Instead of looking up a phone number on your PDA and dialing it by hand, you hit a button.
Wasn't this sort of the hype surrounding Bluetooth? All the devices within (?) 3meters of you could all talk to each other. Personally, I don't want my PDA broadcasting the numbers I'm calling over easily-sniffable RF...
...Then lets just start blending existing products together. PDA's and phones serve 2 very different purposes, and thus have 2 very different sets of design guidelines. A phone should be small(ish) and a PDA should have a large, hi-rez, readable screen. Furthermore, you should be able to take notes on your PDA while talking on your phone, and I _don't_ want yet another wire/cable/dongle to carry around, or lose, or break, or forget, etc, so don't recommend the "hands-free" solution:)
This could almost be considered a good idea, but it'll never happen. Most people writing OSS do so as a sideline to their main gig. Personally, I'd rather let the public review the software than expect the programmer to take up more of their time trying to make the code conform to some set of standards that they are not likely to agree with.
If your company wants a free, secure, reliable, open source, "just push this button to install" piece of software then you're barking up the wrong tree with OSS. We are not going to develop your companies entire IS platform for you, and then accept a nice pat on the back. OSS is for people who can _understand_ the code and tweak it for their specific application. Do your own damn QA...
...As technology advances and we use e-mail as our primary means of communication, the easiest way to defeat Carni-whore will be to use the telephone:)
5 years after that the new recruits at the FBI will think Morse Code is some alien communications protocol...
It's actually only a little bit more than a high-end DVD player
Actually, it's a lot less than a high-end DVD player. A Toshiba 6200 is going for $699, a Panasonic DVDH1000 is $1800 and an Ayre is $10K+.
Tv's are advancing rapidly in quality and features. Two features that we're seeing more of are component inputs and the ability to display a 480P (480 lines, progressively scanned) picture instead of the 480i picture. Thus, if a DVD player doesn't have a progressive scan output it will give me an inferior picture to what I am used to, and will negate the value of the extra money I spent on my TV.
I wish some manufacturer would bite the bullet and make a box that came with a video output better than the piece-of-crap S-video.
I can understand your putting this book on your "never lend" collection. However, it is on my "Lend whenever possible" list. This book was just
too good to keep to myself (I have read it about 5 times).
Personally, I'd rather keep my cell phone out of my Pilot and vice-versa. I use my cell phone _constantly_ and it goes with me everywhere. Thus, I appreciate the tiny amount of cubic volume my Motorola v8160 utilizes. My Palm VII is with me almost as much, but in all honesty I don't need it 1/2 as much as my phone. I'd hate to carry around something as large as the Palm all the time. It seems that any decent PDA needs a decent amount of screen area, so once integrated with a phone, the unit can only get _so_ small and still be useful. What we need is flexible/foldable LCD screens to be affordable. Then my phone could be "unfolded" to reveal a respecably sized screen...
I first read the Hackers book in the early 90's. My paperback copy is part of my "never lend these books out" collection. The book is _very_ readable and mixes history and humor very well, IMO.
If you haven't yet read Hackers, then you should, we all need to know where things came from to understand where they're going...
Am I the only one that thinks that BattleBots is rather lame. Why don't they call them what they are: Radio Controlled Devices. There isn't any
'botness to them.
Yes, this aspect of the show doesn't sit very well with me either. Most of the 'bots are simply glorified R/C cars. However, this is an amateurs competition, and if the 'bots had to recognize the other 'bots, and think for themselves we'd probably just see them wandering aimlessly in the ring for 3 minutes. It would be cool for a designer to add some very simple recognition to their 'bot, perhaps just simple IR heat-seeking. This would allow the "driver" to concentrate on deploying weapons while his 'bot automagically tracked the other 'bot.
_Every_ BattleBot has some some of uPC for a central "brain". Linux runs very well on embedded systems, I have a 386 SBC that is about 3"x4" with a 16MB flash drive. It's got a 10BaseT NIC on-board and a handful of I/O lines. You could easily hide this thing behind a bit of steel or aluminum armor.
