A minimalist, single-tasking, manual allocation API that was fine for scraping along in 1 megabyte of RAM becomes a drawback moving into a future of 64+ megabytes and always-on WiFi networking.
I like my Palm IIIxe, and I've even developed programs for it, but I agree that Palm has needed to add some kind of multitasking in for quite a while. Ironically, the kernel that PalmOS is based on is a real-time, multithreaded OS, but the license agreement that Palm made only allows applications to use a single thread.
There's even a fairly elegant extension Palm could implement if they chose, that would give at least co-operative multitasking. But they haven't done it, even in OS 5.
I still enjoy using my Palm, and though I'd love features like the Zaurus, I enjoy 1-3 month battery life. That's worth a lot right there.
Re:Keep the government out of this!
on
FTC vs Spammers
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, that's just what we need -- governments passing laws to outlaw things that the majority of the population doesn't like.
First they came for the crackers, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a cracker.
Then they came for the spammers, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a spammer.
Then they came for the pump-and-dump scammers on the message boards, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a scammer.
Getting election laws changed to something more sensible, like Instant Runoff or the Borda Count would be very hard.
On the other hand, voteswappingsites have been ruled sort-of-legal. This may offer a way to 'back-door' a more fair election system, until enough sensible people are elected to fix it directly.
But, of course, if 'uncreated' things are possible, why not save a step and assume the universe is uncreated?
Frankly, I think the only reasonable answer to "Where did all this come from?" is "I dunno. Maybe someday we'll find out."
This follows the principle of the creator always being greater than the creation.
Huh? None of the team of people who built Deep Blue could have beaten Kasparov at chess, but Deep Blue did. Creations surpass creators in specific capacities all the time - that's why we make the class of creations called "tools".
...you have to spend hours if not days of computer time crunching packets to break WEP encryption... not the kind of thing that can be done on a laptop in a few minutes by someone wardriving through your neighborhood.
What about Johnny Scriptkiddie two houses down with a Cantenna or something? Perhaps I'm too paranoid, but the thought of anyone rooting my boxes creeps me out. I use ssh on our wired LAN, and I know no-one's peeking in on that.
...it's no more a "joke" than the lock on your car door: hardly impenetrable, but it will deter wrongdoers.
I've got a remote-monitored alarm system. Again, not invicible, but I guess I take security a little more seriously than most.
If your broadband source is DSL or cable modem, it's likely that that will be the bottleneck in your connection, not wireless. If you've got dual T3s coming into your house, by all means lay wire.
I'm aware that even 10BaseT is much faster than typical residential broadband rate. So is 802.11*. But I don't just surf the net.
I have multiple computers, and I share data between them. I just did a major backup-and-restore when I upgraded to a new machine on Sunday, and 100MBit is very nice for such things. Equivalent wireless speeds are, well, pricey.
I don't even have a laptop right now, and with two kids, a wife, and a new house, I won't be spending much time on the computer anyway. I'm pretty sure I can wire up Cat5 faster than I can can configure three computers for transparent VPN in two different operating systems.
Or anyone else who spoofs their MAC address after sniffing some traffic.
I started looking into wireless for the new house we're moving to, but two things stopped me. The first was price... ~$250 just to set up two computers and an AP?
The other problem was securing the damn things. So far as I could tell, I'd need to set up a full encrypted VPN on the wireless section. MACs can be spoofed, the built-in WEP is apparently a joke, etc. etc. If I didn't want to get cracked, or hand my bandwidth to any passing spammer, a VPN would be the only way.
Am I missing something? Or am I wise to just put in the Cat5 and have much faster speeds as well as privacy and access control?
I didn't even go that far. I only had one device the remote didn't work with, so I just learned the buttons involved. Nearly filled the memory but the DVD player works just fine now. All for $25.
Well, there's a way to hack the Palm hardware to at least triple the range, but of course it draws more battery power. Still, Palm III's and even Palm V's are dirt cheap these days; much cheaper than a high-end remote.
Re:The legacy part that bothers me...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
Well, all I can say is I get infinite bus resets on my DC-390U2W SCSI card (53c875 chipset) without "noapic", and things boot okay if I add "noapic".
