So what we have here is a feasible theory with no supporting physical evidence. I don't know I would call this "uncovering" or "discovering", since it is completely speculative.
Personally, I think the most "obvious" method would be correct. The Egyptians would not have been able to do a computer simulation to determine if their building plans were feasible. Thus I would think they would have gone with the most obvious, full-proof method, even if it would have required more resources. The article is short on details, but any building techniques beyond a certain level of complexity would likely have been too much of a gamble for them to attempt.
Open Office 2.2 was released a few days ago, with support for kerning. I'm extremely pleased that my Word-created handbook now renders perfectly in OO2.2, including all pagination.
And in response to individuals that somehow thought I was wanting to fax clipart, those are two completely different downsides. I needed a fax template at one time, and on numerous other occasions have needed clipart.
I guess I'm just posting this for the sake of posterity, since this story is "old news" now.
I had previously posted that an Open Office Writer downside was the rendering difference between it and Word, which completely threw off the pagination in a handbook I had created in Word. I'm extremely pleased that, after installing Open Office 2.2, the Word-created document renders perfectly, and all pagination is correct!
Really? Because I did read the article, and they did take it to the press:
They found Ribena did not contain the advertised level of vitamin C. GlaxoSmithKline didn't reply when the students approached the firm with their findings, so they took their results to a TV show.
Then the commerce commission got involved, leading GlaxoSmithKline to plead guilty to 15 advertising-related charges on Tuesday.
Did you catch the part where the lady from Samsung is showing how you can flip the phone - one side for PDA / playing music and the other for making calls? The Gizmondo guy asks "There's no way to get both, right?", to which she replies "No, you wouldn't want them both.". Oh, really? So if I'm in the middle of a phone call and want to lookup a piece of information, or take down a piece of information, or do something as terribly extreme as using a calculator app, then I'm out of luck? I just love the way these marketing people dictate what people are supposed to want. Instead of saying "No, there is a technical limitation" or "We just couldn't get that flexibility into the first generation" she responds with something more along the line of "People smarter than you decided this is how you are going to use this phone".
First, and probably foremost, is simply rendering differences between Writer and Word. I've got a parent handbook I just made in Word, and when opened in Writer (all fonts are available) the pagination is totally off. So I'm resigned to printing only from a machine with Word, or goof around with formatting (which will probably then break layout in Word).
Next, there's just a lack of the robustness one expects with Office. Two quick examples: A couple days ago I needed to blow out a fax cover sheet. Tried creating a New document and there weren't any templates at all preinstalled. Nada clip art. If you're into searching, evaluating, downloading and installing as many 3rd party clip art galleries as you can find, you might be alright.
Anyway, I'm really trying to give it a shot, and for most things it is fine. However I keep stubbing my toes on stupid little things along the way, and it is starting to aggravate me.
That would be fine if that were the case here. Slashdot (both as an entity and community) is simply anti-religion - anything faith-based is either shown in an unfavorable light (story selection by editors) or railed upon (by the community in comments). I think you'll find that religions are trashed equally across the board, and not just the "Religions that seek to spread the message of inferiority in atheists, women and homosexuals".
A prime example. The grandparent post was modded offtopic. Yet your response has nothing to do with Sinbad or Wikipedia, yet it is +5 Insightful, even though it only addresses the topic contained in the offtopic post.
I'd like to know why this is flagged as censorship. Is it considered censorship that adult movies can't be rated G? Is it censorship that pornography is not allowed in the.gov TLD? Just because it has to be segregated does't mean it is censored.
Regardless of that, I don't see how this can be enforced, since only a fraction of.com domains are owned by entities in the USA.
Leave the ipod and take a good PDA, like a Dell Axim x51v. It's got WiFi, Bluetooth and irDa for connectivity, hardware-accelerated GPU for smooth playback of MPEG (including MPEG4 / DivX at high-resolution), VGA resolution LCD, standard VGA output for viewing movies, etc on larger screens, it actually works really well as a VOIP skype phone over WiFi (just turn it upsidedown and put your ear over the D-Pad - the mic is near the top). You can put a good browser like Opera on it, and with the VGA display you can surf the net far, far better than with a cell phone. It also has both SD and CF slots, so you can have lots of storage and extra hardware like GPS at the same time.
Oh, and it can play MP3s.
Anyway, I would take a device with maximum portability and flexibility. An iPod can be cajoled into doing other things, but if listing to music isn't 95% of what you'll be using the device for, I'd take a PDA instead.
