The patent on LZW compression (the problematic portion of the GIF format) expired on June 30, 2003, though Unisys claims to have patents and patents pending on a number of improvements to the claims in the original patent.
seriously, there's only a few viable scenarios here: *we all kill ourselves off long before that through some kind of global warfare * we are reduced to a scattering of stone age civilizations from said warfare * we don't have said warfare, and aliens make contact in the meantime, and we're all enslaved or otherwise screwed (for anyone who doesn't think we'll be getting f'ed in the A if aliens show up, here's a quarter, buy a clue.) * we survive any or all of the above, and manage to colonize other worlds (probably f'ing in the A some other civilization)
the largest effect of a magnetic pole reversal would be on our technology, especially communications tech. in all of those scenarios except #3, it doesn't really matter that much. in #3 it could actually be helpful to the resistance movement
I'd number them based on how significant the code changes are. For example, if the majority of the code for the new features was already present and merely was turned on in the new version, or perhaps it was waiting on a bug fix before being turned on, then that's a pretty minor release, hence the 2.0.-->1--
Doing a minor version increment every time you add a new feature that doesn't significantly alter anything in the way the software is used is just plain silly.
Then again, so is arguing over version numbers....
While I think that all security-sensitive software in this category should be escrowed, the requirement to disclose the names of all programmers working on a project is a little impractical. Instead,the company should be required to disclose the individuals responsible for reviewing code. Additionally, the law should specify either a base operating system to be used, or more appropriately, that a board of IT professionals approve one or more operating systems.
this is hardly the case. telomerase, as it turns out, is already active past the embryonic stage of development, in exactly two cell types: spermatocytes, which give rise to sperm, and for the win, care to guess the other kind?
Cancer cells.
just having telomerase activity isn't something that's going to let us live forever. the key to long life for a cell is very different from that of long life for humans in general. in some cells, you really DON'T want them to live forever, because they'd never divide. Think scarring and skin. or your intestinal surfaces: food always scraping the sides away and never growing back? recipe for disaster.
Short version: we need to get used to the idea of getting older and dying. immortality ain't in the cards anytime soon.
Guardian ad lidem? That means they wanted the court to remove the parents' legal rights to the child
See what happens when you get your legal education from watching reruns of Law & Order:SVU? the appointment of a guardian ad litem has nothing to do with the parents' legal rights to a child, its a recognition of the fact that the child is not merely an extension of the parents but a person in her own right, and therefore has interests which are not always the same as those of the parents. A guardian ad litem doesn't tell the kid when to go to bed, what shows she can watch, or what to wear to school (not that most parents take that much responsibility these days either). the role of the guardian is SOLELY to make decisions for the child with respect to a single court action.
PC's are no more a relic than owning your own home. Does everyone go out and get rid of a house because of the wide availability of hotel rooms or apartments? No, of course not. A hotel doesn't have the room to store all your stuff, it allows limited if any personalization or customization, and in general the customer service sucks. apartments are only slightly better, but in the end they occupy the conceptual space of a laptop in the computer world. great for some people, but after awhile, you're going to outgrow it as a primary computer.
the future trend is going to be for every home to have one or two really big pc's (something we in the Industry refer to as "servers") that network everything from your tivo/pvr to your cell and cordless phones to ultralight tablets and laptops, and make the data stored on those servers ubiquitously available.
This is what happens when consumer journalists are allowed to write stories about real science.
Newsflash: nearly all autotrophic life on earth (read: photosynthetic life, commonly known as plants) breaks down water when it creates glucose. Basically what the students have figured out is that cyanobacteria came up with a significant part of the chemical reactions that just about every plant on earth uses now, rather than those reactions evolving further down the chain.
The fact that this occured isn't new. at all. originally it was thought that the O2 that plants make came from the C02 they take in, but it was demonstrated quite some time ago that the plants actually split water and use the oxygens from that for the 02.
Nothing you've stated supports your argument in any way more substantial than a house of cards.
Speciation has not been observed, friend. Evolution has... but the two can be different.
speciation has not only been observed, but induced. read up on the current academic lit instead of the tripe that your pastor hands out courtesy the discovery institute or bob jones university for a change.
And their lives taken as a whole are a very strong (and yes, *historical*) pointer to Christ born, died, and ressurected.