Based on what you say, I'll try "pci=noacpi"; we'll see if that helps. I only got the machine last night (dual Athlon MP 2600, 1GB RAM, yadda yadda... very nice), and I haven't had a chance to confirm SMP operation in Linux. Either way it's bleeding fast.
Re:The legacy part that bothers me...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, there is an alternative: APIC. Problem is, it doesn't work too well in Linux yet. (I can't boot my new dual-Athlon monster without the "noapic" boot option; the SCSI card'll freak out. Works in XP, though.:- )
EAX is an audio processor present on Audigy, Live!, and various other sound cards.
Well, the original poster referred to it specifically, so I went with it that way. But if you prefer...
<pedant mode>EAX is a hardware interface and an API for that interface, like Aureal's A3D. OpenAL, like OpenGL and DirectSound, try to abstract away the essence of 3D sound hardware, so that it could be implemented on top of EAX or A3D, like OpenGL works on video hardware from ATI, NVidia, SiS, SGI, and lord knows who else.</pedant mode>
No culture is "better" than any other, just different.
Nope. I think you can, on balance, evaluate a culture, and make relative choices between them. United States culture is the worst on Earth... except for all the others.
I like living in a place with no female genital mutilation (and where even male circumcision rates are on the decline), where women have a better-than-average-for-the-world shot at parity in rights and income with men, where (despite hysterical news hype) the odds of terrorist attack and other violence is actually quite low (violent crime is way down from the highs in the early 90's), etc.
Our stupid Department of Justice seems hell-bent on cutting out our freedom of speech, but I still can (and do) criticize the U.S. government on a regular basis (like this stupid, unnecessary war that we have idiotically comitted ourselves to) and haven't been disappeared. There's racism and such, but no rigid caste system in place.
I wish we had a more European attitude toward sex and violence (i.e. less violence in the media, and less puritanism) and there's other room for improvement but overall there's no place I'd rather live.
Midwest US has a game called "Euchre"; the dealer has a slight statistical advantage. The deal is supposed to rotate with each hand, but sometimes players will work to "steal the deal" by skipping opponents and passing the deal on to their teammate. Considering it's usually played at parties with a lot of conversation and such, it can be easy for someone to forget that it's their turn to deal.
Generally the game is declared void if someone's caught after stealing the deal; but if you catch them before, you might continue with the game, wondering if you missed one before...
ESR has a good essay on game cheating
on
Cheating Online Gamers
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've been using my Palm IIIxe with a QCP-2760. The old "Wireless Web". 14.4 connection (~1KB/sec), and it takes at least 5 seconds to initiate a data call, plus you have to connect the cables between the Palm and the phone.
The main use I've found is surfing the web and doing some email while on a long driving trip. Coverage is usually good along major highways, and it's a nice way to while away some hours. Of course, I have to give it up when it's my turn to drive.
But unless I'm going to have an extended session, it's not worth it. It's easier to call Moviefone than to hit moviefone.com.
If it were built into the phone, it might help, but even then, surfing on a 160x160 screen is, well, limiting. And yes, I'm using Blazer.
It's a Mac SE/30 (of course), but the ROM in those came on a SIMM. And the very first few IIsi's had a ROM SIMM, too. I took the ROM out of a IIsi, put it in the SE/30, and now it's 32bit clean without MODE32 or any of that. (If someone wants to buy a IIsi ROM, or an entire IIsi, let me know...)
I bumped it up to 32MB RAM (I'm still amazed that a consumer machine in 1989 could handle up to 128MB!) and stuck in a 4GB drive. It's got a 2X external CD-ROM (that can read CD-R media, but not CD-RW, oh well),an Ethernet card (10Base2/AUI, I need a converter to get 10BaseT) and a 14.4 modem.
I've got NetBSD going on it, and the web server stuff is working well. (BTW, ssh v2 takes, like, five minutes to get going; ssh v1 'only' takes ~30 seconds.) For the sheer heck of it, I'm going to get pppd going on the modem so I'm my own dialup ISP. (Someday it'll come in handy, I'm sure.)
Take a look, the URL's right after my name up there.
No, I don't buy into it completely, but then again, damn it, we
really have lost am amazing amount of civil liberties, and dissent
from the "war" is frequently labeled "un-American":
These kinds of attitudes, if not confronted, really could develop into something similar. Yes, America is different, but it's terrifying to see how many people are willing to give up critical rights (and critical thinking) just to drop their odds of getting hurt by terrorists from 0.005% to 0.004%.