On a related topic, if linux and embedded PC's became more popular, you could write a daemon that could listen for RF from/to the competitors 'bot and then send out erroneous commands. It could conceivably be possible for your 'bot to control the other 'bot.
I agree that the sports commentart sucks on BattleBots, and they show the same episode too many times, so my Tivo has 5 instances of the same show...
I ran a public voting script similar to this one yesterday. I was available on a sub-sub-sub directory of my server. It was open for 10 minutes, and in that time I voted 52 times, and my friends voted a total of 218 times as well. Windows scored 0 votes during this poll, thus proving that it has no market share.
I like the following line from their document:
Microsoft is always looking at ways to improve the simplicity, flexibility and fairness of its licensing practices in response to evolving customer needs and improvements in technology
It seems like the document should also contain a line like:
Microsoft is always look at ways to improve our bottom line while raping you blind for the use of our mediocre products. We admit we got caught this time, but should the opportunity arise in the future we will gladly come at you, sans lubricant, again.
And they wonder why so many people in-the-know are such rabid supporters of the open-source/GPL/linux concept.
It strikes me that whenever a company comes out with something where they intend to make their profits from after-sale mechanisms, the first
thing that people want to do is to try and avoid this. We've recently had this CueCat business and a page complaining about paying $10 a month for
TiVo, despite the fact that they sell their hardware as a loss leader and rely on the subscription charges to make any money.
_However_... You can opt to use your Tivo without ever paying them $10/mo or any other subscription fee. You don't get access to the value-added features of the Tivo service, but you _do_ get a nifty digital VCR. Tivo also hasn't taken to sending poorly written legal letters to people...yet.
Setting up a remote is expensive. Best bet seems to be a Handspring with IR booster with IR detector on the PC.
Get an $88 wireless IR keyboard and any decent learning remote. You can then learn keystrokes into the IR remote, and use that to control the system. This is what I did with my first PeeCee based DVD player.
I want a TiVo like unit that would have modular tv tuners, so I could plug in more than one and record what's going on on a couple of channels at
once. I hate having to choose between two equally good programs to watch at some times, and other times there is nothing good on.
Yes! I've thought the same thing several times myself. The other problem I've had is that you can't manually add a channel # that Tivo thanks doesn't exist. I have 4 security channels modulated in-house on channels 70,72,74,76. Tivo won't let me add these channels to it's lists, so I can't record them, or even watch them through the Tivo's tuner... Ugh...
Yes, Tivo's value-add proposition isn't good enough for some hackers. And it sucks that it doesn't have a NIC (but I belive this is more to calm Whorrywood's fears that we all live to p1r4t3 movies). However, I took my Tivo's (3) out of the box, and had them setup and working after 10 minutes (plus to 3+ hours to download an initial schedule). I _could_ build a multi-media PC but I _like_ the fact that the Tivo just works out of the box. All I want to do is record stuff that I'll never get around to watching. I don't want to play games, etc...
Everytime a new box comes out that doesn't do _everything_ and isn't uber-hackable our community gets upset. Keep in mind Tivo (and others) are in this to make money, not to allow you to circumvent their service, etc...
If I had a nickle for every time some new product announcment "spelled trouble" for Intel, I'd be retired now. I certainly hope that as new things emerge Intel's death grip on the PeeCee market will erode, but we can only hope. Sometimes I think that the g33k culture gets too excited over things like this, not realizing that Joe Consumer generally doesn't know squat about what's in his box, and is more concerned with what software is pre-loaded, or what kind of speakers come with his new PeeCee. Not to mention that sales to businesses dwarf end-user sales (and the DIY PeeCee builders are less than noise in the equation), we have to ask "Does that make $en$e to the corporate buyers?". If big business endorses it, it will succeed. If Dell/Compaq/Micron/etc don't package this hardware properly, then the Intel/Rambus camp may continue to succeed in spite of its inferior performance.
_If_ mobile phones actually caused cancer, my brain would've cooked years ago. I spend _at least_ 3 hours/day on my mobile, often times in conversations lasting over 30 minutes. Personally, I don't believe the hype...
This thing definately looks cool, and I'm sure I'll have at least one in my house...