No, they don't. A generous examination of the evidence around them lends some credence to the idea that there was a man who claimed to be, or more likely was claimed to be by those around him, the Messiah of jewish prophecy, but NOTHING supports the idea that this man rose from the dead. NOTHING in the record outside of the bible makes any weighty testimony regarding their character, intent, motivations, or mental health. in fact, NOTHING AT ALL contemporary to the time when jesus and the apostles supposedly lived provides corroborative evidence of his miracles, life or resurrection. In short, you're obviously someone who could just as easily believe in the tooth fairy as the messiah, as there is the same amount of real evidence for the idea.
Read the Holy Scriptures with a open heart and mind
whether my mind is open or not is irrelevant. ironically, yours is obviously NOT open to the idea that the scriptures are a massive fraud. (Incidentally your characterization of other religious leaders displays an incredible arrogance regarding the motivations for others actions--then again, your belief that the apostles HAD to be men of impeccable character despite no evidence supporting this idea is proof enough of the arrogant nature of your particular implementation of christianity.) as i was saying, it matters not whether my mind is open or closed--if evidence were present, your arguments could be corroborated to within spitting distance of a reasonable doubt. But no, without any corroboration of a story written by the winners, my mind is most definitely not open. were you to bring all of the evidence supporting christianity in general, and the resurrection in particular, into a court of law, you would be tossed out on your ass.
In conclusion, faith is NOT a reasonable basis for believing anything you want. whether its human nature, the existence of god, the existence of fairies, or karma, without a reasonable basis for belief you are simply delusional.
I should be studying for finals right now, so of course I'm going to rebut this rather absurd characterization of science and the evolutionary debate.
When evolutionary theory tracks all the way back to "origins" it becomes theological too. There is just no repeatable experiements to prove the assumptions it makes
Patently untrue. For example, the Miller-Urey experiments and later work based upon them showed that complex organic compounds can be formed from rather basic components like CO2, ammonia, and water, including short-chain nucleic acids. Biologists have long observed speciation and evolution in action, as has anyone who's ever had a resistant bacterial infection or the flu despite a flu shot. There is a long chain of mechanisms in between the two, but nobody in the serious academic community (read: people who don't get their science from usatoday.com or the discovery institute) makes an assertion regarding those mechanisms without a way to test it or evidence to back it up. You wouldn't even be published without it.
He said this because there are vast amounts of historical and logical evidences for the ressurection.
wrong again. there is NONE. there are no contemporary accounts of the life of christ outside the bible and gnostic texts, which were originally in it until constantine and the pope decided against their inclusion. the closest is a single passage in the writings of josephus, who wasn't born until 4 years after the supposed resurrection and published his account, if you can call it that, 60 years after his death (I bring his account into this with a great deal of skepticism since its been under controversey for hundreds of years, and is almost certainly an editorial addition.) Another example: The census mary and joseph were on their way to when jesus was born? Never happened. The Romans never ordered any census in that region or near that time. as for the resurrection itself, let's think about this one for a moment. It goes against everything we know about the way the universe works. There have never been any artifacts found positively confirming the idea that someone was dead and then not. all we have to go on is a collection of books which have had all conflicting accounts purged from them. This happens all the time in the world today, except we don't call it a resurrection and create a religion out of it; we call it fraud. just ask enron and worldcom employeees.
i'm going to save my "religion is the root of all evil" speech for another day...
If you want to teach children good science, then you show them what areas of evolution are up for debate, and the evidence behind the debate--the mechanisms behind speciation, for example.
What you don't do is teach them hazy and conflicting usages of terms like theory. In science, a theory is even more solid than fact, as it makes testable predictions about future knowledge. In the vernacular, a theory carries even less weight than a term like hypothesis--its just some idea of how something works or doesn't work.
Then the nutjobs like James Dobson and Bill Frist try to put ideas like creationism, (which would be a totally crackpot idea if it wasn't for the fact that it was the *only* hypothesis in most of the west (excluding native american tribes, of course) from the rise of christianity until the mid-nineteenth century) on equal footing with evolution, despite the fact that there is NO evidence for creationism--only a book of the Bible.
Nitrox has a higher percentage of Nitrogen, not oxygen... the point is to keep the partial pressure of oxygen at high pressures at a level that is less than toxic. to do that you have to decrease the percentage of oxygen in the mix.