According to a recent article in Newsweek, Ashcroft really considered widespread suspension of habeas corpus.
My best guess is that big chunks of the army will cave fast. Rooting Saddam himself out will be a much more difficult problem. Finding him will be tough, with all the doubles and places he might be. And then busting into wherever he's holed up will be much tougher, as the Republican Guard is better-trained, better-equipped, and has a higher morale than the rest of the army.
The simple fact that the outcome of this assault is a foregone conclusion is ample evidence that Saddam Hussien doesn't pose a critical threat to the U.S.
He has been a big obstruction to our oil policy in the area, though...
Only 'cause I've got one already - I use it to run older games and such. But my home webserver is a Mac SE/30 running NetBSD; way more than able to saturate a 128Kbps DSL upstream.
(I need more practice at these penis contests. I don't think you're supposed to brag about how small it is...:-> )
Really true. I just started playing with it a few weeks ago, sticking it on an old Mac SE/30. It's now a very capable webserver, more than able to saturate my pathetic DSL upload bandwidth. (Watch, now the poor thing melts from a Slashdotting.)
Linux support for Mac68K seems to have stagnated; the 2.4 kernel still doesn't compile for 68K Macs. Sure, they're not common anymore, but Linux is supposed to scale.
It may not have every whiz-bang feature that Linux has, but portability is important, too. Almost any random hardware with an MMU runs NetBSD, and runs it well. I love Linux, and I run it on my PCs and at work, but NetBSD made way more sense for this project.
It was very easy to set up, too. Configuration is... different from Linux, but I can't say it's worse. I'm not finding it too hard to learn.
Congrats to them, and best wishes for the future. They do good work.
I don't know whether it's actually the case that record companies supporting this would be good or bad for them. However, I do know that saying that CD companies would make money doing something just because people want it doesn't mean that it's a good idea, if it puts people in a game-theoretic position where music is a public good -- and stealing it is better for any individual, though it screws everyone over long run.
That misses the point. You can't make bits uncopyable unless you control all the devices from the ground up. And then you have to plug the "analog hole", so that if you're videotaping your wedding reception your camcorder will shut down every time the DJ fires up a DRM'd song.
Either the customer is in control of the bits, or they aren't. There is no middle ground here.
Choosing the path where customers can't control the bits is a nightmare scenario for consumers; much worse than the current DVD stuff. People put up with a lot of the crap features of DVD (unskippable segments, Macrovision) but you should see the way people's eyes light up when I tell them about my DVD player with the firmware upgrade that kills all that stuff. When your camcorder shuts down every time you accidentally pan past a TV, I'm pretty sure you'll have open revolt.
Letting the customers control the bits is the only long-term stable solution. Maybe the companies will make more than now, maybe less; but only the ones that go this route will be making any money, so far as I can see.
Slashdot Mirror
I like my Palm IIIxe, and I've even developed programs for it, but I agree that Palm has needed to add some kind of multitasking in for quite a while. Ironically, the kernel that PalmOS is based on is a real-time, multithreaded OS, but the license agreement that Palm made only allows applications to use a single thread.
There's even a fairly elegant extension Palm could implement if they chose, that would give at least co-operative multitasking. But they haven't done it, even in OS 5.
I still enjoy using my Palm, and though I'd love features like the Zaurus, I enjoy 1-3 month battery life. That's worth a lot right there.
First they came for the crackers, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a cracker.
Then they came for the spammers, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a spammer.
Then they came for the pump-and-dump scammers on the message boards, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a scammer.
Hmmm... nah.
On the other hand, vote swapping sites have been ruled sort-of-legal. This may offer a way to 'back-door' a more fair election system, until enough sensible people are elected to fix it directly.
But, of course, if 'uncreated' things are possible, why not save a step and assume the universe is uncreated? Frankly, I think the only reasonable answer to "Where did all this come from?" is "I dunno. Maybe someday we'll find out."
This follows the principle of the creator always being greater than the creation.
Huh? None of the team of people who built Deep Blue could have beaten Kasparov at chess, but Deep Blue did. Creations surpass creators in specific capacities all the time - that's why we make the class of creations called "tools".
