I still wonder why this device is so expensive. It is possible to get a Bluetooth baseband controller for 4$ in quantities of 100K pieces (and logitech must order much more than that) with a spec which reads an ARM7 core, 64KB SRAM, 384KB flash and many more things, I cant really comprehend what makes this device so expensive. I mean surely they are using a configuration which maybe costs only half as much. I dont have experience with mouses but I have some experience with more complilcated bluetooth devices, like bluetooth watches with Mpeg4 decoders and stuff like that, and even they cost about 50 USD to make even though they use much more flash and SRAM. So I will say wait for a year before contemplating buying something like this.
" It is not just the fact that cellphone take one hand away from the wheel it is also the dialing, the looking for a phonenumber, the dropping your cell phone and looking for it under your seat, while keeping one eye on the road and the foot on a the pedal"
Dialling- Most phones have voice dialling now and its possible to use the Headset to jsut say the name of the person and it dials the number. Mine works pretty flawlessly actually. Though I can just store 10 voice tags, but I am sure thats not gonna be the case for long.
looking for a phonenumber- Again if U just have to say the name, U dont have to look up the number.
the dropping your cell phone and looking for it under your seat - Well Dude, its wireless. Even if u drop the phone, u dont lose connection to the phone.
The only thing is the lack of concentration while u r talking to someone. Most headsets just fit in one ear, so I guess u can still hear the other sounds,like honking and all. Its not all that bad in my opinion.
In case u guyz are wondering who is the female on the screen of the simputer on simputer.org, well her name is Aishawarya Rai. Beautiful lady indeed. The link also has her phone number but try at ur own risk. Here are some nice pictures of her.
So finally the simputer has been launched. But that doesn't mean it works flawlessly. Until about 2 months ago, they had some problems with their text to speech software, dhvani, and they were planning to go for a closed source solution from another indian company. Now for some of teh concerns raised in the article, as usual about average India salary and stuff like that. The aim of the project is not that every peasent should own a Simputer of his own. In India, in villages u have small committees which are elceted by the villagers, and these committes are allocated some budget by the government. So the idea is that every committee buys one Simputer and then the villagers can simply use thier own compact flash card if atall required. I mean its use was forseen in making weather prediction services and agricultural help availaible to the farmers. For that you dont need ur compact flash. If you want advanced services, then u can buy one, but then compact flash cards are not all that expensive. As far as the Indian middle class is concerned, currently they account for around 40% of the population. Not all of them will feel the need of buying something like this, but they very well can. That is 400 million people. I am just waiting for a review now. Maybe I will get one in December and write one myself. I enjoy working on stronARM and I think it will be interesting to hack this thing.
I am with Fritz on this one. Not because I am the enemy of humanity or someting (Gotcha George Bush...planning to bomb me after reading my first sentence, weren't ya? ) The reason why I am backing Fritz is because if fritz wins, its makers will get $400,000 which they will use to open a chess acdemy to teach chess to people and if Kramnik wins he will get I million dollars, but that will be all Kramnik's...besides even if he loses, he will still get $600,000 so its not as if he aint earning anything. Secondly, I just love Fritz and I hope this software is developled more...
I wont worry too much about it... no CEO wud like to admit that all the employees working under him are smarter than him:-) Anyway, there are many companies even now who don't recruit the brightest people. The reason, the brighter they are, the more likely they are to switch jobs. I kid you not but many companies have this policy, or used to do in dotcom era. Besides, if you have too many smart people working at the same place, I think that wud create mayhem...just think of the arguments these guys can have... So I will say guys, rest assured...we are safe:-)
In my opinion, RIAA is just looking for a scape goat... music sales are falling partly because not many good songs are bring released and partly because of overall economic slowdown,and these guys at RIAA need someway to explain to their shareholders( not RIAA shareholders but shareholders of companiesforming RIAA) that why they are not able to sell more CDs. So they have chosen to blame the online community... I mean how many people in this world have broadband access anyway that they can download music? I still remember that in countries like India,its cheaper to just go and buy the CD than trying to download a song on a dialup. In such places, downloading one or two songs is concievable but mass downloads,now way. Are the record companies implying that the online community is the community which mostly buys their music?? What kind of logic is there in this argument?? And if its actually true, why dont they just release music targeted at the non online communitzy or people who are less likely to download songs?