Other mixes use varying levels of inert gases. according to one text i read not too long ago, the most effective to use, interestingly, was argon; i would have expected it to be either helium, as the lightest, or to increase in effectiveness with atomic weight.
good point about the ambient pressure... rebreathers have actually been used to set world record depth dives. incidentally, the guy that taught me to dive at one time had the world record for deepest non-recycled dive (meaning they were switching out tanks with special mixtures as they went down.) when you're doing dives like that (I think he got to 987 ft.) you almost literally have to invent the science as you go--there's very little published literature on what will or won't kill you at that depth.
That's what I'm thinking... We're used to thinking of DNA as a linear data structure, but in reality its much more likely to have second- and third-order organizations that provide much greater depth to the genetic coding contained therein. For the layman, think of it kind of like steganography--read it straight through and it says one thing, read every word corresponding to the first hundred terms of the fibonacci series and it might say another. We KNOW there's more to the story than just looking at the linear sequences--there's far too many proteins in the body than could be coded for in the number of genes we've been able estimate are in the human genome. Also, when rna is being transcribed from DNA, there's an intermediate step in which a bunch of noise is culled out, which is what the parent is referring to. Depending on how you cull the noise, the same gene could code for a number of proteins, which may or may not be related. I think its entirely possible that important genes exist in multiple dimensions for just such a reason.
its important to note that these results have so far only been seen in arabidopsis... it may be a mechanism unique to plant life or even to that branch of the family tree.
The only reason an EE is harder to get is because EE's have been more successful in regulating the industry--read: getting government to weed out the competition.
I got my CS from an engineering school--guess where all the engineers came for tutors? (Hint: it wasn't their department)
Even if you stuck a headphone jack into your phone to get around the shitty piezo speaker problem, consider that if you actually plan to use your phone for something (oh, I don't know, say, talking on it?), why would you want to wear down its battery by playing music on it?
Yeah, actually, not only would i, but I've been screaming for the ability to do so for years. Now I can stick a miniSD card into my cell phone and have a small "emergency supply" of music on hand whenever I need it, without having to carry around an extra gadget. And not only can I play Beethoven's 9th in 32kb mono wma, but also in 192kb vorbis, 128kb wma, and anything in between if i so choose. Not to mention the ability to put videos on my phone--now if i can just get tivo to let me store as wm10 content i can watch 24 on my phone as well.
As for the charging, the engineers made a very wise decision in allowing the phone to charge over USB, so when i hook it up to sync to my desktop, its also charging for me, which means I only have to carry around a small USB cable instead of a whole charger, and i can charge off anything with a USB port, even if the phone's software isn't installed on the computer. hell, i can even charge off linux.:)
(for those wondering, the phone in question is the Audiovox SMT5600, not the nokias mentioned above, but the same principles apply.)
I know you said Windows smartphones were out of your budget, but if you're up for changing providers, Amazon is offering the Audiovox SMT5600 for $25. I own this phone and i love it. not only can you develop applications in any of win32-CE,.Net Compact Framework, or J2ME, but it also offers most of the functionality of a pda and MP3 player in a tight package. The phone is only slightly larger than my ericsson t610 was.
its totally open to develop apps on too--you don't need any of that crappy developer signing BS to put your apps on it.
if that's out of the question, then the best advice i have for you is stay away from verizon and tmobile--both of them required belonging to developer programs beyond the budget of the casual developer, at least when i was using them.
I would much rather someone SMS'd me a short message if it didn't require any interaction... something like "don't forget to pick up milk on the way home" or "running late, be there soon" or "class cancelled for monday" doesn't require a phone call that interrupts my train of thought, class, meeting, or whatever.
I find myself wondering exactly how much experience this chap really has in this market, as opposed to listening to a bunch of people with real experience talking, since "PAX" is actually spelled "PACS" (stands for Picture Archive and Communication System) and HL7 is an XML-based protocol.