However, it seems that homes really need to be networked first to make things like this _really_ usefull. This would be great as a kitchen station, or bedroom station to supplement a main PC, but very few homes have the infrastructure to support this kind of thing.
Wireless sucks, especially considering the price. Until we can get 25Mbps wireless LANS for less than $40/node (with decent anti-snooping measures) wireless is just another toy.
I'm already turned off by it. No wonder they have to charge $40 for $0.05 worth of plastic and a $0.10 connector. How much do you think they had to pay to get "good.com" for a domain name? If you buy one of these things you're subsidizing the fact that they paid too much for their URL.
Not to mention, it seems that the whole Springboard thing _still_ hasn't really caught on. It sucks (IMO) that you can only put one thing in the slot at a time. Hmmmm, what I do I want to do? Use this 8MB memory expansion module, listen to some MP3's, or plug in my GPS and figure out where the hell I am? So now you've got your small PDA and a card deck of springboard modules to carry around with you. Gack, screw it...
Yet another reason that I won't go into a K-Mart. I'm tired of corporations and government protecting us from ourselves. I've never seen any _convincing_ evidence that anything other than lousy parenting contributes to kids growing up with a taste for blood.
You're a tad incorrect. By owning options, you
can directly trade those options just ask if you
were trading stock. You need not excercise those
options if you choose not too.
While this is technically true, it is not the norm in terms of the "options" that most of us think of when it comes to tech stocks. If I own an option to buy a stock at a reduced price, then it's likely that I can find a buyer to buy my option. These kinds of options are usually the type you would have if you approached your broker directly and bought options on any stock.
However, granted options typically operate differently. You can not (generally) trade or sell a granted option, you can only exercise it to buy the stock at the stated price. If Sega were to _give_ options to an employee or an 3l33t cr4ck3r then that "gift" would have clauses not found in regular options.
A "Stock Option" is the right to buy stock in a company to a fixed price (Hopefully below the curent trading price:-) So this requires that they actuallly have some money to invest in stocks?
No, you don't need any money to exercise (or own) a granted stock option. Ex: Company X gives you a grant of 10,000 shares at Price Y. Their stock price is now Y+25 and you want to exercise some of your options. You call you broker and say "Sell 2,000 of my options at price Y+25 or better". Your broker sells the shares, and you have an accout worth (Y+25)*2000. However, you have to _buy_ a stock in order to sell it. You just sold short (sold shares you don't own), so you now have to buy 2000 shares at price Y. Where do you get $2000(Y)? From your recent exercise. So, now you're left with (Y+25)2000-(Y)2000, or 2000*25, or $50,000. This is how probably 99% of all the Silicon Valley options get exercised.
3. If they have money to buy options it would be great for Sega to sell them the stocks (And thereby getting the revenue from the pirate copies)
From the above example, it's now clear that they don't have to give Sega _any_ money at this point. However, most any stock option grant will have an expiration date, typically 5-8 years. If they didn't exercise the stock for some reason, then there is usually a clause that the granting company retains the right to the option, which then allows then to buy-back their own stock at a price that is often well below the current market price. This is a Good Thing for most any company.
Anyway, the whole story is most likely bullshit, but at least now you know more about stock options:)
quite frankly 80% of all small businesses fail in 2 years time
This is a statistic that gets tossed out quite often. While it is true that many small businesses close their doors shortly after opening, that is not to say they _failed_. Many times the business owners realize that they can make more working for someone else and/or eliminate many of the hassles and risks they encounter by striking out on their own. It is not uncommon for someone to open a business, work at it for a few years/months and then sell the operation and break even, or make a small profit. That (to me) is not a failure, it's like changing jobs or careers. Just because I'm moving to a different employer doesn't mean that I _failed_ at my current gig, it just means that I found something _better_ elsewhere.
This may be slightly off-topic, but if people are scared to even try their hand at running their own business, that just makes the big sloth corporations even stronger. If Amazon can convince people that there is no hope in challenging them in on-line sales, then they have a lack of competition and can do things like dynamically marking prices up, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of looking up a phone number on your PDA and dialing it by hand, you hit a button.