40% of the US population will be untethered from landlines
Tethers need not be visible. In this case people will simply be exchanging a small one for a big, thick, heavy one. Anyone remember ye good ole days, when you had to purchase phone hardware exclusively from Ma Bell? We went through that crap once before the government stepped in and forced them to allow us options. Now we're going through the same thing again with the cellular industry - except its worse. We've got phones that should be capable of doing all sorts of fantastic things, but can't (or won't) unless we buy our software from the carrier, pay the bandwidth fees to them to transfer it (because we can't just plug our phone into our PC and transfer software that way), then continue paying subscription and bandwidth fees if we want to continue using our software. We have to sign 2 year contracts just to get a phone at a reasonable price. They offer insurance that, after 6 months, isn't worthwhile because the cost of the phone has plummeted, and it's cheaper to buy a phone from a 3rd party than pay just the deductible.
Right now I think we're entering a phase in which carriers are not really trying to compete with one another. Have you ever noticed how you can go into a town and every gas station's prices are within a couple cents of one another, and go down the road a few miles and all those stations prices are 5% cheaper? That's because they aren't competing - they're consorting together (indirectly) in their micro-market to set the prices they want. Well, that's what's going on with cell market. You shouldn't have to pay $100 a month network fees for a single cell phone just for decent service, and unfortunately that's where we stand today. Enough people have been bit by an over-minute cell phone bill, with obscene per-minute rates, that the carriers can now extort people to pay a much higher flat monthly fee simply to avoid the risk.
Yeah - the choice between an inferior screen and a modern OS versus a superior screen and a faulty OS.
Yea. I find that rather interesting. One review site stated that the WinCE version couldn't use the higher resolution display (320x320 vs 240x240) because WinCE wouldn't support it. Now that's complete garbage. My Axim x51v runs at 640x480, and is versatile enough to flip the display to landscape real-time. It can even output to higher resolutions via VGA out.
I definitely get the impression that Palm made the hardware decision to give the Palm OS an edge.
Regardless, in reply to the grandparent, 5 years ago, if Palm sold hardware running Windows CE it would be every bit as earth-shattering as Apple selling Macs running Windows Vista today. It's not widely publicized, but Microsoft's entry into the PDA market from scratch with Windows CE 2.11 PSPC ("Palm Sized PC"), and eventual domination of the market over Palm was a massive coup. Since they've won that market they are now working on video game consoles.
So I stand by my original post, that Palm selling devices running Windows CE is evidence that they are "dead".
I noticed our Wal-Mart has a "Max Media Dock" adapter for the DS. It accepts a CF card, and allows you to play MP3s and the like. It is like this one, but accepts CF instead of Memory Stick. According to their web site: "MAX Media Player is the most exciting product ever released for the Nintendo DS. Combining a pristine app launcher for home brew software and an easy-to-use media MP3 and video player"
The interesting thing is this is right there on the shelf at my local Wal-Mart, when it apparently can be used to play, ahem, backups. I doubt Wal-Mart is aware of that capability. I know the packaging makes no mention of it, which is probably why they carry it.
You know, this is extremely interesting. Mars' climate is vastly simpler than Earth's. The lack of oceans alone reduces the complexity enormously. Earth's biology, and its ability to convert and store massive amounts of gases adds additional complexity. Throw in humans, and its pretty much impossible to figure out what's really going on. Although Mars has an atmosphere, the processes going on there are so much simpler that external forces (the sun) will result in faster and more dramatic change. Thus Mars would be a great litmus test of what impact the changing sun might have on Earth. I have a hunch that if this is really the cause of what is happening on Earth, and if we had this quality of Mars data going back further in time, we could have possibly predicted the trends we are seeing on Earth now.
I guess a bunch of execs are sitting around the board room table, still thinking it is 1970 and they have exclusive control over video distribution of their content. It will probably take an entire generation worth of executives to die off before some of these industries can reform. It really takes serious denial to think that consumers would prefer to wait for them to broadcast the content over their channels, when it can be obtained immediately, on-demand, in HD without commercials for free.
What about Google? Practically anything I google for results in a Wikipedia article as the first hit. I can't believe that pagerank alone results in Wikipedia articles ranked highly so consistently for practically every search topic imaginable. I think it would be an advantage for Google to buy out Wikipedia, as they seem to rely on Wikipedia already.
Windows CE 3.0 was a port of the NT kernel, which is why the platform (from that point on) is actually pretty decent and stable. The core sources have been available for some time now.