That being said, if your target market is small physicians offices, don't worry about the runtime; the overhead of installing it to the workstations is indeed negligible. BUT, if you plan on targeting hospitals at all, the lack of a runtime can indeed be a great selling point. While writing a web-based PACS/RIS/scheduling (RIS=Radiology Information System) my company found that in the vast majority of installs, the clincher to the sale was the lack of a required executable install (except for the radiologists who were doing diagnostic reads) and/or the end-to-end integration of our system, which meant they didn't have to cobble together four or five different vendors' software using obscure export/import procedures that usually ended up as a post-it note on the monitor of the technician doing the job.
on the choices of software: if you go with.Net, despite the great strides mono has made, you're going to be a microsoft bitch^H^H^H^H^Hshop for the foreseeable future. if you go java, get ready to deal with the fact that there are a lot of areas of it that are overengineered for your purposes. There are downsides to both, but there are just as many upsides to each as well. If it were me starting from scratch, i'd go with java, if only because i like eclipse as an IDE better. (and for the record, i agree with anyone who says that's a bad reason to choose a toolkit--but i'd make the same decision six days a week and twice on sunday:) )
honestly, if you're intent on going into this area, go for the little shops first. hospitals are attractive targets for the big boys like GE Medical Systems, and they will eat your friggin lunch, right after they kick you in the balls just for fun. There's a huge market for smaller offices who can't afford an entry-level price of half a million for a HIS system but still need practice management. This is what the ASP business model was born to cover. Tell a doc you'll install for less than 5k, charge him 5 bucks a patient/study/unit of work/whatever but in doing so allow him to better track his expenses, increase his payments from medicare/insurance, see more patients in less time, employ fewer people, or whatever promise your software makes, and he'll be foaming at the mouth to buy whatever it is you're selling.
somebody correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe window.open returns a handle to the the newly opened window, regardless of the name or use of __blank, etc. so you still have access to it, even when its not a named window.
well, honestly its not a terribly hard problem to solve at the server either. a script that sends back content-type text/xml and checks the ip address against recent requests would save your bandwidth.
Of course, then you're trading bandwidth for processing power, which may be six of one, half-dozen of the other depending on your popularity.
Ultimately I think blacklisting IP's that overindulge is probably the best way to go, unless you're someone like the New York Times and can't lose the ad impressions (though you can insert ads into your feed really easily. see moreover.com)
Slashdot Mirror
I usually name my wifi "_SURVEILLANCE" just to mess with my neighbors
The patent on LZW compression (the problematic portion of the GIF format) expired on June 30, 2003, though Unisys claims to have patents and patents pending on a number of improvements to the claims in the original patent.
seriously, there's only a few viable scenarios here:
*we all kill ourselves off long before that through some kind of global warfare
* we are reduced to a scattering of stone age civilizations from said warfare
* we don't have said warfare, and aliens make contact in the meantime, and we're all enslaved or otherwise screwed (for anyone who doesn't think we'll be getting f'ed in the A if aliens show up, here's a quarter, buy a clue.)
* we survive any or all of the above, and manage to colonize other worlds (probably f'ing in the A some other civilization)
the largest effect of a magnetic pole reversal would be on our technology, especially communications tech. in all of those scenarios except #3, it doesn't really matter that much. in #3 it could actually be helpful to the resistance movement
I'd number them based on how significant the code changes are. For example, if the majority of the code for the new features was already present and merely was turned on in the new version, or perhaps it was waiting on a bug fix before being turned on, then that's a pretty minor release, hence the 2.0.-->1--
Doing a minor version increment every time you add a new feature that doesn't significantly alter anything in the way the software is used is just plain silly.
Then again, so is arguing over version numbers....
While I think that all security-sensitive software in this category should be escrowed, the requirement to disclose the names of all programmers working on a project is a little impractical. Instead,the company should be required to disclose the individuals responsible for reviewing code. Additionally, the law should specify either a base operating system to be used, or more appropriately, that a board of IT professionals approve one or more operating systems.
this is hardly the case. telomerase, as it turns out, is already active past the embryonic stage of development, in exactly two cell types: spermatocytes, which give rise to sperm, and for the win, care to guess the other kind?
Cancer cells.
just having telomerase activity isn't something that's going to let us live forever. the key to long life for a cell is very different from that of long life for humans in general. in some cells, you really DON'T want them to live forever, because they'd never divide. Think scarring and skin. or your intestinal surfaces: food always scraping the sides away and never growing back? recipe for disaster.
Short version: we need to get used to the idea of getting older and dying. immortality ain't in the cards anytime soon.