What about Johnny Scriptkiddie two houses down with a Cantenna or something? Perhaps I'm too paranoid, but the thought of anyone rooting my boxes creeps me out. I use ssh on our wired LAN, and I know no-one's peeking in on that.
I've got a remote-monitored alarm system. Again, not invicible, but I guess I take security a little more seriously than most.
If your broadband source is DSL or cable modem, it's likely that that will be the bottleneck in your connection, not wireless. If you've got dual T3s coming into your house, by all means lay wire.
I'm aware that even 10BaseT is much faster than typical residential broadband rate. So is 802.11*. But I don't just surf the net.
I have multiple computers, and I share data between them. I just did a major backup-and-restore when I upgraded to a new machine on Sunday, and 100MBit is very nice for such things. Equivalent wireless speeds are, well, pricey. I don't even have a laptop right now, and with two kids, a wife, and a new house, I won't be spending much time on the computer anyway. I'm pretty sure I can wire up Cat5 faster than I can can configure three computers for transparent VPN in two different operating systems.
I started looking into wireless for the new house we're moving to, but two things stopped me. The first was price... ~$250 just to set up two computers and an AP?
The other problem was securing the damn things. So far as I could tell, I'd need to set up a full encrypted VPN on the wireless section. MACs can be spoofed, the built-in WEP is apparently a joke, etc. etc. If I didn't want to get cracked, or hand my bandwidth to any passing spammer, a VPN would be the only way.
Am I missing something? Or am I wise to just put in the Cat5 and have much faster speeds as well as privacy and access control?
I didn't even go that far. I only had one device the remote didn't work with, so I just learned the buttons involved. Nearly filled the memory but the DVD player works just fine now. All for $25.
Well, there's a way to hack the Palm hardware to at least triple the range, but of course it draws more battery power. Still, Palm III's and even Palm V's are dirt cheap these days; much cheaper than a high-end remote.
Based on what you say, I'll try "pci=noacpi"; we'll see if that helps. I only got the machine last night (dual Athlon MP 2600, 1GB RAM, yadda yadda... very nice), and I haven't had a chance to confirm SMP operation in Linux. Either way it's bleeding fast.
Well, there is an alternative: APIC. Problem is, it doesn't work too well in Linux yet. (I can't boot my new dual-Athlon monster without the "noapic" boot option; the SCSI card'll freak out. Works in XP, though. :- )
The First Amendment applies only in a very limited way to commercial speech, and courts have had no problem declaring analogous postal mail and fax behavior illegal. I wouldn't bet much that spam stays legal forever.
The main problem with spam isn't First Amendment issues, it's cost-shifting and theft-of-service. And that kind of stuff has always been illegal.
Well, the original poster referred to it specifically, so I went with it that way. But if you prefer...
<pedant mode>EAX is a hardware interface and an API for that interface, like Aureal's A3D. OpenAL, like OpenGL and DirectSound, try to abstract away the essence of 3D sound hardware, so that it could be implemented on top of EAX or A3D, like OpenGL works on video hardware from ATI, NVidia, SiS, SGI, and lord knows who else.</pedant mode>
Well, there's OpenAL, which is sort of equivalent, like OpenGL vs. Direct3D.
Or the branching of blood vessels. Or bone microstructure. Or nerve cells.
Nope. I think you can, on balance, evaluate a culture, and make relative choices between them. United States culture is the worst on Earth... except for all the others.
I like living in a place with no female genital mutilation (and where even male circumcision rates are on the decline), where women have a better-than-average-for-the-world shot at parity in rights and income with men, where (despite hysterical news hype) the odds of terrorist attack and other violence is actually quite low (violent crime is way down from the highs in the early 90's), etc.
Our stupid Department of Justice seems hell-bent on cutting out our freedom of speech, but I still can (and do) criticize the U.S. government on a regular basis (like this stupid, unnecessary war that we have idiotically comitted ourselves to) and haven't been disappeared. There's racism and such, but no rigid caste system in place.
I wish we had a more European attitude toward sex and violence (i.e. less violence in the media, and less puritanism) and there's other room for improvement but overall there's no place I'd rather live.