As far as the GUI, etc, I'm sure they did port various libraries. MFC was definitely a port. So it certainly was more of a port than a from-scratch effort.
MEDITECH is a healthcare software system used extensively by hospitals (thanks mostly to a terrible decision by Columbia, now known as HCA), that uses dumb terminals with a proprietary server-side OS called MAGIC. It's a wonderful, cutting edge technology if you think it is 1980. These systems are still being installed. In fact, our local hospital was just bought out by a chain, and they installed MEDITECH within the last few months.
Interestingly, the exact opposite of what this article is claiming is happening in these hospitals with regards to client hardware. They started off with mainly dumb terminals 10 years ago, but have switched almost completely to PCs and Laptops running terminal emulation software. Laptops on carts provide portability, and actually end up cheaper than dropping cables into every single patient room, installing hardware on which to mount the keyboard and display, and buying the actual terminal, keyboard and display. In addition to saving money with laptops, they save a lot of room not having to permanently mount hardware in the patient rooms.
The thing is, the cost of PCs and laptops have dropped so much that they can compete with the cost of dumb terminals. Both require keyboards and monitors anyway, and the massive gains from having a multi-purpose computer (able to view HTML, etc) simply outweigh the small increase in cost.
My partner's practice had dumb terminals for over a decade for patient registration and billing at the front desk. They recently replaced the dumb terminals with PCs running terminal emulators.
It's perfectly obvious that there was a temperature gradient in the atmosphere between the aircraft and the building, resulting in optical distortion of that building. Sheesh, conspiracy theorists.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if the Dukes of Hazzard could have 300+ cars, then surely Knight Rider could have at least a paltry 100!
Through the history of the show, an estimated 309 General Lees were used. Twenty three are still known to exist in various states of repair.
Dan East
So what we have here is a feasible theory with no supporting physical evidence. I don't know I would call this "uncovering" or "discovering", since it is completely speculative.
Personally, I think the most "obvious" method would be correct. The Egyptians would not have been able to do a computer simulation to determine if their building plans were feasible. Thus I would think they would have gone with the most obvious, full-proof method, even if it would have required more resources. The article is short on details, but any building techniques beyond a certain level of complexity would likely have been too much of a gamble for them to attempt.
Dan East
I really thought they had something good going, until I read this:
MP3 and WAV files will not be printed. We recommend maintaining copies of your non-paper Gmail in these cases.
Well, that pretty much makes this new service worthless. Someone let me know when they start printing audio attachments, and I might reconsider.
Dan East
Open Office 2.2 was released a few days ago, with support for kerning. I'm extremely pleased that my Word-created handbook now renders perfectly in OO2.2, including all pagination.
And in response to individuals that somehow thought I was wanting to fax clipart, those are two completely different downsides. I needed a fax template at one time, and on numerous other occasions have needed clipart.
Dan East
I guess I'm just posting this for the sake of posterity, since this story is "old news" now.
I had previously posted that an Open Office Writer downside was the rendering difference between it and Word, which completely threw off the pagination in a handbook I had created in Word. I'm extremely pleased that, after installing Open Office 2.2, the Word-created document renders perfectly, and all pagination is correct!
Dan East
Really? Because I did read the article, and they did take it to the press:
They found Ribena did not contain the advertised level of vitamin C. GlaxoSmithKline didn't reply when the students approached the firm with their findings, so they took their results to a TV show.
Then the commerce commission got involved, leading GlaxoSmithKline to plead guilty to 15 advertising-related charges on Tuesday.
Dan East
Just curious, but as you wander how do you access Slashdot? Public hotspots? Internet Cafés? Mobile broadband?
I figured that other wanderers might wonder about that.
Dan East
Did you catch the part where the lady from Samsung is showing how you can flip the phone - one side for PDA / playing music and the other for making calls? The Gizmondo guy asks "There's no way to get both, right?", to which she replies "No, you wouldn't want them both.". Oh, really? So if I'm in the middle of a phone call and want to lookup a piece of information, or take down a piece of information, or do something as terribly extreme as using a calculator app, then I'm out of luck? I just love the way these marketing people dictate what people are supposed to want. Instead of saying "No, there is a technical limitation" or "We just couldn't get that flexibility into the first generation" she responds with something more along the line of "People smarter than you decided this is how you are going to use this phone".
Sorry, that just really jumped out at me.
Dan East
First, and probably foremost, is simply rendering differences between Writer and Word. I've got a parent handbook I just made in Word, and when opened in Writer (all fonts are available) the pagination is totally off. So I'm resigned to printing only from a machine with Word, or goof around with formatting (which will probably then break layout in Word).