Wasn't this sort of the hype surrounding Bluetooth? All the devices within (?) 3meters of you could all talk to each other. Personally, I don't want my PDA broadcasting the numbers I'm calling over easily-sniffable RF...
...Then lets just start blending existing products together. PDA's and phones serve 2 very different purposes, and thus have 2 very different sets of design guidelines. A phone should be small(ish) and a PDA should have a large, hi-rez, readable screen. Furthermore, you should be able to take notes on your PDA while talking on your phone, and I _don't_ want yet another wire/cable/dongle to carry around, or lose, or break, or forget, etc, so don't recommend the "hands-free" solution :)
This could almost be considered a good idea, but it'll never happen. Most people writing OSS do so as a sideline to their main gig. Personally, I'd rather let the public review the software than expect the programmer to take up more of their time trying to make the code conform to some set of standards that they are not likely to agree with.
If your company wants a free, secure, reliable, open source, "just push this button to install" piece of software then you're barking up the wrong tree with OSS. We are not going to develop your companies entire IS platform for you, and then accept a nice pat on the back. OSS is for people who can _understand_ the code and tweak it for their specific application. Do your own damn QA...
...As technology advances and we use e-mail as our primary means of communication, the easiest way to defeat Carni-whore will be to use the telephone :)
5 years after that the new recruits at the FBI will think Morse Code is some alien communications protocol...
It's actually only a little bit more than a high-end DVD player
Actually, it's a lot less than a high-end DVD player. A Toshiba 6200 is going for $699, a Panasonic DVDH1000 is $1800 and an Ayre is $10K+.
Tv's are advancing rapidly in quality and features. Two features that we're seeing more of are component inputs and the ability to display a 480P (480 lines, progressively scanned) picture instead of the 480i picture. Thus, if a DVD player doesn't have a progressive scan output it will give me an inferior picture to what I am used to, and will negate the value of the extra money I spent on my TV.
I wish some manufacturer would bite the bullet and make a box that came with a video output better than the piece-of-crap S-video.
I can understand your putting this book on your "never lend" collection. However, it is on my "Lend whenever possible" list. This book was just too good to keep to myself (I have read it about 5 times).
:)
You trust your friends more than I trust mine
Personally, I'd rather keep my cell phone out of my Pilot and vice-versa. I use my cell phone _constantly_ and it goes with me everywhere. Thus, I appreciate the tiny amount of cubic volume my Motorola v8160 utilizes. My Palm VII is with me almost as much, but in all honesty I don't need it 1/2 as much as my phone. I'd hate to carry around something as large as the Palm all the time. It seems that any decent PDA needs a decent amount of screen area, so once integrated with a phone, the unit can only get _so_ small and still be useful. What we need is flexible/foldable LCD screens to be affordable. Then my phone could be "unfolded" to reveal a respecably sized screen...
I first read the Hackers book in the early 90's. My paperback copy is part of my "never lend these books out" collection. The book is _very_ readable and mixes history and humor very well, IMO.
If you haven't yet read Hackers, then you should, we all need to know where things came from to understand where they're going...
Am I the only one that thinks that BattleBots is rather lame. Why don't they call them what they are: Radio Controlled Devices. There isn't any 'botness to them.
Yes, this aspect of the show doesn't sit very well with me either. Most of the 'bots are simply glorified R/C cars. However, this is an amateurs competition, and if the 'bots had to recognize the other 'bots, and think for themselves we'd probably just see them wandering aimlessly in the ring for 3 minutes. It would be cool for a designer to add some very simple recognition to their 'bot, perhaps just simple IR heat-seeking. This would allow the "driver" to concentrate on deploying weapons while his 'bot automagically tracked the other 'bot.
_Every_ BattleBot has some some of uPC for a central "brain". Linux runs very well on embedded systems, I have a 386 SBC that is about 3"x4" with a 16MB flash drive. It's got a 10BaseT NIC on-board and a handful of I/O lines. You could easily hide this thing behind a bit of steel or aluminum armor.
