Many moons ago we got a new intern in the office. He was young, naive and hopelessly clueless about the corporate world. We took a liking to him immediately. Of course, this meant that we had to play pranks on him. Because that's what you do to people you like, right?
Our best prank was what we did to his computer. We wrote a small program that ran in the background and drew a dot in the center of the screen on top of whatever was running. This dot grew bigger over time; at first it was just one pixel wide, but after a week it was over twenty.
One morning, just over a week after we'd secretly installed it onto the intern's computer, he called me into his cubicle and asked me if I had ever heard of "dead pixels on a CRT". I said no, holding back the laughter, and politely suggested that he try reinstalling his graphics card drivers. He declined, and said that was too much effort and he would just live with it.
The intern was fully prepared to live with this large, expanding, black dot in the center of his monitor. It was nothing but sheer annoyance, but he was willing to ignore it. At this point we caved and uninstalled the software.
That experience taught me that users will put up with just about anything. As long as it doesn't outright prevent them from doing their job (eg, the network card has died), they will find some way to soldier on.
Here's the problem: Windows XP, for the majority of normal use cases, works. There is no business case for spending the kind of money necessary to upgrade everything, just so that your CEO can have "that big task bar".
Email addresses, of course. I'd pay for a @linux.com email address...1gb storage, SSH access to mutt/pine/emacs, IMAP/POP, decent webmail package... yeah, I would definitely pay for that. Premium for good service.:)
I can definitely confirm Insight is also doing it; I got bit by it the night they turned it on. 2 hours on the phone with their clueless tech support didn't help either--the clowns insisted this is the way DNS is "supposed to work".
InsightBB has been doing this for several months. I noticed it when the typo 'cterm' in KDE's run dialog opened a web browser instead of erroring out. I spent an hour on the phone trying to explain why it was a problem to some InsightBB tech support geek who is probably more confused now than when I started. In the end he consulted his manager, who told him "thats the way its supposed to work". Useless frackers.
I "fixed" the problem by switching to a different DNS server.
Price per chip is meaningless -- just look at CAN controllers. Self-contained CAN transceiver ICs can be found for as cheap as a dollar a piece, but finding a usable USB CAN dongle or PCMCIA card for less than $200 is an exercise in masochism.
Am I really the only one worried that determining the precise weight of the Higgs Boson will result in the Earth being crushed into a tiny particle the size of a pea?
I messed around with a few of those back in '05, and it looks like the specs have not changed much since then. The processor, an ~800mhz transmeta chip, is *far* too slow to be useful (it downclocks itself significantly at the first sign of stress -- stress like, say, Windows loading...), the case is cheap and flimsy, and the battery life sucks (an hour, IIRC).
I was not privy to the price, but I'm sure they were fairly inexpensive, otherwise the project lead would not have considered them.
The article also points out that boarding passes work on this basis -- with something like GNU Barcode software and a template of printed out tickets, one might be able to take some nice vacations."
Great, now GNU Barcode will be classified as a terrorist weapon...
Maybe Im missing something, but I always figured the best thing about web services, and Im assuming 'Windows Live' is mostly just a bunch of web services, is that the only action required to upgrade a client is for that client to press the REFRESH button in their web browser of choice...
I don't know about the rest of them, but the Palm OS port of Doom, ZDoomZ, lets you bind areas of the touchscreen as inputs. (for example, top=forward, left/right=left/right, down=back, middle=shoot) As a result, even though I run ZDoomZ on a Treo 650 (which has a multitude of buttons), its not much of a stretch to imagine running it on a device that only has a touchscreen...
Slashdot Mirror
Also Robocop (ED-209).
Many moons ago we got a new intern in the office. He was young, naive and hopelessly clueless about the corporate world. We took a liking to him immediately.
Of course, this meant that we had to play pranks on him. Because that's what you do to people you like, right?
Our best prank was what we did to his computer. We wrote a small program that ran in the background and drew a dot in the center of the screen on top of whatever was running. This dot grew bigger over time; at first it was just one pixel wide, but after a week it was over twenty.