Next, there's just a lack of the robustness one expects with Office. Two quick examples:
A couple days ago I needed to blow out a fax cover sheet. Tried creating a New document and there weren't any templates at all preinstalled.
Nada clip art. If you're into searching, evaluating, downloading and installing as many 3rd party clip art galleries as you can find, you might be alright.
Anyway, I'm really trying to give it a shot, and for most things it is fine. However I keep stubbing my toes on stupid little things along the way, and it is starting to aggravate me.
Dan East
Today:
Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being blocked was mine.
Seven years from now:
Maybe I'm biased, since one of the Web sites being DOSed by Slashdot was mine.
Also, as a resident of Virginia, the article's title caused me unnecessary concern. Thanks a lot.
Dan East
That would be fine if that were the case here. Slashdot (both as an entity and community) is simply anti-religion - anything faith-based is either shown in an unfavorable light (story selection by editors) or railed upon (by the community in comments). I think you'll find that religions are trashed equally across the board, and not just the "Religions that seek to spread the message of inferiority in atheists, women and homosexuals".
A prime example. The grandparent post was modded offtopic. Yet your response has nothing to do with Sinbad or Wikipedia, yet it is +5 Insightful, even though it only addresses the topic contained in the offtopic post.
Dan East
I'd like to know why this is flagged as censorship. Is it considered censorship that adult movies can't be rated G? Is it censorship that pornography is not allowed in the .gov TLD? Just because it has to be segregated does't mean it is censored.
.com domains are owned by entities in the USA.
Regardless of that, I don't see how this can be enforced, since only a fraction of
Dan East
Leave the ipod and take a good PDA, like a Dell Axim x51v. It's got WiFi, Bluetooth and irDa for connectivity, hardware-accelerated GPU for smooth playback of MPEG (including MPEG4 / DivX at high-resolution), VGA resolution LCD, standard VGA output for viewing movies, etc on larger screens, it actually works really well as a VOIP skype phone over WiFi (just turn it upsidedown and put your ear over the D-Pad - the mic is near the top). You can put a good browser like Opera on it, and with the VGA display you can surf the net far, far better than with a cell phone. It also has both SD and CF slots, so you can have lots of storage and extra hardware like GPS at the same time.
Oh, and it can play MP3s.
Anyway, I would take a device with maximum portability and flexibility. An iPod can be cajoled into doing other things, but if listing to music isn't 95% of what you'll be using the device for, I'd take a PDA instead.
Dan East
40% of the US population will be untethered from landlines
Tethers need not be visible. In this case people will simply be exchanging a small one for a big, thick, heavy one. Anyone remember ye good ole days, when you had to purchase phone hardware exclusively from Ma Bell? We went through that crap once before the government stepped in and forced them to allow us options. Now we're going through the same thing again with the cellular industry - except its worse. We've got phones that should be capable of doing all sorts of fantastic things, but can't (or won't) unless we buy our software from the carrier, pay the bandwidth fees to them to transfer it (because we can't just plug our phone into our PC and transfer software that way), then continue paying subscription and bandwidth fees if we want to continue using our software. We have to sign 2 year contracts just to get a phone at a reasonable price. They offer insurance that, after 6 months, isn't worthwhile because the cost of the phone has plummeted, and it's cheaper to buy a phone from a 3rd party than pay just the deductible.
Right now I think we're entering a phase in which carriers are not really trying to compete with one another. Have you ever noticed how you can go into a town and every gas station's prices are within a couple cents of one another, and go down the road a few miles and all those stations prices are 5% cheaper? That's because they aren't competing - they're consorting together (indirectly) in their micro-market to set the prices they want. Well, that's what's going on with cell market. You shouldn't have to pay $100 a month network fees for a single cell phone just for decent service, and unfortunately that's where we stand today. Enough people have been bit by an over-minute cell phone bill, with obscene per-minute rates, that the carriers can now extort people to pay a much higher flat monthly fee simply to avoid the risk.
Dan East
Yeah - the choice between an inferior screen and a modern OS versus a superior screen and a faulty OS.
Yea. I find that rather interesting. One review site stated that the WinCE version couldn't use the higher resolution display (320x320 vs 240x240) because WinCE wouldn't support it. Now that's complete garbage. My Axim x51v runs at 640x480, and is versatile enough to flip the display to landscape real-time. It can even output to higher resolutions via VGA out.