I passed out two years ago from one of the best Engineering colleges in India. And only two people in my college had ever worked on linux. Sure there were many who were pro linux and anti MS, but ask them if they had ever coded on linux, or just compiled the kerenel ( I actually asked this to one of my seniors, a so called linux guru, and then he confessed to me that he had never really compiled a kernel, eventhough he was always boasting how easy it was), and all of them will be saying that, well linux isnt all that gr8, I couldnt make my X run and so on.... The fact was that out of 1000 students, only two had PCs which they really used for some development work for linux, all the rest were just boasting about it. The reason was that they always had other options, namely pirated MS software.When you can get Visual Studio for Rs 150 (about $3) and Windows for Rs 100(about $2), and even for getting linux you have to buy a computer mag for Rs100 (Hey, broadband in India sucks, even in Universities), do you think anyone will actually use Linux?? So what I am really happy about is that now they are planning to introduce linux courses in the colleges... that will force them to finally get them to install linux on their PCs and I know for sure that once they get tinkering around, they can't resist the FORCE. It happened to me, and I am sure it will happen to others too. Besides it will also lead to they syllabi being changed abit which haven't been revised in a Decade or so.
Alll I can say is if this actually happens( Do u think MS will saty silent and let so many potential MS technology developers just get out of their hands?? U must be kidding), it will be one of the best things to ever happen to linux.
I just hope that the software which takes in the decoded signal doesn't have a bug. Otherwise U never know, you may intend to shake the hand of the person in front of you, and you may end up punching him on the nose... and to make it worse, when the person tries to hit you back, ur robotic leg refuses to run saying a critical error has ocurred. Actually I can think of many other scenarios, but I think you get the picture.
Well, that can be solved easily enough. All thats required is that when one installs an application, that application registers its path in a file and the automatic update uses this file to find the path for that particular application. Thats one idea. I am sure that there are many more out there.
I guess this transition should be easy enough for Intel. One thing is sure that apple will expect a Microprocessor which is not availaible generally in the market. The reason is that once you get an intel chip, you can put it in any intel compatible motherboard and voila, you have a low cost mac, which also runs windows. That means that apple will require some special version of the chip, which probably OS X will check( maybe a hardware register or someting like this, or maybe the palladium technology) and only then it will run on that microprocessor. But what prevents people from running Windows on it as well? Would apple allow that to happen? I dont think apple would like to do that. But to prevent that means that the CPU architecture has to be changed to suite apple. Now the question is that will intel do that??
I think that linux provides the sys admins with a false sense of security. Most sysadmins think that because running Linux, they can't be infected with any viruses and worms. The result of this is that many of hese adminstarators never bother to check about new threats, because they haven't seen anything like this for a while. Normally linux adminstrators are more tech savy than Windows adminstrators but as linx GUI improves, one will see a prliferation of not so tech savy adminstrators in the Linux market as well.So be prepared for increasing amounts of damage which such worms can cause. On the other hand, the adminstrators of Windows machines, because they are facing a new worm every second day, try to stay uptodate with the latest news and patches. Most of them have aautomatic update wizards running on their machines which download new patches instantly. Infact I would prefer such an instant update wizard for Linux as well, especially for the Linux running security critical applications, so that even if the system adminstrator is too lazy to check a news site, he will still come to know abot the threat. And because it will be running on linux, it will do what its supposed to do, not "God knows What and Gates knows what" as is the case with windows update wizard.
Okay, now that I did the unbelievable by posting the second message which not only was not a troll, but also pinpointed the cause of this change in HP policy, there is a related story on ZDNET on this
Okay, now that I did the unbelievable by posting the second message which not only was not a troll, but also pinpointed the cause of this change in HP policy, there is a related story on ZDNET. To quote from the article:
"Our relationship has significantly improved," Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin told CNET News.com earlier this month.