On a related topic, if linux and embedded PC's became more popular, you could write a daemon that could listen for RF from/to the competitors 'bot and then send out erroneous commands. It could conceivably be possible for your 'bot to control the other 'bot.
I agree that the sports commentart sucks on BattleBots, and they show the same episode too many times, so my Tivo has 5 instances of the same show...
I ran a public voting script similar to this one yesterday. I was available on a sub-sub-sub directory of my server. It was open for 10 minutes, and in that time I voted 52 times, and my friends voted a total of 218 times as well. Windows scored 0 votes during this poll, thus proving that it has no market share.
I like the following line from their document:
Microsoft is always looking at ways to improve the simplicity, flexibility and fairness of its licensing practices in response to evolving customer needs and improvements in technology
It seems like the document should also contain a line like:
Microsoft is always look at ways to improve our bottom line while raping you blind for the use of our mediocre products. We admit we got caught this time, but should the opportunity arise in the future we will gladly come at you, sans lubricant, again.
And they wonder why so many people in-the-know are such rabid supporters of the open-source/GPL/linux concept.
It strikes me that whenever a company comes out with something where they intend to make their profits from after-sale mechanisms, the first thing that people want to do is to try and avoid this. We've recently had this CueCat business and a page complaining about paying $10 a month for TiVo, despite the fact that they sell their hardware as a loss leader and rely on the subscription charges to make any money.
_However_... You can opt to use your Tivo without ever paying them $10/mo or any other subscription fee. You don't get access to the value-added features of the Tivo service, but you _do_ get a nifty digital VCR. Tivo also hasn't taken to sending poorly written legal letters to people...yet.
The VB5 CueCat decoder software is here: http://www.wizkid.org/
Setting up a remote is expensive. Best bet seems to be a Handspring with IR booster with IR detector on the PC.
Get an $88 wireless IR keyboard and any decent learning remote. You can then learn keystrokes into the IR remote, and use that to control the system. This is what I did with my first PeeCee based DVD player.
I want a TiVo like unit that would have modular tv tuners, so I could plug in more than one and record what's going on on a couple of channels at once. I hate having to choose between two equally good programs to watch at some times, and other times there is nothing good on.
Yes! I've thought the same thing several times myself. The other problem I've had is that you can't manually add a channel # that Tivo thanks doesn't exist. I have 4 security channels modulated in-house on channels 70,72,74,76. Tivo won't let me add these channels to it's lists, so I can't record them, or even watch them through the Tivo's tuner... Ugh...
Yes, Tivo's value-add proposition isn't good enough for some hackers. And it sucks that it doesn't have a NIC (but I belive this is more to calm Whorrywood's fears that we all live to p1r4t3 movies). However, I took my Tivo's (3) out of the box, and had them setup and working after 10 minutes (plus to 3+ hours to download an initial schedule). I _could_ build a multi-media PC but I _like_ the fact that the Tivo just works out of the box. All I want to do is record stuff that I'll never get around to watching. I don't want to play games, etc...
Everytime a new box comes out that doesn't do _everything_ and isn't uber-hackable our community gets upset. Keep in mind Tivo (and others) are in this to make money, not to allow you to circumvent their service, etc...
If I had a nickle for every time some new product announcment "spelled trouble" for Intel, I'd be retired now. I certainly hope that as new things emerge Intel's death grip on the PeeCee market will erode, but we can only hope. Sometimes I think that the g33k culture gets too excited over things like this, not realizing that Joe Consumer generally doesn't know squat about what's in his box, and is more concerned with what software is pre-loaded, or what kind of speakers come with his new PeeCee. Not to mention that sales to businesses dwarf end-user sales (and the DIY PeeCee builders are less than noise in the equation), we have to ask "Does that make $en$e to the corporate buyers?". If big business endorses it, it will succeed. If Dell/Compaq/Micron/etc don't package this hardware properly, then the Intel/Rambus camp may continue to succeed in spite of its inferior performance.
_If_ mobile phones actually caused cancer, my brain would've cooked years ago. I spend _at least_ 3 hours/day on my mobile, often times in conversations lasting over 30 minutes. Personally, I don't believe the hype...