Generally the game is declared void if someone's caught after stealing the deal; but if you catch them before, you might continue with the game, wondering if you missed one before...
I'm working, in my copious spare time, on a cheat-resistant comm library. Someone is sure to beat me to it.
The main use I've found is surfing the web and doing some email while on a long driving trip. Coverage is usually good along major highways, and it's a nice way to while away some hours. Of course, I have to give it up when it's my turn to drive.
But unless I'm going to have an extended session, it's not worth it. It's easier to call Moviefone than to hit moviefone.com.
If it were built into the phone, it might help, but even then, surfing on a 160x160 screen is, well, limiting. And yes, I'm using Blazer.
I bumped it up to 32MB RAM (I'm still amazed that a consumer machine in 1989 could handle up to 128MB!) and stuck in a 4GB drive. It's got a 2X external CD-ROM (that can read CD-R media, but not CD-RW, oh well),an Ethernet card (10Base2/AUI, I need a converter to get 10BaseT) and a 14.4 modem.
I've got NetBSD going on it, and the web server stuff is working well. (BTW, ssh v2 takes, like, five minutes to get going; ssh v1 'only' takes ~30 seconds.) For the sheer heck of it, I'm going to get pppd going on the modem so I'm my own dialup ISP. (Someday it'll come in handy, I'm sure.)
Take a look, the URL's right after my name up there.
like this, this, this, or this.
These kinds of attitudes, if not confronted, really could develop into something similar. Yes, America is different, but it's terrifying to see how many people are willing to give up critical rights (and critical thinking) just to drop their odds of getting hurt by terrorists from 0.005% to 0.004%.
According to a recent article in Newsweek, Ashcroft really considered widespread suspension of habeas corpus.
No doubt. The morale of the Iraqi army can't be all that high, though. They lost the last one big time, and Arab armies in general haven't been too effective in this century.
My best guess is that big chunks of the army will cave fast. Rooting Saddam himself out will be a much more difficult problem. Finding him will be tough, with all the doubles and places he might be. And then busting into wherever he's holed up will be much tougher, as the Republican Guard is better-trained, better-equipped, and has a higher morale than the rest of the army.
The simple fact that the outcome of this assault is a foregone conclusion is ample evidence that Saddam Hussien doesn't pose a critical threat to the U.S.
He has been a big obstruction to our oil policy in the area, though...
Only 'cause I've got one already - I use it to run older games and such. But my home webserver is a Mac SE/30 running NetBSD; way more than able to saturate a 128Kbps DSL upstream.
(I need more practice at these penis contests. I don't think you're supposed to brag about how small it is... :-> )
Really true. I just started playing with it a few weeks ago, sticking it on an old Mac SE/30. It's now a very capable webserver, more than able to saturate my pathetic DSL upload bandwidth. (Watch, now the poor thing melts from a Slashdotting.)
Linux support for Mac68K seems to have stagnated; the 2.4 kernel still doesn't compile for 68K Macs. Sure, they're not common anymore, but Linux is supposed to scale.
It may not have every whiz-bang feature that Linux has, but portability is important, too. Almost any random hardware with an MMU runs NetBSD, and runs it well. I love Linux, and I run it on my PCs and at work, but NetBSD made way more sense for this project. It was very easy to set up, too. Configuration is... different from Linux, but I can't say it's worse. I'm not finding it too hard to learn.
Congrats to them, and best wishes for the future. They do good work.
That misses the point. You can't make bits uncopyable unless you control all the devices from the ground up. And then you have to plug the "analog hole", so that if you're videotaping your wedding reception your camcorder will shut down every time the DJ fires up a DRM'd song.
Either the customer is in control of the bits, or they aren't. There is no middle ground here.
Choosing the path where customers can't control the bits is a nightmare scenario for consumers; much worse than the current DVD stuff. People put up with a lot of the crap features of DVD (unskippable segments, Macrovision) but you should see the way people's eyes light up when I tell them about my DVD player with the firmware upgrade that kills all that stuff. When your camcorder shuts down every time you accidentally pan past a TV, I'm pretty sure you'll have open revolt.
Letting the customers control the bits is the only long-term stable solution. Maybe the companies will make more than now, maybe less; but only the ones that go this route will be making any money, so far as I can see.