Asked if the Compaq influence was the leading factor, Allchin said, "I suspect that's a large part of it."
Following up on our discussion of 802.11b, the kind og bandwidth that one can normally get from 802.11b is not reaally enough for high quality video. So if U are just monitoring ppl, then its fine...but if U really wanna see them( like in the case of the neighbourhood girl), I guess 802.11b wont really work for me:-)
Correct me if I am wrong but isnt Wi-Fi stands for 802.11a with max bandwidth of 45 Mbps? Secondly there is another major problm for 3 G especially in Europe. I live in Switzerland where ppl overall are fairly health conscience. Infact in cities here many places are not covered by cell phones because ppl dont like to have antennnas on top of their houses and thats for 2G. For 3G we require four times as many antennas as its range is smaller. SO that makes me wonder how are they gonna conver the cities here? I believe the situation is the same throughout Europe. So how are the phone companies gonna handle this?
It makes sense to go for a samller HD
on
New MP3 Portables
·
· Score: 1
I have an archos jukebox, which uses the traditional 2.5 inch HD. Even though I never had any problem with it, given the choice I would go for a player with a smaller harddisk. The biggest problem with jukebox is( even though its much smaller than creative nomad) that its too big to comfortably put in the back pocket of regular jeans or trousers. So if you are a regular guy who wears regular jeans, you will have a big problem because you have to always carry it in your hand, which aint so cool. If you are really insistent on putting it in the rear pocket, almost certainly U will push some buttons accidently because it fits too closely. I dont know if this fact bothers other ppl, but it bothers me for sure. So if you are planning to buy a mp3 player, dd consider this as well. So in my opinion it makes sense to go for a samsung and if you have the money, for the ipod.
I am sick and tired of this debate. Everytime there is a news item about Inidia, we go into this debate of first world, second worlk and third world. Tell me something guys, is this really important?? I mean the fact is that India launched a satellite, why not just concentrate on that?? I will tell you the truth about Infratstructure in Indian universities. Its pathetic. But this is also a fact that when U have 1 billion ppl and so few unis, the competition to get into a decent university is intense. Infact for admission into IIT( India Institute of Technology) about 300,000 ppl appear in the test and only the top 1000 or so make it. So to get admission into a decnt university in India, you have to be in top 0.33% of the population. Now atleast some of such guys( those who are not lured away bu US companies) join organisations like ISRO. They are already intelligent enough and soon they get grip of whats going on. Thats the story of India. But always remember, behind every thousand who made it, there are 299,000 who din't.
Why is the American economy not doing better?
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 0
Sometime I wonder that if Bush is such a big friend of coroporations, howcome that the American economy is not doing better?? I mean that guy has tried everything to help those corporations, from replecing memebers in these commities to bloacking Kyoto. Why then does he need this facade of war against Iraq to divert the attentions of the Americans from their economy. But hey, he is a smart chap. His dad one a war and then lost an election....the reason was that the war ended... The son learned from his father's mistakes...
Its a knbown fact that the attention span of humans is very small. Infact when I used to go to school, the most I learned about computers was when the teacher was looking away and I was too bored listening to his lecture.Atleast thast when I got really interested about programming anyway, as I wanted to write my own games.
So will this distribution include some nice games as well? I don't think anyone interested in making an educational package can overlook the value of games.
Does anyone know why this one person was so important?? I mean I am sure that there are millions of ppl swapping music over Kazaa and many thousands using Verizon network but why was this one user singled out??