Guardian ad lidem? That means they wanted the court to remove the parents' legal rights to the child
See what happens when you get your legal education from watching reruns of Law & Order:SVU? the appointment of a guardian ad litem has nothing to do with the parents' legal rights to a child, its a recognition of the fact that the child is not merely an extension of the parents but a person in her own right, and therefore has interests which are not always the same as those of the parents. A guardian ad litem doesn't tell the kid when to go to bed, what shows she can watch, or what to wear to school (not that most parents take that much responsibility these days either). the role of the guardian is SOLELY to make decisions for the child with respect to a single court action.
PC's are no more a relic than owning your own home. Does everyone go out and get rid of a house because of the wide availability of hotel rooms or apartments? No, of course not. A hotel doesn't have the room to store all your stuff, it allows limited if any personalization or customization, and in general the customer service sucks. apartments are only slightly better, but in the end they occupy the conceptual space of a laptop in the computer world. great for some people, but after awhile, you're going to outgrow it as a primary computer.
the future trend is going to be for every home to have one or two really big pc's (something we in the Industry refer to as "servers") that network everything from your tivo/pvr to your cell and cordless phones to ultralight tablets and laptops, and make the data stored on those servers ubiquitously available.
Well, that's ONE way to hit your deadlines before you meet a VC rep...
no kidding--this is why i have "flamebait" articles modded up to five--they're the funniest comments on slashdot.
This is what happens when consumer journalists are allowed to write stories about real science.
Newsflash: nearly all autotrophic life on earth (read: photosynthetic life, commonly known as plants) breaks down water when it creates glucose. Basically what the students have figured out is that cyanobacteria came up with a significant part of the chemical reactions that just about every plant on earth uses now, rather than those reactions evolving further down the chain.
The fact that this occured isn't new. at all. originally it was thought that the O2 that plants make came from the C02 they take in, but it was demonstrated quite some time ago that the plants actually split water and use the oxygens from that for the 02.
conclusion: cnet writers are idiots.
Are you completely out of your f'ing gourd?
Nothing you've stated supports your argument in any way more substantial than a house of cards.
Speciation has not been observed, friend. Evolution has... but the two can be different.
speciation has not only been observed, but induced. read up on the current academic lit instead of the tripe that your pastor hands out courtesy the discovery institute or bob jones university for a change.
And their lives taken as a whole are a very strong (and yes, *historical*) pointer to Christ born, died, and ressurected.
No, they don't. A generous examination of the evidence around them lends some credence to the idea that there was a man who claimed to be, or more likely was claimed to be by those around him, the Messiah of jewish prophecy, but NOTHING supports the idea that this man rose from the dead. NOTHING in the record outside of the bible makes any weighty testimony regarding their character, intent, motivations, or mental health. in fact, NOTHING AT ALL contemporary to the time when jesus and the apostles supposedly lived provides corroborative evidence of his miracles, life or resurrection. In short, you're obviously someone who could just as easily believe in the tooth fairy as the messiah, as there is the same amount of real evidence for the idea.
Read the Holy Scriptures with a open heart and mind
whether my mind is open or not is irrelevant. ironically, yours is obviously NOT open to the idea that the scriptures are a massive fraud. (Incidentally your characterization of other religious leaders displays an incredible arrogance regarding the motivations for others actions--then again, your belief that the apostles HAD to be men of impeccable character despite no evidence supporting this idea is proof enough of the arrogant nature of your particular implementation of christianity.) as i was saying, it matters not whether my mind is open or closed--if evidence were present, your arguments could be corroborated to within spitting distance of a reasonable doubt. But no, without any corroboration of a story written by the winners, my mind is most definitely not open. were you to bring all of the evidence supporting christianity in general, and the resurrection in particular, into a court of law, you would be tossed out on your ass.
In conclusion, faith is NOT a reasonable basis for believing anything you want. whether its human nature, the existence of god, the existence of fairies, or karma, without a reasonable basis for belief you are simply delusional.
I should be studying for finals right now, so of course I'm going to rebut this rather absurd characterization of science and the evolutionary debate.
When evolutionary theory tracks all the way back to "origins" it becomes theological too. There is just no repeatable experiements to prove the assumptions it makes
Patently untrue. For example, the Miller-Urey experiments and later work based upon them showed that complex organic compounds can be formed from rather basic components like CO2, ammonia, and water, including short-chain nucleic acids. Biologists have long observed speciation and evolution in action, as has anyone who's ever had a resistant bacterial infection or the flu despite a flu shot. There is a long chain of mechanisms in between the two, but nobody in the serious academic community (read: people who don't get their science from usatoday.com or the discovery institute) makes an assertion regarding those mechanisms without a way to test it or evidence to back it up. You wouldn't even be published without it.