One morning, just over a week after we'd secretly installed it onto the intern's computer, he called me into his cubicle and asked me if I had ever heard of "dead pixels on a CRT". I said no, holding back the laughter, and politely suggested that he try reinstalling his graphics card drivers. He declined, and said that was too much effort and he would just live with it.
The intern was fully prepared to live with this large, expanding, black dot in the center of his monitor. It was nothing but sheer annoyance, but he was willing to ignore it.
At this point we caved and uninstalled the software.
That experience taught me that users will put up with just about anything. As long as it doesn't outright prevent them from doing their job (eg, the network card has died), they will find some way to soldier on.
Here's the problem: Windows XP, for the majority of normal use cases, works. There is no business case for spending the kind of money necessary to upgrade everything, just so that your CEO can have "that big task bar".
There doesn't appear to be much data indexed yet, just data that has been publicly available for years.
Patent data? Check
Storm data? Check
Yawn. Call me when the FBI starts uploading data.
Lets use it to make toilet paper.
Email addresses, of course. I'd pay for a @linux.com email address...1gb storage, SSH access to mutt/pine/emacs, IMAP/POP, decent webmail package... yeah, I would definitely pay for that. Premium for good service. :)
Searching Google I find that, apparently, I was a porn star in the late 70's. I hope this doesn't hurt my chances of getting hired somewhere.
I can definitely confirm Insight is also doing it; I got bit by it the night they turned it on. 2 hours on the phone with their clueless tech support didn't help either--the clowns insisted this is the way DNS is "supposed to work".
It was in Italian. Loosely translated it said "Apache may someday be called upon to return the favor".
Thats OK, we have Storable.
Because the devices are Nuclear Powered
Does this sound an aweful lot like Theora to anyone else?
InsightBB has been doing this for several months. I noticed it when the typo 'cterm' in KDE's run dialog opened a web browser instead of erroring out. I spent an hour on the phone trying to explain why it was a problem to some InsightBB tech support geek who is probably more confused now than when I started. In the end he consulted his manager, who told him "thats the way its supposed to work". Useless frackers.
I "fixed" the problem by switching to a different DNS server.
Price per chip is meaningless -- just look at CAN controllers. Self-contained CAN transceiver ICs can be found for as cheap as a dollar a piece, but finding a usable USB CAN dongle or PCMCIA card for less than $200 is an exercise in masochism.
Am I really the only one worried that determining the precise weight of the Higgs Boson will result in the Earth being crushed into a tiny particle the size of a pea?
http://www.tatungwebpad.com/
I messed around with a few of those back in '05, and it looks like the specs have not changed much since then. The processor, an ~800mhz transmeta chip, is *far* too slow to be useful (it downclocks itself significantly at the first sign of stress -- stress like, say, Windows loading...), the case is cheap and flimsy, and the battery life sucks (an hour, IIRC).
I was not privy to the price, but I'm sure they were fairly inexpensive, otherwise the project lead would not have considered them.
Great, now GNU Barcode will be classified as a terrorist weapon...
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa
Looks like its a modified version of OpenOffice. I doubt it will share anything more than the name with the old Lotus Symphony.
Oh, and FYI, OpenOffice is a re-branded StarOffice, not the other way around.
Maybe Im missing something, but I always figured the best thing about web services, and Im assuming 'Windows Live' is mostly just a bunch of web services, is that the only action required to upgrade a client is for that client to press the REFRESH button in their web browser of choice...
I don't know about the rest of them, but the Palm OS port of Doom, ZDoomZ, lets you bind areas of the touchscreen as inputs. (for example, top=forward, left/right=left/right, down=back, middle=shoot)
As a result, even though I run ZDoomZ on a Treo 650 (which has a multitude of buttons), its not much of a stretch to imagine running it on a device that only has a touchscreen...
http://opticaldynamics.com/~gbk/2c-a-byte.jpg
Up to 32k for the low low price of $649!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUVFV8g4-Yo
Yes.
Figure out what .js script is the culprit and block that script with adblock.
I have a feeling Hormel will soon file suit against the surviving members of Monty Python...