Slashdot Mirror
I still wonder why this device is so expensive. It is possible to get a Bluetooth
baseband controller for 4$ in quantities of 100K pieces (and logitech must order much more than that) with a spec which reads an ARM7 core, 64KB SRAM, 384KB flash and many more things, I cant really comprehend what makes this device so expensive. I mean surely they are using a configuration which maybe costs only half as much. I dont have experience with mouses but I have some experience with more complilcated bluetooth devices, like bluetooth watches with Mpeg4 decoders and stuff like that, and even they cost about 50 USD to make even though they use much more flash and SRAM. So I will say wait for a year before contemplating buying something like this.
" It is not just the fact that cellphone take one hand away from the wheel it is also the dialing, the looking for a phonenumber, the dropping your cell phone and looking for it under your seat, while keeping one eye on the road and the foot on a the pedal"
Dialling- Most phones have voice dialling now and its possible to use the Headset to jsut say the name of the person and it dials the number. Mine works pretty flawlessly actually. Though I can just store 10 voice tags, but I am sure thats not gonna be the case for long.
looking for a phonenumber- Again if U just have to say the name, U dont have to look up the number.
the dropping your cell phone and looking for it under your seat - Well Dude, its wireless. Even if u drop the phone, u dont lose connection to the phone.
The only thing is the lack of concentration while u r talking to someone. Most headsets just fit in one ear, so I guess u can still hear the other sounds,like honking and all. Its not all that bad in my opinion.
In case u guyz are wondering who is the female on the screen of the simputer
on simputer.org, well her name is Aishawarya
Rai. Beautiful lady indeed. The link also has her phone number but try at ur
own risk. Here are some
nice pictures of her.
So finally the simputer has been launched. But that doesn't mean it works flawlessly. Until about 2 months ago, they had some problems with their text to speech software, dhvani, and they were planning to go for a closed source solution from another indian company.
Now for some of teh concerns raised in the article, as usual about average India salary and stuff like that. The aim of the project is not that every peasent should own a Simputer of his own. In India, in villages u have small committees which are elceted by the villagers, and these committes are allocated some budget by the government. So the idea is that every committee buys one Simputer and then the villagers can simply use thier own compact flash card if atall required. I mean its use was forseen in making weather prediction services and agricultural help availaible to the farmers. For that you dont need ur compact flash. If you want advanced services, then u can buy one, but then compact flash cards are not all that expensive.
As far as the Indian middle class is concerned, currently they account for around 40% of the population. Not all of them will feel the need of buying something like this, but they very well can. That is 400 million people.
I am just waiting for a review now. Maybe I will get one in December and write one myself. I enjoy working on stronARM and I think it will be interesting to hack this thing.
I am with Fritz on this one. Not because I am the enemy of humanity or someting (Gotcha George Bush...planning to bomb me after reading my first sentence, weren't ya? )
The reason why I am backing Fritz is because if fritz wins, its makers will get $400,000 which they will use to open a chess acdemy to teach chess to people and if Kramnik wins he will get I million dollars, but that will be all Kramnik's...besides even if he loses, he will still get $600,000 so its not as if he aint earning anything.
Secondly, I just love Fritz and I hope this software is developled more...
I wont worry too much about it... no CEO wud like to admit that all the employees working under him are smarter than him :-) :-)
Anyway, there are many companies even now who don't recruit the brightest people. The reason, the brighter they are, the more likely they are to switch jobs. I kid you not but many companies have this policy, or used to do in dotcom era.
Besides, if you have too many smart people working at the same place, I think that wud create mayhem...just think of the arguments these guys can have...
So I will say guys, rest assured...we are safe
In my opinion, RIAA is just looking for a scape goat... music sales are falling partly because not many good songs are bring released and partly because of overall economic slowdown,and these guys at RIAA need someway to explain to their shareholders( not RIAA shareholders but shareholders of companiesforming RIAA) that why they are not able to sell more CDs. So they have chosen to blame the online community... I mean how many people in this world have broadband access anyway that they can download music? I still remember that in countries like India,its cheaper to just go and buy the CD than trying to download a song on a dialup. In such places, downloading one or two songs is concievable but mass downloads,now way. Are the record companies implying that the online community is the community which mostly buys their music?? What kind of logic is there in this argument?? And if its actually true, why dont they just release music targeted at the non online communitzy or people who are less likely to download songs?