He said this because there are vast amounts of historical and logical evidences for the ressurection.
wrong again. there is NONE. there are no contemporary accounts of the life of christ outside the bible and gnostic texts, which were originally in it until constantine and the pope decided against their inclusion. the closest is a single passage in the writings of josephus, who wasn't born until 4 years after the supposed resurrection and published his account, if you can call it that, 60 years after his death (I bring his account into this with a great deal of skepticism since its been under controversey for hundreds of years, and is almost certainly an editorial addition.) Another example: The census mary and joseph were on their way to when jesus was born? Never happened. The Romans never ordered any census in that region or near that time. as for the resurrection itself, let's think about this one for a moment. It goes against everything we know about the way the universe works. There have never been any artifacts found positively confirming the idea that someone was dead and then not. all we have to go on is a collection of books which have had all conflicting accounts purged from them. This happens all the time in the world today, except we don't call it a resurrection and create a religion out of it; we call it fraud. just ask enron and worldcom employeees.
i'm going to save my "religion is the root of all evil" speech for another day...
If you want to teach children good science, then you show them what areas of evolution are up for debate, and the evidence behind the debate--the mechanisms behind speciation, for example.
What you don't do is teach them hazy and conflicting usages of terms like theory. In science, a theory is even more solid than fact, as it makes testable predictions about future knowledge. In the vernacular, a theory carries even less weight than a term like hypothesis--its just some idea of how something works or doesn't work.
Then the nutjobs like James Dobson and Bill Frist try to put ideas like creationism, (which would be a totally crackpot idea if it wasn't for the fact that it was the *only* hypothesis in most of the west (excluding native american tribes, of course) from the rise of christianity until the mid-nineteenth century) on equal footing with evolution, despite the fact that there is NO evidence for creationism--only a book of the Bible.
Nitrox has a higher percentage of Nitrogen, not oxygen... the point is to keep the partial pressure of oxygen at high pressures at a level that is less than toxic. to do that you have to decrease the percentage of oxygen in the mix.
Other mixes use varying levels of inert gases. according to one text i read not too long ago, the most effective to use, interestingly, was argon; i would have expected it to be either helium, as the lightest, or to increase in effectiveness with atomic weight.
good point about the ambient pressure... rebreathers have actually been used to set world record depth dives. incidentally, the guy that taught me to dive at one time had the world record for deepest non-recycled dive (meaning they were switching out tanks with special mixtures as they went down.) when you're doing dives like that (I think he got to 987 ft.) you almost literally have to invent the science as you go--there's very little published literature on what will or won't kill you at that depth.
That's what I'm thinking... We're used to thinking of DNA as a linear data structure, but in reality its much more likely to have second- and third-order organizations that provide much greater depth to the genetic coding contained therein. For the layman, think of it kind of like steganography--read it straight through and it says one thing, read every word corresponding to the first hundred terms of the fibonacci series and it might say another. We KNOW there's more to the story than just looking at the linear sequences--there's far too many proteins in the body than could be coded for in the number of genes we've been able estimate are in the human genome. Also, when rna is being transcribed from DNA, there's an intermediate step in which a bunch of noise is culled out, which is what the parent is referring to. Depending on how you cull the noise, the same gene could code for a number of proteins, which may or may not be related. I think its entirely possible that important genes exist in multiple dimensions for just such a reason.
its important to note that these results have so far only been seen in arabidopsis... it may be a mechanism unique to plant life or even to that branch of the family tree.
The only reason an EE is harder to get is because EE's have been more successful in regulating the industry--read: getting government to weed out the competition.
I got my CS from an engineering school--guess where all the engineers came for tutors? (Hint: it wasn't their department)
Most companies do have them.
They're called NDA's.
Even if you stuck a headphone jack into your phone to get around the shitty piezo speaker problem, consider that if you actually plan to use your phone for something (oh, I don't know, say, talking on it?), why would you want to wear down its battery by playing music on it?
