "web performance" in the article to be highly amusing - the device that the 700w is being compared to, the 650, used the absolutely abysmal Blazer browser.
Imagine a browser that switches to a "simple" mode for any page over 200k. That's absurd. Imagine a browser that takes 35-40 seconds to render some pages - while locking the device. That's Blazer.
PIE isn't exactly a great web browser, but it's sure a hell of a lot better than Blazer. And you can also choose Opera, NetFront, or Minimo on Windows Mobile - the alternatives for Palm OS are generally few and far between.
Also, the 240x240 screen size isn't a limitation of Windows Mobile; there are WM devices with 640x480 and 320x240 screens.
Having owned the Treo 650, I never understood why everyone loved it so much - my device crashed frequently (always requiring a soft-reset; WM devices sometimes "bog down" but rarely lock), had a crappy USB/power connector (the Palm design is frankly garbage - it relies on the tension of plastic clips to hold the connector together), had a quiet earpiece (though this was fixable with 3rd-party software), and had a number of interesting "quirks" that made it unusable as a video/gaming system (1px white border around the screen - all the time, practically impossible to allocate more than 2-4MB of memory).
The RSX graphics rasterizer(not GPU) is built on very mature process tech.
Funny how you say that, as I certainly think that NVIDIA would object to their 300 million transistor, GeForce 7800-derived chip being called a "graphics rasterizer".
Yeah, because it's not like anyone has put integrated lights-out management in their systems before.
The Front Row remote is really an awful design, and no amount of justification will change that fact.
If Apple ever wants to add TV to Front Row, the remote will need number buttons, fast forward/rewind buttons (not "next/previous"), a clear and an enter key (to go with the number buttons), a mute button, a record button, dedicated volume and page buttons (unless you like paging through the guide one line at a time), channel buttons, a power button for the TV, and probably a button to bring up the guide.
Overloading the menu navigation keys with functions is generally a very bad idea. How do you pause TV while you're in the menu system? Can you change the channel? Mute? Change the volume level?
Microsoft's Media Center remote is well laid-out, the buttons are grouped appropriately and they all have unique shapes. The TiVo remote is similar.
70 buttons is absurd, but so is 6.
It's just like all other things, we'll play it off no matter what the study says. But I do have this one comment: don't drink diet soda folks, I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone. You are exposing yourself to all kinds of risks you have no idea about. Because the media and the FDA were bought and sold a long time ago.
Well, you could believe the well-documented report prepared by the EU's Scientific Committee on food, which references numerous independent studies and finds no link between aspartame and migranes, epilepsy, or genotoxicity and carcinogenicity.
Or you could believe the (generally poorly-documented) reports scattered around the Internet.
Remember, the placebo effect can be very powerful - without double-blind placebo-controlled tests, it is difficult to determine if a substance really does have an effect.
At the end of the day, I'm going to keep talking on my cell-phone, I'm going to keep driving (but not while talking on the phone), and I'm going to continue drinking aspartame beverages. All of these activities carry a risk, but we cannot live our lives fearing some phantom risk that may never materialize.
The MDA is really a nice device. So nice, in fact, that I'm typing this comment on it right now. I could be in an airport connected with Wi-Fi (which the MDA has), or crusing down the highway at 75mph (riding in a bus, of course). Actually, right now I'm sitting in class connected through the campus wireless network.
The MDA has all the power of a PDA, with plenty of memory, a decent (though slow by Windows Mobile standards) CPU, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a 240x320 touchscreen, stereo audio (that sounds quite good), a keyboard, a miniSD slot for expansion, 1.3 megapixel camera, and, of course, a quadband GSM phone with EDGE.
It charges off of USB (with a standard mini-B connector), lets me talk for 10 hours on a charge, and does pretty much everything that you didn't think a phone should do.
FYI, the MDA is manufactured by HTC, the same company that makes the Treo 650, Dell Axim, and a bunch of other devices.
Why shouldn't a device do everything?
Apple isn't a monopoly.
I find that comment amusing and puzzling. When it comes to online music sales or portable music device sales, they are indeed a de-facto monopoly. They have become increasingly good at locking you in - iPod ties to iTunes which ties to iTMS.
It's exactly what Microsoft did - use their OS monopoly to get a browser monopoly.
It really depends on the server, actually, and when you like to play.
Reading around a bit, I'm convinced that I'm on the the worst WOW server, Kel'Thuzad. Queue'Thuzad is almost always queued from 4pm-midnight, and at peak times the queue can reach 650-800. Lag'Thuzad has also been down for "emergency maintenence" more times than I can possibly remember.
The odd thing is, Kel'Thuzad was crap at first (like it is now), became decent 2-3 months after the game shipped, and then regressed now. The only explaination that I can come up with is that WOW has increased so greatly in size that it has overwhelmed the servers.
The OP wasn't particularly specific about whether this school was part of a district, and if it's not, much of the following can be disregarded.
Having actually worked in a medium-large district in IT (PC Support Tech in Poudre School District, 43 schools), I can tell you that little frosted us more than people like you. Fort Collins, CO is a pretty technical area (HP, Agilent, and LSI Logic are large employers and there is a major university), so there were a lot of parents with technical expertise. There's nothing wrong with offering advice, but far too many of the parents assumed that they knew better than the professionals employed by the district. Knowing how to write a C compiler or admin a Linux system doesn't mean that you understand the kind of requirements and challenges faced by IT workers.
At PSD, we ran Windows because it was cheap. Really cheap. If you are a reasonably large district (~ 14000 seats in our case), Microsoft is willing to give you a deal. Under $40 a seat for Windows + Office, in many cases.
Could we have switched to Linux? Perhaps. But such a project requires a lot of time and a lot of money. We hadn't even migrated from 2000 to XP when I left PSD.
We didn't accept donated hardware in PSD because it costs quite a bit more to support - it's frequently outdated, and when it breaks it becomes a nightmare to repair. We purchased 1800 systems over the summer when I was at PSD in 2004, so it really doesn't make sense to spend hours refurbishing and deploying a few donated systems. 20 hours of extra labor is all it takes to erase all of the benefit from a donated system, and that's assuming that the system is as good as what we would have purchased.
Bottom line: talk to the district IT department. They know their requirements better than you do.
I've been saying this for years - cellular service is cheaper in the US. You can slice it any way you want it - SMS is cheaper, you pay less per minute, and data service is way cheaper.
T-Mobile USA has unlimited EDGE and WiFi (at their HotSpot locations) for $30 a month. Sprint and Verizon offer unlimited EV-DO for $60 a month, and Cingular offers unlimited UMTS for $60 a month.
Paying by the kilobyte went out of vogue here in the US almost four years ago.