No, I just babble in my sleep and a penguin types for me :-)
I passed out two years ago from one of the best Engineering colleges in India. And only two people in my college had ever worked on linux. Sure there were many who were pro linux and anti MS, but ask them if they had ever coded on linux, or just compiled the kerenel ( I actually asked this to one of my seniors, a so called linux guru, and then he confessed to me that he had never really compiled a kernel, eventhough he was always boasting how easy it was), and all of them will be saying that, well linux isnt all that gr8, I couldnt make my X run and so on.... The fact was that out of 1000 students, only two had PCs which they really used for some development work for linux, all the rest were just boasting about it.
The reason was that they always had other options, namely pirated MS software.When you can get Visual Studio for Rs 150 (about $3) and Windows for Rs 100(about $2), and even for getting linux you have to buy a computer mag for Rs100 (Hey, broadband in India sucks, even in Universities), do you think anyone will actually use Linux??
So what I am really happy about is that now they are planning to introduce linux courses in the colleges... that will force them to finally get them to install linux on their PCs and I know for sure that once they get tinkering around, they can't resist the FORCE. It happened to me, and I am sure it will happen to others too.
Besides it will also lead to they syllabi being changed abit which haven't been revised in a Decade or so.
Alll I can say is if this actually happens( Do u think MS will saty silent and let so many potential MS technology developers just get out of their hands?? U must be kidding), it will be one of the best things to ever happen to linux.
I just hope that the software which takes in the decoded signal doesn't have a bug. Otherwise U never know, you may intend to shake the hand of the person in front of you, and you may end up punching him on the nose... and to make it worse, when the person tries to hit you back, ur robotic leg refuses to run saying a critical error has ocurred.
Actually I can think of many other scenarios, but I think you get the picture.
Well, that can be solved easily enough. All thats required is that when one installs an application, that application registers its path in a file and the automatic update uses this file to find the path for that particular application.
Thats one idea. I am sure that there are many more out there.
I guess this transition should be easy enough for Intel. One thing is sure that apple will expect a Microprocessor which is not availaible generally in the market. The reason is that once you get an intel chip, you can put it in any intel compatible motherboard and voila, you have a low cost mac, which also runs windows.
That means that apple will require some special version of the chip, which probably OS X will check( maybe a hardware register or someting like this, or maybe the palladium technology) and only then it will run on that microprocessor. But what prevents people from running Windows on it as well? Would apple allow that to happen? I dont think apple would like to do that.
But to prevent that means that the CPU architecture has to be changed to suite apple. Now the question is that will intel do that??
I think that linux provides the sys admins with a false sense of security. Most sysadmins think that because running Linux, they can't be infected with any viruses and worms. The result of this is that many of hese adminstarators never bother to check about new threats, because they haven't seen anything like this for a while. Normally linux adminstrators are more tech savy than Windows adminstrators but as linx GUI improves, one will see a prliferation of not so tech savy adminstrators in the Linux market as well.So be prepared for increasing amounts of damage which such worms can cause.
On the other hand, the adminstrators of Windows machines, because they are facing a new worm every second day, try to stay uptodate with the latest news and patches. Most of them have aautomatic update wizards running on their machines which download new patches instantly.
Infact I would prefer such an instant update wizard for Linux as well, especially for the Linux running security critical applications, so that even if the system adminstrator is too lazy to check a news site, he will still come to know abot the threat.
And because it will be running on linux, it will do what its supposed to do, not "God knows What and Gates knows what" as is the case with windows update wizard.
Sorry pal.. firstly, get to a higher resolution...
And this is what happens when u accidently hit the submit instead of preview.. sorry for that
Okay, now that I did the unbelievable by posting the second message which not only was not a troll, but also pinpointed the cause of this change in HP policy, there is a related story on ZDNET on this
Okay, now that I did the unbelievable by posting the second message which not only was not a troll, but also pinpointed the cause of this change in HP policy, there is a related story on ZDNET. To quote from the article:
"Our relationship has significantly improved," Microsoft group vice president Jim Allchin told CNET News.com earlier this month.