Yeah, actually, not only would i, but I've been screaming for the ability to do so for years. Now I can stick a miniSD card into my cell phone and have a small "emergency supply" of music on hand whenever I need it, without having to carry around an extra gadget. And not only can I play Beethoven's 9th in 32kb mono wma, but also in 192kb vorbis, 128kb wma, and anything in between if i so choose. Not to mention the ability to put videos on my phone--now if i can just get tivo to let me store as wm10 content i can watch 24 on my phone as well.
As for the charging, the engineers made a very wise decision in allowing the phone to charge over USB, so when i hook it up to sync to my desktop, its also charging for me, which means I only have to carry around a small USB cable instead of a whole charger, and i can charge off anything with a USB port, even if the phone's software isn't installed on the computer. hell, i can even charge off linux.
(for those wondering, the phone in question is the Audiovox SMT5600, not the nokias mentioned above, but the same principles apply.)
I know you said Windows smartphones were out of your budget, but if you're up for changing providers, Amazon is offering the Audiovox SMT5600 for $25. I own this phone and i love it. not only can you develop applications in any of win32-CE, .Net Compact Framework, or J2ME, but it also offers most of the functionality of a pda and MP3 player in a tight package. The phone is only slightly larger than my ericsson t610 was.
its totally open to develop apps on too--you don't need any of that crappy developer signing BS to put your apps on it.
if that's out of the question, then the best advice i have for you is stay away from verizon and tmobile--both of them required belonging to developer programs beyond the budget of the casual developer, at least when i was using them.
I would much rather someone SMS'd me a short message if it didn't require any interaction... something like "don't forget to pick up milk on the way home" or "running late, be there soon" or "class cancelled for monday" doesn't require a phone call that interrupts my train of thought, class, meeting, or whatever.
I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure you're gay.
I find myself wondering exactly how much experience this chap really has in this market, as opposed to listening to a bunch of people with real experience talking, since "PAX" is actually spelled "PACS" (stands for Picture Archive and Communication System) and HL7 is an XML-based protocol.
.Net, despite the great strides mono has made, you're going to be a microsoft bitch^H^H^H^H^Hshop for the foreseeable future. if you go java, get ready to deal with the fact that there are a lot of areas of it that are overengineered for your purposes. There are downsides to both, but there are just as many upsides to each as well. If it were me starting from scratch, i'd go with java, if only because i like eclipse as an IDE better. (and for the record, i agree with anyone who says that's a bad reason to choose a toolkit--but i'd make the same decision six days a week and twice on sunday :) )
That being said, if your target market is small physicians offices, don't worry about the runtime; the overhead of installing it to the workstations is indeed negligible. BUT, if you plan on targeting hospitals at all, the lack of a runtime can indeed be a great selling point. While writing a web-based PACS/RIS/scheduling (RIS=Radiology Information System) my company found that in the vast majority of installs, the clincher to the sale was the lack of a required executable install (except for the radiologists who were doing diagnostic reads) and/or the end-to-end integration of our system, which meant they didn't have to cobble together four or five different vendors' software using obscure export/import procedures that usually ended up as a post-it note on the monitor of the technician doing the job.
on the choices of software: if you go with
honestly, if you're intent on going into this area, go for the little shops first. hospitals are attractive targets for the big boys like GE Medical Systems, and they will eat your friggin lunch, right after they kick you in the balls just for fun. There's a huge market for smaller offices who can't afford an entry-level price of half a million for a HIS system but still need practice management. This is what the ASP business model was born to cover. Tell a doc you'll install for less than 5k, charge him 5 bucks a patient/study/unit of work/whatever but in doing so allow him to better track his expenses, increase his payments from medicare/insurance, see more patients in less time, employ fewer people, or whatever promise your software makes, and he'll be foaming at the mouth to buy whatever it is you're selling.
somebody correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe window.open returns a handle to the the newly opened window, regardless of the name or use of __blank, etc. so you still have access to it, even when its not a named window.
well, honestly its not a terribly hard problem to solve at the server either. a script that sends back content-type text/xml and checks the ip address against recent requests would save your bandwidth.
Of course, then you're trading bandwidth for processing power, which may be six of one, half-dozen of the other depending on your popularity.
Ultimately I think blacklisting IP's that overindulge is probably the best way to go, unless you're someone like the New York Times and can't lose the ad impressions (though you can insert ads into your feed really easily. see moreover.com)