I definitely get the impression that Palm made the hardware decision to give the Palm OS an edge.
Regardless, in reply to the grandparent, 5 years ago, if Palm sold hardware running Windows CE it would be every bit as earth-shattering as Apple selling Macs running Windows Vista today. It's not widely publicized, but Microsoft's entry into the PDA market from scratch with Windows CE 2.11 PSPC ("Palm Sized PC"), and eventual domination of the market over Palm was a massive coup. Since they've won that market they are now working on video game consoles.
So I stand by my original post, that Palm selling devices running Windows CE is evidence that they are "dead".
Dan East
Wikipedia, eh? There. Now Google has an extra $100 Billion revenue to work with.
Dan East
The Palm Treo 700w is evidence of your claims - it runs Windows Mobile.
Dan East
I noticed our Wal-Mart has a "Max Media Dock" adapter for the DS. It accepts a CF card, and allows you to play MP3s and the like. It is like this one, but accepts CF instead of Memory Stick. According to their web site:
"MAX Media Player is the most exciting product ever released for the Nintendo DS. Combining a pristine app launcher for home brew software and an easy-to-use media MP3 and video player"
The interesting thing is this is right there on the shelf at my local Wal-Mart, when it apparently can be used to play, ahem, backups. I doubt Wal-Mart is aware of that capability. I know the packaging makes no mention of it, which is probably why they carry it.
Dan East
You know, this is extremely interesting. Mars' climate is vastly simpler than Earth's. The lack of oceans alone reduces the complexity enormously. Earth's biology, and its ability to convert and store massive amounts of gases adds additional complexity. Throw in humans, and its pretty much impossible to figure out what's really going on. Although Mars has an atmosphere, the processes going on there are so much simpler that external forces (the sun) will result in faster and more dramatic change. Thus Mars would be a great litmus test of what impact the changing sun might have on Earth. I have a hunch that if this is really the cause of what is happening on Earth, and if we had this quality of Mars data going back further in time, we could have possibly predicted the trends we are seeing on Earth now.
Dan East
I guess a bunch of execs are sitting around the board room table, still thinking it is 1970 and they have exclusive control over video distribution of their content. It will probably take an entire generation worth of executives to die off before some of these industries can reform. It really takes serious denial to think that consumers would prefer to wait for them to broadcast the content over their channels, when it can be obtained immediately, on-demand, in HD without commercials for free.
Dan East
What about Google? Practically anything I google for results in a Wikipedia article as the first hit. I can't believe that pagerank alone results in Wikipedia articles ranked highly so consistently for practically every search topic imaginable. I think it would be an advantage for Google to buy out Wikipedia, as they seem to rely on Wikipedia already.
Dan East
Never mind your question - what I want to know is what you've got that baby on? It must be some good stuff! ;)
Dan East
Windows CE 3.0 was a port of the NT kernel, which is why the platform (from that point on) is actually pretty decent and stable. The core sources have been available for some time now.
As far as the GUI, etc, I'm sure they did port various libraries. MFC was definitely a port. So it certainly was more of a port than a from-scratch effort.
Dan East
MEDITECH is a healthcare software system used extensively by hospitals (thanks mostly to a terrible decision by Columbia, now known as HCA), that uses dumb terminals with a proprietary server-side OS called MAGIC. It's a wonderful, cutting edge technology if you think it is 1980. These systems are still being installed. In fact, our local hospital was just bought out by a chain, and they installed MEDITECH within the last few months.
Interestingly, the exact opposite of what this article is claiming is happening in these hospitals with regards to client hardware. They started off with mainly dumb terminals 10 years ago, but have switched almost completely to PCs and Laptops running terminal emulation software. Laptops on carts provide portability, and actually end up cheaper than dropping cables into every single patient room, installing hardware on which to mount the keyboard and display, and buying the actual terminal, keyboard and display. In addition to saving money with laptops, they save a lot of room not having to permanently mount hardware in the patient rooms.
The thing is, the cost of PCs and laptops have dropped so much that they can compete with the cost of dumb terminals. Both require keyboards and monitors anyway, and the massive gains from having a multi-purpose computer (able to view HTML, etc) simply outweigh the small increase in cost.
My partner's practice had dumb terminals for over a decade for patient registration and billing at the front desk. They recently replaced the dumb terminals with PCs running terminal emulators.
Dan East
It's perfectly obvious that there was a temperature gradient in the atmosphere between the aircraft and the building, resulting in optical distortion of that building. Sheesh, conspiracy theorists.
Dan East