Asked if the Compaq influence was the leading factor, Allchin said, "I suspect that's a large part of it."
So now you know why this happened.
Blame compaq for this closeness. I believe compaq was always close to M$ anyway.
:-)
Yohoo, first post and not a troll
Following up on our discussion of 802.11b, the kind og bandwidth that one can normally get from 802.11b is not reaally enough for high quality video. So if U are just monitoring ppl, then its fine...but if U really wanna see them( like in the case of the neighbourhood girl), I guess 802.11b wont really work for me :-)
Hey Guys... a small correction. When I posted this article I wanted the subject to be coming of time for 802.11a? :-)
So hey, sorry for the ommited of
Sorry, I meant doesn't WIfi stand for blah blah blah... :-)
Hey, Blah Blah Blah doesnt mean that I dint have anything important to say though
Correct me if I am wrong but isnt Wi-Fi stands for 802.11a with max bandwidth of 45 Mbps?
Secondly there is another major problm for 3 G especially in Europe. I live in Switzerland where ppl overall are fairly health conscience. Infact in cities here many places are not covered by cell phones because ppl dont like to have antennnas on top of their houses and thats for 2G. For 3G we require four times as many antennas as its range is smaller. SO that makes me wonder how are they gonna conver the cities here? I believe the situation is the same throughout Europe. So how are the phone companies gonna handle this?
I have an archos jukebox, which uses the traditional 2.5 inch HD. Even though I never had any problem with it, given the choice I would go for a player with a smaller harddisk. The biggest problem with jukebox is( even though its much smaller than creative nomad) that its too big to comfortably put in the back pocket of regular jeans or trousers. So if you are a regular guy who wears regular jeans, you will have a big problem because you have to always carry it in your hand, which aint so cool. If you are really insistent on putting it in the rear pocket, almost certainly U will push some buttons accidently because it fits too closely. I dont know if this fact bothers other ppl, but it bothers me for sure. So if you are planning to buy a mp3 player, dd consider this as well.
So in my opinion it makes sense to go for a samsung and if you have the money, for the ipod.
I am sick and tired of this debate. Everytime there is a news item about Inidia, we go into this debate of first world, second worlk and third world. Tell me something guys, is this really important?? I mean the fact is that India launched a satellite, why not just concentrate on that??
I will tell you the truth about Infratstructure in Indian universities. Its pathetic. But this is also a fact that when U have 1 billion ppl and so few unis, the competition to get into a decent university is intense. Infact for admission into IIT( India Institute of Technology) about 300,000 ppl appear in the test and only the top 1000 or so make it. So to get admission into a decnt university in India, you have to be in top 0.33% of the population. Now atleast some of such guys( those who are not lured away bu US companies) join organisations like ISRO. They are already intelligent enough and soon they get grip of whats going on. Thats the story of India.
But always remember, behind every thousand who made it, there are 299,000 who din't.
Sometime I wonder that if Bush is such a big friend of coroporations, howcome that the American economy is not doing better?? I mean that guy has tried everything to help those corporations, from replecing memebers in these commities to bloacking Kyoto. Why then does he need this facade of war against Iraq to divert the attentions of the Americans from their economy.
But hey, he is a smart chap. His dad one a war and then lost an election....the reason was that the war ended... The son learned from his father's mistakes...
Its a knbown fact that the attention span of humans is very small. Infact when I used to go to school, the most I learned about computers was when the teacher was looking away and I was too bored listening to his lecture.Atleast thast when I got really interested about programming anyway, as I wanted to write my own games.
So will this distribution include some nice games as well? I don't think anyone interested in making an educational package can overlook the value of games.
Does anyone know why this one person was so important?? I mean I am sure that there are millions of ppl swapping music over Kazaa and many thousands using Verizon network but why was this one user singled out??