This thing definately looks cool, and I'm sure I'll have at least one in my house...
However, it seems that homes really need to be networked first to make things like this _really_ usefull. This would be great as a kitchen station, or bedroom station to supplement a main PC, but very few homes have the infrastructure to support this kind of thing.
Wireless sucks, especially considering the price. Until we can get 25Mbps wireless LANS for less than $40/node (with decent anti-snooping measures) wireless is just another toy.
I'm already turned off by it. No wonder they have to charge $40 for $0.05 worth of plastic and a $0.10 connector. How much do you think they had to pay to get "good.com" for a domain name? If you buy one of these things you're subsidizing the fact that they paid too much for their URL.
Not to mention, it seems that the whole Springboard thing _still_ hasn't really caught on. It sucks (IMO) that you can only put one thing in the slot at a time. Hmmmm, what I do I want to do? Use this 8MB memory expansion module, listen to some MP3's, or plug in my GPS and figure out where the hell I am? So now you've got your small PDA and a card deck of springboard modules to carry around with you. Gack, screw it...
Yet another reason that I won't go into a K-Mart. I'm tired of corporations and government protecting us from ourselves. I've never seen any _convincing_ evidence that anything other than lousy parenting contributes to kids growing up with a taste for blood.
You're a tad incorrect. By owning options, you can directly trade those options just ask if you were trading stock. You need not excercise those options if you choose not too.
While this is technically true, it is not the norm in terms of the "options" that most of us think of when it comes to tech stocks. If I own an option to buy a stock at a reduced price, then it's likely that I can find a buyer to buy my option. These kinds of options are usually the type you would have if you approached your broker directly and bought options on any stock.
However, granted options typically operate differently. You can not (generally) trade or sell a granted option, you can only exercise it to buy the stock at the stated price. If Sega were to _give_ options to an employee or an 3l33t cr4ck3r then that "gift" would have clauses not found in regular options.
A "Stock Option" is the right to buy stock in a company to a fixed price (Hopefully below the curent trading price :-) So this requires that they actuallly have some money to invest in stocks?
:)
No, you don't need any money to exercise (or own) a granted stock option. Ex: Company X gives you a grant of 10,000 shares at Price Y. Their stock price is now Y+25 and you want to exercise some of your options. You call you broker and say "Sell 2,000 of my options at price Y+25 or better". Your broker sells the shares, and you have an accout worth (Y+25)*2000. However, you have to _buy_ a stock in order to sell it. You just sold short (sold shares you don't own), so you now have to buy 2000 shares at price Y. Where do you get $2000(Y)? From your recent exercise. So, now you're left with (Y+25)2000-(Y)2000, or 2000*25, or $50,000. This is how probably 99% of all the Silicon Valley options get exercised.
3. If they have money to buy options it would be great for Sega to sell them the stocks (And thereby getting the revenue from the pirate copies)
From the above example, it's now clear that they don't have to give Sega _any_ money at this point. However, most any stock option grant will have an expiration date, typically 5-8 years. If they didn't exercise the stock for some reason, then there is usually a clause that the granting company retains the right to the option, which then allows then to buy-back their own stock at a price that is often well below the current market price. This is a Good Thing for most any company.
Anyway, the whole story is most likely bullshit, but at least now you know more about stock options
quite frankly 80% of all small businesses fail in 2 years time
This is a statistic that gets tossed out quite often. While it is true that many small businesses close their doors shortly after opening, that is not to say they _failed_. Many times the business owners realize that they can make more working for someone else and/or eliminate many of the hassles and risks they encounter by striking out on their own. It is not uncommon for someone to open a business, work at it for a few years/months and then sell the operation and break even, or make a small profit. That (to me) is not a failure, it's like changing jobs or careers. Just because I'm moving to a different employer doesn't mean that I _failed_ at my current gig, it just means that I found something _better_ elsewhere.
This may be slightly off-topic, but if people are scared to even try their hand at running their own business, that just makes the big sloth corporations even stronger. If Amazon can convince people that there is no hope in challenging them in on-line sales, then they have a lack of competition and can do things like dynamically marking prices up, etc.